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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 5025056" data-attributes="member: 59082">Wow, Lancelot, that is terrific--a fun read! (And thanks for the clear formatting). I can't say that I disagree with a single word, or at the very least I can see the validity of each and every viewpoint that you express. Now imagine if Wizards of the Coast was to take something like this and say "Hmmm...how can we design a 5th edition that combines the best elements of each while jettisoning the worst?" OK, not gonna happen--yet--but it would be an interesting approach.This relates to your point about 4ed's poor marketing. It is my sense that WotC made a gambit that at least somewhat backfired in that they either forgot or deliberately bypassed their base (the grognards and pseudo-grognards) in a (failed?) attempt to market to a younger, Warcraftian crowd, seemingly forgetting the fact that it is this minority of gamers that purchase a majority of books, and assuming that they would just come along for the ride (which not everyone did, certainly less than came along for the ride called 3ed). My prediction is that 5th edition will be a kind of consolidation based upon the dawning realization that tabletop RPGs are a shrinking market and that the graying base of serious to hardcore gamers--even though it may be the minority of total players--is still responsible for the lion's share of product purchasing. So we really might see something similar to the approach that I'm advocating, albeit with all the bells and whistles that technology will be able to provide in five or six years. That would be the "right way to go", imo, the wrong way being going further into MMO-RPG hybrid territory. I say "wrong" because the MMO players won't downgrade to a less virtual experience, and the RPG players are too old fashioned and in love with that endangered capacity called "Imagination." So my hope is that WotC gets this and 5ed is a step back in the direction of imagination-as-primary and virtuality-as-secondary.p.s. So if 1ed was the Golden Age of Dragon and Dungeon, and 3ed the Silver Age, with 2ed perhaps being the Lead Age, would that make 4ed the Silicon Age? <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=";)" /></blockquote>

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