Quote from: VincentTakeda;1111670I'm a heroes unlimited and ninjas and superspies sdc palladium guy and I reskinned armor rating to damage reduction, untied it from the strike roll, eliminated stacking bonuses, and replaced bonus attacks per round with bonuses to initiative instead.  Its workin pretty well.  My players always hated how powerful magic was in D&D so the fact that magic sucks so bad in palladium nobody ever uses it wound up being a feature not a bug with my group. I tend to avoid Rifts entirely both because I never liked mdc and am also not a fan of being beholden to 'published canon settings'.  Wont deny that my homebrew has a tendency to short circuit the brains and raise the ire among certain other palladium fans.  Some folks are reeeeealy addicted to stacking bonuses so its kinda my fault stepping into a system where that can play such a big role and just snatch it away.

MDC always did drive me nuts, its just a little too out there. Like, I get the intent, but I just think giving a mech a big SDC pool would, you know, work. With Magic, that's fair. The idea here is that we wanted options that work well enough for everyone that would like to pursue that class.

Stacking bonuses don't bother me much, but we did set a hard limit of +10 at level 15, the only addition to that would be attribute bonuses or like laser targeting addons.

I read an article a while back about their strategy to keep the game as accessible as possible and to strongly embrace the community aspect of it. They only release a few books a year in order to create maximum buzz around each one, and know that there will be streamers just lining up to be "first" running each adventure in an attempt to make some money. Here is the article.

https://merricb.wordpress.com/2017/01/03/mike-mearls-a-summary-of-the-interview-on-tabletop-babble/

Clearly it has worked very well for them. With the dominant market share you might expect them to flood the market with books to make the most money they can, as TSR did in the past. Maybe being just a small part of a larger company allows them to be this disciplined about it. And I think it makes a lot of sense. "Buy the Player's Handbook or one of the starter boxes" is a lot more intuitive than, say, Savage Worlds where a new player has a head spinning number of options to pick from.

Personally, this hasn't been an issue. One of my all millenial D&D group linked to another game in our group chat a few years ago and we tried it. They have been very open to new systems ever since and we have not yet returned to 5E. Now, I don't play at game stores or conventions (and would do that only to find the right people to invite to private games), so I may be an outlier from the sounds of it.

It's really not "millenials" at all.

It's the way it has always been with D&D.

Most D&D players are only interested in playing D&D.

Millenials just happen to be the latest batch of "new" players doing what most D&D players have always done.

In my opinion people are noticing this old trend a bit more because of the current state of the hobby: D&D has gone from the 800lb gorilla in the room to the 800,000lb King Kong of rpg's.