10-18-2011 Legends and Lore - Preserving the Past

[Dire Bare]

In general I agree. But let me throw out one more possibility that I think isn't getting much consideration among the speculators:

Assume for a moment that the plan is not to come out with a new edition, but it's instead to revive all old editions, and support them all.

Nah. I can see WotC republishing all old material in electronic form again, and I can even see them developing a set of web tools that support all editions. But I cannot see them producing NEW content for anything but the current edition. It would be a waste of their time and money, and they know it. Now, encouraging fans on their forums to contribute new fan material to some sort of ratable database, I could see that . . .

 

[JoeGKushner]

A short article.

And I'm not knocking Monte here but...

WoTC goal is to capitalize on the past of the game.

There's nothing wrong with that intent in my opinion, but it often takes the form of trying to augment buying patterns of fans of the game by stripining out material that many would consider core and padding future books with them.

I do not see this changing.

 

[Kaodi]

I think it is important to remember and utilize the history of the game to your advantage. But I also think it is important to not be so slavishly devoted that it is to the disadvantage of the new system. History, in other words, is a good source of flavour, but not of mechanics. For instance, if you can make a better game without +X weapons, then do it. D&D will survive, just like it survived the death of THAC0.

 

[Hussar]

I have to admit, this is the first one that kinda leaves me cold. Sure, there's TONS of great stuff from back in the day. I know that. But, there's a reason a lot of stuff fell by the wayside - a lot of it wasn't very good. Sturgeon's Law applies to monsters as much as anything else.

Yes, I realize that someone, somewhere may be using the C.I.F.A.L. as a lynchpin of their campaign, but, just because someone is using it doesn't make it good.

There's a reason some things get changed. Take the "trap monsters" from AD&D as an example. By 3e, these had either largely disappeared or been changed quite a lot (Green Slime being a prime example - it goes from being a monster to being a trap. And the Piercer->Darkmantle evolution for another.)

Just because someone, somewhere, at some point in time thought something was a good idea doesn't necessarily make it so. There is a danger of wearing nostalgia glasses when looking at past stuff and not judging it with an objective point of view. Not that this will necessarily happen, but, honestly, I wouldn't really care if Thouls (for an example) never made it into another edition.

 

[Anselyn]

. History, in other words, is a good source of flavour, but not of mechanics. For instance, if you can make a better game without +X weapons, then do it. D&D will survive, just like it survived the death of THAC0.

Excellent point. Mine the flavour or the player experience related to an aspect of the game. If you like, mine the memory of the play or how the object/monster/skill fitted into the play experience. This may be independent of the actual historical mechanics.

 

[Mistwell]

Nah, it does not fit. Releasing the old stuff requires no thinking of the game's history, at least how Monte sounds in this article.

If they were thinking about what specific products to revive, I think the tone and focus would be a lot different.

This does look like, at the lest, a major reshift in 4E.

I disagree. You're ignoring the part about supporting all those games, not just releasing the old stuff. To support all the old versions at once, you'd need to have a handle on everything that came before. To write an adventure that would work for every version of the game (and just different stat blocks for the challenges, depending on game version), you'd need to have a great grasp on the history of the game.

 

[Mistwell]

Nah. I can see WotC republishing all old material in electronic form again, and I can even see them developing a set of web tools that support all editions. But I cannot see them producing NEW content for anything but the current edition. It would be a waste of their time and money, and they know it. Now, encouraging fans on their forums to contribute new fan material to some sort of ratable database, I could see that . . .

You think a really good adventure, with solid story elements and different stat blocks for each of the different versions of the game, would be a total waste of their time and money? I don't. It would be a way to create a united common experience for all D&D gamers, without uniting them under a specific version of the game. And once you start to do that, you can begin selling things like miniatures for the adventure, for those who want them. And specialty items like over-sized maps, monster cards, set pieces, etc.. Getting access to the entire customer base, rather than a subset who likes just one version of the game, has a lot of value.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't know if this entry actually means anything, but I think it is more about marketing the D&D brand to the people who don't like 4E so much. When 4E first came out one of the major reasons people who didn't like it gave for not making the switch (and I am not saying this is true, just that is seemed like a pretty prevalent reason) was "it isn't D&D anymore". So it sounds to me like cook is saying the next edition (regardless of whether it is more inline with 4E, 3E or even 1E/2E) will be firmly rooted in the game's history. My guess is this doesn't actually mean anything mechanically at this stage, it is simply some kind of guiding principle they may use.

It is an interesting article though. Monsters are a good case for him to hold up, because you can never really have too many of them. I mean even if there are monsters in the MM I don't like or don't quite know how to use, it always feels good to have more options rather than less for monsters. It is one of those aspects of the game you don't really need to edit out (since you can just keep releasing more and more monster manuals).

 

[am181d]

In the electronic age, the idea that weird monsters from earlier editions need to be preserved like endangered species by updating them to the latest generation is just weird...

That stuff will exist forever in electronic form. To Monte's point, WotC would be wise to make that content available to their own staff at the very least.

But should WotC be clogging modern D&D with updates of crappy old monsters to appeal to a minority of a minority of older fans? No, of course not.

And that goes for all the rules. I worry that WotC has learned the wrong lesson from 4e. It's not that evolving the game is bad. It just the direction they went in (more fiddly bits, more gamist) was not a direction that many people wanted the game to evolve in.

 

[JeffB]

As for the "one product, multiple edition stat blocks"

That all sounds great. The problem is the play style of OD&D vs. say, 4E is SOOOOOOOOOOOO different, you cannot write an adventure that would work for every version of the game as is and just provide some statblocks for each edition.

a 1st level 4E character is FAR FAR FAR more powerful than a 1st level AD&D or OD&D character. Now throw some 3.5 1st level characters in there and 2E 1st level characters. and the assumptions of what is "balanced" or appropriate for each game system for a 1st level character. Just the fact that in earlier versions of the game "running away" was an assumed part of play, whereas today it is out of vogue, in favor of a "make the fight tough, but winnable" is enough to make a huge difference in adventure design. You'd have 4 very different adventures for very different character levels in that one product.

Each encounter would have to be so re-worked and balanced for each edition the cost of such a product would be enormous due to the increased page count. Not to mention its an enormous amount of work for a relatively small staff of writers.

I cannot see such products ever being well balanced and successful for each and every edition from a gameplay standpoint, even if somehow it was made to be affordable.