Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4841735" data-attributes="member: 40961">I think "bloat" is starting to get misused, and this argument is starting to turn into a pure edition war.  Bloat isn't just lots of books, its lots of books and some problem resulting from it. With the third party publisher bloat that gets talked about the problem was one of inventory and quality control for retailers, coupled with a speculative bubble in which retailers stocked lots of third party products in anticipation of heavy third party product sales- an anticipation that turned out to be in error after time passed.  This left retailers with unsellable stock, and a feeling that they didn't know enough to pick and choose which third party products to sell in the future.   When people talk about rules bloat at the end of 3e, they are generally referring either to the tendency of designers, adhering to the general policy of noncore books not assuming one another, writing overlapping material, or to the designers running out of good, popular ideas and starting to write more and more niche and experimental material.  The latter of which is cool, in my opinion, but perhaps not saleable. And when people talk about 2e bloat, they often refer to the huge number of campaign settings, and the fact that 2e was mostly selling campaign setting material instead of crunch.  Campaign setting material only appeals to those who play in that particular campaign, meaning that the more campaigns you release, the more you split the market for setting material. So... will 4e have bloat?  I don't know.  Maybe.  Probably eventually. Obviously the first kind of bloat doesn't seem to be happening.  Third party publishers aren't swamping anyone with releases.   Some significant measures have been put into place to combat the second kind of bloat.  The entire power system is, to a certain degree, an effort to control the stack-ability of powers.  When a 3e designer writes a feat in a supplement to represent the martial arts skill of the [X] monastery in [Y] setting, he needs to recognize its compatibility or incompatability with feats written in the [Z] setting as well, plus feats written in Dragon.  When the 4e designer does the same thing with a power, he probably doesn't need to do this because most powers are discrete events that can't be stacked with one another.  There's still some stacking, and therefore some potential for combinatorial problems, notably in feats and in stances.  But even stances are limited since they can't stack with one another, and feats are much less powerful than they used to be.  So will this sort of bloat eventually occur?  Probably some day.  I predict that when it does it will arrive through multiclassing and dual classing, since even the most responsible designer will end up paying more attention to stacking issues within the class for which he's writing rather than within the game as a whole. And the third kind of bloat?  Products becoming progressively niche?  This one's inevitable, someday.  But soon?  I'm not so sure.  Five years from now it will still be possible to write new powers for core, popular classes like the Fighter, instead of needing to write a new fighter-like class to contain new ideas too big to be feats (see 3e Knight, etc). As for campaign bloat, the reason this was a problem in 2e was because it was such a big part of 2e's sales strategy, and as a strategy its fundamentally flawed in the long term as you fracture your own consumer base.  There's nothing inherently bad about having lots of settings as long as you can sell products in a sustainable manner.  4e seems to be more interested in 3e style sales of crunch than in 2e style sales of campaign settings.  And the crunch is, in 3e style, setting independent.  This hopefully makes books like Martial Power 9 or whatever appeal to people in all settings in a way that Forgotten Realms: Hobgoblin Sociology for Beginners may not. So overall, will bloat occur?  Some types of bloat, particularly the niche product type, are inevitable.  Will bloat be driven by WotC instead of by 3rd party publishers?  Of course, the sort of bloat that's inevitable can only come from WotC.  Will it matter?  Not necessarily, but maybe?   The real question is whether the new structure of the game and the new focus on long term, sustainable business (subscriptions, increasingly modular game, planned editions instead of waiting for crisis points like the 2e/3e changeover) will allow WotC to stretch out the non-bloat portion of a game's lifespan long enough to then switch to 5e without feeling rushed. And of course that gets to an entirely new issue... the feeling that an edition change is "too early" is, in a certain sense, an argument that there wasn't enough bloat yet, that more bloat would have been appreciated, because then, seeing the damage caused by the bloat more clearly, the fan base would be more accepting of an edition change.  I have no idea what to say about that.</blockquote>

Verification