Mearls: The core of D&D

[Doug McCrae]

evil, magic-hating longsword

Does that mean it was also self-hating? After all, the sword itself must've been magic. I think that's a great idea.

 

[Mark CMG]

As long as design is framed in terms of divisions (which they create) and formulas (which they cannot recreate), there will be problems.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I've got nothing against that as a preference - although, like I said in my previous post, I personally don't have much interest in playing that game.

What I object to is the claim that this is an inherent requirement - that I can't have a game in which PCs are valuable, or worth playing, without the possibility of building a crappy PC.
.

I agree this is all a matter of personal taste. I recall the division when 3e was at its height between my pro build players and players who wanted more balance. Oddly enough at the time i tended to share the concerns of the balance crowd, but when 4e came out i realized that level of balance wasn't what i was really looking for--i still think 3e had brokenness tgat needed some fixing but 4 e just went too far in tge other direction for my taste.

That said you should play the game/edition that brings you the most satisfaction. I dont believe my tastes reflect some kind of objective standard. Nor do i think your characters are any less enjoyable or meaningful for you because you like a balance when it comes to character options.

I think d&d is especially in an akward spot because they need to appeal to the broadest possible audience with each edition. But you saw this enormous split develop over balance and builds ( not to mention magic) during 3e ( it looked almost 50-50 on the wizards forum). I don't see how they can appeal to both groups....and with pathfinder firmly established now it may not be worth their effort.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION], I agree that it's about taste. I also agree that D&D is in an awkward spot, and that they may not be able to appeal to both groups.

According to Lisa Stevens on the Paizo forums Pathfinder is now outselling D&D. (I'm pretty sure this is not taking into account DDI subscriptions, but I also think it's not taking into account Pathfinder subscriptions - I don't know how the two of these balance out.) If this is right, WotC would seem to have very little chance of regaining the 3E market.

My intuition is that WotC should therefore be trying to do a better job of promoting 4e at what it is good for - something different from 3E-ish play - but I don't know that my intuition on these things is worth very much!

 

[Bedrockgames]

@Bedrockgames , I agree that it's about taste. I also agree that D&D is in an awkward spot, and that they may not be able to appeal to both groups.

According to Lisa Stevens on the Paizo forums Pathfinder is now outselling D&D. (I'm pretty sure this is not taking into account DDI subscriptions, but I also think it's not taking into account Pathfinder subscriptions - I don't know how the two of these balance out.) If this is right, WotC would seem to have very little chance of regaining the 3E market.

My intuition is that WotC should therefore be trying to do a better job of promoting 4e at what it is good for - something different from 3E-ish play - but I don't know that my intuition on these things is worth very much!

I think the problem for them is they can't go back, but how can they grow the game going forward. If the 3E folk have largely migrated over to pathfinder, it is almost like the market has been divided in two. Great for Paizo because they grew as a result. But bad for wizards because they shrank as a result.

In a way this is a positive trend for gamers. It has been a while since D&D had serious competition. Both publishers will now be working that much harder to win over readers.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I think the problem for them is they can't go back, but how can they grow the game going forward. If the 3E folk have largely migrated over to pathfinder, it is almost like the market has been divided in two. Great for Paizo because they grew as a result. But bad for wizards because they shrank as a result.

In a way this is a positive trend for gamers. It has been a while since D&D had serious competition. Both publishers will now be working that much harder to win over readers.

Agreed.

One of the biggest problems with 4e, from my perspective, is the GSL.

With 3e, they tried "Welcome to our house! Come in and play!" with the OGL and it really, really worked. Every "competing" game supplied options for their core game, as well as a reference back to it. But....now, that is not their core game. The OGL effectively supplies options for Pathfinder, and all but references back to it.

With 4e, they tried "You just gotta trust us, this is gonna be the most fun you've ever had, but you can't play around with any of the parts." They tried to take their ball and go home, hoping that we'd all be willing to agree with the designers' idea of what "fun" is. This plan lost market share.

But.....I suspect that a return to the OGL would gain 4e market share. With 3pp able to publish varients that cater to more people, using a license that WotC cannot simply pull, there would be motive for more people to make 4e-compatable products that hailed back to the original game. I had been looking forward to Necromancer Games' take before the GSL fiasco.

Were some 3pp suppliments better received than WotC's take on the same topic? Sure! But that is an opportunity to find out what the market wants that you aren't providing. It isn't an excuse to stick your head in the sand and demand that people play the way you want them to.

And the original hard line of "You can support the OGL with a product (line), or you can support 4e, but not both" really, really backfired....IMHO, at least.

Several changes in 4e seem to switch terms simply as an estoppal to the OGL. The idea that you can't change what terms mean? That's way too "One True Way to Play" for my tastes.

IMHO, WotC should ditch the GSL, and publish an SRD for 4e under the OGL. Then WotC should pay really close attention to the formats successful 3pp 4e adventures use.....and ditch the delve format (except in special cases, where using it actually makes sense).

If you want to charge for electronic tools -- especially on a subscription basis -- they should be tools that are simply too cool to pass up (like the VTT should have been), not tools that are necessary to handle the increasing complexity of character/monster/encounter creation.

Bring back pdfs of earlier editions in a big way. You can't control access anyway; you might as well get some goodwill or money for providing access. I would include not only past edition modules, but rulesets, sourcebooks, and even past issues of Dragon and Dungeon as modestly-priced pdfs. If that means you have to cut Paizo in, then do so. In terms of goodwill, it would mean a lot, and you'd stop coming across as "My Way of the Highway" One-True-Wayists.

That last point is important, btw. I know people who like the game, but don't want to support the attitude. I'm betting that I'm not alone.

WotC can choose to be inclusive, as Paizo has done, and as WotC did in a big way with the enormously successful 3e, or it can continue down the road of "We'll tell you what's fun/how to play" that has cost it market share.

That's the way I see it. I hope they choose wisely.


RC

 

[Celebrim]

Agreed.

One of the biggest problems with 4e, from my perspective, is the GSL.

With 3e, they tried "Welcome to our house! Come in and play!" with the OGL and it really, really worked. Every "competing" game supplied options for their core game, as well as a reference back to it. But....now, that is not their core game. The OGL effectively supplies options for Pathfinder, and all but references back to it.

For which we should be immensely grateful to the 3E design team because they deliberately set up the OGL to ensure that it would not be possible for a company to do exactly what WoTC tried to do, and that's take the game away from the fans. There was a serious risk that if TSR died that the game would end up in limbo with no one who owned the game publishing, and no one who didn't own the game able to support it. The OGL made D&D essentially irrevocably a possession of the fans, ensuring it could never die and would (IMO) never lose its preeminance among RPGs because it doesn't matter now how the property is mismanaged or not - we can still keep the game alive. Even if Pazio dies because they decide to produce a million one legged dwarven minatures and it kills the company, D&D in some form can't die now.

The house is open, we can all play.

WotC tried to get out of that commitment, and they paid for it. It isn't just that they gave up on the OGL and went to the GSL, it's that they deliberately tried to make a game that wouldn't be compatible with the game the OGL provided for and per force also abandoned the most popular game on the market and the dominate game over the last 30+ years.

But.....I suspect that a return to the OGL would gain 4e market share.

I don't think so. Some people jumped on the 4e bandwagon and some people have legitimate reasons for likeing it better. But for the most part, I think what 4e taught most people is that they really liked the old game of D&D better than they thought that they did. More groups and more players in my area seem to be going back to 3e (or switching to Pathfinder) than I see 3e players switching to 4e.

It isn't an excuse to stick your head in the sand and demand that people play the way you want them to.

Early 2e was like that too, and turned me away from adopting it as a system for the same reasons. Second edition made me feel like the designers didn't want me to play the game I was playing, and were openly mocking me for doing so. It was like they were calling their previous enormously popular edition 'badwrongfun' and telling you that you'd have more fun playing there way instead of yours.

My relationship to the games designers and publishers has always felt to me like it ought to be peer to peer. I don't like being dictated to by what is essentially some other DM. If you do the hard work to provide me with content, I'll probably send money your way. But don't tell me how to run my table or try to take the game I'm playing away from me. Don't act like your game is a lot better than mine just because you are published or hold an official position, because TSR and WotC have published alot of embarassing crap over the years and even good published designers who have products I own have at times printed things I'd have been embarassed to put my name to. Act like I'm a respected and valued customer, and maybe I'll be one. Talk to me like a fellow gamer, and stop running down the game I bought from you just to get me to buy something new.

I mean ultimately it comes down to this: why the heck should I care more about what Mearls thinks the core of D&D is than what I think the core of D&D is?

The reason that the OGL was so ingenious and so successful is that it recognized the actual state of the game. The OGL didn't create the diversity of play and rules. It merely validated the existing divesity of tables and approaches to the game that had existed almost since the beginning (and maybe before the beginning, as Arneson's approach always appeared to me to be distinct from Gygax's). It said, "Not only do we like that you all play the game in your own ways, but we are going to help you do that and help you help each other make the game we are mutually invested in more fun." It validated and encouraged the community of DM's that are at the core of D&D's success. No DM's; no game. That's the core of D&D and any one who wants to make money off of the game better never forget it.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Heh, I was pretty turned off by a subset of the 3E guys that took the attitude that the OGL was so that "professionals" could deliver content to us plebians, and save us from our own stinky house rules.

Actually, one of the many good reasons for having a very simple, basic version of the game as a base is that you could then make that base OGL, while preserving the vast volume of the more complicated options as proprietary. You wouldn't do it merely for that reason, but it is certainly a good secondary reason.

Take monsters as just one example. Let's say this theoretical basic version has the proverbial 2-line monster stat block that we all know and love from our early days. There is no flavor there, short of whatever image "ogre" conjures up in your mind. Then in the monster manual, you have a page or three on ogres, complete with options for the varying complexity of the game.

A third party wants to use this ogre. He can put those two lines in his product, no problem. He can put a section at the beginning of the product saying that it was built with the expectation that you would use optional monster rules A, H, and L. You still put the two lines in your adventure, and the DM knows to go look in the monster manual. You say that you also use your own optional rule MyHouseRule X. That is detailed in the product. You can list it after the two lines if you want.

Then WotC sells customization options in the DDI, both to the third party and the users. The third party either pays a fee, or goes for a percentage. If they pay the fee, then WotC just allows their customization options in, and any user that subs for that in their subscription contributes directly to the third party. WotC gets the fee and the heightened interest in their monster manual. Maybe the third party is small. They go for percentage. They enter the data. WotC is out nothing. If it sells, they get a cut and that heightened interest. If it doesn't, well--customization is easy to ignore, if you code it right.

OTOH, say that the third party decides to go with only the base version, no options from WotC or their product? WotC doesn't get anything, right, same as the problem when people reprinted the SRD? Nope, at that point, by definition, the third party is making content and selling it, which helps move the game. It might be adventures. It might be source material. But it is content. And in this model, the DDI is a content movement product, not a particular game.

When the base system is the complicated version, none of this works. It isn't even an option to try to make it work. You've got weird intersections of their version of your complicated options, and it is difficult to track what counts or what doesn't.

 

[Celebrim]

Heh, I was pretty turned off by a subset of the 3E guys that took the attitude that the OGL was so that "professionals" could deliver content to us plebians, and save us from our own stinky house rules.

Granted, there are a lot of stinky house rules out there and some people might feel that way about mine (in fact, some on the board I think do), but I take your point.

For me, there have been times when I have felt that TSR/WotC's official position on your rights to the game as a DM were such that it was illegal to make house rules. Not merely that they discouraged it, or that they stated in the rule book that these were the official rules and that if you caught someone departing from them with so called 'house rules' that you should by all means shun them but that taken literally, that they'd take you to court for having house rules. That is to say, there were times when I felt like TSR/WotC's official stance was that you could buy the game, but that it was illegal for you to play the game.

That is, they seemed to suggest that if I wrote my own modules, or made up my own rules, or adapted any of their material in some derivitive manner that depended on there IP that I was infringing on their IP. Now I can understand where they are coming from at times, but at other times it felt like the very act of playing the game was supposed to be in some fashion breaking copyright laws because I was distributing copyrighted content to my players! And heaven help you if you made something up, like rules for sailing ships or whatever, then photocopied it and gave it to another DM! I mean, I often felt like my own gaming notes were contraband of some sort, which had to be passed around in secret despite the fact that I wasn't quoting anything they'd published but just playing the game described by what they'd published.

The OGL to me felt like a big step toward legitimizing and welcoming how the game was actually played, and encouraging DMs to go ahead and form communities - like at EnWorld here - where it was safe to just make crap up without fear of bringing down a 'Cease and Desist' notice because you know, technically, at some point in the future they might want to make money off their own sailing rules and this talk about sailing house rules was infringing on the future viability of that product. That it allowed a few enterprising and hard working DMs to make a bit of money or even go professional with their house rules was just frosting. I wasn't one of those; I just wanted to feel like the freedom the game books seemed to offer was something I actually had in fact and not just theory.

 

[GSHamster]

The OGL to me felt like a big step toward legitimizing and welcoming how the game was actually played, and encouraging DMs to go ahead and form communities - like at EnWorld here - where it was safe to just make crap up without fear of bringing down a 'Cease and Desist' notice because you know, technically, at some point in the future they might want to make money off their own sailing rules and this talk about sailing house rules was infringing on the future viability of that product. That it allowed a few enterprising and hard working DMs to make a bit of money or even go professional with their house rules was just frosting. I wasn't one of those; I just wanted to feel like the freedom the game books seemed to offer was something I actually had in fact and not just theory.

I am not sure that WoTC intended this as much as you think they did. Here is an alternate construction of the events of the past few years.

1. WotC released the OGL with the intent of allowing people to make modifications on top of the rules. The hobby would have a common rules base, but third parties would be free to make adventures and settings and other minor modifications.

2. Instead of following this path, most third parties started altering the rules themselves. Instead of a common rules base, the game was evolving into several incompatible rule systems that descended from the common OGL.

3. Fearing fragmentation of the playerbase, WotC tried to pull back from the full OGL, and come up with a more limited structure that preserved a common ruleset.

4. Unfortunately, they were too late. The alternate rules had enough mind-share to survive. Additionally, the creation of 4e accelerated the fragmentation of the community into two camps. But this fragmentation would have happened anyways under the OGL as the modified rules grew farther and farther apart.