When did I stop being WotC's target audience?

[The_Gneech]

I think the new edition has been a success, but I wonder if it could have been an even bigger success had it remained an everymans game, instead of setting it sights on part of its audience. But I suppose:

A. We'll never know.

B. It doesn't really matter anyways

I mean hey, what has happened has happened.

Well said.

-The Gneech

 

[Psion]

This is all just speculation, so let me say: No, I don't think so.

(...)

Anyway, RC and I have been part of the "broader existing audience" of 3.x. Where was 4E supposed to go if it wanted to keep us both? How would it have added pemerton?

Since I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of your, RCs, or (especially) pemerton's playstyles, I couldn't begin to guess.

But I can speak generally and say: build for modularity and playstyle inclusivity. The founding philosophies of "this is fun... anything else is not" that seem to inform 4e--and are so much as spelled out in the 4e DMG and dragon articles--to me betray an exclusivity in the design and (as put by Irda Ranger in another thread) monoculture at WotC's D&D design team.

So, yeah. I guess what I am saying is I agree to disagree. I don't propose that it's easy. Just that it can be done.

 

[Maggan]

I was here way back when 3 e first came out, and I just don't remember the vitriol or sheer divisiveness from 2e to 3e.

I remember the launch being very "divise" for some people. There are D&D fan sites where you are not allowed to even talk about D&D3e (or D&D4e, I guess), and amongst a group of gamers, WotC D&D was always derided as "not true D&D", instead passing that accolade to other games.

So at least at the sites I frequent(ed), I have a feeling that there was about the same amount of ... let's say disappointment, among groups of fans of the older editions.

/M

 

[The_Gneech]

Like I asked before, what about 4e impedes your role-playing (and, conversely, what was present in previous editions that aided it)?

I don't think anyone's arguing that 4E impedes roleplaying -- just that there is an underlying tone implying that roleplaying should be met with a held nose and a refrain of "Oh, if you must, but get it over with so we can get back to combat!"

Certainly as long as I can remember, in the larger RPG community, D&D was held up as "the bad example" as far as roleplaying is concerned. I particularly recall blinking two or three times at a passage in Call of Cthulhu, c. 1985-1986, which decried "that bane of intelligent roleplaying, the wandering monster," as it was a revelation to me at the time. The hoary old cliche of "why ROLL-play when you can ROLE-play" has been used by other games to differentiate themselves from D&D for decades.

However, previous editions of D&D, in an effort to bring as many people into the fold as possible, recognized this as an area that could use some development and started to include that crowd in its thinking. The 2nd Edition Campaign Guide is all about "the story," and how GMs can encourage players to get into the roleplaying aspect of the game by playing it up themselves.

3E, with the "back to the dungeon" mantra, wasn't quite as pro-"talky parts" as 2E by any stretch, but on the other hand by allowing much more flexibility in character creation, it was still much better at creating "just the character you want" instead of something "sorta in the right neighborhood." The fact that "just the character they wanted" for a lot of min-maxers may have been a dual-wielding dwarven cleric named "Bob the Stumpy" doesn't detract from the fact that it was easier for those of us who wanted "high-concept" characters to build them. (Early 3E-era Dragon magazines had a ton of articles on how to do this ... I remember looking at the Skald -- i.e., a bard/barbarian multiclass -- and thinking it was a brilliant idea.)

In other words, 3E wasn't built with the intent of being a role-player's paradise, but it still supported role-players in a way that 4E's "choose from column A or B" class system doesn't seem to.

That's how it strikes me, anyhow.

-The Gneech

 

[Fifth Element]

First, I stopped buying WoTC books years ago - when I realized I could find far more creative and imaginative stuff from 3rd party publishers. Nowadays, my whole campaign is based around 3rd party stuff - mostly Necromancer Games.

Secondly, with 4th edition, I feel like the designers, isolated in a box amongst themselves, decided amongst themselves that they alone knew what was best for the game, and changed so much stuff in it, that it (to me) hardly feels like D&D anymore.

I like how you jump from "3PP stuff is more imaginative" to saying that Mike Mearls, who started out with 3PP, doesn't know what's good for D&D.

I don't understand how you can claim the 4E designers are "in a box" any more than the 3E designers, or any set of designers before them. If anything, the fact that they can maintain an online presence (Mr. Mearls posts here at times, for instance) reduces the "in a box" likelihood.

To me these complaints seem to be more of "I personally don't like the changes made, so there must be something wrong with them." Maybe they just don't fit your tastes, but do fit the tastes of many others.

 

[GlaziusF]

Since the release of 4E, and most recently in some threads about the upcoming change in the D&D miniatures lines, I've read many times (not always in direct response to me) that "you aren't WotC's target audience, so they don't really care what you think."

From official WotC sources or from Internet people jumping to Internet conclusions? (which are like regular conclusions, only you know how you can see a web page from Russia in 0.5 seconds? Yeah, same distance compression.)

Really, anybody not actually a WotC marketer who talks about WotC's market or target audience or what have you is talking out of a more southern orifice than their mouth.

The odds are really, really astronomically high that TSR/WotC/Hasbro never considered you, personally, when making decisions about content and publishing, and they never will. You don't want to buy 4E because there's more things that make you want to not buy it than things that make you want to buy it, not because some marketing drone had a hate on for you and decided to take it out on the dev team.

So winkle those things, whatsoever they may be, out of your head with a big pin and stick them on the Internet for everybody to see. You don't have to run with some imagined block of slighted former enthusiasts to keep yourself safe.

I bought 4E because it just spit a bunch of cool things for players out to do without giant complex rule systems to describe how to construct them; put out explicit underpinnings for what (from skill checks to monsters) was considered challenging for characters of any level so I feel more confident in designing my own scenarios and monsters and not worrying about the numbers being trivial or impossible; and most importantly put everything I needed to know to completely run a monster in one small, portable, easy-to-parse block so I can cut down the amount of prep I have to do by an order of magnitude.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Anyway, RC and I have been part of the "broader existing audience" of 3.x. Where was 4E supposed to go if it wanted to keep us both? How would it have added pemerton?

As Psion puts it - modularity. They could allow variations of the core rules to be created that would allow for more "realistic" styles of play (without 1st level characters being able to teleport all over the place, for example). I think this would be a very easy thing to do with 4E, but the way the GSL is setup will prevent thsi from happening - it seems very intent on only allowing one over all game experience. I could do all the work myself, and I may actually end up doing that, but it would be neat if someone (WotC or soemone else) could produce that kind of product. I don't know if its possible to do it legally, however.

 

[Halivar]

In other words, 3E wasn't built with the intent of being a role-player's paradise, but it still supported role-players in a way that 4E's "choose from column A or B" class system doesn't seem to.

4E caters to the method actor, not the technical actor. That's why a whole chapter is devoted to "finding your character" before the chapters on choosing character mechanics. For my part, the 4E PHB goes leaps and bounds beyond 3.x in cultivating good roleplay. It simply does so without mechanical props.

 

[Cadfan]

As Psion puts it - modularity. They could allow variations of the core rules to be created that would allow for more "realistic" styles of play (without 1st level characters being able to teleport all over the place, for example). I think this would be a very easy thing to do with 4E, but the way the GSL is setup will prevent thsi from happening - it seems very intent on only allowing one over all game experience. I could do all the work myself, and I may actually end up doing that, but it would be neat if someone (WotC or soemone else) could produce that kind of product. I don't know if its possible to do it legally, however.

I don't think modularity would satisfy you, because it already exists, and it doesn't satisfy you.

Look at the example you give- first level characters "being able to teleport all over the place." At first level, if you want to teleport at all, you need to be either an Eladrin, a Fey Pact Warlock, or an Assault Swordmage. That means that if you don't use those three build options, ie, you discard the modules you do not like, you won't have first level characters teleporting all over the place. This is true of basically every high fantasy element in the game- they're sequestered very carefully by power source.

This sort of complaint smacks of the old "It bothers me that the option even exists" chestnut, which is of course antithetical to modularity.

I don't think anyone's arguing that 4E impedes roleplaying -- just that there is an underlying tone implying that roleplaying should be met with a held nose and a refrain of "Oh, if you must, but get it over with so we can get back to combat!"

And this is an excellent illustration of why the pro 4e and anti 4e camps will never get along. The antis see this as a reasonable opinion, while the pros see it as being a crank.

 

[billd91]

Anyway, RC and I have been part of the "broader existing audience" of 3.x. Where was 4E supposed to go if it wanted to keep us both? How would it have added pemerton?

I'm not really sure about either RC or pemerton's styles of play (though I think I've been on the same side as they in a number of board debates lately), but I would have been much happier with a 4e that was more backward compatible, particularly with the fluff peripheries.

In fact, I think the classes and power structure could be a pretty interesting subsystem for a more 3.5-like game. There are still things I have grave misgivings about like DCs rising with the level of the party and not the inherent difficulty of the task, but I think a D&D edition that kept more continuity with the past editions and more tools to support that sort of campaign would have been more welcome.

I imagine a MM with monsters designed for 4e but with an additional list of powers for the creature from previous editions, under the heading of "Lesser used powers" for DMs to build additional plot hooks around. Or a MM with a lot more mundane creatures for the lower-powered or more mundane campaign.

Then there comes the new cosmology. Personally, I don't mind it so much since I thought the Great Wheel was quite a hodge-podge. But then I didn't play a Planescape campaign. But since there are outer planes books dating back to 1st edition (and TWO for 3.x varieties) and lots of adventures, there was quite a bit of general continuity that was dropped off the map. Were Planescape my favorite campaign, I'd feel a bit like my branch of fandom was kicked to the curb.

The way I see it, mechanics have a little to do with the types of stories I want to play, but less than all of the other things going on around the actual mechanics. If I want to build an adventure involving a lot of natural creatures, I have to do a lot of wheel re-inventing or wait until 4e finally puts out a MM supporting druid characters, something I didn't have to do very much of in any previous edition of AD&D. Blood war stories? Not so much. Planescape? Nope. Any ongoing campaign focusing on these things, or on druids, barbarians, bards, or even the FR in the heyday of the 2e-3e timeline, faces barriers going to 4e, even if the players and DM like the combat mechanics.

And all of those changes from pre-3e periphery to 4e are completely optional changes, not inherently necessary because of any of the mechanics of 4e revealed to us so far. So WotC chose to tack away from some of the elements that have built D&D into the brand that it is today. I can't imagine they didn't know or at least assume that doing so would lose them some fans and customers, at least in the short term (they could always tack back with some future supplements). Realistically, with certain kinds of changes, you've probably only got customers to lose. Who's going to go to 4e specifically because of the cosmological changes? Probably nobody. They'll shift for the changes in mechanical gameplay. But will there be people, who might have otherwise been willing to shift editions, staying with a previous edition because the cosmology shifted? Probably.

So did WotC's target audience shift? Sure did. They shifted priority away from retaining long-time continuity players and that shifts the target audience.