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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cergorach" data-source="post: 8870644" data-attributes="member: 725">For me a RPG is a combination of rules, 'fluff', and presentation. As an example, I thought that D&D 4E was very mechanically strong, but absolutely lacked in presentation/fluff, I liked the artwork, but it just crushed any inspiration to DM/play. D&D 5E brought back a balance of good mechanics and good presentation.1.) I started to dislike SR with 4e, the 'rewrite' for the wireless rules. Eventually cyberspace becoming a magical realm, etc. It's just not the themes but the heavy handed way they chucked it all in. Imho it went from a cyberpunk game with magical elements to a fantasy game with cyberpunk elements. Mechanics in SR have always been 'iffy', from the 1E horrorshow, to 2E mis-use, etc. SR just went into a direction I didn't like at all.2.) Pathfinder always felt like what D&D 4E should have been, but with a balance between mechanics, 'fluff', and presentation. What I've seen in previews and digital products I bought via Bundles is that they moved away quite a bit mechanically. If people can have a complaint about Pathfinder 1E is that it produced a LOT of product and Pathfinder 2E just feels like a vehicle to sell all that stuff again...3.) nWoD and 5e WoD I both dislike, both due to the direction they went to. Am I mad about it? No, why should I be? I actually did like the 20th Anniversary versions.4.) The issue I have with the newer 40k RPGs is presentation. I do not dislike the art, but the whole package just feels bland compared to the previous versions or even the 40k universe at large.Of course it's my perceptions of those RPGs, but I'm far from alone in that perception. The problem I have with the above editions of the RPGs is that I feel or perceive them to making changes for making changes sake, in an attempt to make the RPG/money printing machine go 'burrr' far sooner then that they needed too. Needing to resell the same thing over and over again.Let me take a D&D example: The 1993 Forgotten Realms boxed set (later revised in 1996), that really needed an update for 3E (2000)! Not only couldn't you get it easily (2nd hand it was starting to get quite expensive), the boxed set format was now extremely expensive to produce/ship. The 3E hardcover book was imho a good hardcover with an insanely dense amount of text/information stuffed in a single D&D book. They advanced the timeline ~5 years and everything that came before was still pretty useful. Did I like everything that happened in those 5 years? Of course not! But it left more than enough room for me to do my own 'thing'. With 3.5E they didn't revise the book, they just redid the crunch in Player's Guide to Faerûn and advanced the timeline another year. With 4E they advanced the timeline over a 100 years... killing off most of the normal NPCs, making everything that came before 'moot' and imho not really relevant anymore. But it mostly felt like a badly done FR reboot, just reuse all the maps, names, etc. and wipe everything else to fit the WoW-like 4E. Now 5E feels to me like a partial rolling back on WotC's part on 4E, it feels more like previous editions, there's still stuff in there that I dislike, but can easily ignore. 5e FR still build upon the 4E mess though...Many of those drastic changes to established IPs feel like the publisher flipping the table in the hopes that we forget the previous stuff and blindly buy everything again and again. Instead of concentrating on imho more important aspects of their games. Like mechanical scalability, internal balance and consistency. Or even guidance through their plethora of additions and products... And products like 5E, WoD 20th, SR 20th, etc. show us that publishers actually realize that people like their style of 'old' product and then milk that anniversary again and again, and often go back to their regular IP 'milking' ways (One D&D, SR 5e/6e, etc.).Notice that I use a lot of 'feels' and 'perceive'? That it's because that's my perspective of the product, with a lot of experience/knowledge of how businesses work with products/services in general. And knowing the difference between a value add and a regurgitation of a product/service at a constantly higher price...</blockquote>

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