D&D General What if Critical Role had stuck with Pathfinder? Or 4E?

[Vaalingrade]

Oh naughty word, I need to check those out then. I was under the impression that they only did D&D.

On the Youtube channel, they're in the One Shots playlist. There some D&D stuff in there, but other stuff as well.

Travis as a preacher in Deadlands is a treat.

 

[BRayne]

Of explicitly non 5e stuff CR have done VtM (albeit a fairly early playtest version of V5), Deadlands (two separate times, a charity oneshot and Undeadwood), Pathfinder, Honey Heist, Mothership (combined with Alien RPG), Call of Cthulhu, Crash Pandas, Monsterhearts 2, and Tails of Equestria. Along with a few 5e based hacks for various videogames (Doom, Diablo, Shadow of Mordor, Hearthstone, and Elder Scrolls).

Dimension 20 has also done a couple of short non-5e seasons. Kids on Brooms for Misfits & Magic and a bespoke system for Shriek Week. As well as the current season being in SW5e which I think is arguable how much it actually has in common with base D&D5e at this point.

 

[BrokenTwin]

Haha, I just realized the enworld uses a content filter for swear words. That was an unintentionally funny discovery.

And I am totally checking out them playing Monsterhearts 2. That sounds like a fantastic time.

 

[darjr]

Their CoC game purportedly gave chaosium a large sales boost.

 

[Vaalingrade]

It was one of the few Mythos things I've every enjoyed.

 

[darjr]

Haha, I just realized the enworld uses a content filter for swear words. That was an unintentionally funny discovery.

And I am totally checking out them playing Monsterhearts 2. That sounds like a fantastic time.

naughty word you!

 

[teitan]

citetion needed...
all we know is 4e outsold 3e, then pathfinder split the fandom and 4e droped as pathfinder rose. at no point prior to the 'dying from lack of publication' did it look like pathfinder would take #1... it just looked like a strong #2.

everything I see shows that WotC (or someone at corrpret, or some group between them) decided that they MIGHT win back some of the #2 going forward... not a fear of looseing #1, just wanting to make it a blow out instead of a mostly race...

no fan memes and being the only edition in history to have to deal with an OGL for it's most resent predecessor (and the growth of a retro clone there of) lead to the 800lbs gorilla becoming a 600lbs gorilla in the room and they wanted those 200lbs back

I never said it was dying from lack of publication. It was already on life support and new edition was all but announced. Essentials was a fail and shortly after several product were cancelled. Several months of nothing and then a quick burst on the heels of the D&D next playtest announcement. So what I’m saying is that once products started getting canceled fans knew, based on history, a new edition was coming and started abandoning the system not the lack of publication itself. Not having new product every month is what allowed Pathfinder to pop to the top in months when there wasn’t a new D&D product. It’s like saying Spider-man beat Batman in theaters last week but there wasn’t a Batman movie in theaters last weekend.

 

[teitan]

I'm gonna call bs on this. 4e was NOT well put together. It was conceptually sound, but the design was an absolute mess and the proof of that was the mountains of errata that those products needed. The PC math needed a complete rewrite of the armor table in AV1, mandatory feat taxes to fix saves and base attacks came in PHB2. Whole powers and subclasses got rewritten (Martial Power) the skill challenge system went through two large overhauls, and the monster math was terrible until MM2 made it playable and MM3 made it good. 4e needed another year or so in development to find all the math issues that plagued those first two years, and by the time they figured it out and Essentials came, 4e had it's reputation cemented.

So I don't think 4e was well put together from the start. I think it felt rushed and the errata that was constantly invalidating what had been printed in the books and need to redo whole rule sets shows that. (If you had access and knowledge of the errata, you were playing a very different game in 2010 then if you just used the books as they were published).

Now to be fair, 5e has had some of that two: Xanathar and Tasha both changed parts of the game fundamentally, and Mordie Presents is a giant errata document turned into a sourcebook. But the underlying main game loop of 5e has been sound in ways 4e could only dreamt of being, and you don't get a second chance to make a first impression.

I’d say Mordy is less than errata because it was not essential. It changes the game but it was a change caused by fixing things that were working as is unlike the iterative patches to 4e where there were constant math updates. The changes in Mordy are more “we want to do things different now” than “this was broken here is a fix”.

 

[SkidAce]

...

I strongly disagree the 4e is less streaming-friendly than 5e; at its core it is simpler and more consistant. Assuming that dates posted upthread are accurate, it was obviously too late to save 4e, so 4e CR would have had an impact similar to PF1 CR (albeit to a slightly greater extent). Now, if Mat Mercer had got the idea of streaming his earlier 4e campaign, that would be a more interesting timeline to spy on....

...

_
glass.

The Icosahedrophila Podcast and the early Penny Arcade episodes (including some with Chris Perkins) were 4E.

They streamed fine and I greatly enjoyed them, well before CR.

 

[teitan]

The main problem I see with the recent arguments on sales is that it doesn't follow basic business logic. The idea that 4E sales fell behind PF (which happened a year before the 5E playtest was announced) because they cancelled products and started working on 5E is backwards.
.

no one has made this claim so I’m not tracking on why you think this claim is made.