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

[Pour]

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.

Hey, I'm included in the badwrongfun too! AND the kvetching. Nothing boils my blood like the 'we won so get out of here, losers' vibe some of these other posts drip. 4e is destined to be the black sheep of the family, but I don't mind it one bit. It's bred some excellent company! Cheers, [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's an EXCELLENT question! What do you say Abdul...?

Hmmm...all interesting points and laid out logically. But I can't help but notice that YOU DIDN'T ANSWER THE QUESTION...

The ball is in your court...

Oh come now, if we want to be blunt, well everyone has their tune and I have yet to see people bend much at all on this whole topic. Again, look at the topic of the thread. It isn't about "all the stuff you think about DDN", its about "wrong path", so that's what we talk about. Since when was I responsible to answering your question? lol. You can imagine whatever you wish, it doesn't really matter to me. Of course everyone imagines that someone is going to read their thread and some lightbulb is going to come on and they're going to take you up on your idea. Isn't that sort of the universal fantasy of all the type of people that would post in this thread?

But really, watch it, your motives could just as easily be questioned!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Hey, I'm included in the badwrongfun too! AND the kvetching. Nothing boils my blood like the 'we won so get out of here, losers' vibe some of these other posts drip. 4e is destined to be the black sheep of the family, but I don't mind it one bit. It's bred some excellent company! Cheers, @AbdulAlhazred

Yeah, that vibe definitely gets under my skin too. The reality is just that WotC's business plan is 3-5 years, then refresh, meanwhile cram out a ton of books. 3.5 and 4e both are marked by that, clearly both editions have plenty of life in them still. Now MAYBE WotC is changing its product strategy with 5e, they've claimed as much, but of course market dynamics and human nature may yet undermine that, who knows... The 3.5 fans should just go and be happy that Paizo supports them so very very well. With 4e's license we'll never get that favor.

The company is good, yeah. Too bad we can't all raise up a table and roll some dice together! We can invite the Canuck and etc too, they'll have fun.

 

[Jester David]

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

It's not impossible. I'll get into this more below.

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

Or maybe, just maybe, you are not the sole voice of 4e fans. That maybe you are not a representative sample of what the 4e community wants. IF there's even such as thing as "the 4e community" and not a wide array of people who played and enjoyed 4th Edition.

Let's presuming for moment that the majority of 4e fans are unhappy with 5th Edition. Now, this is a big presumption because saying "the majority of gamers believe X" is a pretty darn bold statement. I'd be wary about saying "the majority of all gamers like rolling dice." But for the sake of discussion let's assume that a solid majority is dissatisfied with what they've seen so far of D&D Next.
This still does not mean that they'll all be dissatisfied with the same things: different people might be more upset about different things. Some might not like the return of Vancian casting while others might be dissatisfied with the current design of the fighter. Others might long for the return of the combat grid rules or second wind. Still others might be pining for the warlord.
With opinions spread out all over the place, it's quite possible no one group is really unhappy enough with a single element to hit the 10% mark.

Let's also do some pretend math. Given the playtest is free and has attracted players from all editions, let's say that 4th edition players make up a solid third of the playtest. So 1/3rd is 4e, 1/3rd is 3e/PF, and 1/3rd is 1e, 2e, Basic, and OD&D.
(This is actually a pretty high percentage given there are roughly equal numbers of Pathfinder players, and given the best selling edition of all time is still 1st Edition.)
Now, if half of all 4e players are unhappy with 5e, that's still only 16%. So half of all 4e players participating are happy (or content) and the other happy are dissatisfied with as few as two different elements, that cuts the percentages down to 8%.

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.

For starters, please remember Mike Mearls is the manager of the entire D&D Brand. He's not really writing or designing the game. He's not in charge of the design.
But he is the one that will take all the blame if it fails. Given he's risking his job, future employment in his field, and the existence of a hobby he's enjoyed since he was a child... don't you think he'd want to be sure and play it safe? To read the surveys and feedback carefully?

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

It's not impossible. I'll get into this more below.

Pure conjecture based on no evidence whatsoever. Anything presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

For starters, please remember Mike Mearls is the manager of the entire D&D Brand. He's not really writing or designing the game. He's not in charge of the design.

That's where the "& co" part comes in. In any case, judging by the podcasts, he has more than a small influence on the design though.

But he is the one that will take all the blame if it fails. Given he's risking his job, future employment in his field, and the existence of a hobby he's enjoyed since he was a child... don't you think he'd want to be sure and play it safe? To read the surveys and feedback carefully?

Like I said, I think that he probably feels like he's doing what's best, but as AA pointed out, in a closed environment, even with survey feedback, it's pretty easy to convince yourself of whatever you want. That data still has to be interpreted and is probably presented in a report to him (I seriously doubt he reads it all personally.)

In any case, even if you have decided that us "naysayers" are just a vocal minority, doesn't make our opinions any less valid, nor does it give you any kind of power to tell us what basically amounts to, "change your mind, or cope and shut up about it."

I'm also not sure if you noticed this, but every one of those feedback surveys requires you to indicate your favourite edition as one of the first questions. I think it's more than a little possible that they use that one question to weight the importance of feedback given; it's entirely possible/likely that a lot of the harsher criticisms of the direction Next is taking that come from self-professed 4e fans simply do not carry as much weight for the design team as their chase market (3.x or PF people) and thus get filed into a pile labeled "butthurt 4th ed fans" or similar.

 

[Jacob Marley]

I'm also not sure if you noticed this, but every one of those feedback surveys requires you to indicate your favourite edition as one of the first questions. I think it's more than a little possible that they use that one question to weight the importance of feedback given; it's entirely possible/likely that a lot of the harsher criticisms of the direction Next is taking that come from self-professed 4e fans simply do not carry as much weight for the design team as their chase market (3.x or PF people) and thus get filed into a pile labeled "butthurt 4th ed fans" or similar.

Pure conjecture based on no evidence whatsoever. Anything presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

So, do you have evidence supporting the bolded portion?

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

So, do you have evidence supporting the bolded portion?

Nope! So feel free to dismiss it.

However, you will note that I wasn't stating it as some kind of fact; I merely presented it as a possibility. Which it is (a possibility).

It carries every bit as much weight as the speculation that the pro-4e naysayers make up less than 10% of the feedback respondents, and every bit as much weight as pretend math.

 

[Jester David]

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.

Well, they cancelled four books and stopped producing new content. The final 4th edition book was the Dungeon Survival Handbook published in May 2012. Which puts the lifespan of 4e at just under four years: June 2008 - May 2012. Now, assuming 3.5e was a separate edition from 3.0e it ran from July 2003 to December 2007 putting it a hair over four years.
So 4e lasted several months less than 3.5e.

As I've said before, they wouldn't have launched the D&D Next project if 4e was making a satisfactory revenue stream. By the time 5e launches they will have been working on the game for three years. The first year (2011-12) they continued to release books written by freelancers while the in-house staff worked on the game. This means WotC was paying people other than their salaried staff writers to write books. The staff paid to make content that generates profit for WotC essentially does not generate profit for three years. Three years of salaries, benefits, office space, and the like.
From an interview Mike Mearls gave the Tome Show podcast we know there are roughly 20-25 people involved in the D&D brand. Let's assuming as few as half will have spent the three years writing and testing the game and not been involved in board games, novels, or the miniature games. Even at a low salary of $30,000 a year, that's over a million dollars in salaries alone paid for the development of 5th Edition. Again, not including office space, utilities, computers, benefits, travel expenses to conventions, and the like.

So either 4e was not a major commercial success (i.e. "failed") or it was doing fine and WotC decided to piss away a million dollars on the hopes of something better.

Now, keep in mind, the reasons 4e failed might only partially involve the system. There are many, many other factors that likely influenced its declining sales. Such the ability of people to get all the content via the Character Builder for a single monthly fee, the lack of 3rd Party support, the radical revisions to the lore of the game, the "nuking" of the Forgotten Realms, and devaluing the core books via updates and accessories that replaced the PHB. None pf those have anything to do with the rule system or the game but easily could have impacted sales.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

Now, keep in mind, the reasons 4e failed might only partially involve the system. There are many, many other factors that likely influenced its declining sales. Such the ability of people to get all the content via the Character Builder for a single monthly fee, the lack of 3rd Party support, the radical revisions to the lore of the game, the "nuking" of the Forgotten Realms, and devaluing the core books via updates and accessories that replaced the PHB. None pf those have anything to do with the rule system or the game but easily could have impacted sales.

To say nothing of the fact that it came out the same year that the US economy took its worst nose dive since the Great Depression, the likes of which they are still recovering from.

And you forgot to include the numbers for DDI in your pretend math. Even with only 50k subscribers at the best rate possible, that's a low-overhead income of 3.5million. The DDI group on the WotC forum puts that as a lowball. Keep in mind that not every subscriber is a member of the forum over there (I'm not and neither is the other guy in my group who subs), and that not everyone chooses the most preferable rate (yearly). It's impossible to nail down exact numbers, which makes pretend math rather pointless, but even with a rough, conservative estimate, that just covered your pretend salary calculations for the Next team for the entire development cycle.

I can guarantee you one thing: we're both wrong in our math.

 

[Ratskinner]

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 fail to see how a FATE implementation like Legends of Anglerre or Dresden Files fails to deliver the same level of focus that a game like D&D does. Creating such an implementation is rather trivial.

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.

Agreed about the vacuum.

Reskinnable? To some extent, sure. Certainly one could re-interpret DCs and the like to adjust "gonzocity". I'm not sure that I care about it being re-skinnable beyond its fantasy wheelhouse. I don't find that a particular virtue in a system, except for universal/generic systems, of course.

Narrative agenda? A little tougher, but can be added to a baseline old-school D&D with a modified alignment/XP system. (see below)

Encounter Focus? Trivial by adjusting the adventure design rules. I fully expect to see that come up as they have already talked about making the "recharge" trigger DM-determined.

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).

Your choice of examples is telling, whether you see it or not. The type of action that 4e was targetting includes the type of action you see in Star Wars, and people often refer to 4e's tone as "super-heroes". Changing between them is a fairly straightforward "reskinning" or re-coloring. Trying something like Game of Thrones or Black Company is more difficult. You're right about 3e, too. The difference is that its just easier to adjust that tone with 3e, as you seem to admit(?). Mostly because....

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.

...doing this is much harder in 4e than previous editions. Consider what that means for the different systems. If I want to adjust magic, or combat, or any other feature of the game....I can take 3e and do that by adding some feats, changing a few rules about initiative or combat casting, etc. Because of the structure, I can make changes to the tone of the game by directly addressing it. Now to do the same in 4e...well just consider what it would take to alter the tone of melee combat....all those powers to review and modify... In which system is it easier to generate a new class? If, as I am often informed, the powers and their functioning (all the X's and O's) is a necessary vehicle for the 4e architecture to convey tone, reworking the tone of melee combat would require examining and rewriting hundreds (thousands, by now?) of melee powers in multiple classes. I think sheer proliferation of classes, feats, spells, etc. in 3PP and on the internet argues for 3e/d20 there. In the older systems, things are even less structured.

Which is not to say that older editions were some universal system...far from it. However, the less narrative specificity the mechanics incur, the more is up to the table to invent. For any of the systems in question, the amount of work required is proportional to the deviation from its "home" tone and feel. Its just that slope of those valleys differs between the systems. I'll go a step further and point to a game that I suspect would be even harder to bend away from its native feel than 4e would be: Dungeon World. Reading the notes about how they developed the moves for the various classes...wow...at least 4e gives you a core mathematics to work from as you crank out the powers. In DW, you'd have to test and re-test each new or re-worked power to see how it felt in play. (I could be wrong on that, though. Folks are cranking out new DW classes fairly quickly. I haven't heard much talk about relative quality, though.)

I've never heard of anyone doing narrativist classic D&D, certainly not before really narrativist games were released.

Sure you have. They were called alignment restrictions and Paladins were/are the poster child for them, especially when a thief or assassin was in the party (or anybody evil/chaotic, in some versions). Of course, the old-school Paladin mainly faced the "stick" end of the mechanics. Gold for XP, and class-based XP rewards were a "carrot" to help push the thieves and assassins into conflict with the Pallys. Its a mechanic that drives players to confront a dramatic premise: Narrativist to the core. Above, when you asked if I could see adding Narrative Agendas to D&DNext, I was referring to this. Bolt on a more sophisticated and variable version and voila, you've got it. Coming up with the rules module for this wouldn't be exactly trivial, but its not impossible or even terribly difficult.

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.

No argument here, although many will argue that 4e breaks the trend towards process-sim.

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).

Yes. Once the basic idea of an rpg was out there, people started making other versions to better address things they wanted to see (with wildly varying degrees of success). That process hardly stopped or even slowed when 4e came out, so I'm not sure what you think it proves. Its not like 4e came out and suddenly all the other companies and indie designers closed up shop crying "Finally we have found the perfect Role-playing architecture!"