D&D General Why TSR-era D&D Will Always Be D&D

[Umbran]

At the risk of getting into the murky waters of discussing 4E, that's kind of what they did already - and it didn't work, at least economically and in terms of reception by the public.

Yes. Because being new and different, breaking the patterns of earlier decades, is not in and of itself a way to make something better.

 

[Umbran]

wrong

4e outsold 3e

I think you'll need to cite some reliable documentation on that assertion.

 

[Mannahnin]

I think I'd like to see that too.

We know that the older big claim that 4E sold badly was wrong, or perhaps only correct against expectations. We know that Pathfinder only tied it pretty late in 4E's cycle, and truly surpassed it around when 4E stopped having new releases entirely. But given D&D's historic market dominance, that was certainly performing below expectations. And there's some chicken-or-the-egg there. No doubt part of the reason WotC stopped releasing 4E books was because they weren't dominating the market anymore.

I'd be really curious to see comparative sales numbers in absolute terms between 3E & 4E. The 3.5 to 4E stretch of years definitely seemed to be one in which Hasbro was leaning on WotC to pump out hardcovers at a kind of absurd rate.

I honestly think that it all comes down to Piazo. if PF never was 4e would have exploded. Now I can blame wotc twice for this (They made the OGL... then they didn't include it)

I don't know if 4E would have exploded- between poor marketing alienating some gamers and the aforementioned flood of books for 3E and 3.5, a LOT of folks were inclined to stick with 3.x. There was a big sunk cost effect at play, even before we get into how much the big changes did or didn't appeal to some.

I do think there's a lot of validity to the latter statement, though. The decision to have the GSL for 4E instead of including it in the OGL does seem like it was a terrible corporate misstep. Between alienating Paizo as a partner and turning them into a direct competitor, and making it less easy for other third party companies to support the new edition...

 

[Oofta]

At the risk of getting into the murky waters of discussing 4E, that's kind of what they did already - and it didn't work, at least economically and in terms of reception by the public. But in terms of game design? I had my criticisms of 4E, but I do think in some ways it was the "best" designed version of D&D (My main criticism is that combat ended up grindy and rather formulaic, but I don't see how a further revision couldn't have shifted that a bit).

4E still had all the trappings of D&D, but it really tried to take a different approach and create its own, distinct approach. It was bold, at least relative to the history of D&D; where 3E was a rather successful attempt to play catch-up and streamline D&D from the old, anachronistic TSR chassis, 4E was an attempt to bring it forward into the fold of innovative game design. I mean, we know that they were trying to appeal to video gamers, but it also tried to push the game forward into new waters. For many it was just too much, and the line was cancelled after four years.

Now, a game doesn't have to be cutting edge in terms of game design to be a success, so I would say this idea of "hampered" seems too saddled with the idea of game design innovation, rather than game design as accomplishing its primary goal: which is to produce a fun game experience. In that regard, 5E is a wild success. For those with an eye for innovation, it feels rather staid. If I remember correctly, the initial reception back in 5E was that everyone felt like it was a "grade B" game - everyone (among long-time fans) liked it, but few absolutely loved it.

That said, let's imagine an alternate history. Dial back to 2008 and 4E never came out - WotC squeezes out another half-decade of 3.5, and then declares a new edition in 2012-13. Then, in 2014, 4E comes out. Now let's assume that the same cultural forces were at work: you had minor celebrities on board, and the zeitgeist is just right for Zennials to fall in love with the game. Certainly, you'd have the same old-timers jumping ship, but would that have stopped the rising tide that we see now? Maybe, maybe not. But my point being, maybe 4E would have worked just fine for the current player base - and thus perhaps more so than it did back in 2008, when the player base was mostly folks who had started with 3E or before and for whom 4E felt too different from the D&D they knew and loved.

When 4E came out I ran or helped run a couple of game days in a major metro area. There was a fair amount of enthusiasm even if we did lose a lot of people to Pathfinder initially. But slowly over time people just faded away. We went from an initial peak of probably 8-12 tables twice a month (so around 50-80 players) to a couple dozen die-hards. So it wasn't "cultural forces" or "minor celebrities" or even major celebrities. In our area 4th edition started relatively strong despite losing a significant percentage because it did initially bring in new people. At lower levels it was a more approachable game. But ultimately it simply didn't have staying power for mass popularity, unlike what we have now.

There's no telling what could have been of course and lack of broad popularity and staying power is not the only way to judge game design. I just don't think 4E could have ever approached the numbers we see with 5E, even if some of it's design and intent was an improvement. If it had been it's own thing, I suspect it would still have a decent following. But it's all just speculation and guesswork at this point.

 

[Mercurius]

Leaving aside 4E for the moment (I agree that it was the most ambitious attempt to break away from TSR legacy design), 3E had the unified mechanic of "D20 plus modifiers against a DC, roll high", but "streamline" otherwise seems a bit off to me.

Character and monster design was at its all-time highest* for complexity and detail. Skills and feats and the combat system had massive amounts of new rules*. Spells and magic were much cleaned up from AD&D, but at least as detailed.

I do think it mostly built onto AD&D rather than trying to break away from it. Comparisons of spell verbiage, for example, between 1E and 3E show a remarkable amount of overlap. And perhaps that's more what you're getting at. 3E was faithful to AD&D in many ways despite switching to the D20 core mechanic and adding a skill system, feats and so forth.

(* I recognize that some of this was prefigured in the Skills & Powers and Combat & Tactics expansions in late 2E, but to the best of my knowledge most of that was never widely adopted, and none of it was part of the core rules).

Yes, true - but it was, in my view, an attempt to update D&D to a more contemporary context. And as I said earlier in this thread or another, a lot of this was Jonathan Tweet, who worked on Ars Magica with its clear dice roll + attribute + skill mechanic, and also Talislanta, which also had a really clean and simple d20+ mechanic.

By the end of the 90s, D&D was a rambling, anachronistic heap - loveable, of course, but messy. I think the main impetus behind 3E--from a design perspective--was to clean it up and update it. And of course with that core d20 mechanic, we had the d20/OGL "revolution."

wrong

4e outsold 3e

4e only didn't hit a made up number that WotC wanted it to (not only higher then 3e 2e or 1e but substantially) and they saw that for the first time a competitor didn't have a new system (like WW in 90's) but was basically holding out an older edition as competition (something no edition before 4 delt with) they saw they could raise there profits (hey it is what it is and we all need to eat) by selling the forward progress of 4e out for nostalgia and it worked (although the new edition of PF pushing more away from 3.5 helped 5e too)

100% agree 4e was a start not an end. If 5e had improved on 4e I think we would be in a better place going into 2024 (IMO) however we may not have pulled back 3.5 fans, and as such even with growth would not be as big as it is.

I honestly think that it all comes down to Piazo. if PF never was 4e would have exploded. Now I can blame wotc twice for this (They made the OGL... then they didn't include it)

It isn't only about raw sales, though - it is also about the cohesion of the D&D community. 4E fractured the base unlike any edition before or since. And I wouldn't blame Paizo - Pathfinder was a response to 4E's mixed reception, not a cause of it. In other words, they filled a need: for folks who were basically happy with 3.5 and wanted 4E to be a revision of it, not a revolution.

And of course this is supported by the fact that 5E essentially brought the band back together, and a large part of that was through going back to a more "traditional" version of D&D, at least relative to 4E. Pathfinder diehards kept their subscriptions, but I'm guessing a lot of them were more amenable to playing 5E than they were 4E (not to mention retro-cloners, etc).

When 4E came out I ran or helped run a couple of game days in a major metro area. There was a fair amount of enthusiasm even if we did lose a lot of people to Pathfinder initially. But slowly over time people just faded away. We went from an initial peak of probably 8-12 tables twice a month (so around 50-80 players) to a couple dozen die-hards. So it wasn't "cultural forces" or "minor celebrities" or even major celebrities. In our area 4th edition started relatively strong despite losing a significant percentage because it did initially bring in new people. At lower levels it was a more approachable game. But ultimately it simply didn't have staying power for mass popularity, unlike what we have now.

There's no telling what could have been of course and lack of broad popularity and staying power is not the only way to judge game design. I just don't think 4E could have ever approached the numbers we see with 5E, even if some of it's design and intent was an improvement. If it had been it's own thing, I suspect it would still have a decent following. But it's all just speculation and guesswork at this point.

With regards to cultural forces and celebrities, I was referring to 5E. There's still a mystery of how 5E became the phenomenon that it is, and I'm saying those are factors. Back in 2008, there was no Critical Role, no sexy True Blood stars sharing videos of D&D uber-rooms or having Tolkien geek-offs with Stephen Colbert. And, I would argue, there wasn't the same thirst for it in the younger folk - they were happy with their Nintendos and iPhones and Warcraft. Fast-forward to 2014-18 and we have a different cultural climate - for whatever reasons. I'm not saying that the celebrity factor was primary, but it helped - and was part of a rising tide.

Clearly we'll never know, but my point is that if A) the bulk of D&D's current base are people who are new to it with 5E, and thus younger, and B) there was a cultural/generational thirst for an organic game of story and imagination in 2018ish that wasn't there a decade before, and C) most of the folks who had a problem with 4E were older/long-time players, then D) 4E might have done just as well as 5E, at least as far as the new generation of players is concerned.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I think you'll need to cite some reliable documentation on that assertion.

I don't have it at work I have in other threads and so have others. it was a statement from WotC that people like to pick apart...but you can not make ANY statements without them, they are the only ones with numbers

 

[GMforPowergamers]

It isn't only about raw sales, though - it is also about the cohesion of the D&D community. 4E fractured the base unlike any edition before or since. And I wouldn't blame Paizo - Pathfinder was a response to 4E's mixed reception, not a cause of it. In other words, they filled a need: for folks who were basically happy with 3.5 and wanted 4E to be a revision of it, not a revolution.

I will chicken in the egg this... Paizo (again they had to eat I understand, and wotc put out the ogl then tried to abandon it so there bad) and the PF crowd were VERY vocal and in some cases still are (It's all magic, everyone regrows lost limbs every night, you can shout someone back from the dead).
I compare it to a youtube channel CinamaSins... they are a couple guys that make fun of movies (if you find them funny is up to you) but they blew up to have millions of viewers... and they took the jokes serious. So then people repeated the joke as critisms. then people who heard that critisism repeated it again... soon it looped around and people who don't watch and have no idea what the channel is said it to someone who liked the channel. When that happened it reinforced that it MUST be right because people without seeing it new it.

The same way I see debunked movie complaints repeated without knowing where it came from, I see with 4e (and other things it isn't just them) it is a memification of complaints.

And of course this is supported by the fact that 5E essentially brought the band back together, and a large part of that was through going back to a more "traditional" version of D&D, at least relative to 4E. Pathfinder diehards kept their subscriptions, but I'm guessing a lot of them were more amenable to playing 5E than they were 4E (not to mention retro-cloners, etc).

In my experience day 1 didn't bring them all back. However it DID bring back alot by going back to 3e styles (and adjusting for the meme complaints) However as pathfinder aged more people looked to new things (like every edition) and when PF went 2e a big influx to 5e happened when if you were changing anyway...

 

[Oofta]

...

With regards to cultural forces and celebrities, I was referring to 5E. There's still a mystery of how 5E became the phenomenon that it is, and I'm saying those are factors. Back in 2008, there was no Critical Role, no sexy True Blood stars sharing videos of D&D uber-rooms or having Tolkien geek-offs with Stephen Colbert. And, I would argue, there wasn't the same thirst for it in the younger folk - they were happy with their Nintendos and iPhones and Warcraft. Fast-forward to 2014-18 and we have a different cultural climate - for whatever reasons. I'm not saying that the celebrity factor was primary, but it helped - and was part of a rising tide.

Clearly we'll never know, but my point is that if A) the bulk of D&D's current base are people who are new to it with 5E, and thus younger, and B) there was a cultural/generational thirst for an organic game of story and imagination in 2018ish that wasn't there a decade before, and C) most of the folks who had a problem with 4E were older/long-time players, then D) 4E might have done just as well as 5E, at least as far as the new generation of players is concerned.

As I said, when 4E started there was a burst of popularity and people coming to the game day (I had been active in 3.5 days as well) that I had not seen before. Many of them were younger, for the first year or so we were going gangbusters. Then that crowd we initially attracted slowly faded away.

I do think there are several factors that have led to 5E's success, I attribute less of it's success to CR than you do. Mercer and company only switched to 5E from Pathfinder because it worked better for streaming, CR started after 5E was already vastly exceeding expectations and they started out with quite a small following. Who knows how many people started playing D&D first and then tuned in to watch the stream? To this day the number of people that watch CR is dwarfed by the number of people that play D&D according to the best estimates we have. That, and many of the things that make 5E popular are also what makes for an enjoyable streaming experience. I watched some streams for 4E back in the day, the same reasons it didn't work as a stream are many of the same reasons I wouldn't care to play in a 4E campaign again.

There are many reasons for 5E's success. People wanting a way to connect on a more personal level. Streaming. The rise of comic book movies making it okay to admit that you like things that were considered for the geek crowd only. But I don't think any of it would have mattered without a solid game with broad and ongoing appeal.

 

[Umbran]

I don't have it at work I have in other threads and so have others.

Invoking unspecified people having the information tucked away in unknown places does not help you.

If you are going to step up to someone and just flat say, "Wong," you ought to back that up when you say it. If you don't have the information, maybe be honest about that, like, "I'm not sure that's correct - I seem to recall X...."

 

[Hex08]

wrong

4e outsold 3e

I thought it was generally accepted that 3.x outsold 4E but I am willing to accept that I could be wrong but I would need evidence. Also, it's a hard thing to measure. Are you just comparing core rule books, the line as a whole from WotC or all of the products sold across different publishers? If it's including all material available then it becomes hard to measure. 3.x was a unique thing in the history of D&D because other publishers could now get into the game so we had TONS of third party content. I just looked at the Wikipedia page listing all of the various rulebooks published by WotC and was surprised to see how few I owned outside of the core books and the Monster Manuals (maybe two or three) but I owned tons of stuff from Malhavoc Press, plus a fair number of books from other publishers. Was there third party content for 4E and if so how much? I didn't play 4E so I am not well versed in the product line.