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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 4836057" data-attributes="member: 14159">The existence of "Grognards" was within Wizard's control to a degree.They didn't have to put out 4e, after all, or at least the 4th edition that they did produce.  Wizards started the Edition Wars in the first place by setting up the circumstances that made it nigh inevitable at least in retrospect.  You would think that WotC would have known this would happen from market research, that or they knew it would schism the fanbase and just accepted it (then again, I recall reading in one interview that they thought that pretty much all D&D players would get with 4e in time, one of the interviews during the piracy lawsuit issue, the one where they likened D&D's business plan to a band that makes radical changes to their sound every few years but eventually all the fans still listen and stay fans, thus D&D will radically change its style with every edition and they assume/assumed that almost all D&D players will convert to whatever the new edition is).Every time they make a new edition, especially one that seriously deviates from that which came before you risk creating a lot more grognards.  The 3e to 3.5 switch created very few by comparison because it was a minor switch that seemed like a logical growth of the game.  The switch from 2e to 3e also created relatively few because it was patently obvious at the time that 2e needed some kind of revision and while 3e was different in the rules it was clearly meant to support the same play style and made with attention to the traditions and history of the game (assassins, barbarians and half-orcs back in core, for example).  2e did create grognards because it was seen as oversimplifying, and took away options from the core instead of adding them (kind of like the 3.5/4e split).  Yes, the fractioning of the gamer base into diverse camps is bad for the gaming community and game as a whole, but assuming that everybody is going to switch over to a radically new edition that carelessly discards decades of style, tradition, and lore (i.e. "fluff") was a very bad assumption on WotC's part and if it was built on the music analogy it was a poor comparison to begin with.  Note that I am not saying some 4th edition should never have been made, nor that it is a poor game, but making a game that different from what came before both in "crunch" and "fluff", was setting the field for a schism, and WotC didn't help with the infamous "not fun" marketing didn't help either because it started things off on a very sour note for some people.</blockquote>

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