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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9574785" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Continuing my tradition of obsessively nitpicking Snarf comments, I think he means "tic".Although a Pavlovian Tick seems like it should be some fun old school puzzle monster (maybe you defeat one by ringing a bell and throwing food in the other direction?).  Also reminds me that Giant Rats were AKA Sumatran rats in 1E.OSRIC came out in 2006, for the record.  The OSR really got started a couple of years before that, though it didn't have as much visibility in the wider D&D community until later.  I didn't find out about it until 2009, maybe.Yeah, agreed.When 3E came out WotC had a ton of community goodwill, between saving D&D and wanting to keep RPGs as a big thing.  Remember that in the 90s Magic, alongside MMOs like EverQuest, was seen by some as a threat to the continued existence of RPGs.  A lot of players wanted a lower-commitment or more convenient form of gaming.  I knew a ton of folks who lamented losing players from their groups to MMOs and Magic.  When WotC said "Hey, we LOVE D&D and want to continue it and make it the industry king again!" that was a nice morale boost to D&D fans.  Their "back to the dungeon" marketing, their embrace of Greyhawk as the default campaign setting, and a lot of other things, were appeals to reassure longtime D&D fans.And systemically, AD&D was indeed super long in the tooth.  People had been playing around with a lot of alternatives in the 90s (White Wolf, GURPS, Shadowrun, and other stuff).  While AD&D still had fans, it was widely regarded as kind of old-fashioned and immature.  Systems with a consistent core mechanic were much more in vogue. Making it "the D20 system" meant keeping the core d20 mechanic we all knew from attack rolls and saving throws while generalizing it to other mechanics, which was a great way of having your cake and eating it too.  Retaining the familiar and nostalgic while updating to feel a bit more modern and consistent and simpler to introduce new players to.3E killed a few sacred cows, but it also streamlined and rationalized things in a way which felt consistent with what AD&D promised but never actually did.  If you do a text comparison of 3E with AD&D you also find that WotC retained a TON of language, especially in spell descriptions.  Read Fireball, say, side by side. It's mostly a cleanup and good edit of the AD&D spell.3E wasn't nearly so long in the tooth, and had already had one reboot only a few years in.  And there was consumer fatigue/sunk cost in terms of the huge number of hardcover books and supplements which had been published for it.  Dedicated players often had hundreds or even thousands of dollars in books for 3.x by the time 4E was announced.And I think a significant part of WHY the designers were allowed (and told) to get more ambitious and make 4E more different and not reverse-compatible was because the GSL was Hasbro's first try to get out of the OGL.</blockquote>

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