What's stopping WOTC from going back to 3.5?

[Fox Lee]

The reality, however, is that players latch onto a system that feels right and stick with it.

I disagree with that - or at least, Id like to see some good evidence for it. The gamers I have had experiences with have played multiple systems and enjoyed several of them thoroughly, including a near-encyclopaedic knowledge of 3.5e, but as a group we still shifted to 4e because while 3.5e felt right, 4e still felt better. We initially resisted 4e precisely because we were already comfy with 3.5e, but 4e won us over - which is almost exactly what you describe WotC mistakenly expecting to happen.

Now, I realise that's absolutely anecdotal - but, because I'm coming from that position, I'd need to see something convincing before I believe somebody else's anecdote instead.

I think your broader point is correct though. I'm sure it's not economically viable for WotC to produce print-versions of books for all editions, especially because their production values are fantastically high (like 4e or not, the physical and visual production is top-notch). However, releasing PDFs is a ridiculously low investment, to the point where even indie publishers can do it sustainably. No doubt they would still push new editions and would want those to have the biggest playerbases, but it's undeniable that there are diehards who will never shift. If all it cost me was an online store and PDF production, I would surely volunteer to take their money as well.

OTOH, there is also brand management at work here. If WotC doesn't want D&D to be associated with older imagery and ideas, I can kind of get that. There are things in 1st, 2nd and AD&D that would have seriously turned me off if I had known about them before I'd gotten into D&D (like the artwork). D&D would have seemed like goofy, silly fantasy to me, which was the exact opposite of what I wanted (hey, I was a teenager in the 90s - it was all about being taken seriously). Not to mention its attitude toward women.

I still look at the recent Red Box and imagine it giving a negative impression to people who found their way to gaming through, say, anime, or Lord of the Rings movies, or Harry Potter. We've come to the point where elves and wizards and stuff can be cool again, and part of the reason is that they now tend to look amazing and be played by sexy stars in big-budget productions (I believe that this aesthetic is one of the primary draw cards for female gamers, too, though I have no evidence to present). The Red Box... sure, it's an awesome retro callback for the people who enjoyed classic D&D, but for new players I can only imagining it presenting a weird, old-fashioned, cheesy image that's totally wrong for a system that's probably the closest match to contemporary, big-budget fantasy.

OH BOY can I ramble! Anyhoo, I agree with you mostly, and really I don't think it would hurt their brand to resell overpriced PDFs to old-edition grognards But then, I'm not their brand manager, and it seems likely that they disagree.

Or, like many big game publishers, they are just that scared of piracy. It's hardly impossible.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Wizards produced very few modules for 3.5. Paizo mostly did dungeon adventures, and the third party material was hit or miss.

Goodman Games, Necromancer Games and Green Ronin were all well-known third party publishers with (deserved) excellent reputations for their adventures. No one who really wanted a bunch of 3.5 adventures went starving for them, especially with Dungeon magazine in the mix, pre-Paizo.

when I was playing 3E and WOTC was supporting it, I just never got why they focused so much on splat books and so little on modules.

There are more players than DMs and creating products everyone at the table might buy a copy of seemed to make more sense to them than selling to only one person per table.

 

[ANewPosterAppears]

Also, not as a new fanboy, but immediately giving a perspective on a dynamic that could only exist on the Internet, and only places where PF fans and 4e fans meet, so EN World and a few other forums. And he doesn't strike me as a lurker, so he's either a sockpuppet or someone who came over from another forum to carry on the same arguments.

Only in places where PF fans and 4e fans meet? So you mean anywhere on the internet that people talk about D&D?

Well ok, maybe not Dragonsfoot.

But hey, if it helps, I can solomnly swear I am not the sock puppet of any poster on EN World.

In my experience, very very few groups play both 4E and 3E/Pathfinder at the same time. They may try both, but settle on one or the other. It is obviously possible to maintain campaigns of both, but in practice highly unusual.

Also, watch those asymptotes.

But in these cases they play the game that suits them most.

The challenge brought forth is that somehow people who hate 4e are still being forced to play it because 4e still, I don't know, exists, I guess? And that Pathfinder must reign supreme or else people will still play 4e. That so long as 4e is popular, people will play it, and that this is somehow bad.

I can't imagine the sociopathy needed to want a gameline to end because you think people shouldn't be allowed to enjoy it, that they have to convert by sword to your system of choice instead. Or that people, deprived of 4e, will all start up Pathfinder games (Most 4e fans will not play Pathfinder regardless of what happens to 4e. Sorry!).

The idea that Pathfinder is this glorious ideal that people would join automatically were it not for the sinister 4e is something that hits the level of religion, and that quite frankly scares me.

 

[SSquirrel]

Have you actually done this? I haven't played a converted 3E adventure, but I have played early 4E adventures which seem to have been designed with 3E sensibilities, and they're a godawful slog. 3E assumes a lot of small, trivial combats; but there is no such thing as a small, trivial combat in 4E.

For a local example, especially if you're a community supporter around here, you could always compare the 3.x and 4E versions of War of the Burning Sky. I never played the original and I haven't played the 4E version either, but that is an easy to compare thing right there.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The idea that Pathfinder is this glorious ideal that people would join automatically were it not for the sinister 4e is something that hits the level of religion, and that quite frankly scares me.

Despite my owning AU, AE, Midnight 2Ed, True20, FantasyCraft, Warriors & Warlocks, AAAAAND Pathfinder, I doubt I'll ever run a campaign in any- as a group, we're pretty happy with 3.5Ed.

Even if 4Ed didn't exist, I can't really see Pathfinder as the Holy Grail of gaming either. Like all the clones, it makes changes I love...and it has some holdover elements & new flaws that, to me make it just a reasonable alternative or supplement to the original, not a replacement.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Boxed set modules? Now we're into 2e. Let's be honest here, 2e isn't exactly known for it's great modules. There's some REALLY hit and miss stuff here, but, there just so much sheer volume, that they managed to make some good stuff more by accident than design.

Again I am thinking of the whole span of 1E through 2E. Personally i thought both editions released good modules. And I think many of the 2E mdoules (especially early on before say 94) were excellent.

I just happen to have Dungeon 149 within reach, so, I'll look at that one. 3 modules, as was standard after the Paizo relaunch. One Savage Tide AP module - Enemies of My Enemy, which is 45 pages long written by Wolfgang Baur, War of the Wielded, a generic low level module (and a really fun one too) that weighs in at 14 pages and Twisted Night that is only 12 pages long.

Well I don't have my dungeons anymore that this sounds like a very atypical issue. Anyways, you can argue in dungeons favor all you want (like I said I liked dungeons and wasn't trying to criticize it) but for me it wasn't the same as having a full line of modules.

So, on a fairly random sample, I've got a magazine with a major name in gaming and two no-name ones, the longest of which weighs in at about half what a really long module comes out to. Granted, it is one of the twelve in the series as well.

The longest adventures sounds very unusual in length to me. I don't remember seeing that many dungeon adventures that were over twenty pages. The other two are quite short.

I really have to echo the guys at Dungeon here and wonder why gamers weren't taking more advantage of Dungeon magazine. As a resource, you just can't beat it.

I was. I was a regular subscriber. But it had its shortcomings and it wasn't the same as having modules. And like I said before, dungeon existed prior to 3E. So it wasn't like I suddenly had a new option when third edition came out.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Goodman Games, Necromancer Games and Green Ronin were all well-known third party publishers with (deserved) excellent reputations for their adventures. No one who really wanted a bunch of 3.5 adventures went starving for them, especially with Dungeon magazine in the mix, pre-Paizo.

I liked some of Green Ronins stuff, didn't care much for goodman or necromancer. What I really wanted to see was modules with the production quality of other wizards material. Green Ronin was excellent at times. But I wanted more official modules, fewer official splat books.

And after a while, when I realized I liked green ronin's stuff better than WOTC, I began to wonder why I was even playing a game made by WOTC. That is when I started to look for alternate systems.

There are more players than DMs and creating products everyone at the table might buy a copy of seemed to make more sense to them than selling to only one person per table.

I understand that position (though I think Pathfinder is demonstrating that GMs will buy an awful lot of material if its out there). However I thought the endless slew of splat books made the game worse over time. It became like an expansion thing where the whole point of buying them was to get an edge over the other guy. If they had toned down the power creep, uped the flavor content, and maybe put them out as softcovers ratehr than hard covers (presumably with lower prices) I would have been as bothered by it.

 

[Eridanis]

"ANewPosterAppears" has just become "Sir-Not-Appearing-On-These-Boards." (Don't create alts to try to get around a ban, folks; it's too easy for us to catch you!)

Let's keep the discussion polite, please.

 

[technoextreme]

Have you actually done this? I haven't played a converted 3E adventure, but I have played early 4E adventures which seem to have been designed with 3E sensibilities, and they're a godawful slog. 3E assumes a lot of small, trivial combats; but there is no such thing as a small, trivial combat in 4E.

Actually, I would say that 4E does small trivial combat far better than 3.5E can ever have hoped to attained. I don't think even LFR runs combat encounters like how you are supposed to but if you actual follow their guidelines you will get exactly what you claim is missing.

 

[prosfilaes]

If they had toned down the power creep, uped the flavor content, and maybe put them out as softcovers ratehr than hard covers (presumably with lower prices) I would have been as bothered by it.

Making them hardcover was done because the softcover 3.0 books didn't sell that well, and apparently they got feedback that distributors and bookstores were prioritizing hardcovers (from 3rd parties) over softcovers.

Power creep is hard. The new magical classes in the Complete books tended to be less powerful then the cleric and wizard in the core book, so I for one tend to think for a while before I play one of them. If a book has a lot of new content, and all of it is less powerful then the core options, people aren't going to be happy and probably aren't going to use it. (This may not be as true if they designed material as replacements for the core material instead of alternatives, but most of the Complete material didn't come across that way.) So you have to try and make options that are powerful enough that people will take them instead of core material, without making them so powerful that they are more powerful then the core material. It's a tough line to walk, and the Complete books had a lot of stuff that was distinctly underpowered, while having a few things that were overpowered.

Flavor is another complex line to walk. Personally, I found the prestige classes in Complete Arcane to have a bit much flavor, making them hard to weave into a campaign. It perhaps would have been better if they felt like they came from one world where they all made sense.