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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 8646293" data-attributes="member: 6799660">Okay. Thank you for this. That's certainly something. At some point around the second printing of the initial product release, it was outpacing both expectations and where 3e was at that same time. That's useful, informative, and helpful. It doesn't show the claim I asked about, so I am still without the context I would like to have, but I appreciate the effort. FWIW, I am solidly in the camp of '4e was a perfectly good game,' or even '4e was a good game and didn't get a fair shake.' I'd play more of it, except that when I'm looking to scratch the itches 4e scratches, I tend to overshoot D&D altogether and play another TTRPG entirely (for my group, D&D is the minivan of games or something like that, I don't know how to fit that into the 'quality' debate). I am perfectly fine saying that 4e was shortchanged, needlessly vilified, victim of a smear campaign, hamstrung by marketing missteps rather than actual lack of game quality (there's that word again), or even just released at the wrong moment when people weren't really done with the 3e. Thing is, WotC still did cut the game lifecycle short, right (or is that a contentious statement too)? Eight year lifespan for 3e and 4 for 4e. If 4e made more money than 3e (or sold more units, or whatever metric they used -- which again I am genuinely trying to find) why do so (the one thing I think we can all agree with about WotC is that they wouldn't shut down a profitable revenue source that people only thought wasn't doing well*)? That's why I want context. What doesn't make sense to me is a game that is actually pretty good and so woefully mistreated in the court of public opinion and over before its' time and oh by the way secretly more profitable that then one before it (but they shut it down early anyway... for reasons).  I think we all (most all?) in-thread have concluded that neither popularity or profitability directly equal quality. That just makes me all the more quizzical that, a page or two past this post, we're back to people talking about 4e as the second most profitable edition, and I don't see where that was shown.*If you want an example of that, find some old 90s White Wolf employees talk about Hunter the Reckoning -- the collective wisdom seems to be that it was a misstep and that what gamers really wanted was and expansion an the Hunters Hunted VtM splatbook and that because it wasn't that, it tanked. The employees generally say, 'No idea why you think that, it sold great! The company was slowly dying, but not because of that product line.'I certainly will when I get the time (perhaps the long weekend). I'm still not the one making a claim about sales for any edition, though, so it will be at a leisurely pace. OP has mixed the general topic with both snips at 4e and a general defensiveness towards snips at 5e. It's hard to say. We have to do a lot of 'would X have happened if Y hadn't?' kind of questions (particularly related to how modern entertainment experience has been shaped by always-on internet). Regarding the system of 2e in particular, I guess I'd say why not? For all our line-drawing between editions, they are all still relatively close together compared to the entire scope of possible RPGs out there. Put it in the 90s and it could have been WEG Star Wars might have been the game to go over the top... or not even an RPG proper at all (maybe some mod on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talisman_(board_game)" target="_blank">Talisman </a>or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordheim" target="_blank">Mordheim </a>where you gave your peices personality. That's kind of the point. The divergence point where everyone agrees is a primary component of what makes a game Quality is so close to qualifying as a game at all, that discussions of quality almost inevitably will have some level of caveats to them, be highly subjective, or be arguments predicated on 'if you agree with a pre-premise that...'-type statements.What do you mean by unacceptable? Who gets to decide what is acceptable or not? Your own personal standard? Okay, I guess, but then so be it. I'm really not clear the point you are trying to make. A game that actually can be used at least some of the time is probably a game. A game that permits its users to enjoy its use is probably subjectively a good game. Is that what you're going for?Since I don't get your point, this might be heading off in a completely tangential direction. However, my thoughts, and central premise are this -- TTRPGs are closer to Jazz performance or horror movies than they are like burgers, much less automobiles or timepieces. The functional threshold for 'do they do a good job of performing their basic primary function?' is so close to automatic that discussions of their quality almost immediately scatter into either subjective criteria, or at times ordinally-measurable qualitative metrics that are not universally agreed to being primary measures of quality (or, even if agreed to within a group, what their relative importance is). Thus reviews of RPGs can often look closer to Siskel and Ebert movie reviews than to rocket engine performance tests or structural engineering reports of bridge health.</blockquote>

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