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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 3308872" data-attributes="member: 697">Very good point. Time and time again, I've seen play accounts of high lethality games that had GMs fudging rules or lethality nerfed in passing. I hadn't really thought of it before. That's a good point.Novelty for gamers v. casual players is also an interesting point. HALO seems a little tired to PC gamers, but it was a major step for console gaming. Compare its pop culture influence to Half Life. It's interesting to watch as PC gaming and console gaming audiences evolve.Someone mentioned Final Fantasy, and how that compares to dungeon crawling. I was thinking more along the lines of games like Suikoden and Disgaea, but FF is an interesting beast. I think there is a market out there for RPGs that rest heavily on the GM as storyteller and the players coming along for the ride. I'm not sure how that would work, since it's easy for a GM to simply tweak results in an existing game to move his story along.Innovation and WotC: Book of Nine Swords? Complete Mage? D&D's innovations rest within the framework of the game. They are innovative within the game, but likely not without it. It'd be foolish to monkey with the core of the game, since it's rolling along. Some things succeed (Nine Swords) some things, well, not so much (MM IV's tribes). I'd love for someone could point out a financially successful, mainstream RPG company that thrives on innovation. A lot of companies receive fan love for doing things differently, but positive Internet postings do not (yet?) pay the bills.Besides, I have yet to see a definition of innovative in RPGs that doesn't boil down to either:A) Stuff I likeorB) Stuff that's vaguely differentA company like Pelgrane Press (Esoterrorists, Dying Earth), or Goodman Games (making money on D&D modules when the market for them was supposed to be dead) is innovative. The Wii is innovative. Guitar Hero is innovative. The OGL, and the PDF market that grew out of it, innovative.A new way to roll dice, manipulate the result, and decide if you hit an orc/climbed a wall/jumped over a building/invented poetry, no, not so innovative.</blockquote>

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