D&D 4E Monte Cook on 4E

[Celebrim]

When 3.0 came out and it was such a drasticaly new game MANY people said the same thing about not going and hope it fails and people wouldnt support it.

None of it came true.

I'm really getting tired of this observation. 'Many' is meaningless in this context. It means only, 'More than one.', and hense it is meaningless.

Monte is right. The situation now is different than it was then. Noting that some people didn't like 3E and some people didn't like 4E doesn't prove that the situation is the same. Not remotely.

Note that says nothing about the quality of 4E or its liklihood of success, much less its success relative to 3E.

But if we were to quantify the situation when 3E came out and compare it to some quantification of the situation now, I think it would be obvious how different the two were. I don't have numbers, but my rememberance of the time just prior to D20 was that D&D was a has been game with a steadily declining market share. White Wolf was making almost all the top hot games and TSR probably wasn't claiming more than a 1/3rd of the RPG groups. Everyone was playing something other than D&D.

D20 was a juggernaut. It was a steamroller. It claimed a greater share of the shelfspace for D&D than any time since the early '80s. It utterly transformed the market. Even if you weren't playing D&D, chances are you were playing something inspired by its mechanics. Go look at the shelfs now and compare them in your mind to what they looked like prior to 3E.

If I had numbers, I'm sure that they would back those claims up. I don't know what things are like now. Maybe sales are falling. Maybe they aren't. I don't know what's going on now. But I can tell you what happened then, because what happened then was so the opposite of subtle that you couldn't miss it.

The idea that people are as unhappy with 3.X now as they were with 2E is IMO ridiculous. Monte of course sees it as it is. Yes, some people complained about 3E then. Yes, some people complain about 4E now. Yes, some people were disenchanted with 2E then, and some people are disenchanted with 3E now. But those statements are so superficial as to be more meaningless than meaningful. They obscure the truth more than they reveal it. Things are not the same now as they were then.

 

[dmccoy1693]

yes there is a lot of bad d20 products

While I do agree with you historically, I wonder who makes bad d20 products today? Nothing I've read that was released in the past 6 months-year I'd consider bad from a 3rd party company. Dreamscarred Press has some Psionic stuff that I consider better then WotC. Paizo adventures rule. City of Brass, my DM won't let me read yet, but I want to; Tome of Artifacts is great. I've heard plenty of good things about Pirates Guide to Freeport (though haven't read it myself).

Mongoose is out of the d20 market, as are alot of the tiny companies that didn't know how to put run a company profitably or put out a quality product.

So what are the current bad 3rd party products?

 

[Mighty Veil]

Maybe MC is bitter about 4e? Not impossible. EGG if asked about D&D just says he likes 0D&D (which he plays) and 1e, but will plug C&C. That interview off Gaming Steve does give a good insight to the market 4e seems to be focused on. I do think a simpler game (which I'm not sure 4e will be if SW Saga is close to it, from my own experience of getting old gamers to try the new game instead of WoW), and a way for people who can't meet up face to face, are a good move on Wizards' part.

 

[Darkwolf71]

Mongoose is out of the d20 market, as are alot of the tiny companies that didn't know how to put run a company profitably or put out a quality product.

1) It sounds as if you are lumping MGP in with the likes of FFE. Simply not the case. Mongoose has come far in six years. They have license for several game settings, and I believe they now own the rights to Runequest. They profit nicely and put out products easily comparable in quality to Green Ronin.

2) MGP is not 'out of the d20 market'. It's no longer their main focus, but they do plan to continue supporting it.

State of the Mongoose:

The big thing in 2008 will, of course, be D&D 4e. I’m not going to go into whether it will bring a new flood of books to the market, whether it will create a resurgence in roleplaying, and so forth. But there are a few things worth inspecting for the smaller publisher.

First, will we support it under the OGL? Well, it does not look like they will make things easy as things stand. As I write this, we have no idea of whether there will be early copies of the SRD for publishers to release books at the same time as their initial releases (I wouldn’t if I were them), and it looks like there will not be an official D20 logo (for our part, not required). If all else is equal though, yes, there will be support from Mongoose. We have a new setting in the wings that works very well with D&D (because of the relative power levels and influence of magic). I could see us revising the epic Drow War campaign too, which was very popular when released. However, we will not need to make ourselves reliant on the OGL, as we did when we started a little more than six years ago.

Not to mention they have no plans to can the d20 Conan system, neither will they be updating it to 4e.

 

[Robert Ranting]

I think that Monte has a point about it being a hard sell. Whether it will be more of a hard sell than 2E, I can't say, but the fact that many people are happy with 3.5, and that the SRD can live on through the web and the contents of our harddrives means that those who are happy to stick with the old can do so. It is necessary for WotC as a company to continually produce products that sell in order to keep the brand vital, but it is in no way necessary for the fans to buy said supplements to keep their individual games vital. So long as some group, somewhere, thinks that the game is fun and wants to play, they can keep playing it until doomsday. So why should they switch? That is the question that WotC has to answer, and in order to do so, they need to deliver a product that is worthwhile, and they need to market it as broadly as possible, to fans both new and old.

As for the tangential topic about 3rd party publishers...

"WotC may have some design issues, but if a top level 3rd party product was as flat out unedited as IH, then 3rd party products are not for me. (seriously, had *anyone* but Mearls read it before publishing? Had he gone back and done basic sanity checks??)"

For what it is worth, I'm pretty sure that Mike Mearls was hired by WotC before Iron Heroes was entirely finished. They probably had to do a rush job on the line to get it published before his exclusive contract for WotC kicked in. I don't have a citation for this, but the timing was about right, since Mearls left Malhavoc and started working for WotC before the third IH supplement hit the printers, IIRC.

As for unbalanced mechanics in IH, that doesn't reflect nearly as much on third party products as a whole as it does on Mike Mearls' specific design philosophies. I guess what I am getting at is that, IH, being wholely the responsibility and brainchild of Mike Mearls is probably the best indicator we have of the quality he is capable of. His joining the WotC team does not suddenly make him blessed with greater insight and skill than he had before.

It seems somewhat hypocritical to point at Mearls' work as an example of how bad 3rd party products are while praising the virtues of WotC, which he is now part of. The same mind and hands that crafted Iron Heroes are now hard at work on the Monster Manual 1 and the first four or so adventures of a new edition of D&D.

I realize that I am a minority, but it is my feeling that the name of the designers, and artists who contributed to the book is much more of an indication of quality than any brand name will ever be. If you hand the same adventure "concept" to Bruce Cordell, Nick Logue, and Monte Cook, you will come up with very different adventures, each based on that author's own biases and sense of mechanical balance. An editor can only do so much to iron out the kinks in a manuscript, short of tossing it out entirely and getting someone else to write it. That said, if the things you don't like about Iron Heroes are things you don't like about Mike Mearls' game design work, then no team of WotC editors will make you like what he produces.

Robert "Not A Fan of Mearls' Work Either" Ranting

 

[Li Shenron]

An interesting note:

Monte Cook says he's going back to 3e (with a little stuff from 3.5e)
Jon Tweet stopped using 3e some time ago, and can't wait until 4e.

Cheers!

I've got the D&D game that I love. I'm back to running two campaigns at once using 3.0, plus a few things from 3.5.

Knowing that my favourite RPG designers currently chooses 3.0 over any other edition and half-edition is a nice Xmas present

 

[Imp]

I'd probably go for Iron Heroes 2.0 quicker than I will D&D 4.0.

There is some kinda wonky stuff in IH. Most of it seems to be on the broken-pointless side rather than the broken-insane side. The way a number of the classes' tokens seem to work, or don't work, for example. And I'm aware that there's a whole array of fixes for it, etc. but compiling and evaluating and presenting all that material is a pain.

 

[Scholar & Brutalman]

Knowing that my favourite RPG designers currently chooses 3.0 over any other edition and half-edition is a nice Xmas present

I don't find it very surprising that a designer says he prefers the system that he designed. It's like Gary Gygax saying he likes AD&D 1e.

And I get the feeling, perhaps unfounded, that Monte was the source of a lot of the 3e gaming philosophy, in terms of the complexity and simulationism of the system. It's probably closer to his ideal system than that of some of the other designers. I suspect that Mike Mearls is in a similar role in the current design effort.

 

[Merlin the Tuna]

And I get the feeling, perhaps unfounded, that Monte was the source of a lot of the 3e gaming philosophy, in terms of the complexity and simulationism of the system. It's probably closer to his ideal system than that of some of the other designers.

I'd agree, but as has been mentioned (I think), a lot of the things he's posted on his website are also ideas that are echoed in 4e development. Spellcasting, for example.

 

[Li Shenron]

I don't find it very surprising that a designer says he prefers the system that he designed. It's like Gary Gygax saying he likes AD&D 1e.

Of course, he had a major part in designing 3.0, but still he could have jump on the 3.5 wagon and reap some benefit of approval from the gamers population. A few others are currently engaged in saying how much their own work in 3e sucked, and how well 4e will fix it, and get praised for that.