Could Wizards ACTUALLY make MOST people happy with a new edition?

[MoxieFu]

I'm posting this only after scanning the first page so if I am repeating what someone else said, just content yourself that brilliant minds think alike and hey, you were first!

They could at least try.

Ever since the decision to pull the license for Paizo to publish Dragon and Dungeon magazines (and print versions altogether) it seems to me that hey haven't cared what most of their customers want.

After that it seems (to me anyway) that it's been one rash decision after another. It seems like all decisions being made are to make the game be something different from what is was in the past. I think the designers of the new editions (both 3rd and 4th) have been too busy stroking their own egos and not trying to serve the customers and The Game.

I do think the listen to (some) of the fans, but only those that agree with what they want.

Just my 2 cents, and I reserve the right to be absolutely wrong.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Just my 2 cents, and I reserve the right to be absolutely wrong.

Which is good, cause I think for the most part, you are.

 

[Sadrik]

Something I posted a couple of years ago:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/269298-spaghetti-sauce.html

 

[Cergorach]

It seems like all decisions being made are to make the game be something different from what is was in the past. I think the designers of the new editions (both 3rd and 4th) have been too busy stroking their own egos and not trying to serve the customers and The Game.

I think that is way to harsh towards the designers, that you (and I) don't like the direction 4E has gone would not originate with the designers. Designers design by the demands of their higher ups. WotC/Hasbro management decided what course they wanted to sail, designers just implement the policies. When you line up all the 'mistakes' they made the course they are sailing becomes clear, it's not a wrong course, it just doesn't have as many passengers as they hoped or were used to. I find (objectively) 4E very sound, game mechanic wise, it just lacks that certain something that inspires me to run a game (Pathfinder does have that certain something, for me atleast).

I fear that 5E would continue the course 4E started, WotC management hoping that this particular course will lead them to the new world with all it's treasures, only forgetting that most of the passengers are dying of malnutrition along the way...

 

[MoxieFu]

I think that is way to harsh towards the designers, that you (and I) don't like the direction 4E has gone would not originate with the designers. Designers design by the demands of their higher ups. WotC/Hasbro management decided what course they wanted to sail, designers just implement the policies.
[snip]

It is a very harsh opinion and very likely unfair too. As I said I reserve the right to be wrong.

But this is the purely emotional reaction that I have. It is neither rational nor empirical. But it does inform the reason I like what I do. I am not a fan of the Pathfinder rules, but I love the company. They know how serve the needs and tastes of their customers. WotC could learn a lot from Paizo, an awful lot! If a company ignores or insults their customers, they will only lose those customers. From the pulling of the magazines to removing the PDFs, I felt insulted.

If a company is inclusive toward me I respond positively. If I feel excluded I will respond negatively.

 

[triqui]

All you have done here is go right back to the "all change is good change" fallacy.

No, what I did ther is to show the "you can't repeat the same thing and expect different results" truism. The RPG industry _IS_ small. WotC wants it to be bigger. Therefore, they can't keep doing the same things that have kept RPG as a small industry for 40 years. Sure, they might *fail* in their attempt. If they do, they'll be a small insignificant industry in the next decade. However, if they don't even try, they WILL be a small insignificant industry in the next decade, for sure.

And, bottom line, the people you are talking about as gamers now were not playing table top then and they are not playing tabletop now. And there is no reason to expect they will be playing tabletop tomorrow.

There is a reason to expect they'll be playing tabletop tomorrow: they have appeal for games, they have appeal for fantasy, they have appeal for pretending to be an elf hero. They just don't have appeal for current tabletop gaming system. That *might* change if you make a different tabletop game system that *does* appeal them. Before Facebook existed, there were a billion people in the world wich was *not* interested on Myspace. However, lot of those changed opinion becouse
A) facebook was better
B) Facebook was popular.

with A) having influence on B).

 

[humble minion]

I think that is way to harsh towards the designers, that you (and I) don't like the direction 4E has gone would not originate with the designers. Designers design by the demands of their higher ups. WotC/Hasbro management decided what course they wanted to sail, designers just implement the policies. When you line up all the 'mistakes' they made the course they are sailing becomes clear, it's not a wrong course, it just doesn't have as many passengers as they hoped or were used to. I find (objectively) 4E very sound, game mechanic wise, it just lacks that certain something that inspires me to run a game (Pathfinder does have that certain something, for me atleast).

Oddly enough, I find myself heartily agreeing with the second half of your post while disagreeing with the first!

I genuinely think that 4e's rule changes were designer-driven rather than management-driven. Perhaps some of the tone and what I percieve as the targeting at a younger audience (twoword compoundnames for everything, and the utterly cringeworthy melodramatic prose that heads up maneuver/class/whatever descriptions, for instance), but in general, I think the 4e rules were largely a designer-driven reaction to the weaknesses of d20/3e. Addressing 3e's very real issues with the layering of buffs overcomplicating combat, the divergent maths at high level, save or die, gamebreaking spells at low level, the ridiculous complexity of high-level 3e stat blocks and the drag that applied to DMs, the attempt (even if clumsy) to separate out tactical vs ritual magic, etc, etc, etc. All these issues were very well known to the design team and are certainly what I would have looked to address if it were me designing 4e.

But I think there's a temptation when redesigning something like D&D, to go too far and lose what's familiar. As a designer, you probably spend years living the ruleset during the new edition design, talking it about it every day with your fellow designers, coming up with new ideas, testing, refining, making more and more fundamental changes as times goes on. It's probably a small, incremental process of change for a designer, who gets to try all the intermediate stages and who can fight for their favourite bits over the development period, but it's very sudden and stark for a customer, and I think designers who've been immersed in a fluid ruleset for years often forget that. And 4e actually magnified the problem by making a bunch of flavour changes (planar structure, dragonborn etc) that really just seem to be largely unnecessary (certainly un-asked for) from a game experience point of view and could have almost been custom-made to get on the goat of long-time players.

NWoD seems to have had the same problem, and I know that previous WH40k ruleset edition changes were recieved so badly that the last couple have actually been so minimal that 90% of the previous edition's material is still usable - and this is in an environment when players play AGAINST each other, so balance is much more important than in D&D.

Anyway, I do very much agree that 4e was necessary and even desirable, and I even agree with the designers about what issues it should address. But like you, I just think the 4e we got wasn't one I liked very much.

 

[wedgeski]

To my mind there are a few facts that need to be accounted for in the next edition if it is to appeal to as wide a base as possible: D&D no longer rules the roost; go *forward*, not backward; innovate to stand apart; use the social network to its fullest; provide quality electronic tools.

(Interestingly I think Wizards engaged with several of these for 4E and should be given credit for that whatever your view on the game that emerged in the process.)

Previous editions split the fans, but no previous edition had the OGL to contend with. In a lot of ways, I'm glad that the R&D dept. at Wizards weren't so scared of the OGL that they just iterated on 3.5 and delivered a 4th Edition that was no more than D&D v3.6. Instead they stripped the game right back and delivered a contemporary vision of D&D, to love or to hate as you saw fit.

But now you have two supported visions of a game with D&D at its roots, and the industry has changed. Official D&D no longer rules. Wizards need to embrace that fact with the next version (which I hope is years and years away), continue to innovate, and if they consider the bite Paizo is taking out of their market to be big enough, take them on.

Paizo have built their market as a safe haven for 3.5 players who didn't like 4E. They've achieved this with utmost skill, but it remains to be seen whether their customers will forever buy material for a game that looks like 3.5, and if not, how they'll react to innovations which start to take the game in new directions. I can imagine Pathfinder 2 and D&D 5 coming at about the same time, and it'll be a fascinating scrap.

 

[Cergorach]

Anyway, I do very much agree that 4e was necessary and even desirable, and I even agree with the designers about what issues it should address. But like you, I just think the 4e we got wasn't one I liked very much.

I don't think the issue is that we don't like 4E, but it's all the stuff around it that fills me (and others) with worry regarding 5E. I seriously doubt that it was a designer choice to limit fluff, stop Dungeon and Dragon Magazine, etc. Those are all management decisions, not really the designers fault. If you take 2E, 3E, and 4E I'm pretty much certain that you can draw a straight line and create expectations of 5E mechanics wise. I don't necessarily think it's a bad result, but if you look at the things surrounding 4E that are not mechanics and follow those to their 'natural' conclusion for 5E I start to shudder a bit. I think they are trying to (incrementally) reach a point where they can possibly get a lot of customers (the Fantasy MMORPG crowd) but at the cost of loosing their previous customers, I think that is a gamble that is far to risky. I think they are moving to fast and to early, the technology isn't there yet or at least WotC and the folks they hire don't get the required technology off the ground in the last decade plus. Pathfinder choose the classic RPG path but updated it to current day usage.

Pathfinder made a good move by concentrating their Mechanics in a few core books and didn't spawn them as if they were demonrabbits. Then they put in all their other products in clearly defined categories and named them so customers already knew what kind of product it was before they even saw the title. Pathfinder is mechanic wise better then 3.5E (and all the corrections that followed), but it isn't as clear/simple/consistent as 4E, sure I could use the 4E rules with the Pathfinder stuff, but that's more work then I want to do. Also the 4E rulebooks are pretty bland to me, the Pathfinder rulebooks inspire me greatly, just by leaving through a chapter I get all kinds of cool ideas and I actually want to read the rules.

On one technological point Paizo is light years ahead of WotC, PDFs. I loved my PDFs before there were mainstream tablets, but ever since I got my iPad, I read more game pdfs on it then I do in game books. I'm also currently out of bookshelf space, so pdfs have become a necessity ;-)

I think there are still more 4E books in circulation then that there are Pathfinder books, and it will take a long while before that changes. But it will change unless WotC changes something in their way of doing business, imho it's less about the rules and more about the stuff around it all, if WotC changes that they would repair more bridges then a 5E ever would. I even think that a properly redesigned core rulebook set would change a lot after the other issues are resolved, something that doesn't feel like a textbook/manual, and let's not forget all the errata (a 4.5E or a revised version would need a lot more playtesting and a lot less further errata).

 

[DEFCON 1]

It is a very harsh opinion and very likely unfair too. As I said I reserve the right to be wrong.

If a company is inclusive toward me I respond positively. If I feel excluded I will respond negatively.

But unfortunately for you... this is the kind of attitude that is easiest for WotC to ignore. An unreasonable negative opinion based purely on emotion and not fact. Thus, you fall into the 'there's no pleasing some people' category. So hopefully you've accepted that you're never going to be happy, because WotC has no impetus to even attempt to please you.

My guess is that since you are here on the boards complaining about WotC... that answer is 'no, you haven't'.