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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Roman" data-source="post: 4687991" data-attributes="member: 1845">The first thing that I need to be say on this topic is that as a gamer I do not feel obliged to judge the game on its commercial success for the company concerned - merely on how it suits my gaming needs. Yes, I take an interest in the general RPG industry and market, but I am not going to begin liking a game just because it is the "best commercial decision" or "what the market wants" - I will like it or dislike it completely independent of those commercial issues. With that caveat out of the way: My solution presented to the Hasbro overseers would be to indeed produce a new edition of the game. The design parameters of the new edition, however, would have been rather different than those of the current 4E. I would have explained to Hasbro, that D&D has a uniquely dominant position in the market that exists based on historical path dependence (D&D was first) and on the positive externality of a large network of players making it relatively easy to find games or groups when compared to other roleplaying games. These strengths are inherent in the D&D brand, but they must be supported and protected by making the game appropriate to a wide range of gaming styles to accomodate a diverse gaming audience and ensure that D&D remains the RPG that most default to. Growing the hobby is commercially important, but at the same time, the existing network of players is a massive strength of D&D compared to all competing RPGs and the new edition should strive to build on it, rather than throw it away or split the base. Retaining most of the flavor conceits of the previous editions is a harmless way to appeal to the existing user base. Massive changes of flavor (ranging from Cosmology through Dragons) are likely to needlessly leave a large chunk of the existing user-base disenchanted thus diminishing not only sales, but also the network effect that is, among other things, also important for acquiring new players. New flavor can still be introduced in new campaign settings for those who want some novelty (after all, if they want novelty, they probably don't particularly want to use legacy campaign setting anyway) and if many new flavor features are desired for the purposes of marketing to expand the user-base. The design plan for the rules would stress supporting multiple game styles - at the very least an honest effort would be made to accomodate gamism, narrativism and simulationism, rather than choosing one or two of those and tossing the third (or even two of them) completely out of the window. We don't know the precise split of the user-base (no good data on this), but all of these are numerically important play-styles and need to be supported. The above is the basic idea of what I would recommend. The extent of the changes between editions (and it can easily be greater than between 3E and 3.5E yet smaller than between 3.5E and 4E - there is a LOT of space in between these two extremes) is something I won't go into. I think, commercially-speaking, the appeal to existing user-base would have been greater overall, if the changes have not been quite as extensive as they were and the direction of the changes could also have been somewhat different. Final Caveat: I am not a fan of 4E at all and dislike the direction the system has taken, so read the above with that in mind. Commercially, though, I think 4E is probably very successful - we don't really have any data, but I think there were some indications from WotC of 'record sales' and so on (though I did hear some negative rumors about follow-on sales, so I am not completely sure which rumors are closer to the truth - I merely suspect that the good sales rumors are from closer to the source and thus more credible) - so commercially they may well have made the right decision with 4E. That won't change my mind about it, though, since as I said at the beginning, I judge a game based on its suitability to my gaming needs rather than by commercial success or lack thereof.</blockquote>

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