D&D General Does D&D (and RPGs in general) Need Edition Resets?

[Thomas Shey]

No, you need to keep growing that base / attracting new customers. If you just sell to the established base, you get the 2e graphs. That does not mean you do not need to also release new products, that is a given.

Its a fantasy that you can do this indefinitely (even if a common one in some parts of business). Market saturation is a thing, and to act like it isn't is to live in a dream world.

 

[Zardnaar]

The senior project manager in charge of 4e's online and digital tools committed a murder-suicide which likely caused WOTC to end most of 4e's tools.

This seriously took away many of the potential tools needed to keep 4e going. Late stage 4e stuff was complex because

1. You have to go wackier and more innovative to produced new ideas
2. 4e devs were not as conservative as earlier ones and made some complex powers

Without online tools, 4e was too complex to run past PHB/DMG/MM 1. Like running Pathfinder without the AoN wiki and character builder.

This is why I believe a non-nichhe incrementally designed RPG is impossible without online tools and it all being available digitally.


It was best selling at it's time. It died because the online tools needed for PHB3+ and the power powers never happened and sales fell off.

Theoretically 4E should have been able to exist independently of said VTT.

If it couldn't it was flawed from the get go.

If it was the biggest selling D&D of all time it would have collapsed in 4 years. It probably outsold 3.5 (that's not hard btw).

Never saw anything official in terms of numbers sold. There was a comment about pre-sales and comments from junior staff who weren't high up in WotC or Corporate


Jonathan Tweet said 4E was a disaster in his Grandmother Fish AMA. That's one of the head designers. Ben Riggs said it sold less than 3E but didn't specify what version.

Less than 600k 4E phb sold apparently. 3.5 was 250-350k Pax East 2013 or 14 iirc. Only OD&D has sold less.

 

[mamba]

This is a thread about a RPG with no resets.

It doesn't matter if the base is simple, you still have to make new content.

Even if you only do 4 books a year, that still 80 books in 20 years for 1 edition.

How many races, classes, feats, quirks, traits, apects, etc is that?

4 books a year do not all need to be crunch. Those I expect at < 1 per year, and nothing past year 10 or so.

There are only so many classes / races / spells before you run out of ‘reasonable’ things and have to publish nonsense almost no one buys, see D&D for examples of that

 

[Lanefan]

agreed, we do not know how things would have gone, but I feel pretty confident in saying we would not have gotten 3e, 4e or 5e unless at some point TSR broke compatibility with 1e/2e.

Some of the (ideally, better) things in those editions, however, would have found a way in.

I could for example see bloodied or something similar being introduced as a mechanic; ditto optionally-variable resting rates, removal of species-based level limits, some sort of feats system (though not to the ridiculously-bloated extent of 3e and 5e), martial maneuvers, and so forth.

What I don't think would have happened is the massive steepening of the overall power curve we got in 3e and that has only somewhat been toned back since; nor do I think we'd have seen the expansion of high-level play and resulting ovr-powered characters (and, thus, foes as well). In the TSR editions the general expectation is you're thinking about retirement on hitting double-digit levels; with WotC 10th level means for many people you're just getting started, due to how expectations have (been) shifted.

I am not sure any of it would have stuck, with graphs like these, the problem is not just TSR shooting themselves in the foot

Graphs showing sales going off a cliff in the 1990s aren't much of a surprise, given their whole business was going off that same cliff.

How do you know that it is the best place you can be? I understand that changes always feel better to some while not to others, and certainly 3e to 4e to 5e is not a straight path of continual forward momentum either. That is where course correction comes in, and these days polling the player base to find out beforehand and avoid stepping off a cliff altogether.

Ideally the course correction you refer to is what takes place, but in practice what tends to happen is the new less-ideal situation becomes normalized to the point where inertia prevents a return to the previous better place. Case in point: covid sent a lot of games online, which is a poor substitute for in-person play but will do in a pinch; yet now that things have generally returned to normal a lot of those games have stayed online due to inertia.

If you prefer 1e and consider it the best place for you, then you can stick with 1e. Not sure you need much more material for it than what is available either.

Dunno 'bout that - one can never have enough adventures!

I'd rather see them trying out new things. As I said, if I do not get the 2024 books, it is because they did not change enough, not because they changed too much.

I'll certainly have a look at the 2024 books but likely won't buy them...with the exception of the one they announced that has the history of OD&D plus a reprint of the original three booklets. That one's already on my birthday wish list.

 

[mamba]

Its a fantasy that you can do this indefinitely (even if a common one in some parts of business). Market saturation is a thing, and to act like it isn't is to live in a dream world.

so call it attract new customers, what you cannot do is just sell to the existing base you got in the first two years, that is living in a dream world

A market of 10 to 15 year olds does not really saturate, there are constantly new ones to sell to

 

[mamba]

Graphs showing sales going off a cliff in the 1990s aren't much of a surprise, given their whole business was going off that same cliff.

the graphs already do that in the 80s however

I agree with most that you wrote about how 1e could have evolved. I do however think that adding feats, martial maneuvers and things like that to an existing system without redesigning it will generally be clunkier than with a redesign, and it will add power creep

Ideally the course correction you refer to is what takes place, but in practice what tends to happen is the new less-ideal situation becomes normalized to the point where inertia prevents a return to the previous better place. Case in point: covid sent a lot of games online, which is a poor substitute for in-person play but will do in a pinch; yet now that things have generally returned to normal a lot of those games have stayed online due to inertia.

it has advantages and disadvantages, and it clearly is the direction WotC wants to grow in. Not sure if things did not revert back, at least to a degree, with the growth in online play being a general underlying trend

 

[Lanefan]

I'm talking 4e. D&D first incremental RPG.

But the point is that a no reset RPG can't fit much in their core books and would have to spread first and second tier content over many books.

Or simply reduce the amount of first and second tier core content and make everything else purely and blatantly optional.

Core:
PH: 10-15 classes, 5-7 species, char-gen rules and charts, mundane equipment lists and prices, short-form spell write-ups
MM: all the monsters you can fit, written up in short form with no wasted space nor words
DMG: game-mechanical rules-charts-tables, guide to how to run a campaign including some corner cases, guide to worldbuilding, dials and levers to tweak difficulty-lethality-advancement rates-campaign length
About ten good well-written standalone adventure modules, roughly one per level for the first ten levels.

Optional books (for optional things):
Pantheons and deities
Feats and abilities
A complete setting book/guide
Extra species and-or classes, also sub-classes
Etc. etc. etc. - the sky's the limit here.

There is no Warlock or Dragonborn in the 1e or 2e or 3e PHB. You would have to buy another book to get it. Probabably 2.

Which would be fine were those things labelled optional; I could choose not to buy them (I've no use for Warlock if there's a Sorcerer-like class already there; and no use for Dragonborn at any time) while you could buy them to your heart's content.

 

[Lanefan]

fair enough, this was more about @Lanefan saying they only want to buy something once / permanence (two posts), in which case any new set of books, whether iterative or not, is something they should not be interested in

Not quite true: if I buy the initial round of books once on release, I can add in later iterations myself (if I like what they've done) through houserules; and if a new book adds enough I might even buy it

And I'd highly likely be buying the adventures in any case.

 

[Zardnaar]

100k sales outside launch year is great numbers for most editions btw.

81-83 and 5E are the exceptions to typical trajectories.

 

[Minigiant]

4 books a year do not all need to be crunch. Those I expect at < 1 per year, and nothing past year 10 or so.

There are only so many classes / races / spells before you run out of ‘reasonable’ things and have to publish nonsense almost no one buys, see D&D for examples of that

1 book a year is not enough to be the top RPG. Too slow to get everything out.

It would be like 4e where you had to wait a long time to play a monk.

And if you produce 1 stinker, you are screwed.