D&D 5E How would you ensure longevity and sustainability for 5th Edition?

painted_klown said:

I like the starter set, however, I do have my "quibbles" with it. Mainly two things, that center around one issue. The issue of character creation.

If it were me, I would have "amped up" the starter box a bit. Instead of the condensed version of the basic rules, I would like to have seen the full basic PDF in print. So basically, instead of getting the "Starter Set Rulebook" as is, I would have made it the full "Players D&D Basic Rules" in print form.

Also, I would have added a third book that is a print copy of the "Dungeon Master's D&D Basic Rules" in print form.

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When we picked up the Starter Set last Summer, we also incorporated the Basic Rules right away (several people had a copy) and I peeled off two additional spell books for the casters in the group. That helped too. I also made a poster map of the town of Phandalin to put on the wall where we played which gave the group visuals reminders of their various missions and contacts.

http://www.creativemountaingames.com/2014/07/the-friday-grab-bag-my-d-5e-starter-set.html

Zeuel said:

MMOs using various popular licenses including Lord of the Rings, Conan, Warhammer, and Star Wars have all gone up against WoW and have all failed to take over it's place in the market with Warhammer Online actually being defunct now. Experienced MMO developers producing sequels to popular MMOs such as Guild Wars and Everquest have failed to take the spot from WoW. They've managed to take tiny portions of WoW's subscriber base which hurts WoW in the long run, but I think general wisdom is that right now the only thing that kill WoW is WoW.

When WoW was released, MMOs were still primarily for hardcore players and a niche genre. WoW was a very casual friendly game(yes even in Vanilla WoW) that attempted to appeal to a mass audience by removing massive penalties for death*, being able to be played solo**, running on older computers, made leveling faster***, and just came off of a very successful Warcraft 3 game and expansion. WoW was still unfinished and buggy when it came out and still had a lot of problems but there wasn't any serious competitors at the time to punish them. Any MMOs nowadays has to try to come into a market where there is an already reigning champion and they generally have to have a large amount of publicity and an incredibly solid game with plenty of content and many of the bells and whistles that MMO players are used to to even have a chance at unseating WoW. Chances are no knew MMO will take over until WoW is in it's final days and even then I have this feeling that a post-WoW MMO world will probably be a lot more decentralized with one MMO maybe having a plurality of active players at best due to the change of most MMOs from a subscription model to a F2P model.

*It might cost you a small amount of gold/silver/copper to repair damaged gear while other games might make you lose your equipment entirely or take away chunks of xp gained

**Many other MMOs before WoW often required you to have a group of people to even try and gaining levels or progressing through the game. WoW generally only requires you to group when you want to find a group for a dungeon or at max level when you want to join a PvE raid. You could level from 1-60 without ever entering a group if you wanted to.

***I never played original Everquest but I had friends who did and from what I understand it would take even hard core players several months to reach max level from character creation and that was with being able to get into groups to gain levels. I think my first character in WoW to get from level 1-60 took 12 days played(as in 12 actual 24 hour periods) and that was me being a noob at it.

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I believe I could do it. I will have no chance to try. This is a thread of "what if." I figure I'd go big.

Lord of the Rings was never built to be an MMORPG. I love the books, didn't touch the game. It isn't built for it. You don't play Lord of the Rings to advance in levels and gain more powerful magic. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of why a person would be attracted to a Middle Earth game. It isn't what attracts people to MMORPGs.

Star Wars had exactly the same problem. You don't play Star Wars to kill and accumulate. Nothing in the Star Wars universe has anything to do with this behavior. MMORPG's thrive on the kill and accumulate mentality. The vicarious thrill of gaining power. Star War's universe was never built with this model in mind.

Conan I played. Conan failed because after the 1-20 story, the game content sucked horribly. It wasn't intuitive or interesting. The artists did an extremely poor job of world creation. They reskinned their base humanoid figure into uninteresting creatures. Conan failed for other reasons.

Warhammer was too much like WoW and poorly constructed comparatively.

Everquest 2 was a lazily designed game. They removed aspects of the game that players liked. It was an example of a successful game that didn't realize why it was successful. It launched thinking former customers would flock to the new game. Everquest the original is a better game than WoW in nearly every way. You know why I picked WoW over Everquest 2? They didn't bother to design racial cities for EQ 2 for starting characters. The charm of EQ 1 was the feeling of starting out in a city where your race lived and leveling up in a unique area. WoW remembered how important that aspect of a game is.

WoW is winning not because it appeals to casual gamers, but because it's gameplay is amazing. It's raids and new areas are interesting. It kept adding interesting questing options and providing people with countless hours of interesting areas to explore and challenging encounters with a loot system that kept that carrot hanging in front of players. WoW's gameplay is second to none. Gameplay is what makes a game great. Most new MMORPGs only do a good job with the first 10 to 15 levels of gameplay releasing the game thinking they have time to build the rest. That isn't the case. You have to have the game ready to go all the way to max level with end game content. You try to get lazy about it, the game is going to fail. It's game play at all levels that allows attracts and retains players of all types from the super hardcore to the super casual. They're looking for an experience. You have to provide it whether they're in the level 1 newbie area or max level raids. All those other games failed miserably at the gameplay part.

I would not fail if I had control of D&D content. You would see unique cities built for all the racial areas. Citadel Adbar, Waterdeep, The Dalelands, Menzoberranzan. I would not launch the game without raciai cities and well-developed newbie areas. I'd start off with Myth Drannor for a raid zone in the Cormanthor Forest. I'd make sure it was built before I launched the game. I'd have a carefully constructed leveling arc from zero to max level with no weak gameplay areas. People would feel like they were adventuring in a fantasy world that provided a completely unique experience.

I'm looking to take WoW's cake. I know you can't do that by half-assing it. If I didn't get funding for the full plan, I wouldn't even bother. You can't take WoW's cake by releasing a game that provides an uninteresting play experience at any point in time. You don't have time to build out raid zones and hope you've done well enough to challenge the WoW raid experience. You can't even provide an uninteresting newbie experience. You've got to have an extremely strong game from top to bottom with a team ready to make sure expansions are hitting within a time frame that retains your customer base.

The big advantage D&D would have is the world content is in place. Very little time needs to be spent on story. The entire game is the original model for MMORPG's kill and accumulate paradigm. D&D is THE GAME that models what MMORPGs have been doing for years. They have all the cool magic items built up over the years to prove it. I would dangle that giant glittering gold carrot out for their MMORPG addicts to salivate over. You want Blackrazor? Look at that beautiful black sword with all the glittering stars? You want a shiny Holy Avenger? Come and get it. You want to wield the Sword of Kas or obtain the Hand of Vecna? Come and get it. You'll have to fight Vecna himself. You want to raid Undermountain and fight Halaster in his deep, dark dungeon? Here you go. The Mad Wizard himself. What's next? Planescape is next. Head to Sigil. Raid the Hells. Assail the fortress of Asmodeus and the Nine Rulers of Hell.

You do D&D online right. Spend the money. WoW and every other MMORPG game that has existed will be like a pale memory. D&D is the Grand Daddy all these other games seek to emulate. It has not ascended to that position because no one has had the vision and deep pockets to make it happen. Oh, the beautiful raids, zones, and instances I could build from D&D content had the I ability. It would be amazing blending all the D&D worlds into one beautiful virtual world of endless content. Could you imagine designing a layer of the Abyss as a raid zone? Or flying by means of a fly spell? Or wielding an Orb of Dragonkind? Or fighting mind flayers?

- Make a new Starter Set every other year, trying to make it better and better, and with a new themed adventure in it linked to a two-years long AP-backed plan
2 - publish a single book about the different existing Planes / Settings, about how they are connected, and how they can be used. Call it Book of Worlds or whatever.
- release an OGL

Celtavian said:

I'm looking to take WoW's cake. I know you can't do that by half-assing it. If I didn't get funding for the full plan, I wouldn't even bother. You can't take WoW's cake by releasing a game that provides an uninteresting play experience at any point in time. You don't have time to build out raid zones and hope you've done well enough to challenge the WoW raid experience. You can't even provide an uninteresting newbie experience. You've got to have an extremely strong game from top to bottom with a team ready to make sure expansions are hitting within a time frame that retains your customer base.

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What you are proposing is to out-Blizzard Blizzard. Blizzard's specialty is taking a genre that was pioneered by other companies, and creating the most polished, streamlined, expansive, user-friendly iteration of that genre anyone has ever seen. They have massive technical and design expertise to back this up, but more importantly, they have experience. There is no substitute for having done something; observing somebody else doing it is not the same, nor is throwing giant heaps of money at the problem. The company that built World of Warcraft was able to do so because it was the company that built Warcraft III and Diablo II. And the company that built those games was able to do so because of Starcraft and Diablo I.

If you want to challenge WoW on its own turf, you need two things:

1) A big pile of money.
2) A game development studio that's up to the job.

Having a popular IP like D&D is great, but if you have item #1, getting the rights to a popular IP is unlikely to be an issue. It's finding item #2 that poses a problem.

Celtavian said:

WoW is winning not because it appeals to casual gamers, but because it's gameplay is amazing. It's raids and new areas are interesting. It kept adding interesting questing options and providing people with countless hours of interesting areas to explore and challenging encounters with a loot system that kept that carrot hanging in front of players. WoW's gameplay is second to none. Gameplay is what makes a game great. Most new MMORPGs only do a good job with the first 10 to 15 levels of gameplay releasing the game thinking they have time to build the rest. That isn't the case. You have to have the game ready to go all the way to max level with end game content. You try to get lazy about it, the game is going to fail. It's game play at all levels that allows attracts and retains players of all types from the super hardcore to the super casual. They're looking for an experience. You have to provide it whether they're in the level 1 newbie area or max level raids. All those other games failed miserably at the gameplay part.

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There's no one reason Warcraft is king.
Being easy on casual gamers does help: it gets them in the door and keeps them hooked. Gameplay keeps everyone involved, as does the myriad little sub-mechanics and mini-quests in the game. That really makes WoW and is something every other MMO fails to do.
Content is another huge one: even vanilla Warcraft had two factions spread over two continents, with different level bands in multiple zones. So you could play the game twice with the two factions and have completely different experiences. Even playing the same faction provided a wealth of new story provided your race and route through the continents was different. My biggest problem questing in WoW was usually that I ended up outlevelling the content and had to move onto the next zone with the current zone unfinished. Compare that to every other MMO where there's often barely a single playthrough and often gaps in in the content so you need to grind for a level or so. Now, with five expansions under its belt, WoW has an unassailable advantage with content. Even power leveling and ripping through content there's months of playtime in the game. It's biggest challenge is getting people to the endgame.

Celtavian said:

The big advantage D&D would have is the world content is in place. Very little time needs to be spent on story. The entire game is the original model for MMORPG's kill and accumulate paradigm. D&D is THE GAME that models what MMORPGs have been doing for years. They have all the cool magic items built up over the years to prove it. I would dangle that giant glittering gold carrot out for their MMORPG addicts to salivate over. You want Blackrazor? Look at that beautiful black sword with all the glittering stars? You want a shiny Holy Avenger? Come and get it. You want to wield the Sword of Kas or obtain the Hand of Vecna? Come and get it. You'll have to fight Vecna himself. You want to raid Undermountain and fight Halaster in his deep, dark dungeon? Here you go. The Mad Wizard himself. What's next? Planescape is next. Head to Sigil. Raid the Hells. Assail the fortress of Asmodeus and the Nine Rulers of Hell.

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The world of D&D is barely an advantage. Lots of other games have had just as detailed a world. None have succeeded. The world is the smallest element needed to succeed at making a good MMO. And most other properties with a world (Star Wars for one) have a lot more fan pull and money than D&D.

Celtavian said:

I would not fail if I had control of D&D content. You would see unique cities built for all the racial areas. Citadel Adbar, Waterdeep, The Dalelands, Menzoberranzan. I would not launch the game without racial cities and well-developed newbie areas. I'd start off with Myth Drannor for a raid zone in the Cormanthor Forest. I'd make sure it was built before I launched the game. I'd have a carefully constructed leveling arc from zero to max level with no weak gameplay areas. People would feel like they were adventuring in a fantasy world that provided a completely unique experience.

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The problem is one of time and money. It takes millions of dollars to make an MMO. Millions of dollars and years of time. WoW cost $50 million at a time when most MMOs cost $5-10 million (and four plus years), making it a huge gamble. Because graphic expectations have risen since then, most MMOs are now far more expensive and time intensive.
This is because the worlds are so large and so much content is required. You're hard pressed to make a more expensive product than an MMO game. And the content takes months to make but hours to play through. The game you spent years designing someone will blow through in a fortnight and then move onto other games. Which makes MMOs hard to sustain, and why most end up going to the Free2Play model.

The fact of the matter is, making a good MMO is likely to cost $10+ million dollars each year. Which is likely twice the total profits of D&D. Which is kinda the definition of a bad investment.

Celtavian said:

WoW is winning not because it appeals to casual gamers, but because it's gameplay is amazing.

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Is it even "winning" anymore? WOW revenue fell 54% in seven months. It's revenue is now less than half of what it was at the peak. They're now turning to price increases to staunch the bleeding revenue numbers, which seems like a short term fix at the expense of long term customer retention. They started the first quarter of this year with 10 million customers and by the end of the quarter were down to 7 million customers.

Celtavian said:

Lord of the Rings was never built to be an MMORPG. I love the books, didn't touch the game. It isn't built for it. You don't play Lord of the Rings to advance in levels and gain more powerful magic. There is a fundamental misunderstanding of why a person would be attracted to a Middle Earth game. It isn't what attracts people to MMORPGs.

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Yet it's one of the most successful F2P MMOs out there. Since I have played it, I can tell you that while there is of course the standard aspects of levels and gear, what primarily pulls people into the game is being immersed in Middle Earth "come to life" on their screen.

And to preempt the counter point, yes the game started as subscription, but I recall an article stating it's actually making more money F2P than it was as a sub game.

Celtavian said:

Star Wars had exactly the same problem. You don't play Star Wars to kill and accumulate. Nothing in the Star Wars universe has anything to do with this behavior. MMORPG's thrive on the kill and accumulate mentality. The vicarious thrill of gaining power. Star War's universe was never built with this model in mind.

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I won't say incorrect because I don't work for EA, but the biggest problem I experienced with SW is that it's a great single-player MMO. The game probably would have been more successful if it were released as a solo game. That said, it's still doing quite well as a F2P game now.

I'd also like to add here that your fundamental belief that MMORPGs "thrive on the kill and accumulate mentality" is a gross generalization. The Secret World is the first major counter example that comes to mind.

Celtavian said:

Most new MMORPGs only do a good job with the first 10 to 15 levels of gameplay releasing the game thinking they have time to build the rest. <snip> All those other games failed miserably at the gameplay part.

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I suppose this is true for some games, but "most" and "all" used here seems like a very wide brush to be using.

Celtavian said:

I would not fail if I had control of D&D content. You would see unique cities built for all the racial areas. Citadel Adbar, Waterdeep, The Dalelands, Menzoberranzan. I would not launch the game without raciai cities and well-developed newbie areas. I'd start off with Myth Drannor for a raid zone in the Cormanthor Forest. I'd make sure it was built before I launched the game. I'd have a carefully constructed leveling arc from zero to max level with no weak gameplay areas. People would feel like they were adventuring in a fantasy world that provided a completely unique experience.

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Maybe you could do this, but I'm unclear what makes you so confident.

What is in your noggin that was missing from the teams of people that have been working in the gaming industry for years that will make you succeed where they failed?

Surely you can name many cool fantastical places from D&D lore, but how are any of them fundamentally better than Minas Tirith or Tattooine, and so on; places that come with overflowing buckets of lore-y goodness to capture the hearts and minds of players, yet none of which unseated WoW?

Celtavian said:

The big advantage D&D would have is the world content is in place. Very little time needs to be spent on story.

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No different than SWtOR or LotR really.


[MENTION=2525]Mistwell[/MENTION]I'd say until another MMO is reporting earnings that exceed WoW's, it's still winning.

dracomilan said:

- Make a new Starter Set every other year, trying to make it better and better, and with a new themed adventure in it linked to a two-years long AP-backed plan
2 - publish a single book about the different existing Planes / Settings, about how they are connected, and how they can be used. Call it Book of Worlds or whatever.
- release an OGL

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This isn't a bad idea. It could blend really well with my idea of migrating the focus setting every few years. A new setting starts off with a new Starter Set that includes a small setting primer, the starter set rules, and a small adventure. The Campaign Setting book or books would be the big, wide appeal product. The stories and adventures would take place in this setting. It would really be like a relaunch of the game in many ways, but without actually being a relaunch of the game.

tyrlaan said:

[MENTION=2525]Mistwell[/MENTION]I'd say until another MMO is reporting earnings that exceed WoW's, it's still winning.

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Is AOL winning on the dial-up service industry? Would ANYONE describe AOL as a winner right now, even though nobody comes close to them in that industry and there used to be lots of competition in that industry? I don't think "beating everyone else in an industry in serious decline" is necessarily winning. I am not saying WOWs industry is in serious decline - I am saying I am not sure they are winning right now even though they have the most revenue in their industry at the moment. Making the most revenue in your industry might not be the only criteria for "winning".

Jeff Carlsen said:

This isn't a bad idea. It could blend really well with my idea of migrating the focus setting every few years. A new setting starts off with a new Starter Set that includes a small setting primer, the starter set rules, and a small adventure. The Campaign Setting book or books would be the big, wide appeal product. The stories and adventures would take place in this setting. It would really be like a relaunch of the game in many ways, but without actually being a relaunch of the game.

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This is actually a really clever idea, and is an excellent answer to the original question posed. it really is a way to keep the game fresh without rules bloat, and keeps the 3 core books evergreen.