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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 5206495" data-attributes="member: 18280">Simply agreeing with the point I thought you were making; increasing the risk doesn't necessarily make combat better.  And the "level of risk determined by the manufacturer" is relatively unimportant, so long as it can fairly easily be "modified by playing groups".Forked from that thread was a thread called "It's All About the Minis" which you did participate in.  Until I had dredged up the quote, I imagined that you might have been part of the original conversation as well.Well, you could read things that way, I suppose.What we do know is:*  Prior to the advent of 3e, using minis was relatively uncommon.  Over 40% of the gamers polled by WotC claimed to have never used minis at all.  The remaining under 60% had used them, but we don't know how often.*  The WotC data also showed that those who bought minis spent 10 times as much as those who did not (on gaming materials), or more.*  3.0 was mini-friendly, but did not require the use of minis.  From the statements of Monte Cook, and from the previews in Dragon, I expect that WotC wanted the game to be miniatures-friendly, but nothing more.*  I suspect that, as the marketing data indicated was likely, the minis sold very, very well.  If the marketing data is correct, then the sale of books is 1/10th the sale of minis; the game becomes a means of selling minis, rather than the minis becoming an adjunct of the game.*  3.5 comes out, and references to real distances are replaced by references to the grid; the game is made to forward the use of minis more than 3.0 did.*  4.0 comes out, and all but requires minis.  Scott Rouse:  "With effort you can play with out but them but it does require a fair amount of DM hand waiving and/or behind the screen position tracking to make area effects work."*  We know that this was a business decision related to the use of and sale of minis in previous WotC editions (3.0 & 3.5).  Scott Rouse:  "This was a rules decision influenced by both a style of play that had come out of 3e and the business model that style of play created."  (emphasis mine)Frankly, if I know that I can sell X, or I can sell X + Y and make ten times the money, and I know that I can produce X so as to make Y all but mandatory, I would be a fool not to produce X in such a manner.  Even if doing so caused 10% of my current clientele to desert (and there were lots of threads where folks thought this unlikely), those clients would not be my meat-and-potatoes clients anyway, as they were presumably less likely to buy Y in the first place.  And, if my marketing data is correct, the sales in Y will more than cover the loss of sales in X.I would find it more than vaguely insulting, were we to assume that my goal was to make money, were you to suggest that I am incapable of seeing the obvious and responding accordingly.I would, therefore, suggest that it is more than vaguely insulting to imagine that the good people at WotC are somehow incapable of following the obvious profit trail.That could just be me, though.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />YMMV.RC</blockquote>

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