D&D 5E If an option is presented, it needs to be good enough to take.

Derren · Oct 5, 2012

Neonchameleon said:
Two fallacies there.

1: 4e lasted longer than either 3.5 or 3.0. Are we going to call 3.0 a miserable failure then?

That also a way to skew numbers. 4 and 4.5 combined (Yes, Essentials is 4.5) lasted a lot shorter than 3E/3.5E. And even when following your premise that 3E and 3.5E can't be counted together while 4E and Essentials can, 3.5E still lasted longer.

4E lost/drove away a lot of the playerbase of D&D, damaged the brand name and created D&Ds now biggest competitor. Its hard to call that anything but a failure from an economic point of view.

2: 4e offered more general non-combat support than any other edition. To the DM it offered a structure and pacing mechanic (Skill Challenges) unmatched by any other edition of D&D.

Unmatched? No. Except you mean a way to abstract every non combat activity into a string of dice rolls which mathematically didn't really work as designed while removing a lot of out of combat skills because they were not important to "adventuring". In that 4E was very successful.

Obryn · Oct 5, 2012

Derren said:
(Yes, Essentials is 4.5)

Just because you need this to be true in order to make your point does not make it actually true.

We can go around about it in another thread if you want, but there's no reasonable sense in which the new subclasses introduced in the Heroes Of... books amount to an actual edition of the game. And I don't think you're familiar enough with the subject matter to coherently argue the point.

4E lost/drove away a lot of the playerbase of D&D, damaged the brand name and created D&Ds now biggest competitor. Its hard to call that anything but a failure from an economic point of view.

The OGL made D&D's biggest competitor by allowing it to be existing editions of D&D, complete with all their support. D&D's editions have pushed forward in part with a forced obsolescence model, by dropping support for one game and starting support for a new one. Without an OGL, I'm not saying 4e would have been hugely more adored or what have you, but D&D certainly would have been competing with several games, as opposed to mainly PF and a diaspora of other retro-clones.

If making a competitor for D&D is actually as horrible a business decision as you say, you also have to damn business decision to make the OGL itself.

-O

Derren · Oct 5, 2012

Obryn said:
Just because you need this to be true in order to make your point does not make it actually true.

1. Not really. Even when you think that 3E and 3.5E were so vastly different that they have to be counted as different editions while 4E and Essentials are similar enough to be counted as 4E, 3.5E still lasted longer than 4E proving Neonchameleon wrong.

2. Which still doesn't change that it was 4E which lead to a huge amount of D&D players search for a different system instead of staying with the brand they have played with for years. If 4E had been a success, those players would have stayed and no serious competition would have arisen, with or without the OGL.

And now we should stop talking edition war.

Obryn · Oct 5, 2012

Derren said:
1. Not really. Even when you think that 3E and 3.5E were so vastly different that they have to be counted as different editions while 4E and Essentials are similar enough to be counted as 4E, 3.5E still lasted longer than 4E proving Neonchameleon wrong.

2. Which still doesn't change that it was 4E which lead to a huge amount of D&D players search for a different system instead of staying with the brand they have played with for years. If 4E had been a success, those players would have stayed and no serious competition would have arisen, with or without the OGL.

And now we should stop talking edition war.

I'm not edition warring - I'm disputing your interpretation of the facts. I don't think I've said anything inflammatory (or even uncomplimentary?) about any editions here...?

My argument re: the OGL is that while 4e might have driven away some players, it didn't actually create a competitor. The most it could create would be a market for one. With no OGL, I can't imagine a majority of all the folks who really wanted to stick with 3.5 uniting behind a single non-3.5 game. Because of the OGL, that competitor really was 3.5 itself.

Whether or not 4e drove more players away than it attracted is only one ingredient. The OGL is what allowed for the previous edition of D&D to directly compete against the new one. So if your list of "bad business decisions" by WotC includes, "created a competitor for D&D" then you're throwing the OGL into that "bad decision" bucket.

In fact, given the OGL, I can't imagine a scenario where WotC wouldn't have been competing against itself when a new version was released.

-O

Neonchameleon · Oct 5, 2012

Derren said:
That also a way to skew numbers. 4 and 4.5 combined (Yes, Essentials is 4.5) lasted a lot shorter than 3E/3.5E. And even when following your premise that 3E and 3.5E can't be counted together while 4E and Essentials can, 3.5E still lasted longer.

Not yet it hasn't. That depends when 5e comes out. The 3.5 PHB was released in July 2003, the 4e PHB was released in May 2008. Which means that 4e will outlast 3.5 as of April 2013. (For that matter 3.5 only lasted as long as it did because Orcus had big enough issues they pulled the whole thing and rushed what we got as 4e out of the door). And I specifically said 3.0.

And Essentials isn't 4e. It's closer to Magic of Incarnum/Book of 9 swords. You play Essentials and classic classes at the same table.

4E lost/drove away a lot of the playerbase of D&D, damaged the brand name and created D&Ds now biggest competitor. Its hard to call that anything but a failure from an economic point of view.

Which as has been pointed out is the fault of the OGL - Ryan Dancey's poison pill. As for losing a lot of the playerbase, it also drew a lot in. 4e was intentionally targetted with language that would appeal to MMO players rather than keeping the old tabletop wargame vocabulary.

Unmatched? No. Except you mean a way to abstract every non combat activity into a string of dice rolls which mathematically didn't really work as designed while removing a lot of out of combat skills because they were not important to "adventuring". In that 4E was very successful.

Except as a scene framing mechanic that actually provides a meta-way of stringing ordinary skill checks together and providing a systematic reward for non-combat task resolution you mean. If you are turning the activity into just a string of dice rolls and not saying what those dice rolls mean then you are playing it badly and against the guidance in the PHB and DMG. I'll grant the guidance isn't great - but it is there. And common sense alone should say that you actually tie the rolls to the fiction and narrate them. So please stop misrepresenting skill challenges. (That said most of the published ones in the early adventures were crap - I have no idea why after producing a superb game, WotC followed it up with third rate adventures).

As for the out of combat skills, the skills removed were Use Magic Device, Use Rope, Profession, Craft, Perform - the rest were all folded into either skills or in two cases feats. The first two shouldn't have existed at all and the last three are generally flavour, which is why in 4e you get backgrounds to say what's special about you and what you did before becoming an adventurer. And with 31 skills and five further skill families (Knowlege, Perform, Craft, Profession, Speak Language) even a rogue's 8+Int skill points/level wouldn't go very far.

billd91 · Oct 5, 2012

Obryn said:
My argument re: the OGL is that while 4e might have driven away some players, it didn't actually create a competitor. The most it could create would be a market for one. With no OGL, I can't imagine a majority of all the folks who really wanted to stick with 3.5 uniting behind a single non-3.5 game. Because of the OGL, that competitor really was 3.5 itself.

I think you're missing an important perspective. If 4e was a radical-enough change that a large proportion stuck with 3e - that's already a competitor to 4e, whether OGL exists or not. It's just a used-market competitor rather than active, initial market one. And that's been the case since different editions have come out. Hell, TSR even actively competed with itself with BECMI and AD&D.

WotC couldn't avoid creating at least one competitor for itself with the release of 4e. The problem for them was they didn't successfully minimize the competition and the measures they took to reduce competition may have spurred more vigorous competition than they might otherwise have had. Had they stuck to the OGL, it's conceivable that Paizo might have supported 4e rather than struck out on their own with Pathfinder.

Obryn · Oct 5, 2012

Oh, I agree that D&D has competed with itself basically forever, but the "active market" bit can be crucial to a game's vitality, attraction of new players, ability to find a gaming group, and so on.

I don't disagree about other bad business decisions WotC made around the time of 4e's release. I think there were several, and have gone on at length about them. (For example, I think probably the worst problem was that what was released was, effectively, playtest quality. Especially for monsters.)

And yeah, once the cat's out of the bag with the OGL, what do you do? I don't think that's an easy question to answer, and IMO the only decisions were probably bad ones from one perspective or another.

Let's say WotC released 4e under the OGL, too. Now they already know there will be a competitor which sticks with 3.x OGL and still develops for it, because they're not idiots. And then when they want to move to 5e, there would be an inevitable 4e OGL clone, too. Both of which can be in active, legal, 100% secure development, still competing with their RPG flagship. (And also releasing the full rule set in new books like Mongoose's Pocket PHB, etc., now directly competing on price, too.) Good for players? Absolutely, unless the company folds! Good for a company which needs profits to employ staff and survive? Who knows?

So I don't think there was necessarily a good decision to be made here.

-O

Steely_Dan · Oct 5, 2012

Neonchameleon said:
1) And Essentials isn't 4e.

2) It's closer to Magic of Incarnum/Book of 9 swords.

3) 4e was intentionally targetted with language that would appeal to MMO players

1) Of course it is, let's not get silly, it's a 4th Ed product.

2) Not at all, let's not get absurd.

3) You said it.

Neonchameleon · Oct 5, 2012

Obryn said:
I don't disagree about other bad business decisions WotC made around the time of 4e's release. I think there were several, and have gone on at length about them. (For example, I think probably the worst problem was that what was released was, effectively, playtest quality. Especially for monsters.)

Agreed. They started creating Orcus in October 2005 - and pulled it in April 2006 because it was horrible. Condition tracks for everything. Everyone gets different recharge mechanisms - with no powers that are genuinely limited use. Very fiddly and requiring lookup tables (or rather specialised condition tracks) all over the place.

My only fond memories from the days of the multi-track system were moments of dialogue I recorded in our quotes file. Someone said, "What's the opposite of the petrification track?"

"The liquification track. Aboleths: be very worried when they bring out the straw."

"No, we don't have a liquification track because it's part of the swallow-whole track."

But getting back on topic they more or less rushed the PHB over the six month period October 06 to April 07. The PHB was published in June 2008 - after they threw the whole thing out in April 06. That's not even two years. And the full on playtesting started in June 2007. Not enough time - I'd say it needed at least another year.

And yeah, once the cat's out of the bag with the OGL, what do you do? I don't think that's an easy question to answer, and IMO the only decisions were probably bad ones from one perspective or another.

Yup. You don't change it enough and people stick to the old books and you get no more sales. You change it too much and people don't want to migrate across because it's a different game.

Obryn · Oct 5, 2012

Neonchameleon said:
But getting back on topic they more or less rushed the PHB over the six month period October 06 to April 07. The PHB was published in June 2008 - after they threw the whole thing out in April 06. That's not even two years. And the full on playtesting started in June 2007. Not enough time - I'd say it needed at least another year.

I'd say experience has borne that out. There were some pretty shallow bugs in the PHB - V-shaped classes, a few insane powers, Solos that were a grind, the so-called "expertise gap", and so on.

Like I mentioned before, the designers seemed to think that because...

* a monster that takes longer to kill but which does less damage, and
* a monster that gets killed quickly but deals out a ton of damage

...would do the same damage over the course of a combat, that these were somehow equivalent. It may be true in a mathematical sense, but it is almost laughably untrue when you're at a table with real players. And thus, grind was invented...

-O