When did I stop being WotC's target audience?

[cperkins]

Originally Posted by Fifth Element

Neither are valid arguments. 4E's success as a whole does not depend on you buying it, or people who frequent the stores you do buying it. You haven't even based you conclusion of the actual number of copies actually sold by your local retailers, just the number you perceive (or assume, or guess) to have been sold.

I'm sure that 4th edition is selling REALLY well but, as far as I've seen, no one I know who has played 4th edition wants to stick with it.

I TOTALLY realize that what I'm seeing among the 20-odd gamers I know may may be an anomaly... but it's odd that such a popular game could lose every potential customer that I know personally.

A the same time, most of these players have bought the PHB or the core set but won't be subscribing to the DDI or purchasing any other 4e products. This, to me, points at great initial sales of 4th edition products with a sharply declining market afterward. As I've said this is based solely on what I'm seeing but that (and my gut feeling) is all I have to go on.

[Thasmodious]

Originally Posted by Psion

But I can speak generally and say: build for modularity and playstyle inclusivity. The founding philosophies of "this is fun... anything else is not" that seem to inform 4e--and are so much as spelled out in the 4e DMG and dragon articles--to me betray an exclusivity in the design and (as put by Irda Ranger in another thread) monoculture at WotC's D&D design team.

I couldn't disagree more and I don't understand this stubborn insistence from some that 4e is a limited focus game that attacks other playstyles. It isn't backed up by the system as presented, nor the design philosophy.

4e IS built for modularity and playstyle exclusivity. 3e wasn't. The designers tried to design every little subsystem they thought anyone might want and cram it into the overall game structure. It ended up limiting, rather than expanding game play, as you were stuck with the designers half-baked craft system instead of a well thought out, balanced one (for example). If crafting wasn't a part of your groups playstyle, those rules were a waste or resulted in actual conflict with the system (endless gold loops). If your group was all about the crafting, the rules that were there were not nearly sufficient and you had to houserule them to death anyway.

4e is modular. The core books present the core system and the core component of D&D gameplay - encounter resolution. With a solid, balanced system you can plug away, easily adding whatever subsystems you want. You can take them easily from past editions, other games, whatever, and thanks to tables such as that on pg. 42 DMG, and advice from the section on house ruling its easy to do in a balanced manner.

Want to plug a more involved economic system on the core equipment rules, easy to do. For core gameplay, mundane equipment is largely irrelevant to adventurer wealth. This is, obviously, consistent with every other edition. In 4e though, rather than devote pages to it, and come up with starting gold tables, all PCs get the same and the prices are set a bit artificially because you only do it once. Want more for a low magic game or one where secondary gear (like pitons, chalk, etc) prove very important (such as an exploration/wilderness focused game)? Its easy to institute your own starting gold tables and expand the lists using information from past editions. The gold scale in the game really applies to magic items, so you can even just plug the equipment straight from 3.5 into the game with no problem.

Want crafting or other skill sets outside of the core adventuring set of skills? Easy. Add them in, decide how many of this extra set of skills each class gets to pick. They can do this without affecting their ability as adventurers. Want those choices to affect their abilities as adventurers, add the skills, don't give any from free, just add access to the class lists.

Crafting rules? Use the craft points system from UA or the crappy 3e system if you really want. Use the table on page 42 for the DCs.

The design of 4e lets you add anything your group wants into the game without worrying overmuch about its interaction with the core rules. It also has the added benefit that if your group wants something as part of the game, they are unlikely to look to abuse it, but to use it in the spirit intended. For some optimizers in 3e, all the crafting system or the artificier were good for were endless gold loops.

At no point does the game system tell you how you must play the game. It makes it easier than ever before to tailor the game to your groups playstyle without interference from the rules. The only conceit the game engages in is in saying that the core of gameplay for D&D games is - gaining levels and treasure through defeating monsters and enemies. If this isn't part of your gameplay, then D&D, not just 4th edition, is not for you.

The assumption is that gamers are generally a creative, imaginative bunch. I've never understood the attitude of some in saying - "they took away xxx, my group likes to xxx, now we can't xxx, 4e sucks". Especially as the system is designed to be modular. This will be a major area where 3PPs will find wiggle room, I would imagine - building subsystems (craft, profession/background skills, alternate skill systems, etc.).

[The Little Raven]

Originally Posted by Carpe DM

Why not? Often, publishers release numbers if their book is selling well.

Because Wizards of the Coast is a subsidiary of Hasbro, a publicly traded corporation. There are laws that regulate the flow of information from publicly traded companies, and their subsidiaries, to the public in order to prevent things like insider trading.

[DaveMage]

Originally Posted by Psion

I'm dubious about that.

1e was a fledgling game, and there was a lot of undiscovered country then. New races, classes, proficiencies, and settings were all things that came out in those early years, and came out slowly.

3e did not start out from ground zero here. 3e was built on the shoulders of a giant. It incorporated many of the features that showed up in 1e supplements right out of the starting gate, and whereas it took years for FR and Dragonlance to come out for 1e, dozens of settings were available for 3e in the first year.

It seems that you demarcate 3.5 as a new starting point. It's even less so than 3.0 was. It was a refinement of 3.0. The resetting of the supplement curve would be even less drastic.

Perhaps there were more options that could have been tried, but fundamentally, each supplement sells less than the last. I can see there was a genuine economic need for a new edition to "reset" the game in the time frame it happened.

What I disagree with is the shape 4e took. A system could have been designed that addressed the tastes of a broader degree of the existing market.

I use 3.5 as a starting point becasue a lot of the products updated 3.0 material for 3.5 (in other words, it was the same stuff re-presented). And, as you say, it pretty much covered the 1E rules as well, but not the other stuff.

And, don't think rules supplements. I think there were too many of these. (So for rules supplements, I agree - enough already.) But think adventures. Think locations. Tell me it wouldn't have been cool to have the Palace of Bones as a product. Tell me it wouldn't have been cool to have Abysm detailed. Tell me it wouldn't have been cool to have Undermountain (or some other mega-dungeon) designed by WotC in 3.5. And I cannot be convinced that there aren't products out there that I can't even fathom that would be great additions to the 3.5 multiverse.

Bruce Cordell wrote the incredible "Return to the Tomb of Horrors" very late in the 2E life cycle. That was a fantastic product. There is much potential for that type of stuff at any point in a product's life cycle.

[Carpe DM]

Originally Posted by The Little Raven

Because Wizards of the Coast is a subsidiary of Hasbro, a publicly traded corporation. There are laws that regulate the flow of information from publicly traded companies, and their subsidiaries, to the public in order to prevent things like insider trading.

Um. No. Rule 10b-6 does not cover that eventuality. There is no law prohibiting the release of number of book sales. And we can see why: half the bestseller book jackets out there would be illegal.

-Carpe

[Cadfan]

Originally Posted by cperkins

I TOTALLY realize that what I'm seeing among the 20-odd gamers I know may may be an anomaly... but it's odd that such a popular game could lose every potential customer that I know personally.

I don't think its so odd that groups tend to go similar ways.

[Windjammer]

Originally Posted by Fifth Element

To me these complaints seem to be more of "I personally don't like the changes made, so there must be something wrong with them."

I think it was mentioned before in this thread that, among other things, what put people off playing 4E was the rabid fans on the net who deteriorated into personal attacks and feeble ad hominem argumentation in response to arguments that were neither. You might want to consider that.

Originally Posted by Fifth Element

I like how you jump from "3PP stuff is more imaginative" to saying that Mike Mearls, who started out with 3PP, doesn't know what's good for D&D.

Ridiculous. Mearls exchanged the creative freedom he had at Malhavoc for the coolest thing ever: to officially design his own D&D. I suggest you read Book of Iron Might and Book of Nine Swords side by side. If you think Mearls' design principles haven't changed inbetween these products, I conclude you don't really care about the man beyond him sticking his name on a book. Another very, very good comparison would be to see how Keep on the Shadowfell fares with Necromancer's Siege of Durgam's Folly (in my humble estimate, Mearls' finest adventure to date). It's basically the same plot idea, except that the execution couldn't differ more: the first one is low on non-combat resolution, hyper-linear and an offense in railroading of the very worst sort, where Durgam's Folly shines in non-linear module design and endless opportunity for non-combat roleplaying challenges. To see how much WotC' ultra-linear delve format is out of touch with Mearls' own creative principles - hence, to see how much of creative control he had to sacrifice for working on 4E - read this article . And to see how much Mearls' design principles changed on the side of crunch, I recommend this insightful article on the "Design Ethos at Wizards". (It chimes well with what Psion said in this thread, if I may say so.)

Originally Posted by TheAlexandrian

I don't have high expectations from any game that Slavicsek is responsible for. On the other hand, Mike Mearls is the head developer for 4th Edition. Mearls is responsible for a slew of high quality D20 supplements and the generally excellent Iron Heroes. Unfortunately, since Mearls started working at WotC, there are plenty of indications that he's swallowed the Kool-Aid. Which leads to the other big strike 4th Edition has against it, in my opinion: the new Design Ethos at Wizards.

For the nuts and bolts of the arguments to back up the last line, follow the link I just gave.

[Psion]

Originally Posted by DaveMage

Bruce Cordell wrote the incredible "Return to the Tomb of Horrors" very late in the 2E life cycle. That was a fantastic product. There is much potential for that type of stuff at any point in a product's life cycle.

Yep, that was a great adventure.

But how well did it sell? Is a worthy revenue-generator for a company like WotC?

Certainly there are great ideas and great books that could still be written. That's sort of not my point. Great new products can still be written for an old game. But it will still probably generate less sales than the product before it, as a variable independent from quality.

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Originally Posted by Psion

Since I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of your, RCs, or (especially) pemerton's playstyles, I couldn't begin to guess.

But I can speak generally and say: build for modularity and playstyle inclusivity. The founding philosophies of "this is fun... anything else is not" that seem to inform 4e--and are so much as spelled out in the 4e DMG and dragon articles--to me betray an exclusivity in the design and (as put by Irda Ranger in another thread) monoculture at WotC's D&D design team.

So, yeah. I guess what I am saying is I agree to disagree. I don't propose that it's easy. Just that it can be done.

And what's with the beginner? That doesn't even know how to play any RPG? How will he react to a lot of "modules" he has to plug together and figure out what he likes?

And what is with play-testing and balancing the system? "You know, we still need 4 play-tester groups for the Vancian Spell + Martial Token System + Wound & Vitality. "

The way I see it, 4E Core Rules presents us with one module. But there are several points where you could exchange game aspects.
Healing & Hit Points for example - you could change a lot here. You could add wound tracking, lasting penalties (disease track => injury track). You could exchange the encounter/daily power system with a "skill challenge" variant that uses attack rolls. You could change how rituals operate.
We are already seeing ways to repurpose stuff like skill challenges (use them on an "adventure" scale), disease tracks (why not for poisons and injuries?) and multiclassing (why not use them for low level Prestige-Class like aspects or Spellscars (Spellfire)?)

And all this is far easier to create and build then ever before.

The modularity is already there. The modules just need to be created.
And here lies at the moment the greatest weakness - the GSL sucks compared to the OGL. It will probably always create a hindrance to real innovation from 3PP. But that doesn't mean that the DMG II, III and IV or the 4E equivalent of the Unearthed Arcana won't eventually add such ideas. Of course, there is also no guarantee it happens. I certainly can't do so. I have no insights into WotC plans or their designer ideas. I hope something like this will happen.

All this doesn't help people that want to play D&D 4E NOW and expect it to have the "modules" they prefer.

[carmachu]

Its hard to find out, isnt it?

There's no set time or limit. Both WotC and Games Workshop...I've discovered I'm not the target anymore....

[The_Gneech]

Originally Posted by Cadfan

And this is an excellent illustration of why the pro 4e and anti 4e camps will never get along. The antis see this as a reasonable opinion, while the pros see it as being a crank.

I certainly didn't intend it as a crank, just calling it as I see it. As with all subjective things, the presence or absence of such an attitude is going to be a matter of opinion.

Originally Posted by MrMyth

You can certainly feel free to prefer the RP strengths of 3rd Edition over those of 4E - but if you genuinely think it somehow looks down on roleplaying, I really think you are viewing it through a biased lens and giving an extraordinarily incorrect description of the game.

Well, one of the annoying things about bias is that by its nature it's almost impossible to tell if you've got it or not. It may be definition of terms -- one of the truisms of gaming is that "you can roleplay in 'Monopoly' if you really want to," but what does that mean? Pretending you're a little boot going around a track? Pretending you're a 1920s mogul buying and selling property? Haggling with other 1920s moguls "in character?"

Originally Posted by Halivar

4E caters to the method actor, not the technical actor. That's why a whole chapter is devoted to "finding your character" before the chapters on choosing character mechanics. For my part, the 4E PHB goes leaps and bounds beyond 3.x in cultivating good roleplay. It simply does so without mechanical props.

But why not do both? For me, the mechanics and the roleplay are inseparable. I mean, if you roleplay a flighty elf archer, but the character sheet is a dwarf berserker, isn't there some fundamental disconnect there? That was one of the reasons I used to hate 2E so much. I was constantly coming up with what I thought were neat ideas, but which mechanically just couldn't fly. (And granted, some of them still didn't fly in 3E -- I never did get a "warrior mage" to work the way I wanted. But at least the system was trying, so to speak.)

If the chapter devoted to "finding your character" was then followed up by mechanics that supported that character, I would be a lot more 4E-friendly. Instead, what I see is "find your character -- and then shove him into one of six pre-made slots from which there is little derivation."

A lot of this is the "you are your role in combat" thing coming up again. For me there should be just as much "roleplaying" in combat as out of it. So when I wanted to create a fighter who kicked down the door, ran across the room, and lopped the head off the enemy boss, and was told "your job is to defend your teammates while the ranger or the wizard do damage," it really stuck in my craw. To me, a "fighter" is "someone who fights." It's not "someone who is and always shall be the meatshield."

-The Gneech

[ProfessorCirno]

You know, I feel the need to refer back to myself. This thread just helps so much in proving my own point that it wasn't Wizards that made the divide as wide and painful as it is, it's the legion of 4e fanboys that cannot abide anyone saying anything bad about the game.

This whole thread started as "Why aren't I your target audience?" and was quickly answered with "Because something is wrong with you."

As for the idea that 4e caters to everyone if they'd just make up their own rules, no. No, it doesn't, and that's a stupid argument, and it wouldn't work for any other game. I can alter any game and any system in existence to do what I want so long as I just BS it enough; that hardly speaks out in that game's favor. The crafting thing just blows my mind - the actual argument here is "4e has crafting if you put it in." Well, Deadlands can be played to take place in outer space if I put that in, but last I checked nobody cared because that's not an official part of the game.

Crafting is not an official part of the game. Dialogue skills are not an official part of the game. The vast majority of spells having a use outside of combat is not an official part of the game. It doesn't matter how much you houserule it, it's still not a part of the game, and that's what people are refering to regarding the modularity. And before someone gets mad at me, that isn't inherently a bad thing. Some people love that non-combat spells are 100% rituals. We had a whole thread of someone talking about how happy they were that there were no crafting rules. 4e knows exactly what it wants to be, devil take the rest. Some people like what 4e wants to be. But some people don't, and the problem is that those people are left behind.

[Fifth Element]

Originally Posted by Windjammer

I think it was mentioned before in this thread that, among other things, what put people off playing 4E was the rabid fans on the net who deteriorated into personal attacks and feeble ad hominem argumentation in response to arguments that were neither. You might want to consider that.

And you might want to read my sig.

[Mallus]

Originally Posted by The_Gneech

IIt may be definition of terms -- one of the truisms of gaming is that "you can roleplay in 'Monopoly' if you really want to," but what does that mean?

Implicit comparisons between 4e and Monopoly aren't helpful.

For me, the mechanics and the roleplay are inseparable.

For certain definitions of role-playing, you're absolutely right. But there are other ways of looking at RP. For example, if you consider role-playing primarily in terms of creating personalities, then mechanics and role-playing are almost completely unrelated (at least as far a D&D is concerned, since it doesn't really rules that describe the psychological makeup of characters).

That was one of the reasons I used to hate 2E so much. I was constantly coming up with what I thought were neat ideas, but which mechanically just couldn't fly. (And granted, some of them still didn't fly in 3E -- I never did get a "warrior mage" to work the way I wanted. But at least the system was trying, so to speak.)

The only way to really fix this is to adopt a full-fledged effects-based point-buy system like HERO/Champions or M&M. Anything else is going to be a kludge (as 3e's various attempts at a fighter-mage demonstrate).

If the chapter devoted to "finding your character" was then followed up by mechanics that supported that character, I would be a lot more 4E-friendly.

4e is definitely a more rigid class-based system (though I believe it's a lot more flexible that it appears initially).

Instead, what I see is "find your character -- and then shove him into one of six pre-made slots from which there is little derivation."

For people who define role-playing in terms of characterization (in the fictional sense), in terms of personality, this isn't so important.

[Fifth Element]

Originally Posted by The_Gneech

Instead, what I see is "find your character -- and then shove him into one of six pre-made slots from which there is little derivation."

Not sure why you picked the number six, but regardless this is symptomatic of any class-based system, not just 4E.

[Lacyon]

Originally Posted by ProfessorCirno

This whole thread started as "Why aren't I your target audience?" and was quickly answered with "Because something is wrong with you."

You and I must be reading different threads.

Originally Posted by ProfessorCirno

Dialogue skills are not an official part of the game.

???

[The_Gneech]

Originally Posted by Mallus

Implicit comparisons between 4e and Monopoly aren't helpful.

I was getting at the definition of roleplaying, not whether 4E was like Monopoly. Other than a frantic desire to collect treasure, the two games are only superficially similar!

Originally Posted by Mallus

The only way to really fix this is to adopt a full-fledged effects-based point-buy system like HERO/Champions or M&M. Anything else is going to be a kludge (as 3e's various attempts at a fighter-mage demonstrate).

Well, no, not really. 3E worked more often than it didn't, in this regard, it just had a few notable holes. Saga Edition, with its free multiclassing and closer class balancing, works better still. 4E could have gone this way, but the designers made a point of choosing not to, for whatever reason.

I've said before, and I'll say again, if 4E had been a Saga-ized D&D, it would have been a huge win, instead of leaving me (and several others, as evidenced by these recurring threads) feeling like we got kicked out for liking an unfashionable play style.

-The Gneech

[DaveMage]

Originally Posted by Psion

Yep, that was a great adventure.

But how well did it sell? Is a worthy revenue-generator for a company like WotC?

Certainly there are great ideas and great books that could still be written. That's sort of not my point. Great new products can still be written for an old game. But it will still probably generate less sales than the product before it, as a variable independent from quality.

If what you are saying is correct, then should we expect that a D&D product life cycle for each new edition at this point is only 4 years or so? I have trouble accepting that - especially since Paizo is *still* going strong today - a year after WotC essentially stopped producing 3.5 stuff.

And yes, I realize Paizo is magnitudes smaller, but to me it means that the D&D brand is in the wrong hands if it can't sustain its acceptable profitability for more than 4 years.

[The_Gneech]

Originally Posted by Fifth Element

Not sure why you picked the number six, but regardless this is symptomatic of any class-based system, not just 4E.

Again, not necessarily. See my comments re: Saga Edition above. When the class is a building block, not a straightjacket, it makes all the difference in the world.

And the number six was pulled largely out of the air because I didn't want to make an exact inventory of the number of classes and sub-builds without a book handy to reference. Call it "a handful" if you prefer.

-The Gneech

[Fifth Element]

Originally Posted by The_Gneech

Again, not necessarily. See my comments re: Saga Edition above. When the class is a building block, not a straightjacket, it makes all the difference in the world.

But to extend your thought, you would have to conclude that OD&D is no good for roleplaying either. Because if you think 4E's classes are restrictive, you should see OD&D. But I think those who enjoy playing OD&D would vociferously disagree.

I used to play OD&D, and I certainly disagree.