NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8500158" data-attributes="member: 18">I think it would still have been largely unsuccessful, because thing with 4E is, it was sailing in very dark waters long before anyone really knew what the mechanics were, at least knew them enough to know they were not for them.4E was essentially torpedo by WotC long before launch by really three major factors:1) The messaging and marketing on 4E was absolutely appalling. Almost every bad decision that could have been made, was made. For example, deciding to mock people who played current editions, and not only doing that, but by doing it with a guy the sort of accent The Simpsons would use for a "snooty and unpleasant European". One of the major people at WotC coming out in an interview and linking 4E to MMOs and talking about how he wanted it to be successful like them. Now, his comments were misinterpreted, but they were so easy to misinterpret, and utterly primed people to see 4E in a certain light. It's much easier to see what he meant now, but... terrible.2) The GSL instead of the OGL. To call the GSL a "slap in the face" of 3PPs and anybody who enjoyed the work of 3PPs would be to severely understate things. It was also rejection of the whole d20 era, which really, was a pretty popular era. The GSL was greedy, short-sighted, mean-spirited, and just an all-round bad idea. From a distance of time, you can see it made a certain amount of crude sense for WotC because WotC clearly believed, at that time, the OGL was a mistake and they should have profited from it more, but, they were wrong, very wrong.3) Going very hard for digital before they had the developers, and just slightly before the world really had the technology, especially doing it during what was a major technological change (the rise of smartphones). Should they have seen smartphones coming? Perhaps not, but should have adopted the digital strategy they did, with a totally unproven studio, all eggs in one basket (eggs later smashed by the head dev being a murderer)? No. They should have gone for something proven and professional - hired a company to do it, like an established, decent-sized one. Or just not gone so hard for digital. They absolutely hyped people for digital - marketed as if they'd have a strong digital offering at launch, and totally did not - in fact, even by the time 4E was shut down, they still weren't at where they'd said they'd be at or shortly after launch.Changing the rules doesn't change any of that.It also still leaves things wide open for Paizo and Pathfinder. Instead of 4E being called "The MMO version of D&D" or "A wargame pretending to be D&D" or the like, you'd likely have got "D&D got dumbed down so they could make it into an MMO!" (things like Warlocks would be held up as evidence of this) or "Baby's First D&D" or the like, because realistically, going from 3.5E's extreme range of options, and fiddly, complex mechanics involving dozens of types of bonuses and them stacking or not, hundreds of feats, and so on, to "Advantage/Disadvantage" and like a dozen feats, with an audience already primed to hate the game by the three things I listed above, it would not look good.Would it have done better than actual 4E? I don't really think so. Maybe a little but not a lot. Pathfinder would still have succeeded in capturing a large audience share. I think rather, the insults about it would be a little different, the distaste would be that it was a "simplified game for video game people", rather than "a wargame masquerading as an RPG".</blockquote>

Verification