You know what would end all of the arguing and fighting?

[Evenglare]

Wizards will have 5 editions of D&D soon. Why don't they just support them all? The biggest slap to the face for consumers is investing in all of these books then they switch to a new edition. I understand that they wont bust in your house and take your stuff and you can play all the old systems, but it sucks that the fans never get any official support anymore. It seems like they -want- to do that by releasing the old books , and when the virtual table was up it seemed to support the other systems. Why dont they just DO it with D&D insider?

I get the feeling that they simply can't commit to an edition before thinking of a new way of doing things. D&D essentials was supposed to be their evergreen system. It was going to be the entry point and retailers were supposed to always have them on the shelves. That didnt last very long at all. I personally think essentials was great. Hell, I think all the systems are great.

I dont think rebuying the same stuff in a slightly different format is great. If you remember when 4th edition came out they talked about how they were fixing the mistakes of 3rd edition and all of that, and it parallels this D&D next. I understand they WANT to unite the fanbase, but it's just not going to happen. You can't please everyone, you just cant. People will gripe about the new system and within 5 years or so they will be thinking of D&D 6th edition, or D&D forever, D&D infinity, or whatever they call it. It'll be the same story wanting to fix the problems of Next... then rinse and repeat.

Surely I can't be the only person that feels this way?

 

[SteveC]

Even though it may sound crazy, I agree with this assessment. I was just talking with someone about Ted Talks, (which if you haven't heard of, are awesome) and they pointed me to this one, about research in food that comes down to "researchers are looking for the perfect pepsi, and that's an incorrect premise. What they should be looking for is the perfect pepsis." The conventional wisdom is that it will split the market, but at least with food, that hasn't been true.

Take a look at the talk: here ...it's interesting stuff to think about anyway.

 

[Dannager]

They don't do it for any number of very good reasons. For instance: the prohibitive cost in both man-hours and publishing it would take to provide all editions of the game with a level of support that is even close to what we are accustomed to.

I don't understand why we see people put this idea out there time after time after time. Do you really think that a department as small as WotC's D&D team has the resources for something like this?

 

[DogBackward]

It's not about "splitting the market". It's about "there are only so many people working here, and we only have so much time and energy available". You can't just expect them to work slavishly night and day to support every edition that's ever been, since there simply isn't enough time for them to do so. It's far better to focus on making a game that is as adaptable as possible. They won't create a perfect edition, no, because that's impossible. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't keep trying to get as close to perfect as they can.

 

[Evenglare]

I'm not saying support all edition all the time . But what would be the harm of people writing into D&Di and submitting articles for other editions? Nothing, that's what. Also I certainly don't believe that the people there don't have house rules and other homebrew stuff for the old editions. There's no reason that they couldnt be put into D&Di .

Infact this is how D&Di works now is it not? People writing articles for 4th edition. The only man power it would take would be someone proof reading over it to see it's no completely absurd. It scares me that people can just blow off a compromise by saying "not enough funds" or something without trying to think of other alternatives.

 

[Badapple]

BECMI existed side by side with AD&D for years and years. It's entirely possible for WotC to support more than one edition.

Especially digitally. There have been a lot of misstarts, but eventually a lot of time and labor has resulted in the current Insider, and it would only take a minimal amount of maintenance to keep this recurring revenue stream going for the 4e crowd. Most of the 4e gamers I know (including myself) have more or less burned out of buying more books for the system, even though we all still love to play the game, but we still keep DDI accounts going. I'd love to see DDI expanded to include previous editions, even if it's primarily just having the monsters and rules and character classes online as references.

I don't really think it would be practical, cost effective to support previous editions with printed materials, but one very clever thing WotC did was to get (many) of the 4e customers hooked on the DDI to run the game. Now the business model can be: Release a new edition. Cash in on the huge sales of the core books. Let the splatbooks and campaign settings and adventures and rules modules provide some extra sales until they eventually start trickling away and the system gets bloated. Errata and rules bloat finally push 5e customers to stop buying new books and get online subscriptions... Then repeat with 6e.

And it really doesn't have to be such a sininster/cynical model... Occasionally contract writers can produce a module or some extra source material converted to an old edition that is uploaded and accessible to DDI customers. I see it as a workable business model that can keep more of their customers happy and playing their games of choice.

 

[stoloc]

To answer the thread title- Pie. I bet Pie would end all of the arguing cause everyone likes pie.

 

[Ahnehnois]

They'll sell some books as reprints and through pdfs, but they'd never sell enough to make their business work long term. There's also not a whole lot to do but reprint things that have already been written; there is a lot of material out there for all the existing editions. And most players already have what they need.

Most importantly, D&D is not a static thing. It does require revision and expansion. There are problems that pop up in the rules over time. There are things that need to be improved. Until 4e, the edition treadmill was, while hardly perfect, sufficiently successful to maintain the dominance of the D&D brand and improve the overall quality of the rules with each edition. But this last time, that didn't happen, and the D&D brand has cratered.

Two problems. One, D&D players are typically intelligent and opinionated and diverse and it is difficult to please all of them. That one's been around forever.

Two, WotC just isn't good enough. Most of whatever talent and vision exists in the industry worked for WotC at some point, but has been fired/laid off and has moved on to work for any number of smaller but better companies. The business and creative people at WotC clearly don't work together well. Through some combination of unforseeable misfortune and forseeable incompetence, their tech staff has utterly failed. D&D is not profitable enough for them to spend the money they need to to hire staff and make a better game. Things are not looking good for this company.

Is releasing another edition going to turn things around? Probably not. But it's their best, last option. The all edition approach won't fix anything.

 

[Scylla]

I agree with the OP, to a point anyway.

Wizards is never going to get everyone under one umbrella. That ship has sailed. Many 3.5e fans have embraced Pathfinder and Paizo, never to return. Some grognards cling to their old books. Many 4e fans won't accept any new edition unless it is basically 4.5e, because they like what they're playing now.

Yes, manpower and advertising dollars must be split, but it can be done. I once worked in a publishing house where a staff of 18 people supported over 70 academic journals of wildly varying styles, successfully, so with a professional editorial staff it can be done. A lot of 3rd-party RPG companies are basically 1 or 2-person shops supported by freelancers and yet they can release a lot of product, so Wizards needs to be smart about staff usage.

For months I've suggested a three-fold approach:
1. supporting an old-style "2.5e feel" D&D (for the 1e, 2e, and retroclone folks),
2. supporting a 4.5e (to keep the 4e fans happy),
3. and creating a truly new edition for those that crave something brandy new.

I would abandon the pre-1e editions (too small a market share). And I would also give up on 3.5e (Paizo has largely seized that market), except for occasional adventure support (which could be handled by freelance authors and a single editor).

By doing this 3-fold plan, you retain your 4e base, lure back a good number of grognards, sell adventures to the 3.5e folks, and also attract those new to D&D or those that haven't fully embraced the newer editions. It makes more sense than an ice cream shop hoping everyone enjoys the same flavor.

 

[Transformer]

I'm kind of shocked so many people seem to think this is a real possibility. Wizards might as well just light their money on fire or dump it into a giant pool and swim in it like Scrooge McDuck as try to simultaneously churn out quality new materials for six or more different systems at once.

Only a small subset of the (already tiny) tabletop RPG market is interested in retro fantasy RPGs. Of those, only a very few scattered groups actually play editions from the TSR era, as opposed to retroclones or homebrew systems. Of those few scattered groups, many wouldn't even be interested in buying new materials from Wizards; they either like to homebrew everything or they've already got all they need from stuff they bought years ago/stuff they bought or pirated in PDF form. And of the remaining people--maybe, what, a dozen groups in the whole United States, at most?--only a small portion might have an interest in this or that particular new splatbook or adventure.

Even if we're talking about Wizards releasing a different version of the same basic product (with the same fluff) for every edition, it would be comically frivolous of them to take the time to separately design and playtest all the crunch for OD&D, Basic, 1st ed. AD&D, and 2nd ed. AD&D. It's a self-evidently ridiculous business plan.

It gets slightly more plausible if we're talking about simultaneously supporting only 3rd and 4th edition, but even there, most of the 3rd edition players who regularly buy new products have moved on to Pathfinder. It's almost certainly the case that Wizards would get a better return on investment from just continuing to support 4th edition, and evidently that path was already deemed not lucrative enough.

No, it seems perfectly obvious to me that the best they can do in the way of supporting older editions is sell high-quality PDFs of lots of pre-existing older edition materials. Get together a nice, high quality site with an excellent search function, get really good quality PDFs of all the old stuff, and sell them cheap. Have sales sometimes to highlight certain parts of the catalog. Luckily, it looks from the GenCon presentation that Wizards is going to at least do something similar to this.

I'm not saying support all edition all the time . But what would be the harm of people writing into D&Di and submitting articles for other editions? Nothing, that's what. Also I certainly don't believe that the people there don't have house rules and other homebrew stuff for the old editions. There's no reason that they couldnt be put into D&Di .

Infact this is how D&Di works now is it not? People writing articles for 4th edition. The only man power it would take would be someone proof reading over it to see it's no completely absurd. It scares me that people can just blow off a compromise by saying "not enough funds" or something without trying to think of other alternatives.

I'd say there are a couple of massive problems with this plan:

1. Will there ever be enough, say, 2nd edition support in DDI to actually convince a few of the people running 2nd edition campaigns to subscribe, when all of the actual tools only work for 4th edition, and those people have plenty of great products sitting on their shelves already? I doubt it. You could say "make the tools work for every edition," but then you're back to the original problem: it would cost several orders of magnitude more money than it would bring it to make every DDI tool work with every edition.

2. Correct me if I'm not understanding you, but are you suggesting that Wizards publish submitted fan-created material, and then make money off of that material by charging for DDI, and not pay the actual author a dime? I could be wrong, but wouldn't that generate a ton of ill-will and negative feedback, along the lines of "Wizards doesn't even have professional designers make half their stuff anymore, it's just random people, and they don't even pay those people for their creative work, just like slimy companies who try to get artists or musicians to do valuable work for free just for the exposure."