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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rknop" data-source="post: 7992311" data-attributes="member: 20176">Continual changes and upgrades doesn't work for a RPG system as it does for video game consoles.  With software, the operating system is underneath, and whatever nastiness it has to do in order to support old stuff (emulators? legacy libraries?) is painful for the developers, but coded in and (if done right) transparent to the users.  Emulators are enabled because eventually new systems are fast enough that they can inefficiently replicate earlier systems at even faster speeds.  Buildups of libraries (to the point that now lots of people work in containerized virtual environments where each and every application comes with a complete system of OS libraries to go with it) have been enabled by growing memory and disk space.WIth a pen-and-paper RPG, we are the hardware that runs the operating system, and the books are the code.  Continual changes is not a process that allows us to continually adapt, it's a constant buildup of cruft that makes the system heaveir and heavier and eventually nearly impossible to keep up with.  Human mental capcity has not been expanding along Moore's Law as computers have.  This buildup of cruft to make the whoel thing unwieldy is what happened with Pathfinder 1e, which lasted something like ten years (and which I still play, by the way).  Somewhere between the Advanced Class Guide and Occult Adventures, it became clear that there were just too many rules.  Yeah, GMs had the option to limit them, but that becomes a big effort.  In organized play, it's not an option.  It became basically impossible for a GM to come to the table and understand everybody's character if the players were using stuff across all of the releases.  New players were at a pretty big disadvantage because there's no way they could assimilate all of the rules system.You can run many XBox 360 games, and even some original XBox games, on your XBox One without you yourself having to know anything about those earlier systems.  You can't pick up Pathfinder's Ultimate Intrigue and create a Vigiliante without also going back and understanding something about the Pathfinder core rulebook, plus a whole bunch of stuff in between.The closest you can come to a new edition while keeping it backwards compatible is probably what Call of Cthluhu has done.  But, that's a very different sort of game system from D&D; new editions really don't change much, and they aren't constantly adding things, certainly not for players, not anywhere near the rate of a D&D or Pathfinder.  The idea of continuing to give players new toys -- that describes a buildup of necessary knowledge and cruft that will eventually become just too brobdingnagian for many players to keep up with.</blockquote>

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