Courts of the Crane Clan

And a lot also play the CCG. Like me.

Do you remember that, when people last had to pay for IA memberships, it was a constant complaint that it provided no value to RPG players so they didn't want to pony up for it?

If you want to complain about something serious, go back to the part where we've all been getting charged for IA memberships all year while they've been providing none of the promised content.

That just makes it an even worse avenue for these kinds of decisions. Not only does it exacerbate divides in different kinds of customers, but it's not known for being particularly well-run in the first place.

You do know that no matter what Path's are chosen for each respective clan that AEG is not going to come along and tear pages out of RPG books, or in any other way invalidate them. It's the RPG, players can do whatever they like, running whatever game they like, in whatever timeline they like. Why all this worry?

This isn't D&D, it doesn't need to have an update every 5 years just to keep selling books. There's no reason why they would need to do a 5th edition of the game. And even if they did it'll most likely look similar to the 4th edition version that was storyline free (or at least mostly free and not bound and tied completely together).

So again, worrying about potential invalidation of the RPG line, or areas within it, seems a little foolish. Especially when the 4 iconic areas of the clan have been 'saved' as it were.

You speak as if releasing a new edition of a game in order to sell more books was somehow a D&D-specific thing.

And I keep seeing people assuming that choice 'X' will result in no more Doji Courtiers, or Dragon Monks or whatever other 'thing' will ever be printed in an RPG book because they now no longer exist. Even though said things have existed for 20 years (or pretty much all the entirety) of L5R's life. Why assume that a game that is currently timeline neutral is going to go away from that if a new edition was designed/written/printed?

As for the picking on D&D thing I used that as an example since that's the big game that has updated itself between 2 editions in a short space of time. Pathfinder hasn't, NWoD hasn't (updated but not major reprints invalidating earlier material), Dark Heresy/40K RPG has recently but that games 1st edition came out before 4e L5R and that's streamlining of material again. Most RPG products are on the market for longer than 5 years before an update is considered.