D&D 5E D&DN going down the wrong path for everyone.

[I'm A Banana]

Do you categorise "probably not inclined to play it" as "can't abide it"?

Depends on if the inclination is based on a fair and provisional analysis of the information known thus far and not an instinctive hostility to that which is not one's preferred way of playing imaginary elves.

Given how early it is in the NEXT process, how much flexibility they state that they wish to offer, and how the open playtest is not the same as a rules preview, I'm not so sure I'd trust prognostication of eventual interest or lack thereof at the moment.

Regardless of my categorization, people are free to play whatever they want for whatever arbitrary reason they want, and I'm sure there's going to be more than a few active message board posters who won't play NEXT because it's not 4e, or it's not 3e, or it's not 1e, or it's not OD&D. Given that 4e is the edition being nixed, I expect the preponderance of it to be 4e fans not going softly into that dark night of playing the game they like even though it may not be actively supported by the official company anymore.

But I don't think that this represents a fundamental schism in the player base that is deeply intractable and at odds. I think this more likely represents a fringe group of the emotionally intractable, and those players are lost regardless of what WotC does. They cannot be easily appeased, because what they want is not viable for the company for one reason or another. Those fans don't want the change. They don't want to adapt their warlord to modules and maneuvers, they want to keep playing the Warlord basically as it is. They want the thing that is being cancelled (or has been cancelled) to not be cancelled anymore, and that's not something that can happen.

That's different from those who, say, are worried about NEXT maybe not having inspirational healing, but who'd be perfectly fine if there was an option to add it, because they like it, and want it in their games, and if NEXT doesn't have it as an option, they're not that interested in it. Rather than "can't abide it," I would categorize these folks as "apprehensive about the apparent direction of NEXT." Which I think is a fair position to take, but also says nothing about if they're going to like the game when it launches or not.

I've got a buddy worried he won't easily be able to play a wizard who runs out of spells. He probably won't play NEXT if that's not an easy option for him. He's got a legit concern that his playstyle won't be something he can do with the system. I think he'd be wrong to say he probably won't play it, though, because the thing is so nebulous and fluid right now, I'm not sure he can really say that he WON'T be able to do what he wants.

Of course, if my pet dream about them opening up every edition to OGL and administering an online marketplace of publish-your-own rules supplements is to come to fruition, fans of no edition will have much to worry about in the long run. I admit that's a fever-dream born of my unassailable optimism, however.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

They made a lot of mistakes with Essentials: The product line was confusing, expensive, and (as you say) divisive. It accomplished none of the things WotC claimed they were trying to accomplish with it. The entire thing was badly bungled, represented a huge missed opportunity for the company, and basically sealed 4E's coffin.



I'm forced to agree. 5th Edition is looking pretty much exactly like what I suspected it would look like: A commercially non-viable compromise between classic D&D and 4E.

Back in January 2012, I speculated that the obvious goal of 5E would be to re-unify the splintered D&D fanbase. But in trying to achieve that, WotC, ultimately, faces an immutable truth: No reboot edition of an RPG has ever succeeded unless there is clear, deep, and widespread dissatisfaction in the existing customer base.

So WotC faces two problems:

(1) Among 4E players, there is not a clear, deep, and widespread dissatisfaction with 4E. So, right here, you have a problem that I don't know how you solve. No one has ever pulled it off before. There's no road map for WotC to follow.

(2) They have to win back 3E/PF players. In order to do this you have to make 5E more appealing than 3E/PF to them. Complicating this is that 3E players have invested large amounts of time, expertise, and money invested into their game. Traditionally you overcome that through novelty (but 3E/PF have already rejected novelty once), support (but their game is already the best supported in history and Paizo continues to crank out high quality support material every month), or superior design.

"Superior design" comes back to the issue of clear, deep, and widespread dissatisfaction: In order to convince these players that your game is so good that they have to abandon the investment of time, expertise, and money they have in their current game you need to identify something they all dislike a lot and then fix it in a way that they all like. The problem is that among actual 3E/PF players that clear, deep, and widespread dissatisfaction doesn't seem to exist. (Well, there are a couple things I could make an argument for. But that's probably a discussion for a different time.)

Long story short: Even if WotC said "screw the 3E/PF players, we're just going to double-down on 4E", I think they would fail. And, similarly, I think that if WotC said "screw the 4E players, we're just going to make a game specifically designed to win back 3E/PF players", I think they would fail.

But this is what I actually predicted WotC would do: "Honestly, I think the most likely outcome is that WotC will produce a game which attempts to return to classic D&D gameplay. But in an effort not to lose their existing 4th Edition players, they’ll try to strike a compromise between the two. The result may or may not be a great game, but commercially it will almost certainly fail: 3E players will reject the 4E elements and stick with the best-supported RPG in history. 4E players will reject a return to “wizard win buttons” and other spherical cows (which will presumably be even less true in 5E)."

And that, ultimately, appears to be the game they're actually designing.

We're at the stage right now where people are still able to look at the game as it exists, imagine that the problems they have with it are definitely the problems that WotC will be "fixing" before the game is actually released, and come away with a generally favorable impression. (If you look around at online forums, for example, you'll see a lot of people putting a whole lot of faith in the word "modular".) But my prediction, regrettably, is that when the actual game comes out and the quantum uncertainty of the "they might still change it!" goes away, most of these people are going to end up being unhappy with the finished product.

In essence, yes, though I see it more in terms of different gaming agendas. The more narrative story-driven preference people want a game like 4e that works reasonably well for that, others are more interested in different aspects of the game and generally want to play what they had in some previous edition or other. Its not about 'spherical cows' ultimately.

Overall I have to agree with the guy [MENTION=44797]aboyd[/MENTION] PF already IS the dominant game in terms of 3.x fans and they're not mostly going back. Some will adopt the 5e that DDN is becoming, but probably not in mass droves. There's just no reason for WotC to bother with that. OTOH I think they COULD create a game that would be a basis for a better follow-on to 4e and would provide a fairly B/X-like 'basic' play mode that would serve well as both an intro game and for some people's lighter OSR type desires. Honestly DDN's first playtest release wasn't a bad start in that direction, though I thought a bunch of the twiddling wasn't really needed. I think WotC's problem now is they are caught in a fan backlash and they've taken to pandering. That's always a bad spot to be in. The audience is running them for a ride with "don't like this, don't like that, give us this impossible thing or else!" and when its all over they'll pick up their toys and go back to whatever they were doing all along. 4e's development and roll out certainly contained some miscalculations, but in a sense the core design team was right, you have to do your thing and sell people on it, not try to pander to every whim of an audience that is famously impossible to please. WotC is likely to spend the next 10 years going backwards and wandering in the wilderness over this. Oh well. The game will go on without them I guess...

 

[pemerton]

Depends on if the inclination is based on a fair and provisional analysis of the information known thus far and not an instinctive hostility to that which is not one's preferred way of playing imaginary elves.

<snip>

people are free to play whatever they want for whatever arbitrary reason they want

<snip>

But I don't think that this represents a fundamental schism in the player base that is deeply intractable and at odds. I think this more likely represents a fringe group of the emotionally intractable

<snip>

That's different from those who, say, are worried about NEXT maybe not having inspirational healing, but who'd be perfectly fine if there was an option to add it, because they like it, and want it in their games

<snip>

I've got a buddy worried he won't easily be able to play a wizard who runs out of spells. He probably won't play NEXT if that's not an easy option for him. He's got a legit concern that his playstyle won't be something he can do with the system

How do we tell who is "emotionally intractable" and who has a "legit concern that his/her playstyle can't be done in Next"?

Or to put it another way, who is the arbiter of whether or not Next delivers the play experience that a given person wants? I would have assumed it's that person.

To put it yet another way, I don't see why people who currently play 3E, or 4e, or any other version of D&D, are under some sort of obligation to play Next just because WotC is asserting that their play experience will be the same. I don't think that's what you're meaning to say, but I'm having trouble with this category of the "emotionally intractable". How many AD&D players who didn't pick up 3E, or 3E players who didn't pick up 4e, were in that category?

 

[jhunton]

the thing I was hopeing for out of DDN was one game to rule them all. that way when you go in to a new area and ask who plays D&D you don't get 6 differt ansers.only way they can pull that off is if hasbro buys pathfinder. like they did parker brothers back in the 70s .or kill OGL.I do beleve the first playtest pack was better then the one out now.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

the thing I was hopeing for out of DDN was one game to rule them all. that way when you go in to a new area and ask who plays D&D you don't get 6 differt ansers.only way they can pull that off is if hasbro buys pathfinder. like they did parker brothers back in the 70s .or kill OGL.I do beleve the first playtest pack was better then the one out now.

I don't see how Hasborg assimilating Paizo would really accomplish this. Either they'd end up with Yet Another flavour of a published game that competes with itself, or they'd shut it down, neither of which sound like appealing options. And it's not like everybody is just going to start playing Pathfinder. Some people actively don't like it/don't want to, and it has nothing to do with how it's run, or who owns its publisher.

The OGL isn't going to go away either. It was written such that it CANNOT be killed. How they slipped that one past the lawyers I'll never know. I can only hope that someday they release 4e under the OGL and scrap the GSL.

 

[I'm A Banana]

How do we tell who is "emotionally intractable" and who has a "legit concern that his/her playstyle can't be done in Next"?

Mostly it's between "I've already made up my mind," and "I'm not sure this'll work for me." Because it seems really premature to have already made up one's mind to me.

Not that it's a problem if one has, of course. People can decide to do whatever they want for whatever arbitrary reason they want to. But I'm not personally a fan of reflexive tribalism, and I don't believe it's pervasive.

Or to put it another way, who is the arbiter of whether or not Next delivers the play experience that a given person wants? I would have assumed it's that person.

Yup.

To put it yet another way, I don't see why people who currently play 3E, or 4e, or any other version of D&D, are under some sort of obligation to play Next just because WotC is asserting that their play experience will be the same. I don't think that's what you're meaning to say, but I'm having trouble with this category of the "emotionally intractable". How many AD&D players who didn't pick up 3E, or 3E players who didn't pick up 4e, were in that category?

Yeah, no one's obligated to do anything. But at this point in development, it seems like either declaiming or praising NEXT is premature, and that unless one is (IMO) overly tribal in their gaming preferences, they might not exactly know how the finished product is going to sit with them.

And I think people CAN be overly tribal in their gaming preferences, but I do think it's kind of silly, and I don't think it's really pervasive.

 

[jhunton]

well your prombley wright .but they did get in to a pickele with the OGL.

 

[jhunton]

SO THE RIDDLE IS HOW TO REUNIGHT THE FAIMLY WITH OUT PISSING ENANY ONE OFF ? WOW

 

[arcahazedrow]

I game with 15 or so between 2 groups. What i find with my players is the main concern is dropping hundreds of dollars on the same supplements with a twist of the rules set. We play anything from modern to fantasy, super heroes to space pirates. We pretty much use 3.5, PF, Cortex and M&M. We tried Saga and 4e and the consensus was no thanks. My gamer's range from 1ed to PF and tend to be happy with just sticking with 3.5/pf.

5e would really have to wow the group to get everyone to change over, especially the older group that grew up with 1e,2e,3e palladium etcetera and with little new material for the older system i'm hopeful that 5e nails it!

 

[Obryn]

Mostly it's between "I've already made up my mind," and "I'm not sure this'll work for me." Because it seems really premature to have already made up one's mind to me.

It's not just premature. I simply don't think it's possible to make up your mind yet about Next. It won't be possible until it's released.

I think you're reading too much into the emotional state of the skeptics, here, and I don't think it's a useful (much less productive) classification system.

-O