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

[AbdulAlhazred]

Actually, I'd argue that the 30 large supplements in 5 years was a big reason it did fail. Too much content too fast. They saturated the market and no one would buy the content.

I've done a blog post on why 4e failed. The solid majority of the reasons have nothing to do with the system itself.

Did it fail though? Well, I discuss that in my blog but they fired the man in charge of 4e (Bill Slavicsek) and decided to spent three years racking up debts and making a new edition rather than continue to publish 4e, so that's a bad sign. And the company lost its position as market leader to a company essentially dedicated to re-publishing an abandoned edition of the game.

Did I like 4e? I found it okay. It was adequate. I rather liked what they were doing with the later books post-Essentials.
I was initially rather anti-4e. Or rather, I was really supportive of the changes during the design but disappointing by the final product. Initially just by the pure combat focus and needless symmetry of the classes. As I played and ran the game I mellowed to some aspects but saw other problems more and more.
Still, even when running and playing it wasn't my preferred edition and did not let me tell the stories I wanted to tell. I always found myself compromising my adventures to accommodation the needs of the game. With well over two years of 4e experience under my belt I could probably do better, and have a better idea of the stories that would compliment the system. There are stories that 4e would have been good at telling, but they were never high on my list and my main group wholeheartedly rejected 4e so considering them was a moot point.


I don't think he can.
He's the manager of D&D (he's in charge of the entire brand but isn't technically the one making the game), but there's more than a couple levels of bureaucracy above him. What can and cannot be revealed is pretty heavily controlled and WotC as a company has a pretty serious problem with secrecy and control.

Plus I think they're still working on the details. They can't get into specifics because they haven't solidified yet because they're still tweaking the base game. They have ideas and know how it should work but they haven't actually written it enough to say for sure.


Clarke's first law states: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Given how totally and completely different d20 Modern felt from 3e or Gamma World felt from 4e, I say it is quite possible.


However you're also not even close to unanimous with that opinion.

Keep in mind the surveys. (I assume you're actually filling out the surveys and not just ranting on message boards that will never be read.)
They're reading the surveys. They can see how many people are happy and how many are upset. And they've stated they're willing to make major changes if as little as 10% of respondents are unhappy.

So there are a few likely options:
a) they're ignoring 4e fans outright
b) they're lying and don't care if people like the game
c) they're hoping when the tactical modules are released more 4e fans will be happy
d) the percentage of unhappy fans is smaller than 10%

Now, if the answer is a) or b) we're pretty much screwed. And so is 5e. But they'd have to be pretty silly to do that and risk killing a game they grew up playing and​ sacrifice their jobs (especially as jobs in the RPG industry might be hard to get if they're seen as the people who killed D&D).

C) is a possibility. I included it out of fairness. It's worrisome as it means they might be in for disappointment if the tactical module goes up like a lead balloon and is hated by ardent 4e fans. This is the most-likely bad scenario.
But it does mean the worst case scenario is a tactical module that doesn't appeal to a fraction of a fraction of the total audience.

The most likely scenario is d): people like 5e and the majority are satisfied with what they see or are optimistic about the game. Let's face it, forum goers are a pretty niche sampling of the audience and people complaining on message boards are not likely to be a representational sampling. Casual players or those content with what they're seeing are unlikely to spend their free hours ranting online. And, frankly, the majority of players will likely play whatever game is set before them.
While the surveys are likely skewed as well, favouring those who want to comment or are interested enough in the playtest to, well, playtest, there's a far better chance of an even sampling there than here.


Umm.... well... kinda.
I don't there's a single thing that you can point to and say "this makes 4e into 4e." Some might say AEDU powers. Others might say the focus on encounters as the core of combat. Others might point to tactical gameplay. Some might view the strong party roles as defining of 4e. And others still might say something like the Nentir Vale, Primordials, and dragonborn.

Some of those things are easier to integrate into 5e than others. They've already discussed a module that makes PC resources into Encounter resources. And there is the tactical module. Those two options together might satisfy a large percentage of 4e fans.

Will they satisfy every single 4e fan? No. But neither will they satisfy every 1e or 3e or PF fan. This is the gamble of 5e.
4e gambled that it could try and satisfy a large majority of 3e fans and make up for lost fans with new fans, such as MMO players. Instead, it satisfied a minority of 3e fans and an unsustainable number of new players.
5e is trying a very different tactic, focusing first on appealing to actual fans of the game rather than potential fans (read: theoretical fans). The alternative, the 4.5e, would be a huge mistake as; just like 3.5e, it would not pull in all 4e fans nor would it attract fans from previous editions. 4.5e would target a very, very niche audience. 5e at least has the change of attracting a larger audience.

You still make many unjustified assumptions about the success and acceptance of 4e. Some people screamed about it on boards, I can as easily dismiss that as you dismiss the screaming about DDN. I'd also note that there was plenty of positive talk going on about 4e from practically every quarter before it came out. I don't think it is justified to say that 4e lost WotC anything. Did it lose them market share? Really? Overall? At specific times specific PF books have outsold specific 4e books. It is very hard to say that PF is anything beyond a trivial factor in terms of 4e as a product and its market. Most of the people I know own 4e even if they also own PF. Clearly WotC can ask itself "how would we got THOSE sales as well as the ones we have", but that doesn't mean they've lost sales compared to 3.x. Clearly if 3.x was selling well then why would they have made 4e?

PF is a very mild update (if you can even call it an update) of 3.5, its not like it captured market by being a better game, or created some completely new experience that people had to have. IMHO PF's popularity is all about people that LIKE Paizo. I think they found a successful niche in producing a full-featured D&D clone and styling it and providing it with material that meets their particular aesthetics and qualities. It is good material, but I am not at all convinced that it is popular BECAUSE of 4e, but more DESPITE 4e.

As for your "Mike can't talk about it because TOP SECRET" that's just IMHO utter nonsense. He's talked and talked and talked about the design of DDN ad-nauseum for the past 2 years. Why on God's Green Earth would any possible mention of what would make it appealing to a major part of their customer base be so secret that he can talk about every other part of the game and not that? The notion is just not tenable. The only reasonable interpretation is he has nothing to talk about. The most parsimonious interpretation of that is because there IS nothing to talk about, in fact there are no major features designed to appeal to 4e players.

That isn't of course 100% fair, we assume there's still a 'tactical module' on the agenda somewhere, but its odd that such a thing would be relegated to the end of development and demand so little validation that if it doesn't show up real soon now it isn't going to be present at release at all. I mean if Vancian casting deserves 2 years of P/T then surely tactical combat deserves an equal amount, and should equally be likely to influence core design decisions? I'm puzzled there, but whatever, its quite possible it will be everything people have asked for.

Of course it really isn't tactical combat that matters to many of us. It was generalized mechanics (which in the case of 4e was embodied in AEDU power schedules mostly), exception-based design (which BTW has nothing to do with the feel of the game), and narrative features/reskinnability. NONE of those are things that can really be tacked on (I suppose you could provide a whole alternate set of classes). Core rules would probably need to work differently as well, healing, skills, etc. The question isn't so much 'can you hack this game to be that game' as "is it worth completely rewriting this game to be that game, just so you can say that you're publishing only one game and not two?". Once the 'modules' become so extensive that it would be cheaper for everyone if there were just 2 separate rule books with different names is there really a whole lot of point left in this exercise?

I think 5e will be lucky attract an audience as large as 4e's. Like every edition it will have a bubble, but I don't think it will be sustainable. Its a tapped out formula.

 

[ForeverSlayer]

PF is a very mild update (if you can even call it an update) of 3.5, its not like it captured market by being a better game, or created some completely new experience that people had to have. IMHO PF's popularity is all about people that LIKE Paizo. I think they found a successful niche in producing a full-featured D&D clone and styling it and providing it with material that meets their particular aesthetics and qualities. It is good material, but I am not at all convinced that it is popular BECAUSE of 4e, but more DESPITE 4e.

Mate, you are seriously grasping at straws with a statement like this.

Just listen to yourself for a moment. "People buy Pathfinder because they like Paizo." I really don't know what to say about this only that it's absurd and Pathfinder is more than a mild update of 3.5, if you actually played the game then you would know that.

The bottom line is Pathfinder's still trucking while 4th edition is not. You can love 4th edition all you want but the game wasn't what the majority of fans wanted so it was cancelled which concludes that it was a failure. You may not think it was a failure mechanics wise but it didn't do what the designers and Wizard's wanted it to do, andy please don't give us that line about Hasbro setting the bar too high for D&D to reach.

Ever see someone shoveling dirt behind them without actually turning around to see what's going on? That was 4th edition, they were pushing so much material out that they didn't bother to look back and see if it was really selling or not. It's not like 4th edition was out out there, time passed for everyone to absorb it and then based on it's popularity new material was put out. This stuff was coming whether we liked it or not.

Now looking at Next, I see it as being an even larger failure than 4th edition. If you check out a lot of the forums you will see people talking more about Pathfinder/3.5 and loads of interest in 2nd edition.

The game currently appears to be going more towards a general system with less of the iconic D&D flavor which will hurt the game in the end because there are a lot better generic D&D type systems out there in all honesty and the current mechanics are not anywhere close to ground breaking so I don't see this movie ending to well. I could be wrong because I hate to see D&D fall but there's no sense in ignoring what's in front of us.

 

[Jester David]

Mate, you are seriously grasping at straws with a statement like this.

Just listen to yourself for a moment. "People buy Pathfinder because they like Paizo." I really don't know what to say about this only that it's absurd and Pathfinder is more than a mild update of 3.5, if you actually played the game then you would know that.

I actually agree with that. Paizo has great fan support and a very, very loyal customer base. Pathfinder succeeds because of Paizo.

 

[Umbran]

Folks,

The top of this forum has a warning about edition warring in it. Heed it. If you fail to heed it, you'll find yourself removed from the conversation.

Oh, and did we mention - one of the things we lost in the hack was the threadban feature? Until that's back, if we have to remove you from a conversation, we have to give you a vacation from the site. So, really, don't edition war. You won't like the results.

If that's clear, we're good. If not, please PM or e-mail a moderator of your choice to discuss the matter. Thanks, all!

 

[El Mahdi]

Post Deleted.



(Umbran's post was posted while I was still writing mine, and didn't see his post until after I posted.)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

err....you can do almost any sort of fantasy with FATE, thanks to its narrative outlook. What you can't do (or is very hard to do) is a finely-detailed X's and O's tactical game, regardless of genre. Dungeon World is a brilliant game, and wonderfully suited to its purpose, but I'm not sure what does that FATE couldn't. Both approach role-play from a narrative perspective (Neither is good for X's and O's). The main difference (outside core die mechanisms) is that DW is fairly hard-coded for producing one particular type of experience/narrative. Honestly, that's neither good or bad, its just different.

Sure, different. When you want a game of type "X" you use game "A", and for "Y" you use game "B". Its always been that way. Sure, there are also 'framework' systems like GURPS, FATE to some extent, d20, etc, but they never deliver the same level of focus on tone, genre, setting, or agenda like a specific game does. Just adding modules to a core CAN go some ways, but not all the way, not even close.

I wasn't claiming that. I would claim that rules can be much more flexible than you seem to be giving them credit for. Making them tightly-focused in tone and color, and serving a singular creative agenda is a design choice, not an inherent property of rpg design.

Well, this is also a very hard conversation to have in a vacuum. Look at DDN's design and tell me that you would make a highly reskinnable game with a narrative agenda and an encounter focus out of it. Is it possible in some way? Sure, if you rip out 99% of the rules and replace them. At that level of customization nothing is really common.

There a plenty of folks (4e fans all) on this board who will expound for you how well and tightly 4e presents its tone, feel, and inherent narratives. I also think it does so successfully. The problem is that that tone and feel are scripted (to use the term loosely) into the powers, races, classes, and monsters as written (much like Dungeon World.) This isn't a failure at all, it is (AFAIK) what its designers intended. If you wanted to evoke a very different feel for the game, you'd need to do some significant re-writing. (I would suspect that the out-of-combat side is less this way.) Personally, I have found it very hard to give 4e a gritty (not the same as deadly) feel. A quick Google will reveal many threads on many rpg-boards with folks frustrated at trying to run a gritty game in 4e. Given the following comment, I don't think I'm alone in seeing 4e as rather tightly bound to a certain tone and feel:

I don't think Mike is saying that 4e IS bound to some narrow tone/genre/etc but that it has been presented and perceived that way. It is impossible to know what he thinks about the actual flexibility of the system. However let me ask you this, in what way is 4e less flexible than 1e or 2e? I see no evidence whatsoever that it is. Saying that "all the existing powers are designed for a fantasy action hero game" is all well and good, but in that case 3e is all about a high magic fantasy game of powerful wizards, yet somehow people managed to use it for other things. I've so far seen 4e WITHOUT mechanical changes, just reskinning, used to do a Star Wars game and a Super Hero game (literally using the races, classes, weapons, powers, etc of 4e right out of the book, characters can be built in CB and then reskinned, no numbers change). With new classes and powers it can certain do much more than that, and with slightly deeper changes (different skills, alternate subsystems of various types) I think its pretty clear you can do a wide variety of things.

Again, when have we seen any such thing before d20 at all? Original Gamma World/Met Alpha was the ONLY other game that was even loosely based on pre-d20 D&D. And if you look at 4e and d20 they're pretty close to being the same system with some extra polish going to 4e's engine. So, I can't read Mike's mind, but if he was trying to say 4e can't do anything but one narrow thing, then fire the idiot, I could care less if he helped write it, the guy has lost his marbles.

If you can't take the word of one of the dudes who designed the thing....well, I'm at a loss.

If Isaac Newton told me I could flap my arms and fly I still wouldn't jump off the Empire State Building, that's right. You can be at whatever loss you want to be at, it doesn't matter.

I'm not sure how "Even so, many people played Old-school D&D with wide variety of agendas and stances. (Still do, in fact.)" turned into "Old-School D&D would be a good basis for a universal rpg." That wasn't even close to the point I was heading at. Refuting the one has nothing to do with the other. Old-School D&D is where most of what we call creative agendas and stances were invented, even if they weren't well-understood or named. I'll agree that they are not all equally well-supported by the rules, but the point was that one set rules can serve different agendas. If anything, I think it requires a good deal of intent to make an rpg that only serves one creative agenda.

I've never heard of anyone doing narrativist classic D&D, certainly not before really narrativist games were released. Presumably there was a guy somewhere who got frustrated with his D&D and wrote "My Life With Master" etc at some point in the early 80's, but does that count as 'stretching D&D' or recognizing its limitations. In fact D&D has become more and more focused on a sort of process-sim type of agenda over the years, if anything. It was at least pretty abstract back in the early days. So sure, in some sense it wasn't 'hard' to do some completely different agenda with say OD&D, but that was more because nobody could quite figure out what it was to start with. The proof is in the pudding though, all those people went on and invented different systems. Heck, Traveller came out within a year of D&D and immediately invented a very different sort of skill based system (clearly it owes a good bit to D&D and is a very SIM agenda game, but the tone and other aspects are quite different and its mechanics specifically support them).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Clearly, Mr. Alhazred, we are the ones having badwrongfun and must be Doing It Wrong and thus our discontent and butthurt reactions in this thread

Clearly we are less than a 10th percentile of survey respondents, so our opinions don't count for much.

Truthfully, I think the answer is closer to C. I believe that Mearls & co really do believe that their 'tactical module' is going to be the silver bullet that brings all the 4e fans into the fold of Next. I think he's in for a rude awakening, because I think it's a mistake to assume that by including per-encounter resource management and a tactical grid is the only thing that makes 4e, 4e. It's not, and only time will tell if all our kvetching is for naught, or not.

I think it is easy for people to convince themselves of things. Mike sat down one day and said "you know, I like 1e AD&D better than I like 4e, why can't we make that game instead?" and he's had that agenda ever since. This is by his own admission to a certain extent. I don't think he or other people are saying we're having badwrongfun, they are simply saying that they're going to be the arbiters of what is D&D now, and we're not going to be heard in that discussion.

I don't think we're less than 10% of anything, that's hogwash. What we are is out of fashion with Mike. It isn't hard to design a set of surveys and a set of game packages to cater to what you want. I don't think Mike doesn't THEORETICALLY believe he wants to make a game for everyone, but the whole process has become horribly skewed. We only have to look at the result to see that. Chances are yes, Mike has convinced himself that a 'tactical module' is the essence of 4e. He'd probably have LOLed that notion 4 years ago, but its easy to convince yourself of what you want to convince yourself of.

Honestly, I think the best response at this point would be a "New School Hack" of DDN. SHOW THEM what would work and be acceptable.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think you may be staking out an unrealistic and untenable expectation.
Considering that there are multiple editions before 4e, I wouldn't expect you to get to the halfway mark. Maybe that's where your expectations are problematic. It's not everybody else vs 4e. They're trying to satisfy D&D (x3ish editions), AD&D 1e, AD&D 2e, D&D 3e, D&D 3.5e, D&D 4e. If that were arrayed out in a best fit plane, I don't think you'd be able to expect more than meeting about 1/8 in your direction. Now, of course there's a lot of overlap in those earlier editions, so maybe there actually is a bit of that everyone else vs 4e actually going on. But even so, they'll still have to consider balancing the optimal negotiating point around their best understanding of how the differing market segments are distributed.

Yeah, I think it is kind of "all others vs 4e" though I admit there are some areas where other editions might not totally overlap. HOWEVER they were mostly a linear addition of material from OD&D -> 1e -> 2e -> 3e, so its not exactly hard to make a game that simply adds more bits to cover all of them, and they have the same basic agenda etc. In fact DDN does this reasonably well. The thing is it just doesn't do ANY of 4e, not 1/8th or even 1/32nd of it (well, maybe its 1/32nd 4e, lol, but that's being generous). There's no point if all we can get is some at-will spells added to vancian wizards (and that isn't even really unique to 4e).

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

...I don't think he or other people are saying we're having badwrongfun, they are simply saying that they're going to be the arbiters of what is D&D now, and we're not going to be heard in that discussion.

I don't think we're less than 10% of anything, that's hogwash.

Yes, this was me being sarcastic/tongue-in-cheek, and maybe a tad passive-aggressive. I should have added some eyeroll smileys. Heh. I basically agree with you that it's hogwash.

What we are is out of fashion with Mike. It isn't hard to design a set of surveys and a set of game packages to cater to what you want. I don't think Mike doesn't THEORETICALLY believe he wants to make a game for everyone, but the whole process has become horribly skewed. We only have to look at the result to see that. Chances are yes, Mike has convinced himself that a 'tactical module' is the essence of 4e. He'd probably have LOLed that notion 4 years ago, but its easy to convince yourself of what you want to convince yourself of.

Honestly, I think the best response at this point would be a "New School Hack" of DDN. SHOW THEM what would work and be acceptable.

Unless we're just seeing the ugly side of their marketing scheme - you know the one, I've speculated about it before - the one wherein they spend the first 3/4 of the dev cycle trashing on 4e to win back butthurt fans, then turn around and amp up the, "4e was the coolest thing evar!! Buy our new tactical module!" rhetoric for the last 1/4.

Time will tell.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Mate, you are seriously grasping at straws with a statement like this.

Just listen to yourself for a moment. "People buy Pathfinder because they like Paizo." I really don't know what to say about this only that it's absurd and Pathfinder is more than a mild update of 3.5, if you actually played the game then you would know that.

Ummmm, wow the cummupence! I hate to tell you this, but PF is very widely seen as a fairly minor update of 3.5. Its almost 100% compatible with 3.5 in fact. I'm also unaware of your being a member of my gaming group that you would know which games I have and haven't played

Perhaps I'm not being clear. I think there are things people like about Paizo. I think they've played the "small underdog" quite well vs WotC the corporate behemoth. However, what I'm really talking about is the design and execution of their products, their marketing, the fact that they actually sell PDFs (OK, as of what a month ago WotC finally gave in and joined the 21st Century, but still). Heck, I don't especially like PF but I still like their community and the people that work for Paizo. They write FAR better adventures and a wider range and originality of supplements etc. However, I don't think their game system FOR ME AND MANY OTHER PEOPLE holds a candle to 4e, and I think most of 4e material is great (just write your own adventures, but I always have).

The bottom line is Pathfinder's still trucking while 4th edition is not. You can love 4th edition all you want but the game wasn't what the majority of fans wanted so it was cancelled which concludes that it was a failure. You may not think it was a failure mechanics wise but it didn't do what the designers and Wizard's wanted it to do, andy please don't give us that line about Hasbro setting the bar too high for D&D to reach.

4e was canceled? Really? Huh, seems to me that it is the current version of D&D. Its already lasted as long as the previous version did. I don't see any way shape or form in which 4e 'failed' or 'was canceled' or any such nonsense. And whether you like it or not its a mater of record that WotC sold Hasbro on $50m annual sales, its not a 'line'. You don't have to like any of this but it is silly to deny it.

Ever see someone shoveling dirt behind them without actually turning around to see what's going on? That was 4th edition, they were pushing so much material out that they didn't bother to look back and see if it was really selling or not. It's not like 4th edition was out out there, time passed for everyone to absorb it and then based on it's popularity new material was put out. This stuff was coming whether we liked it or not.

Excuse me? I was THERE on the 4e boards and with my friends and etc and I saw how eagerly each 4e supplement was picked up and how people swarmed to the places that got them out a day early, etc. Even the later Power series splat books were eagerly awaited by many people. YOU didn't like the game, that's all. Those supplements were perfectly good. A lot of the earlier ones were pretty hard crunchy, and they've perfected their delivery and made even better supplements since the Power series, but there was nothing wrong with those, nor were they disliked.

Now looking at Next, I see it as being an even larger failure than 4th edition. If you check out a lot of the forums you will see people talking more about Pathfinder/3.5 and loads of interest in 2nd edition.

The game currently appears to be going more towards a general system with less of the iconic D&D flavor which will hurt the game in the end because there are a lot better generic D&D type systems out there in all honesty and the current mechanics are not anywhere close to ground breaking so I don't see this movie ending to well. I could be wrong because I hate to see D&D fall but there's no sense in ignoring what's in front of us.

IMHO DDN most closely resembles a somewhat less haphazard 2e with probably some 3e aspects tacked on. If you leave off the non-basic parts then you'd have a game SIMILAR to a Basic or OD&D in some ways (but different in some respects that might be important, still, its 2013, not 1974). If flavor demands absolute adherence to the old rules, then sure, DDN will be something different from that, but in that case you're in luck, its VERY easy to get AD&D books! Heck, you can buy mint copies of the 1e book for usually $10-20 on eBay.