D&D 4E Ben Riggs' "What the Heck Happened with 4th Edition?" seminar at Gen Con 2023

[amethal]

Oh yeah, 20%/50% chance to miss if something has concealment. Such a feel-bad mechanic.

I once failed about a dozen consecutive 50/50 miss chances in a D&D 3.5 game.

Most boring combat ever, as the opponent ran out of fun things to do by about round 4, and was reduced to plinking away with their rapier for the rest of the fight.

 

[Yalım]

Going back to the very first post:





I'm highly suspicious of statistics that are provided with less than a very very careful analysis. Most of what I get from this is that 4E sold less than 3E, and was expected to do better. This gives a basis to ask two questions:

(1) Why did 4E sell less well than 3E?

(2) Why did 4E sell less well than was expected? (Equivalently: Why was 4E expected to sell more than 3E?)

The various reasons that I've heard are a combination of:

(1) The game was changed too much. That is not to say that 4E isn't a great edition, only that it had too many changes to satisfy a relatively entrenched 3E D&D market.

(2) (NOT the same as (1).) 4E doesn't hit the "sweet spot" of what most D&D players are looking for.

(3) The sales pitch was offensive: "Y'all playing 3E having been playing D&D wrong. You are idiots if you don't switch to 4E."

(4) There were expectations that the high returns of Magic: The Gathering could be replicated with a combination of an update to the game plus the release of collectable miniatures plus (reasonably) high expectations of an (unreasonably unready) subscription based digital platform.

(5) An underappreciation for the hesitancy of the D&D market to buy a new edition following the quick release of 3.5E on top of 3E.

(6) An underappreciation of the impact of the license change.

Maybe:

(7) The market was just smaller. The D&D market may have been saturated to the point that a new edition just didn't have the same available market.

For (1), I think it's important to distinguish analyses of how the game was different from analyses of how these differences were too much for the then current 3E market. For (1), there are cross-overs to other points: Certain changes might have been more palatable if presented with better messaging.

For (2), this shows up in various factors, for example, having the game being strongly coupled to the use of miniatures. Or, power effects being too abstract. Or, there not being enough stuff that is interesting to read in monster books. Then: 4E was a great game, just not the game enough players wanted.

Here, I want to emphasis that 4E does very well satisfy many players. The point is that it doesn't satisfy enough D&D players. (This synergizes with the game changing quite a bit and with the very poor sales pitch.)

I don't have anything more to say about (3).

For (7), if we compare 3E, 4E, and 5E, 3E was released after a long drought of products; 4E much less so; 5E did have Pathfinder underfoot, but had a longer drought than 4E, if you consider 5E being a successor to 3E, not to 4E.

As for internal issues, without a way of telling whether the turmoil was more or less what regularly happens, there is no way to tell how the final product was affected. I can hypothesize, but don't have any way to test my hypotheses:

(1) The turmoil was exceptionally high, leading (one way or another) to many poor decisions.

(2) The turmoil was more or less what typically happens. Any failures are more attributable to other matters.

Alternatively:

(1') There was a failure of WotC leadership to manage issues in the presence of not too exceptional turmoil.

This places the emphasis on leadership and decision making. That seems a better focus than on the turmoil. Then, the problem was not the turmoil -- the problem was the failure of leadership and decision making in the presence of turmoil.

I think the failure of the electronic product should be looked at as a separate issue. There are a lot of additional factors which are involved. My best sense is that the company was not ready yet to create a product and product ecosystem of the scale which was being attempted.

TomB

Forgive me if this was already mentioned before, but I think you should also add the Great Recession to the list. 2009 saw a ~5% drop in spending on entertainment in the US. I doubt there are numbers specific to rpgs, but I imagine most of them suffered quite a bit in that era.

 

[payn]

Forgive me if this was already mentioned before, but I think you should also add the Great Recession to the list. 2009 saw a ~5% drop in spending on entertainment in the US. I doubt there are numbers specific to rpgs, but I imagine most of them suffered quite a bit in that era.

MMORPGs were also at the height of popularity. Numerous ones, but WoW for sure, were drawing people away from tabletops.

 

[payn]

IMO, all of the subsequent reasons you listed played a part. There's no one silver bullet to explain why people bounced off of 4e. There were multiple issues, any one of which might have been possible to mitigate, but which altogether hindered 4e like a 4e monster festooned with conditions.

To whit, one reason that I don't think has been examined very much was that 4e was not blessed with a viable on-ramp. This had been called out by Mearls either before or during the D&D Next playtest. Their market research showed that many people bought the 4e Starter Sets, but did not move on to buying the PHB. That was part of the impetus for Essentials (with a revised Starter Set), as well as a design goal for D&D Next.

The original "Starter Set" was Keep on the Shadowfell. It contained quickstart rules for players, the adventure book for DMs, pregens, and battlemaps. What did it not have? Dice or tokens. And the quickstart rules devoted half a page (1 column) to discussing what a RPG was before then diving into 15 pages of rule explanations. I'm not saying that one couldn't pick this up without any RPG experience and get into D&D. I'm sure there are some who did. But they didn't make it easy. KotS and the quickstart rules are rather obviously intended to get already active D&D players quickly up and playing 4e.

The original "blue box" starter set is, IMO, not much of an improvement. The player's booklet is essentially the same quickstart rules as above, but at least time they include dice and tokens. The DM's booklet comes with all the necessary rules for DMs to build encounters. But the "introductory adventure" consists of...three dungeon encounters. None of which utilize the Skill Challenge rules. So you're not inspiring players, and not really giving them a taste of what a role-playing game can be. You're basically just hoping that they get hooked by the combat rules.

The "red box" starter set is a much better attempt. Dice, tokens, maps, power cards. You've got the solo tutorial, which is excellent. Unlike Mentzer Basic, you can choose from any of the major classes, and it gets across the rules the player needs to know while also getting them into character. All the rules nitty-gritty is in the DM's booklet, along with a proper introductory adventure. All leading to either the Essentials books or the original PHB(s). I think if 4e had led with this, it would have had a much better time. Alas, it was released in September of 2010. In January of 2012, a mere 15 months later, D&D Next was announced.

I vaguely remember this. I think the explaination was keeping the starter set very affordable, but at the same time, wasnt newb friendly. I dont recall 3E having anything better. However, Paizo did up the standard with their Pathfinder Classic beginners box. Yes, folks balked at its 40-60 dollar price tag, but it included lots of good quality items and a rule book designed for new players.

 

[Red Castle]

(5) An underappreciation for the hesitancy of the D&D market to buy a new edition following the quick release of 3.5E on top of 3E.

Remember back when 4e got released that some people felt like Cash Cow and was turned off by that.

The quick release after 3e (2000) and 3.5 (2003) combined with the feeling by a lot that 3.5 was just fine, there was no need for a new edition made it look like 4e was just a cash grab, Hasbro being greedy. And they were not entirely wrong, but hey, welcome to capitalism.

What reinforced this feeling was the aggressive release schedule of books. If I remember correctly, they were releasing 1 book per month, always with new shiny options… that’s a lot! Not everyone has this gaming budget.

But, they also made all this content available online to subscribers of DnDInsider, so in the end, if you were a subscriber and was only interested in player options or new monsters, there was little point to buy the books, since everything was accessible (and actually easier to navigate than having 4-5 books on the table while searching for a new feat).

But to come back to the quick release of a new edition, seeing the aggressivity of book release of 4e, if I had already a big collection of 3.5 books and still had fun with this edition, I would have seen no point in buying into 4e. It might even turn me off, no way that I’m buying a new book collection only to need to buy it again in 3-5 years!

Now, I don’t think that it was the main reason of the « lower » sales, but I do believe it played a part. One of the many reason of DnD 4e backlash.

 

[Echohawk]

What reinforced this feeling was the aggressive release schedule of books. If I remember correctly, they were releasing 1 book per month, always with new shiny options… that’s a lot! Not everyone has this gaming budget.

The 4e release cycle was fairly similar to the 3.5e release cycle, which was admittedly aggressive.

 

[Red Castle]

The 4e release cycle was fairly similar to the 3.5e release cycle, which was admittedly aggressive.View attachment 333737

Exactly! So it’s easy to imagine that someone that invested a lot in 3.5 could be pissed off at the idea of « needing » to do it all over again. Especially if he was happy with 3.5, why change? That’s kinda what happened with me with 5e. I invested a lot in 4e, was (and still is) very happy with it, so I never bothered with 5e. The only reason I bought a PHB of 5e two years ago is because a friend of mine wanted to DM a 5e game so I bought the PHB to create my character… but if I DM a DnD game, I still use 4e.

Now, I’m pretty sure that some people (not everybody) that was angry about the change, fearing that everybody would move to 4e and leave them with an obsolete book collection, were actually looking for reason to hate the new edition, to convince people to keep playing 3.5, the edition they already invested a lot in. Also, if that person was the forever DM of his group (often the case with people that buy a lot of books), it’s easy to imagine him talking trash about the new edition to his players, so that they don’t want to try it and keep playing with his edition of choice.

Now, I’m really not saying that it’s the main reason of the backlash, but I’m pretty sure it’s at least a part of it. Maybe if 4e got released 2-3 years later with 3.5 book release slowing down in those 2-3 years, people might have been more open to the change, but so close to the release of 3.5, with an aggressive release schedule following another one… odds were high that it would pissed off a part of their playerbase…

 

[Voadam]

For me it was the OGL and no SRD that blocked me from trying 4e for a long while.

In 3.5 I had the online srd and could learn the rules starting day 1 without buying a core set and use almost all of my big array of 3.0 stuff with about as much conversion as I had done using BECMI basic stuff in my AD&D games and spend my RPG budget on supplements and settings and adventures. This was fantastic.

I was happy with 3.5 (and later Pathfinder 1e). When 4e came out there was no OGL SRD release for it. You had to either get KotS or go straight into the PH, DMG, MM core book set to learn the whole new edition. They did not even provide an online version of the quickstart rules from KotS until much later so there was a pay barrier to learning 4e to play as a player in somebody else's game.

I was fine as is, running games, had tons of material to go on for life, and pretty happy with a lot of d20 3e. 4e sounded like it had some good points, but not enough to really hook me in to buy and learn and invest in a new system that would be fairly game system incompatible with my big d20 library just because.

The restrictive 4e GSL, particularly its original poison pill provision to attempt to kill off support for 3e OGL stuff, was obnoxious. WotC went from a company enabling my game stuff to a company trying to obstruct it in an attempt to drive me to buy their new game and from them only. This was compounded later with the PDF pulling of access for old edition stuff.

I took the concept of minions and elite monsters and solo monsters that was being discussed here and applied them to 3e stuff and it made my d20 games better for me.

When Pathfinder came out I checked out their srds and adopted it right away the way I had 3.5 earlier and used my 3e/3.5/d20 modern/other d20 stuff using the system and started buying and using pathfinder things.

It wasn't until years after 4e started that I joined a group playing 4e and I bought my first 4e books, the PH I&II Christmas bundle sale. I then read the PH cover to cover and made a character for the game. I really like a lot of 4e, but WotC worked pretty hard to have me not get into it for a while.

 

[Aldarc]

The 4e release cycle was fairly similar to the 3.5e release cycle, which was admittedly aggressive.

I'm curious how that compares with Paizo's PF1 release schedule. That honestly felt pretty aggressive as well.

 

[payn]

I'm curious how that compares with Paizo's PF1 release schedule. That honestly felt pretty aggressive as well.

PF1 had an online SRD which took a lot of the sting out of all the purchases. In my experience anyway. I think there was a lot of good will allowance for the fact that folks could still get use out of their 3.5 library, even if folks eventually moved on from it. It was a slow transition, as opposed to an abrupt one.