D&D 4E Despite complaints, 4e will sell like crazy when relased.

[Arashi Ravenblade]

The only way ill buy a 4e is for new Forgotten Realms material.
There is however one other way i would buy 4e and thats if the game system is still d20 and your older books are still good with some minor (and by minor i mean adjustments you can keep mental notes) changes.

There will be some who wont change (Im sticking to 3.5 rules), but for everyone who wont change there will be like 2 people who will get into D&D for the changed rules.

I have so many 3e and 3.5 products i would never just toss them out for something new.

 

[monkeynova]

This isn't really the same thing as a release for 4e. Wargamers are more communal, in that a game you play at home is supposedly the same game you would play at a tournament. This isn't true of rpgs, which are way more variable in their interpretation and use of rules.

I wish that were true, re: wargames.

Unfortunately, people seem just as likely to houserule a portion of a wargame that they don't like as they are to houserule a portion of an RPG they don't like. (Let alone designers of their own games; take a look at A World at War's history sometime. Funny stuff that seems somewhat-to-perilously similar to what goes on in RPG-land.) When rules questions are decided by "fact" -- in this case, rules explanations from the game's designer(s) -- some wargame players are just as likely as some RPGers to ignore them/vehemently question the mental stability of the game's designers/"throw their toys out of the pram".

Bringing it back to 4e, I'm ambivalent on how well it will do; I'm really thinking that some of the things D&D has spawned (Mini's) or will spawn (D&D Online) will either steal customers from the RPG line in the next version, or will see larger growth than the RPG line in the next version. I also don't know how successful the OGL has been for Wizards: we've seen an explosion in the PDF publishing and third-party d20 markets, but I don't know how much of an impact this has actually had on Wizards bottom line (outside of goodwill and positive "word-of-mouth"/viral advertising, natch). If Wizards cuts the OGL in 4.x, I'm not entirely convinced that will have as much an impact on Hasbro as it will on the third-party market.

I'm also not sure what Wizards could do to make 4.x compelling enough to move it from "maybe buy" to "must own now"; yes, there will be a core of fans who will buy it regardless. But will there be enough of a change to the ruleset to stimulate the kind of positive word-of-mouth advertising we all saw when 3e first came out? At this point, it seems to me that any changes made to the existing 3.x ruleset would be more refinement and less revolution. And I'm not sure Wizards will be able to spin "refinement" as something that is so "revolutionary" that You Simply Must Own This Now.

monkeynova