On the marketing of 4E

[Fifth Element]

Um....I refer to electronic format DDI articles, not Paizo. It seems like a marketing bit to claim that older editions are pulled because electronic copy is unsafe, but the mags are only published electronically, and that's okay.

Cost/benefit, I would guess. They're willing to risk the piracy with the magazines because they're supporting the current game line. The old products stand on their own, and don't promote the sales of 4E material. The greater benefit makes the risk more bearable.

 

[an_idol_mind]

Currently WotC publishes 4e Dragon and Dungeon magazines as pdfs only.

I guess one could argue that this is an example of marketing that didn't work on me, since the mention of the magazines immediately makes me think of the out of print physical copies rather than the online versions now tucked away in DDI.

 

[Shemeska]

Forgive him, he's a D&D youngling.

I kid Shemeska 'cause I know him, but I had a lot of affinity for the great ideas that came out of the 2E years, also; unfortunately, there was more "idea factory" going on than "business savvy" and TSR paid the price. For anyone who came to 3E but was faimliar with the 2E flavorful settings, the 3E settings and ideas seem pretty sparse by comparison.

That I am.

I started in 3e, but I'm heavily, heavily inspired by mid and late 2e material, especially the settings. In my opinion that stretch of years produced some of the most creative material in the history of the game. In my opinion, 3e was often sparse by comparison, especially having culled many of the 2e settings, and 4e went even further down that road (especially with the vacuous lack of setting support). It's too bad that during the same period with 2e, management didn't make very good moves on the business end of things.

 

[Fifth Element]

It's too bad that during the same period with 2e, management didn't make very good moves on the business end of things.

Don't overlook the possibility that the type of products being produced in the 2E era was in itself not a very good move on the business end of things.

 

[Primal]

Not true. 2E had multiclassing and dual classing rules. It also had expanded proficiency systems, kits, and, of course, Player's Option (shudder). Plus specialty priests and expanded rules for specialist casters. I remember AD&D 2e... I remember demonstrating that a strong Fighter specialized in darts could outperform almost any other combination in terms of damage output (darts had a high rate of fire, but were eligible for weapon specialization per dart).

In fact, if you want to be technical, builds go back to AD&D, where the bard was the original archetype of "building." How soon do I go rogue? How soon do I get druid? And with wizards, there was definitely a divide between the "fireball mage" and the more utility-oriented variety.

You don't get rid of builds until you go back far enough to get rid of most choices.

I played such a fighter (who managed to eventually get 'Gauntlets of Ogre Power', to boot), and back in the day it *was* one of the cheesiest fighter builds possible (IIRC, you added bonuses to hit from both Dex and Str with thrown weapons). Also, Haste *doubled* your attacks in AD&D, so I remember flinging 10 darts per round and each of them inflicted 1D3+13 points of damage (with Darts +5, I think) -- it was absolute MURDER when you consider very few critters or NPCs had 100+ Hit Points back then, and you used the same THAC0 score for every attack. More often than not, I killed anything the DM throwed at us in one round. Oh, fun times...

 

[Hussar]

On RC's PDF question.

IANAL and this is pure speculation on my part, but, mightn't the reason the pdf's got pulled is part of the ongoing legal process prosecuting the piracy case? I honestly have no idea, but, this could possibly explain things, and also explain why WOTC is so closed lipped about it, since discussing ongoing legal proceedures is a very big no no.

Or it could be they just don't want to support older editions of the game. That's possible too.

But, a question though, what does that have to do with marketing?

Oh, and the online SRD was mentioned. I would point out that it was a number of years before the online SRD's were created, and, with the GSL, you can't actually do it with 4e. The GSL doesn't allow you to reprint the rules for free.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

One thing to also remember too is that 3e was a sudden shift from the 2e mindset.

In 2e, kits and other customizations existed, but they were suggested for concepts from the role-playing perspective, or the "story" side of things. In fact, I forget if its the PHB or DMG, but the 2nd Edition book there's a section saying that people SHOULD NOT Min/Max because it's not what the game is about. They discouraged people from playing that way. People who played that way were dismissed as "munchkin". About the biggest "build" was specialty priests, and that was more based on character and deity not tactics.

In 3e, Min/Maxing, multiclassing, prestige classes, all of that was encouraged. Part of the design of 3e was to make sure people remembered it was a game, rolling dice, hack and slash, etc. So you now shifted from de-emphasizing that to whole "min/max" articles in Dragon. (I believe WoTC recognized that many people played CRPGs that way and many table-top players played that way).

So, while customization started a long time ago, it became a bit more common in 3e based on the new paradigm.

You have just described the core problem of 2e: giving players the necessary tools to heavily minmax their chars and unbalance the game (not just by kits but also by the constant stream of add-on spells for the spellcasting classes) and then counter that by writing in the books "but please don´t do it."

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

You have just described the core problem of 2e: giving players the necessary tools to heavily minmax their chars and unbalance the game (not just by kits but also by the constant stream of add-on spells for the spellcasting classes) and then counter that by writing in the books "but please don´t do it."

As much as I hate to say "me too", this is precisely my experience. The main reason I welcomed 3e with open arms didn't have anything to due with customization, detail or anything like that. It was instead that the entire design philosophy appeared to be "don't balance a combat advantage with a roleplaying disadvantage".

2e "balanced" the game using one of two methods: Giving you way more power in exchange for a "disadvantage" like "if you try to fight more than X battles in a day, you'll run out of spells" or something like "You are a thief who gets to fight with the THAC0 of a fighter, but in exchange 'trouble finds you'".

At that point in 2e, I was plain tired of everyone creating characters who were extremely powerful and then, as the DM, being responsible for having "trouble find them" in order to balance it out. Ironically enough, when trouble did find them, they were so powerful, they defeated it without much of a problem.

I felt that if the adventure didn't involve them fighting 8+ battles in a single day, I wasn't given the fighters enough of a fair shake. If I didn't hand out enough magic items, I also wasn't giving them a fair shake. And they had to be magic items they could use. I had to throw in enough traps for the thief to feel useful, but not too many of them or I'd bore the rest of the group.

The idea that the game would balance itself without work on my part was the thing that won me over to the new edition. I wanted to be able to sit back and tell my players, "Yes, be anything you want from the options available" and I wouldn't have to carefully watch over the character creation to make sure they weren't abusing it. I'd have to examine the reasons for everything. One player may want to take the Swashbuckler kit for thieves in 2e....but were they taking it because they wanted to play a Swashbuckler or because they got the THAC0 of a fighter?

 

[Umbran]

It seems like a marketing bit to claim that older editions are pulled because electronic copy is unsafe, but the mags are only published electronically, and that's okay.

Not all content is the same, so why should we expect all content to fit under the same policy? An issue of current Dragon (or even several issues) is in no meaningful way equivalent to, say, an older edition PHB or DMG. There's no reason to expect them to take the same risks with Dragon content and older edition content.

 

[Nikosandros]

Not all content is the same, so why should we expect all content to fit under the same policy? An issue of current Dragon (or even several issues) is in no meaningful way equivalent to, say, an older edition PHB or DMG. There's no reason to expect them to take the same risks with Dragon content and older edition content.

Wouldn't current magazine content be worth more that older edition content, from a commercial point of view? If anything, you would assume that they wold take less risks with it...