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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 5413372" data-attributes="member: 59082">I think we have different senses of humor. As I have already explained, my post began rather facetiously and became more serious. I don't really think that WotC "hates" old-timers, but that they have lost sight of certain elements of what makes D&D a unique experience (see mattcolville's excellent post a few before this one which I will respond to in this post).This is well said and resonates with my view (although video games don't appeal to me and I do dislike WoW for various reasons, although I don't dislike WoW players! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />).Good points. I don't entirely agree about the last part, but I do think it (4E) wasn't thought through as well as it should have been. At the least I think it is pretty safe to say that WotC couldn't possibly have expected the sheer degree and quantity of negative backlash. This was such an excellent post (xp to come) that I had a hard time cutting out parts of it. I agree wholeheartedly and this is a major aspect of what I was trying to get at, but put more concisely and clearly. What's next? Great question. I'm afraid more of the same--more ways to support your combat encounters. Virtually, of course.Why not something different? Why not, for instance, a guide to sandbox campaigning? Or a toolbox book for improv DMing? Why not a new campaign setting? Why not alternative sub-systems for the game, or new creative approaches like Weapons of Legacy or Magic of Incarnum?But of course we know why: Because that sort of thing has a low profit margin, or at least lower than books with more options for how to kill things. Because a new campaign setting is risky, riskier than another re-boot. And so on.This is not to say that WotC hasn't taken risks or that they haven't tried to innovate - they have. But what seems to have happened is that the all-powerful Combat Encounter has become a kind of massive attractor, a vortex into which everything gets sucked. Of course we have the power to break out of it, to run our games as we want to, but it would be nice for WotC to provide more tools to help us along the way, or at least diversify a bit. In summary, I think you are right: D&D is in danger of jettisoning what makes it (as a tabletop RPG) unique, which is the play of imagination within fantasy worlds. This is the factor that should be explored and nourished. The bifurcated concepts of "crunch" and "fluff" exemplify this: "fluff" is what the DM reads at home so that he can offer flavor text between encounters, while "crunch" is what we do within the game session.Again, no one is forcing anyone to play D&D this way, but WotC certainly advocates and encourages it.</blockquote>

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