The Myopic Sniper
Hero
Nothing to add except that I was out of the D&D realm during this period, but I find all this fascinating. Keep up the good work.
D&D 5E Legends & Lore - A Retrospective
- Thread starter Iosue
- Start date
Blackwarder
Adventurer
I'm not sure if it's a matter of under performance, going with essential was a change in tactics, going with 5e was a huge strategic change.
Warder
Iosue
Legend
Agreed. One thing to keep in mind, though, was while they may have been looking ahead to 5e at this time, they probably weren't anticipating a big public playtest and consequent early announcement of 5e. I suspect that Essentials was an early 4e expression of these ideas, and it was after looking at Essentials performance throughout 2011 that the decided to go that route. And by performance I don't mean purely revenue-wise. In another interview Mearls mentioned that one thing they were seeing was a lot of people buying the Red Box, but weren't continuing on into the full game. I suspect it was after this that they thought that not even Essentials was growing the market, and they decided to scrap everything and start over.
I think these two things are tightly connected, at least in respect of 4e.
4e, over its lifespan, was 40-odd hardcovers. (I've got 32 or so on my shelf.) Of these, a large number were providing PC build options: 3 PHBs, 6 power books, 3 "Heroes of" hardbacks, 3 AVs (inc MME) - which is 15 - plus then you have a good chunk of the FRPG, Neverwinter, Into the Unknown, the Dragon Annual, the Dark Sun CG, etc. Which is up to 20+.
These books make for long lists. To build a character from them, you need a good memory or good indexing! And when it come to paragon paths and epic destinies (and to a lesser extent, because they came later, themes), they provide a lot of flexibility - it approximates a free descriptor system, but where you have to pay WotC for your list of descriptors - but any given player will probably use only a handful of these in his/her 4e gaming. That's a lot of content that goes unused, while reducing the accessibility of the game.
The other big chunk of 4e books gives the GM lists (mostly of monsters, but also of traps and skill challenge structures): 3 MMs plus the Dark Sun one at the core of it, but also Demonomicon and Open Grave with big monster lists, and monsters in MoP, Underdark, Plane Above/Below, etc. And then lists in two DMGs as well.
Reducing many monsters special abilities to those found on a spell list dramatically shortens these lists too.
I think this will all be interesting to see. I'm not sure feats are as easy to balance as you say here, but agree that subclasses is the big issue.
I have heard some people say good things about the Essentials product structure, but not many!
Even if there were not 4e hardbacks (PHBs with various numbers on them, etc) hanging around Essentials would still make it very hard to graduate from the Red Box to the fuller game - with the mix of boxes and books (as you note), the repetition of content (across the 2 "Heroes of" books, the DM book and the RC), etc.
I also think RC makes for a pretty intimidating rule book for a new player!
Neonchameleon
Legend
What do we know? The 4e PHB2 sold extremely well, hitting the top 15 on the WSJ bestsellers list (and spending multiple weeks on the list), and the PHB3 didn't sell remotely so well but was somewhere round #50. (Not bad at all, all things considered given it was a pretty awful book IMO - out of six classes I hard ban three, soft ban two, and ban Hybrids, leaving just the Monk).
So. Prior to Essentials, 4e was selling pretty well. And the only quarter Pathfinder caught it on the ICv2 lists was the one where the released book was Psionic Power - the splatbook for the three PHB3 classes I hard ban. On the other hand the business model was coming to the end of the road. What else was there to release after the three PHBs, and a splatbook each (plus the excellent Martial Power 2) and two Adventurers' Vaults? (Other, of course, than some actually good adventures).
Enter Essentials. 4e's lovely internal edition war of a product. I'm not aware that despite being cheap either of HoF* made the NYT or WSJ bestseller lists. The shift in character builders to the online-only Silverlight thing which was both a bandwidth hog and had reduced functionality caused subscriptions to be cancelled. The design principles of HoF* (Heroes of the Fallen Lands/Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms) were not those of the PHB - they were ones that didn't attract non-fans, and quite seriously pissed off a lot of 4e fans (most notably bringing back Wizard Supremacy and dumb fighters). Several of the classes in HoF* were badly made; they didn't scale properly and were unable to do their job. (Slayer without external feats, Sentinel Druid, the Knight had a weakness vs forced movement, Hunter, Hexblade had issues).
I know literally no one who started buying D&D because of Essentials and a lot of 4e fans who stopped subscribing over Silverlight, and stopped buying 4e at HoF*. Shortly after HoF*, 4e was confronted by its first cancellations (Class Compendium, Mordaniken's Magnificent Emporium) - both of which were meant to support Essentials. And while the (critically panned) Heroes of Shadow was largely Essentials based, the subsequent Heroes of the Feywild and Heroes of the Elemental Chaos were more classic 4e than Essentials. Pathfinder also caught 4e for the first time the quarter Essentials was actually released (Q3 2010), and overtook it about six months later (Q1 2011).
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that Essentials really underperformed.
TerraDave
5ever, or until 2024
PHB 2 did sell well, though (you can see this by checking other dates in the links) sales fall off pretty fast. DDI/CB is a suspect here.
Speaking of which, I remember... all too well the controversies around essentials, and the errata tidal wave, and the online CB. Something to annoy everyone!
They clearly felt they had to respond to...something..whether it was a legitimate lag in performance or just their own unrealistic expectations. Any Collins was let go in May 2010, for example...and then, after Essentials in June 2011 Bill Slavisec would be gone.
Basically only one guy who had been involved in 4E was still doing RPG design for D&D after that point.
And his name was Mearls.
Neonchameleon
Legend
Slight correction. James Wyatt. But he was more a worldbuilder/storyteller (and is now working on Magic: the Gathering as part of their creative/story team) Crawford was, I think brought in after 4e was launched (his first credit was the PHB2).
My take is that 4e was doing well (it was making $6 million/year as late as November 2013, over a year after the final book) but not up to the $50 million/year target Dancey said they needed to become a core brand. Then Pathfinder came out and started selling well. The flailing was due to the unexpected competition, and someone suggested taking 4e in the direction of PF (pleasing no one) hence Essentials. Essentials failed. Slavisek took the lead so he took the fall, leaving Mearls.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
Sounds right to me.
Essentials certainly didn't sell well to my group, unlike previous 4E stuff. Only the Rules Compendium did - we have multiple copies, even "non-RPG-book-buyers" have it, because it's handy and light. Everything player-oriented before that we bought.
This why I'm skeptical of 5E's "Themed books" model. The Essentials themed books were high quality (broadly speaking) but no-one seemed to want to buy them, where the broader, less-focused PHB and power-source stuff had been bought.
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