WotC Seeks Unity with a New Edition

I don't think "unite all players" with 5e is an obtainable or realistic goal. I do, however, think it's awesome that it is a stated goal for 5e, because even if they fall short of that mark, I'm sure some good design and development will come out of it anyway. More so when you combine that with their other stated goal - massive fan input and playtest.

I don't think we'll ever see the OGL as it existed during 3e/3.5e ever again, at least not from WotC/Hasbro. I think they see that as part of the reason 4e failed to live up to their expectations both financially and with regards to edition lifespan and carrying over fans of the previous edition. Note I said "failed to live up to their expectations", not "4e is a failure". I also think you could argue that by failing to open up 4e with an OGL like they did 3e, WotC/Hasbro contributed to their failure to meet their expectations.

Now my data point: Don't spend too much time, money or effort trying to win me back, WotC/Hasbro. I'm in that 45 and older crowd, and while I know I don't speak for everyone in that age group, I've moved on. I already have what I need in 3 1/2 editions of D&D, Pathfinder, a few d20 "spin off" and OSR retro-clone games, not to mention the non-d20/non-D&D games I play now as well. Spend that time, money and effort appealing to my younger nephews and nieces (ages 11, 9, 6 and 6) instead. Take D&D well into the 21st century by getting them on board. Take almost 40 years of D&D and revamp and refresh it for the younger generation. Make them feel that same magic that I felt in 1979 when I first discovered D&D. But don't just package up 1979 D&D and resell it. Use every modern technology and tool that has been developed since D&D first came out and are such an integral part of the younger generation's lives, and integrate that into the the new game. Keep in mind their preferred way of getting information - sound bites, text messages, short and to the point. Don't overwhelm with countless tomes filled with pages and pages and pages of information. Let them pick up the game and be up and running and playing in 10 minutes or less. Do that, and people will still be playing D&D another 40 years from now.

Based on the tone of their press release, I'm worried that WotC is going to go too far in trying to make a game that appeals to everyone.

My concern is that their approach will take the form of designing "meta-rules" - entire systems for various aspects of the game that can be added or subtracted without crippling game-play - and that this will lead not only to divisiveness, but also to the demise of the unified d20 mechanic that characterized the Third and Fourth Editions.

To be clear, when I talk about "meta-rules," I'm thinking of, for example, things like feats and skills in Third Edition. Imagine if you tried to run a 3E game without those; you'd run into problems with prestige classes (prerequisites), magic items (skill boosters), class abilities (bonus feats), racial abilities (skill bonuses), etc. Now, try and design 3E so that feats and skills could be easily removed from the game without causing those problems...that sounds like what 5E wants to do.

That worries me because it has built-in fault lines for community fragmentation. Forget about play-styles...if there's no specific set of rules, things will only grow more factionalized among players.

The other part of this is that it's easier to design a game where rules sets can be added and subtracted if all of those sets run independently. If nothing else references feats, then it's easier to drop feats. This, however, tends to lead back towards the earlier editions of the game (e.g. 2E and previous) wherein the game was effectively a collection of sub-systems...something that was (not without merit, I think) indicted as poor design when Third Edition came out.

If the D&D guys can find a way to pull this off while avoiding those pitfalls, I'll be impressed. But until I see the end result, I'm nervous about what 5E will look like.

Scott_Rouse said:

was broken as a game and business and it's needs to go away. The "they broke their promise" argument sounds vaguely familiar of the "they are killing my 3.x game" that was all over the boards when 4e was announced.

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Well to be fair they DID kill 3.x, at least support for it. Which at that point was to be expected since they were introducing 4E. It's also the reason that Pathfinder and other OSR games became havens for people who wanted nothing to do with WOTC's new and shiny.

I find it incredible and also a little galling that with WOTC is still going to support both 4E and whatever the new edition is though. I understand that the DDI is in place and if they pulled the plug on it for their 4E players there would be absolutely no reason for 5E players to trust them at all.

I'm also saying this as someone who's not a huge fan of 4E: I think that this is a mistake. Theyre going to try and do with the fans what they did with thier properties back in 2007-2008: Pull everything back in house. I think the hardcore 4E people are going to resent having their edition end about as much as the hardcore 3.x people did (or maybe not as much because they'll still have support...). The dedicated Pathfinder people dont trust WOTC enough to boil water for tea much less a new system. The OSR fanbase for the most part shuns BOTH of the later systems so anything resembling them gets poo-pooed.

the design team and WOTC REALLY has their work cut out for them. I dont envy them at all. Especially with this upcoming playtest. If they experience anything close to the complete douchelike behavior that came out of some of the playtester forums on Paizo? I expect Monte and Mearls to start drinking HARD.

Jan van Leyden said:

Oh, by the way: You don't like "spells per day" for wizards

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Vyvyan Basterd said:

Do you mean no Vancian magic as there was pre-4E? That was per day. Or do you refer to the structure from 4E alone?

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Should have seen that coming. It's an aside, but I'll answer the question (thoroughly). I think that Vancian magic is a problem; the game has largely been balanced by the idea that mages can do incredible things a few times per day and fighters can do decent things indefinitely. This didn't achieve balance very well, less so as spells became more plentiful and easy to cast. Spells aren't difficult enough to cast. The fighter and the fatigue and wounds of combat were not modeled well, and his infinite reserves of stamina aren't that useful.

4e tried to fix this by adding an abstraction to where fighters and mages used the same power system. This also didn't model fatigue very well, robbed spellcasters of their diversity, and, even worse, created a "per encounter" distinction, even though an encounter is not an objective time unit. There's also the "homogeneity" and "grind" that even 4e advocates often complain about. Even if it was more balanced, it's hard to say that's worth it.

My take on the whole thing is that limiting an ability by "X uses per unit time" is an anachronistic game mechanic. It doesn't achieve balance, because the amount of adventuring in a day varies enormously by group, and it creates cheesy attempts to rest and regain uses (15 minute adventuring day). In addition, it doesn't model reality very well. You could get away with it with mages because magic isn't real, but the problem was there even before the mechanics migrated towards fighters. People fatigue over time, but they aren't fine one minute and unable to swing their sword a certain way the next. If you're going to release a new edition of D&D, an "upgrade" this is one of the prime things to fix.

And yes, I have some ideas on other ways of doling out spells and other abilities (which I'm sure I'll be posting at length somewhere else).

And no, I never liked 3.X barbarian rages, PF barbarian rage points, the 3.0 version of power critical, anything from the Tome of Battle, or any of the other "per day" or "per [unit of time]" mechanics that made their way into the rules during 3e. This is an edition-neutral issue. I hate "per day" in all editions, and I see it as a nexus of problems that many different people have with the game, along with hit points, magic items, combat maneuvers, and some other things.

And no, I don't think Trailblazer's "per rest" solution works, that's a band-aid.

Bottom line, unless you're going to take problematic rules and replace them with innovative and better mechanics that are actually better than the old ones, why would I buy a new game?

billd91 said:

But how can a corporation like WotC regain people's trust? Should they be forced to shoulder a burden that isn't working out for them because they need to wait 4 more years before you trust them? Do they have that kind of time? Or should they scrap the stuff that isn't in working in an effort to better serve dissatisfied customers?

I haven't had much confidence in WotC's decisions in some time, but I'll still review them individually in the hopes that they're successfully learning something.

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To regain trust, the cycle of terminations of WotC employees has to stop. Otherwise there is no accountability and what's said today is meaningless.

Scott_Rouse said:

Since you're quoting me I'll chime in. I don"t have a horse in this race and I have largely moved on (professionally and personally).

Yes I did say that and at that point in time anyone on the D&D team would have said the same thing. The publishing goal was (and should be) to have the edition last 8-10 years and we truly believed that would be the case with 4e.

There are a lot of things that happened with 4e that violated the communities trust (failure to have DDi tools at launch, the GSL vs OGL) but after all that has happened with 4e is a shorter edition life-cycle really going to be the thing that turns you away from the opportunity of a better game that 5e offers? 4e was broken as a game and business and it's needs to go away. The "they broke their promise" argument sounds vaguely familiar of the "they are killing my 3.x game" that was all over the boards when 4e was announced.

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The point is that the people there today may (and one might even say it's likely that they will) be gone tomorrow and WotC has a terrible record with regard to staffing. Therefore, anything said, any time spent on the process, may become meaningless when the next "leader(s)" come in to do their thing.

I'm not saying you weren't being honest when you said 4E would last 8-10 years. Quite the opposite. I'm saying that there are forces within (and above) WotC that make any statements by any staff member dubious.

Today they want an all-inclusive game. Tomorrow they may all be fired.

Now granted, it's possible in any business that the climate may change forcing decisions to be made, but WotC seems to bring the changes on themselves and they don't seem to be getting better - but worse in this regard.

jaerdaph said:

.

Now my data point: Don't spend too much time, money or effort trying to win me back, WotC/Hasbro. I'm in that 45 and older crowd, and while I know I don't speak for everyone in that age group, I've moved on. I already have what I need in 3 1/2 editions of D&D, Pathfinder, a few d20 "spin off" and OSR retro-clone games, not to mention the non-d20/non-D&D games I play now as well. Spend that time, money and effort appealing to my younger nephews and nieces (ages 11, 9, 6 and 6) instead. Take D&D well into the 21st century by getting them on board. Take almost 40 years of D&D and revamp and refresh it for the younger generation. Make them feel that same magic that I felt in 1979 when I first discovered D&D. But don't just package up 1979 D&D and resell it. Use every modern technology and tool that has been developed since D&D first came out and are such an integral part of the younger generation's lives, and integrate that into the the new game. Keep in mind their preferred way of getting information - sound bites, text messages, short and to the point. Don't overwhelm with countless tomes filled with pages and pages and pages of information. Let them pick up the game and be up and running and playing in 10 minutes or less. Do that, and people will still be playing D&D another 40 years from now.

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I'm genuinely curious. Have you seen the Pathfinder Beginner Box? If you have, how good a job of doing this did they do? I certainly believe that their intent was to pretty much do exactly what you propose above (well, not the technology so much as it was still a printed product)

Kamikaze Midget said:

It may be. Still, it does grate on me. This is perhaps because I am over-sensitive to copyright issues, though.

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Then perhaps write your own game or product and keep all the copyrighty goodness for yourself?

ShinHakkaider said:

Well to be fair they DID kill 3.x, at least support for it. Which at that point was to be expected since they were introducing 4E. It's also the reason that Pathfinder and other OSR games became havens for people who wanted nothing to do with WOTC's new and shiny.

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To be fair, considering how well Pathfinder is doing, the DID NOT kill 3.x (thanks to the OGL).

TSR/WotC have never supported past editions when a new version came out. Most (if not all) publishers stop supporting old editions when new versions come out.

BTW there is a school of thought that a publisher like WOTC should support ALL editions new & old of a game like D&D. I think that is crazy but there are people who subscribe to this idea.

DaveMage said:

I'm not saying you weren't being honest when you said 4E would last 8-10 years. Quite the opposite. I'm saying that there are forces within (and above) WotC that make any statements by any staff member dubious.

Today they want an all-inclusive game. Tomorrow they may all be fired.

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Exactly. If 5E turns out (thinking of a way to say this nicely) performing in a similar manner to 4E, which of the people in charge will be here in four years saying the equivalent of:

Scott_Rouse said:

4e was broken as a game and business and it's [sic] needs to go away.

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(Which, BTW, would be an excellent sig if I was type who like tweaking noses with sigs).

Scott_Rouse said:

BTW there is a school of thought that a publisher like WOTC should support ALL editions new & old of a game like D&D. I think that is crazy but there are people who subscribe to this idea.

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I wonder how much this school of thought is being pursued now at WotC? Given the nature of the 5e announcement, with its talk of unity and drawing from earlier editions, it seems natural to wonder if we could see this happen to some extent. It would be nice at the least to see the pdfs of older edition material made available for sale again.