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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6848144" data-attributes="member: 996">Indeed.  For instance, 4e made D&D much easier to learn and easier for new DMs to run.  I'd never seen new players - new to gaming, not new to the edition - transition to running games so quickly, nor having such a surprisingly easy time of it...That's be something.  ;|Presumably RPGs as a whole.  But, D&D is such a dominant force in the industry (the top two games are D&D and a clone of D&D), that you can't consider RPGs as a whole, without considering D&D.  D&D and it's clones and close imitators are in the grip of a somewhat-delayed/long-anticipated come-back of the 80s fad years, and that's got to impact the broader hobby.  Whether it'll blunt the demand for more innovative - or sharpen the need to innovate to get attention...?Hasn't that been the case for most of the hobby's history, though?  (The 3.x era stands out as an exception because of the dominance d20 achieved for a time.)That's a fair observation of how 'niche' games got in the 90s, for instance, and that may, indeed, be happening again with crowdfunding enabling more diverse and niche offerings. Not the best way of putting it, IMHO.  D&D has to appeal to it's own past and it's established player base, and thus the often quixotic playstyles they managed to fit to it over the decades (which, yes, is one of the reasons they had to roll back some of the innovations adopted by 4e - though those innovations may have been made by other games years if not decades earlier).  But D&D has never supported a broad range of play styles, it's just that, as it was the dominant game for so long, gamers have adapted many styles to D&D, as best they could.There's been a strong sense of a pendulum swinging on certain issues.  3e combat was too static, so 4e combat became dynamic and tactical, so 5e combat became fast.  Then again, there are other aspects where it's just a straight trend - spellcasting just getting easier an easier with every edition, until, in 4e, it was no more risky or penalized to cast a ranged spell as any other ranged attack (like a bow), and, in 5e, where it's now easier to cast a spell in melee than to use a bow.  On the DM side, yes, the pendulum has taken a longer swing from the player-empowerment of 3e & 4e, back to the DM empowerment of the classic game.  Sounds like fun.  You can do that while adopting positive aspects of board games:  good first play experiences, playability, balance/fairness, relative ease to learn, and, in looking at one of the recent innovations in boardgaming, cooperative boardgames (like Pandemic, for instance) and applying it to D&D:  not needing a DM, or, at least, being much easier to DM or have the potential to spread DMing duties among more than one player....  That'd be a dramatic innovation, if adopted (again, it's already been done, but either by actual board games, or by obscure RPGs).Yeah, there aren't any of those - rather, they already have done just that, if they ever tried RPGs at all.  Mere OneTrueWayism.  An RPG is both Role Playing, /and/ Playing a Game.  Go too far towards either, and you don't have a workable RPG anymore.  You may have a great game or an entertaining shared storytelling workshop, but not an RPG.And the people who want both wonder why the other two can't get along... ;PI'm in agreement, there.  I've generally considered them 'bored games,' in the past, but starting with Catan, board games got more interesting, and once cooperative boardgames came out, I'm happy to be a 'board gamer,' too.</blockquote>

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