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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7726807" data-attributes="member: 996">More than double what the entire 'industry' had ever pulled in?  Yeah, a bit absurd as a goal for an RPG.  What must have made it seemed possible was the idea of a) making the game less repugnant to new players by slaughtering sacred cows & fixing broken class designs and b) getting an income stream going by making play dependent on DDI.  The former actually worked - 4e retained new players and segued them into DMing amazingly easily, IMX - but there weren't enough new players trying the game to get rapid growth, and the latter hinged on the on-online tools the development of which was torpedoed by, well, a human tragedy, not a fit topic. Commercial failure is a critically important failure.  A game design could be stellar (no D&D design ever has been, but hypothetically), and if it fails commercially for any reason, however unfair it may seem, it's going to go out of print. I'm sure it was also a contributing factor to the commercial failure.  D&D depends on it's status as top dog, and everyone else riding on the d20 bandwagon supports that image, while D&D jumping off it, itself, undermined it.   I admit it was, mechanically, the best-in-a-technical-sense system ever squeezed between covers bearing the D&D logo. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  My favorite ed has to remain 1e, because it's what I started with, and I lived & breathed it for the whole of the 80s.   Reconciling game & narrative elements is a function of imagination, and, well, willingness - 'suspension of disbelief,' that kind of thing.  An unwilling player will find an RPG experience awful, regardless of the quality of the system or skill of the GM.  If something about the GM or the system can get him to buy-in instead of sabotage, it doesn't matter if either is otherwise particularly good.  Players are a greater contributor to the success of an RPG session than they're often given credit for.</blockquote>

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