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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BryonD" data-source="post: 5362402" data-attributes="member: 957">Early D&D was, to state the obvious, hugely successful.However, I think there is a big mistake made when that success is presumed to based purely on the merits of the game itself and thus should be a benchmark for all future games to be compared against.I am not speaking about individual tastes.  I'm not remotely challenging anyone on their love of OD&D or 1E or whatever.  That is all cool and happily embraced.I am speaking about mass appeal.  D&D was not huge because it was the awesome ruleset that everyone loved.  D&D was huge because it was an awesome new concept.  (And no, I don't care about a roots of D&D argument because, again, to the mass market as a whole it was VERY new.)The idea of fantasy roleplaying caught fire and was huge.  The rules were secondary.  Moreso, there was plenty of complaint about the actual rules themselves at the time.  That is largely forgotten, but it is true.  It was commonplace when joining a new game to automatically find out the houserules.  Houserules remain completely common today, certainly for 3E.  But the presumption of them as defining the very basis of the game was stronger then.There were other RPGs that followed, but most of them sucked even worse and it was a long time before serious quality plus marketing put any other games on the radar.  And by then D&D was fully established as an institution.  I readily agree that 3E is very different than prior editions.  But I think it was the general appeal of the ruleset combined with the name recognition that created the second "golden age" that happened.  Again, if you hated 3E, cool, I'm talking about the market as a whole.But, the mass appeal of the ruleset was critical to the success.  If it had been too much just like older games, the mass appeal would not have been there.  The early games got by on "this is new and cool", that isn't enough anymore.I do not think it makes sense to lump 4E in with other editions and exclude 3E.  I think there are elements of older editions that 3E removed and 4E brought back.  So a case can be made.  But when everything is considered it is a really flawed case because there are just as many "old school" things that 4E removed.  I can see lumping pre 3E together.  But both 3E and 4E each have historic elements but each also ends up being significantly removed.</blockquote>

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