Quote from: gamerGoyf;688875No the problem was you all along, correct yourself -_-

Keep fucking that chicken dude.

Quote from: One Horse Town;6888773e was a huge success because it brought d&d back in from the wilderness as a brand

Thinking back to that time, I realize I'd forgotten how much ill will TSR had managed to generate toward themselves by the late 90s. In that context 3e was a breath of fresh air.

Quote from: gamerGoyf;688875Each player is only ever going to be interacting with the small slice of the splat pile the have on their character sheet, a character sheet that has the same amount of stuff on it if use no splat books or all of them -_-

Congratulations on playing 3e from the beginning with the same party of characters, I guess. How'd that fighter/rogue/duellist turn out for you? Meanwhile in most other places people "make new characters" when their old ones "die" or "get boring" and meanwhile since it's 3e the DM has to make his own characters and be on top of the splatbooks the group is using.

(Personally, I think you can fight off cult-of-RAW/char-op types/whoever you find annoying in your gaming group quite well if you're reasonably lucky, but the administrative overload of 3e did overwhelm me eventually. I still like a lot of things about it though.)

I was a pretty solid 3e fan until some groknard on some forum somewhere educated me on the whole 'system mastery' vileness.

Quote from: mcbobbo;688929I was a pretty solid 3e fan until some groknard on some forum somewhere educated me on the whole 'system mastery' vileness.

Well I'm sorry that happened but please reconsider. Don't lets the Piestros or the Sunic's of the world get you down, the fun you have at your table is what matters not the ravings of bitter people on the internet who probably don't even play ^_^

Quote from: gamerGoyf;688934Well I'm sorry that happened but please reconsider. Don't lets the Piestros or the Sunic's of the world get you down, the fun you have at your table is what matters not the ravings of bitter people on the internet who probably don't even play ^_^

You are a delightful little troll aren't you?

I tend to think the game that rises to the top $ wise is the one with the greatest number of unified players and a company supporting those players.  As long as Paizo keeps up their Pathfinder Society they'll do fine with the existing product.  So the question is how long does it take a happy player in a system to turn into an unhappy player with the same system.  Judging by the fact we are seeing a renaissance in people playing games that came out 30-40 years ago a lifetime seems like a reasonable guess.

Quote from: Piestrio;688936You are a delightful little troll aren't you?

What's the matter bro, can't handle someone with a dissenting opinion ;3

But I digress let's talk about Pathfinder ^_^

As long as they command a substantial portion of the 3e fanbase I bet they can just keep faffing around with the 3e rules. Heck their core product is adventure paths is their any reason they can't just keep releasing them in perpetuity  ¯\(^_^)/¯

A better question is what's gonna take to pry the dead hand of 3.0 off the hobbies neck :?

Quote from: Piestrio;688844I suppose. But looking at it as an outsider TSR was most successful when it had two lines going and had all but completely abandoned Basic by the time they went into serious decline (I think the last BD&D product was released in '93 and the line didn't get a lot of attention for several years prior).

TSR's death came years after Basic was in the dustbin so it seems odd to blame it.

The problem was half of TSR's products would only be appealing to half their audience. And it could be confusing to newcomers. But D&D was so huge in the 80s that TSR could still be successful, even with the the AD&D/BD&D split. A company the size of Paizo can't afford that split. They can't make their adventure paths support the basic game, because of all the balance, math, etc. that Pathfinder fans expect. So half their audience would not longer want to buy their core line. Or they'd have to create two lines of adventure paths, and there's no way they have the resources for that.

Quote from: Piestrio;6888543e was successful I think because it catered to a lot of different tastes at the same time.

The original game was of middling complex and pretty easy to "wing-it" and most groups I knew played it that way. Pretty loose, pretty fast.

The edition then kind of followed the overall trajectory of the industry of chasing the hardcore consumers. More splats, more feats, more classes, more rules, more, more, more...

In my experience most of the "lapsed gamers" that came back to role-playing in 2000 (and there were a lot in my neck of the woods) were gone by '03-'04. Put off by the growing complexity of the game and the 3.5 switch.

Yep. For example, the Necromancer Games board was humming with activity and releases for the first couple years of 3E. Then the whole RAW/balance culture came to dominate 3E, and more and more "3rd edition rules, 1st edition feel" fans came to just want the "1st edition feel" part. The old-schoolers dropped out of the forums and the company just kind of withered away.

My current group (playtesting Next) are made of a couple players who never stopped playing AD&D, and a couple guys who played AD&D, took up 3E for a few years and then gave up out of exhaustion.

WotC knows they can't keep going to the well of the hardcore gamers. Essentials was a desperate ad hoc attempt to make D&D more accessible. Next is a more strategic and deliberate effort to do the same.

I fear Next might be too tepid in its attempt, and still too complicated for a lot of people who otherwise might like to run a D&D game, if it weren't such a pain in the ass number and feats wankfest to begin with. That's the impression I get looking at playtesting documents: that it IS better than 3/4e, but not significantly so. It kind of makes me think of a crunchier Castles & Crusades that way, which is more like a "meh" to me than anything else, having left C&C quite some time ago to get directly back to the games it tried to emulate instead, O/AD&D, or as you just said Haffrung, I stopped caring about "these different rules, 1st edition feel" and just went for the 1st edition rules and feel instead.

The final organization, the modular aspects of the final rules and the accessibility of the system might make this point entirely moot however. I guess we'll see.

Quote from: Haffrung;688961"3rd edition rules, 1st edition feel" fans came to just want the "1st edition feel" part. The old-schoolers dropped out of the forums and the company just kind of withered away.

My current group (playtesting Next) are made of a couple players who never stopped playing AD&D, and a couple guys who played AD&D, took up 3E for a few years and then gave up out of exhaustion.

WotC knows they can't keep going to the well of the hardcore gamers. Essentials was a desperate ad hoc attempt to make D&D more accessible. Next is a more strategic and deliberate effort to do the same.

Wait wat 0_0

You're asserting that they can't keep going to the well of 3e players, they need to broaden their audience to people who weren't playing when they were most successful :?

Quote from: gamerGoyf;688964Wait wat 0_0

You're asserting that they can't keep going to the well of 3e players, they need to broaden their audience to people who weren't playing when they were most successful :?

See this is this sort of remark that makes you sound very young dude. The 3rd ed era was successful for some time, but its success is nothing compared to the enormous cultural phenomenon that (A)D&D was in the 80s. I mean... nothing like. Really. We're talking of a scale of apples to peanuts, or Boing 777 to remote control model airplane, here. Wake up.

Quote from: gamerGoyf;688964Wait wat 0_0

You're asserting that they can't keep going to the well of 3e players, they need to broaden their audience to people who weren't playing when they were most successful :?

Actually, WotC are quite clearly reaching back to when they really were most successful - the 80s - by designing a version of D&D that will be both familiar to that huge cohort of lapsed players, and something they can run without a big investment of time and resources.

Quote from: Benoist;688966See this is this sort of remark that makes you sound very young dude. The 3rd ed era was successful for some time, but it's success is nothing compared to the enormous cultural phenomenon that (A)D&D was in the 80s. I mean... nothing like. Really. We're talking of a scale of apples to peanuts, or Boing 777 to remote control model airplane, here. Wake up.

Tell me can you back that up with any hard data, because according to WotC 3e was the best selling edition (and this was during the 4e era when they really wouldn't want to say that) :?

Quote from: gamerGoyf;688970Tell me can you back that up with any hard data, because according to WotC 3e was the best selling edition (and this was during the 4e era when they really wouldn't want to say that) :?

So you really have no idea what it is I am talking about, whatsoever. This is actually very useful feedback. I think it just made me realize something I did not fully comprehend until now.

Thank you very much. I mean it.