What is good for D&D as a game vs. what is good for the company that makes it

[Hussar]

But how many people really relish building 4e characters without it?

About as many people as relish building a 3e character or Pathfinder character. 3e or 4e, building a character is hardly a quick and easy thing, depending on how many supplements you insist on using.

Or, to put it another way, you can create a 4e character in the same amount of time as a 3e character without too much difficulty.

 

[GregoryOatmeal]

The question is: what would that game look like? The current market for D&D products is pretty clearly showing us the hobby wants some significantly different things out of D&D. How do you reconcile the people who want an AD&D-like experience and those you want 3e/Pathfinder?

I don't see a clear path to this.

WOTC dug their own grave here...

My observation is D&D players never really wanted a common set of mechanics. Back when I started, the big game was AD&D, and everyone was busy house-ruling it to high heaven, importing mechanics (and charts!) from other systems, and otherwise customizing it to taste. And the result was very different play experiences from table to table, without any concern over 'compatibility', or the effect on the overall health of the hobby.

Campaigns were very different depending on the group, despite ostensibly using a "common" set of rules.

I think the idea that we were "all playing the same game" back then has been, from a practical perspective, grossly exaggerated.

The original poster wrote a healthy gaming community promotes a stable rule base and a unified player base. Being able to radically house-rule your game doesn't contradict either of these goals.

In comparison to edition fatigue, I haven't heard of house rules invalidating the investment in time or money someone spent learning a core rulebook, causing players to quit campaigns and gaming groups, discouraging players from joining new campaigns, or causing anything like an edition war/divided community we see now.

 

[Hussar]

WOTC dug their own grave here...



The original poster wrote a healthy gaming community promotes a stable rule base and a unified player base. Being able to radically house-rule your game doesn't contradict either of these goals.

In comparison to edition fatigue, I haven't heard of house rules invalidating the investment in time or money someone spent learning a core rulebook, causing players to quit campaigns and gaming groups, discouraging players from joining new campaigns, or causing anything like an edition war/divided community we see now.

Are you kidding?

You've never looked at someone's homebrew and thought, "Wow, I'd never play that"? You've never seen players quit because of what the DM thought was a good house rule? You've never seen all the "Core rules only" type posts talking about how all the supplements are causing all the problems in the game and no one should ever use them?

You never saw the acrimony between 1e and 2e players? Granted, that one probably wasn't as easy to see because it was pre-Internet days, but, it most certainly was there. Heck there were serious divides between old school and new school in the EARLY 80's, between Gygaxian D&D and more story based games like Dragonlance.

Tell you what. Go to Dragonsfoot and start a 3e thread and watch what happens.

The notion that we were this one big happy family before 4e came along really is a meme that needs to die. It simply was never true. D&D has always been a divided house and that's FANTASTIC. I hope that people's wishes for a one true game never comes true.

Again, I wonder how happy people would be if the Evergreen D&D was 4e. After all, that would be the easiest one to make evergreen because of the DDI. You can reach far more people far easier with 4e than with any other edition simply because of its Internet presence.

Would everyone be groovy and happy if 4e was the Evergreen D&D?

 

[Pentius]

Would everyone be groovy and happy if 4e was the Evergreen D&D?

Bahaha, even I wouldn't be happy with that, and I like 4e.

 

[Hussar]

I was hunting up polls for another thread and came across this one:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/266346-edition-poll-october.html

Now, I know that's totally not scientific. I realize that. But, it does match most of the other polls I've seen around here. While 4e might not have the straight majority, it's still the most commonly played edition around.

And, by and large, that matches how it went in 3e. 3e might have been up around 60%, but probably not a whole lot higher. So, basically, the "big game" has lost about 10-20% of the total number of players to a legacy game. Not surprising considering how popular 3e was/is.

But, how is that a "massively fractured hobby" when almost half of all D&D gamers are playing the same game? Or, as a better question, why is it a "massively split hobby" when there's really only about a 10-20% difference now than, say, 5 years ago.

It's still pretty much the same. Most D&D gamers are playing one game and the rest are playing a spread of other games. Sure, there's a bubble of 3e/Pathfinder gamers out there, and that's great. But, taking a longer view of it, it's not really any different than the past.

I mean, heck, what percentage of gamers in the 2e era played B/E/C/M/I? I'd take a stab and guess it was around 20%. With a possible guess at around 30 or 40% playing 1e. Doesn't that mean we had a massively split playerbase twenty years ago?

 

[Umbran]

Doesn't that mean we had a massively split playerbase twenty years ago?

I don't know how the numbers worked out then, or really even now. But there is a point there.

The past we had little knowledge of what each other did. Now, we have a constant flow of information from what we'd expect to be a smallish portion of the player base.

It is very, very easy to fall pray to confirmation biases under these circumstances. Hussar may well be right, that we may not be a whole lot more fractured now than in the past.

 

[Mallus]

The only way I can think of is to take the approach film and television shows take when they want to appeal to a broad audience: don't offend anyone. That is make a game with mechanics that don't make pathfinder or 4E people bristle. But the game also has to be fun and playable. So it is tricky.

Tricky is an understatement. Broadly-speaking, you've got one group of players who want what the other doesn't want, and vice versa.

3e/Pathfinder fans like the comprehensiveness and complexity of the system. They like all the character building options, the system mastery, the interactions with the game world (mostly) being mediated by the rules.

Pre-3e fans... like the opposite.

What motivates fans of either experience to meet in the middle and adopt a product which has less of what they like and more of what they don't? It's not like they would be coming together for a good cause like paying off the national debt or ending world hunger...

I wasn't thinking about people customizing the game or not to taste, so much as having a common system that everyone refers to as a common ground. But I think it is easier to grow D&D when D&D is one thing.

I won't belabor the point (more than this), but D&D is only one thing up until the point people actually start playing it, beyond which, the differences accrue rapidly, even within a single published edition.

Yeah, I believe this depends on the place and time. When I started just before 2E came out, I do think people were playing very different games, but after 2E, all the games I played in pretty much used the same rules. By 3E this was even more the case in my experience (perhaps due in part to the internet).

My experiences taught me we're usually playing fairly different games, even we're using the same rules -- but maybe I'm just special.

(in the exceptional sense or the short bus sense... I'm afraid I'm not objective enough to determine!)

 

[GregoryOatmeal]

Are you kidding?

You've never looked at someone's homebrew and thought, "Wow, I'd never play that"? You've never seen players quit because of what the DM thought was a good house rule? You've never seen all the "Core rules only" type posts talking about how all the supplements are causing all the problems in the game and no one should ever use them?

Clearly these issues aren't even on the same order of magnitude. I've never actually seen a player quit a game over a house rule. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I've yet to see it. Usually it's over disagreement about how the rule is implemented or what kind of calls the DM makes. I may be turned off by a homebrew but I'll usually try it. Small issues can be divisive and players will squabble about anything, but a new edition is an entirely different level.

You never saw the acrimony between 1e and 2e players? Granted, that one probably wasn't as easy to see because it was pre-Internet days, but, it most certainly was there. Heck there were serious divides between old school and new school in the EARLY 80's, between Gygaxian D&D and more story based games like Dragonlance.

Tell you what. Go to Dragonsfoot and start a 3e thread and watch what happens.

Who said past editions weren't divisive? You seem to be agreeing with me. It just gets worse as more come out and they break more radically from past games.

The notion that we were this one big happy family before 4e came along really is a meme that needs to die. It simply was never true.

First no one said that. That's silly. But really, divisions give me headaches and mean I constantly have to switch between different 300 page rulebooks whenever I play D&D. They're all just an impediment of rules and resources and disparate backgrounds that make it harder for the group to do what we all want to do. Do you have no sympathy for that?

Again, I wonder how happy people would be if the Evergreen D&D was 4e. After all, that would be the easiest one to make evergreen because of the DDI. You can reach far more people far easier with 4e than with any other edition simply because of its Internet presence.

But you could give any game an internet presence and DDI support

Would everyone be groovy and happy if 4e was the Evergreen D&D?

If there was just one good stable game, yeah, sure. If I could point people at 4E and casual gamers would say "yeah, I played that game when I started playing D&D, I have resources for that, I'm not scared of those rules", then yeah, that'd be friggin great. Even if we switched to a different game three months later it would be a great starting point. And it would inevitably happen more frequently if the game remained in print. Not universal familiarity, but increased familiarity.

 

[GregoryOatmeal]

I keep noticing new 4E players and GMs doing the system injustice by running it as if it were 3.5 and failing to design encounters properly for 4E. DMs will use too many solos, trash encounters, boring terrain, and high-level monsters with difficult ACs rather than lower ACs that can be hit. Players likewise talk in gamist terms and fail to strategize or appreciate their surroundings.

The rules aren't the problem - if properly implemented they function well. The problem is that the group hasn't fully digested the rules in order to play the game well. It may take a few muddled sessions in order for the DM to get the hang of running 4E properly. But even then the GM hasn't fully digested all of the nuances of the game - that takes years of constant play.

The more different rules systems we have, the more time we're going to be spending figuring things out. While this is just fine for the players that have played every class and understand all of the nuances of combat and can level up NPCs on the fly - that's not the vast majority of the players I know.

For most players the game hasn't begun to get stale before it gets flipped on its head.

 

[Hussar]

First no one said that. That's silly. But really, divisions give me headaches and mean I constantly have to switch between different 300 page rulebooks whenever I play D&D. They're all just an impediment of rules and resources and disparate backgrounds that make it harder for the group to do what we all want to do. Do you have no sympathy for that?

Quite honestly? No. None. There have been divisions in D&D since I started playing in 1980. You had people playing Basic/Expert and people playing AD&D. And those were two very separate and distinct groups IME. And, additionally, the rules are not the same between those two games. They are pretty different in fact and the game plays pretty differently.

When 3e came out, I didn't make the switch immediately because I didn't see the need to. I had people who wanted to play in my 2e game and, after 10 years of playing 2e, I could run a pretty decent 2e game. Then I played in a 3e game and never went back. I thought it was a better game. It took all my house rules, made them ten times better and then gave me more stuff.

Then, by about 2005, I had realized that I didn't have the time to prep 3e games to my satisfaction and started running nothing but modules. I'd still run 3e, but, only with modules. It's not a system I care to homebrew in because it takes too much time for me. And, I'm not about to go back to 2e (partially because I no longer have those books - moving to three different countries on two different continents are HARD on gaming book collections ) because I no longer want a game with that kind of ruleset. It's no longer to my taste.

So, 4e rolls out. I wait a year or so to jump into 4e and again, I find that it appeals to my tastes now. It's much faster to design for - I can start making adventures again YAY! - it runs pretty sweet and it has some of the bells and whistles that I've learned to appreciate from playing other, more narrative to be honest - games.

However, all that being said, I've loved every edition that I've played, despite not wanting to go back.

Your presumption of an Evergreen D&D presumes that people's tastes don't change. I think they do. I don't play the way I played when I was 14 years old. The game that appeals to that 14 year old version of me is not the same as what appeals to me at 39.

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That all being said though, I do agree that D&D needs a solid gateway game. But, IMO, an RPG is not it. I'd go with a Euro-style board game with roleplaying elements. Think Diplomacy with a few more rules and more dragons. I always thought that the D&D Minis was an excellent gateway game to D&D. The gateway game to RPG's should not be a straight up RPG. Your Monopoly model actually would have better legs if the gateway game was an actual boardgame with RP elements.

Again, it's not 1982 anymore. It's not like there isn't a whole library of games on the market right now that could serve as a template for a D&D gateway game. We're not stuck with stodgy old Parker Brother's games of chance anymore. Catan, Rio Grande, Carcassonne, and others make a very, very good entry level RPG game.

Heck, D&D done with Dread rules would make a FANTASTIC gateway RPG game.