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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 2884556" data-attributes="member: 697">Comparing RPG production to car manufacturing is a good analogy. You buy a car expecting to take the time needed to learn how to work the radio, change the oil, deal with maintenance, and so on. I just bought a Honda this week, and it does feel a bit like getting into a new RPG. The owner's manual is right next to my computer - I still haven't learned how to set the clock.It's interesting to contrast RPGs with miniatures game. With minis, you're happy to buy the next figure that comes out. The fact that there's a cool new figure coming out next month doesn't make you feel sad that you bought a new figure this month. If anything, half the fun is waiting to see the cool new stuff. You don't buy a miniature expecting it to fill your "miniatures needs" for the next five years. Best of all, you can tear open the mini as soon as you get home, assemble it, prime it, and start painting.An RPG requires a lot of time to read, and a bit of effort to get a group together.Boardgames and CCGs are also a lot more like miniatures games than RPGs. For both of them, it's fun to buy new ones to increase the scope of options. If you buy and play Settlers, you might play it a bunch of times, get a little bored with it, and move on to Puerto Rico or Ticket to Ride.With an RPG, you just move on to the next campaign. Judging by sales numbers, the staggering majority of people play D&D, or Vampire, or Exalted, or GURPS, and just stick with it. A GM can just generate a new campaign and run it, and it can feel nothing like the previous campaign.In some ways, WotC has moved to the model that you mention. D&D minis, the upcoming dungeon tiles, these are things that you're happy to have lots of (or at least with the dungeon tiles, we hope so!), they're easy to just break open and use, and they fit in with the idea of playing D&D for years on end.I'm really curious to see how the dungeon tiles do. I have a set that I'm using while working on the D&D Open for GenCon, and they've been really fun to use. The playtest sets we had were also a lot of fun - they made dungeons really easy to map out and easier to plan for. They're a little like D&D minis in that if you start with the tiles and then build a room, it goes by quicker and it's easier to build something interesting.</blockquote>

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