D&D 5E GAMA Trade Show and Game Developer Conference start Monday - announcement Tomorrow?

[Hussar]

That 3 feet of space meant that 3 fighters could fight in a line in a standard 10x10 area. Also, there could be a row of spearmen behind them for a total of 6 fighters in what is now 4 squares.

More people can fight in a smaller area if they are properly equipped to do so. The introduction of the 5' personal bubble had a huge impact on room sizes.

I always wondered but was too lazy to look it up. Is space required diameter or radius?

But really the difference is one character. I am of the opinion that this largely worked because people ignored the rules.

 

[Rygar]

I am starting to wonder if they plan on publishing the same adventure with conversion notes for all editions. Perhaps even the same setting books with notes for all editions too.

Pulling the thread back a little bit...

I'm pretty confident that's *exactly* what they're doing. I strongly suspect that 5th edition is meant to be an on-shelf entry point and nothing more. I strongly suspect WOTC intends to "Unify" the player base by treating every edition as if it's in print, because you'd have to be insane to think you can unify all of the other players any other way.

Look at WOTC's statements this past year. Paraphrased, "We don't care which edition you play", "We're not trying to compete with Pathfinder", "We don't care if we're number one in [ICV2] sales". Let's be honest, those statements would give suits and marketing staff strokes. Unless there's a reason and a motive behind it.

WOTC's going to announce their intention to support every edition going forward with conversion notes and/or edition neutral material. It's the only thing that makes sense given what they've said, and honestly it's the only viable business plan at this stage.

Especially in light of the comments about keeping 4th edition in print, which makes no sense because it wasn't a big enough customer base to support the edition when it was "The" edition, why continue to sell it alongside 5th edition?

I'm strongly of the opinion that 5th edition's purpose is to provide an entry point, and perhaps a "Merge lane" where the different edition's players could play together if they wished without have to fight about which edition they'll play.

I think WOTC has a couple of aces up their sleeve they haven't played yet. I'm guessing it'll be revealed at Gencon but I suppose PAX is possible given it's popularity these days.

 

[Spykes]

Pulling the thread back a little bit...

I'm pretty confident that's *exactly* what they're doing. I strongly suspect that 5th edition is meant to be an on-shelf entry point and nothing more. I strongly suspect WOTC intends to "Unify" the player base by treating every edition as if it's in print, because you'd have to be insane to think you can unify all of the other players any other way.

Look at WOTC's statements this past year. Paraphrased, "We don't care which edition you play", "We're not trying to compete with Pathfinder", "We don't care if we're number one in [ICV2] sales". Let's be honest, those statements would give suits and marketing staff strokes. Unless there's a reason and a motive behind it.

WOTC's going to announce their intention to support every edition going forward with conversion notes and/or edition neutral material. It's the only thing that makes sense given what they've said, and honestly it's the only viable business plan at this stage.

Especially in light of the comments about keeping 4th edition in print, which makes no sense because it wasn't a big enough customer base to support the edition when it was "The" edition, why continue to sell it alongside 5th edition?

I'm strongly of the opinion that 5th edition's purpose is to provide an entry point, and perhaps a "Merge lane" where the different edition's players could play together if they wished without have to fight about which edition they'll play.

I think WOTC has a couple of aces up their sleeve they haven't played yet. I'm guessing it'll be revealed at Gencon but I suppose PAX is possible given it's popularity these days.

Totally agree. I'm sure at some point, every offering on dndclassics will come with conversion notes for all editions. They have been laying the groundwork for this for some time now.

 

[Rabbitbait]

As a lazy DM, I don't really want conversion notes - I want a conversion. In a PDF world that should be almost as easy as creating conversion notes but much easier for the DM. I will hope for that.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Totally agree. I'm sure at some point, every offering on dndclassics will come with conversion notes for all editions. They have been laying the groundwork for this for some time now.

I just don't see it. That requires someone at WOTC to read through, take notes on, and spend a lot of time and effort creating new monsters and stats for each book. This is especially difficult for 3.5e where a single monster can take an hour or two to stat up.

I believe that they offered conversion notes for the first 2 sundering adventures because D&D Next wasn't out yet and a lot of people don't want to play a playtest. This way people who wouldn't be interested in D&D Next would buy and download the adventures. Then they offer the 3rd with no conversion notes working only in D&D Next with a basic outline of the rules. I think the entire goal is to get people to read the new adventures and to like the format and design. Then when they go to buy the next one in the series...BOOM, play D&D Next or don't play.

I'm virtually positive that WOTC's strategy is simple: Don't badmouth other games or other editions. Show that they are perfectly open to those who want to continue playing older editions by offering them books to purchase and goodwill articles on their website. But encourage them as subtly as possible to convert to the new edition(with as minimal expense as possible). That way it doesn't look like they are forcing anyone to switch(which many people felt about the last edition) and WOTC comes out looking as good as possible even to people who decide not to switch.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

Back in the day, I had tried to convert some old TSR-era stuff to 3e and 4e. Here was my results.

3e usually didn't work as written, but I found it a lot easier to recreate. The general abilities of a 5th level party weren't too much different; they had access to flight, +1 weapons, and 3rd level magics. You might tinker a bit with the balancing ELs and treasure values (or you might not) but I tended to find for the most part, it worked the same until around 9th level.

4e, the biggest concern was what level did you set it at. For example, a 5th level 4e party had a different power level than a 3e or 2e one; in some areas they had abilities you couldn't get til later (short-range teleport) but in others they were far behind (flight). You had to really scale monsters (for example, drow in a 5th level module) to convert them, and treasure usually went out the window.

And that doesn't even begin to touch grid-combat and room layout.

I guess for me, 3e still felt loosely connected to 2e/1e, enough that it appeared close enough to allow conversion-by-rebuilding. 4e always felt like "redesign in the spirit of", which at that point felt like why bother; I'll create my own module plots.

Well, my experiences were quite the other way round.

To-3e conversions were quite easy as long as I could find a replacement monster in 3e. When a special monster was used in the old material for which no 3e version existed and thus had to be built from scratch... I guess we all know this can feel with 3e rules.

To-4e conversions, on the other hand, were easier for me. I decided on a CR according to the encounter's description and built a fitting replacement encounter which, with the Adventure Tools and easy re-skinning, came easy to me.

The room layout was the hardest part that is, the conversion of a whole dungeon level to rooms large enough to host an interesting 4e encounter without changing the whole thing into something completely different. What's more, a good 4e encounter has more dimensions than the room size: waves of monsters and their timing play a big role. Sometimes I tried to cut an older dungeon level in "encounter areas" consisting of several rooms. Once triggered, this encounter area became "acitve" s a whole.

As far as the encounter design of 5e is concerned, especially offering different encounters for different versions, I don't hold my breath. While it's somwhere between easy and manageable for a single encounter, I seriously doubt that WotC will invest in such an endeavour. They would not only have to take care of 1/2e, 3e, 4e, and 5e (what about BECMI and 0e, by the way), but also for the different modules for 5e.

They had started something similar in 2008 with Dungeon articles converting Keep on the Shadowfell to the Forgotten Realms and Eberron in issue #155. Dungeon #156 saw another article adapting Thunderspire Labyrinth to the Realms, but that was the end of the story.

 

[Dausuul]

I agree that they're unlikely to release all adventures with conversions to all editions; that would be far too much work. Much more likely, they will release old-edition adventures with conversions to 5E.

 

[dm4hire]

Actually what they could do is release the mods designed for 5th with free online conversion content. It wouldn't be hard to hire a couple of programmers to design an app that converts an encounter to a different version either and then release it for free or charge a little for it.

 

[Dausuul]

Actually what they could do is release the mods designed for 5th with free online conversion content. It wouldn't be hard to hire a couple of programmers to design an app that converts an encounter to a different version either and then release it for free or charge a little for it.

To make the conversion worth anything would be an enormous challenge. It's not as simple as swapping out statblocks. Just as an example, an adventure that was fast and fun in 1E would be a godawful slog in 4E, because 4E encounters take so much longer to resolve and require so much more open space. And then there's the fact that many adventures have monsters that were custom-built for that adventure. The app would have to figure out how to convert such a monster on the fly. And on top of that, you have other rules references like poison dart traps. If it's an AD&D trap that calls for a save vs. poison/paralysis/death magic, what's the appropriate save DC in 3E? 4E? Next? There are a million niggling details like this that would have to be accounted for. It would be a huge amount of work and would yield mediocre results at best.

I suppose one could write an app to handle the "scut work" of the conversion--swapping out the statblocks of "off the shelf" monsters, recalculating encounter levels, and flagging rules terms for review. That would be a big help to a human doing the conversion by hand. But a fully automated conversion app isn't going to happen.

 

[Iosue]

Pulling the thread back a little bit...

I'm pretty confident that's *exactly* what they're doing. I strongly suspect that 5th edition is meant to be an on-shelf entry point and nothing more. I strongly suspect WOTC intends to "Unify" the player base by treating every edition as if it's in print, because you'd have to be insane to think you can unify all of the other players any other way.

Look at WOTC's statements this past year. Paraphrased, "We don't care which edition you play", "We're not trying to compete with Pathfinder", "We don't care if we're number one in [ICV2] sales". Let's be honest, those statements would give suits and marketing staff strokes. Unless there's a reason and a motive behind it.

WOTC's going to announce their intention to support every edition going forward with conversion notes and/or edition neutral material. It's the only thing that makes sense given what they've said, and honestly it's the only viable business plan at this stage.

Especially in light of the comments about keeping 4th edition in print, which makes no sense because it wasn't a big enough customer base to support the edition when it was "The" edition, why continue to sell it alongside 5th edition?

I'm strongly of the opinion that 5th edition's purpose is to provide an entry point, and perhaps a "Merge lane" where the different edition's players could play together if they wished without have to fight about which edition they'll play.

I think WOTC has a couple of aces up their sleeve they haven't played yet. I'm guessing it'll be revealed at Gencon but I suppose PAX is possible given it's popularity these days.

I agree in spirit, but differ on how I think they are going to execute it. I think the point of 5e is not to be simply an on-ramp, but also the medium through which WotC can address the market as a whole, rather than split it by offering products for each edition.

Emulation of previous editions via 5e allows people to buy it without invalidating much of their previously bought material. Got a lot of 4e stuff? Take 5e, jack up healing from rests and drop down short rests to 5 or 10 minutes, add tactical module and go to town. Have a lot of 1e or BD&D stuff? Drop healing from rests down, jack up short rest time to an hour or more, add exploration module and enjoy. In these kinds of cases, you'd simply use 5e monsters instead of the ones in the original, and use the adventure as a frame: labyrinthine dungeons for exploration in the case of old D&D, larger rooms with interesting terrain and features for later editions.

Going from the other side, they can design new adventures for 5e that can be used in other editions. Murder at Baldur's Gate, for example, was specifically written to be usable with 3e, 4e, and 5e. Steve Winter wrote an adventure for Dungeon 210 called "Blood of Gruumsh". While written for 4e, it's an exploration-heavy adventure designed to be used with older editions with a few alterations.

So, IMO, rather than full conversion notes for every adventure, past, present, and future, I think we're more likely to see general advice, probably on their website, for configuring 5e to emulate different editions and conversions of adventures.

The typical rejoinder to this is that if WotC wants to put most of their eggs in the adventure publishing basket, they're in trouble because WotC adventures suck. But just because they sucked once doesn't mean they always must. Late 4e adventures like Madness at Gardmore Abbey were very well received. It's probably fair to say that WotC has largely sucked at adventures because it has not been their focus, at least compared to splatbooks. If they change focus, they may very well change performance.