D&D 4E 4E WotC way of saying your fired?

[BryonD]

In that case my poll is perfect as I have decided only to care about the opinions of the respondents!




First 100% accurate poll on the internet! Woohoo!


I win the interweb!

I disagree.

Run a poll and we'll work it out.....

 

[Celebrim]

The problem with online polls is not the sample size (many online polls can get a huge number of people answering), it's the fact that the sample isn't random, which skews the results.

That's true of alot of polls that nonetheless get treated as scientific facts.

The best answer I guess is how representative do you think we are? Based on the variation of opinion you find in other sorts of polls, I think we are fairly representative. You get gamers of every sort here. If we over represent anything it is passion. We probably underrepresent casual gamers, but I think this is probably a net wash because of the fact we probably make it up in market share (number of products we buy).

So, when 30% of people say that they thumbs down 4e, maybe that just fits in perfectly with my preconcieved notion that about a third of players seemed disinterested or even angry about a new edition.

But I wouldn't bet on it.

 

[Turjan]

Who else thinks that EN World develops into a new Dragonsfoot, just for 3.x? This should be a poll in General .

 

[Grog]

That's true of alot of polls that nonetheless get treated as scientific facts.

I'm not aware of any poll that gets treated as scientific fact, no matter how random the sample. Even people who perform scientific polling do not claim that their results are factual, merely that they have a high degree of confidence (usually 95%) that they are accurate.

The best answer I guess is how representative do you think we are?

Actually, that's not even the right question. The right question isn't how representative is ENWorld, it's how representative are the people who chose to answer that particular poll? And that subset is not a random sampling of ENWorlders. It's a biased sample, because the respondents are self-selecting. Thus, the results are not accurately reflective of the opinions of ENWorlders, let alone the gaming population at large.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

Sorry, but I don't get it.

Well this is what Erik Mona said. The scenario might play out something like this:

Back at Wizards of the Coast in 1999 there was a lot of talk about "firing the existing audience" of D&D with the third edition launch. The logic went like this: "Even if we have to fire all of our existing customers, so long as we replace those old customers with more new ones, the result will have been worth it."

Of course, 3.0 did nothing of the kind. Instead, largely by harkening back to the "good old days" of first edition ("Back to the Dungeon," Greyhawk as core, half-orcs, monks, and assassins back in the game, etc.) they managed to revitalize the community of "lapsed" D&D players, bringing them back into the fold.

--Erik Mona

3.0 was a good stab at the old, loyal fans. Level limits? Completely gone. Multiclassing restrictions? Almost completely gone. Classes restricted to certain races? Gone.

Insert a working and important skill system, offer an alternative to the Vancian-type magic user, invent feats and PCs to let the players give their characters flavour on the base of the game's mechanics.

This is an impressive list of revolutionary changes. A much more impressive list than what is apparently happening with 4e. And I say that this list is what brought back "lapsed" players, not the re-emergence of half-orcs, assassins and dungeons.

In the second half of 2e's lifetime I concentrated more and more on other RPGs, and actively tried to convince my players to change the system. There were so many games much more elegant, easy to run and easy to explain. This stopped in the year 2000. This stopped because 3e finally made D&D a modern game, a game I love to run and play.

But 3(.5)e is not the holy grail of roleplaying games. There is always room for improvement, for the newcomers, the players of the next generation, as well as for old farts like us.

I understand the problems for publishers, being faced with the tough decision, whether and if so when to make the change. You have to weigh the expected numbers of loyal 3.5er against new players and edition-turncoats against each other.

I'll even give you another reason to use the 3.5e rule set for your third Pathfinder series: a massive adventure path like this will not be very attractive to newcomers, who only have half a year of experience with D&D. I think those new guys will take some more time to become confident to look outside of WotC's portfolio and to develop a thirst for such a big thing. But in 2010 you should have something to offer for a new generation of D&Ders. They will be the ones who pay your rent.

Hmmh, this long rant-like post is due to my sentiments building up during the last weeks. Those the-end-is-neigh-they-are-killing-D&D doomsayers are pushing my buttons.

---
Huldvoll

Jan van Leyden

 

[Celebrim]

Thus, the results are not accurately reflective of the opinions of ENWorlders, let alone the gaming population at large.

I don't think you have any more basis for that assumption than the contrary, except that it fits what you want to believe. I can agree that there might be a basis for believing that EnWorlders aren't signficantly representative of the population, but I don't agree that because that is so we know which way we lean. Lots of people have commented about how positive of an environment EnWorld is. We might overrepresent those that are excited about a new edition. Or we might not.

I find it much harder to agree that those that are answering these polls significantly differ from the EnWorld community as a whole. For one thing, if we did, that would act as a strong incintive for lurkers that disagreed to post/poll, and as far as I can tell the 4e contriversy is pulling in lots of lurkers on both sides of the debate. Why should polling particularly attract either those excited or those upset by the new edition. If anything we are just excluding the apathetic middle, which logically is going to split over whether to adopt a new edition anyway because of things like the cost/trouble of converting.

 

[Celebrim]

3.0 was a good stab at the old, loyal fans. Level limits? Completely gone. Multiclassing restrictions? Almost completely gone. Classes restricted to certain races? Gone.

How hard would it be to add any of those things back in as house rules? Of the old loyal fans, what percentage say those things as cludges or as an advantages to the system? And didn't multiclassing restrictions stay in precisely where players felt that they were most important? Is the removal of a restriction something hard to change?

Insert a working and important skill system, offer an alternative to the Vancian-type magic user, invent feats and PCs to let the players give their characters flavour on the base of the game's mechanics.

Additive. There is a big difference between adding new things to the system or removing old restrictions and transforming things from one thing to another.

This is an impressive list of revolutionary changes.

I see them as neither revolutionary nor even changes. I could drop the 3e skill system straight into a 1e game. Removing multiclassing restrictions wasn't a big change. Changing the way multiclassing works was a big change, and its one that people are still complaining about in a disguised form (namely, the 'gish' fighter-mage is no longer viable as it once was) because while they saw the advantages of the change they weren't completely happy with the implementation.

I'd saw that on the whole, changes in multiclassing (and things like unified advancement tables that are part of that) where the biggest and most revolutionary changes in 3e, and also the ones that are in subtle ways the most buggy.

Unifying the saving throw mechanic was also a pretty big change, as was scaling saving throw DCs upward to fit the challenge.

A much more impressive list than what is apparently happening with 4e.

No, its a much more impressive list of additions. It's a much less impressive list of changes. 3rd edition changed the saving throw mechanic. 4th is replacing it. 3rd edition gave a semi-Vancian alternative to pure Vancian spellcasting. 4th is replacing it across the board. And so forth. People tend to feel more comfortable with for example, now getting a side dish along with thier favorite menu item (because they can always not eat the side dish), than they do with thier favorite menu item changing.

And I say that this list is what brought back "lapsed" players, not the re-emergence of half-orcs, assassins and dungeons.

I think it was both. I think people like half-orcs, assassins, and dungeons and generally didn't like racial based level limits. I think 2nd edition generated so much contriversy because it took out things that they liked and didn't fix things that they didn't. So all of the hassel and less of the fun. It remains uncertain how they'll react to 4e and whether the 4e design team will take out more fun than they put in, and that will depend on the implementation and the individual.

 

[Grog]

I don't think you have any more basis for that assumption than the contrary, except that it fits what you want to believe.

No. It has nothing to do with what I want to believe. The fact of the matter is that online polls result in biased samples, because they allow self-selection among the respondents. There are any number of websites out there that go into this phenomenon in detail - just Google "biased sample" for a start - but the short answer is that these polls are not scientific and thus are generally not taken seriously.

(And it's also worth pointing out that the people who come to ENWorld are, themselves, a self-selecting subset of the gaming population at large. So if you're trying to gauge the opinions of gamers in general, a poll at this website gives you a biased sample of a biased sample. Making any kind of prediction about the future of the tabletop RPG market based on such a poll would be foolish in the extreme).

 

[Plane Sailing]

This is an impressive list of revolutionary changes. A much more impressive list than what is apparently happening with 4e. And I say that this list is what brought back "lapsed" players, not the re-emergence of half-orcs, assassins and dungeons.

For my friends and I, it is the revolutionary changes that brought us back to D&D. Couldn't care less about half-orcs, assassins and dungeons; they were just window dressing.

I doubt that any other than a tiny, tiny fraction of people came back to D&D because of certain races and classes being back in the core books again.

 

[Reynard]

(And it's also worth pointing out that the people who come to ENWorld are, themselves, a self-selecting subset of the gaming population at large. So if you're trying to gauge the opinions of gamers in general, a poll at this website gives you a biased sample of a biased sample. Making any kind of prediction about the future of the tabletop RPG market based on such a poll would be foolish in the extreme).

So are the folks that go to the WotC forums, choose to take a poll on the WotC website, join the RPGA, and/or attend a big convention. The issue -- for me, anyway -- is that the method they've used to determine which way they are going to go with the game is no more likely to produce an honest result than an ENWorld poll. Add to that the love affair they are having with the Internet as well as the obvious mandate to reimagine the game's basic assumptions, and you have the potential for a flat out mismanagement. Throw on top of this the belief by many 4E supporters here that believe that it can't fail just because it has the D&D logo on it scares the crap out of me.