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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mattcolville" data-source="post: 5414302" data-attributes="member: 1300">They're not in a bind. We don't matter. What they need is a game that's fun to play and if a designer can't speak intelligently on what is fun, or what makes something fun, they should be fired. Throwing up your hands and saying "well everyone's idea of fun is different" means "we should not be paying you to make fun games."The game doesn't *have* to compete with...any other game, because kids have lots of free time. They can do more than one thing. All D&D has to do is be fun in a way other things aren't fun.What separates D&D from the Castle Ravenloft board game? I honestly don't know, because as far as I can tell, WotC's attitude is "nothing." D&D is a series of encounters in which you fight monsters. So is Castle Ravenloft.What makes D&D Different is the existence of the Temporal World and while you and I can graft that onto the game because we grew up with a tradition that assumed it, it doesn't seem like WotC thinks it's worth pushing to the fore.From where I sit, they should be working on nothing else. Because I already have more tools to kill monsters with than I could ever use. So now it's time to give our characters some ambition.AD&D assumed a certain set of built-in ambitions and these were good and served two generations of gamer well, but WotC could do better. Epic Destinies are as close as WotC gets, but I think they're a cop-out. First, they're sort of the opposite of ambition. They're what you get when you've already achieved everything else. I'm talking about stuff like."I want to build a keep.""I want to start a guild.""I want to create a new spell.""I want to be a Baron.""I want to be...." whatever your character wants, apart from a dude who kills monsters. Which, based on my assessments of how people play the game, is something players should be thinking about and given tools for at around 7th level. Epic Destinies are about becoming a God and whatnot. That's not The Temporal World, that's transcending the Temporal World. The Temporal World is what gives our adventures *meaning*. That's something critically missing from D&D4. In D&D4, because of the way magic and rewards work, it doesn't matter what adventure your character goes on. He's going to come out the other side exactly the same as if he'd gone through any other adventure.He's going to get some money that he can't really buy anything with, some XP, and some magic. And the magic will be pretty blah, but it doesn't matter what it is, because he can render it down to residuum and combine it with the cash he can't spend to get the items he DID want. In fact, the DMG suggests just asking players what magic they want, and giving it to them.Adventures, therefore, become a black box. From the outside, before or after, we can't see inside. We can't tell, by looking at your character sheet, which *in-game* choices your character made. We can only see the choices the player made when he leveled up.Instead we need....well first we need to keep what we have. The 'Fighting Monsters' part works great. Now we need a world, we need context. We need adventures with choices and worlds to affect. I love 4E. Great fun. But the absence of meaning, context, a world that exists as a resource, a thing to take and use and change, as opposed to wallpaper, is criminal.</blockquote>

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