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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 7402431" data-attributes="member: 19675">No, because I’d be a great counter example: more than 100 systems before 4Ed came out.  And because I’m human, my natural assumption is that my opinion- absent other data- is the norm.  While I liked playing it, it was firmly in the “I never want to DM it” category.What I meant was that people tend to fall in love with things. They gain sentimental value.  Their familiarity is comforting.  They are more likely to accept new things more quickly if they’re a supplement to instead of a replacement for something they already like.  That was the big lesson from New Coke.  Coke did tons of research testing New Coke as a counterforce to Pepsi’s surging market share.  Theynfound that NC not only beat Pepsi in taste tests, it also beat traditional Coke.So when New Coke rolled out as a replacement for the old recipe, they gained all kinds of new consumers from Pepsi and other brands...but lost huge numbers of traditional Coke drinkers.  Despite the taste test results, Coke’s established market didn’t want a replacement for Coke, they wanted a Pepsi-like drink to consume on occasion.  Sales plummeted.4Ed did a great job with bringing in new players, but veteran D&D players were a different story.  There wasn’t a wholesale rejection, but there wasn’t a massive adoption, either.  The major 3.X games- especially Pathfinder- all had a boost from D&D vets who were hoping 4Ed would be a refined version of 3.5Ed, not a substitute for it.  Sales were strong, but it also split the market.Which was kind of what I expected based on my education and my purely anecdotal observations.  There was just something that told me that 4Ed as a system could have been bigger if it were not marketed as D&D, and presented in a more genericised “toolboxy” system like HERO, GURPS, OR M&M not shackled to D&D’s sacred cows.I mean, imagine 4Ed with no classes, just the 4 roles, with all the role-specific powers available to each character with that descriptor.  No more need for multiclassing feats in a feat-hungry system.  Very flexible.</blockquote>

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