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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 3307964" data-attributes="member: 697">Yeah, that's exactly my point. A designer can obsess over details all he wants, but in the end the gamer determines how a game gets used. Their campaign (as described to me) is pretty much dungeon crawl after dungeon crawl in space; enter room, zap guards, take their stuff, move on to the next room.You are definitely spot on about designers and how gamers are the ones who dictate where something goes. That does speak to creating rules that fit, but obviously that's irrelevant if the game doesn't speak to anyone. This extends even to RPGs. One of the most presistent comments I heard about 3e circa 2000 was that it felt like the D&D that gamers always wanted to play, but TSR wouldn't give them.I distinctly remember the art for 3e as the first D&D images since the mid-1980s that actually synched with my personal view of what a D&D campaign looked like.I think that the gaming zeitgeist rests in the 20 year olds, and what the TRPG industry struggles with is speaking to those gamers. We can skate by on some evergreen concepts (WoW and about 20 billion Japanese CRPGs show us that going into dungeons to clobber stuff is still popular; Star Wars still sells billions of dollars of toys), but there are a lot of subtle shifts out there.For instance, I think the concept of evil megacorps has fallen by the wayside. They're not the major bogeyman to a 20 year old in 2007, as opposed to a 20 year old back in 1990. There's an entire genre of game, first person shooters, that speaks to the concept of a one man army taking on an entire planet of bad guys; that flies in the face of a trend in gaming for high lethality worlds. If you look at the best selling console games of the past year, and you look at what's out there for TRPGs, is there really much crossover?Anyway, that brings me back to my initial point. To go d20 or not is a question you can answer only after you've built your game's initial hook. I think that's when you make the call.</blockquote>

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