Dislike 4E? You can write off 5E

[Shemeska]

Umm, of course he's going to defend the edition he worked on. Not just professional pride, but business sense and him wanting to keep his job sorta dictates that he keep talking about it positively regardless of anything else.

Even if you totally botched something -or multiple things IMO-, you don't admit to it, and right until the end you defend it. So of course Wyatt would describe any hypothetical 5e as very much like 4e. I can't blame the guy for being intelligent about gamer perceptions of edition success (support drops if people perceive support to be dropping, or anything bad about it being admitted to by the people working on it).

If the current 4e design team remains in place, 5e will look like 4e. If 4e goes down in flames and a new design team handles things, it will look vastly different from 4e potentially (a return to 2e style flavor, please please please). Of course arguably any situation where 4e goes down in flames would likely preclude WotC actually making a 5e D&D themselves.

 

[Scribble]

I'm guessing there are a number of ideas they come up with that just for one reason or another would change the fundamental aspects of 4e too much that it goes into a "save it for 5e" bin.

This and "Pay attention to which areas of the 4e core design aren't working as well as we'd hoped?"


Are probably the extent of any real work on 5e.

 

[billd91]

It's WAY too early to assume much about what 5e will look like, though I think it's natural to assume it'll be more like 4e than any other edition.

But if WotC does take D&D down the road of getting rid of the 3-18 stats in favor of just the modifiers, I think I can already say the game isn't for me. I'd accept that in a new game, one that's not D&D. But, frankly, I expect my D&D to be D&D and not something else.

 

[N0Man]

The original post here seems so misleading and potentially inflammatory that if I had the ability to take away xp, instead of giving it, I would...

 

[ggroy]

If the current 4e design team remains in place, 5e will look like 4e. If 4e goes down in flames and a new design team handles things, it will look vastly different from 4e potentially (a return to 2e style flavor, please please please). Of course arguably any situation where 4e goes down in flames would likely preclude WotC actually making a 5e D&D themselves.

They'll outsource the development of 5E D&D to space aliens from Alpha Centauri?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I've just come from Alpha Centauri...they play a game that combines HERO and Pathfinder. Way wild!

 

[fuzzlewump]

@N0MAN

Level drain? Force him to craft magical items?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Well said!

I've been told point blank from Greg Leeds, WotC's president, that they're not even going to start thinking about 5e for years. They're invested in the current rule set. As sexy as scurrilous rumor is, this may be a little extreme.

He clearly lied!

And it's very easy to prove t hat. Just ask him: "What do you think of 5E" - and BOOM - he thinks about it. Hah!

 

[dm4hire]

I believe it was Monte Cook who admitted after the announcement of 4e that they had actually started planning it just after the release of 3e. I think what he was referring to is that in the back of everyone's minds they started thinking how they could make the game better. I would hope that anyone who designs a game would continue, after its release, trying to adjust it until they were completely satisfied. Even then they probably couldn't give it completely up. In a sense game design is like poetry in that "a poem is never finished, only abandoned." (Can't remember who said that, but it fits.)

I can understand why someone representing WotC would say no about the possibility of 5e being currently designed, because who wants to hurt sales. Just take a look at the last days of 3e after the announcement of 4e to see that. As for the cycle of putting out editions, I think it depends on how well the current game is selling. Some games see a new edition amost every other year and others are still chugging along on their first. Compared to other game systems D&D has some of the longest periods between editions. Champions and CoC for example, which are now in their 6th or later editions, are not quite as old as D&D.

I personally would love to see 5e, but realistically I'd expect a 6-10 year window between it and 4e.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I thought this bit of the interview was inadvertedly funny

It’s funny because you will still see something like Wil Wheaton twittering something about failing his will save. But we never had will saves before 3rd edition. That’s a fairly recent introduction to the game that is now gone. So I will say something like “the chex mix attacked my will. I am now dazed and immobilized (save ends both). With my will saves I’ll just be standing here eating forever”. Hopefully the people who follow me understand that but it doesn’t have the same penetration yet.

I can see how "failed my Will save" can quickly become a cultural reference.

I don't think that "the chex mix attacked my will. I am now dazed and immobilized (save ends both). With my will saves I’ll just be standing here eating forever" or its equivalent EVER will