What would WotC need to do to win back the disenchanted?

[Dannyalcatraz]

It can even work for RPGs: Call of Cthulhu has been pretty much the same for about 30 years and is still quite popular.

And HERO's main changes have been tweeks- the bones of the system are essentially unchanged since 1981.

I think the same may even be said of GURPS.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Well, not to turn this too much into my problems...
[sblock]

Instead of having a random table, I had the Monster Builder or Compendium open on my laptop, and I'd quickly search & copy the relevant stats for that encounter - or item. (Need a 17th level item... hmm, that looks good!)

Yeah, I prefer not spending time thinking about it, considering the items, weighing options. Closest I get now is with the DDI, searching various keywords to my adventure to get things at least kind of thematically related. Even that's kludged, though, because I miss the level. And it takes a LOT of time to page through those 17th level items at the table. I'd rather just have some table spit me out something.

I wouldn't be creating statblocks on the fly, that was for certain. (I wouldn't in 3E, either!) Instead, I took advantage of the library of blocks that was available to me, reskinning them as necessary.

Here's where 4e's "lots of monsters in an encounter" works against it, for me. In 3e, I could have a vague idea of an adversary or two, and throw them at the party, and see what happens. In 4e, if a combat breaks out (and it's D&D, so combat breaks out frequently), I need 5 different types of monsters spread across 4 levels and 3 group types, along with interesting terrain. I also need to pay attention to the party makeup: a party without a controller might get decimated by minions, and a party without a striker turns soldier-types into a slog.

That's a lot of complexity that I just don't have time to consider the ramifications of when the party decides it wants to fight the goblins.

And if the party decides it wants to have a philosophical debate with the goblins instead, I'm even more adrift in the grey, samey, Skill Challenge zone.
[/sblock]
Buuuuuuuuuuuuut, as a current D&D customer, I'm not officially amongst the disenchanted. I'm enchanted enough (weirdly enough, it comes down to 4e's approach to buffing that wins me over -- lazy DM says fiddly cascading +1's are more effort than they're worth). I do more work to prep for my game now than I used to though, and I think that kind of sucks. I get the sense that most DMs don't share my suffering here, though.

 

[MerricB]

I disagree. There's a large number of classic boardgames that have remained popular for decades: Monopoly, Risk, Clue, Scrabble, Stratego, etc. Then there's the true classics which have been around for centuries: Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, etc. A classic game can be static and still remain popular. It can even work for RPGs: Call of Cthulhu has been pretty much the same for about 30 years and is still quite popular.

It's very interesting to look at the circumstances of each of those games and analyse why they are still popular. Do I consider each to have an exceptional circumstance? I certainly do. Most games do not survive so long.

This is not a large number of games. It is a very small number comparative to how many have been designed.

In RPGs, there are games that have managed to survive over 30 years without changing their mechanics much. However, you've got to ask yourself this: do they even approach the sales of D&D? I cannot think of one that does. They sell to a very small market; enough to survive and make a profit, but not to be a game on the level of D&D.

Call of Cthulhu is an interesting case. In fact, I shall be running a session of it on Friday when my regular D&D 4E campaign takes a break. This is a game which has one good and important mechanic (Sanity) and then the rest of it comes from the theme and play of the game.

Meanwhile, all of these games have pressure from the greater world outside. D&D is particularly vulnerable to the rise of fantasy computer games such as World of Warcraft. D&D's magic was designed with an eye towards that of Jack Vance, but how does this relate to a world in which the young adult whose introduction to fantasy was Harry Potter, where the characters cast spell after spell after spell?

D&D is special in that it has a uniqueness to itself (D&Dness), but it draws upon the fantastic imagination of the world at large. If something becomes an important part of the concept of fantasy in the world, then D&D will likely incorporate it into itself. Compare meanwhile to Call of Cthulhu, which has a much more restrictive body of work to draw upon.

(One wonders at how Vampire is faring these days: a game that seemed to draw heavily on Anne Rice now dealing with vampire tales like Twilight? Will Vampire be the game that those who read Twilight and like RPGs go to, or will something else develop for them?)

Game systems can exist for years without change, but to be successful through that time and beyond? That is exceptional.

I will note in closing that there has never, ever been a time when D&D was not changing. From its original release in 1974 through to the present day, the game has always had the addition of new material and the revision of the old.

Cheers!

 

[Hussar]

KM - I can totally understand that. I've never been a "seat of my pants" DM, so, for me, it's a major win. As MerricB rightly says, it's all a trade off. I can have a system that's incredibly easy to stat out - like 1e D&D. But, I lose a great deal of mechanical complexity in the process.

I'm not willing to do that honestly. Losing that much mechanical complexity does not seem a fair trade-off to me. I want more complexity. Now, you can go too far - which is where 3e kinda lost me. I haven't written a 3e adventure from scratch in years, despite playing weekly or even twice weekly. I played 3e with modules almost exclusively.

Doing this 4e adventure has been a major blast. But a totally different approach from what I did before. This time, I started with the math, kinda divided things out and then designed the adventure around the encounters. Pretty much backwards to what I did before.

I can totally see why that would turn some people off.

 

[pemerton]

Why?

People get attached to brands all the friggin' time. We are a consumer culture. We identify ourselves with our purchases.

<snip>

For a lot of D&D players, the friendships and experiences playing the game were some of the best experiences of those rocky (especially rocky for a lot of D&D players, who are usually amongst the more nerdy kids) years.

This makes some sense. I guess I still find it a bit surprising that the "outsiders"/nerds who are into D&D are just like the insiders in their approach to self-identity, except they've substituted the D&D brand for whatever it is that the cool kids are interested in.

KM is right on the money, but it's not just about brand. It's also been about availability.

This makes a lot of sense, including the stuff I snipped about the impact of edition changes.

My RM group was formed while I was at a big university in a city of 3 million people, and I never had trouble finding players. I can imagine things might be a bit different in a modestly sized town or small city. The brand becomes a place-holder for the whole activity.

 

[pemerton]

4e assumes I want to prepare something for the party to go through. My native style is just to have a vague idea of possibilities and fill in the details during play. 4e doesn't like that, because it doesn't know what slots to put things in unless I tell it.

I have had exactly the same experience - I do a lot more GM prep than I used to.

Although RM has a reputation for being crunch-heavy, it can be played very prep-light, because there are big books of monsters with even shorter stat blocks than 4e monsters, and there are good pre-prepared tables for NPCs. And the tactics of combat and spell casting are to do with allocating skill bonuses to attack, defence, and so on, and rationing power points. These are decisions made in the course of play - they don't require advance planning. (RM can be very prep-heavy in one respect, namely, deciding what ruleset to use, given the various versions out there and the huge range of options that have been published by ICE and developed by fans. But that's a bit different from session/adventure prep.)

For me, the extra prep for 4e is not so much NPCs/monsters (I mostly just use monsters from the books, and I can adjudicate an interaction skill challenge on the fly), but maps. We never used encounter maps in RM - if a picture was needed, I would just draw up a sketch of the combat location - but they are pretty central to the tactical element of 4e play.

 

[pemerton]

There's a large number of classic boardgames that have remained popular for decades: Monopoly, Risk, Clue, Scrabble, Stratego, etc. Then there's the true classics which have been around for centuries: Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, etc. A classic game can be static and still remain popular. It can even work for RPGs: Call of Cthulhu has been pretty much the same for about 30 years and is still quite popular.

Adding to what others have said - the boardgames (i) make a lot of repeat sales as kids grow up, pieces are lost, boards are damaged, grandparents need to find gifts for grandkids, etc, and (ii) do not need to earn any more money than is necessary to make a return on milling pieces and printing boards.

D&D, on the other hand, makes fewer repeat sales - books don't get lost or broken at the same rate - and is trying to support a full-time stable of writers, plus pay for the work of the many associated freelancers. (In that sense it strikes me as a curious business model - it's a game which only needs to be bought once to play, but it's trying to make money like a publishing house constantly selling new books to readers who have finished with the old ones.)

It's true that Cthulhu hasn't changed much. But the flip side of that is that it's a small game with comparatively little published support. Sales of Cthulhu aren't keeping a big writing team afloat.

And HERO's main changes have been tweeks- the bones of the system are essentially unchanged since 1981.

I think the same may even be said of GURPS.

And Rolemaster - the move to RMSS in the early/mid-90s was not as big a change as that between AD&D and 3E. On the other hand, ICE is no longer an example of a flourishing RPG publisher.

 

[pemerton]

Gripping tactical battles is not an outcome.

Well, it is an outcome in the sense I intended it. I know it can be a desired outcome of play to enjoy gripping tactical battles, because I have that desire for that outcome.

I can tell you one fantasy RPG that does not produce gripping tactical battles, at least in my experience: Runequest. Very few tactical choices have to be made by a player either in character build or play, and the resolution of combat turns purely on the dice rolls. Runequest has a lot going for it as a system, but gripping tactics is not one of those things.

The fact that I can describe an RPG that doesn't deliver the desired outcome reinforces my conviction that it is an outcome of play that it makes sense to desire.

The outcome in this case would be to win or lose that gripping tactical battle.

Well, that's also an outcome. But as GM I don't particularly care whether the PCs win or lose - I just want gripping tactics! And, conversely, Runequest will also deliver wins or losses in battle, but it won't deliver gripping tactics.

Winning and losing battles is not the outcome that I'm interested in. It's the fact that the battles involve gripping tactics that I care about, and that (for my group) 4e delivers on (as does RM, but in a different way - and at the moment at least 4e is more satisfying for my group).

If those mechanics facilitate a path toward a destination known from the start then you don't really have a game.

This just isn't true. The mechanics of chess facilitate a path towards a destination know from the start - namely, resignation by one player (or checkmate in some cases) because the position is one in which his/her king cannot be defended from the other player's attack. It's still a game.

Cthulhu-based roleplaying games facilitate a path towards a destination known from the start, namely, revelations of cult activity that lead to confrontations between bookish investigators and strange creatures that threaten to overwhelm those investigators both physically and psychically. It's still a game.

Hard choices come when the actual outcome of the game is riding on them.

Well, I talked about a game in which the desired outcome is "finding out what it means to be a fantasy hero". Such a game of necessity will involve hard choices - if no hard choices are put in front of a player, s/he is hardly going to find out what heroism means! But those hard choices won't be ones that threaten the desired outcome - they will ensure that it is achieved. For example (a choice that has already come up in my 4e campaign), Do heroes make deals with slave traders to buy back their slaves, or do they rescue those slaves by beating up on the slave traders? My players went for the first option. Other players might very well feel that dealing with slave traders is never justified, even if it's the most convenient way of freeing the slaves in question. That's a hard choice (not hard like "Should I have kids or not?", but hard enough for a fairly low key recreational pursuit). The gameplay turns upon that choice. Ingame outcomes ride on it (eg do the slavers live to continue their evil trade, or not?). But the occurence of that choice does not put the overall goal, of finding out what it means to be a fantasy hero, into question. It makes realising that goal possible.

And what I've just described manifestly involves playing a game - it's a pretty bog-standard instance of playing an RPG.

 

[The Little Raven]

Forgotten Realms (which actually had different character creation rules in 3e from the Greyhawk/default setting)

3e - Region (area you're from).

4e - Background (are you're from). Multi-Class Only Class - Spellscarred. New Class - Swordmage.

Eberron

3e - Dragonmarks. New Class - Artificer.

4e - Dragonmarks. New Class - Artificer.

Ravenloft

Not an actual setting in 4e. Merely the inspiration for the Domains of Dread concept in 4e. Note that none of the Domains of Dread presented are from Ravenloft.

Personally for me the problem is that they have chosen not to differentiate any of the settings listed above through unique rules to enhance their flavor. However it seems they may have gotten a clue with Dark Sun... though I'm not sure if I have enough faith in WotC to even buy it to see.

So, "Region" is a unique rule to enhance the flavor of the Realms in 3e, but it's 4e brother-by-another-mother "Background" doesn't count. And a multi-class only class (which exists in no other setting so far) doesn't count either or an entirely new class doesn't count? The same Dragonmarks and Artificer class available in both editions of the game means that 3e has unique rules for the setting, but 4e doesn't?

 

[The Little Raven]

Then there's the true classics which have been around for centuries: Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, etc.

And took centuries to reach the current forms we know. They weren't the static games they are now.