D&D 5E Are you ready for a new edition of D&D?

[pemerton]

3e was a great step forward when it came out, but I think it would be a shame if it was still the market standard rpg fifteen years after its release. Surely we have learned from it enough to take the game to a new level with revisions that rationally address some of the problems and introduce some new ideas.

Of course, there wasn't a shred of that in any of the 4e releases, and the 5e playtests never look promising, but we do need a new edition, just a better one than whoever's left at WotC seems capable of making.

Or maybe people actually didnt LIKE 4E?

I dont understand when people say this. It's as if people were simply going to play D&D no matter what. Whether they actually liked the system or not. People who liked 4e PLAYED 4e. People who didnt DIDNT.
If they didnt like 4e they would have played it until they DID?

Like I said, I dont get this reasoning.

ShinHakkaider, let me introduce you to Ahnehnois.

Ahnehnois thinks that D&D should be a classless, skill-based, magic-point game with a wound system and parrying rather than hp and AC (I extrapolate this from previous posting history). That game exists in various forms, and has for over 30 years (eg Runequest, Rolemaster, HARP). But Ahnehnois, to the best of my knowledge, has never played any of those games and is still here describing 3E as the market standard RPG.

There is someone who is playing a game not because that person thinks it's the best-suited game for him, but because of some other property it has (eg brand recognition).

What was the original intent of the OGL?

The OGL locks the indefinitely into one type of method, and one particular product line.

Mistwell is correct here. The function of the OGL is to lock the product line.

Ryan Dancey actually had a bit of a prediction on what would happen if WotC went away from the OGL. He predicted that some other company would pick up 3e and run with it, WotC would be forced to go in a direction that would be criticized by many as "not D&D," and would hurt for it, sales-wise.

But how does this prove that the OGL is a good thing for WotC? All it does is confirm Mistwell's point, that the OGL locks in a certain approach to a product, and precludes introducing a different product strategy. It doesn't prove that it's good for WotC to be locked in!

It's not as if WotC believed, in 2008, that it could go on making millions from 3E but it felt like taking a punt on 4e. That's not how a wholly-owned (? or mostly owned?) subsidiary of a publicly traded company works. In 2008 (or earlier, really, when the plans for 4e commenced) WotC clearly decided that continuing to publish and sell 3E was not commercially viable for them - because if it was, they would have kept doing it!

 

[Zardnaar]

ShinHakkaider, let me introduce you to Ahnehnois.

Ahnehnois thinks that D&D should be a classless, skill-based, magic-point game with a wound system and parrying rather than AC (I extrapolate this from previous posting history). That game exists in various forms, and has for over 30 years (eg Runequest, Rolemaster, HARP). But Ahnehnois, to the best of my knowledge, has never played any of those games and is still here describing 3E as the market standard RPG.

There is someone who is playing a game not because that person thinks it's the best-suited game for him, but because of some other property it has (eg brand recognition).


Mistwell is correct here. The function of the OGL is to lock the product line.

But how does this prove that the OGL is a good thing for WotC? All it does is confirm Mistwell's point, that the OGL locks in a certain approach to a product, and precludes introducing a different product strategy. It doesn't prove that it's good for WotC to be locked in!

It's not as if WotC believed, in 2008, that it could go on making millions from 3E but it felt like taking a punt on 4e. That's not how a wholly-owned (? or mostly owned?) subsidiary of a publicly traded company works. In 2008 (or earlier, really, when the plans for 4e commenced) WotC clearly decided that continuing to publish and sell 3E was not commercially viable for them - because if it was, they would have kept doing it!

As a former 3.5 fan the last year or two of 3.5 book quality was not there. I wanted a new game evolved from 3.5 not a revolution like 4th ed. Technically 4th ed evolved from 3.5 I suppose but they chose the wrong books to use.

 

[Balesir]

Profiting off the intellectual property of another = losing money

Only if it's a zero-sum game. Which it's pretty clear that it isn't. More support for a game = bigger and more active community = bigger total market size = more profit "pie" to go for.

The OGL, if handled well, makes hugely good business sense, growing the D&D market pie in exchange for letting others have slices of it. The huge mistake with 4E was removing the OGL, removing, at a stroke, a mass of support and enthusiasm for the game while, at the same time, leaving the old version to go its own way in competition (and then not even continuing to sell it, so missing out on free moey).

The way to manage an OGL going forward is to add each evolution to it, being VERY careful about what "product identity" you keep for yourself. If WotC do this with 5E I would expect it to be much more successful than 4E on that basis alone.

It's only anecdotal evidence, but look at the folks saying that they want to play games that are supported or that have plentiful published adventures. That is just a part of what you get with an OGL. Keep selling your older editions (even if as PDFs only) and you join those profiting from your "competition"; if your "competition" is your own previous products in the publishing industry, how can that possibly be bad, if it's managed well (i.e. so you continue getting revenue from the older product)?

ShinHakkaider, let me introduce you to Ahnehnois.

Yep - and it's not like we haven't pointed this out to him...

Mistwell is correct here. The function of the OGL is to lock the product line.

Which it would not do if the new product was folded into the license properly. It means you have added competition, but (a) despite what lazy, exploitative managers might believe, competition is almost always good for both business and customer, and (b) it's competition you (can) get a cut from - how good is that?

 

[Phototoxin]

Not ready, didn't like the playtest and my group wasn't mad on it either. Rather than learn a new unpolished ruleset merely in order to beta test we spent our precious gaming time on 4E campaigns. We're in the middle of a campaign and they're heading to paragon soon, if we're lucky we might get to epic!
On top of that I've some FATE and WoD and 40K systems I'd like to play run so have plenty of stuff.

Finally 4E was more 'noob' friendly - people who would never have played 3E (my wife for one) have played 4E. 4E has been a great evangilsation tool and made D&D not just for geeks who agonise which prestige class to pick for their build!

 

[delericho]

The OGL, if handled well, makes hugely good business sense, growing the D&D market pie in exchange for letting others have slices of it. The huge mistake with 4E was removing the OGL, removing, at a stroke, a mass of support and enthusiasm for the game while, at the same time, leaving the old version to go its own way in competition (and then not even continuing to sell it, so missing out on free moey).

Actually, I think the BIG mistake of 4e was failing to renew the Dragon/Dungeon licenses with Paizo. At a stroke, that moved transformed their biggest cheerleaders into their biggest competitors. It forced Paizo to look at how to adapt their business to continue to make money.

And it left Paizo with access to a huge body of potential customers (the database of former subscribers), many of whom were aggrieved at WotC cancelling "their" magazine. (Whether that ill-feeling was justified or not is another discussion, but largely irrelevant to the above.)

The consequence of this was that Paizo created Pathfinder to continue support for 3.5e. They thrived. Then, as people started to dislike what they were hearing about 4e, Pathfinder became a natural home for them. And from there, it became a sensible move for Paizo to produce their own game, and tap into the desire for something other than 4e.

If WotC had renewed that license, it's entirely possible that no other manufacturer would have been in a position to do their Pathfinder-equivalent - nobody else had the same reliable customer base.

(What's more, it's entirely possible that if WotC had renewed the licenses, Paizo would now be a memory. The magazine business is not a good place to be, so it's possible the magazines would just have failed 'naturally' over those 6 years.)

 

[delericho]

The OGL allows companies to skip a huge portion of normal free market capitalism. They get to simply use a brand name and then make their own generic version of it without the heavy cost of getting to that invention in the first place, circumventing the entire point of the intellectual property laws.

And I am saying for WOTC, that was bad.

The OGL and d20 licenses also allowed 3e to benefit from a huge amount of 3rd party support, much of it very good. The availability of that support, and the excitement of so many people in the industry working on all that support, was a significant factor in the acceptance of 3e. It's likely that the edition wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful without.

(And I doubt the d20 license itself could have done the job - at the time there was a huge amount of scepticism that this was all a ploy by WotC to "steal all our campaigns" or somesuch. The OGL license, with its lack of an expiry date, was a strong counter to that.)

The OGL locks the indefinitely into one type of method, and one particular product line.

Worryingly, it looks like it may well lock everyone into that preferred method indefinitely. Because if Pathfinder 2nd Ed switches to any radically-different approach then it will split its own market (and so have to compete with Pathfinder 1st, not to mention opening an opportunity for someone else to do their own Pathfinder-equivalent). And anyone else going up against Pathfinder, with the possible exception of 5e, is fighting against the entrenched position that Pathfinder now has as the #1 RPG.

(There's still space in the market if you don't mind being a smaller operator - especially with Kickstarter opening up a lot of funding possibilities. So, a "Numenera" or a "13th Age" can do pretty well. And the "Star Wars" license will, of course, remain valuable. But it looks like the bulk of the market will be dominated by OGL-derived games for the foreseeable future.)

 

[RevTurkey]

Yep. Ready

I think it will be good.

Got a nice empty spot on my coffee table waiting for it.

I look forward to playing the snot out of it for years to come.

 

[billd91]

Worryingly, it looks like it may well lock everyone into that preferred method indefinitely. Because if Pathfinder 2nd Ed switches to any radically-different approach then it will split its own market (and so have to compete with Pathfinder 1st, not to mention opening an opportunity for someone else to do their own Pathfinder-equivalent).

That doesn't worry me very much. Paizo doesn't seem likely to produce a radically different 2nd edition to Pathfinder. I think they will have a 2nd edition eventually and it will be much more like a AD&D's 2nd edition - evolutionary. And if they do surprise us with a more radical change, we can be reasonably confident they'll make it pretty widely known long before publication and we'll have plenty of time to offer feedback.

 

[Emerikol]

These two statements can both be true....
1. The OGL was the best thing ever for customers. It broke the monopoly and got competition into the marketplace for D&D.
2. The OGL was the worst thing ever for the owner of the ip. It allowed competitors to use the ip for free and compete against them.

Now. We could argue that perhaps long term the hobby itself will prosper with more competition because honestly competition fuels innovation. While I hate many of it's innovations, I do think 13th Age did introduce some new ideas so that is a positive.

A monopoly is only good if it's your monopoly. I don't trust WOTC to be the sole controllers of the ip. I trust Paizo a lot more. But it's probably best for us consumers that we no longer have to trust anyone. One potential negative would be innovation outside of D&D might suffer but to be honest, I don't see that happening. Savage Worlds is pretty big now. World of Darkness in it's days was big.

 

[Wulfgar76]

True, depending on how long we're talking about. 4e only lasted somewhere around five tumultuous years with a lot of revisions and a sub-edition buried in there. How long will 5e last if it falls short of expectations?

4e was a failed experiment, the New Coke of D&D. Half the customers disliked it and went back to Classic Coke.
While 4e was an expedition into uncharted territory, 5e is a return to the familiar. I don't think the two are comparable really at all.
That said, I have no idea how long it will last. I'm optimistic though.

3e is good enough that a version of it is the #1 rpg now, even six years after it was "done". It's good enough that some unknown mass of people are still playing it without a thought of PF. At some point, someone (perhaps Paizo) is going to realize that 3e and the OGL had some good ideas, stop trashing it, and start working on making it better. There are just too many good reasons to do it for business concerns to keep getting in the way forever.

I think 3e is number one not because it's that great, but because there is a product vacuum and nothing better on the market right now. I think D&D Next is going to shake things up considerably.

However 3e/PF is indeed the best at a certain type of game and playstyle, therefore it will always have an audience.