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

[Jester David]

Pure conjecture based on no evidence whatsoever. Anything presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Given no one in this discussion has any evidence, if we ignore reasonable conjecture the discussion descends into
"Does too.
"Does not."
"Does too."
"Nuh uh."
"Uh huh."
"Nuh uh."

We do know that as of the Fall of 2010 Pathfinder had passed 4th Edition in sales, as reported by the CEO of Paizo based on the reports of the shared distributor used by both companies and also reflected in book sales from the Paizo website. And this was shortly backed-up by reports from ICv2.
While there is undoubtedly some shared audience between the two games the numbers must be fairly even. Those two audiences should easily make up the majority of participants in the playtest.
The question then is what percentage of non-PF/4e players is participating in the playtest? Given the most successful edition of D&D was 1e, there must be far more lapsed D&D players out there than active players, so it's quite possible a large percentage of people involved or responding to the free playtest are fans of 1e or Basic, lapsed players, or players of other RPGs. They could very easily be the majority, a large minority, or a small fraction of the participants.

Thus, splitting into thirds seems fairly reasonable without any outside data.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

Given no one in this discussion has any evidence, if we ignore reasonable conjecture the discussion descends into
"Does too.
"Does not."
"Does too."
"Nuh uh."
"Uh huh."
"Nuh uh."

Descends? That's what it's been the whole time!

So that leaves us to banter back and forth as to what makes "reasonable" conjecture. I disagree with your analysis, as usual, and so I am dismissing it, since you have nothing to back it up with. Feel free to do the same with what I, or anyone else who disagrees with you has to say on the matter.

Even if you could prove that my opinion is some kind of fringe, worthy of fully being excluded from any discussions on the nature of Next rules, it still doesn't matter. I don't change my opinions on topics that are entirely subjective because it doesn't agree with popular consensus.

While I don't think that DDN is going down the wrong path for everyone, it certainly is going down the wrong path for me, and I'm clearly not alone. You can tell me that my opinion is an outlier all you like - it won't change my mind. The simple fact of the matter is that Next fails to do what I want for my primary game, just as 4e fails for you. What's wrong with that?

 

[Ratskinner]

I'm also not sure if you noticed this, but every one of those feedback surveys requires you to indicate your favourite edition as one of the first questions. I think it's more than a little possible that they use that one question to weight the importance of feedback given; it's entirely possible/likely that a lot of the harsher criticisms of the direction Next is taking that come from self-professed 4e fans simply do not carry as much weight for the design team as their chase market (3.x or PF people) and thus get filed into a pile labeled "butthurt 4th ed fans" or similar.

I think that's entirely possible, especially if the mechanics being tested in a given iteration of the playtest aren't those aimed at a 4e playstyle. Recall that they are intentionally testing different modules in combination to see how they fly. (Or so we are told.) While they have said that the "core" game is basically fixed, they haven't said what exactly that entails. (I suspect far less than most of us give it credit for.) When/if they are testing 4e material, I would expect that to reverse itself.

In a more general sense, though....I think they have to ask that question or they can't know who or how much they are appealing to fans of any given edition.

 

[Jester David]

To say nothing of the fact that it came out the same year that the US economy took its worst nose dive since the Great Depression, the likes of which they are still recovering from.

Very true. But if it were merely that it would be cheaper to hunker down and then re-release content, waiting out the recession.
(Plus 1e was released during the recession of the early '80s following the Iranian energy crisis and 3e suffered under both the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.)

D&D is a fairly cheap entertainment. $40, the cost of a couple evenings out, and you have all you need to play for a year. DMing is a higher investment at $120, but if it's your primary hobby you'll likely continue buying books regardless of the economy.

And you forgot to include the numbers for DDI in your pretend math. Even with only 50k subscribers at the best rate possible, that's a low-overhead income of 3.5million. The DDI group on the WotC forum puts that as a lowball. Keep in mind that not every subscriber is a member of the forum over there (I'm not and neither is the other guy in my group who subs), and that not everyone chooses the most preferable rate (yearly). It's impossible to nail down exact numbers, which makes pretend math rather pointless, but even with a rough, conservative estimate, that just covered your pretend salary calculations for the Next team for the entire development cycle.

I can guarantee you one thing: we're both wrong in our math.

I did also low-ball the salaries and I'm sure as we get closer to release more and more people will be working on Next.
While DDI is probably a solid revenue stream it's not pure profit. It pays for the magazines, which include a fair amount of content. The cheapest issues cost thousands of dollars in words and even more in art (art is not cheap). Plus there are the servers and - until recently - updating and maintaining the online tools.

DDI and the reprints are likely the reason WotC can even justify the luxurious two-year long public playtest. Without those, it'd be too expensive to even consider.

 

[innerdude]

... Snip lots of good stuff...

Once the basic idea of an rpg was out there, people started making other versions to better address things they wanted to see (with wildly varying degrees of success). That process hardly stopped or even slowed when 4e came out, so I'm not sure what you think it proves. Its not like 4e came out and suddenly all the other companies and indie designers closed up shop crying "Finally we have found the perfect Role-playing architecture!"

Can't XP you, Ratskinner, but I agree with nearly everything in this post.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

Very true. But if it were merely that it would be cheaper to hunker down and then re-release content, waiting out the recession.
(Plus 1e was released during the recession of the early '80s following the Iranian energy crisis and 3e suffered under both the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.)

D&D is a fairly cheap entertainment. $40, the cost of a couple evenings out, and you have all you need to play for a year. DMing is a higher investment at $120, but if it's your primary hobby you'll likely continue buying books regardless of the economy.

Perhaps, but you'll be a lot more choosey about it. There can be little doubt that the entertainment budget is the first thing to get slashed when hard times hit, and in that regard RPGs have a lot of stiff competition. And it's not every gamer's primary hobby.

And you will note the part about the 08 recession being the worst one since the 1930s, meaning it would have a greater impact than during all the other time frames you mentioned.

I did also low-ball the salaries and I'm sure as we get closer to release more and more people will be working on Next.
While DDI is probably a solid revenue stream it's not pure profit. It pays for the magazines, which include a fair amount of content. The cheapest issues cost thousands of dollars in words and even more in art (art is not cheap). Plus there are the servers and - until recently - updating and maintaining the online tools.

DDI and the reprints are likely the reason WotC can even justify the luxurious two-year long public playtest. Without those, it'd be too expensive to even consider.

I didn't say it was free and 100% profit, but what it indicates is that it certainly pays the bills and then some. They're in a much better place to work on a new edition with an income stream like that than during any other new edition, in all likelihood.

 

[Jester David]

Descends? That's what it's been the whole time!

So that leaves us to banter back and forth as to what makes "reasonable" conjecture. I disagree with your analysis, as usual, and so I am dismissing it, since you have nothing to back it up with. Feel free to do the same with what I, or anyone else who disagrees with you has to say on the matter.

But it would be nice for to to say what you disagree with, what points you find wrong other than just dismissing my conclusion.

What do you refute? That there are likely comparable numbers of Pathfinder and 4e players? That there are more lapsed players than current? That 4e players are not a single united camp but a spectrum of opinions and tastes? That it takes more than five licks to get to the chew center of a Tootsie Pop?

While I don't think that DDN is going down the wrong path for everyone, it certainly is going down the wrong path for me, and I'm clearly not alone. You can tell me that my opinion is an outlier all you like - it won't change my mind. The simple fact of the matter is that Next fails to do what I want for my primary game, just as 4e fails for you. What's wrong with that?

Nothing at all.

 

[Balesir]

...doing this is much harder in 4e than previous editions. Consider what that means for the different systems. If I want to adjust magic, or combat, or any other feature of the game....I can take 3e and do that by adding some feats, changing a few rules about initiative or combat casting, etc. Because of the structure, I can make changes to the tone of the game by directly addressing it. Now to do the same in 4e...well just consider what it would take to alter the tone of melee combat....all those powers to review and modify... In which system is it easier to generate a new class? If, as I am often informed, the powers and their functioning (all the X's and O's) is a necessary vehicle for the 4e architecture to convey tone, reworking the tone of melee combat would require examining and rewriting hundreds (thousands, by now?) of melee powers in multiple classes. I think sheer proliferation of classes, feats, spells, etc. in 3PP and on the internet argues for 3e/d20 there. In the older systems, things are even less structured.

Generating and/or modifying 4e powers and systems is actually not hard; I think what you are sensing there is the natural learning curve with a new set of mechanisms. When AD&D came along I felt very intimidated from modifying or inventing new system material for it - especially after reading the dire warnings about "upsetting the delicate balance of play" in the DMG. 4e initially looked at least as intimidating, but after taking time to 'grok' the system I now find it pretty easy.

As for making the "Martial = mundane, magic can do *anything*" game some seem to desire out of 4e, I would say it could be easy or hard, depending on your approach. If you are happy to abandon balance it could be really easy - just jettison all the effects of Martial powers that you imagine to be "unrealistic" and make Martial power users make extra rolls for any effect that could be useful. If you want to maintain a balanced game for all classes, however, it would be hard - but that's not specific to any particular system, it's because "Martial = mundane, magic can do *anything*" is inherently unbalanced and nothing very much can be done about that except possibly making magic much, much harder and more dangerous to do.

As an aside, I finally got to play FATE this weekend - yay! I would say I think the same applies as with the D&D examples above; from limited exposure I cannot see how one would even begin to make a "dungeon crawl" aesthetic using a system that so boldly encourages the players to drive the story. Not that I think it's not possible - it's just that I would need to grok the "working parts" of the system far more than I do now in order to see how it could be achieved.

Yes. Once the basic idea of an rpg was out there, people started making other versions to better address things they wanted to see (with wildly varying degrees of success). That process hardly stopped or even slowed when 4e came out, so I'm not sure what you think it proves. Its not like 4e came out and suddenly all the other companies and indie designers closed up shop crying "Finally we have found the perfect Role-playing architecture!"

Um, I'm not sure where this came from - Abdul's point seemed to me to be that there is no such thing as " the perfect Role-playing architecture", which is why a game that tries to be "all things to all men" won't work. I'm inclined to agree.

As a final note (not specifically to you, Ratskinner) about the vaunted "tactical system", it's been said before but I think it misses the point. The main things I value about 4e I think are the clarity, the elegance, the structure, the precision and the rigour of the base rules. Various - often very different - systems have this; Primetime Adventures, Universalis and DragonQuest are three that spring to mind, but DDN does not. And these are things that, if they are to be present at all, have to be baked into the core of the rules, so it's pretty clear that DDN is unlikely to have them added in by any supplementary or "modular" system later. In this respect I don't think DDN is going the wrong way for "everyone", but it will certainly fail for some, namely those who don't want to be making up the fundamentals of how the game works as they go along. Maybe the advantage of that is that you get what you think you want, but the disadvantage is that what you think you want isn't always good for you...

 

[ForeverSlayer]

The problem is expecting to sit down with Next and play a session of 4th of 3rd edition.

 

[Iosue]

So either 4e was not a major commercial success (i.e. "failed") or it was doing fine and WotC decided to piss away a million dollars on the hopes of something better.

I'm fairly certain the conversation went something like this.

R&D Member #1: Well, 2014 is three years away, so if we're going to make a new edition, it's time to start developing it.
R&D Member #2: So what do we want to address in the new edition?
R&D Member #1: Well, obviously the market is split. 4e's doing good, and DDI's been a money-maker, but Paizo's doing well with Pathfinder, and there's a lot of activity in the OSR. If we can tap into all of these markets, that'd be pretty awesome.
R&D Member #3: Hmmm...an edition for fans of all editions? I like the sound of that! But that's going to be a tough bit of design.
R&D Member #4: Say, public playtests are pretty popular. What if we hold a huge public playtest, over the course of two years? We'd have a much better idea how the game will be accepted by the various groups, and we could bring back some of the freedom and customization of 3e without the balance problems.
R&D Member #5: But what do we sell during that time? No one's going to want to buy 4e product while we're publically playtesting the next edition.
R&D Member #1: Well, DDI brings in about [REDACTED] dollars a month. Even if that drops off a bit, we can make up for that with collector's reprints of old editions and some edition-neutral product. Maybe get back into the PDF game. The board games are doing well, and we've got the digital rights back from Atari. That should be enough to pay the bills!