Legens&Lore: Monte Cook takes over

[Windjammer]

Well, this answers one of my nagging concerns over the past months... IF they are actively working on 5E, who's at all competent enough to do it? Certainly none of the few remaining staffers, who also mostly lack street cred or - in the case of Cordell - spectacularly gambled it away.

But the wording of the announcement leaves me a tad wary:

"we've brought him on board to work with R&D in making D&D the greatest RPG the world has seen."

Well, him being brought "on board" as opposed to getting hired as a full time staff member should be taken with an enormous grain of salt. Smacks of freelance contract, and of an underpaid one in light of that underwhelming Facebook entry shared earlier,

Yes, I am working for Wizards of the Coast again. It's no big deal. They had some wastebaskets that needed emptying, floors that needed sweeping... that kind of thing. We're still haggling over some things in the contract, though. I don't do windows.

You know what's instructive? Historical precedence, that is.

I remember when it was announced that Cook would work on the Pathfinder RPG. People were dancing, celebrating ultimate victory over 4E, and so on on paizo.com

And what did they get? A preface to the core rulebook with next to no evidence that Monte did actual design work for them. He simply provided 'consultation'.

I said it back then, I'll say it now. To all appearances, this is primarily a marketing stunt, and little else besides. It'll be virtually identical to what Monte did for Necromancer Games when Tome of Horrors II came out: he wrote the preface to a book he had ostensibly not read, let alone contributed to.

Design consultant my a$$. Either bring him in with full development assignments, or forget it. And from the sound of the above fb tweet, WotC doesn't have the budget to do it proper.

God do I hope to be wrong.

 

[Thunderfoot]

My whole point was that Monte is back in R&D. (That's research and development for the few of that may not know (but I really doubt that's many folks here)) That's more than just he's back in WotC, he back to designing.
THAT is why I think 5e is on the burners. He built 3e, for the most part. Mike slowly rose to prominence taking ever next promotion and eventually became the "Galactic Emperor" of WotC; and while his dream of making D&D more widely accepted worked, the core of RPers started going over the Pathfinder.

/My statement of the prior is based on the GenCon attendance of the various events using both systems. For a third straight year the D&D open and the Dungeon Delve have lost attendance while the PF hosted games are growing in attendance - anecdotal, yes, but there is something there./

My guess, strictly conjecture, no real proof, is that Mike is doing triage to stop the bleeding out of core players. They need something that covers all the bases:

1. Acceptable enough to get both new short-term (session) and long-term (mega campaign) players interested and loyal.
2. Easy to learn and easy to modify
3. Something that will maintain long-term profit margins - ie minis, cards, splats or whatever the flavor of the month is.
4. Something that will finally get the product back in to big box stores like Target, Wal-Mart, etc. So that they can corner brand recognition outside the niche market.

Of course this has always been the goal, but it's really hard to keep a hard core gamer/geek interested (LotR style heavy fantasy) while also getting something out there that a Paris Hilton type could get behind. (so like that's Hot.) Mike has been spot on with his marketing so far, while 4e wasn't my thing he has increased the overall revenue for WotC, so good on him. But without a sustainable core market success is going to be short-term. Monte created a version that spawned renewed interest in the game by veterans and at least 2 major "clones" - PF, True 20 (and I'm sure there are a host of others I'm missing)

It's simply good business to hire back the best designer you've had in the last 15 years to try and find a balance. Mike makes the final decisions so Monte can be kept under thumb while being free to expand both market base and interest. Reading too much into this...maybe, but I said before GenCon that something was up, now it looks like it's just coming to light.

 

[Mark CMG]

Sounds to me as if they are going to throw select elements of 4E, 3.*, AU/AE, Iron Heroes, and probably a few other niche ideas and things that were considered for some time but thought too adventurous, into a blender, then refine what comes out.

Shame about all the dirty windows, though.

There's a transparency/OGL metaphor in there somewhere. Note, if you own the original IP, even if it was eventually OGC, it can be repackaged without the OGL.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

During that time he also seems to have had his own projects going on as well - re-releasing Ptolus, etc.

Wait, what? Ptolus is getting another release?

 

[IronWolf]

Wait, what? Ptolus is getting another release?

Well - the release he made at Gen Con this year. He turned the one book into two hardback books which were available for sale at Gen Con.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

First I've heard of that. Interesting.

I'd love to see more new Ptolus stuff, other than the Experimental Might adventure he did a while back.

 

[qstor]

I think this can only be a good thing.

Mike

 

[SSquirrel]

Well, him being brought "on board" as opposed to getting hired as a full time staff member should be taken with an enormous grain of salt. Smacks of freelance contract, and of an underpaid one in light of that underwhelming Facebook entry shared earlier

*snip*

Design consultant my a$$. Either bring him in with full development assignments, or forget it. And from the sound of the above fb tweet, WotC doesn't have the budget to do it proper.

God do I hope to be wrong.

Funny, I took his FB post to just be his usual self-effacing humor and him trying not to make too big a deal out of it. "Brought on board" is a general euphemism for hired and indicates nothing particular about pay level or about if it is contract or otherwise. Monte was pretty straight when he said the Paizo deal w/a consultancy. This sounds like a real, full-time job. *shrug*

3E looks like it did b/c Monte, Skip and Jonathan were given very specific guidelines of what sacred cows could and could not be slaughtered and there was a very careful balance being maintained w/all their decisions. There were comments after the fact that there was a felling of "not having gone far enough", so I don't' know that I would agree the next edition of D&D will look more like 3E than 4E. Personally I'd rather see the game keep moving forward.

Say what you will about the Time of Troubles and the SpellPlague, they were certainly huge change-inducing events to the Realms. Whether those changes were for the better is another debate, but I'd rather see forward movement than stagnation or constantly dipping into the past. I understand people's desires for old campaign worlds to come back in new editions, heck I was very vocal in wanting Dark Sun to come back to 4E and it was very nice, minus the whole complete lack of maps bit heh. The last new campaign setting we had for D&D before Eberron was what....something in the Red Steel/Birthright/Planescape era*? In over 15 years D&D has had one new major world, after creating so many in 2E.

I won't go so far as to agree w/Barney from How I Met Your Mother that "new is always better", but new is certainly different. Different can be scary, but it can also be a lot of fun. I can't fathom Monte sitting around yelling at kids to get off his D&D lawn, complaining that in his day they didn't' have healing surges, etc. He's shown he can design more than one thing, so we won't just get a re-tread of the past.

 

[Hussar]

Them hiring Monte Cook as part of the R&D team is more than a mere burp (I would argue the last several months has been a string of "more than burps"). The obvious implication of hiring Cook can't escape wizards, unless they are totally oblivious (which I doubt). This is the strongest indication yet that 5E is in fact in the works and that 5E will go in a very different direction from 4E (likely closer to 3E and 1E).

See, I have to wonder at that last bit. Closer to 1e? Why? 3e was about as far from 1e as you could make it. They took pretty much every sacred cow mechanic in 1e and 2e and turned it into hamburger for 3e. They removed virtually all alignment restrictions, multiclassing restrictions, made making monster characters part of core, rejiggered virtually every spell, stripped down the base stats. Removed vast swaths of the rules to clean them up.

Why would you think a Monte Cook designed 4e would go closer to 1e? 3e? Mabye, I'd buy that. But 1e? Good luck.

 

[Celtavian]

re

I like Monte Cook. But he was no fan of 4E. This seems like a strange decision based almost entirely on money for Monte rather than love of the game. Unless of course he's also there to help get D&D back to being D&D. That would be nice, though I'm pretty heavily committed to Pathfinder now.

But Monte was a major contributor to 3E, probably the most successful version of D&D to date. So this might bode well for future editions of D&D to see Monte back in the fold.