D&D 5E D&DN going down the wrong path for everyone.

[Mishihari Lord]

Not only does it need to be an improvement, it needs to be "better enough" to overcome the inertia of people who are mostly happy with what they have. Speaking for myself, that's exactly why I didn't move to Pathfinder - on balance, I felt it was an improvement over 3.5e, but it's just not "better enough" to make up for the sacrifice of the system mastery I've built over the years.

Not really. I know plenty of people that just go with the latest edition.

 

[adamc]

From what I've seen, 4e players mostly want to feel like their edition was not considered a mistake and not to be thrown under the bus in an attempt to appeal to a different demographic.

Well, I'm only one 4e player, but I don't think that's very accurate. There are some things I like about 4e and am reluctant to lose:

• How easy it is to DM
• The fact that nearly all classes are effective and viable
• How movement/positioning becomes a strategic concern

There's really only one thing I think is a problem -- the fights take too long. And there are ways of coping with that.

When 5e came out, I was open to the idea that they might pull something amazing off. I'm still open to it, but I'm increasingly skeptical.

I'm not even opposed to Pathfinder; if someone else wanted to DM a game I'd be happy to play, I guess. But I'm not signing up to DM something harder than 4e.

 

[adamc]

Here's my problem with 5e: I'm unclear what the sales pitch is, other than the idea that it might appeal to everyone -- which would be great for WoTC, but which doesn't matter a lot to me. It only has to appeal to my group for me to like something...

I'm no D&D expert (only been playing a few years), but it strikes me as a very open-ended game, so there are lots of ways to run a game that can succeed, at least for some groups. But, even from what I've seen, I'd guess that the DM's are usually the most committed, and provide the bulk of the revenue to WoTC. Formation of D&D groups seems highly dependent on having folks who will DM (and who aren't terrible at it). So that strikes me as the core of the target audience.

Unfortunately, I don't know what they want, en masse. From the posts here, a lot of them seem to want to keep playing the game they are already accustomed to. (Understandable, but it's hard to sell anything MORE like what they've got than what they've got.) I can see that getting away from miniatures might help with adoption/new DMs (miniatures are fun but expensive). Anything that makes DMing easier would also probably help with adoption/new DMs.

I'm OK with the game changing, but I really want it to be easy to set up a week's session (which means easy monster math & design), and I'd like to keep the balanced classes that are 4e's hallmark. That's a lot more important to me than whether the mechanics are "believable" or whether any particular mechanic (e.g., Vancian spellcasting) is in the game.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

My issues are more orthogonal to the Next design itself, though the Next design and discussion is bringing things into relief that I've suspected for some time. I think, for example, that it is very difficult to write a truly excellent game that takes a lot of books to present coherently. So there is a built in budget ceiling on excellent games, unless you:

1. Find a way to sell a lot of supplementary material (e.g. adventures) that doesn't change your game much.

2. Find a way to sell a lot of truly optional supplements that tweak the game without each of them eating each others' sales.

3. Strike lightning in the bottle the way D&D did circa 1980.

Or, I guess, you could try to get sales and marketing to move a lot of product quickly before everyone catches on to the house of cards.

Next aims for #2, but I don't see them laying the groundwork to make reaching it obtainable. And it's not one of those things you can do halfway, much like it is a bad idea to try a swan dive off the high dive but change your mind half way down. Or rather, in this case, even if you do decide to really go for it, you know that sales, marketing, legal, and Hasbro are probably going to be tripping and poking you all the way down.

 

[Hussar]

That's fair. The claim that the pre-3e group is larger is indeed an unsupported assertion. However, the existence of a large pre-3e grouping is easily supported (see Dragonsfoot and the OSR), and it's also quite easily established that many of these would object to be bracketed with the 3e folks.

However, the existence of a silent majority of gamers who are not online is not unsupported - Wizards' estimates put the number of active gamers at some 6 million, while the communities here and at Wizards.com reflect only a minority of those. (But before you point it out - there's no evidence to support the statement that the intersection of not-online-gamers and pre-3e gamers is a majority view. That was, indeed, a mistake.)

Depends on your definition of large. Dragonsfoot has what, 8000 ish members on its forum. That's about 10% the size of En World. I've seen people claim the size of the Pre-3e group, but, the problem is, it's like proving a negative. There's no evidence of them.

 

[drothgery]

Depends on your definition of large. Dragonsfoot has what, 8000 ish members on its forum. That's about 10% the size of En World. I've seen people claim the size of the Pre-3e group, but, the problem is, it's like proving a negative. There's no evidence of them.

And more importantly from WotC's perspective (and Paizo's), however many of them there are, there aren't a lot of them who are actively buying new stuff unless they're mostly buying 4e or Pathfinder stuff and back-converting it (Yes, I know people who do this exist. Yes, a lot of OSR games and supplements exist. It ain't a lot.)

 

[jedavis]

Except they already tried to go the 4e route and that failed. And doing 4e over again is what they did with Essentials. And just trying to remake 3e would be doomed to failure as well, as they lose their current audience and have to lure an audience away from a company and game that makes them happy.

They can't beat Paizo at 3e, and they can't repeat 4e. So their real choices are to make a completely brand new game that goes in a completely different direction or they have to appeal to multiple audiences at once.
With one option they have a potential audience - a theoretical group of people that might buy the game. With the other option they have people who were their audience and have given them money before, they just have to win back as many as are willing to swap games. They don't have to get everyone back, but if they can appeal to a fraction of every audience and fans of all past editions that gives them a greater pool of fans to draw from. It's the best odds of success.

Eh, I still think they could appeal to the 4e audience by taking what is core to 4e, keeping it, and cutting down the fat and slowness and huge number of powers and whatnot. Essentials did not go far enough. Make a new 4e, 4e-er than 4e. Performing a fourier transform, if you will.

I really didn't have much to add there, except for the pun. Honestly I think it would be preferable to provide support for multiple lines. D&D once had Basic and Advanced branches, so it's not historically unprecedented. Wizards would garner more goodwill from the fanbases of previous editions by putting out new content for several editions concurrently than trying for a grand unification scheme, IMO.

But, even from what I've seen, I'd guess that the DM's are usually the most committed, and provide the bulk of the revenue to WoTC. Formation of D&D groups seems highly dependent on having folks who will DM (and who aren't terrible at it). So that strikes me as the core of the target audience.

I think that while DMs may be the most committed, Wizards has definitely in 3e and 4e at least focused more heavily on released targeted at players, for the simple reason that there are more of them. This is part of why we see the supplement treadmill; players buy supplements, not adventures or campaign settings. Perhaps DMs provide the majority of sales during the early days of a new edition, while later on when the production chain shifts to supplements, it shifts to players providing most of the revenue?

Unfortunately, I don't know what they want, en masse. From the posts here, a lot of them seem to want to keep playing the game they are already accustomed to. (Understandable, but it's hard to sell anything MORE like what they've got than what they've got.)

Bingo. So don't! Sit down and write some quality adventures. Tweak for each edition you want to support. Sell. Do the same for campaign settings. We're already seeing this in some places, like Frog God selling their modules in both PF and S&W versions. Unite the multitude of players under the common shared experience of similar (good!) adventures, rather than that of a shared system. Adventure prep is where many DMs spend a lot of their time; free them from that burden for a reasonable price and with quality content. This is where Paizo went when Dragon shifted to WotC's site, and it worked out very nicely for them, but I think WotC could do it better if they really tried. To use tech parlance, get out of platforms and start selling cross-platform apps. What Wizards is doing with 5e instead is in my mind more akin to this.

 

[jhunton]

I guss we will have to wate and see.Iam play testing it like a lot of others and can see good and bad things in it but it is still in playtesting . oh and Iam an old sckool gamer and I am on EW not on dragonfoot

 

[Raith5]

And more importantly from WotC's perspective (and Paizo's), however many of them there are, there aren't a lot of them who are actively buying new stuff unless they're mostly buying 4e or Pathfinder stuff and back-converting it (Yes, I know people who do this exist. Yes, a lot of OSR games and supplements exist. It ain't a lot.)

Exactly. Even if they make a good game which hits one or more of the target audience, they wont necessarily get huge sales. It basically has to be better than all of the existing editions by such clear margins that everybody drops what they are playing and buys DDN. Good luck is all I can say.

 

[Argyle King]

And more importantly from WotC's perspective (and Paizo's), however many of them there are, there aren't a lot of them who are actively buying new stuff unless they're mostly buying 4e or Pathfinder stuff and back-converting it (Yes, I know people who do this exist. Yes, a lot of OSR games and supplements exist. It ain't a lot.)

Similarly, there are some people (like myself) who have bought PF products with the intent of converting some of the material into a system which wasn't D&D at all. I also do play Pathfinder on occasion, but a lot of the adventures and fluff content were purchases I made with the intention of using the information in a GURPS game.