As for healing through action, I could see a justification for this. Ever gotten hurt, but been so busy or occupied that you didn’t even notice until later?

The article points out that game designers, in order to make an the next edition of D&D more successful and to increase its appeal and longevity, need to focus on finding ways to provide personalized publishing as a way to end to the editions war. Personalized content, if it can be done, I believe, will also help to prevent the “product overload” you are talking about.

But can personalized publishing even be done? That is the question.

Teos, I like the idea of pay to play. WotC for example could do something like if you want to play in Encounters, you pay the store and that money goes to continuing Encounters. And the player gets a limited version of the Character Builder for One Encounters character. If they already have DDI, then they can choose some other Reward, perhaps a pdf of an out of print book.

@Alphastream: That’s a good point about spreading the funding load across the gaming group. Just about every group I’ve ever played in has had people who never buy the game. I just don’t see a way around it, though, as long as people are willing to share books. The game companies can’t charge admission to a table top RPG.

Fundamentally, a new model is needed. But I don’t think it is about crowdsourcing. Instead, something must be found to change the nature of one DM owning everything. The game has to work with everyone paying their share and doing so regularly. Gamers that say they like RPGs more than video games should not be paying constantly for video games and not paying anything for RPGs. A possible model is one where the game is not provided in complete form. You get levels 1-x and basic stuff, and you pay more to get more. And yet, you need more feats/powers/etc and pay for them. At the store level, maybe you have to pay to play as gamers do for Magic, but get something in return. This model won’t be about Fortune Cards. It has to be larger.

OR, we accept that this is our hobby and the larger companies need to work harder on branding. They publish traditionally but make their money with the video games, the movies, the T-Shirts, etc. Licensing then covers the shortcomings of the typical RPG model.

The key point you make above is “not always giving the customers what they want.” Most really elegant games are niche. The people who want that kind of game form a cult around it & most others never touch it. That’s great. Unfortunately, it’s just not how to make the money a large company needs. Which I guess is your point.

It might be that large companies can’t sustain themselves on roleplaying games or gimmicky extras. Unfortunate for WotC, if true, but I bet D&D will live on.

I’ll second Savage Worlds, but also admit that I’ve become such a “seat of your pants”er that I’m more likely to make up rules than to look them up, depending on what my combats/encounters need. So, fudge some insubstantial rules from WFRP, some poison rules from 4E… I figure that if my players can’t be bothered to pick up the books and read them themselves to know the rules, then it doesn’t really matter whether I’m right or wrong as long as they’re fun and fair.

Cheers to lazy gamers! And jeers to the publishers that want so much of my time.