7 Years of D&D Stories? And a "Big Reveal" Coming?

When asked what he was working on, WotC's Chris Perkins revealed a couple of juicy tidbits. They're not much, but they're certainly tantalizing. Initially, he said that "Our marketing team has a big reveal in the works", and followed that up separately with "Right now I'm working on the next seven years of D&D stories". What all that might mean is anybody's guess, but it sounds like there are plans for D&D stretching into the foreseeable future! Thanks to Barantor for the scoop!

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Both can happen is one is it fizzled in 2011/2012 and another is that it fizzled before late 2010.

It certainly launched as a blockbuster. But your "few years" is guesswork and evidence doesn't support it very well.

The schism happened at launch. It came out and half the people playing 3.5e at the time said "No way I'm buying that crap!". 4e made up for it by attracting a LOT of new people. Most of the stores I went to were filled with people playing D&D Encounters who had never played D&D before 4e.

But 4e was still going strong. WOTC just got a lot of complaining from people who opted out of 4e or bought only the PHB and then decided the edition wasn't for them. They hung around, constantly complaining that 4e wasn't 3.5e. So, when Mearls was talking about finding a way to heal the schism, he was talking mostly about trying to bring the people who liked 3.5e back into the game. Most of them had switched to Pathfinder but some went to 4e with their friends but weren't entirely enjoying themselves.

Which is why they started coming up with the idea for 5e around 2010.

They probably could have stuck with 4e and continued selling books fairly well. But Mearls felt it was more important to have an edition of D&D that would bring back those they had alienated with 4e.

 

[delericho]

The schism happened at launch. It came out and half the people playing 3.5e at the time said "No way I'm buying that crap!".

Before even that, I'm afraid. The Edition Wars seemed to kick off shortly after the announcement of the edition, never mind the release.

Also, put me down as another who doesn't think 4e fizzled so much as it just didn't meet expectations. And I'm inclined to blame the DDI for that: by putting all the mechanical stuff into the Compendium and accessible for a low monthly price, WotC must have eaten into their splatbook sales quite significantly, and since those are normally the safest bets as far as supplements go, I can't imagine that helped. At the same time, although the DDI managed tens of thousands of subscribers (which would have delighted anyone else), I fear it may have been sold to management on a promise of hundreds of thousands and so may also have been considered a disappointment.

But 4e did seem to be going reasonably well until Essentials, which appears to have bombed, rather than fizzled.

 

[Uchawi]

I agree essentials bombed. But the focus was applied in the wrong spot. A lot of the criticisms behind 4E were based on mechanical bias. They would have been better off smoothing out some of the rough edges and adding more options to the game, like allowing casters more spells, or martial characters more attacks. Or add more options for story pacing and healing. But worse of all, you had a feeling that the developers did not want to stand behind their product. That may have been due to some unrealistic expectations set by Hasbro, or the developers promised to much. I believe an attempt was made to branch out to entice another group of players like Magic the Gathering to come into the fold. That would explain the micro management necessary from round to round to manage conditions, interrupts, etc.

But on the other hand 5E threw away most of the strengths and rules consistencies of 4E from the perspective of transparent and easy to understand rules (no DM gets to decide mumbo jumbo), and also dumbing down martial characters and enhancing spell casting classes.

 

[Sailor Moon]

I will say that 5th edition is a testament to how bad 4th edition was. If the previous edition failed because of high expectations or product bloat, then we would have seen a very similar game with 5th edition, we don't. We actually see a game that more resembles 2nd and 3rd edition which means Wizards must have realized that the gaming community weren't finished with those editions.

Sometimes companies believe whenever they create something new that people will automatically take to it and never really look back. That was proven wrong because a lot of people simply got out their old books, played Pathfinder, or got into the retro clones.

 

[delericho]

I agree essentials bombed. But the focus was applied in the wrong spot. A lot of the criticisms behind 4E were based on mechanical bias. They would have been better off smoothing out some of the rough edges and adding more options to the game, like allowing casters more spells, or martial characters more attacks. Or add more options for story pacing and healing.

I'm not familiar enough with 4e to comment.

But worse of all, you had a feeling that the developers did not want to stand behind their product.

I don't think that's fair. I'm sure they genuinely wanted to produce the best product they could, they genuinely put in their best efforts, and it just didn't work out.

But on the other hand 5E threw away most of the strengths and rules consistencies of 4E from the perspective of transparent and easy to understand rules (no DM gets to decide mumbo jumbo), and also dumbing down martial characters and enhancing spell casting classes.

Actually, I think this goes back to your first point: with 4e they tried to formalise an awful lot of the game, what with all those grid movements, the rolling revisions as they endlessly tweaked the game, and the corrections for those criticisms of mechanical bias.

And at the end of all that work, after years of tweaking and lots of complaints about there being too much errata, they ended up with a game that still wasn't perfect, that still suffered lots of complaints of mechanical bias, feat taxes, and the like.

At which point I suspect they concluded that the notion of perfecting the mechanics is a chimera - the more they fix some things the more others will pop out of alignment. Because any sufficiently complex piece of software always has infinite bugs. Much better, then, to simply skip all that effort - to note that the game will always need a human DM to fix some issues, so why not just built that in from the outset?

Either that, or Mearls just has a preference (either in general, or just now) for a more rules-light version of the game.

 

[delericho]

Humans are, as a rule, pretty crap at predicting the future.

You would be better off with either a dart board or a trained monkey (untrained monkeys tend to bite too much!).

I suppose monkeys would do. Sadly, our last true prophet is now dead.

 

[Halivar]

I will say that 5th edition is a testament to how bad 4th edition was..

You may say so, but the experience of thousands of gamers will disagree. It was not what enough of the market wanted to suit WotC; that is the most you can say.

This is the part of the Edition Wars I think I will enjoy the least: the endless schadenfreude and "I told you so's" that come from its conclusion.

 

[Raunalyn]

So, what was the big reveal (since I'm too lazy to scan through all the comments on this thread)?

 

[Halivar]

So, what was the big reveal (since I'm too lazy to scan through all the comments on this thread)?

So far? The reveal is that there will be a reveal. Soon(tm).

 

[Wicht]

The schism happened at launch. It came out and half the people playing 3.5e at the time said "No way I'm buying that crap!".

I think it was closer to 30% actually, at least initially. There were several polls that showed it to be in that Ballpark upon release. Over the course of a year and a half the number dissatisfied with the game grew, contrary to many people's expectations (that being the people who thought 4e was great and those people who assumed the DnD name alone was enough to carry any edition). At the same time, while new 4e players were coming in, Pathfinder was also bringing in new blood and it is obvious in hindsight which one was actually doing it better.