D&D 5E Is 5e's Success Actually Bad for Other Games?

[Dausuul]

All this talk just reminds me of the time Ryan Dancey wrote an editorial to complain about gamers of the time playing games other than 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons. His point was that it was a tiny industry, and if a company was to succeed it needed every gamer to play its games, and only its games. He stopped short of calling the rest of us "commie mutant pinko traitors," but that was the vibe I got.

I don't get a sense of accusation from that column at all. More like, "We are D&D. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your games will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

 

[MerricB]

Not really interested in relitigating this, but they pretty much dropped everything that was important to me in 4e. They already pretty much done so with Essentials though. They showed about zero interest in learning what we loved about it.

It's interactions like this that make me hesitant to engage with this community. No empathy or curiosity is expressed. Just denial.

I'm going to be quite brutal here: When you have a game that sells 1,000,000 units, and the next edition of that game sells 100,000 units, then the opinions of those who loved the later edition don't matter so much. (These are not the actual numbers, but read on...)

As we get further away from 4E, it's becoming very clear that the sales numbers were catastrophically bad. At the end of 2010, two years after its release, icv2 was reporting 4E was tied with PF for first spot in sales in hobby stores. By Q2, 2011, PF was in first spot.

D&D, under usual circumstances, has 10:1 or 100:1 sales over any other RPG.

And that's why, when 5E rolled around, it wasn't a "fixed" 4E. For all the brilliant design decisions in 4E - and I DMed two campaigns to 30th level in it - it was rejected by the wider gaming population.

We do not know exactly how bad 4E sales were, but I think, after the bounce of the initial release (when everyone was curious about the new edition), ongoing sales dropped to 50% of 3E or perhaps even lower.

This is why I'm interested in seeing with RPGs took advantage of 4E's failure to rise up in prominence. Because it is the era when you can test if "4E's lack of dominance is good for other RPGs".

The game I'm now paying attention to is Fate Core, which got into the Top 5 of the icv2 lists for several quarters, while ALSO publishing quarterly sales numbers. (It's selling about 1,500-2,000 copies a quarter during the time when it was hitting Top 5).

How does this compare to D&D? We don't know. However, by some posts I've seen, the PHB was selling 100,000+ copies a year during the 1E era. (Those are evergreen sales). Expressed quarterly, that's 25,000+ copies - or over 10 times the sales of FATE Core when it was doing strongly. Is that comparable to today? I suspect so, but I don't know.

(Wizards' goal with D&D is to sell a wildly popular RPG.)

Cheers!

 

[Malmuria]

The survey was mystifying. Everyone got a different survey, what survey they got did not seem to be based on the questions they answered, some got a sneak preview of some sort of digital product and had to sign an nda, the questions on races were sort of overly specific but the answers too general or vague, and the weird rules questions at the beginning. People are going to use the survey to speculate on the direction dnd is going in, and with this bag of weird questions you get a thousand different interpretations. Are they trying to correlate rules knowledge with opinions on races (with level of eduction, with whether you play online...)? Are they screening out the opinions of those with less rules knowledge? Is it all just a marketing charade, including the super weak nda? Do they even know what they are doing?

It is remarkable that wotc has enough fan enthusiasm that they can get people to fill out these surveys on their product and even on things that are not yet product (like the UAs). So much so that the playtesting/feedback itself becomes a form of brand engagement. I don't know whether dnd is good or bad for other games, but obviously almost none of those other games can leverage its popularity for that amount of free engagement. That is, it's a matter of the marketplace, not just whether another game is better or worse.

 

[Malmuria]

We do not know exactly how bad 4E sales were, but I think, after the bounce of the initial release (when everyone was curious about the new edition), ongoing sales dropped to 50% of 3E or perhaps even lower.

This is why I'm interested in seeing with RPGs took advantage of 4E's failure to rise up in prominence. Because it is the era when you can test if "4E's lack of dominance is good for other RPGs".

Right - is it the case that dnd's lack of popularity allowed for other games to be created and more effectively gain an audience? Or did the forward-thinking design aspects of 4e inspire other game designers? I'm guessing it was the former, if anything.

 

[Malmuria]

I don't recall the piece, but what I said above works both ways - we are not entitled to a product that meets our particular desires, and no company is entitled to our business.

Ultimately, your enfranchisement here is "vote with your wallet".

I agree that dnd is a product, and if it doesn't meet a consumer's need they should move on to a different product. On the other hand, this is complicated by the way that people engage with "the hobby" as a form of community and, crucially, the way that wotc speaks of the supposed dnd community as part of its brand creation. This mostly works in its favor but leaves it open to the sort of complaints that we see from people who take that part of the brand seriously; namely, that they should be treated as not just as customers but more holistically, as community members.

 

[Don Durito]

You know thinking back on the 4e to 5e transition, I think there's a lot of contingency there. Essentials and 5e both feel like they contain a lot of Mearl's personal ideas of what D&D should be, in part based on the OSR kick that he was clearly on during the later half of 4e. (Take a look at Mearl's House Rules for B/X from 2012 - it already contains Advantage/Disadvantage). He wasn't the only one involved, but it does feel like a lot of the playtest was about Mearls winning that internal struggle at WotC.

We might look at 5e's success and say "he was right", but that feels fairly contingent historically as well. We have no real way of knowing whether (success wise at least) there were other ways to be 'right'. 5e has been wildly successful, but it has continued being wildly successful even as it development seems to increasingly diverge from Mearls' OSR style vision of the game.

 

[MerricB]

Honest question here, it seems obvious that something simpler than 4E was needed, but if WOTC had basically served up Shadow of a Demon Lord but without the grimdark elements, would it have been less successful?

My impression after playing a level 1-10 campaign of Shadow of the Demon Lord is "it would have been less successful".

I think two elements that are needed are both simplicity and scope, and Shadow of the Demon Lord was too narrow a focus (even ignoring grimdark); it didn't have the wide scope of 5E in its character options.

But that's a very personal opinion.

Cheers!

 

[Don Durito]

My impression after playing a level 1-10 campaign of Shadow of the Demon Lord is "it would have been less successful".

I think two elements that are needed are both simplicity and scope, and Shadow of the Demon Lord was too narrow a focus (even ignoring grimdark); it didn't have the wide scope of 5E in its character options.

But that's a very personal opinion.

Cheers!

Really? I've only used it for one shots so far, but it looks, on paper at least, to have a lot more options. Especially, in the way careers can be combined in different ways.

 

[Thomas Shey]

When it comes to any form of testing or feedback process what you are testing and the sort of feedback you illicit is just as impactful as the size of your testing base. I mean while it was not as large in size Pathfinder Second Edition also had a wide open playtest where they also elicited feedback based on their creative vision. I don't think anyone would argue that Paizo wanted to build a particular sort of game with PF2. I don't think it should be all that controversial that Wizards designed the sort of game they wanted to and used the playtest to finetune it.

I actually think that's how you should test a product. The testers are not game designers. Design by committee tends to suck. You need targeted feedback, not a wish list. I think mostly the issue I tend to have is not with the playtest process, but some of the magical thinking that goes with open playtests broadly. The perception that the game is the result of collected community feedback instead an iterative design process by professional designers who used that feedback as a means of acceptability testing with their target audience.

I see some of the argument here, but I still maintain that if you curate your playtest populace too much, you risk selecting for people who have the same blindspots the designers do. That can all too easily lead to a game that runs into walls in some areas pretty hard when its released into the wild (I think this was a non-trivial cause of some of the problems with D&D 3e).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Honest question here, it seems obvious that something simpler than 4E was needed, but if WOTC had basically served up Shadow of a Demon Lord but without the grimdark elements, would it have been less successful?

This is speculation, and can't be anything but speculation. That said (and I want it to be clear that, barring the grimdarkness, SotDL is one of the three D&Doids I have any interest in at all):

I think at least some elements of SotDL would have been a bridge too far. Specifically, the attribute folding would likely have gotten a negative response. I also suspect some elements of the magic system (even pulling out Corruption) would have gotten pushback.