A road not taken: What if there had been no 4E

[StreamOfTheSky]

3e became bloated with too many supplements, the quality of many of the books was poor, and serious problems with the core rules such as broken spells and power imbalances were not being addressed. It was also growing stale.

I really wanted a 4th edition that fixed all that. I was so looking forward to 4e.

Unfortunately, WotC came out with a '4e' that went in the opposite direction to what I wanted in just about every way. Spells all cause damage? Minions? Healing surges? Marking? Monsters don't advance as characters? I want no part of it.

Pathfinder is the closest thing right now to a 'real 4e' as far as I'm concerned. Not a full solution, but it fixes some problems. And Paizo is serious about putting out quality products, unlike WotC which only cares about profits.

The thing that WotC could do to win my affection now would be to close up shop and gift all of their IP to Paizo.

I skipped 3.5 entirely as I was fed up with the system by then. 3E drove me back to playing 1E again. If 4E hadn't come out, WOTC would be out a few hundred dollars in book purchases. I wouldn't have got minis so Auggie would be out some money. The big loser of playing time is Mutants and Masterminds as our group would probably have played more superhero games. I guess with the Old School Counter Reformation going on, I'd be a zealot in that movement.

I was very worried about 4E. I figured it would just amp up the nonsense from 3E. 12 attributes, 100 classes and races, ten hour character creations, a week to build an encounter, hit points redone to be "realistic" and a spell list longer than War & Peace.I was very pleasantly surprised.

Back on topic, please?

Mods, please don't lock this thread.

 

[Banshee16]

Yes too, but a lot of what TSR did was settings and adventures, as opposed to rulebooks. And the cost was often low, as in a 9$ module rather than a 30 $ player book

Of course, it did not turn out too well in the end, as we all know ...

Well, to be fair, we're all looking at these charts showing volumes of published game books etc. But I don't think we can just look at x many books published in 1995 vs. Y many in 2009 and say that one was over publishing whereas the other wasn't.

As someone else in the thread mentioned, there are supposedly 200,000 current players? How many were there in 1995? How many in 1985? The fact that more books were published 14 years ago could be related to number of active gamers.

Banshee

 

[Maxboy]

According to the court documents in the recent PDF pirating case, WoTC said there are currently 6 million ppl playing DnD.

Though that could mean all editions

 

[Vigilance]

Yeah but WOTC isn't even close to that number at all.

Look at Echohawk's handy table that shows the breakdown of RPG products vs total products and the high point in the DnD cycle under WOTC was 2006.

Factoring out 1997 (that's an odd year, I thought TSR went bankrupt in 1999?!?!) and 1988 (run up to 2nd edition) you have to go all the way to pre 1983 for TSR to produce less.

So even compared to the bulk of the 80s in the glory days of TSR (when people consider the company healthy in 1e), WOTC is still producing less than TSR did.

Right, but you can't just give the 80's a pass.

Remember the first mention of TSR having financial troubles we get is 1985.

Gary Gygax has said the company was in dire financial straights, which prompted him to come back from California and get Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures out the door RIGHT THEN.

So the company was having financial problems off an on even during the 1e era. It didn't just fall into hard times during the 90's.

 

[AllisterH]

Well, to be fair, we're all looking at these charts showing volumes of published game books etc. But I don't think we can just look at x many books published in 1995 vs. Y many in 2009 and say that one was over publishing whereas the other wasn't.

As someone else in the thread mentioned, there are supposedly 200,000 current players? How many were there in 1995? How many in 1985? The fact that more books were published 14 years ago could be related to number of active gamers.

Banshee

But this doesn't really matter if you think about it.

Even if you 10x the number of active players back then, you're still splitting your audience and instead of say one single release netting you 100000 sales, in a month, TSR was only seeing 20000 x 5 releases with every release itself costing some overhead.

Right now, WOTC releases roughly 1 hardcover per month (not including adventures) that retails for about $35 (let's ignore online sellers).

I'm not sure how this could be considered killing the market with oversaturation.

EDIT: Wasn't the reason why Gygax had to come back was that TSR had only been producing modules at the time and things like the Wilderness/Dungeoneer's Survival Guide are what pulled TSR out of their slide?

 

[Remathilis]

Right, back on topic...

There was still another year or two of "quality" supplements (Dark Sun setting, Expanded Epic Level Handbook, Arms & Equipment 2, Complete Warrior II, additional psionic material, Eberron regional books, Faerun regional books. Feyonomicon, etc.

Still, that's only 2 years tops. 4e would have come by 2010.

 

[AllisterH]

Actually, you could have had easily more years of 3.5

For example, why not produce a Monstrous Arcana series for 3.5? I always thought this was a good idea in 2E.

So have the Monstermonicon and then a couple of adventures for certain monsters.

 

[Arashi Ravenblade]

I could have seen them releasenig a revised 3.5. That included Errata. This would have cleared some things up.
Maybe another UNearthed Arcana, more PHB's and DMGs plus tons of more Fareun regional books along with new Campaign settings. Honestly I once wrote up a list of all the new 3.5 books I wanted to see and Im not talking goofy stuff like "complete Commonr." But stuff I could see people actually using, like more monster books, for Fey, Giants and the like. Plus with more campaign settings they could have had more books for years to come, just on the planes alone.

 

[billd91]

But this doesn't really matter if you think about it.

Even if you 10x the number of active players back then, you're still splitting your audience and instead of say one single release netting you 100000 sales, in a month, TSR was only seeing 20000 x 5 releases with every release itself costing some overhead.

Right now, WOTC releases roughly 1 hardcover per month (not including adventures) that retails for about $35 (let's ignore online sellers).

I'm not sure how this could be considered killing the market with oversaturation.

You may have been splitting the market with lots of setting-specific supplements, but keep in mind that's now potentially spread over several markets. That reduces the effect of oversaturation compared to focusing all on one market. In the long run, fewer markets are probably better for sales in general and profitability but that market may be easier to oversaturate.

 

[Jack99]

According to the court documents in the recent PDF pirating case, WoTC said there are currently 6 million ppl playing DnD.

Though that could mean all editions

They are talking about all editions.