What If....4E had been a modular option sub-set for 3.5?

[n00bdragon]

The suggestion makes no sense. The real innovation 4e brought was that it was that nothing was shoe-horned onto something else. Everything was designed to fit nicely with the other 4e pieces and that's what made it good. It'd be like saying "What if LEGOs had never existed but plastic blocks had been an adaption onto Tinker Toys." I know very few 4e advocates who care much if anything about a particular aspect of 4e's design. They don't really care about powers or healing surges or any of that. What they like is the design symmetry that makes the crunch predictable and easy to play with. Like knowing how strong level X monsters should be or keeping everyone's attack and defense values within a coherent range or making sure they all acquire special abilities at the same rate and of roughly the same type (same number of attack powers, same number of utilities, etc). If you jammed that onto 3e you would lose all of that.

 

[TerraDave]

The n00bdragon is right, the main gain from 4E wasn't just some player options, it was the cleaner core rules. And the ease of DMing. Fighter dailies were just the icing on the cake.

 

[pemerton]

My question isn't how much or little it would have played. I'm more curious what the 4e players and diehards would be doing. Would they have tried to use a cribbed together 4e system, would there be a 4e pure system developed (a la pathfinder) and been successful? I don't know. It seems like many, very many, seemed to jump to 4e when they were casual enough not to care, or when they did care enough but disliked what 3.5 had to offer. To this end, I summon pemerton to try and add some insight.

I don't know that I have much insight to offer.

I didn't play 3E more than a handful of times, and didn't play 3.5 at all. The 3E material I bought was for ideas/adaptation to other systems (primarily Rolemaster at the time).

I heard of Tome of Battle and Tome of Magic but never looked at either. A 4e-style 3E supplement (whatever exactly that looked like) would probably not have got any more attention from me.

What attracted me to 4e was the coherence of the design along the lines [MENTION=1210]the Jester[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6689371]n00bdragon[/MENTION] have said upthread. Keeping classic D&D tropes - fighters, MUs etc - but rebuilding them mechanically from the ground up. Plus designing a combat and recoevery system that fully exploits the Gygaxian notion of hit points plus building on the fact that D&D has never used abstract movement and positioning. And also the reconceptualisation of the classic D&D story elements - the gods, the planes, the variety of humanoids and the crazy monsters - which was first set out in Worlds & Monsters.

I don't see that very much of this could have been done in a 3.5 supplement. And I can't imagine that such a supplement would have sold as well for WotC as 4e did.

 

[athos]

It's like the old southern saying, "If frogs had wings, they wouldn't bump their butts when they jumped"; basically they had to do it the way they did and hope against all logic they got lucky.

I was there at GenCon when they killed Living Greyhawk, which was a big influence in 3.5 with its conventions and games at local stores and online; and that did not go down well. There was a groan and even some boos in the room when they announced 4e.

People were happy with the game they were playing, but WotC wasn't showing enough profit, so some wag says, "Hey, let's make a game anyone with any IQ can play" and off they went trying to capture the WoW market. They knew good and well 4e couldn't compete with 3.5, so there was no choice, they couldn't make it a part of 3.5, too different. So they had to kill 3.5 and hope that 4e caught on.

Now they are killing 4e and hoping to regain the 3.5 market they lost with the nextgen game. If they were smart, they would just license D&D RPGs to Paizo, take a percentage for doing nothing, and get out of the pen and paper game market. They will make more selling the IP to movies and games then they will ever again make selling books.

So I don't think it is a logical what if question since I don't see how it could have happened. There were too many contradictory things in the way.

 

[The Human Target]

It's like the old southern saying, "If frogs had wings, they wouldn't bump their butts when they jumped"; basically they had to do it the way they did and hope against all logic they got lucky.

I was there at GenCon when they killed Living Greyhawk, which was a big influence in 3.5 with its conventions and games at local stores and online; and that did not go down well. There was a groan and even some boos in the room when they announced 4e.

People were happy with the game they were playing, but WotC wasn't showing enough profit, so some wag says, "Hey, let's make a game anyone with any IQ can play" and off they went trying to capture the WoW market. They knew good and well 4e couldn't compete with 3.5, so there was no choice, they couldn't make it a part of 3.5, too different. So they had to kill 3.5 and hope that 4e caught on.

Now they are killing 4e and hoping to regain the 3.5 market they lost with the nextgen game. If they were smart, they would just license D&D RPGs to Paizo, take a percentage for doing nothing, and get out of the pen and paper game market. They will make more selling the IP to movies and games then they will ever again make selling books.

So I don't think it is a logical what if question since I don't see how it could have happened. There were too many contradictory things in the way.

Okaaaaaaay.

 

[Tovec]

I don't know that I have much insight to offer.

I didn't play 3E more than a handful of times, and didn't play 3.5 at all. The 3E material I bought was for ideas/adaptation to other systems (primarily Rolemaster at the time).

I heard of Tome of Battle and Tome of Magic but never looked at either. A 4e-style 3E supplement (whatever exactly that looked like) would probably not have got any more attention from me.

What attracted me to 4e was the coherence of the design along the lines @the Jester and @n00bdragon have said upthread. Keeping classic D&D tropes - fighters, MUs etc - but rebuilding them mechanically from the ground up. Plus designing a combat and recoevery system that fully exploits the Gygaxian notion of hit points plus building on the fact that D&D has never used abstract movement and positioning. And also the reconceptualisation of the classic D&D story elements - the gods, the planes, the variety of humanoids and the crazy monsters - which was first set out in Worlds & Monsters.

I don't see that very much of this could have been done in a 3.5 supplement. And I can't imagine that such a supplement would have sold as well for WotC as 4e did.

Well yeah, this is kind of what I thought too. As I said, it seems like those most chomping at the bit for 4e was those who were dissatisfied with 3e - either those who were playing and unhappy, or those who were not playing. But ether case the main demographic seems to be only those who did not enjoy the 3e style. That is why I'm very sure that 4e simply would have not worked for 3e. And that certainly it uses different math, should have been built from the ground up, and what not - all of the things that only come with a new edition of the game.

So, yeah, I don't think 4e would have worked as an add-on to 3e. I think it also would have done better if it had slaughtered fewer sacred cows and worked harder to incorporate the existing fan-base and history of the game. I think that these are things they are trying to do with 5e, but we'll see how successfully they do. I fear the damage may be done for a lot of gamers - I know people in my circle simply won't try anything WotC releases at this point even if it says 5e on the tin.

 

[Sunseeker]

I'd still find 3.5 horribly system-mastery intensive.
I'd still find wizards horribly broken.
And I still find 3.5 can go to far more "gonzo" extremes than 4e ever did. 4e may have been more thematic, more flashy, but it could never compete with the ultra-optimization 3.5 produced. I don't think anything in 4e does high-level 3.5 Fireball damage on a regular basis.

To sum it up: I probably wouldn't be playing D&D.

 

[Umbran]

... but WotC wasn't showing enough profit, so some wag says, "Hey, let's make a game anyone with any IQ can play" and off they went trying to capture the WoW market. They knew good and well 4e couldn't compete with 3.5, so there was no choice, they couldn't make it a part of 3.5, too different. So they had to kill 3.5 and hope that 4e caught on.

And this is where your reasoning becomes self-contradictory. They are doing something to make more money that, by your scenario, the know *won't* make money. That makes no sense.

 

[Bluenose]

People were happy with the game they were playing, but WotC wasn't showing enough profit, so some wag says, "Hey, let's make a game anyone with any IQ can play" and off they went trying to capture the WoW market.

The people who were happy playing the game were playing the game. That's a tautology. The people who weren't had moved on. It's just as plausible that 4e was an attempt to get those people back by addressing their objections to 3e as it is to claim that they were after the WoW market - probably more so, frankly.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

Like others, I think 4E is radically different enough to 3.5E that it couldn't/wouldn't work as a modular option: it really is its own game.

What I do sometimes wonder, though, is if WotC would have been better off taking a more Saga-like approach to 3.5E and creating 4E that way. Even though I am happy with 4E and would never go back to 3.5E - or, worse, devolve to Next - I can imagine a tidied up ruleset for 3.5E that might have been more successful than 4E.

However, I don't think it was just 4E's rules that killed the edition. Clearly the crappy opening adventures - particularly those two with Mike Mearls name on them - killed a lot of enthusiasm for the new edition and for 4E and Paizo was waiting there with open arms and products that many seem to find superior.

Anyway, that's all pointless navel-gazing now. We had 4E, we're about to get Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition and who knows what will happen next. (I do hope Next will be successful simply because I want my 4E DDi tools to remain online.)

And this is where your reasoning becomes self-contradictory. They are doing something to make more money that, by your scenario, the know *won't* make money. That makes no sense.

To be fair he began with "There's an old southern saying..." which, in my experience, means that what follows is going to make no sense.