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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4803321" data-attributes="member: 2067">There is some crazy wisdom in the OP.With regards to D&D, some of those points are why I think the whole "It's to make the game more appealing to the newbies!" reason for some of 4e's changes is pretty dunderheaded.If you want to make D&D more appealing to the newbies, the change you make isn't "Focus on the action and reboot Forgotten Realms!" The change you make is to the very structure of the game. It's a tough nut to swallow when you're starry-eyed with fantasies of D&D riding the fantasy wave, but the fact is that spending four hours a week in a room with six people pretending to be elves is fundamentally out of the reach of a HUGE portion of humanity, and it only gets rarer as you get away from middle school, high school, and college (which have a way of mitigating the usual pull of social tides). 4e can't be serious about making the game appealing to the masses, because D&D is still a game you play in a room for four hours on a weekend pretending to be an elf with six other people. There's other things that contribute to it, too. One is the "entrance cost": Three two-hundred page books, special dice, special sheets, special toys, special markers, special online databases, special boards....(which 4e has been unashamed about encouraging you to buy, even moreso than 3e was). One is the "effort factor:" The DM has to put in work when he's not playing so that the game can be played. The players have to study the rulebooks like textbooks. One is the lack of eye candy: there's nothing that wows you, because you have to work at imagining everything. It takes a special kind of dork to be wowed at rolling high on a dice, which is pretty much the high point of a D&D game. And one, of course, is the heavy combat focus that is present in all editions of D&D but is glorified in 4e as the minis combat system has become, in many ways, the D&D game, with everything else going to support that leg.Which really defeats the interest of anyone who really doesn't like or doesn't want to invest in minis combat. Which would be "most people."There's some broader themes in gaming in general: how the Sims is a "girlfriend game," for instance (not coincidentally, that is a game that is basically about playing house). But for D&D, the big thing is that D&D as we know and love it will always be incredibly niche. In order to make D&D appeal to a broader section of the population, we would need to change the game so much so that it probably wouldn't be "D&D" even by the broad brushstrokes of 4e's criteria. It might still be a game about killing monsters and taking their stuff, but it's not like there's not games like that which aren't D&D. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> And might not even be a game about that! Of course, I think long before we reach that point, one of two things will happen:(a) the game will loose enough of it niche without gaining from the outside that it becomes fairly unprofitable(b) the game's designers will become comfortable in a D&D niche big enough to support a steady business.</blockquote>

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