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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5413718" data-attributes="member: 54877">As far as I'm concerned, the elephant in the living room has only been aluded to, thus far in the discussion.  I would state the problem as, there are two competing ways to state the goals of a modern edition of D&D: 1. Make the best possible game you can make, where "best" is defined any way you want, but has to involve a steady stream of players (i.e. at least slowly growing), some minimal threshold of elegance in the mechanics and efficiency of results using best game design, and likewise some minimal fidelity to D&D traditions. 2. Do the best you can with the above, while also making something that sells multiple products on a somewhat regular schedule. I'm fairly certain that lasor-like focus on the goals in option #1 would preclude option #2, because "best" is not going to be served by a stream of products.  You can have "inspirational" gaming materials produced, but you can't have them produced by a team of 20-30 people, every month or two.  Inspiration doesn't work like that, not even for the best writers.   As just one of the more obvious examples, they could easily make powers more elegant.  There aren't enough differences in powers to justify many of them.  But this would make the list of powers much shorter.  And thus, there would be a lot less power books.  Note that this is not only a 4E problem, either.  3E and 2E had it as bad (as do many other non-D&D games), merely in different areas.  Each edtion has tried to circumvent this basic problem by thinking up something else to talk about a lot, but you can't solve, "we need to talk less about X," using that strategy. (And yes, I understand exception-based design well enough to know that it is a good strategy for design, but when pursued strictly for design reasons, you don't have that many exceptions--especially, when the exceptions are essentially cosmetic.  From a software design perspective, what we have in D&D is a failure to "refactor" exceptions that aren't necessary into higher level constructs.) Sorry to be so pessimistic, but that's the way I see it.  The only way out I see is to "shoot the moon".  Build that best possible game without trying to sell a steady stream of supplements, and then determine how to make that game profitable--whether by building network, leveraging the network for other games, online social networks, gametable, etc.</blockquote>

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