D&D 5E Will there be such a game as D&D Next?

[AbdulAlhazred]

I have a feeling that for those just coming into DDN, 5E or whatever they call it, it will have it's own direction and feel - you'll be able to pick up the DDN books and put together a D&D game and it will play a certain way. HOWEVER, those who come from prior versions will also be able to take DDN and throw in a module here or there (either included in the base game or sold as an "add-on") to make it emulate the game they know and like.

So a newbie could just play the game "out of the box" - it's complete enough and with its own style that it can be played as a stand-alone. A 3E'er could pick up a DDN adventure or supplement and with some rules module or tweaks, use the material in his 3E game. A 4E'er could do the same as could someone playing 1E/2E or even BECMI. A DDN'er could possibly grab older edition material and work it into their game - the less muss, the better.

Now, is that going to work? I'm not really sure. 3E and 4E really throw a wrench in compatibility sometimes. They did have something like this working back in 2E with the Player's Option and Complete books; you could be playing 1E, 2E, OD&D or BECMI and use books between all the systems, and I do remember using the B & X series of modules in my AD&D games.

Yeah, at least in principle, new players might as well pick up DDN and why would they care how it relates to any previous editions. Is there REALLY any such thing as a whole group that picks up D&D from scratch in this day and age though? There are no doubt some, groups where someone played many years ago, etc. I'd think it is the exception nowadays.
[MENTION=98938]DeF[/MENTION]CON1 sure, nobody cares, but there is still network effects. If there are already 1000's of people playing say PF then chances are more people will be well-advised to join them, all other things being roughly equal (and if you are new to RPGs or just agnostic then surely PF or whatever is as good as something else).
[MENTION=336]D'karr[/MENTION] I dunno. I wonder sometimes how clever they really are. They CAN write well, they are obviously capable of putting out content with good technical quality. I'm kind of skeptical about their ability to make compelling content. PERSONALLY I think compelling content is their problem, not game systems. They're solving the wrong problem by making DDN. It is a classic grand strategic blunder, WotC's march to Moscow.

 

[D'karr]

I wonder sometimes how clever they really are. They CAN write well, they are obviously capable of putting out content with good technical quality. I'm kind of skeptical about their ability to make compelling content. PERSONALLY I think compelling content is their problem, not game systems. They're solving the wrong problem by making DDN. It is a classic grand strategic blunder, WotC's march to Moscow.

I don't necessarily agree with that. Heroes of the Feywild, Underdark, Open Grave, Plane above, Plane Below, Shadowfell, and Heroes of the Elemental Chaos all had content that I would call compelling. Heroes of the Feywild in particular has been great in my game for the amount of "nuggets" that it put forth. Dragon, and Dungeon magazine have been more hit and miss in that department, but no more than those magazines have always been. As for adventures, Gardmore Abbey, and the adventures that came with the Essentials products have been rather good.

So I have to disagree that they are unable to make compelling content. [MENTION=55363]Drammattex[/MENTION] (Steve Townshend) and Brian James, just to name a few, have shown that they can put out some compelling and rather interesting content.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't necessarily agree with that. Heroes of the Feywild, Underdark, Open Grave, Plane above, Plane Below, Shadowfell, and Heroes of the Elemental Chaos all had content that I would call compelling. Heroes of the Feywild in particular has been great in my game for the amount of "nuggets" that it put forth. Dragon, and Dungeon magazine have been more hit and miss in that department, but no more than those magazines have always been. As for adventures, Gardmore Abbey, and the adventures that came with the Essentials products have been rather good.

So I have to disagree that they are unable to make compelling content. @Drammattex (Steve Townshend) and Brian James, just to name a few, have shown that they can put out some compelling and rather interesting content.

I think they CAN, but they don't do it consistently. I mean lets look at what they put out during the 4e era:

3 campaign setting rehashes, nothing new at all (and in fact AFAIK WotC has only EVER done one actual new setting, Eberron). PoL we can count as 3/4 of another setting I guess? All of them were less extensive than previous treatments of the same settings. DS was probably the best in that sense. I'm not aware of anyone who thinks 4e's treatment of FR or Eberron are particularly compelling. Decent, but nothing special. DS at least was something from a good long time back, but even so the treatment seemed a bit light weight, though certainly welcome.

The adventures they released in the first 2 years of 4e consisted of what, 9 modules in an 'AP' that was frankly filled with mostly clunkers. There were some good individual bits here and there but the material was remarkably not compelling. The 3 adventures released for the 3 campaign settings contained 2 mediocre adventures and one that was a real stinker (the Dark Sun adventure, that thing really was a rotter). Beyond that they put out a delve book and Against the Giants, which was OK but again pretty uninspiring overall. FINALLY they did a couple decent adventures, but you can count them on one hand and aside from Gardmore Abbey none of them is all THAT special, just "good enough" or "moderately good". That's nothing to crow about.

I agree, the supplements were decent, but honestly they lacked the 'edge', generally, that say Paizo's PF supplements have. SOMETHING is missing. I can garner many useful pieces of material, and I think the 4e cosmology and mythos are craftsmanlike designs that suite an adventure RPG quite well. STILL, there's just not that much really compelling about the backstories and such. It feels too conservative and consensus built to me somehow. Its hard to explain, but I just don't think they create material that really blows people away. That's what they are being paid for. This is entertainment. If it doesn't make you say "wow" at some point, yeah, its forgettable and won't be compelling.

 

[Stormonu]

New and different can be hard to do; you are taking a chance of it catching on vs. old standbys that already have a proven track record. 2E is remembered for all the campaigns they put out, but for each one that was a success, there were 2-3 that were stinkers or just didn't catch on (Maztica? Jakandor? Council of Wyrms? Revised Dark Sun? Post-conjuction Ravenloft?)

TSR took a lot of flack even for some of its more successful lines - I remember the jeers against Planescape describing itself as being "edgy" and more like White Wolf offerings. Birthright's inscrutible names turned some players off in the circles I knew and others hated the campiness of Spelljammer.

 

[Drammattex]

Thanks, [MENTION=336]D'karr[/MENTION]!

I'm entering this discussion late, but here are a few thoughts on what I've skimmed.

As for whether WotC can create compelling content, I'm not in a fair position to judge.
I should also clarify that I'm a freelancer; I live in Chicago instead of Seattle; I work a 9-5 job where I'm paid to listen to people complain about things. So, while these are my D&D credits, I'm not actually "WotC."

One observation I've made while freelancing is this: I used think of WotC the way people talk about WotC on forums--like it's an entity with a personality who makes decisions. Same with Paizo. In my experience, it's nothing like that at all. I have no idea who or what WotC is. I worked with Mike (Mearls) and found a kindred spirit, a guy who loved D&D and had brilliant design ideas. I worked with James Wyatt and found another kindred spirit--an exceptionally creative, empathetic, down to earth guy with deep ideas. I worked with Rodney Thompson, a thoroughly literate gamer with a head for game mechanics and structure. I worked with Chris Perkins, a wildly creative man with an inexhaustible supply of inspiration. And those are just a handful of designers--not to mention editors, producers, past greats like Steve Schubert and Rich Baker and Rob Heinsoo and SRM (now Paizo) all the rest.

All those folks are very smart and immensely talented. I know the discussion concerns what WotC could/should have done better, or whether they can write compelling content. But what I'm saying is, it's not a "they." And the people involved actually do great stuff.

That's not to say that everything that's come out has been to my taste. I'm a different writer, so I write games according to what I value and what I think is important. Mostly, that all comes down to creating an immersive experience for a group of people in the most efficient manner possible. That's not what everyone loves about RPGs, but that's where my heart is. Anyway, it's all subjective.

As for me and 5e: I hope it's awesome. If it turns out that it's not to my taste, I've come to accept that I have 4 other editions of the game to play.
I've also come to accept that I love and hate all of them for different reasons.
I've also come to accept that the rules don't know as well as they think they know, and that if I want dwarves to be 56th level wizards in AD&D, I can change that and feel good about it.
I've also come to accept that I lose interest in EVERY edition of D&D after a time, and that's not the game's fault. That's me being a human being. However...
I've also come to accept that I regain interest in D&D, and even other versions of D&D after some time away. So there's not much at stake for me in the success or failure of the next edition (but I hope it's awesome).



-Steve

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

[MENTION=55363]Drammattex[/MENTION] I hear what you're saying. There just seems to be some edge missing somewhere at least part of the time. I don't know if it is something inherent in working for a bigger shop with relatively a lot of resources or exactly what it is. I think people sense it though. There's an inherent conservatism. I don't doubt for one minute that all the guys you mentioned are highly creative and super capable. I certainly am not one of the "look at those idiots" crowd. I just read what the designers are doing and saying over at Paizo, AND DO RIGHT OUT IN THE OPEN EVERY WEEK, and it is just clear that they're working under less constraints and they somehow get to think more about game stuff as game stuff somehow. I think that's EXACTLY what is at the heart of why WotC is getting whipped by Paizo. It isn't because "blah 4e blah", and putting out DDN won't just fix it, because it isn't about rules.

I bought all the 4e supplements D'Karr is talking about, and I LIKE 4e a lot, but again, CLEARLY there's something going on here, it isn't just some disgruntlement with how the rules work or how they're presented even. I think every one of those products is good and I own all of them IIRC, but yet none of them quite rose to the level of being great enough. Which product got an Ennie? Really! It wasn't Heroes of the Feywild, as nice a product as it is, and I thought it was great. Even that one didn't quite push things enough. All of it was really good, but it didn't pass from really good to 'blew me away'. That's what WotC has to do if they're going to survive in this business. At least now and again they have to really catch fire in a bottle. They have to be consistently better than the competition, and right now apparently they're not quite there.

 

[Drammattex]

I'll certainly agree that Paizo is incredibly, wonderfully open. I worked on Ultimate Campaign for Paizo and I was tremendously impressed with the way they took care of me insofar as giving me all the materials I could possibly want to complete my assignment, and paying me extra for the additional design I needed to do to complete the project. My experience working for them was marvelous (and by "them" I truly mean Stephen Radney-Macfarland).

Heroes of the Feywild lost the Best Supplement ENnie to Gurps Horror and Cthulhu by Gaslight. But Monster Vault Threats to the Nentir Vale and Madness at Gardmore Abbey won awards. Great year for stuff I worked on, at any rate.

I understand what you're saying though. I don't disagree, just hope for the best.

Personally, I couldn't tell you what direction is good for D&D right now, and I don't envy the person(s) who has to make that decision. I'm as nostalgic as anyone my age who grew up with the red box and AD&D.
But on the other hand... indie games.

 

[Iosue]

I think this exchange from the Future of D&D panel at last year's PAX East is relevant to the issues raised in this thread.

Question: The modularity thing brings me flashbacks to 2nd Edition, where the base fragmented considerably....and this was a terrible death blow to an already flailing TSR, and Dancey says the company identified that as a key problem, and we couldn't afford to fragment the base any further. .... And I fear, on the one hand, that modularity is just going back to the 2nd Edition mistake of constant fragmentation of the base.

Mearls: The important thing to remember about where TSR was, was that they pursued that strategy through their products. You'd have a Spelljammer book, which wouldn't have any relevance if you were playing in Greyhawk. What we're looking to do is pursue that more in the core rules*, so we can produce an adventure that if you're running a comedy game, well, you have the modifications made to your rules, you could just run this adventure, but you're using the rules to make cartoon physics and stuff. Or you're doing the real High Drama rules.

So you can imagine taking an adventure like Ravenloft, if the DM's like "Well, I just want a real combat focused game," it's very flexible, so you could just run Strahd as a combat monster, or you could run him as this tragic figure, so players are like, "Do we really want to kill this guy? He's had a rough life. It's society's fault that he's eating people!" And I think the mistake was taking that diversity and TSR trying to live that. And it's a noble thing, to say "Hey, let's do all these cool settings!" But I think what we'd rather do is put that in the DM's hands, and when we make a product or whatever we're working on, we can say, okay, this is a new expression of D&D, and we already know that DMs are a diverse lot. So it's better for us to think of that first, and then say okay, this can survive DM's cutting and pasting, changing it, and running it in their style, rather than saying, okay, we think there are 20 different types of DMs, let's have 20 different product lines.

Crawford: And this one of the downsides of using the word module, because in the old days in D&D a module was a product. Again, we're talking about an approach of modularity that will be on display in the core*. So "module" does not equate directly to "product". Our vision is that a single product will have multiple modules in it. Which just another of saying that a single product will have multiple options in it. So that's a key difference between our current strategy and TSR's strategy in the days of 2nd Edition.

*This was before they had solidified their concept of a Basic game (what Mearls means these days when he says "core") and a Standard game (what most people think of "core" and what I believe they are referring to when they say "core" in this panel.

 

[Bedrockgames]

@Drammattex I hear what you're saying. There just seems to be some edge missing somewhere at least part of the time. I don't know if it is something inherent in working for a bigger shop with relatively a lot of resources or exactly what it is. I think people sense it though. There's an inherent conservatism. I don't doubt for one minute that all the guys you mentioned are highly creative and super capable. I certainly am not one of the "look at those idiots" crowd. I just read what the designers are doing and saying over at Paizo, AND DO RIGHT OUT IN THE OPEN EVERY WEEK, and it is just clear that they're working under less constraints and they somehow get to think more about game stuff as game stuff somehow. I think that's EXACTLY what is at the heart of why WotC is getting whipped by Paizo. It isn't because "blah 4e blah", and putting out DDN won't just fix it, because it isn't about rules.

I bought all the 4e supplements D'Karr is talking about, and I LIKE 4e a lot, but again, CLEARLY there's something going on here, it isn't just some disgruntlement with how the rules work or how they're presented even. I think every one of those products is good and I own all of them IIRC, but yet none of them quite rose to the level of being great enough. Which product got an Ennie? Really! It wasn't Heroes of the Feywild, as nice a product as it is, and I thought it was great. Even that one didn't quite push things enough. All of it was really good, but it didn't pass from really good to 'blew me away'. That's what WotC has to do if they're going to survive in this business. At least now and again they have to really catch fire in a bottle. They have to be consistently better than the competition, and right now apparently they're not quite there.

My feeling is sometime shortly after 3E started, not right away, but at some point in the early-mid 2000s wotc really lost sight of how to deliver flavor (at least to a customer like myself). Increasingly, I felt they were focused on the game aspect and not really connected to the flavor material. I will give an example, if you contrast the TSR complete books with the wotc complete books, you see a much stronger emphasis on crunch in the latter. To the point that people often just bought them for the feats or prestige classes. Whereas with the complete books, the crunch was lart of a broader package. You bought them to find inspiration for your character or campaign. I think this is loosely in a shift of focus from GM to player. It makes sense because there are moreplayers than Gms, so why not tailor books to them. I think at some point they decided players really want crunch. The problem is you need inspired GMs to keep the game alive, and midway through 3E's run, I found myself just not being inspired by what they were putting out.

A key point is the release of Castle Ravenloft. They took what was arguably one of the greatest adventures ever and made a terrible module out of it. Tere was just no setting behind it. I remember reading it and thinking it felt like a video game. It was simply something I couldn't run. I was all about encounters and keeping players busy tracking objects down in the landscape (with a bunch of artifiical egg hunts that felt torn out of zelda) but it didnt feel like the writers believed in the setting.

 

[Drammattex]

[MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION], this was my feeling precisely. There are 2nd Edition books that (imo) have never been surpassed in the amount of practical information they held between their covers. The first Arms & Equipment Guide, for example. You got illustrations of virtually every item in the book; you got real world information about how these weapons handled, how they worked. The Castle Guide was another great one. It tells you how a castle is actually run, who works there and what they do, the various components of a castle, outlines the feudal system, etc. And the Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide is still one of my favorite books on DMing.

I feel (rightly or wrongly) that a large part of the reason that I had the opportunity to write for D&D at all was because D&D changed. Had it remained as it was in the early/mid 2000s, I'd never have had the opportunity. This month I'm working on a 13th Age Bestiary for Pelgrane. When I research a monster, the most useful info I find is in the 2e monster entries or Dragon Ecologies; Al-Qadim has been an invaluable resource this week.