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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 5324918" data-attributes="member: 32740">Top-heavyness was not so much an issue with the ruleset in and of itself but with DM's failing to put sensible limits on their own games regarding sheer VOLUME of rules.  Of course WotC is never gonna tell anyone, "use less of what we sell you," but there it is. This fails to acknowledge that different editions simply have different approaches (both intended and unintended) to the game.  Basic/Original D&D, for example, is VERY rules lite and thus promotes and works better with play styles that are more improvisational.  Players do - over time - tend to gravitate toward the edition that best supports their preferred play/gaming style rather than what happens to simply be the newest edition. 4E CANNOT be all things to all players.  Neither can 1E, or OD&D.  When D&D was the ONLY RPG this wasn't an issue.  When D&D dominated other available RPG's 50:1 it wasn't an issue.  Now that there are 4 distinct edition of D&D, each with substantially different approaches to play and different "philosophies" behind the creation of their rules, and there are GOBS of other RPG's out there - many of them clones of, or inspired directly by various versions of D&D - I think it would foolish in the extreme to assume that you could make a version of D&D that will never again need wholesale, substantial revision in favor of only minor adjustments or a few add-ons. Which rather invalidates the excuse that the PDF's were taken down for reasons of piracy doesn't it?  It seems apparant to me that (whether they were correct or not in their thinking) they wanted to eliminate as many sources as possible for players to use anything but 4E. While there's more than a grain of truth to that, I believe it is more the unusual nature of RPG's as a business, given the relationship that the publisher has with the reader and that any given publication they sell you is NOT self-contained but relies on the customer having purchased several others as well as continuing to purchase additonal products... as opposed to customers doing what they did in the earlier days of RPGs - which is to take the basic rules and then make everything else up themselves. D&D has changed from a teeny-tiny business that supported a hobby that it created - to ongoing attempts at changing the hobby game itself into something that better supports a much bigger business (albeit in the grand scheme of things still VERY small).  The thing that WotC doesn't want you to realize and embrace is that you don't need to buy a thing from them once you have the core rules.  You can ALWAYS come up with "content" for a game from your own imagination as well as any rules changes you want/need.  If they can drive you to playing 4E because you aren't able to readily find rules for past versions, so much the better (they believe).  4E is available in bookstores and FLGS's everywhere.  If any other version of D&D takes even one extra step or degree of effort to obtain they're that much closer to their goal. 'Course this is all stuff that we will NEVER see WotC discussing openly and honestly because that would simply be bad business.  I seem to recall that a long time ago when they did research prior to releasing 3E they gave up SOME of what they learned, but by and large that became VALUABLE information that is NOT something you just announce to the world.  When they tell us things about what direction they see the game going and where they WANT it to go it's because they've pretty well determined that releasing that information will either do them more good than harm, or that it won't make much difference to tell because the information ISN'T business sensitive. JMHO</blockquote>

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