D&D 5E A Modest Proposal to Unify the Fanbase without D&D Next

Vyvyan Basterd · Jul 17, 2012

Chris_Nightwing said:
It may as well not exist? For you perhaps. If you like your game as is, play it and ignore 5E. Even if you never see any 4E material published ever again, you still have your books and your game. Nobody owes you the continuation of the current edition, so I wonder why you feel it necessary to contribute, if you are already satisfied?

I am neither defnding thecasualoblivion nor arguing with you, but if anyone has followed my model of purchasing for 4E and WotC discontinues the online character bulder and compendium, then no, some of us do not have our "books." And I won't have a game I'm willing to run anymore.

I do hope 5E provides something I want. And luckily I am very open to what the designers are seeking to provide, so I'm likely to get what I want. But I can imagine others' in my shoes that have major concerns over the direction of the new edition in light of the cancellation of the current.

Fifth Element · Jul 17, 2012

billd91 said:
What's not perfectly fine is taking different opinions or preferences and their expression personally and getting all snarky about it.

I think that was a response to the snarky expression of those preferences in the first place.

Mallus · Jul 17, 2012

billd91 said:
But I've already got that. And our group has, collectively, its own idiosyncratic preferences too.

Great!

It's not that we're getting "hung up" on systems.

Aren't some people doing exactly that? Isn't that the heart of the most rancorous edition warring?

That characterizes our preferences like they're some kind of psychological damage.

You're reading in, here.

What's not perfectly fine is taking different opinions or preferences and their expression personally and getting all snarky about it.

I'm not criticizing anyone's preferences. Until their preferences extend to "stop producing new games, 'cause I don't want one". In which case I will begin leveling what I believe to be fair criticisms.

Really, my main point was: make people and campaigns the priority, not systems/editions. I'm against counterproductive levels of tribalism, not people having their own tastes.

ExploderWizard · Jul 17, 2012

Its a good sentiment but impractical for several reasons:

1) Staffing. WOTC doesn't have the kind of staff to produce products for that many different lines at once.

2) The OGL. It's hard to create material for the older systems with so many OSR publishers already filling that market.

3) Demand. D&D as a whole barely does enough business for WOTC to struggle with ONE product line at a time. The potential sales of each of these lines would not be worth the investment to produce them.

I think WOTC should launch kickstarter projects for older rulesets, an OD&D whitebox, the original supplements, Holmes & Moldvay Basic sets, RC, and 2E. See which products gets the most backers and release these classics at no risk.

Do you know how much money they could generate with a reprint of the OD&D whitebox & supplements?

I got my AD&D reprints this past weekend and they are beautiful. I would love reprints of other favorites to sit alongside them.

billd91 · Jul 17, 2012

Mallus said:
Aren't some people doing exactly that? Isn't that the heart of the most rancorous edition warring?

Ultimately, I don't think it is. The heart of most rancorous edition warring, as I see it, is how we're treating each other and each others' preferences.

I'm going to use a collective "we" here to cover the community, particularly as edition debaters/warrior/critics/supporters, whatever.

It's not that we have preferences, even strong ones. It's not even that we actively dislike another game. It's that we can't let go of someone else's preferences. We confront, we debate, we try to undermine, we belittle, what we don't do is accept them as valid for the person expressing them. I think that's the heart of the edition warring.

DEFCON 1 · Jul 17, 2012

thecasualoblivion said:
I'm not really in the market for a new RPG, to be honest, but WotC is in the market for ME. If WotC wants me as a customer, they need to do better than to staple together a bunch of sacred cows from various editions, many of which I could care less about or find offensive, with no overall guiding plan.

Actually, no... WotC doesn't give a rat's ass about YOU. If YOU don't buy 5E, oh well, no skin off their nose.

What they care about are D&D players as a group. So they are trying to produce a game that can work for a majority of players, even if it isn't 100% exactly what each of those players would want. If it's close enough, then they're good.

But no company in their right mind would design a game to cater to YOU. Because what YOU want is not necessarily what most of the player base wants. And to think otherwise is just ridiculous. And if you go elsewhere while a large proportion of the player base goes along with what they are doing, then so be it. Enjoy whatever game you play.

tlantl · Jul 17, 2012

I think the issue is not whether to support all editions, it's how can we (Wotc) get the biggest return for our investment in developer costs.

D&D N is just another instance of the five year cycle of releasing another set of rules for D&D. The essentials expansion failed to draw a crowd and 4e isn't selling as well as they would have liked so the idea is to try to unite the fan base with a version of the game that will appeal to people that 4e doesn't, as well as those who found pathfinder to be a better fit, and all of the rest of us who have found WotC's versions of D&D to be a poor substitute for TSR D&D.

D&D N is a marketing scheme that is attempting to get as many D&D players to buy into it as possible. Supporting the older games won't make them as much money as selling us all a new system.

I don't need them to sell me several dozen 1e or 3e books I already have them. I don't buy their adventures because the suck, and I like to write my own. I get a lot of my enjoyment of the game drawing maps and filling in the areas with traps, treasure, and monsters. As far as I can see there's not enough market to justify not making a new edition.

I guess that there's just going to be one more chapter of edition wars coming and a further division of the base as D&D N fails to make 4e layers happy, or the vancian haters or the at-will haters or any other splinter segment of the hobby. It's written in plain sight on the wall. Each faction wants things their way and this, I believe, will be the straw that breaks the camel's back

bogmad · Jul 17, 2012

I was hoping this proposal involved eating babies.

Ahnehnois · Jul 17, 2012

Create modules, gadgets, computer programs, games, worlds. Sell monster supplements, new editions of old books with fixed-up artwork, modules, pre-generated characters, maps, rulers, minis, grids, movies, notebooks and lunch boxes.

•Re-publish core rulebook and sourcebooks for all previous editions of D&D.
•Re-publish all old D&D supplemental content such as modules and settings for all editions.
•Re-publish old issues of Dragon and Dungeon Magazine in POD or eBook formats.
•Use POD and eBook formats such as EPUB, PDF, and Kindle to release the vast library of D&D content without stock overhead.
•Convert modules and campaign settings originally published under one edition, and publish them under all other editions.
•Combine all material from the current 4E edition, including errata and Essentials materials, to create more streamlined version of this edition to be re-published.
•Sponsor DDI support for all four editions, including Character Builders, Monster & Encounter Designers, and Rules Compendiums. Allow fans to buy subscriptions to each support program separately, or to subscribe to bundles, or the entirety of DDI support, as desired.
•Implement the use of new technology in all editions of D&D, either through internal development or outsourcing. Publish Player and Dungeon Master apps for palm devices, tablets, and smart phones.
•Release new content for all editions in Dragon and Dungeon Webzine articles, allocating percentage of pages in proportion to DDI subscriptions for each edition.
•License all editions under a new agreement to encourage 3rd Party Publishers to support all editions of the game.
•Design and release of new supplemental content (modules, sourcebooks, campaign settings, etc.) can be published for all editions – one product sells to four consumer groups!

So instead of making D&D they should be merchandising it and rehashing it? Creating products that at best are insubstantial trinkets or tangential add-ons, and at worse are garbage that drags the brand down?

The problem with trying to make WotC into a "content provider" is that providing content really isn't the role of any company. Characters, stories, and even rules are handled best by individual players and DMs. There is a content market for people who lack the time or ability to create their own, but that isn't much for a company the size of WotC to base a business model on. Moreover, the better the rulesets that are out there, and the better that people understand them and can use them to create content, the less demand for settings/adventures/etc. there is.

This is an inherent problem with rpgs as a business. With most hobbies, as people become more avidly invested in the hobby, they spend more time and money on it. However, with D&D, people generally spend more time and less money on it as they get better at it.

From a business perspective, this is an unsolvable problem. The hobby itself is predicated on individual creativity, so content providing won't work. D&D is archetypically a game played in private space with minimial equipment that lasts a long time; there's really very little way of monetizing it. Mechanical innovation sells products (along with branding, art, and other peripheral things), but this is a path with no clear direction or endpoint. Simply revising and improving the rules was deemed unsuccessful, so they tried reinventing them (to put it nicely), angering a large part of their customer base without really expending the hobby to new audiences, causing them to decide that this was not a success either they needed to radically change something (again).

So if you (@Neuroglyph or anyone else) want to say that 5e isn't a solution, I agree. And I do think that there is some room to republish old material or sell it online and to create edition-free setting products, but that's not going to make money on the scale that selling the substance of the game (the rules) does. It's not a solution, either. However, if there is a solution to make rpgs a functional business model in the long term, I have not seen it.

Umbran · Jul 17, 2012

Sorry. I'm not behind anything of the form, "I have what I want, so nobody else gets anything new."

I also think that, as a business model, becoming a content provider is probably a non-starter for WotC. RPGs are a small market, and they tend to saturate with content very easily. It is difficult to sell content into a saturated market.