D&D 4E 4E's aggressive pace: Too much, too fast?

[Kevin Brennan]

Financial disaster for all involved. WotC could probably survive a year with no D&D sales.

WotC could certainly survive indefinitely with no D&D sales--D&D is not their biggest income stream (I'm pretty sure Magic is significantly bigger).

That said, I agree that there's no possibility of the launch being delayed. The marketing budget is in place, the printer time has been paid for, and they're not going to put it out late. The thing is, there's no way that this game is going to be terrible--I don't like a lot of the changes personally, but even if there are a lot of subtle problems that show up over the long term I'm sure the obvious issues will be fixed. It's going to be "good enough" to go out the door. You'd need a lot of people inside the company agreeing that the launch of 4e in June would be a complete disaster before WotC even THINKS about MAYBE delaying it.

And that won't happen, because the staff at WotC seem to genuinely believe that 4e even now is a much better game than 3e.

 

[delericho]

WotC could certainly survive indefinitely with no D&D sales--D&D is not their biggest income stream (I'm pretty sure Magic is significantly bigger).

Sorry, I should have specified WotC's D&D department.

The thing is, there's no way that this game is going to be terrible--I don't like a lot of the changes personally, but even if there are a lot of subtle problems that show up over the long term I'm sure the obvious issues will be fixed. It's going to be "good enough" to go out the door. You'd need a lot of people inside the company agreeing that the launch of 4e in June would be a complete disaster before WotC even THINKS about MAYBE delaying it.

Actually, the hard deadline increases, rather than reduces, the odds of it being terrible. It may well be that someone finds a potential game-breaker at the 11th hour, and puts together a quick fix just before the book is finalised. Obviously, such a fix wouldn't be properly tested... and might itself cause something else to break. With a team of designers working in parallel, and working very hard in parallel at that, it's entirely possible that they all throw in their last minute tweaks, and the whole thing falls apart.

That said, I don't think the game will simply be terrible. In the worst case, I expect them to produce a really good game that I have absolutely no interest in playing. Which isn't quite the same thing.

And that won't happen, because the staff at WotC seem to genuinely believe that 4e even now is a much better game than 3e.

Unfortunately, even really talented people can make really bad mistakes. George Lucas once said that "The Phantom Menace" was the only film he had made that he was 100% happy with.

 

[Kevin Brennan]

Unfortunately, even really talented people can make really bad mistakes. George Lucas once said that "The Phantom Menace" was the only film he had made that he was 100% happy with.

Yeah, but the sentence is tied to the preceding paragraph, so I'm not actually saying anything different than you are. All I'm saying is that WotC's staff likes 4e and they're not going to say it's not ready for publication--in fact, I would be surprised if any of them think they might NOT be ready to launch on time. They might say "I wish we had a couple more months to polish this up" but the people who say "sorry, can't do that, we have to hit the dates" will override that kind of weak resistance.

The thing is, 4e has already been better playtested than most RPG products ever are. Even if it's not as well-constructed as say, 3e (and I'm not denying that 3e had issues) it will take a while for people to find the broken bits and for those problems to become widely known.

I'm actually pretty negative about 4e--I don't like most of the changes in direction we've seen so far and I think it probably will be buggier than its predecessor. All I'm saying is that people who think that any of those bugs are going to push back the release date don't understand how projects like this work.

 

[AGFlynn]

A) This conversation is irrelevant.

Yet worthy of a reply?
Yeah, you're probably right. But I find the process interesting nonetheless.

This is the real world, and a company has given a team a due-date for product implementation. If that due date were not met, huge amounts of money would be lost and people would be fired. As much as we may academically debate how much time this project requires, and as much as we may or may not feel more time would create a better 4E, in corporate terms, if the project is late, it is a failure and that is that.

Yes, that's a given. But I guess I don't really care if WotC makes money, lives or dies. I'm not sure the consequences would be as dire as you suggest, given that this happens all the time in the gaming software world, though that's a vastly different and more lucrative market.

B) 6 months for six monsters is what people do if they have day jobs, which I am guessing you and most game designers out there in the world do. WotC has full-time employees who show up for work every day to make monsters or whatever else. And these are people who see game design as a dream job, not shlubs who show up to collect a check. These folks take work home with them and probably don't think about much else. Add up all the time you spend on work-related matters each week AND all the time you spend thinking about gaming each week. That total is how much time this staff spends working on 4E each week. They can do the Monster Manual on time.

That's certainly the case. I guess they probably had lots of meetings to consider all of these things years ago and picked Q2 2008 as the deadline they could reasonably meet. I guess what I'm questioning is whether they were right at those meetings. What made me suspicious is the seemingly contradictory statements we've had from WotC that A) "We've got loads of stuff done that we're dying to show you, but we can't yet!" and B) "A lot of these changes are in flux and we won't finalize a lot of things until the last minute!". Like the fact that when Shadowfell comes out before the PHB it may not incorporate the final version of the rules.

C) As mentioned above, 3.5 sales will continue to decrease over the next six months. The PHB is the #1 selling RPG book year in and year out, but I would expect 2008 to be worst year of PHB sales ever... until the 4E version comes out. Six more months of decrease is a corporate nightmare and a fiscal disaster. Not only would people get fired, but paychecks probably would not be written. A delay like the one you're talking about not only won't happen, but should not happen given its consequences for the RPG industry.

I disagree. I think that having had the 3.5 PHB out as long as it has been would mean revenue for it likely passed the break-even point a long time ago. Not so the other 3.5 accessories, etc. But it won't affect mini sales, etc. Unfortunately, when Hasbro reports its quarterly financials, it does not break out WotC's results, which would give us an interesting peek under the hood to substantiate these musings.

D) If you don't believe even a bad new edition of D&D will sell extremely well, you are vastly overestimating the discernment of the average, non-message-board-posting D&D gamer. This is a hypothetical, but if you take the five best, most well-considered and carefully written role-playing game rulesets of any given year, add their sales together, and compare them (even phenomenal games like Dogs in the Vineyard or Burning Wheel or Mutants & Masterminds) to that year or any year's sales of the PHB, I think you'll find the PHB still outsells them all-- even including the year WoD 2.0 came out. I think poor design would hurt long-term sales, but not short-term, and short-term money is clearly the point of releasing a new edition so soon. If the product is not bad, but at least mediocre to decent, they should do fine. If it is good or great, it could revive the post-d20-boom RPG industry. I hope for the best, of course.

But aren't long-term sales the real goal when you need to meet revenue targets? Short-term sales mean nothing if you don't eventually recoup your plate expenditures. Money in has to surpass money out over time if you want to pay staff and then make a profit.

E) All that said, there does seem to be a lot of rushing going on. It is my hope that the areas of WotC's implementation that see the drawbacks of that are those where the rushing seems most apparent, like the Digital Initiative and tied-in game settings, and not the game itself. It is my hope that the basic rules of 4E are treated as the centerpiece of the entire operation and therefore given the most care and attention. I do not know if my hopes are realistic, but if someone smart is at the wheel they should see that errors in the Core Rules will poison the peripheral sources of profit.

Exactly! I think there probably is someone smart at the wheel. But even smart people make mistakes. As for the rushing, my hope is that that comes now from the marketing side, with the blessing of the designers, who, one hopes, have been rushing around for the last four years.

None of this is to defend WotC or 4E, but such a delay would not happen, and if it did many people-- such as employees and their dependents-- would actually suffer. Good or bad, 4E has to roll for the summer cons. The WotC folks just have to do the best they can in the time they have.

That's a good point (and a good quote!). Like I said, I think they would suffer more if the product stinks and gets universal condmenation from us. I don't think it will.

 

[AGFlynn]

(Oops duplicate post)