D&D 5E No longer interested in 5e now

[vagabundo]

It boggles my mind that people thought that 5e would somehow allow all the different rule sets to play together at the same table. I thought it was fairly clear what they were going for and I like that they are "thinking big"

I'd prefer they do something like this and maybe fail than just produce another rung in the edition mill. It might not work, but then we all have our editions of choice to fall back too. And they might offer some support for those previous editions, at least they seem open to those ideas.

 

[Number48]

A lot of people are calling for older material PDFs. You have to remember that WotC doesn't have digital files on these. It would require cutting up, scanning and cleaning each page of the book. Just how many $10 sales of 1E Unearthed Arcana are they going to get? The labor cost for the employees doing that work is better spent making new product.

 

[Yora]

They do have quite a large number on pdf. They were available for free on their website until a few years ago, if you knew where to look.

 

[Mark CMG]

A lot of people are calling for older material PDFs. You have to remember that WotC doesn't have digital files on these.

The vast majority of older materials was scanned in the early 3.XE era by WotC (Jim Butler worked for them then and had a number of others working under him on that project, IIRC). So they do have digital files except for the more obscure items. Some/Many of them, however, were less than stellar scans due to the fast pace with which they were scanned and the limits of the technology of the time, a decade ago. I think all or most of the old ones were scanned as images and thus cannot be mined for material easily. I agree that a lot of people would find the scans, and the fact that sections can't be copied and pasted into homebrew documents, problematic or unwanted, so maybe they would need to use more modern OCR (optical character recognition) scanners to produce new digital documents. I also think this is unlikely to take place. I'd personally be content with the old scans being made available again with clear warnings about their limitations.

They do have quite a large number on pdf. They were available for free on their website until a few years ago, if you knew where to look.

They were available through RPGNow and a number of us 3PP were recruited to help get the sales text added for each of the PDFs sold. There were hundreds of them.

 

[Salamandyr]

Taking an unrelated potshot at 4e with a 4 year old catch phrase, classy. Welcome to the 4hater bandwagon!

Honestly I don't think 5e will be the amazing utopian One Edition to Rule Them All either, but it'll fair better than what you'd been hoping for. For a variety of reasons.

I say this as someone who likes and has played 4e and who likes and playes World of Warcraft. 4e suckered World of Warcraft into a dark alley, mugged it and rifled through its pockets for spare mechanics. The encounters based design, the use of class based powers to attack "I use my Sinister Strike, er, Sly Flourish!", the emphasis on settings based fights with unique mechanics, the emphasis on builds, balance, and uniform mechanical structer...here I'm referring to the way your characters generally reset to the default power level, how at X level, you'll always have Y number of powers, etc. 4e was an attempt to take many of the best parts of running an instance in WoW or Everquest and translating them to the tabletop. Yes, there's a lot of differences, but there's a whole heck of a lot of similarities.

And a whole lot of people felt that this was a bad idea (I am not necessarily one of them). You may not agree with them. You may think the similarities are smaller than the differences. That's all fine. But they have a legitimate point of view, and just because you don't like hearing it shouldn't mean they should be forced not to speak of it.

4e borrows/rips off WoW. That's either good, bad, or indifferent, but it's not a catchphrase.

 

[Njall]

I say this as someone who likes and has played 4e and who likes and playes World of Warcraft. 4e suckered World of Warcraft into a dark alley, mugged it and rifled through its pockets for spare mechanics. The encounters based design, the use of class based powers to attack "I use my Sinister Strike, er, Sly Flourish!", the emphasis on settings based fights with unique mechanics, the emphasis on builds, balance, and uniform mechanical structer...here I'm referring to the way your characters generally reset to the default power level, how at X level, you'll always have Y number of powers, etc. 4e was an attempt to take many of the best parts of running an instance in WoW or Everquest and translating them to the tabletop. Yes, there's a lot of differences, but there's a whole heck of a lot of similarities.

And a whole lot of people felt that this was a bad idea (I am not necessarily one of them). You may not agree with them. You may think the similarities are smaller than the differences. That's all fine. But they have a legitimate point of view, and just because you don't like hearing it shouldn't mean they should be forced not to speak of it.

4e borrows/rips off WoW. That's either good, bad, or indifferent, but it's not a catchphrase.

Sorry, not seeing it, and I've been playing WoW for 7 years or so, give or take.
In WoW, combat is about rotations or priorities, a constant stream of healing, tanking and repetitive tactics.
It also features different kinds of resource management depending on your class ( rage for warriors, energy for rogues, focus for hunters and mana for casters, which was kind of a big deal when the game launched ).
In 4e, encounter powers were introduced so that you didn't have to do the same thing every round; healing was capped ( healing surges ) so that healbots weren't necessary anymore and everyone was given the exact same resources to manage, and the game tried to encourage everyone, both players and DMs, to use varied, creative tactics to win the day.
Also, they tried to cut back the amount and importance of magic items, whereas in WoW ( and just about every other MMO out there, really ) getting new, better stuff is pretty much the point of the game.
So, IMHO, the similarities between WoW and 4e start and end with "all PCs get powers!", but then just about every game out there features special abilities these days.

[/OT]

As for the OP: sorry dude, but you set yourself up for disappointment here.
Still, the playtest should be free, so it's not like checking out the game will do much harm, will it?

 

[avin]

4E somewhat borrowed DPS/Tank/Healer from Wow.

Nothing more, no matter how people (who usually NEVER played Wow) say that.

4E is far closer to Final Fantasy Tactics than Wow.

If one is trying to compare it to a videogame, at least aim right...

 

[Plane Sailing]

After reading Monte's latest "Legends&Lore" article, I'm going to have to say I'm no longer interested in 5th Edition or "D&D Next" or whatever.

Why? Because of this very part:

"To be clear, we're not talking about creating a bridge so that you can play 1E and 4E at the same time. Instead, we're allowing you to play a 1E-style game or a 4E-style game with the same rules. Also, players at the table can choose the style of character they want to play. In short, let's talk about style and D&D."

Sorry, but, I care less about playing a D&D game with mixed styles. I just want my edition of game to continue getting support, in fact, I want all 4 editions getting support. That's the best way to go, and it'd be more than profitable than any new edition could accomplish. This is because you capture every generation of D&D gamer ever to exist to come throwing their money at you for products for their preferred edition.

I was hoping more along the lines of everyone gets to play their edition as is and supported, or everyone plays their edition at the same time with some sort of set of rules to help with that, and also continues getting support for the 4 editions like new game material and campaign books.

So screw 5E, it'll bomb like 4E because now instead of leaving everyone in their own camp and giving each camp their own "rations", so-to-speak, you're trying to accomplish getting 4 different and resentful camps to all sit in one big tent and eat at the same table and be happy with it.

This is going to fail hard, IMO. A DM like me, I run 3.5e with a few of my own houserules and, therefore, everyone at my table must abide by the same thing.

Exactly why is it WotC's business to convince me that I should include "1e-style" or "4e-style" gamers at MY table? We like our edition choice at our table and all we ever wanted was to, once in awhile, see a NEW 3E PRODUCT for our games. That's all we ask. We have what we want, and so does every other gamer, just continue to give us more of what we like.

Again, support the 4 editions. This "uniting" crap is silly. I believe taking the "best" of all 4 Editions and blending them into some weird soupy goo is very poor and very sloppy game design. Leave what is alone and support them.

Just like it was stupid to take everything in an MMO and blend them into a TTRPG. You can see how well 4E did because of that mistake.

Turns out that erdrick is a sock puppet for someone who has been permabanned in the past, so he has been permanently booted

 

[Salamandyr]

So, IMHO, the similarities between WoW and 4e start and end with "all PCs get powers!", but then just about every game out there features special abilities these days.

I disagree. I pointed out a number of other similarities in my own post above. But the big gist of my post has more to do with the tendency of threads to go something like this.

"4e is like WoW"

"You can't say that!"

Yes, they can.

EDIT: Avin, you may very well be right. I've never played a JRPG in my life and only know about their mechanics by osmosis. However, I'm not sure that invalidates the point. People who dislike 4e's similarity to video games have a right to say so.

 

[Njall]

I disagree. I pointed out a number of other similarities in my own post above. But the big gist of my post has more to do with the tendency of threads to go something like this.

"4e is like WoW"

"You can't say that!"

Yes, they can.

Doesn't make them right, especially considering that there are a lot of games ( and videogames) around with just about every feature you listed.