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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Malhost Zormaeril" data-source="post: 3817051" data-attributes="member: 49669">Let's not talk about RPGs anymore.  Let us talk about computer operating systems.  Of the OSs currently in use, there are two important ones:  Windows and Unix.  Of these, Windows is by far the most used -- something about 80% of all computers running today use some version of Windows -- and Unices (especially Linux and Mac's OSX) have a solid second place.  By your reasoning, of course, Windows must be far better than Unix, since some flavours would have supplanted Windows by now if it were really that bad.Of course, the truth is that Unix itself isn't that good, either.  Originally, the hallmarks of Unix were to be "portability" and "everything is a file".  That philosophy broke down in the late 70s when parts of the OS which weren't files (sockets) were introduced.  Portability followed soon after when the various incompatible corporate flavours of Unix were created (AIX, HP/UX, Xenix, etc.).  So perhaps Unix hasn't overtaken Windows because it is just as bad, then...However, there is an OS out there which is "Unix done right", and it's called "Plan 9 from Bell Labs", created to take the philosophies of Unix to the last consequences.  And they succeeded beautifully; the system is small, lean, works across a network transparently, handles concurrency transparently, and is generally all-around better behaved.So why hasn't this system supplanted Unix?  For several reasons, among which the license under which the code was released, but mostly because even though Unix isn't good, it's good enough:  People already know it, and they've learned to work with it, and if they have a hard time trying to make it jump through hoops, that's how computers work, there's no way around it...  Windows is the same; it's harder to program for by an order of magnitude, but the customer uses it, and everybody knows how to work in it, so that's what people use.So back to talking about RPGs:  Yes, inertia really is that powerful.  So much that people played 1st-level mages casting Sleep once in the dungeon and falling back on the sling for the rest of it.  It's not actually good game design, but we fool ourselves that it has to be that way, and that's how the hobby works.  Humans are a difficult species to work with...</blockquote>

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