Is the Split a Bad Thing?

[RoryN]

I agree that it has been both good and bad in different areas.

Personally, after being out of the hobby for some 10-odd years and wanting to get back in, I found it very difficult to embrace either 3.5 or 4E D&D after playing so long in 2E. I did play some 3E when it first came out, and it was a lot of fun, but the changes made between that edition and 4E really didn't set well with me personally. So when I was told about PFRPG, I took a look and liked what I saw. Even though it is pretty rules heavy, I find it much closer to 2E or 3E for me.

Some people have mentioned the small companies who produce RPG items, whether they be adventure modules or campaign settings, it seems to me they are doing better now than they were doing in the 80's and 90's. I think that having 4E and PFRPG, along with d20 open source gaming gave many of those smaller companies a bigger base to work from with regards to accesories they could produce. I believe they have a bigger audience to market to now.

There still may be a split, but I don't think it's as big as it was when 4E and Pathfinder were first doing head-to-head battle. The battle lines have blurred now, and people are, if not fully embracing both, at least acknowledging both can exist in the same world, which benefits all the RP community.

 

[Roland55]

Growth in number of players isn't the only thing that is "good" for a particular game or hobby. There's the concept of hybrid vigor to consider - having multiple ways of doing things tends to drive creativity, and that is good for what is, at its root, a creative endeavor.

Of course, if the players are a bunch of acrimonious jerks about it, the value of that creativity will be lost. So, it isn't a sure win - it depends on us.

A somewhat scary thought.

But only somewhat!!

 

[Dice4Hire]

I've seen rival RPG gangs rumble. It was erasable markers under the highway. I'm just glad their war council didn't decide on d4's...

The LARPers have a definite advantage here.

 

[Celtavian]

I can only speak for myself. The split was good for me because I get new material using a set of rules I prefer. I was one of the people that wasn't going to play 4E even if there was no alternative. So WotC would have lost me as a customer even if Paizo hadn't released Pathfinder.

As far as markets go, a split is a good thing for customers. More products competing on the market usually improves quality. Though as we all know most corporations the size of Hasbro do everything they can to prevent competition as it hurts their profit margins. So I consider that a very good thing.

 

[Hussar]

For those who wanted a DDI with 3e or earlier editions, how do you realistically think that WOTC could have done it? After all, between the OGL and OSRIC, any tools that they put online would be copied, for free, within days, and 100% legal. Heck, that Italian site, ((with the girl's name that I can't for the life of me remember right now)) produced a character builder for 4e that had virtually all the functionality of the DDI within a month of the DDI going online.

How long would it take for a free clone, a la The Hypertext SRD, to hit the 'net if they included 3e in the DDI?

How could WOTC possibly make money out of this? While I realize that the OGL is seen as a great thing, it just doesn't play very well with any sort of subscription model. You'd have a free suite of DDI tools within a month of release. There's a reason that Paizo hasn't tried to make any sort of DDI tools for Pathfinder. Their subscription material is nice and safe behind non-OGL walls.

Someone upthread considered 500k subs to be a success. Holy crap. How much material do you honestly think that gamers actually buy every month? A well selling 3e/3.5 book was making maybe 50k copies. At the outside. Yet, you expect 10 times that number to sub for 4e? That's your benchmark for success? Good grief, only the top tier MMO's hit that kind of number. 100k is a very solid 3rd tier MMO which makes sense given the size of the markets.

I really wonder at what people think is a reasonable goal.

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Edit - S'mon, my group is in the same boat as yours. In 3e, I was the only one with a Dragon sub (plus a one year sub to Dungeon) and a couple of players bought books (certainly not me). Now, 5 of the 6 at the table have DDI accounts and people still buy about the same amount of books. My group certainly spends more on 4e than it did on 3e.

 

[ExploderWizard]

If DDI had OD&D, 1E, 2E, and 3E support in the form of character builders, npc/monster builders, encounter builders, rules compendiums, and Virtual Table Top rules support (with import of character/monsters/npc's), and occasional articles/adventures in Dungeon & Dragon - do you really think that they wouldn't get a significant number of older edition players/DM's to subscribe?

An OD&D character builder? You think people would shell out money for a 3d6 die roller program?

The older systems are simple enough to prep and play with just note and graph paper, and thats what makes them so great.

There really isn't much of market for older edition player material. New adventures and fluff material for DMs perhaps but the OSR publishers are already doing that.

The market for old school DMs is so tiny that it isn't worth Hasbro's time to produce products for them. Removing the older edition pdfs wasn't such a good idea because of the loss of goodwill and the miniscule amount of effort required to keep them available. Beyond that there isn't much WOTC has to offer the players of older editions.

 

[Nifft]

My group got sick of the edition fighting, so they became open to playing things which were not D&D. This has been very good for me: I like trying new games.

Cheers, -- N

 

[El Mahdi]

An OD&D character builder? You think people would shell out money for a 3d6 die roller program?

No. I don't.

But an OD&D character builder with monster, npc, and encounter builder in combination with and fully importable to a VTT with OD&D rules support?

Yes.

Would there be as many takers as they might get for AD&D, 3E, and Pathfinder support?

Of course not.

But with as simple and easy as such applications would be (due to the simplicity of the system), the applications would also not be nearly as expensive to develop and implement as other edition support would be.

And the goodwill it would generate would be worth it's weight in gold pieces...

 

[Mark CMG]

Is the Split a Bad Thing?

It's the gaming army we've got.

 

[Reynard]

"The Split" is really the reason for 4e, not the other way around.

I don't buy the premise. Lots of people were unhappy with 3.5, sure, but there were lots of games out there for them, from True20 to Conan to non-d20 games. These other games didn't cause "splits." The split happened when 4E was announced -- or more specifically, when it became clear that 4E was going to be a different animal and that it was not going to be supported by 3rd parties the way 3.x was. Paizo stepped up with Pathfinder only because there was no OGL for 4E. Would some have stayed back or left D&D? Sure -- just like at every other edition change. But without the twin factors of an extreme shift in the "D&Dness" of D&D, and the fact of the OGL empowering Paizo, there would be no split.