Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9431409" data-attributes="member: 6790260">It has nothing to do with "nefarious." I think it's reflecting weaknesses of character in corporate culture. That's not nefarious; at worst, it's simply that marketing-speak and corporate-speak is plastic, hollow, and talking out of both sides of its mouth. Given the ways WotC has behaved over the last two years, I don't think it's particularly unfair to say that the upper-level, corporate types are making some double-plus ungood decisions lately.And I'm of the opinion that "5.5e" is significantly more compatible with the things your alleged "'mainstream' audience" would know and understand, while "2024 D&D" is not.That I can figure it out does not mean what I'm figuring out is necessarily respectful.That will never happen. Period. It is not possible to iteratively update all possible things. Paizo literally, explicitly said that to their fanbase, when Mr. Bulmahn both eloquently and respectfully asked for PF1e players to give the new edition a chance. He was both circumspect and honest with his audience: the 3e "engine," so to speak, is simply broken beyond repair. It cannot be fixed by slow, iterative updates. It has to be replaced, one way or another. Drop Dead Studios' Spheres of Power/Might system is a similar recognition that the existing rules of 3e are simply broken beyond repair, and have to be replaced; they simply went in a rather different (and interesting!) direction.Whereas I think they were fools to think it would work then, and they're fools to think it will work now. There will be a sixth edition, sooner or later. Nothing is eternally evergreen. Remember when Microsoft swore up and down that Windows 10 would be the eternal one? That's why they skipped over naming it the number 9 (even though it is, internally, version 9.x), because the new version would be forever and calling the 9th version the forever version felt off to them?And now we're only a year out from Windows 10 end-of-life, with Windows 11 being a mildly controversial but relatively accepted platform.The dream of the evergreen edition/OS/platform/whatever is as much a pipe dream as the 3e engine's dream of having a discrete rule for everything and giving every discrete rule pride of place. It simply does not work; eventually, you realize all the places you've designed yourself into a corner that you can't fix with mere iterative updates. The caster/martial disparity, for example, cannot be fixed with a backwards-compatible rules system, unless you're okay with either massive nerfs to casters or massive power creep for martials.</blockquote>

Verification