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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imperialus" data-source="post: 4293390" data-attributes="member: 893">Lots of good responses but I'll focus on this one.I agree that many groups do limit themselves to the core rules or core plus a limited number of splatbooks.  It does make the game a great deal simpler and prevents the group from spinning their wheels trying to get character concepts to work.However, a lot of groups aren't like this.  Typically IME a good DM is willing to allow players to create esoteric character types, at least if he knows (or is pretty sure) that the player in question isn't trying to create something that is going to throw the campaign out of whack.  Late in a product cycle however it's pretty tough to see sometimes how a build will turn out.As a matter of fact your group is probably one of the big reasons why such an edition cycle is necessary.  You aren't buying the splatbooks.  You have your core books, plus maybe a couple extras that caught your eye.  Wizards is no longer getting money from you.  They want your money, they need your money so they come out with new corebooks to get you buying again.  I'm not saying that 4E is your 'fault' but if the splatbooks continually sold well there'd be no business reason to replace 3.5.Also lets face it.  Wizards relies on those splatbook sales to make them money until a new edition is released.  Unless they adopted a 'freelance only' model which I believe would be untenable for a company the size of Wizards they need to make enough money to keep the lights on and the staff paid.  Splatbooks let them do this.  In response to a couple of the other posters I disagree that they can rely on continued sales of the corebooks for healthy sales, at least not without a very expensive marketing campaign.  The D&D movies released to date have not done well, and I think a lot of that is due to the relatively poor reputation the D&D brand has in wider society.  We (as gamers) like to believe that the D&D brand name carries a lot of clout but lets face it, to a lot of people we're still nerdy little Satan worshipers, who sit in basements, dress up and pretend to be elves.  This is a problem that goes beyond edition wars.  It's one that TSR and WoTC have both tried to address in the past to varying degrees of success but it's far from solved, and if anything 'dumbing down' (a charge laid at every edition of D&D that I've seen released) the rules is an attempt to find a solution and break into a wider market..</blockquote>

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