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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wolv0rine" data-source="post: 3299457" data-attributes="member: 9045">Howdy again, U_K. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I'll come right out and state that as a gamer I'm unusual, from the beginning of my gaming career to the present.  That being said, I have never once walked into a game shop and had a game demonstrated to me.  More to the point, I've never even heard of a RPG being demonstrated to someone (with the exception of "They're playing it over there, you can go watch if you want").  So I just don't get the "They can't demo it in a few minutes" thing.And see, if you tell ANYONE there's a recommended 960 pages of reading just to get started they'll turn green and walk away in a hurry.  And really, there's nothing like that needed, and they shouldn't be made to feel there is.  They're a new player, they need (presuming the optimal situation of having joined a group) to read the racial descriptions and class descriptions.  Someone explains in summary the rough idea of the skills system and walks them through it, the same with the feats, help them pick some equipment, and throw them to the Worgs.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />In oddball situations like mine (where I got involved in D&D in complete isolation, and didn't meet other gamers for nearly 10 years afterwards), well then the reading of the books is a hobby that grows into a fascination, and there's no 960 pages to read to prepare, you're reading.  That falls into the same category as "There's like XXX friggin thousand pages if you want to even catch up with the Harry Potter series, and if you want to even get the gist of LotR, there's pages enough to fill an encyclopedia".  You don't care, you're there to read it.Hmm, I presume that guesstimate is referring to relatively recent/modern gamers, since if you go back into the gronards that's how pretty much everyone started. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />That being the case...  that could well be.  Then again D&D has always (save for the early gamers) been that way.So basically, in your own weird way, you're trying to make D&D more and more of a "Rules Light" system?  While I'll agree that has it's proponents, the gamers I've known have been trying to make it a more (coherently) Rules Heavy system since 1E, because it's abstractions are just too abstract.  So I guess that boils down to "That's just not even vaguely to my gaming taste".I don't think I was going off on a tangent.  I was talking about the difference between the dense forests of text that Gygax used when writing the 1E books vs. the Diet Coke text used in the 3E/3.5E books.  While the rules have gotten more numerous and interlocked, the books have continued to be written more and more dumbed down.  This is a very overt sign, and I don't personally feel like it's a very promising one.  Not only are we (largely justifiably, I'm sorry to say) assuming that the generations that follow us are weaker on attention span and applied intelligence, but we are both encouraging and empowering that trend when we throw our hands in the air and cry "If we don't, they're just ignore us!"The point being, and I admit from step one that it's a very gronard, 'old guy' point, is that WE waded through dense, obscurely worded verbosity in the books we learned to game in, and when we didn't know a word we went and learned it.  And we grew more learned from the experience.  While I won't claim that today's youth have what it takes to do that, I think it's damaging to continue to lower the bar again and again.  That's both a gamer POV and a parental POV. While I am (even if it may not seem like it) a proponent of simple rules (IF they are also functional, flexible, and elegant), that just seems like an over-simplified, over-abstracted take on game mechanics to me.  You've lost flexibility, and limited the use and scope of skills in the game with something like that.It's possible, maybe even very possible, that market research has been done on the matter,  I strongly propose that it's a subject that cannot be market researched, being a variable that tends to shift, fluxtuate, and even change in the transition from experience to the telling.  It's the old "Tighten your grip, sand slips through your fingers" sort of thing, I believe.For ME, yes 3E is more fun than 1E.  While 3E is by far not the game that I would have written before 3E was released, I immedaitely saw that the 3E system was close enough to a mountain of rules changes that I had been working on implimenting atop 1E (Yes I mostly skipped 2E as "That bastard retarded child of AD&D") since 1990 (a mountain so high I had dropped the idea of making them changes to AD&D and spent nearly a decade in slowly creating an entire new game system built around them in my spare time) that I could accept it and be able to twist it and add to it, instead of lopping off entire swaths of it as making no logical sense to me.  BD&D and 1E is the girl I fell in love with, but 3E was the woman she grew up to be that I could entertain the idea of marrying.And, being the sort of gamer who does spend idle time making PCs, monsters, PrCs, spells, and all manner of things I have a huge chance of never usng, just for fun, yeah I still enjoy doing that.  I hate statblocks as much or more than the next guy, but I mean really even if I saw $100 spring to life in my bank account every time I did one I'd still wish it was as easy as the 1E approach of "4 orcs, hp: 5, 8, 6, 6".  And yes, a 3E statblock could be easily done in that vein.  It just isn't because we want to treat DMs as lazy.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I won't argue with you on the weaknesses of the spell lists.  Those bug me too.  Although the seperation of Arcane and Divine spell lists is, I feel, a must.  But 1 Arcane list, and 1 Divine list should be sufficient.So great, we need a GOOD "BASIC 3E D&D".  Just because we don't have one doesn't mean we need to redefine D&D from the basement up. Heh-heh.But no, it's not semantics.  If I have half a turkey, some pasta, a plate of ginger cookies, brown mustard, and salsa and corn chips I have a number of choices about what to do for dinner.  If I have that list and am under the restriction that I must use all of these items to make my meal, I am no longer a happy man.  It's the same thing.  If I CAN use Minis (or not), that's peachy.  If I can't play unless I use minis, then the game is no longer the same game. No, you've fallen victim to WotC's PR.  The game doesn't revolve around minis.  The game tries very hard to make you think that it revolves around minis by using 'squares' instead of 'inches' or 'feet'.  But we know that 1sq=5ft.  I don't even really read "5 squares", I see "25 feet".  Honestly, I have never once, in all my years of gaming, played in a game where minis were used.  Not once, ever.  Closest I've come it some impromptu items set up in a basic "Okay, the ogres are over here, kinda like this, and you guys are here.  There's a wall here, blocking your view like this much".  No battlemat, no board, no measurements, no minis.And I really like it that way.  Visual aids can be The <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> sometimes, but I don't want a "move my piece" RPG.I'm in favor of online versions, too.  NWN and DDO are great.  I don't have a computer new or strong enough to play DDO (or the money for it) but I still have NWN and I still enjoy it.  But if D&D 4E was NWN, D&D4E would have lost my business and most everyone else's I know.The online apprach requires certain things from a user that a board game doesn't.  System Requirements being a not-small one of those.  While it's fine and grand to say "Practically everyone has or can afford a computer that can meet the requirements", that's like saying "Practically everyone can use sanguine in a sentance, or spell Existentialism".  It's fine because obviously You can, but you don't know how many others can, really.  I've been trying to manage to upgrade my computer for over 6 years because it's over 10 years old.  I still haven't gotten the money together to do it.  My system is pressed to it's limit to play Baldur's Gate 2, still, and I have to use my partner's computer to run NWN.  Some people can't afford to upgrade TO the New Thing is what I'm saying, and you lose those people when you go to something that requires them to do it.I take it from your collected posts so far that by "the same approach" you mean "Books", and that's mind boggling because nearly as long as books have been published there have been claims that something was just about to make them obsolete.  And so far, that's not even a realistic possability.  Now game shops, those are on the way out, but they've been slowly on the way out since at least 1987.  I remember previously successful game shops just closing one day that far back because they couldn't hold their business together on the business they were getting.  And that was before the Internet came along and gave us Internet Publishing.  So yes, the way gamers meet and gather and gossip and all that previously game shop stuff will likely have to change.  Luckily for us, it slowly has been changing, moving to the internet.2E managed to sell retreads of the same stuff just fine.  3E managed to sell retreads of the same thing dandily.  3.5E even managed to do it.  Why shouldn't 4E be able to?  Especially if the rules system includes (or is built around) enough significant changes that the material in those books prospers from an update to reflect the new, different way things are done that apply to those topics?  It's been done again and again.  But you still have to have that mark in the sand that says "Pas this point, you hold something different than what you carried over it", and must decide if coming out the other end with an apple when you went in to save your orange was worth it.If I were WotC I would have made every foray into attacking the mass market (and knowing full wll going in that the discernable results would make baby jesus cry a little) in as many ways as possible, but I would (and still would continue to) attack that mass market with the product I was trying to interest them in in the first place. U_K, mate, you have just done a wonderful job of selling me on Heroquest, which is in pretty much EVERY way the game you just tried to sell us.  Actually, going only on what you posted here, you are in EVERY way selling HeroQuest.  And you know, I bought HeroQuest about 14 years ago.  Still have it, plus 1 expansion set, somewhere.  Haven't touched it in at least a decade.  But HeroQuest DOES always remind me that there was at one point a company that managed to provide me with a good number and assortment of plastic minis, PLUS an endlessly configurable board, PLUS configuration flats, PLUS room decoration pieces (doors, weapons racks, torture devices, a vanity, a chest of drawers, etc), managed to tell me all I reasonably needed to know about what pieces I was buying in that box (read: NO RANDOMIZATION), PLUS a fully-playable set of game rules...  all for like $20-$25 or so.  And THAT, more than anything else I've read so far, shots Merrick's "Laws of Minis" straight through the forehead for MY money.  <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=";)" />But in the end, HeroQuest is NOT D&D, and should never be made to try to be.</blockquote>

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