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May 8, 2011 -- 9:18AM, MysteriousMask wrote:

So what you are saying is that a new edition is needed to sustain the production of new material.

No.  I'm saying the rate of bloat from 2008-2010 was unsustainable and we should all get used to a drastically reduced rate of mechanical releases.  That would be true even with a new edition, as I don't think WotC would want to repeat the bloat rate of 4e with a new edition either.

May 8, 2011 -- 9:49AM, wrecan wrote:

May 8, 2011 -- 9:18AM, MysteriousMask wrote:

So what you are saying is that a new edition is needed to sustain the production of new material.

No.  I'm saying the rate of bloat from 2008-2010 was unsustainable and we should all get used to a drastically reduced rate of mechanical releases.  That would be true even with a new edition, as I don't think WotC would want to repeat the bloat rate of 4e with a new edition either.

Yeah, I entirely agree.

I think when they started with 4e they were looking at 3.5 as a system that was HUGE. Not only was their all the WotC material from 5 years of 3.5 plus 3 years of 3.0, there was also the vast quantity of 3PP stuff floating around out there, 8 years of magazine material, etc etc etc. If 4e was going to be successful it was obvious it would need to cover a lot of that ground ASAP. The 4e PHB1 for instance covers more than any previous PHB in one shot in many areas. They obviously felt that 4e should boot up and be a very well supported system FAST, and the rise of PF as an alternative only made that necessity even stronger.

In the long run it was probably harmful to the edition. A lot of stuff was designed and thrown out there with only a very limited understanding of how the system would work out in actual play and what player preferences would be. Now we see them slowing down, taking a deep breath, and trying to go back and solidify and improve things. This is why we see a lot of material that goes over territory already covered once (Essentials in-toto really falls into this category).

I think if you take a bit more of a broad perspective on D&D down the years and look at what we're getting now vs what historically has been the norm and what is probably sustainable in the longer term the current situation isn't particularly alarming or appalling. Honestly, I have boxes full of Dragon Magazine going back all the way to issue #11 (and a few earlier than that, Snit Smashing was in #11, hehe). Most issues, even in the heyday of TSR Dragon contained only a fairly small amount of crunch. Maybe some article on some obscure subsystem, a new spell or three, a few magic items or traps. Often there'd be one crunch article in the entire magazine. In fact crunch wasn't REALLY the main emphasis of Dragon (or Dungeon either). It is only more recent times when that has come to the fore. Probably because we have online communities now and so the magazine HAS changed. The point is, it was always a good read and it still is for the most part. I actually find the current Dragons to have much more actual utility for play than the old time ones did.

May 8, 2011 -- 12:40PM, Incenjucar wrote:

Do keep in perspective that 4th edition has a lot more ROOM for material than 3rd edition did, due to every class having many options (and not just spellcasters), non-modular magic item rules, everyone having access to many feats, the introduction of paragon paths and hybrid classes, and so on.

There is some truth to that, although 3.5 was certainly pretty much infinitely extensible in one way or another. For that matter so were earlier editions in principle. You just needed to create a new class to do something REALLY different in say AD&D. Actually the odd thing is not that many new classes were produced for AD&D. The 1e PHB was in fact to a large extent just all the classes that had been presented in Dragon and various supplements from 74-78. After the 1e PHB came out, there really weren't many added. The Barbarian and the Cavalier were the main ones actually, and that covers a LOT of years from 78-89. 2e didn't add ANY new classes at all, reworked a few, and dropped a couple. TBH there were a very few experimental classes that did come out in Dragon that never went anywhere, but they were few and far between.

TSR Dragon really wasn't all that crunch heavy. The vast majority of crunch that showed up in it was new magic items in Bazaar of the Bizarre from what I recall. There were often articles detailing some small stuff, but it was largely DM-side stuff like a new poison, a monster, or some fairly peripheral thing. Dungeon obviously became the place for adventures and some of the DM crunch later on, but there wasn't a flood of that kind of stuff. AD&D really didn't emphasize new crunch all that much. It stayed a pretty small system by today's standards. When they did start up with tons of crunchy stuff it was later 2e and it all came out in supplements, very little of it showed up in magazine format.