You made some really great points in your response. I really enjoyed reading them and mulling them over, thanks!
Thanks for acknowledging them! My arguments are far from perfect, but they have a core about which I have thought reasonably deeply.
To the above, I have issues with "inconvenient to their business plan". Every responsible company has business plans. Every company should want profit and most should want to grow. Customers should want companies in their hobby to grow. I wish upon every RPG company plenty of growth and profit, because that grows our hobby.
Maybe the wording I chose was a little brutal, there
Of course all companies need not just a business plan but a coherent business model that will generate profit commensurate with their capitalisation (or better). I think, however, that Walter White can offer us a lesson (several, actually) about business. Just because something is convenient for an easy business plan doesn't mean it's a good idea. Robbing a bank would, after all, be a quick and effective way to get a capital injection - but it has serious downsides... I'm naturalised to living in Yorkshire these days - we say what we mean bluntly and without ceremony up here! Cutting off fans of older products to "encourage" growth in the new one is, to some degree, a smart and effective business plan - but it has serious downsides, especially in the longer term, that I think make it a very poor one for the customer, for the market and, at the end of the day, for the health of the originating business.
But, the RPG model has so far shown that after a while we see stagnation. Every RPG wrestles with the problem that each successive book will see declining interest. Out of 1,000 gamers, 500 might like the core book. Only 200 might care for the DM book. Of those 200, only 160 might like the book on undead. And only 100 might like the book on a forest setting. RPG companies wrestle with that, because it is a cycle that kills business. With 3E, that cycle had fully played out.
ONE RPG model has shown that. I don't accept that this is the only available business model for RPGs. It may be a productive one in the short term, but I think it sows (has sown) the seeds of its own destruction.
Other models have been tried and have proved at least marginally effective. WotC itself, before it struck M:tGold, had one going with The Primal Order line. Steve Jackson Games and Chaosium have others that don't rely entirely on expanding player options and an edition treadmill (even though SJG gets *this* close...) Oh, and take a look at Columbia Games and Kelestia Productions with Hârn - a very different kettle of fish, for sure!
And the customer base was already seeing Wizards as having pressed too far with 3.5 on top of 3.0. Only an outside competitor could, under the very true auspices of "you don't have to leave 3E", update the rules and republish everything. That was key. Now it wasn't evil WotC republishing our game for money-grubbing reasons, it was Paizo swooping in to republish our game so we could keep playing the edition.
That helped Paizo, for sure, but I think there was another way - more below.
The same is true for 4E. It's a complete edition. While we can each consider a book or two that could be added, or a setting, all of those would have very poor sales. Wizards did try to reinvigorate the edition with Essentials, but that clearly did not work. (Could it have? Maybe. WotC certainly mismanaged and mis-marketed Essentials - any time you have to constantly explain what it is, it was poorly done.) I really don't think the chances are high that 3E or 4E could have been successfully relaunched, or that enough interesting material could have been added to keep the company afloat. (And we should all want WotC to remain afloat).
Not immediately, perhaps - but see my expanded remarks below. I think 4E still has huge potential as a procedural system for adventuring play expanded way beyond what it currently covers.
But as I wrote above, I don't think the issue was a lack of imagination. After all, look at how incredibly creative 4E was! It was the most radical reinvisioning of D&D ever and a deliberate attempt to change everything problematic about previous editions. Wouldn't work for everyone, of course (no edition does), but the WotC staff did not at all lack in imagination. (We could perhaps also talk about how Skills & Powers didn't reinvigorate 2E's flagging sales and how Book of Nine Swords did not reinvigorate 3.5's sales. Visionary products don't seem to save an aging line. The same will most likely be true of Pathfinder some day... we already see many repeated books with diminishing returns... one Paizo designer said at a recent convention "I wasn't sure I could find something interesting to write, but the book ended up pretty cool." That's a sure sign of those diminishing returns.)
This I really doubt. If WotC would have applied the same changes to the 3.5 corpus as Paizo did, they would have had three options. Either sell it as one or more add-ons ("Power-up Classes", "Revised Combat") or make a new (sub-)edition (3.75), or in the form of new printings of the core books and perhaps offering changes as free downloads. In neither case could WotC have been giving the "good guy" comparable to Paizo, the "saviour of D&D".
These two posts really attacked the same point I made and it's a good observation that demands a full answer.
Over the last few days I have got around to reading (or, at least, starting to read) Robin Laws' "Hillfolk" game. In this game he expands in a practical game-system way on the thoughts he put forth in his "Hamlet's Hit Points". Some of his thought I am finding quite profound; here, for example, is an excerpt from a part ot the introduction he titles "Why This Game Exists":
"Scenes in stories can be divided into two categories: procedural and dramatic. In a procedural scene, the characters confront and overcome external obstacles. They fight opponents, conduct chases, investigate mysteries, explore unfamiliar environments, and so on. When they succeed by talking to others, it is by negotiating with characters who exert no particular emotional hold over them, over practical matters.
In a dramatic scene, the main characters confront internal obstacles, seeking emotional reward from people they care deeply about, for good or ill.
Historically, roleplaying games have concentrated on procedural action, giving short shrift to dramatic interplay. They’re based on adventure genres, which focus on the external over the internal."
Now, I'm not going to suggest that D&D, or any other RPG, should start covering those "dramatic" scenes as a focus and impinging on Hillfolks' turf. I believe strongly in focus and clear design intent in RPGs, and D&D's focus and strength has always lain in the procedural (and I could define it further, but now's not the time). But, by "lack of imagination" in my previous post what I really meant was "unwillingness to look at the game in a little wider a context - in a broader way".
Toes have been dipped in waters the odd time. Birthright gave us "Realm Play" rules that were, in themselves, elegant and remarkable. Sadly they were never integrated too successfully with the "adventuring" rules, in my view, making the game just a little bit incoherent (in a non-Forge-y way).
Imagine an alternate world where, instead of ditching 3.x and the OGL, WotC had:
a) Gone ahead and made 4E; it was too good in many ways to miss and they had some really radical and effective solutions to the problems of 3.x with adventure play.
b) But, while doing this, they kept 3.x in print (without much new material) and supported by Dungeon and Dragon (maybe even with a few articles from staffers contributed).
c) As 4E rolled out, "conversions" and ways to incorporate 4E's more "old edition fitting" ideas are published - either in the magazines or as add-ons for 3.x.
d) Both 3.x and 4E are expanded (with optional, modular material) to cover all sorts of other "procedural" scenes (according to Robin Laws' categorisation). The rigour of 4E brought to tense negotiations or paranoid exploration could be great! And the modules could be made to fit reasonably (with a bit of tweaking - more magazine articles) with 3.x (and maybe earlier editions, although the lack of a sound underlying structure might hinder, there).
e) Eventually, by modules and variants, 3.5 could actually be revised as Paizo has done, by WotC.
f) Adventures and settings could be published that can suit all editions - with "Cliff notes" about differences and modifications needed for each edition.
The overall aim is to generate an ecosystem of game systems and game components that feed back to teach the designers what works and what doesn't "in the wild" for each procedural area of the game. Where designers from competing companies are able to "mix and match" to create things that are faster, meaner and smarter than the systems that came before - as demonstrated by their longevity and prominence in the marketplace*.
Would all this need to be slower than the 4E development we saw? Yes, certainly. But the haste required was predicated partly on the need to torpedo 3.x anyway - with a tiny bit more 3.x support while 4E was in the works (and with development started ealier, too, most likely) that might have been less of a problem#. Was all this occasioned by the demand from Hasbro for higher, faster returns? Quite possibly; but that doesn't make it an impossible business plan - just a more moderate one.
*: Someone a while back mentioned WotC trying to get hold of the licensed marketplace - that strikes me as a pretty fair idea, provided the temptation to abuse the position is avoided (which would have the same deleterious effects as ditching the OGL would have).
#: Look at the time taken over DDN to see this, and consider that if the magazines had stayed with Paizo as OGL vehicles, using them to support 3.x as 4E was built would have required much less resource than has clearly proven too much for WotC during the current edition-switch...
