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

[mamba]

Of course, by your definition, no one should make any gaming product other than 5e, and that would be a sad state for the community.

no, by my definition everyone should aim to make the most popular game they can within their design parameters - and I am pretty sure that is what pretty much everyone is trying to achieve

 

[haakon1]

4e was designed well to be an incremental RPG.

Disagree on both counts.

It makes record numbers of money

That seems highly unlikely.

Maybe with non-inflation adjusted USD, like how Hollywood likes to claim “record” box office for things like Avatar, that actually sold far fewer seats than the real top blockbuster movies like “Gone with the Wind“ and the original “Star Wars”.

but not enough for WOTC and didn't do what many fans wanted.

Yes.

 

[mamba]

Did Hasbro execs read and absorb Ben Rigg’s “Slaying the Dragon”, explaining how TSR went bankrupt? Signs point to no.

no idea, but the mistakes TSR made are very different from the ones WotC is making

 

[Micah Sweet]

So I guess I would say there are three factors I was considering when I wrote this.

1.) Good for Sales: Is it more beneficial for WotC to resell updated "Core" material (a new PHB, a new Planar book, a new Eberron campaign guide) than it is to sell augment material (a supplemental book of PC options, a deep dive into a specific plane, an adventure set in Xen'drik)
2.) Good for Bloat: Does resetting the game effectively kill bloat by replacing "outdated" versions of stuff with newer versions? Is it in players and DMs interest to no longer have to worry about balancing and updating things like psionics, incarnum, or other rules like that when upgrading to the next version? In essence, to wipe the board clean from all the supplemental chaff and start fresh?
3. Good for the Game: Does making monumental changes that invalidate the game ultimately make the game better or worse? There is no reason for a 5e player to seek out Complete Arcane; there is at best limited value in acquiring a copy of Tales from the Lance Boxset or The Village of Hommlet module. On the one hand, it keeps 5e players focused on what is available now rather than seeking out OOP books. On the other, it makes collected volumes of older material of limited or no value (barring a tremendous amount of work for conversion or just as inspiration).

To ansswer my own questions: I think one is important to WotC as there is a law of diminishing returns on the sale of esoteric items. I think two serves a useful function of pruning deadweight, but I also think three should be more important than it's been treated, despite the fact it clashes against 1 and 2. Because I would have loved to buy additional Eberron material that expanded the world over the past few years rather than rebuy the Eberron Core setting book (because I need the edition specific versions of the rules) over and over again.

Well fair enough. Because I feel 1 is prioritized to the nth degree already, far more than it should be, and because I don't really believe in 2 as a problem (I don't really buy into the idea of bloat as a real issue), I far prefer to muck around with 3.

 

[mamba]

81-85 the type of adventures more variety and they invented multiple types of adventures. Dungeon hacks to hex crawls to I6 Ravenloft.

eventually you have invented them and can just rehash them, this is a lot like the saying that ‘there are only seven basic narrative plots in all of storytelling’

 

[Thomas Shey]

New archetypes are easier to make in a class system than a classless one as you can opt to avoid other classes completely as a new class or integrate directly as a subclass.

But in classless, everything touches everything else.

No, they're really not, not if a classless system is already full-featured. I can put together a new archetype package in Hero in 20 minutes and be pretty sure it'll work, because I'm using nothing but components already available for use in the system. Same to a lesser degree in GURPS.

Its only a problem in systems where you have to invent new components out of whole cloth in the first place. If a system already has the tools to make a Beastmaster, then the Beastmaster Archetype is just pre-constructing it for them and making sure all those components are already in place.

 

[haakon1]

Classless D&D is likely never going to happen.

I hope you’re right, but you never know.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Game design that doesn't sell doesn't get to make incremental additions

How much does it have to sell to count as enough for you? It's not a choice between "all the money we can possibly squeeze out of the customers" and "we can't keep the lights on". Insisting on a binary here is a big part of the problem IMO.

 

[Micah Sweet]

no, by my definition everyone should aim to make the most popular game they can within their design parameters - and I am pretty sure that is what pretty much everyone is trying to achieve

But the most money can apparently be made by not having any design parameters, beyond "appeal to the most people possible", so why isn’t everyone doing that?

 

[mamba]

But the most money can apparently be made by not having any design parameters, beyond "appeal to the most people possible", so why isn’t everyone doing that?

For the same reason not everyone is developing WoW or GTA clones, because you cannot really compete with D&D, you need to find your niche instead