Dungeoneer
First Post
All this talk of the Essentials line being a '4.5' of 4E has been pretty baffling to me, although probably not as baffling as it is to the good folks at WotC who can't quite figure out how announcing a couple of new books caused people to think the sky was falling. Since they've been releasing close to twenty 4e books per year since 2008 they might be excused for wondering why people are freaking out over a few more. What is it about the "Essentials" line that has turned fans into conspiracy theorists?
But of course, many fans have been cynically predicting a 4.5e ever since 4e was released. And no wonder - they still remember being burned by the 3.5 fiasco, even if it was nigh on ten years ago. Forcing your customers to repurchase all the core books within two years of the release of the originals is a pretty serious party foul. You'll get no argument from me there.
So cynics, I understand your cynicism.
But it's also blinding you to the fact that 4e is not 3e, and not just because it nerfed wizards. Not only is 4e completely different from 3e and 3.5, it's different from 2e and 1e and all the other D&D games that have come before it.
How? Well, the biggest change to 4e is something that you can't understand by reading the PHB or the DMG cover to cover. It's an innovation that wasn't obvious at 4e's release and is only now becoming clear: 4e is the edition that is always getting better.
A shortcoming of tabletop RPGs from the 70's, the 80's and the 90's is that they were static. The designers went into a dark room and pounded furiously on a typewriter for a few months. They poured feverishly over their manuscripts, scrutinizing the rules until every i had a dot and every t had a cross. Then they printed and bound their flawless creation and released it to the waiting public.
Who promptly tore it to pieces.
No game can stand up to the scrutiny of a million ravenous fans. All too quickly they will find the inevitable misprints, flaws, and game-breaking design problems that all the editing and testing in the world won't catch. But since the rules are written in stone, or at least inked on a billion cheaply printed pages, you can't call them back and change them. Your only choice is to eventually come out with a new edition of your game (or risk a '.5', I suppose).
But imagine if designers weren't bound by these restrictions and that the release of the game didn't mean the end of its design process. Suppose they could respond to feedback and criticism from the fans and constantly fine tune the game to improve it.
Well, it turns out that you actually can do this. And 4e puts theory into practice. You just need two things to pull it off: the internet, and exception-based design.
I don't know if you guys have heard of this internet thing, but it's actually pretty cool. Basically it means that all people everywhere have free or very cheap access to a very robust publishing medium. So if game designers want to update the rules of their printed game they can just put a copy of the updates out on the 'world wide web' where people can 'download' it and incorporate it into their games at no extra cost.
Silliness aside, someone might fairly respond that they don't have time to download and print out thousands of lines of errata and cut and paste them into their books.
That's where the other piece of the puzzle fits in: exception-based design. 4e was designed from the get-go to have basic rules which apply across the board and which (hopefully) don't really need to change. Everything else is just an exception to the rules. It's all pretty optional. So you don't have to incorporate any of the changes, and you'll still be fine, and have very little problem even playing with people who DO.
In a nutshell, as long as the designers of 4e don't get too crazy with their tweaking, experimenting and adjusting, they can play around with the rules of the game quite a bit without rendering it incompatible with itself. Those who enjoy this kind of thing can keep up to date via the intertubes. Those who just want to stick to their books and dice, thank-you-very-much, won't be left out in the cold. Nobody has to go out and buy a PHB 4.5.
Truth to tell, releasing a real, honest-to-god 4.5e would be a terrible business proposition. If customers start expecting that every edition of the game will have a revised version two years in, then when they release the 5E PHB, no one will buy it because they'll all be waiting for version 5.5.
Even worse, people seem to be kind of over buying books generally. As the economy tanks and Amazon.com and the iPad are on the rise traditional publishers are scrambling to figure out how you sell books in a world where physical books may soon become obsolete, or at least a niche market. If I can download your book for free, why should I shell out big bucks for a clunky hard-copy? Oh, and even if I am willing to pay to download your book, why should I pay as much as I would for a hardcover?
These are major issues that the entire publishing industry is wrestling with. If you haven't read this spectacularly entertaining account in The New Yorker about the tug-of-war going on between traditional publishers, Steve Jobs, Google and Amazon.com, you really ought to.
But generally the point is that this is a time when there are a lot of question marks about the future of the publishing industry, and Wizards of the Coast has to take this as seriously as anybody. They are, at the end of the day, a publisher.
The obvious response is to give the customer value beyond simply selling books. In fact, selling books may just get less profitable, so finding a business model where you can sell something else is a good idea. Thus was born DDI and all that goes along with it. Selling players online updates to their game makes a ton of sense in the new media landscape. But attempting to sell players a '4.5', i.e. books that they just bought two years ago, doesn't make any sense.
Wizards of the Coast is not going to make a 4.5. And it's not because they've cleaned up their act or sworn off profit or just become kinder, gentler people. It's because 4.5 wouldn't work, and they don't need it anyway.
I think that that is what people don't get: the ideas behind 3.5 - update the rules and sell people more books to boot - either don't apply anymore or would simply be bad business.
These are the new ideas: create a game that can be expanded almost indefinitely without changing the underlying framework; update the rules in real-time as though you were patching software; and charge customers a small fee to download new features and enhancements via DDI.
Oh, and keep selling books while you're at it, for however long that lasts.
"Great," you say, "but what do I get out of it?" Well, you get a game that is constantly being fine tuned so that it plays better and serves players needs. And you get a game where the designers are constantly innovating and adding new features, and not just in a "Here's yet another elven sub-race" kinda way. Best of all, the company has made the errata free and the online subscription cheap, so this is all easy to take advantage of.
Or not, which is also a viable option.
When I see yet another thread started about whether such-and-such constitutes "4.5," I wonder if people understand how the internet works. Yes of course 4e is changing. But complaining that 4e changes is like complaining that your OS gets patches: they help you out, they're free and you can turn them off if you like. Where is the issue?
Essentials, as far as I can tell, represents more of the same kind of willingness to experiment and play around in the existing framework of the rules that we've seen really since at least PHB2. The errata that goes with it is giving people not just minor fixes but actually some cool new options. And whenever the DDI update goes live I'll plop down my $10 to update my subscription and get the new builds and other stuff.
I think the fact that people are paranoid about this stuff is a legacy of the 3.5 debacle. But hey, guess what, x.5 is sooooo early 2000s. 4e is its own beast: a living ruleset, constantly being expanded and improved.
I've seen it claimed that 4e removes the need for a 5e. I wouldn't go that far. There are limits to how far the rules will stretch. Change something fundamental and you change the game. The spell system can't be changed back to Vancian casting, or to use mana points. You can't upset the economy of actions, or fundamentally change the movement rules. But there are tons of things you can tweak without breaking the game. So who needs a 4.5 edition?
4.5 is dead, long live 4e.
But of course, many fans have been cynically predicting a 4.5e ever since 4e was released. And no wonder - they still remember being burned by the 3.5 fiasco, even if it was nigh on ten years ago. Forcing your customers to repurchase all the core books within two years of the release of the originals is a pretty serious party foul. You'll get no argument from me there.
So cynics, I understand your cynicism.
But it's also blinding you to the fact that 4e is not 3e, and not just because it nerfed wizards. Not only is 4e completely different from 3e and 3.5, it's different from 2e and 1e and all the other D&D games that have come before it.
How? Well, the biggest change to 4e is something that you can't understand by reading the PHB or the DMG cover to cover. It's an innovation that wasn't obvious at 4e's release and is only now becoming clear: 4e is the edition that is always getting better.
A shortcoming of tabletop RPGs from the 70's, the 80's and the 90's is that they were static. The designers went into a dark room and pounded furiously on a typewriter for a few months. They poured feverishly over their manuscripts, scrutinizing the rules until every i had a dot and every t had a cross. Then they printed and bound their flawless creation and released it to the waiting public.
Who promptly tore it to pieces.
No game can stand up to the scrutiny of a million ravenous fans. All too quickly they will find the inevitable misprints, flaws, and game-breaking design problems that all the editing and testing in the world won't catch. But since the rules are written in stone, or at least inked on a billion cheaply printed pages, you can't call them back and change them. Your only choice is to eventually come out with a new edition of your game (or risk a '.5', I suppose).
But imagine if designers weren't bound by these restrictions and that the release of the game didn't mean the end of its design process. Suppose they could respond to feedback and criticism from the fans and constantly fine tune the game to improve it.
Well, it turns out that you actually can do this. And 4e puts theory into practice. You just need two things to pull it off: the internet, and exception-based design.
I don't know if you guys have heard of this internet thing, but it's actually pretty cool. Basically it means that all people everywhere have free or very cheap access to a very robust publishing medium. So if game designers want to update the rules of their printed game they can just put a copy of the updates out on the 'world wide web' where people can 'download' it and incorporate it into their games at no extra cost.
Silliness aside, someone might fairly respond that they don't have time to download and print out thousands of lines of errata and cut and paste them into their books.
That's where the other piece of the puzzle fits in: exception-based design. 4e was designed from the get-go to have basic rules which apply across the board and which (hopefully) don't really need to change. Everything else is just an exception to the rules. It's all pretty optional. So you don't have to incorporate any of the changes, and you'll still be fine, and have very little problem even playing with people who DO.
In a nutshell, as long as the designers of 4e don't get too crazy with their tweaking, experimenting and adjusting, they can play around with the rules of the game quite a bit without rendering it incompatible with itself. Those who enjoy this kind of thing can keep up to date via the intertubes. Those who just want to stick to their books and dice, thank-you-very-much, won't be left out in the cold. Nobody has to go out and buy a PHB 4.5.
Truth to tell, releasing a real, honest-to-god 4.5e would be a terrible business proposition. If customers start expecting that every edition of the game will have a revised version two years in, then when they release the 5E PHB, no one will buy it because they'll all be waiting for version 5.5.
Even worse, people seem to be kind of over buying books generally. As the economy tanks and Amazon.com and the iPad are on the rise traditional publishers are scrambling to figure out how you sell books in a world where physical books may soon become obsolete, or at least a niche market. If I can download your book for free, why should I shell out big bucks for a clunky hard-copy? Oh, and even if I am willing to pay to download your book, why should I pay as much as I would for a hardcover?
These are major issues that the entire publishing industry is wrestling with. If you haven't read this spectacularly entertaining account in The New Yorker about the tug-of-war going on between traditional publishers, Steve Jobs, Google and Amazon.com, you really ought to.
But generally the point is that this is a time when there are a lot of question marks about the future of the publishing industry, and Wizards of the Coast has to take this as seriously as anybody. They are, at the end of the day, a publisher.
The obvious response is to give the customer value beyond simply selling books. In fact, selling books may just get less profitable, so finding a business model where you can sell something else is a good idea. Thus was born DDI and all that goes along with it. Selling players online updates to their game makes a ton of sense in the new media landscape. But attempting to sell players a '4.5', i.e. books that they just bought two years ago, doesn't make any sense.
Wizards of the Coast is not going to make a 4.5. And it's not because they've cleaned up their act or sworn off profit or just become kinder, gentler people. It's because 4.5 wouldn't work, and they don't need it anyway.
I think that that is what people don't get: the ideas behind 3.5 - update the rules and sell people more books to boot - either don't apply anymore or would simply be bad business.
These are the new ideas: create a game that can be expanded almost indefinitely without changing the underlying framework; update the rules in real-time as though you were patching software; and charge customers a small fee to download new features and enhancements via DDI.
Oh, and keep selling books while you're at it, for however long that lasts.
"Great," you say, "but what do I get out of it?" Well, you get a game that is constantly being fine tuned so that it plays better and serves players needs. And you get a game where the designers are constantly innovating and adding new features, and not just in a "Here's yet another elven sub-race" kinda way. Best of all, the company has made the errata free and the online subscription cheap, so this is all easy to take advantage of.
Or not, which is also a viable option.
When I see yet another thread started about whether such-and-such constitutes "4.5," I wonder if people understand how the internet works. Yes of course 4e is changing. But complaining that 4e changes is like complaining that your OS gets patches: they help you out, they're free and you can turn them off if you like. Where is the issue?
Essentials, as far as I can tell, represents more of the same kind of willingness to experiment and play around in the existing framework of the rules that we've seen really since at least PHB2. The errata that goes with it is giving people not just minor fixes but actually some cool new options. And whenever the DDI update goes live I'll plop down my $10 to update my subscription and get the new builds and other stuff.
I think the fact that people are paranoid about this stuff is a legacy of the 3.5 debacle. But hey, guess what, x.5 is sooooo early 2000s. 4e is its own beast: a living ruleset, constantly being expanded and improved.
I've seen it claimed that 4e removes the need for a 5e. I wouldn't go that far. There are limits to how far the rules will stretch. Change something fundamental and you change the game. The spell system can't be changed back to Vancian casting, or to use mana points. You can't upset the economy of actions, or fundamentally change the movement rules. But there are tons of things you can tweak without breaking the game. So who needs a 4.5 edition?
4.5 is dead, long live 4e.
