WotC 4E D&D bloat (was Forked Thread: Pathfinder (PFRPG) bloat)

[JoeGKushner]

I know WoTC is producing a lot of books.

But to me, it seems way too slow. Where's the Oriental Adventurers? Where's the Psionicist Handbook? Where's the Weapons of Legacy or other rule set that showcases how items can grow with the players? Where's the revision/reimagination of classic adventurers (I know we've got one boxed set coming down the line but where's White Plume Mountain eh?). And I hope that they break from the Monster Manual at least long enough to do a Fiend Folio.

I don't like the whole three products per campaign setting idea either.

I know that the likelyhood of seeing books like OA are slim to none. The PHB concept seems to have taken that style of publishing's place.

I'm enjoying the new books as they come (Martial/Arcana power are thumbs up!) out and using the adventurers for inspiration/maps but man, I'd love to see some more print products for the Forgotten Realms if for nothing else than to steal some ideas and give the ole campaign I'm running in the old timeline some more 'prophecy' style events.

Hell, if they ever updated the crunch from Exemplpars of Evil and Elder Evils (along with the Eberon book), then at least we'd have more material to work with now that has a lot of fluff to it.

 

[Crothian]

I think people get wrapped up in the idea of what's core. Sure there are a few books out there but we sure don't need them all to play. Plus for those of us that do have them all the online compendium Wizards has it almost priceless for finding things and keeping organized.

 

[tyrlaan]

To be frank, arguing that WotC is "guilty" of bloat is like arguing that WotC is a business that wants to turn a profit. In other words, of course there is bloat.

If you want to make money over the long haul through an rpg, you can't expect a handful of books to do the job. You also can't expect "optional" material like campaign setting manuals and adventures to keep the money flowing either. Both are examples of niche products.

So you have to make products that are core to the game or you can at least convince people are core to the game. You need to instill a notion that people "need" it to play the game. You might have hooked a customer on the Eberron setting, but you can't guarantee you will get them to buy Dragonlance material. But toss a PHB3 at them, with all new CORE races and classes, and you probably have a sale.

This is all just a corporation at work and we shouldn't expect anything less. WotC isn't in the business of making RPGs just for the love of the game. If you're that put off by the fact that employees at WotC like to earn paychecks (to put a slight melodramatic spin on it), I recommend hunting down some free RPGs or building your own. I'm not saying we all should jump with glee when the PHB7 and Martial Power 16 hit shelves, but getting offended/angered/etc about it isn't all that helpful.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

Where's the Weapons of Legacy or other rule set that showcases how items can grow with the players?

That's in the PHB with the rituals to change magic items, at least in part.

 

[rounser]

This is all just a corporation at work and we shouldn't expect anything less. WotC isn't in the business of making RPGs just for the love of the game. If you're that put off by the fact that employees at WotC like to earn paychecks (to put a slight melodramatic spin on it), I recommend hunting down some free RPGs or building your own. I'm not saying we all should jump with glee when the PHB7 and Martial Power 16 hit shelves, but getting offended/angered/etc about it isn't all that helpful.

It's possible to strike an acceptable balance between making a buck and meeting the needs of your customers, though. It's valid for people to question whether the latter has been compromised too much for the former.

The company that acts in too obviously mercenary a fashion towards it's customers, to the extent that they notice unacceptable compromises in the product or service and are driven to find alternatives, probably deserves to fail.

There's also the issue of trusting a brand. Not all companies have to hustle their customers to make money, and it doesn't help brand loyalty if people notice that they are being exploited gratuitously.

 

[timbannock]

I'm not detecting much different between now and 3E's schedule, but I haven't actually sat down and looked at the numbers. I do find it somewhat amusing that in the course of a year WotC have gone from accusations of releasing an 'incomplete' game to accusations of 'bloat'.

Seriously. Can't you all just be happy?



If Monk and Bard are missing, everyone's mad. If there's more than 2 or 3 crunchy splats in a year, everyone's rolling their eyes.

I agree with the folks who've said things are more focused in 4e. As a DM, I avoid a LOT of stuff because the Compendium handles most of my needs. I just need monsters (in the Compendium), treasure to hand the players (in the Compendium), and the occasional adventure (in print). My players can pick up the PHB and only the splats that revolve around the Power Source they like most: Martial or Divine or whatever. Basically, each member of the group can buy into a "line" (or really, "sub-line") of core + splats, and nobody needs it all.

The collectors in the group can buy everything if they want, but generally, much more manageable. 3e's splats often tried to "cross-over" too much ("Complete Warrior is useful for all classes, but especially martial ones!"), and earlier editions never seemed all that well-planned for the long-term in terms of types of supplements and focus. 4e seems to have a pretty well-thought out business model.

Is it a good one? ::shrugs:: But it works for me.

 

[Cadfan]

I think "bloat" is starting to get misused, and this argument is starting to turn into a pure edition war. Bloat isn't just lots of books, its lots of books and some problem resulting from it.

With the third party publisher bloat that gets talked about the problem was one of inventory and quality control for retailers, coupled with a speculative bubble in which retailers stocked lots of third party products in anticipation of heavy third party product sales- an anticipation that turned out to be in error after time passed. This left retailers with unsellable stock, and a feeling that they didn't know enough to pick and choose which third party products to sell in the future.

When people talk about rules bloat at the end of 3e, they are generally referring either to the tendency of designers, adhering to the general policy of noncore books not assuming one another, writing overlapping material, or to the designers running out of good, popular ideas and starting to write more and more niche and experimental material. The latter of which is cool, in my opinion, but perhaps not saleable.

And when people talk about 2e bloat, they often refer to the huge number of campaign settings, and the fact that 2e was mostly selling campaign setting material instead of crunch. Campaign setting material only appeals to those who play in that particular campaign, meaning that the more campaigns you release, the more you split the market for setting material.

So... will 4e have bloat? I don't know. Maybe. Probably eventually.

Obviously the first kind of bloat doesn't seem to be happening. Third party publishers aren't swamping anyone with releases.

Some significant measures have been put into place to combat the second kind of bloat. The entire power system is, to a certain degree, an effort to control the stack-ability of powers. When a 3e designer writes a feat in a supplement to represent the martial arts skill of the [X] monastery in [Y] setting, he needs to recognize its compatibility or incompatability with feats written in the [Z] setting as well, plus feats written in Dragon. When the 4e designer does the same thing with a power, he probably doesn't need to do this because most powers are discrete events that can't be stacked with one another. There's still some stacking, and therefore some potential for combinatorial problems, notably in feats and in stances. But even stances are limited since they can't stack with one another, and feats are much less powerful than they used to be. So will this sort of bloat eventually occur? Probably some day. I predict that when it does it will arrive through multiclassing and dual classing, since even the most responsible designer will end up paying more attention to stacking issues within the class for which he's writing rather than within the game as a whole.

And the third kind of bloat? Products becoming progressively niche? This one's inevitable, someday. But soon? I'm not so sure. Five years from now it will still be possible to write new powers for core, popular classes like the Fighter, instead of needing to write a new fighter-like class to contain new ideas too big to be feats (see 3e Knight, etc).

As for campaign bloat, the reason this was a problem in 2e was because it was such a big part of 2e's sales strategy, and as a strategy its fundamentally flawed in the long term as you fracture your own consumer base. There's nothing inherently bad about having lots of settings as long as you can sell products in a sustainable manner. 4e seems to be more interested in 3e style sales of crunch than in 2e style sales of campaign settings. And the crunch is, in 3e style, setting independent. This hopefully makes books like Martial Power 9 or whatever appeal to people in all settings in a way that Forgotten Realms: Hobgoblin Sociology for Beginners may not.

So overall, will bloat occur? Some types of bloat, particularly the niche product type, are inevitable. Will bloat be driven by WotC instead of by 3rd party publishers? Of course, the sort of bloat that's inevitable can only come from WotC. Will it matter? Not necessarily, but maybe?

The real question is whether the new structure of the game and the new focus on long term, sustainable business (subscriptions, increasingly modular game, planned editions instead of waiting for crisis points like the 2e/3e changeover) will allow WotC to stretch out the non-bloat portion of a game's lifespan long enough to then switch to 5e without feeling rushed.

And of course that gets to an entirely new issue... the feeling that an edition change is "too early" is, in a certain sense, an argument that there wasn't enough bloat yet, that more bloat would have been appreciated, because then, seeing the damage caused by the bloat more clearly, the fan base would be more accepting of an edition change. I have no idea what to say about that.

 

[filthgrinder]

Well, I think one thing about WotC 4E "bloat" is that it's organized bloat. In 3E, you could have a player come and sit down at your table and all of a sudden their cleric casts something ridiculous that happens to be in some random Underdark source book. In 4E, you know his powers are going to be from a player's book, or Divine Power. He's not going to be pulling out a level 5 daily from the Dragonomicon II or something.

That being said, you also have an expectation of power as well. If he pulls out an at-will from a book (or the minis), you have an idea of how power it'll be. It'll probably do 1[W] + a buff or move effect. It's not going to be something completely ridiculous. Also, with the compendium and character builder, you can at least skim through everything ahead of time.

 

[an_idol_mind]

I think the term "bloat" as used here is one of those subjective terms that can't really be defined outside of personal preference.

1st edition was considered bloated when it had a dozen rulebooks.

2nd edition was arguably the most bloated of systems because not only did it have a ton of books out but supplements and adventures all assumed the use of non-core books - look at the number of times kits were references or spells from the Tome of Magic were referenced in adventures without any help for those who didn't own those books.

The appeal of 3rd edition to me was that the game was complete as I wanted to play it in just the core books. As a result, I never saw the game as bloated. However, many people, especially online, seem to assume the use of the vast number of supplements WotC released, leading to a glut of material that was shoehorned, often quite poorly, into the main game.

I don't see 4th edition as particularly bloated because the game was designed around a continuing stream of supplements. In 2nd and 3rd edition, the new supplements didn't meld with the game as well because they weren't thought out from the beginning - the core books were the game, and everything else was an artificial graft on top of that. 4th edition was designed with an eye toward future supplements, as was driven home when WotC flat out admitted that frost giants and other iconic creatures were being held until later Monster Manuals. As a result, the products being released now are more filling in holes rather than adding to a system that doesn't really need the addition. By the time WotC gets to the point where they do perceive the game to be overbloated with a glut of additional books, they'll probably be ready to kick off 5th edition.

 

[tyrlaan]

It's possible to strike an acceptable balance between making a buck and meeting the needs of your customers, though. It's valid for people to question whether the latter has been compromised too much for the former.

If someone has market research to demonstrate that what product WotC is publishing is not meeting the needs of their customers, then yes I'd agree. But until there's evidence to suggest this, I personally can't consider such arguments valid. In fact, I'd suggest that WotC is very much putting the needs of their customers behind their choice of product offerings because they would be foolish not to drive their business off market research.

The company that acts in too obviously mercenary a fashion towards it's customers, to the extent that they notice unacceptable compromises in the product or service and are driven to find alternatives, probably deserves to fail.

I agree with this. However, I think this is a different point of contention than "WotC puts out too many things." Unless you are suggesting the content put out for 4e thus far is demonstrating a decline in quality. To prevent tangenting, such a conversation is best served in a new thread.

There's also the issue of trusting a brand. Not all companies have to hustle their customers to make money, and it doesn't help brand loyalty if people notice that they are being exploited gratuitously.

Do you feel exploited gratuitously? WotC puts out a PHB2. Is that hustling the consumer? Telling people you NEED the PHB2 is just flat out marketing/advertising. The fact is you can play 4e with just the PHB1, MM1, and DMG1. Everything else a person buys is due to personal interest and good marketing on WotC's part.

WotC has realized that a new "core" book has a larger market penetration than a new book to support a campaign setting. This isn't shady business dealings, it's just putting your money where the money is.