Is D&D (WotC) flaming out?

[Dark Mistress]

Well ENWorld isn't the official WotC chatboard, but I remember quite a few times seeing WotC reps come on to the boards off and on. Has this changed?

They have some yes, but the ones that did it the most are no longer with WotC. Even when they did, I didn't see them post anywhere near the level that some other companies do. Mongoose for example you fairly often see one of them posting. ICE you see the posting just about every day. White Wolf back in the hey day you seen just about everyone working their actively posting in the forums. Paizo is the same as White Wolf. I mean just about every person that works there has thousands and thousands of posts.

I think any company that does that on a regular bases and engages their fans that way is smart. I mean lets face it we are a niche product and most gamers tend to be fairly smart and passionate. Letting us feel like we get a say in the game and our concerns, opinions etc are heard is a good thing.

I am sure more companies do it, those are just the ones I have experience with that I see do it fairly often.

 

[korjik]

People have delved into the nature of the changes here and elsewhere. The biggest ones from my perspective include; massive hit point inflation, a huge change to the way saving throws work (they're no longer absolure, instead going against a target number), alterations to the initiative system, skills as opposed to NWPs/characteristic checks. They add up to making a game that doesn't give you the same results if you approach it the same way.



In 1st edition your level 1 Fighter had the name title Veteran. You weren't a lowly nobody then, or in BECMI, or in 2e. You weren't even one in 3e, if you started out with levels in a PC class, no matter what people claim. You're part of that very small percentage of people that the DMG claims have PC levels. You might not yet be Miyamoto Musashi, but you are a trained Samurai and not a peasant who picked up a sword. And I'm pretty certain no-one really thinks a 1st level Wizard or Cleric hasn't had lots of training.

Personally I don't find 3e supports all playstyles. It's actively bad at some, though to be honest I find the same trues of all editions of D&D.



Because you get different results.

At least, that's what we observed when after a couple of months playing 3e we started to find things working strangely. We took some 2e characters, ran them through an old dungeon (one of the Slave Lords series), and recorded what characters did and what they rolled. Then we converted the characters and dungeon to 3e and used the same actions and rolls. The results were different, even more so when we experimented with higher level adventures.

I think the point is that while 3e was very mechanically different from 2e, the base assumptions were still pretty much the same. While saving throws changed, there were still saving throws. While the AC progression inverted, and the to hit changed, they were still mostly the same progressions as 2e. Thieves were thieves, clerics were clerics, fighters were fighters, fighter/magic-users were.... well multiclassing was pretty different.

The break from 3e to 4e was much different. You could not see why changes were made (unlike the 2e to 3e change). Basic assumtions of the game changed. Fighters were defenders, rogues were strikers, spell were powers just like any the fighter had... and fighters have powers.

Like BryonD, I think that the changes from 2e to 3e made a better game, but one which was in the same spirit of the prior edition. 4e is to a large degree Warhammer Quest, and is a very diferent spirit to the prior editions.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

So, yes, you can achieve very similar results between 1e and 3e without radically changing the content of the original materials.

Agreed.

As I've said several times on these boards, I'm part of a campaign that has been active since about 1985.

It started off as an AD&D game, and over time was converted to a 2Ed, 3Ed and eventually 3.5Ed game virtually seamlessly. Sure, there were some houserules along the way, but the PCs remained quintessentially the same.

That campaign will never be a 4Ed campaign because the underpinnings are so different that huge sections of the campaign and PCs within it would have to be unrecognizably altered. Some 75% of my own PCs in that campaign simply can't be built in 4Ed. Another 10-15% would require such changes as to make them extremely dissimilar to their former incarnations. Other players in the group experienced similar difficulties (albeit with different percentages).

That inability to do things the way we always did has been a significant barrier. While I can enjoy 4Ed as a well designed FRPG, it simply doesn't scratch my D&D itch.

So yes, I know from experience that you can play 3.X substantially the same way as prior editions with similar results AND that in many substantive ways, 4Ed is far and away the most radical design change.

 

[jbear]

Skipped here from page 1.

@ OP if your still even involved in the thread:

For exciting products why don't you check out The Monster Vault. It is fantastic, seriously.
Apart from the short adventure and poster map it comes with about 6 sheets of absolutely gourgeous thick card monster tokens that are red when you flip them over to mark them as bloodied. The book itself has uptodate lethal monsters with some very nice adventure inspiring, easy to read fluff.

Repackaging ... hmmm ... if that is the case it is some marvellous packaging well worth the very reasonable asking price. I couldn't beleive my eyes when I opened the box ... drool! I'm not a colectionist. I'm very specific about what I buy. It has to be something I know I'm going to squeeze every cent out of. I will buy every one of these products that come out, religiously because I know I will be able to do just that with them.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Skipped here from page 1.

@ OP if your still even involved in the thread:

For exciting products why don't you check out The Monster Vault. It is fantastic, seriously.

Thanks for the recommendation -- at first glanee I assumed it just repackaged MM1, so ignored it -- I'll check it out.

 

[Bluenose]

But you also get different results depending on play styles in just about any edition.

It's not exactly noticeable going from 1e to 2e, or for that matter to the BECM games. It is with 3e and 4e.

One of the most obvious places to observe this is with the pre-generated characters provided with some modules. Compare the magic items they have. Then look at characters of similar level from 3e games. That's expected by the rules, and it's not a cosmetic difference.

 

[Mark CMG]

It's not exactly noticeable going from 1e to 2e, or for that matter to the BECM games. It is with 3e and 4e.

One of the most obvious places to observe this is with the pre-generated characters provided with some modules. Compare the magic items they have. Then look at characters of similar level from 3e games. That's expected by the rules, and it's not a cosmetic difference.

Recent editions have certainly more obviously codified the relationship between power items and levels of play.

 

[Beginning of the End]

The difference when compared to 3rd edition is that they admitted it. You can't play 3e the way you played earlier editions and get the same results. Yet people still carried on playing the same settings and pretending nothing had changed. So they could do so now. Disliking the 4e rules is fine, but insisting that the 3e ones were like earlier editions in a way the 4e ones aren't is ridiculous.

Not IME. I play in both a 3.x and an OD&D game. Although 3.x adds a lot of new options, the fundamental gameplay is virtually identical.

We've noticed only three significant points of departure:

(1) Sleep is crazy powerful in OD&D. It effectively ends any low-level encounter.

(2) Turning is incredibly powerful in OD&D. A 2nd level cleric can automatically turn 2d6 skeletons, for example, and there's no limit on the number of encounters clerics can turn in a given day. The result is that undead encounters are fast-tracked for obsolescence. (This was changed in AD&D1.)

(3) The lack of a mechanic for handling searches requires significant adjustment. (But, of course, this was gone by 1976.)

I've also used 3E modules in OD&D and pre-3E modules in 3E. The result supported the fact that encounter design, not fundamental changes in gameplay, is the difference most people describe in 3E versus pre-3E play. (Modules played the same regardless of the edition you were playing them in.)

Conversely, I've run Keep on the Shadowfell (or sections of it) in both 4E (three times) and OD&D (twice). The result here was a radically different experience.

This is unsurprising, frankly. 4E is a game explicitly built to support a very different style of play and it's fairly trivial to notice that the core gameplay has been radically altered for every single class.

Any printed adventure *must* to some extent be a railroad. Perhaps one with lots of branches and tracks, but still a finite number. Adventure paths only exacerbate the issue by forcing assumptions as to the resolution of previous adventures.

This assumes that "branches" and "tracks" are the only way to design an adventure.

They aren't. And, in fact, they're a poor way to design a non-linear adventure whether you're writing a professional game module or prepping your notes at home. I recommend Don't Prep Plots and Node-Based Scenario Design.

If you design situations instead of plots, it's actually quite trivial to design non-linear printed adventures.

 

[Remathilis]

It started off as an AD&D game, and over time was converted to a 2Ed, 3Ed and eventually 3.5Ed game virtually seamlessly. Sure, there were some houserules along the way, but the PCs remained quintessentially the same.

Oddly, we came with a lot of hiccups when the conversion to 3e took place.

A number of our 2nd edtion PCs (not unusually, multi-classed or dual-classed) came out terrible in 3ed edition due to the stacking multi-classing. Often times, PrC stop-gap fixes (EK, MT, AT, and the like) fixed some of the problem, but often times created PCs that couldn't do everything their 2e counterpart could (fight, sneak, and spell).

Other 2e->3e conversion problems came up (many converted thieves were starved for skill points due to Int not being as big a requirement for 2e thieves as it was for 3e rogues) and sometimes some oddities occurred (the wizard/archmage, by virtue of his 20+ Int, had a higher search than the Rogue of equal level. If the wizard had taken one level of rogue, he could have rivaled the Rogue on nearly all counts of trapfinding).

We had so many problems that people often converted multi-classed PCs to single classes (a mage/their to sorcerer, a cleric/mage to just cleric) or even re-rolled their PCs (to take into account 3e's new ability score requirements for classes, like Cha for clerics or Int for rogues.

We eventually decided that 3e was better with fresh new PCs than older one rolled up under 2e's assumptions. We never bothered to try and convert to 4e (other than to mess around with the CB) since we KNEW they wouldn't even remotely look "Ze same!"

 

[Beginning of the End]

A number of our 2nd edtion PCs (not unusually, multi-classed or dual-classed) came out terrible in 3ed edition due to the stacking multi-classing. Often times, PrC stop-gap fixes (EK, MT, AT, and the like) fixed some of the problem, but often times created PCs that couldn't do everything their 2e counterpart could (fight, sneak, and spell).

This is a good point.

This is something I didn't encounter because the dual/multi-class rules were so horrifically (and self-evidently) broken that we stopped using them at least a decade before 3E came out. (I suppose the other solution would have been to have everyone use them, as you did.)

With that being said, you can pretty accurately model dual-classed 2E characters using 3E multi-class rules. For mulit-classed 2E characters I'd probably look at gestalt classes.