What will happen to 4th edition?

[prosfilaes]

So I dont think there was "d20" crash

It's not really a matter of opinion; there was. Designers & Dragons: The 00s by Shannon Appelcline documents it; Wizard's Attic, which dealt with the distributors for 80 companies, went under in 2002-2003, which lost those companies both product and money owed for product sold, and Osseum Entertainment and Fast Forward Entertainment, which offered the same services, both died in 2005. It was a lot harder for a small publisher to get in stores, and the surviving d20 publishers often turned to OGL branding or completely different systems. There was some d20 publishing after 2004 or so, but not nearly at the sheer volume there was before. The splatbooks and the d20 versions of old games disappeared. A lot of companies went out of business at that time, and a lot of stores and distributors got stuck with product they couldn't sell.

 

[Haffrung]

I think there's a reason why none of Ron Edward's games have sold anywhere near the number D&D has... and that's because most people have never even heard of a game by him. The fact that every game store that carries RPGs carries D&D and everyone who has played an RPG has heard of D&D is the primary reason D&D sells more.

I wouldn't say distribution is the primary reason D&D is more popular than indie games. At some point design aficionados are going to have to recognize that D&D has genuine, fundamental appeal as a game. And Ron Edward's games aren't even played by storygamers more than once or twice. That's because most indie games have a very narrow focus, and their main aim is to impress other game designers. In some senses, the indie RPG scene is like the eurogame scene - the hardcore fans like to try 30 or 50 new games a year because they love learning new systems. They'll praise a designer like Martin Wallace to the skies, even if they've never played any of his games more than three times.

D&D is flexible and broadly appealing enough to sustain its appeal over dozens and hundreds of sessions. That has tremendous value to the gamers out there who don't especially enjoy learning new systems - and they are legion.

What I found astonishing about the whole Essentials debacle was that there was no book actually called a PHB that you could point people towards. (And, yes, I realise there still was the original 4E PHB but it had so much errata that a new one really was required.) The takeover of TSR by WotC and the subsequent professional business analysis that was performed revealed very clearly that EVERYTHING had to drive sales of the PHB. The advent of DDi has not changed that.

Frankly, it was just a half-assed revised edition that, at the time, seemed to be a way to buy a few more months for the edition and which was then subsequently revealed to be exactly that: a way of stretching out the inevitable. Honestly, though, who in their right mind would publish an effectively new edition of D&D in paperback using a book size that D&D had never used before?

It made no sense at the time and makes even less sense with the benefit of hindsight.

That's funny, because I only got into 4E last year with the Essentials line, and one of the things I found appealing about it was the book format. Digest sized paperbacks are much more convenient to use at the table than big hardcovers. I've never had a group where every play had a PHB. Typically, there are only two at the table, and one of them is mine. So the split PHB books, each half the cost of a full hardcover PHB, made perfect sense to me. I was frankly disappointed that WotC went back to the old format with 5E. I still cling to a hope that something like the Essentials Rules Compendium, in the same softcover digest format, will eventually be released for 5E.

I like the Essentials format so much that I went whole-hog and bought all the Essentials books. The DM's kit is great - organization, advice, adventure, the whole shebang. The Rules Compendium is fantastic. The Monster Vault is the best of its kind. Throw in some Essentials era adventures like Gardmore Abbey and the Harkenwold adventures,, and I have a comprehensive system and excellent support that I can come back to for years. Whatever its reception by the 4E player-base at the time, as someone approaching it with fresh eyes I loved Essentials.

Cultural relevance and compatibility with current culture would be big ones. Does D&D resonate with younger people well? These days when I talk to younger PLAYERS they have basically never read, often never heard of, the literature which directly inspired D&D.

Most of the kids who started playing D&D in the 70s and early 80s weren't familiar with that literature either. And you know what? It didn't matter. D&D is its own genre. It is not a game you play to emulate books and movies - it's a game you play to play D&D. And I think kids get that, and get it more easily than older gamers who are trying to be sophisticated by playing out a schlock fantasy novel.

But I think that is consistent with what Jer is saying about 5e - it is not 4e-esque, it is Essentials-esqu with the 4e-isms that Essentials retained stripped away (or, rather, covered over in layers of obfuscation).

Essentials was an effort to redress the mistakes WotC felt they made with 4E. It was driven by the same motivation that eventually spawned 5E - a need to make the game both more familiar to older D&D players, and easier to get into for new players.

 

[prosfilaes]

At some point design aficionados are going to have to recognize that D&D has genuine, fundamental appeal as a game.

It's amazing that up until 2009, no one managed to published a game that was better. I wonder why Jonathan Tweet became such an awesome game designer at the very instant he was hired by D&D 3.

I'm not arguing that Ron Edward's games were the end-all and be-all of anything. I'm saying that comparing D&D to any other RPG by comparing saless is like (June 2013) comparing Robert Galbraith's The Cuckoo's Calling to Kathy Reichs's Bones are Forever, and saying that the latter is obviously a much better book because it's a much better seller. Or, today, saying that J.K. Rowling's The Cuckoo's Calling is a much better book because it's a much better seller. The external forces driving sells of those books or those RPGs are stronger then any innate quality of them.

the hardcore fans like to try 30 or 50 new games a year because they love learning new systems.

You can dismiss their opinions, but I'm certainly not going to take the opinion of someone who has only learned one system.

D&D is flexible and broadly appealing enough to sustain its appeal over dozens and hundreds of sessions. That has tremendous value to the gamers out there who don't especially enjoy learning new systems - and they are legion.

By those standards, D&D sucks. GURPS 4E came out in 2001; Savage Worlds in 2003, both with no new editions. Heck, Pathfinder is now older then any version of D&D since WotC bought it, and unlike WotC, Paizo has explicitly said that the earliest they would think about a new edition is 2020. If your goal is flexible game that can sustain its appeal over dozens and hundreds of sessions, there's three that are at least as flexible as D&D that are older then any recent D&D edition got to be, and have reasonable expectations of going another 5 or 10 years without another edition.

 

[pemerton]

Well, its not like previous editions LACKED the same sort of connection, it just wasn't a generalized rule, with all the system baggage that brought. Read the 1e Flametongue description and the 4e version and you will see what I mean. Clearly the later is a lot more robust and clear.

Agreed.

My pathway towards that sort of clarity was AD&D > Rolemaster (much more systematic than AD&D, because many effects are unified via the crit tables) > 4e (much more systematic again, unified and presented via keywords).

I will observe too that the 4e version doesn't bother to tell you all the other narrative stuff that the 1e version does. I guess the assumption was that the DM would be clever enough to know that a 'fire' keyword signifies the actual presence of fire with all its narrative implications. Unfortunately nowhere in 4e is this linkage actually spelled out.

<snip>

The item damage rules in DMG1 were a bit of a start

I think it's a pity that the keyword linkage of mechanics to fiction was illustrated only in the item damage rules. Those rules aren't unimportant, but they're a bit obscure. It should have been spelled out front-and-centre.

But maybe WotC thought this sort of thing was enough (PHB p 55): Fire: Explosive bursts, fiery rays, or simple ignition.

one of my players had to exterminate a bunch of jermlaine in a dungeon that were infesting ventilation shafts. She used Stinking Cloud to do this by applying an SC to turn it into a ritual that let her make the cloud flow into the shafts and fill them. This is an application of tying poison to the narrative via the mediation of the SC rules, but this kind of thing is completely ignored in the actual text of 4e. It is totally implicit.

The players of the invoker/wizard ritualist and of the sorcerer/bard in my game do this sort of thing all the time. Just a couple of examples: Heroes of the Feywild has a 15th level domination daily that removes the caster from the game. The flavour is clearly that of bodily possession (like an Intellect Devourer). The wizard PC used this ability to try and read a guard's mind to learn a password (it failed, and hilarity ensued). For the sorcerer, he used one of his bardic songs - I can't remember which one, now - to sing a song to help him counteract the effects of the terror-inducing screams of a trapped demon (mechanically, granting a bonus to his skill check in the skill challenge).

I agree that this sort of stuff is implicit. But it's not buried, either: DMG 2 talks about gaining bonuses for using encounter and daily powers in a skill challenge.

What WotC could have done is actually provide some examples of play modelling this sort of thing - a sort-of "Page 42 redux".

I only got into 4E last year with the Essentials line, and one of the things I found appealing about it was the book format. Digest sized paperbacks are much more convenient to use at the table than big hardcovers.

<snip>

I like the Essentials format so much that I went whole-hog and bought all the Essentials books. The DM's kit is great - organization, advice, adventure, the whole shebang. The Rules Compendium is fantastic. The Monster Vault is the best of its kind.

I like the physical format of the Essentials books.

But I don't really like the organisation of any but the MV. The RC is good, but to me is not completely intuitive in its organisation (eg to find the rules for a Wall effect I have to go to a different place from the rules for forced movement or cover, although these are all things likely to come into play together) and I'm sure it could have been written more concisely - for a fundamentally simple rule system RC is a lot of words.

The player's books I find have too much redundancy (between them, RC and the DM book) and I find the presentation of the classes to be way too padded. I preferred the economy of the PHB-style. (Which also reminds me of the economy of RM's presentation of it's PC build rules: when I first started playing and GMing, its economy of presentation in comparison to D&D was one of its appeals.)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The size of the DDI usergroup which also posted on the WotC Boards was public (even if it broke last November when WotC "upgraded" their boards). As of March 2013 there were about 81,000 subscribers (with numbers dropping off to 73,400 by last November at the upgrade). For there to have been only 100k PHBs sold that would mean that 80% of people who bought the 4e PHB were still subscribing to DDI by March 2013 - or there was a significant number of people that subscribed to DDI without ever buying the PHB. I know I wasn't still subscribing by then!

So I'd say your numbers were pretty inaccurate there.

Yeah, there was always that DDI user group. The problem was always the question of whether it was accurate or not. I think it PRECISELY tracked up and down with subscriptions, but it was never clear that it started at 0. For all we know WotC reserved 30k user accounts at the start for some administrative reason and that throws the whole thing way out. I think its safe to say there were "10's of thousands" of DDI subscribers. Of course one of the things that is hard to gauge with 4e is just how much DDI cannibalized book sales. In some sense it seems like the answer is "a lot" but we just don't know. Regardless, 4e had a very enthusiastic and energetic core following that definitely bought a LOT of books. I bought a lot, and most of the people I corresponded with and played with online bought EVERY splat book. They may not have sold in vast quantities but each one moved up the charts at Amazon and they clearly moved some product. Encounters was a pretty popular thing too, so again they were clearly having interest in D&D. Its very wrong to think that 4e was 'dead' or some vast meltdown. OTOH real numbers are illusory.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Agreed.

My pathway towards that sort of clarity was AD&D > Rolemaster (much more systematic than AD&D, because many effects are unified via the crit tables) > 4e (much more systematic again, unified and presented via keywords).

I think it's a pity that the keyword linkage of mechanics to fiction was illustrated only in the item damage rules. Those rules aren't unimportant, but they're a bit obscure. It should have been spelled out front-and-centre.

But maybe WotC thought this sort of thing was enough (PHB p 55): Fire: Explosive bursts, fiery rays, or simple ignition.

The players of the invoker/wizard ritualist and of the sorcerer/bard in my game do this sort of thing all the time. Just a couple of examples: Heroes of the Feywild has a 15th level domination daily that removes the caster from the game. The flavour is clearly that of bodily possession (like an Intellect Devourer). The wizard PC used this ability to try and read a guard's mind to learn a password (it failed, and hilarity ensued). For the sorcerer, he used one of his bardic songs - I can't remember which one, now - to sing a song to help him counteract the effects of the terror-inducing screams of a trapped demon (mechanically, granting a bonus to his skill check in the skill challenge).

I agree that this sort of stuff is implicit. But it's not buried, either: DMG 2 talks about gaining bonuses for using encounter and daily powers in a skill challenge.

Yeah, I think they gradually realized that they needed to talk about it. In fact I'm not sure the people writing DMG1 really understood it at the time. I think they saw keywords as classifiers and didn't cotton to the real narrative power until long after. DMG2 is a MUCH more mature system than DMG1 in many respects. You can still see how in DMG1 they were buried in the procedural morass of 3e still. The very item damage rules that ironically in some sense are the seed of a more narrative tie in for powers are also a holdover from 3.5 and AD&D. Another holdover are the NPC rules and NPC class templates in DMG1. You could even say the monster templates are rather 3.5-esque, where DMG2 instead introduces much more narratively cohesive themes (though I think GOOD revised templates could be a nice resource even so). In fact if I were building a 4e monster book I'd package up my monster 'stories' with a theme and a template that went together.

They never did seem to come fully to terms with it before abandoning 4e though.

What WotC could have done is actually provide some examples of play modelling this sort of thing - a sort-of "Page 42 redux".

Yeah, though I cringe at most of the examples of play they DID provide in 4e...

I like the physical format of the Essentials books.

But I don't really like the organisation of any but the MV. The RC is good, but to me is not completely intuitive in its organisation (eg to find the rules for a Wall effect I have to go to a different place from the rules for forced movement or cover, although these are all things likely to come into play together) and I'm sure it could have been written more concisely - for a fundamentally simple rule system RC is a lot of words.

The player's books I find have too much redundancy (between them, RC and the DM book) and I find the presentation of the classes to be way too padded. I preferred the economy of the PHB-style. (Which also reminds me of the economy of RM's presentation of it's PC build rules: when I first started playing and GMing, its economy of presentation in comparison to D&D was one of its appeals.)

Yeah, I thought the Essentials books combined the worst of the space-filling formatting of the 4e books in general with both a wordiness and a poorly-thought-out form of organization that made them hard to use. While I can appreciate the price and handiness of the E-books, and some of the writing in some of them, I would have the 2 player books reformatted ala PHB1 in a flash.

 

[Haffrung]

You can dismiss their opinions, but I'm certainly not going to take the opinion of someone who has only learned one system.

I'm not going to dismiss the opinions of someone who enjoys learning 20+ boardgame systems a year, because I'm one of them. However, RPGs are an entirely different matter. In my experience, people don't play them primarily to engage with the system (as most boardgamers do). A great many RPGers want the system to fade into the background. And D&D, which has always been the home of the casual player, has more than its share of players who don't enjoy learning new systems at all. You can dismiss the muggles who play D&D as ignorant rubes, but that doesn't change the fact that indie designs that try to impress with clever systems are never going to appeal to them. Long-time D&D players know what they like, and don't have any compelling reason to adopt anything radically different; sneering that they have their head in the sand does nothing but marginalize the sneerer.

 

[prosfilaes]

I'm not going to dismiss the opinions of someone who enjoys learning 20+ boardgame systems a year, because I'm one of them. However, RPGs are an entirely different matter.

In that you're not one of them, therefore you can dismiss their opinions?

A great many RPGers want the system to fade into the background.

You say this in advocation of D&D? The system that inspired such questions as "How does grapple work again?" "What does Bless give bonuses to again?" and "Do Holy bonuses stack?" is being described as fading into the background?

You can dismiss the muggles who play D&D as ignorant rubes,

I did not sneer at them, nor did I call them rubes or muggles, nor do I believe that all people who play D&D are ignorant. However, if someone has only played one RPG system, they are not qualified to speak on the comparative quality of RPGs.

that doesn't change the fact that indie designs that try to impress with clever systems are never going to appeal to them.

Try to impress with clever systems? That seems as much like D&D as any indie game I've seen. And if they've never tried them, then they can't know if indie games will appeal to them or not.

Long-time D&D players know what they like

"I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am."

and don't have any compelling reason to adopt anything radically different;

D&D has huge network effects, meaning there are compelling reasons to play it. Maybe it's not worth their time to play other systems. That doesn't make D&D best, except in terms of those network effects.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In that you're not one of them, therefore you can dismiss their opinions?



You say this in advocation of D&D? The system that inspired such questions as "How does grapple work again?" "What does Bless give bonuses to again?" and "Do Holy bonuses stack?" is being described as fading into the background?



I did not sneer at them, nor did I call them rubes or muggles, nor do I believe that all people who play D&D are ignorant. However, if someone has only played one RPG system, they are not qualified to speak on the comparative quality of RPGs.



Try to impress with clever systems? That seems as much like D&D as any indie game I've seen. And if they've never tried them, then they can't know if indie games will appeal to them or not.



"I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am."



D&D has huge network effects, meaning there are compelling reasons to play it. Maybe it's not worth their time to play other systems. That doesn't make D&D best, except in terms of those network effects.

I think I kind of have to agree with you here. Setting aside a couple of years at the very beginning before much else was written D&D has probably never been the 'best' system in the sense of what the vast majority of players would be most happy with that was available at that time given all else being equal. It certainly never was a system that 'got out of your way', certainly not since the debut of AD&D, and before that OD&D was a very obtusely written game that emphasized knowing lots of things about which dice were used for what. In fact knowing the arcana of the rules was sort of an initiation rite into the game back then.

Traveller for instance, just being an example of a contemporary of OD&D/Holme's Basic, was VASTLY better written, lighter weight in play, and just simpler and clearer all around. Most of its complexity was hidden from players, unless they decided to build a starship or something. Chargen was a bit involved, but it was still pretty simple and not something you did every day. It used strictly d6, and while not as streamlined as many of today's indie games it had a very minimalist feel to it in play. It certainly 'got out of your way' when you played and most of my players never really bothered to learn the rules.

Anyway, I think the main point has some validity too, you really have to play a bunch of games to fully appreciate RPGs and the possibilities and what is likely ACTUALLY most suitable to you. However most players are casual and play what is put in front of them, which is fine. They DO still have an opinion that is valid, within the context of what they know.

 

[Haffrung]

D&D has huge network effects, meaning there are compelling reasons to play it. Maybe it's not worth their time to play other systems. That doesn't make D&D best, except in terms of those network effects.

Whether it's best is irrelevant. The only people who care about that are uber-geeks who like to argue on the internet. All that matters to most D&D players is whether they have fun playing it.

Look, if D&D's place as the top RPG in unassailable because of these network effects, and if the player-base really are reactionary troglodytes, then the system reformists and indie game advocates should just move on and find something else to occupy their energy besides trying to turn D&D into the game they want it to be. And if it isn't unassailable, if there's a chance another game system might take its place as the most popular tabletop RPG, then that's where their energies would be best applied. But I'd suggest narrowly-focused indie games aren't going to be the ones that topple D&D.

At some point, you would think people would stop trying to turn D&D into the game they want it be, and recognize it is what it is and either embrace it or move on.