As long as we are talking hypothetically...

[ggroy]

1. I don't see 4E lasting up to 10 years.

My lowball guess for 4E's lifetime, would be 4 years.

4 years was the length of the time period of 3.5E, from the release of the 3.5E core books in July 2003 to announcement of 4E at gencon in August 2007.

My highball guess for 4E's lifetime, would be 11 years.

11 years was the length of the time period of 1E AD&D, from the release of the 1E AD&D PHB in 1978 to the release of the 2E AD&D core books in 1989.

(This is based solely on historical analogy).

 

[thecasualoblivion]

OTOH I was thinking exactly this regarding your 8-10 years of life time of 4e. I would rather put that in 5 years.
As far as how Pathfinder goes it has as much to do with the numbers of loyal fans as the cash these loyal fans are willing to give. Plus the production costs or what have you.

Again, I refer to AD&D's run from 1977-2000 with less mechanical variety than is contained in just the 4E PHB. If AD&D was able to maintain its popularity without getting stale, I don't see the issue with 4E.

Another thing to consider: if D&D loses strategic value (ie novels sell less and less) and brand power we do not know if Hasbro will justify risks to keep D&D in development or try to find a sweet deal to sell it to someone that may think he could resurrect it in market due. It could be anyone from Microsoft to Nintendo. And this is important because right now some amount of investment is noticeable. I am not sure if it is in the millions Scott is talking about but if people perceive a considerable decline in investment the value of the brand name will suffer a lot.

I'd be interested to see the correlation between people who hold this sort of opinion and those dissatisfied with the current D&D paradigm. I wonder how much personally having a negative opinion of the current paradigm correlates with predicting D&Ds demise and sale to another party.

 

[ggroy]

I'd be interested to see the correlation between people who hold this sort of opinion and those dissatisfied with the current D&D paradigm. I wonder how much personally having a negative opinion of the current paradigm correlates with predicting D&Ds demise and sale to another party.

I don't fit nicely into this characterization.

I do enjoy DM'ing 4E, but I find myself feeling pessimistic about 4E's future viability.

 

[Korgoth]

...comment on your response to the following scenario:

1. 4E is successful, maintains itself as the top selling and most played RPG, and runs 8-10 years

I wake up and say "Wow, what a weird dream."

That's not Hasbro's business model. So what you're discussing won't happen and is a totally moot point.

 

[Umbran]

1. 4E is successful, maintains itself as the top selling and most played RPG, and runs 8-10 years in its current direction before being replaced by a 5E even less like previous editions

My own thought is that 8-10 would be at the high end. My personal thought is that while streamlining made it highly playable, and easy to prep, it also minimized the mechanical diversity available to the game, and that will shorten it's effective lifespan.

2. Pathfinder tapers off after a successful launch by 3PP standards, and achieves a stable presence on par with True20 or Mutants and Masterminds.
3. The 3.5E playing community shrinks over time until its on par with people playing previous editions.

Over those 8-10 years? Yes, that seems plausible. I expect the drop off in 3.x playing to be long and slow - many will continue with that edition for the rest of their gaming careers. B

4. OGL based gaming begins a slow decline, with the big names soldiering on and fewer and fewer new products being released.

There are only three major publishers that have been able to keep a game rolling for the really long term: TSR/WotC (D&D), Steve Jackson Games (GURPS), and White Wolf (WoD). Without such a beast driving, any game, OGL or not, is apt to taper off after while.

 

[wingsandsword]

I don't know anyone (at all) playing 4e, so for me it's like 3rd edition has just stopped printing new books. I'm not really interested in pathfinder. I finally have a complete set of D&D with the guarantee that no more books will come out.

So I'll continue to run my games in 3.5 and if new players come along who don't know 3.5 then I'll teach them.

Maybe 5e will interest me. I'll get back to you on that one in 10 years.

Besides, if it ever reached the point that I could no longer find people to play 3rd edition, I'd just run GURPS instead. 4e is irrelevant to me.

This is pretty much where I am.

I wish Pathfinder all the best, but I'm seriously not interested in it. I have dozens of books that are enough for me to game for the rest of my life and still not play similar campaigns twice. Pathfinder will probably be a good game, but I don't really need it myself.

Nobody I know in real life plays 4e, only some people I know friend-of-a-friend that I didn't already game with before 4e came out. The gaming groups I know of in meatspace all decided 4e was too unlike what they knew of as D&D and avoided it like the plague. Heck, one was a playtest group (names in the playtest credits and all that) that dropped 4e the moment the playtest was over and went back to 3.5.

Today, at my 4-year-olds birthday party, an old friend of mine I haven't gamed with in years came up to me and said she was running a D&D 3.5 campaign and wanted me in it (she was there because her grandson and my stepson are playmates). Her words about the edition issue? "I hope you don't play that revision, if you did, I'd have to hurt you.", said playfully, she'd looked at 4e on the shelves and had put it back in horror. She started with OD&D in the late 70's, moved on to 1e, and then stayed with it for over 20 years until jumping to 3.5 in '05, and from the looks of it she's going to be playing 3.5 for the rest of her life (barring a 5e or later edition that more closely resembles the 1e/2e/3e design lineage instead of the 4e evolutionary offshoot). I'm planning on playing in this campaign, and this is a woman who like to run multi-year long campaigns. I don't really see a problem with having people to play 3.5 for a number of years, right now I'd have more of a problem getting a 4e game together if I tried.

Could they make a 5e that would bring me back to buying WotC D&D? You bet! However, it would have to be a return to the "feel" of 1e/2e/3.x instead of a continuation of 4e. It would have to feel like it was an advancement or development of that which came before and not just a a release churned out to sell more new numbered PHB's and yearly MM's.

I hold next to zero interest in playing a 4e campaign, and I would be far more likely to haul out my New World of Darkness, or d20 Modern, or Star Wars (d6 or Saga), or even LUG Star Trek before I played 4e if nobody played 3.5 D&D anymore. If I wanted a game for one of those I could also put a group together for NWoD and Star Wars on pretty short notice.

My hope for Pathfinder is that it keeps people playing in the 3.x sphere of gaming and helps keep newer gamers within the 3.x world, and that the final game as released is close enough to 3.5 to cause minimal issues with people going between the games. I haven't kept up with developments, but as I understand it that is one of the design goals of the game.

 

[carmachu]

I'd be interested to see the correlation between people who hold this sort of opinion and those dissatisfied with the current D&D paradigm. I wonder how much personally having a negative opinion of the current paradigm correlates with predicting D&Ds demise and sale to another party.

One can argue the same correlation for those that went with 4e and not pathfinder, and teh negativity and/or pessimissim towrds how well it may or may do.

Again, I refer to AD&D's run from 1977-2000 with less mechanical variety than is contained in just the 4E PHB. If AD&D was able to maintain its popularity without getting stale, I don't see the issue with 4E.

Uhm no. It wasnt a healthy run all the way up to 2000 and you know it. It limped crawled and was in a death throw there until WotC bought them up and saved it.

 

[Windjammer]

You know, I don't buy this. AD&D 1E/2E lasted from 1977-2000 with less mechanical variety than what is contained in the 4E PHB.

Well, 2E's healthy life span surely didn't go up all the way to 2000. I certainly can't envisage WotC to pin the health of 4E on the sort of nichê product TSR relied on in the final 5 years of 2E's existence.

Where I'm on board with you, OTOH, is that 4E's mechanical simplicity isn't a stumbling block to future development. I mean, PHB 2 is already a huge step forward; if WotC keeps going on that scale, the potential for 4E is easily on a par with 3E. (I'd have never thought I'd ever write a sentence like this, but strange things can happen.) You see, like you I think some of the self-imposed constraints on 4E could be lifted pretty easily (e.g. DDM-distances on mobility, way more rituals, etc etc). So the question isn't whether WotC can see this through at a game-mechanical level, but whether they're interested to see it through at a corporate/economical level. Which is where my earlier point re TSR's death-defying optimism re nichê product comes in. See, I think continually developing 4E to ever more complex (not complicated) reaches inevitable renders a portion of the early 4E stuff obsolete. (In part, I think that's what's happening with PHB 2 vs. PHB 1 already, although I'd rather not render this a matter of debate in this wonderful thread.) So the issue is, how far can WotC go without alienating customers who don't want to see their extant 4E-investments being partly, but continuously, invalidated?

That's hard to guess. Personally I'd keep buying 4E products year in, year out, provided the new stuff IS more interesting than the old stuff, and I don't get forced to switch editions in the process of picking up new stuff. But yeah, I think we've just seen a scratch of 4E's full potential. Whether that potential will see fruition in 4E itself or whether WotC thinks it more worthwhile to wrap all that into the next (read: 5E) PHB 1, only time will tell.

 

[xechnao]

Again, I refer to AD&D's run from 1977-2000 with less mechanical variety than is contained in just the 4E PHB. If AD&D was able to maintain its popularity without getting stale, I don't see the issue with 4E.

I do not think you can make such a comparison. The markets are totally different.

I'd be interested to see the correlation between people who hold this sort of opinion and those dissatisfied with the current D&D paradigm. I wonder how much personally having a negative opinion of the current paradigm correlates with predicting D&Ds demise and sale to another party.

Well this mind set does not help the discussion. Speculation is speculation but it does not need to be baseless. Attributing motives to arguments on a speculative discussion does not help.

 

[Herremann the Wise]

I'd be interested to see the correlation between people who hold this sort of opinion and those dissatisfied with the current D&D paradigm. I wonder how much personally having a negative opinion of the current paradigm correlates with predicting D&Ds demise and sale to another party.

The inverse of this would also be interesting. However, the neutral how much is one's optimism coloured by their favour for the current edition should suffice... and yes, I imagine it would be as expected with the correlation clear and pronounced. However, if there are enough naysayers out there, I cannot see it doing anything but impinging upon the current editions success or dare it be said failure.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise