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<blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7769524" data-attributes="member: 6873517"><p>One reason 2E was such a minimal rewrite of 1E has to do with business issues. It's really important to remember that these kinds of design decisions are not made in a vacuum. Recall that 2E came out in 1989, which was just a few years after Gygax was kicked to the curb and new management came in. TSR had a warehouse of 1E material still, and didn't want it to all of a sudden become totally obsolete. Also, the relatively new management of TSR was very gun-shy about destroying their market by making what would be perceived as really drastic changes to the game. New editions, just like a band getting a new lead singer or a change in direction for an author, movie series, or video game series, need to be handled very delicately and they were feeling pretty insecure at that point. The designers thought of all sorts of things that eventually showed up in later editions back in the late '80s but <a href="http://plotpoints.libsyn.com/98-five-generations-of-dd-design" target="_blank">those ideas were nixed by management</a>. D&amp;D also has the curse of being the market leader---it's much harder for the market leader to be innovative. We see this in many products, not just games.</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="Jay Verkuilen, post: 7769524, member: 6873517"] One reason 2E was such a minimal rewrite of 1E has to do with business issues. It's really important to remember that these kinds of design decisions are not made in a vacuum. Recall that 2E came out in 1989, which was just a few years after Gygax was kicked to the curb and new management came in. TSR had a warehouse of 1E material still, and didn't want it to all of a sudden become totally obsolete. Also, the relatively new management of TSR was very gun-shy about destroying their market by making what would be perceived as really drastic changes to the game. New editions, just like a band getting a new lead singer or a change in direction for an author, movie series, or video game series, need to be handled very delicately and they were feeling pretty insecure at that point. The designers thought of all sorts of things that eventually showed up in later editions back in the late '80s but [URL="http://plotpoints.libsyn.com/98-five-generations-of-dd-design"]those ideas were nixed by management[/URL]. D&D also has the curse of being the market leader---it's much harder for the market leader to be innovative. We see this in many products, not just games. [/QUOTE]

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