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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="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5020064" data-attributes="member: 80487">That seems to be the most commercially successful package, one with which Chaosium (starting with RuneQuest) was once able to make a significant dent in D&D's dominance. I think WotC has continued to follow the formula of comprehensiveness, even though the rules may come first.Of course, all that is quite different from what Arneson and Gygax, to judge from their statements, at first envisioned! The shift in emphasis with the Advanced D&D line showed, I think, some grasp of the realities of the bigger market -- more "mainstream", and generally younger, than the initial base of war-gamers -- the hobby was then poised to exploit.Players of the earlier wave often rejected and lampooned the new Official Rules mentality, whereas new players were more likely to notice how little the new "game system" was really systematic.With 2e, the rules were in the first place more clearly defined. In the second place, the writers called out some sections as "tournament rules" and others as even more "optional" than everything was for a home game.Right from the start, there was room for supplements in, e.g., the temporary removal of assassins, half orcs, monks and psionics. The "kits" system encouraged the "gotta get the book" syndrome, as did the development of "setting canon" (such as in the TSR version of the Forgotten Realms).Had that been merely a one-way appreciation, it should have died out soon enough. In the event, it was a response to what was becoming the dominant D&D "game culture". White Wolf was also appealing to that demographic, one expecting to get served its RPG experience fully cooked.The books you have bought belong to you; it is your game. You are always free to customize it however you like! However it is likely that, as Gygax put it in the 1st ed. DMG, "your players expect to play this game, not one made up on the spot."The players -- more specifically, the subset of players who buy a lot of "product" -- drive the business. They seem for some time to have demanded, in effect, that "professionals" should indeed do more of their imagining for them. What the pioneers considered essential parts of play, fun nobody would want to have taken away, have come widely to be viewed instead as at best labor one should be able to avoid ... at worst as evidence of "bad" design.</blockquote>

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