I'm stocked for life! (But what if no one cares?)

[Mishihari Lord]

I'm pretty sure that what will happen is that a large majority of players will move to the new edition and there will be a small number of holdouts. Why? Because that's what happened with every other edition change. I don't see any reason why the next time around will be any different.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

If the putative "Third Edition diehard" crowd becomes anything like the bitter, hateful First/Second Edition diehard crowd, count me the hell out.

 

[jdrakeh]

I've been poring over the numerous Dungeon/Dragon/4e speculation threads with great interest. One comment I've seen repeatedly is people saying things like this:

"Screw WotC and 4e. I'm sticking with 3.5, baby. I've got enough books and adventures to last me for life!"

I'll admit, I'm inclined to think similar thoughts, except for one thing: the best RPG in the world is meaningless if you can't find players. Where WotC goes, so go the majority of players.

Good points, all.

For the time being, I don't plan on moving to 4.0 unless the differences between it and 3.5 ar minimal (i.e., in the vein of differences between 3.0 and 3.5). It has taken me until the last month or two to get a good, firm, grasp on the ins and outs of the current D&D (3.5) -- and I'm not ready to piss away all of that effort to learn a completely different game system just yet.

Also, for the time being, the proliferation of D&D 3.5 support material is arguably much more widespread and voluminous that the body of support material for AD&1e and 2e (largely due to the OGL and d20 STL). This being the case, people have a lot more material to keep them busy for a much longer period of time. What am I on about?

Unless the mountain of 4.0 support is as large or larger than the current mountain of material available for 3.5, I'm not certain that there will be a truly compelling reason to move on, as it were. In the past, this wasn't an issue because outside of TSR, there were precious few (if any) other companies churning out game support for AD&D.

When TSR yanked support for AD&D/D&D Edition X, that was the end of support for the most part. People had a reason to move on to the new edition. This was less true of the 3.0 to 3.5 switch and, given the mountain of support available for the latter, conceivably less true for the anticipated 3.5 to 4.0 switch.

Unless 4.0 does things significantly better than 3.5, I don't think that people will flock to the new edition as they have to new editions of years gone by.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

I've never said "Screw WotC" over 4E, and I won't. It's a business decision, and eventually something they have to do.

(If you wanted to hear me curse someone's name about stupid new editions, you shoulda been around me during undergrad and law school, where they'd change the order of presentation in a book, and nothing else, call it a new edition, and milk us for 200 bucks.)

That said, I've also never said "I'll never buy the new edition," but I'm saying it now. I will never buy 4E. If my players want me to continue to DM, they'll use 3.5. If they want me as a player in any 4E games, they'll lend me their books.

 

[Teflon Billy]

I think 4e will be a different enough beast (Collectible, Minis required, purchaseale powerups etc) that I think it will hav no interest for a good sized chunck of the current D&D crowd.

WotC seems to love the cash that Collectibility brings, and I can't imagine them not using that model for 4e.

I'll probably stik with what I've got, and--as folks have mentiond earlier in the thread--as DM I pretty much set the tone for what we ae going to play (and have for years)

 

[Steel_Wind]

DMs set the trend for a lot of groups.

A way to guarantee this is to start a group now, and whenever 4e comes out say "We're sticking with these."

Hey you! We're sticking with these.

 

[WayneLigon]

The question isn't, "Will you switch?" but "When you switch, how willing would you be to play in a D&D 3.5 game if someone else was offering to run it?".

I would be very unlikely to do so, provided 4E has enough features that I want.

 

[WayneLigon]

I think 4e will be a different enough beast (Collectible, Minis required, purchaseale powerups etc) that I think it will hav no interest for a good sized chunck of the current D&D crowd.

WotC seems to love the cash that Collectibility brings, and I can't imagine them not using that model for 4e.

I dunno. That was the big sky-is-falling fear about 3E: collectable rules, D&D's only game world being Dominaria or whatever, magic seperated into colors, blah blah blah. Not even a whiff of any of the fears of MTG contamination came true and I doubt that it will this time.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

WotC seems to love the cash that Collectibility brings, and I can't imagine them not using that model for 4e.

I can, because you can't sell a bad game.

 

[ThirdWizard]

If it was me, the answer remains "it depends".

We don't know how different 4th edition will be.

If, while I'm playing this 3.5 game, I'm constantly thinking :-

"I can see what the DM was trying to achieve, but 4th edition would have handled that particular encounter so much better"

"if this was 4th edition I'd have something cool I could do now, but since its 3.5 I'll have to just do nothing this round"

"it was only when 4th edition removed that rule that I realised just how much playing time it had been taking up for so little effect; its a real pain to have to worry about it again"

"if we were using the streamlined, intuitive 4th edition grappling rules, maybe the DM would have spent more time describing the encounter in cool ways and less time with his nose buried in the rule book"

then the rules are intruding upon the role-playing, and I might have more fun doing something else with my Sunday afternoons.

What he said.

I've had lots of players turn down my ideas. The way I see it, GMs love to want to try out new things, but players rarely want to go for them. I'm no different, and I'm fine with that. My group didn't want to play Cinematic Unisystem, and I don't hold it against them. It's their preference. If I really wanted to play it, I'd go out and find some others to play with. I'd rather play with them, though, so I keep searching for a system that everyone wants. That tends to be D&D.

If a friend of mine wanted to run 3.0 instead of 3.5, I would look at him like he was crazy. I still have my old books, but there's no way I'm playing in it. Why? I like the changes that came in 3.5. I played and loved 3.0, and there aren't that many changes between the two. But, it doesn't matter. I'm not going to play 3.0. So, I imagine that the same would be true of 3e vs. 4e.

If 4e has a predisposition toward magic items similar to 3e, I'll still want to play Iron Heroes, so OGL is still a possibility for me at that point. The main thing there, though, is that its going for a different experience than D&D. So its not like I have to be playing the latest thing, its just that if the latest thing in a particular genre is, what I see as better, then I'll always go for my preference.

If 4e isn't what I'm looking for in an RPG, I'll stick with 3.5. But, I doubt that will happen. I'm actually looking more forward to 4e as time goes on, and I start to notice the things about 3e that bug me more and more. When 3e came out, it was so much better than 2e that I didn't notice the annoying, inconsistent, or bad things about it. But, they're there, and I would love to see them fixed. After seeing them fixed, I can't imagine going back.