Speculation about "the feelz" of D&D 4th Edition

[Parmandur]

2-4 years.

;(

My vain hope this time around is that they've realized they'll never make real money off that trick, so have settled for just keeping costs really low. The up-side will be a stable, positive image for the brand. Instead of squeezing some money out of the fanbase every 2-4 years or so, at the price of them nerdraging at you, accept that they're not a gold mine and try to develop the IP in some other medium with more promise.

Time will tell. We should have a "countdown to 5.5" doomsday clock somewhere...

That seems to be the plan, with media franchising and limiting the release schedule to three products a year; [MENTION=5788]me[/MENTION]arla has been pretty big on evergreen as a strategy, and having g a ten year plan for the edition; would expect 6th Ed for the 50th anniversary, and probably not a big change at that.

Notice that 5th edition is not part of any marketing; WotC only talks about Dungeons & Dragons now.

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[Tony Vargas]

That seems to be the plan, with media franchising and limiting the release schedule to three products a year; would expect 6th Ed for the 50th anniversary, and probably not a big change at that.

Yep all very hopeful.

Notice that 5th edition is not part of any marketing; WotC only talks about Dungeons & Dragons now.

I don't think that's new.

...but, worse...

[MENTION=5788]me[/MENTION]arla has been pretty big on evergreen as a strategy, and having g a ten year plan for the edition;

Yeah, he was pretty big on evergreen as a strategy when he was pushing Essentials in 2010, too. And they claimed they planned to go 8-10 years or something like that with 4e shortly after launch, too, in response to folks being angry that 3e only got 8 years (or less relevantly 3.5 only ~5).
Not a great record.

But, like I said above, this time'll be different!

(pleasepleaseplease, fingers crossed, knock on wood, &c)

 

[Parmandur]

Yep all very hopeful.

I don't think that's new.

...but, worse...

Yeah, he was pretty big on evergreen as a strategy when he was pushing Essentials in 2010, too. And they claimed they planned to go 8-10 years or something like that with 4e shortly after launch, too, in response to folks being angry that 3e only got 8 years (or less relevantly 3.5 only ~5).
Not a great record.

But, like I said above, this time'll be different!

(pleasepleaseplease, fingers crossed, knock on wood, &c)

Well, now they are behaving differently, releasing products like an evergreen product rather than a bloat treadmill.

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[Tony Vargas]

Well, now they are behaving differently, releasing products like an evergreen product rather than a bloat treadmill.

::sigh:: No, sadly, after Essentials was declared 'evergreen,' they did, indeed, drop down to a few books a year. Barely two years into that, on the heals of the above marketing speak MaOW quoted, they announced Next.

But, yeah, they can't change what they said & did in the past, only finally carry through with what they're saying now.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, those outside factors did play a part, but as somebody who wasn't even mad, I did just stop playing RPGs after 4E, straight up entirely: my zest for it was lost, and came back with 5E. There was something to the play itself that left me wanting.

To go back upthread a little bit, I'm pretty sure we ignored wealth by level guidelines and such in 3.x as well; a lot of the codified rails like that were considered guidelines we could safely ignore. Which became untenable in 4E, but is perfectly tenable, if not assumed in 5E.

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Yeah, I just don't understand the whole 'untenable' thing. I thought 4e's entire 'parcel' concept was a terrible idea, probably the worst thing that 4e ever did. We UTTERLY ignore that. I don't see any particular consequence to doing so. Obviously if you give away tons of higher level magic items to low level PCs that will have some impact on the game at a resource/numerical level, but things will still work, just with some understanding that encounters may need to be adjusted and whatever. Certainly it will still work as well as 3.x ever worked at all OOTB (assuming you even think 3.x worked at all OOTB, which I'd argue it didn't, but...).

This discussion is of course quite similar to that about TotM, if you're willing to just go ahead and do something in 4e it usually is no harder than with any older (or newer) edition. People may have been more reluctant to do it based on a perception that 4e "wasn't broken" and thus "shouldn't be fixed", but factually it doesn't arise from an actual difficulty in tweaking it. I mean, this is coming from a guy who ran stock 4e for 6 years, and then tweaked so much I now have my own game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm confused... I didn't comment on 4e one way or the other... I was responding to a specific assertion about grognards, 5e making D&D great again by "undoing everything that had been done to improve it and make it fit for the future." But since you gave XP to the post I was referring to I'd assume you had read it and had the context.



Well when one is directly stating or implying, as the post I was responding too did, that 5e is great for grognards, has undone everything that had been done to improve D&D and isn't a fit game for the future... I think why it is attracting younger gamers, is still popular at this point in it's release cycle and so on are very important questions to ponder... I mean if you believe it is unfit for the future and appeals to grognards... why is it attracting and retaining so many new players?



But that doesn't speak to why people other then grognards are buying and playing 5e if it's a game unfit for the future that has undone everything that improved D&D and was little more than marketing and anti-WotC backlash... the type of game that describes seems like it'd be a flopeither at release or as people played it more... at least for anyone outside the grognard demographic. Again, I'm not commenting on 4e... and I didn't in the post you are responding too... I was very careful in only addressing the assertions made about 5e...

Sorry, it seemed to me that the gist of the assertions about 5e was that it is such a superior entre to D&D than 4e was. That was what I got out of that line of discussion in general, but perhaps I've just been reading too many other posts and can't keep it all straight? I'm not sure...

I wasn't attacking 5e either. I was just saying "gosh, 4e seemed like a perfectly good entre to D&D", but there's no way to measure how many new players there are now vs say 9 years ago. Also, I don't think that just because a game was PRIMARILY aimed at satisfying long-time D&D players that this would automatically make it bad in any particular respect, such as an entry point for new players.

To be perfectly honest, I don't think edition is a big factor in new player acquisition in D&D. Players join games and learn the rules at play at the time they join, and then maybe they learn other versions of the game if they stick around. I doubt one or another version has made that much harder or easier.

 

[Parmandur]

Yeah, I just don't understand the whole 'untenable' thing. I thought 4e's entire 'parcel' concept was a terrible idea, probably the worst thing that 4e ever did. We UTTERLY ignore that. I don't see any particular consequence to doing so. Obviously if you give away tons of higher level magic items to low level PCs that will have some impact on the game at a resource/numerical level, but things will still work, just with some understanding that encounters may need to be adjusted and whatever. Certainly it will still work as well as 3.x ever worked at all OOTB (assuming you even think 3.x worked at all OOTB, which I'd argue it didn't, but...).

This discussion is of course quite similar to that about TotM, if you're willing to just go ahead and do something in 4e it usually is no harder than with any older (or newer) edition. People may have been more reluctant to do it based on a perception that 4e "wasn't broken" and thus "shouldn't be fixed", but factually it doesn't arise from an actual difficulty in tweaking it. I mean, this is coming from a guy who ran stock 4e for 6 years, and then tweaked so much I now have my own game.

Perception can become reality; I am sure 4E could be massaged just as with any other game, but it didn't feelz like it. Earlier, I posited that this may be a difference of degree, as enough information cumulated became just a little too much...

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[Parmandur]

Sorry, it seemed to me that the gist of the assertions about 5e was that it is such a superior entre to D&D than 4e was. That was what I got out of that line of discussion in general, but perhaps I've just been reading too many other posts and can't keep it all straight? I'm not sure...

I wasn't attacking 5e either. I was just saying "gosh, 4e seemed like a perfectly good entre to D&D", but there's no way to measure how many new players there are now vs say 9 years ago. Also, I don't think that just because a game was PRIMARILY aimed at satisfying long-time D&D players that this would automatically make it bad in any particular respect, such as an entry point for new players.

To be perfectly honest, I don't think edition is a big factor in new player acquisition in D&D. Players join games and learn the rules at play at the time they join, and then maybe they learn other versions of the game if they stick around. I doubt one or another version has made that much harder or easier.

Think you may be on to something there; it's about culture, not rules. Disrupting a tradition-based culture can be dangerous business.

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[pemerton]

I don't think they're doing it deliberately.

Why not?

I mean, the debates around 4e revealed a few key issues/talking points for the "D&D community" (I use scare quotes because what exactly that is is one of those talking points).

When you discover that the connection between many of your customers and your product is not utilitarian but deeply sentimental in some fashion (such that eg matters of technical layout of game elements like spells, class features etc play a fundamental role in market uptake, apparently at least as big as the details of the mechanics themselves), why wouldn't you run a market campaign that speaks to all that?

5e is the equivalent of shrugging their shoulders, burying everything that happened after 2e, building a monument on top and polishing it to mirror-like sheen.

This I don't agree with - certainly not fully, at any rate.

Mechanically, 5e owes a great deal to 4e. The idea of "bounded accuracy" has its origins in 4e, which was the first version of D&D to be designed for a roughly constant hit-rate (the "sweet spot") across all levels of play. But 5e dials down the level bonus slightly (subject to magic item issues that [MENTION=12749]MwaO[/MENTION] has mentioned); and whereas 4e goes for a roughly constant 2/3 hit rate for both PCs and NPCs/monsters, 5e seems to step the PC hit rate up to 70%+ while stepping the NPC/monster hit rate down to 50%-ish.

5e pays a great deal of attention to detail with its damage expressions (evident in its use of non-traditional damage expressions for such classic spells as cause light wounds and fireball, and its departure from traditional level scaling as seen eg in magic missile and fireball). This is a direct legacy of 4e.

5e also has an intricate action economy, built on the 4e foundation; a system of long and short rests, like 4e; and an intricate (if controversial) encounter-building system that likewise builds on that earlier foundation. And connected to that encounter-building system is a system of "balance" around asymmetrical resource suites which clearly owes a lot to 4e (including Essentials) - in AD&D, for instance, there was no obvious design logic behind fighters getting a bonus attack at 7th level when MUs got their fireballs at 5th; whereas in 5e the 5th level extra attack and 5th level fireball are deliberately correlated as part of the overall logic of class design.

What's intersting to me is how close 5e hews to 4e design ideas, and yet how significant the points of departure are: in combat, there is the "bag of hp" monster design and the capacity for mostly-daily oriented PCs to nova; in non-combat there is the lack of a skill challenge-type system and the effect of non-scaling on skill checks (which I think [MENTION=12749]MwaO[/MENTION] also noted upthread); and perhaps most significantly, the asymmetrical class resource suitses, requiring the GM to manage the adventuring "day" to ensure balance, is a big obstacle to an encounter/scene-based approach to play, and favours a return to 2nd-ed style pre-authored and GM-managed scenarios.

Then there is the packaging - eg some people clearly place importance on writing out a spell description like this:

You create three glowing darts of magical force. Each dart hits a creature of your choice that you can see within range. A dart deals 1d4 + 1 force damage to its target. The darts all strike simultaneously, and you can direct them to hit one creature or several.​

Rather than like this:

Target: One visible creature
Effect: The target takes 1d4+1 force damage, and you can repeat the attack twice, against the same target or a different one.​

But that has nothing to do with mechanical design.

 

[Parmandur]

Why not?

I mean, the debates around 4e revealed a few key issues/talking points for the "D&D community" (I use scare quotes because what exactly that is is one of those talking points).

When you discover that the connection between many of your customers and your product is not utilitarian but deeply sentimental in some fashion (such that eg matters of technical layout of game elements like spells, class features etc play a fundamental role in market uptake, apparently at least as big as the details of the mechanics themselves), why wouldn't you run a market campaign that speaks to all that?

This I don't agree with - certainly not fully, at any rate.

Mechanically, 5e owes a great deal to 4e. The idea of "bounded accuracy" has its origins in 4e, which was the first version of D&D to be designed for a roughly constant hit-rate (the "sweet spot") across all levels of play. But 5e dials down the level bonus slightly (subject to magic item issues that [MENTION=12749]MwaO[/MENTION] has mentioned); and whereas 4e goes for a roughly constant 2/3 hit rate for both PCs and NPCs/monsters, 5e seems to step the PC hit rate up to 70%+ while stepping the NPC/monster hit rate down to 50%-ish.

5e pays a great deal of attention to detail with its damage expressions (evident in its use of non-traditional damage expressions for such classic spells as cause light wounds and fireball, and its departure from traditional level scaling as seen eg in magic missile and fireball). This is a direct legacy of 4e.

5e also has an intricate action economy, built on the 4e foundation; a system of long and short rests, like 4e; and an intricate (if controversial) encounter-building system that likewise builds on that earlier foundation. And connected to that encounter-building system is a system of "balance" around asymmetrical resource suites which clearly owes a lot to 4e (including Essentials) - in AD&D, for instance, there was no obvious design logic behind fighters getting a bonus attack at 7th level when MUs got their fireballs at 5th; whereas in 5e the 5th level extra attack and 5th level fireball are deliberately correlated as part of the overall logic of class design.

What's intersting to me is how close 5e hews to 4e design ideas, and yet how significant the points of departure are: in combat, there is the "bag of hp" monster design and the capacity for mostly-daily oriented PCs to nova; in non-combat there is the lack of a skill challenge-type system and the effect of non-scaling on skill checks (which I think [MENTION=12749]MwaO[/MENTION] also noted upthread); and perhaps most significantly, the asymmetrical class resource suitses, requiring the GM to manage the adventuring "day" to ensure balance, is a big obstacle to an encounter/scene-based approach to play, and favours a return to 2nd-ed style pre-authored and GM-managed scenarios.

Then there is the packaging - eg some people clearly place importance on writing out a spell description like this:

You create three glowing darts of magical force. Each dart hits a creature of your choice that you can see within range. A dart deals 1d4 + 1 force damage to its target. The darts all strike simultaneously, and you can direct them to hit one creature or several.​

Rather than like this:

Target: One visible creature
Effect: The target takes 1d4+1 force damage, and you can repeat the attack twice, against the same target or a different one.​

But that has nothing to do with mechanical design.

Yes, I think this is broadly right: 5E does take a *lot* of 4E and run with it; and for me, that first quoted example is far more intriguing than the second: says pretty much the same thing, but with style. If I'm going to invest time and money in a game, I want style?

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