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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 3795474" data-attributes="member: 3400">When I listen to the cynic in me, as I listen to the cynic in you, he tells me "Here we go again. Another person looking for ulterior motives because someone is daring to change his game in a direction he isn't immediately nodding his head to." Personally, I don't entirely understand the point in some of these threads. For the game company publishing the game to survive, realistically, it needs to reinvent the game periodically. If it didn't, they'd eventually hit their market saturation and fade away with declining sales. Or, they'd have to continually add to the foundation, field tons of criticism about there being too many options and too much overwhelming material, and they'd still be reinventing the game anyway. They'd just be doing it by cobbling more patches on an increasingly old infrastructure that shows more and more rust all the time.So, why does it appear that so much is changing? In some cases, the reinvention of one aspect leads to the reinvention of another. Simple enough. Happens with integrated things all the time whether they're game systems or software.It's also the case that when you are in the process of reinventing something, all of the other things that have bothered you over the years suddenly become opportunities. Why change planar travel (particularly in the hostile elemental planes) now? Because it's been on someone's back burner for a while and, with a new edition under way, that's an excellent time to put back burner project on the main track. They're going to be doing a big publishing push for the new edition, might as well make it worth it by getting in all of the other revision project as well. Hell, that's just efficient.Now, it may be that they are geeking out. Wouldn't that be the dream of a lot of us, though? Why are there so many threads about house rules? Why did so many of us have (or still have) binders or reams of house rules written up (stored in our noggins, posted on websites, on our hard drives, etc) for our games? Because we can't resist the urge to tinker, to implement the ideas we have that we believe are superior. Why do it? Because, quite frankly, we love to do it. Either we love to play enough that we are finding ways to make it easier and smoother for us to do so or we just love to wrap our brains around an issue and implement a gaming solution. Why should the R&D team at WotC be any different? If they do a good job of it, they'll be rewarded with good sales. If not, they won't. Everyone can still pick their favorite edition and play with whatever house rules they've cobbled together during their own geekgasm phase.Personally, I do think that what they're doing is making sure D&D has another good 5-8 years of good sales and relevance in the broader gaming world by trying to reinvent the game in a way that it's fun and awesome based on today's understanding of game development (one that uses some lessons learned from online games and years of further experience with 3E versions and other previous editions). I don't think anything is being done simply "because they can" or to just tap into a spendthrift demographic.</blockquote>

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