Roleplaying since the 80s and I'm really tired!

[Nellisir]

"Im a monster! Raaarrr!"

You just dislike because they didn't give 'em gills.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

REMOVED! A little more snark than intended. Nothing to see here

 

[Jacob Lewis]

Dominion is the perfect example of this. The original complete game works perfectly by itself. The add-ons are wholly optional, though if you're a fan of the game the aaditional strategies make the core even more fun.

At $44.95 a pop for a large dominion set, you'd think there's a model there for D&D to follow.

I like to think so!

 

[haakon1]

Gnomes, unlike dragonborn and tieflings, have a roughly 30-year history as a "core" race in D&D. WotC wasn't eliminating them (unlike the assassin in 2e, which was just axed outright); ...
You could go from 1e to 2e to 3e relatively painlessly*, at least as far as races were concerned, but you couldn't go from a 3e core ruleset to a 4e core ruleset in the same campaign without a major reset or rewrite, which I think really dissuaded a number of people from making the jump at all.
...
*True, there was no half-orc in 2e core, but you could at least continue to use 1e rules for the race without difficulty.

In 1988, when 2nd Edition came out, my PC was a half-orc assassin. I never ended up playing 2e -- I dropped D&D for several years, then restarted with AD&D (the real one) and eventually switched to 3e and 3.5e.

I certainly appreciated that 3e was convertible from 2e . . . we converted over all our AD&D characters to 3e, and continued to use the Greyhawk setting I've almost always used.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

Trying this again, but with less snark-additives

My original point was more about why you felt you needed to start a thread on this subject. You do seem to be agreeing with me here that you can just drop all the extra supplements you really don't want or need?

That they also introduced a incredibly verbose way of writing the classes with completely seperate powers for each class and adding twenty or so extra classes is something I didn't appreciate as much, but I don't quite see the point of complaining about having too many options.

Basically, every edition of D&D has it's up and downs. Which one you end up playing usually has nothing to do with if it's better or worse than the other, but more about your play style and subjective preference.

5e looks to be more of a mix of the previous editions instead of a pure evolution and this probably partially due to some of the issues you have mentioned. It looks like they want to shed some of the weight they added with 4e. Except for the non-scaling attack bonuses and defences, I really don't like the character generation so far and the reports from assorted play-testers on this forums do mention that the "math" doesn't really add up too well so far. I have no idea if I will like the finished product.

We agree on a lot of points, actually. I think you understand that my complaints are valid, but you're confused because I'm taking the time to actually complain about them. My guess is that you've been active on message boards too long, my friend. I don't participate as much as I once did, largely because I find myself more productive (and happier) doing other things. I will browse to gather news, information, and even insight through different perspectives. But for the most part, I avoid getting drawn in unless I *really* need to get something off my chest. I'm not working a conspiracy theory or plotting a rebellion here. I just have something I've really been wanting to say for a long time, and didn't feel like waiting any longer for someone else to come out and say it for me. I am entitled to give my voice, just like everyone else. If I continued to say nothing, keep silent, minded my own business, no one would ever learn the reasons people like me make their choices.

So why did I wait this long to say anything until now? Why do I even bother? Because I am 42 years old. I've been playing living with this game for about three decades. I have spent thousands of dollars and hours in one way or another. I believe I'm entitled to have a say in it whenever I decide. But as a loyal and dedicated fan, and now a former customer, I want it to be understood why some people, like myself, are done with all of this. I want it to be understood why I, at least, am no longer going along for the ride, or even care how good (or bad) the next product will be.

I am fifty five and have been playing for a long time. I sometimes feel this way not about new supplements I enjoy new supplements but the constant tweaking and changing of the rule system gets to me. At least with 3E you could tweak your Ad&D worlds and characters to fit but when 4E came out that was impossible it totally wiped out 30 something years of the game. That was just one of the many issues I had with it. It is why I am looking at Next with a jaundiced eye and really have we will see after it comes out.

I've felt this way for a long time. I stopped buying games based on the 'wall of books' publishing model sometime in the early 90s - I think Call of Cthulhu was the last RPG where I bought extensive setting books, guides, campaigns and scenarios.

I completely understand where you're coming from. I hit a similar wall around 2008, with the advent of 4e. I was tired. I didn't want to deal with the crap, the opinions, the gnashing of teeth and tearing of clothes, the endless cycle, the thought that maybe -this- thing would be better. I couldn't take the numbers of 3e/d20/PF, had no interest in 4e, and remembered enough of 1e & 2e to not be that interested in the OSR.

Jacob it was great to see this thread and the fact that others out there are as frustrated as our gaming group has become. Our group came together in the early 1990's and has wandered back and forth between gaming systems for 20 years now. I started playing at the age of 10 with a copy of the third edition of Chainmail. Things have moved a lot since then and I too have complete sets of all the books from basic thru 3.5 and Pathfinder as well as numerous other gaming systems but our group always comes back to our core campaign that I have been running since 1992. The characters may have changed but the world is the same. One I drew up by hand origionally (i am a cartographer by trade) and later imported into Campaign Cartographer. There is a discussion right now in the group if we should shift the game into pathfinder but to date that is unresolved. 4th edition fell flat on its face with our group and we never went past picking up the base book set.

As for the fact that the 3.5 books now comprise 2 full shelves on a bookcase and the supplements an additional 2 shelves well I agree it would be nice if we could have the depth and experience without the need for all the mechanics but in all of our explorations of other games which litter my shelves we have yet to find one that we really enjoy. The closest was probably Savage worlds but even that died after about 6 months.

Some of us are just tired of always settling for less than what we deserve.

 

[bleakraven]

Well said, most people do forget its a game powered by your imagination and simply supported by the books...

 

[Aeolius]

You just dislike because they didn't give 'em gills.

4e was remarkably dry.

 

[Umbran]

Do you think there is any other way to design and market a successful tabletop RPG that doesn't follow the traditional formulas?

Yes, and they have been trying it, too, but you've said you don't want anything to do with "renting" content or using computers in the game. You may need to be open to the idea that the other way that works may not be what you want.

In other words, is it just commonly accepted that a business model designed and marketed for a niche audience at least 20 years ago is still the best/only way today? Can there be a robust, fun, and viable RPG system/product that doesn't require volumes of books and rules to make it work?

I am fairly convinced that the basic modes of business available are limited by the niche-nature of the market. And that's not due to game design, or marketing, but due to the nature of the activity. Just as not everyone enjoys model trains as a hobby, not everyone enjoys RPGs. That means market saturation will always be an issue for publishers, making a game based in a single-small book unlikely to be economically desirable for the publisher.

Plus, I think you overestimate how many gamers are really interested in having such a game as their main option in the hobby. Of the niche market, a great many of the potential players are, for lack of a better term, "gearheads," for whom fiddling around with the rules is a major part of their fun with the game. For these folks, a game that is too simple with relatively few moving parts and fiddly bits will be unsatisfactory, leaving that single-book game to be, in essence, a game for a niche within the niche.

So, I think you'll find that, for both players and publishers, the truly successful and viable games (you didn't satisfactorally define what you meant by those terms, so I'm using my own feelings on the words) need to be rather more complicated.

People look at it and see dozens of books around a game table and think to themselves "Do I really need to buy all this just to play a game?"

I don't think that's so, largely because it isn't really true. I, for example, am running Classic Deadlands, a game with something like a dozen books. I, as GM, have a stack of books. Of my players, however, I think only one (maybe two) out of the six of them even owns the player's manual, and certainly only one of them ever references the book during play. We open a rule-book maybe once per session, on average.

The many books are there for those who want them (which is a considerable number, admittedly). But they aren't necessary for everyone - from 3e onwards, so long as the group as a whole isn't focused on powergaming it has been entirely possible to make a perfectly viable and interesting character with just the PHB. I daresay that games where the majority of folks are referencing a horde of books in play is not particularly prevalent, making your image here a bit of a bugaboo.

So, those extra books are required for economic viability for the publisher, and to give enough options to the game so gearheads are attracted to play alongside folks like you - these two together are required for real "success" and "viability" for both the publishers and players. But I don't think those extra books are actually intimidating folks and causing them to stay away from the game.

 

[Ryujin]

Jacob, there's a certain resonance for me in your original rant. I'm going to hit 50 in a couple of years and have been playing D&D, and a plethora of other RPGs, since the late '70s. Every now and then something a little different came along and distracted me for a little while, but I've generally come back to some form of D&D. Why? Because it generally took several years before they decided that they'd plumbed the well dry and decided to turn out another version, so that they could get another few hundred bucks out of us on new books. The cycle tends to be shorter for other games.

Or doesn't exist at all.

One of the issues my gaming friends and I have, these days, is that we actually have fully formed lives away from gaming. Girl friends, wives, kids, and non gaming friends take more and more of our time, and time is a precious commodity. It has gotten to the point where we can no longer spend many hours on world development and adventure creation, and so must rely upon authors to do these things for us. Great systems like Alternity come out and then die on the vine, because they lack adventure support for the aging likes of us. Many gaming systems are published and have absolutely NO support for anything, other than the basic game rules. There are many games out there that we'd like to try, but we simply don't have any spare amounts of that precious commodity to use.

I think that there's one basic truth, that is largely being ignored by many companies; the demographic is changing. Younger gamers are playing on consoles and computers. It's older gamers who are tending to drive the RPG market. There are certain things to consider, when you realize that truth.

So create all of the splat books, world books, and expansions that you want to but, if there simply isn't the time to create what is used WITH them, they're going to stay on the shelf.

 

[Aeolius]

It has gotten to the point where we can no longer spend many hours on world development and adventure creation, and so must rely upon authors to do these things for us.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that. I am married, have seven kids, and have my job. I also have a "hobby farm" with horses, donkeys, goats, and the like. Yes, I have most of the 3.5e splat books but my game is basically The World of Greyhawk + Stormwrack + 3.5e/d20. To this I add inspiration from OCEAN and Blue Planet , as well as my saltwater aquariums and a handful of websites. That's more than enough for world building and adventure hooks, so long as you have an overactive imagination, a willing suspension of disbelief, and a "somewhat less intact box".