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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5995442" data-attributes="member: 996">A number of somethings.  From broad things, like class balance, to little things, like Warlords.  But, each edition had things that others didn't.  2e had Kits.  3e had modular multi-classing.  1e had randomly-determined psionic potential.  OD&D had no Chaotic Evil or Lawful Good.  Those are just examples, I'm sure there are myriad differences and commonalities to be found if we look hard enough.Understood.  And, in  a live-and-let-live world where there had been no 'edition war,' that'd be more than enough.  But, in our post-edition-holocaust survival scenario, the framers of 5e need to know WTF happened, and how to keep it from happening again.  You say "dissasociative mechanics happened!" but, upon examination, it's just a meaningless circumlocution, a rationalization, not a reason, for hating 4e.  There's no way to keep that from happening again.I say, the OGL happened.  When they went open-source they let a genie out of a bottle, it's not going back in, so they better play ball with it.  Make 5e open-source, just like 3e, and the same problem won't manifest.  The fan base might remain fragmented, but the industry will rally around the prospect of riding D&D's coattails again, and 5e will have a shot  at the same dominance as 3e had (but no, D&D is not likely to repeat it's fad highs).  While we can geek out over the system and theorycraft all we want, I don't think most fans much care about such minutiae.  I think the 'silent' (but still wallet-voting) majority of D&D fans care about ongoing support for the system, and I believe that they're a bit change-adverse.  If you give them a new system and no ongoing support for the old one, they change over.  If you give them a new system with an uncertain future and give them ongoing support for the old, they won't.  5e needs to be presented with confidence and a long-term commitment that, no, we are not going to just 'make' you re-buy the core books like we did with 3.5 and 4e and Essentials and, now 5e, for real, this time, 5e is going to be around for a decade and more.  And, 5e needs to have an open-source licence so attractive to 3pps that every currently-rival d20 publisher will leap on the bandwagon and make support for the new game, /not/ the old one.    That's my opinion on what it would really take to re-unite the base in the sense of customers.  They might still violently disagree over what makes a great system, and whether 5e is it - but they'll buy 5e, if most of the industry is busily turning out supplements and expansions for it, instead of 4e or 3.5 or Pathfinder.  I guess it amounts to getting the industry to buy into a self-fulfilling prophesy that 5e will be The Next Big Thing.  3.0/d20 OGL did that.  4e GSL didn't.  5e must.</blockquote>

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