WotC Seeks Unity with a New Edition

Walking Dad said:

Because he clarified a few posts later he wasn't speaking about mechanics and being a 4e fan.




<!-- BEGIN TEMPLATE: dbtech_usertag_mention --> @Scott_Rouse <!-- END TEMPLATE: dbtech_usertag_mention --> Can you please add the clarification to your original post to avoid further misinterpretation? Just for the sake of clarity for people not reading all your following posts. Thanks!

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Done. Thanks

Phrase of the Day is Wait and See

...for many of the reasons stated above in the thread. I'm interested in seeing what they do though the least common denominator problem does concern me.

I am glad though that they are taking a more open approach to this one. 1E to 2E was discussed somewhat in advance in Dragon and 2E to 3E had preview articles for a year that prompted disucssions on this very site, among other places.

bhandelman said:

Your selective quoting missed the part that said "Where I game". I wasn't saying everyone in the world that now plays PF also plays 4e, I was saying where I specifically play.

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You're right. I was just giving an example of folks i know where Pathfinder has taken former 4e players.

DaveMage said:

The problem is that from 2002-2013 there will have been 5 editions.

3.0, 3.5, 4.0, 4.Essentials, 5E. That's a LOT of edition turnover in 11 years.

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So you want to support a company with a pretty consistent design & development staff and a game system (cal it "edition") with a 8-10 year life-cycle?

Seems like Paizo may be fitting that criteria pretty well.

talok55 said:

Yeah, it is. I can't give numbers, but I've seen countless "I've left 4E for Pathfinder threads" on forums and am part of gaming group that left 4E for Pathfinder. I've heard it enough that is seems to be a fairly common occurance.

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Honestly, if forum post counts mattered 3e would never have been successful because when it came out all I saw were posts about how people weren't switching to a TRPG that was trying too hard to be Diablo. Excuse me if I don't find forum posts on a hard core fan website to be very representative of things as a whole based on prior experiences like that. Add on to that the fact that nearly every post I see talking about Pathfinder being so great is by someone who decided to stick with 3.5 until Pathfinder was released and are mostly people who didn't even bother to read the PHB. I understand your gaming group switched, and I'm sure some did, but I'm not sure that was where most of or even a sizable amount of Pathfinder only groups come from.

Please understand, I'm not trying to play Edition War here. I personally prefer to play 4e but I don't have a problem with Pathfinder in any way and plan on playing in a game of it pretty soon just for the heck of it. It's just that where I play, all the DMs running games were running 3.5 games before Pathfinder was released, not 4e, and all of them have played 4e and still play on a fairly regular basis either in Encounters or at the monthly meetup before or after their Pathfinder games. Also, the DM of the 4e game I was in last Saturday played in a Pathfinder game right after he ran our game.

I see a lot of blanket statements made here that act as though the whole community feels a certain way, but most people I know at the store don't care at all about things like the OGL vs GSL arguments and just want to game in a fantasy setting. The rules are kind of a secondary thing it seems.

Kzach said:

I do not believe in democracy. I can't go into the reasons why without earning a ban, but suffice it to say that I don't have any, and I mean zero, faith in humanity to make intelligent decisions. People need to be ruled.

The division within the D&D community isn't because of different editions, it's because people are inherently divisive. Design by committee doesn't work anywhere else so it's not going to work here either. WotC should ignore the community entirely, especially the online community, and just make games.

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I bet you'd be surprised by how many people feel the same way. Hell, I don't even trust myself. So I had the same thoughts this morning.

But I'm not quite sure that "design by committee of 10,000 internet nerds" approach is the direction WOTC is going to go. It's hard to imagine anyone would sign off on that approach and it appears WOTC has already made some big decisions about where they want the game to go independent of the online community. I think they'll use the community to get the kinks out and obtain feedback, rather than allowing them to dictate major decisions. I'd say it worked out pretty well for Pathfinder, and it appears that's the model they want to follow.

I'm excited.

DaveMage said:

Do you need the PHB, DMG, and MM if you have the Essentials products? (I was told "no".)

If the answer is "no", it's a new edition. It may be perfectly compatible with 4.0, but it's a new edition.

And, it doesn't matter if one plays 4.0E - it matters to the people that *don't* play 4.0E - it causes yet more edition confusion.

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Sure, you could run a game with all those Essential books and not the 3 core books, but all you are really doing is running a game using the 3 core books, patched with 2 years of errata, in a smaller paperback format. The rules aren't just compatible, they are the same rules. To me, a new edition requires a change of rules that makes the game incompatible or at least difficult to run together. 3.0 to 3.5 is an edition change, incompatibilities were introduced that required conversion. 4e to 4e essentials is just a fancy way to sell more books, hopefully to new people.

Scott_Rouse said:

So you want to support a company with a pretty consistent design & development staff and a game system (cal it "edition") with a 8-10 year life-cycle?

Seems like Paizo may be fitting that criteria pretty well.

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To paraphrase this man:



"Let's not start rolling each other's dice quite yet."

Paizo is three and a half year's in to their cycle. Whether they get to "8-10" years is very much a fact not (yet) in evidence. I appreciate the sentiment, but it's still too early to be planning that parade route.

Ahnehnois said:

How about three or more? 4e didn't work. Businesswise or creatively. Then again, some people enjoy it. The same was true for 3.5. The reason for 4e in the first place was that 3.5 was losing steam in the marketplace and some problems had emerged with how the game played. PF is just a sideways step from 3.5. 3e was introduced because 2e had been run into the ground. And so on. Why should any of these games be immune to civil, reasoned criticism?

Every version of D&D has severely broken mechanics, mixed quality art and presentation, and business decisions behind it that are debatable at best. Why can't this be the point of commonality? Everyone can criticize equally.

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Technically it would take exactly 3 wrongs to make a right. Just like it takes 3 left hand turns to be heading the same way as a right hand turn... if you made more wrong you would be facing another direction again.

Nemesis Destiny said:

If you'll read the response he made to that post, he indicated that he was referring to the community and the business model, not the game itself.

It's a pretty annoying comment for him to have made though, in the context that it does nothing to help said community (especially out of context, as most people will take it) - all it will do is fuel the fires for more warring.

How many anti-WotC people are now dancing in the streets saying, "I told you so!" right now? Quite a few. These are the same folks that were alienated and annoyed by the piss-poor marketing surrounding 4e's launch. Now they're saying, "we were right all along; 4e is badwrongfun. haha!"

Sorry, but two wrongs don't make a right.

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People shouldn't put that much stock in what I say, in fact I may have turned into just another message board troll.