What is THE NEXT BIG THING?

[JVisgaitis]

You want more? I can get more.

I'm intrigued. Lay it on me...

 

[helium3]

VTT's (virtual tabletops) will devour the gaming scene.


Pilsnerquest

Once they're done devouring your next 26 paychecks, that is.

 

[Bert the Ogre]

The Trends I'm Seeing...

WOW! I never though I would start a thread that would get so much discussion!

Anyhoo... One thing I'm seeing as I read these posts is an interest in creating a "freeform" boardgame for casual players, but STILL be able to expand into the full tabletop/imagination obsessed version. I think the DDM helps this, by creating a physical/tactile way of playing the game almost boardgame style, but developing a product line that expands the basic individual characters in to many different possibilities.

So to me, it seems as if a new "Basic Set/Core Rules" model needs to be developed and marketed. I would think a streamlined PHB/DMG with skills, feats and a reasonable spell and much expanded monster selection would be a very good idea. Sort of like what the "Black Basic Set Box" had, but MORE! More along the level of the Moldvey/Cook or Menzer versions, but with all the tasty minis and tiles and other goodies. Prices at say $30-$35 a set, with rules for 1-3rd level, then possibly a second boxed set (Expansion Packs, where have we seen these before?) for higher levels, say 4th-10th instead of 4-14th. It seems to me (and I could be wrong) that once PCs pass Level 10, the magic items, powers and other items takes the game away from "Hack and Slash" that is playable as a boardgame, and requires more of the tabletop/imagination version of the game.

A boardgame version works well with most people's first introduction to D&D: the dungeon crawl. And boardgames, if well designed and enjoyable, tend to last for a very long time. So a well designed dungeon floorplan, followed by different floorplans and mini sets (also marketable as Expansion Packs!) would be appealing to the casual player, while adventures, sourcebooks and all the other material that has already been published would remain as the Role-Player Supplemental Material.

I kind of liked the Minis included in the Black Basic Set, they were the most basic "monsters" beginning characters were most likely to encounter, although there will always be arguments between should the first monsters be goblins or kobolds, hobgoblins or orcs, skeletons or zombies. But considering WoTC tends to do FAR more market research than TSR ever did, I'm sure the initial package of monsters, or the decision to just drop in a random pack, will be hottly debated over these boards!

I'd personally like to see the cards that came with the minis be editable from a CD included in the Basic Set, sort of like the Iniative Cards from The Game Mechanics, or The Other Game Company. A short and simple character sheet without the entire history of the character, his/her parents, their parents, and the entire abbreviated history of Greyhawk and how it affects the character! Just the basic "game mechanics" necessary information, so both the DM and the Player can have the critical data right in front of themselves. I use the info cards from the WoTC web site, even if I don't have the specific mini availabe.

I also think a better/more advanced virtual tabletop for internet playing, with premade adventures, DM driven NPCs, and other tools for building a custom world for a smaller group of players than the MMORPGs currently offer. An isomorphic tabletop with customizable avatars as well as generic clones for monsters/npcs would make the visual/mini aspect of tabletop portable to the internet.

Making/marketing the game as a mainstream game will get us away for the "only geeks play tabletop D&D" mentality that exists in the U.S. Millions of people play computer based RPGs, but the tabletop players still tend to be seen as the geeks and freaks. While some players heartily embrace the "Chic Geek" lifestyle, it's that type of stereotyping that probably hurts the growth of the game.

So, if YOU were to be the designer of "The Next Big Thing" in D&D, what would you want to have put in or left out?

 

[elforcelf]

FLUMPHS!

 

[DragonLancer]

I showed the owner of my FLGS this threadt this afternoon and we had a lengthy and heated (in a good way) discussion about it and the subject at hand. He has had many years experience in the gaming community and agrees with the boardgame style NEXT BIG THING but only where new players are concerned. His opinion is that D&D and other RPG's just arn't visual enough to draw non-gamers in. A group of players sitting round a table talking and rolling dice is not what draws people in. Seeing players do the above but also with map plans and miniatures is his view of how RPG's will draw new players in and away from consoles and the TV.

I can see that but then the way I see it, if you use that to draw new players in then thats what they come to expect, and RPG's will become boardgame's rather than roleplaying games.

Overall, it's not going to be an easy decision for the gaming industry to find the next big thing and draw in a new generation of players.

 

[Andor]

The NEXT BIG THING will be the first game to come out with spells that actually work.

 

[Wolv0rine]

((Sorry, Double Post))

 

[Wolv0rine]

Hi Wolv0rine!

Howdy again, U_K.

Since when has complexity choked and inhibited anything from gathering new interested people?

When they (meaning new or casual gamers) go into a shop and can't have the game demonstrated within a few minutes of their time.

Or when someone new to the game finds that theres a recommended 960 pages just to get you started.

I'll come right out and state that as a gamer I'm unusual, from the beginning of my gaming career to the present. That being said, I have never once walked into a game shop and had a game demonstrated to me. More to the point, I've never even heard of a RPG being demonstrated to someone (with the exception of "They're playing it over there, you can go watch if you want"). So I just don't get the "They can't demo it in a few minutes" thing.
And see, if you tell ANYONE there's a recommended 960 pages of reading just to get started they'll turn green and walk away in a hurry. And really, there's nothing like that needed, and they shouldn't be made to feel there is. They're a new player, they need (presuming the optimal situation of having joined a group) to read the racial descriptions and class descriptions. Someone explains in summary the rough idea of the skills system and walks them through it, the same with the feats, help them pick some equipment, and throw them to the Worgs.
In oddball situations like mine (where I got involved in D&D in complete isolation, and didn't meet other gamers for nearly 10 years afterwards), well then the reading of the books is a hobby that grows into a fascination, and there's no 960 pages to read to prepare, you're reading. That falls into the same category as "There's like XXX friggin thousand pages if you want to even catch up with the Harry Potter series, and if you want to even get the gist of LotR, there's pages enough to fill an encyclopedia". You don't care, you're there to read it.

Someone could have an interest in Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter and never be turned on to Dungeons & Dragons simply because you really need to be indoctrinated into D&D. I'd guesstimate maybe 1 in 10 players started without joining an existing group or someone who already knew how to play.

Hmm, I presume that guesstimate is referring to relatively recent/modern gamers, since if you go back into the gronards that's how pretty much everyone started.
That being the case... that could well be. Then again D&D has always (save for the early gamers) been that way.

I cannot agree that just because RPGs are a niche product that appeals to a limited sub-set of the population that it must become less complex to continue. On what are we basing our thoughts that if we make it easier and easier for someone with only a passing glimmer of interest and a 3rd grade reading level to understand that the gamer base will grow? Hopeful thinking

Thats not what I am saying at all. I'm more interested in boiling the rpg experience down to the fundamentals, rather than imposing a lot of the minutiae and paperwork. I think that will make it a lot more accessible.

So basically, in your own weird way, you're trying to make D&D more and more of a "Rules Light" system? While I'll agree that has it's proponents, the gamers I've known have been trying to make it a more (coherently) Rules Heavy system since 1E, because it's abstractions are just too abstract. So I guess that boils down to "That's just not even vaguely to my gaming taste".

I think you are going off on a tangent. Its not about the complexity of the individual components, rather that there are too many components wasting time with minutiae and paperwork.

Its like why have 100 moving parts when you can build something which does the same job with 25 parts. Occam's Razor and all that. There are too many moving parts to make D&D time economical.

I don't think I was going off on a tangent. I was talking about the difference between the dense forests of text that Gygax used when writing the 1E books vs. the Diet Coke text used in the 3E/3.5E books. While the rules have gotten more numerous and interlocked, the books have continued to be written more and more dumbed down. This is a very overt sign, and I don't personally feel like it's a very promising one. Not only are we (largely justifiably, I'm sorry to say) assuming that the generations that follow us are weaker on attention span and applied intelligence, but we are both encouraging and empowering that trend when we throw our hands in the air and cry "If we don't, they're just ignore us!"
The point being, and I admit from step one that it's a very gronard, 'old guy' point, is that WE waded through dense, obscurely worded verbosity in the books we learned to game in, and when we didn't know a word we went and learned it. And we grew more learned from the experience. While I won't claim that today's youth have what it takes to do that, I think it's damaging to continue to lower the bar again and again. That's both a gamer POV and a parental POV.

I think the current rules Re: Skills are far too time consuming, self-referential and the minutia of it is bordering on the banal.

Personally I would design something much, much simpler.

Ability Score Checks + class level (if its a skill relevant to that class) against the DC.

While I am (even if it may not seem like it) a proponent of simple rules (IF they are also functional, flexible, and elegant), that just seems like an over-simplified, over-abstracted take on game mechanics to me. You've lost flexibility, and limited the use and scope of skills in the game with something like that.

Plot out the fun to complexity graph and target the game where fun peaks? I’m sorry, I know that’s intended to come across as responsibly proactive and well-meaning and all, but that line of text in and of itself just seems to kind of want to suck ‘fun’ into it like a black hole.

Heh heh!

Okay, I was shooting in the dark there, but I am sure someone out there probably has done market research along those lines.

It's possible, maybe even very possible, that market research has been done on the matter, I strongly propose that it's a subject that cannot be market researched, being a variable that tends to shift, fluxtuate, and even change in the transition from experience to the telling. It's the old "Tighten your grip, sand slips through your fingers" sort of thing, I believe.

I think I am comparing it to previous editions. Is 3rd Edition more 'fun' that 1st Edition - I think they are probably about the same (when you are playing that is). But in terms of minutiae that just gets in the way, 3rd Edition is far more complex in terms of the number of 'moving parts'. Which means that when you or I go to construct our own PCs, NPCs, Monsters (etc.) it takes much, much longer.

For ME, yes 3E is more fun than 1E. While 3E is by far not the game that I would have written before 3E was released, I immedaitely saw that the 3E system was close enough to a mountain of rules changes that I had been working on implimenting atop 1E (Yes I mostly skipped 2E as "That bastard retarded child of AD&D") since 1990 (a mountain so high I had dropped the idea of making them changes to AD&D and spent nearly a decade in slowly creating an entire new game system built around them in my spare time) that I could accept it and be able to twist it and add to it, instead of lopping off entire swaths of it as making no logical sense to me. BD&D and 1E is the girl I fell in love with, but 3E was the woman she grew up to be that I could entertain the idea of marrying.
And, being the sort of gamer who does spend idle time making PCs, monsters, PrCs, spells, and all manner of things I have a huge chance of never usng, just for fun, yeah I still enjoy doing that. I hate statblocks as much or more than the next guy, but I mean really even if I saw $100 spring to life in my bank account every time I did one I'd still wish it was as easy as the 1E approach of "4 orcs, hp: 5, 8, 6, 6". And yes, a 3E statblock could be easily done in that vein. It just isn't because we want to treat DMs as lazy.

I think thats just a minor excuse, but the real issue is the time consumption of minutiae, versus the time spent actually 'playing'. Skills, feats, potential laundry lists of items, spells.

I mean even looking at spells for a moment. Why not just have the same spell allocation table for every class? (Bard progression 2/3, Paladin 1/2 etc).

I won't argue with you on the weaknesses of the spell lists. Those bug me too. Although the seperation of Arcane and Divine spell lists is, I feel, a must. But 1 Arcane list, and 1 Divine list should be sufficient.

I'm not saying 3.5 should just go away, but simply that a 4th Edition in the vein of 3.5 won't be anywhere near as successful as 3/3.5.

So great, we need a GOOD "BASIC 3E D&D". Just because we don't have one doesn't mean we need to redefine D&D from the basement up.

Just what exactly am I afraid of? Well, do you recognize the difference between playing a game of D&D and deciding to use minis, and playing a mini game that’s called D&D?

Yes, semantics.

Heh-heh.
But no, it's not semantics. If I have half a turkey, some pasta, a plate of ginger cookies, brown mustard, and salsa and corn chips I have a number of choices about what to do for dinner. If I have that list and am under the restriction that I must use all of these items to make my meal, I am no longer a happy man. It's the same thing. If I CAN use Minis (or not), that's peachy. If I can't play unless I use minis, then the game is no longer the same game.

The game already revolves around minis and a board (or at least the acknowledgement of a grid/squares). Go take a look at the Combat chapter in the PHB.

No, you've fallen victim to WotC's PR. The game doesn't revolve around minis. The game tries very hard to make you think that it revolves around minis by using 'squares' instead of 'inches' or 'feet'. But we know that 1sq=5ft. I don't even really read "5 squares", I see "25 feet". Honestly, I have never once, in all my years of gaming, played in a game where minis were used. Not once, ever. Closest I've come it some impromptu items set up in a basic "Okay, the ogres are over here, kinda like this, and you guys are here. There's a wall here, blocking your view like this much". No battlemat, no board, no measurements, no minis.
And I really like it that way. Visual aids can be The sometimes, but I don't want a "move my piece" RPG.

I am in favour of online versions (a number of my friends have been raving about X-box live), and I think software utilities could certainly prove useful.

But how is an online version any different (in terms of strategy) to the boardgame approach. Both are moving away from the hardback supplement business model, which is something I don't see working again with another Edition.

I'm in favor of online versions, too. NWN and DDO are great. I don't have a computer new or strong enough to play DDO (or the money for it) but I still have NWN and I still enjoy it. But if D&D 4E was NWN, D&D4E would have lost my business and most everyone else's I know.

The online apprach requires certain things from a user that a board game doesn't. System Requirements being a not-small one of those. While it's fine and grand to say "Practically everyone has or can afford a computer that can meet the requirements", that's like saying "Practically everyone can use sanguine in a sentance, or spell Existentialism". It's fine because obviously You can, but you don't know how many others can, really. I've been trying to manage to upgrade my computer for over 6 years because it's over 10 years old. I still haven't gotten the money together to do it. My system is pressed to it's limit to play Baldur's Gate 2, still, and I have to use my partner's computer to run NWN. Some people can't afford to upgrade TO the New Thing is what I'm saying, and you lose those people when you go to something that requires them to do it.

I think if the next Edition of D&D continues with the same approach the audience will continue to dwindle.

I take it from your collected posts so far that by "the same approach" you mean "Books", and that's mind boggling because nearly as long as books have been published there have been claims that something was just about to make them obsolete. And so far, that's not even a realistic possability. Now game shops, those are on the way out, but they've been slowly on the way out since at least 1987. I remember previously successful game shops just closing one day that far back because they couldn't hold their business together on the business they were getting. And that was before the Internet came along and gave us Internet Publishing.
So yes, the way gamers meet and gather and gossip and all that previously game shop stuff will likely have to change. Luckily for us, it slowly has been changing, moving to the internet.

Yes, there is an uphill battle in getting new gamers interested in D&D (or RPGs in general) against more visually arresting and instant-gratification providing activities. But the question remains, at what point do we draw the line and say “I am willing to push the game this far, even though by pushing it this distance it is no longer the game I began pushing?”

I think that point is right now. Simply because I don't see a pen & paper based 4th Edition selling retreads of all the 3rd Edition books. Which means what the heck are you going to do after the PHB, DMG and MM. Are WotC going to try and sell me another Manual of the Planes or Forgotten Realms campaign setting? How are those things going to be markedly different enough to interest people this time around?

2E managed to sell retreads of the same stuff just fine. 3E managed to sell retreads of the same thing dandily. 3.5E even managed to do it. Why shouldn't 4E be able to? Especially if the rules system includes (or is built around) enough significant changes that the material in those books prospers from an update to reflect the new, different way things are done that apply to those topics? It's been done again and again. But you still have to have that mark in the sand that says "Pas this point, you hold something different than what you carried over it", and must decide if coming out the other end with an apple when you went in to save your orange was worth it.

If I were WotC I would continue to support 3.5 but I would also attack the mass market with the simpler more visceral, collectible approach of the boardgame, as well as try to make strides into the online sector.

If I were WotC I would have made every foray into attacking the mass market (and knowing full wll going in that the discernable results would make baby jesus cry a little) in as many ways as possible, but I would (and still would continue to) attack that mass market with the product I was trying to interest them in in the first place.

So then what is the incentive to buy the Manual of the Planes, Hordes of the Abyss, Frostburn supplements as opposed to say an Abyss boardgame supplement or a Frozen Waste boardgame supplement?

I have been contemplating the ideas of flexibility within the boardgame format and there are a number of things you can do. The first of which is, as you say have a blank board, or, more specifically a gridded tablecloth (possibly themed to the particular boxed set).

Also if the game has the room/corridor sections handled individually (rather than all in big 12 x 12 boards) then there is far more flexibility in the setup. Remember the pieces can be reversible, so you have double the amount of options.

So if you need an outdoor section, use the tablecloth grid, if you need an indoor structure, that can be easily assembled using the room/corridor pieces.

So even with a basic setup of tablecloth grid, rooms and corridors you can construct an unbelievable number of different setups and adventures.

Each new boxed set could cover different themes so maybe start with the basic Sewers/Dungeon and then Island/Volcanic Temple, Forest/Wizards Tower, Village/Vampire Castle, Sunken Caverns/Pirate Ship.

Dungeon Magazine would be great, they could include maybe a 'page' of new rooms/corridors each issue on top of new adventures/layouts and so forth.

U_K, mate, you have just done a wonderful job of selling me on Heroquest, which is in pretty much EVERY way the game you just tried to sell us. Actually, going only on what you posted here, you are in EVERY way selling HeroQuest. And you know, I bought HeroQuest about 14 years ago. Still have it, plus 1 expansion set, somewhere. Haven't touched it in at least a decade.
But HeroQuest DOES always remind me that there was at one point a company that managed to provide me with a good number and assortment of plastic minis, PLUS an endlessly configurable board, PLUS configuration flats, PLUS room decoration pieces (doors, weapons racks, torture devices, a vanity, a chest of drawers, etc), managed to tell me all I reasonably needed to know about what pieces I was buying in that box (read: NO RANDOMIZATION), PLUS a fully-playable set of game rules... all for like $20-$25 or so. And THAT, more than anything else I've read so far, shots Merrick's "Laws of Minis" straight through the forehead for MY money.

But in the end, HeroQuest is NOT D&D, and should never be made to try to be.

 

[Upper_Krust]

Hello Upper_Krust!

Hey Flexor!

Well with the MOP I have a guide to a huge environment that I will modify to fit my game, or maybe use wholesale. It doesn't say "These 20 squares are the Abyss and this is what they look like and contain." It gives me a framework to let my imagination loose upon, or ignore compeltely. I can make up my own Abyss and have it drop seamlessly into the game system too.

How does that change when you have a board (or more specifically as I mentioned, board pieces)? As far as I can see, the board only helps players visualise combat scenarios. I mean you only need refer to the board when a tactical situation arises.

Why have a board at all in that case? Isn't a cool part of a good boardgame excellent board art? A blank board requiring players to imagine what is on it seems to miss the point of a board game to me.

Well remember that I am suggesting board pieces for interiors, the tablecloth could be double sided - one side could have a (lightly gridded) outdoor theme (say an island for instance) while the other side could be blank with a grid.

You are still limited in what you can do, since you have x number of tiles that can only be assemlbed x number of ways.

Even with a single boxed set I would say the possible combinations would be in the millions I think.

Yet in the end the dungeons looks the same with the same feel and textures since you have 1 or 2 "styles" of tile that are supposed to look together. Every dungeon looks the same in the end, the rooms are just arranged differently.

I think this is where the allure of different boxed sets, minis and 3D furniture pieces lies. Don't think of each boxed set simply having different coloured patterns, try and think outside the standard fare.

This could help remove the sameness of the tiles, and start to cost a bit of cash too. "Hey I want to run a dungeon in a black stone ancient temple...man that set is 39.99 so I better stick with the generic dungeon."

But each new boxed set is more than simply a few new boards, its new PC classes, new monsters, new NPCs, new spells, new skills, new magic items, new adventures.

Sure, I don't say they aren't flexible, but they are not nearly as flexible as my imagination. Heck we used to tweak the heck out of Talisman making up new cards and characters and all that stuff, but it could never come close to the varitey of play we got from D&D.

Well, if one board could cover a million possible scenarios, its going to be a while before you wear them all out.

People here talk like its D&D versus one boxed set. But D&D itself is a minimum of 3 books, and we know everyone has more than that right!

Add up how many D&D books you have purchased. Convert that into boxed sets at a ratio of 1:1 per hardback. Then tell me you could ever exhaust or get bored with that much variety.

I have approx. 20 WotC 3rd Ed. D&D hardbacks and about the same number of d20 hardbacks. The mind boggles at what you could achieve with 40 boxed sets!

You can say that 100 boxed sets still wouldn't be as varied as what you could imagine and you would be right. But at the same time if you have EVER purchased a published adventure, supplement book, Dungeon magazine or other, what you are saying is that you don't rely on your imagination ALL the time...and I suspect that is the same for 99.99% of gamers.

Do you think what you are discussing would be a richer gameplay experience than a well run RPG session as they are done now using only the imaginations of the players?

It would be better and I'll tell you why.

The board/minis only add to the tactical experience, it takes nothing away from any roleplaying aspect as far as I can see.

 

[Upper_Krust]

Howdy again, U_K.

Hi Wolv0rine mate!

I'll come right out and state that as a gamer I'm unusual, from the beginning of my gaming career to the present. That being said, I have never once walked into a game shop and had a game demonstrated to me. More to the point, I've never even heard of a RPG being demonstrated to someone (with the exception of "They're playing it over there, you can go watch if you want"). So I just don't get the "They can't demo it in a few minutes" thing.

I guarantee you couldn't teach a 'noob' to play D&D in 5 minutes let alone teach them to DM a game in 5 minutes.

And see, if you tell ANYONE there's a recommended 960 pages of reading just to get started they'll turn green and walk away in a hurry. And really, there's nothing like that needed, and they shouldn't be made to feel there is.

So when someone goes into a shop and says "I want to play D&D, what do I need to buy", the store clerk says "You need the 320 page Players Handbok, 320 page Dungeon Master's Guide and the 320 page Monster Manual. $90 dollars please. You can come down to the store on Thursday nights and either watch or join in a game, it will take a few hours to pick it up."

Or (Scenario #2)

The store clerk says, "You could buy the (new 4th Edition) Dungeons & Dragons boardgame (it only costs one third as much as the books). $40 dollars please. We have one of the boxes open, I can show you how to play in a few minutes."

They're a new player, they need (presuming the optimal situation of having joined a group) to read the racial descriptions and class descriptions.

You have already made the assumption they are a player - what if they want to play the game with their friends, none of which have ever played before? Someone needs to read all the rules, then the players need to be prepped on all the relevant rules.

Someone explains in summary the rough idea of the skills system and walks them through it, the same with the feats, help them pick some equipment, and throw them to the Worgs.

NOT THE SKILL SYSTEM! AAAARRRGGGHHH!

In oddball situations like mine (where I got involved in D&D in complete isolation, and didn't meet other gamers for nearly 10 years afterwards), well then the reading of the books is a hobby that grows into a fascination, and there's no 960 pages to read to prepare, you're reading.

Someone needs to read it, and understand it, and then design their own adventures (there are none in the core rulesbooks). New players need someone to take them through it.

That falls into the same category as "There's like XXX friggin thousand pages if you want to even catch up with the Harry Potter series, and if you want to even get the gist of LotR, there's pages enough to fill an encyclopedia". You don't care, you're there to read it.

The difference is that they are stories, not RULES which need to be learnt.

Hmm, I presume that guesstimate is referring to relatively recent/modern gamers, since if you go back into the gronards that's how pretty much everyone started.
That being the case... that could well be. Then again D&D has always (save for the early gamers) been that way.

Which means you are 'rubber-ducked' if you don't have someone there to teach you.

In the 'early days' the rules were far less demanding.

So basically, in your own weird way, you're trying to make D&D more and more of a "Rules Light" system? While I'll agree that has it's proponents, the gamers I've known have been trying to make it a more (coherently) Rules Heavy system since 1E, because it's abstractions are just too abstract. So I guess that boils down to "That's just not even vaguely to my gaming taste".

What I am suggesting is that if you start with the basics you can ADD optonal rule upon rule to your hearts content. But if you start with 960 pages of non-optional rulebooks, you alienate casual gamers (and therefore the bulk of your potential audience).

I don't think I was going off on a tangent. I was talking about the difference between the dense forests of text that Gygax used when writing the 1E books vs. the Diet Coke text used in the 3E/3.5E books. While the rules have gotten more numerous and interlocked, the books have continued to be written more and more dumbed down. This is a very overt sign, and I don't personally feel like it's a very promising one. Not only are we (largely justifiably, I'm sorry to say) assuming that the generations that follow us are weaker on attention span and applied intelligence, but we are both encouraging and empowering that trend when we throw our hands in the air and cry "If we don't, they're just ignore us!"

The point being, and I admit from step one that it's a very gronard, 'old guy' point, is that WE waded through dense, obscurely worded verbosity in the books we learned to game in, and when we didn't know a word we went and learned it. And we grew more learned from the experience. While I won't claim that today's youth have what it takes to do that, I think it's damaging to continue to lower the bar again and again. That's both a gamer POV and a parental POV.

If Gary Gygax' books were so verbose how come 3rd Edition rulebooks have twice as many pages!?

The current rules are FAR more time consuming.

While I am (even if it may not seem like it) a proponent of simple rules (IF they are also functional, flexible, and elegant), that just seems like an over-simplified, over-abstracted take on game mechanics to me. You've lost flexibility, and limited the use and scope of skills in the game with something like that.

No. YOU have lost flexibility in the pursuit of gamers. Once you have the bare bones in place you can easily add new features to make the game more diverse. But you can't so easily strip rules away.

It's possible, maybe even very possible, that market research has been done on the matter, I strongly propose that it's a subject that cannot be market researched, being a variable that tends to shift, fluxtuate, and even change in the transition from experience to the telling. It's the old "Tighten your grip, sand slips through your fingers" sort of thing, I believe.

Oddly enough Ryan (Dancey) linked to an interesting article about gamer demographics in the other thread in General Discussion.

http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html

For ME, yes 3E is more fun than 1E. While 3E is by far not the game that I would have written before 3E was released, I immedaitely saw that the 3E system was close enough to a mountain of rules changes that I had been working on implimenting atop 1E (Yes I mostly skipped 2E as "That bastard retarded child of AD&D")

Me too.

since 1990 (a mountain so high I had dropped the idea of making them changes to AD&D and spent nearly a decade in slowly creating an entire new game system built around them in my spare time) that I could accept it and be able to twist it and add to it, instead of lopping off entire swaths of it as making no logical sense to me. BD&D and 1E is the girl I fell in love with, but 3E was the woman she grew up to be that I could entertain the idea of marrying.

But will 4th Edition be a sexy enough mistress to tease you away from your wife?

If 3rd Edition is Kate Beckinsale and 3.5 Edition is Kate Beckinsale dressed in the black leather gear from Underworld, what does 4th Edition have to be to make me cheat on her?

A packed house at the Playboy Mansion?

And, being the sort of gamer who does spend idle time making PCs, monsters, PrCs, spells, and all manner of things I have a huge chance of never usng, just for fun, yeah I still enjoy doing that.

There is no reason why that would have to change.

I hate statblocks as much or more than the next guy, but I mean really even if I saw $100 spring to life in my bank account every time I did one I'd still wish it was as easy as the 1E approach of "4 orcs, hp: 5, 8, 6, 6". And yes, a 3E statblock could be easily done in that vein. It just isn't because we want to treat DMs as lazy.

As a game designer myself I dream of the time when statblocks could be done as easily as 1st Ed.

I won't argue with you on the weaknesses of the spell lists. Those bug me too. Although the seperation of Arcane and Divine spell lists is, I feel, a must. But 1 Arcane list, and 1 Divine list should be sufficient.

Different spell lists, but not necessarily a different spell table.

In fact to be honest I don't even agree with seperate spell lists. Personally I think there should just be white (divine) and black (arcane) magic, with spellcasters of one type allowed to cast spells from the other at half their spell level.

So great, we need a GOOD "BASIC 3E D&D". Just because we don't have one doesn't mean we need to redefine D&D from the basement up.

This thread is about the NEXT BIG THING. What we are proposing IS the redefinement of D&D.

I have been saying all along, a pen & paper 4th edition with some rules changes is a waste of time.

Heh-heh.
But no, it's not semantics. If I have half a turkey, some pasta, a plate of ginger cookies, brown mustard, and salsa and corn chips I have a number of choices about what to do for dinner. If I have that list and am under the restriction that I must use all of these items to make my meal, I am no longer a happy man. It's the same thing. If I CAN use Minis (or not), that's peachy. If I can't play unless I use minis, then the game is no longer the same game.

But then how is that limitation any different from the limitation of having 'x' amount of monsters in the Monster Manual?

No, you've fallen victim to WotC's PR.

Oddly enough I don't own a single D&D mini.

...yet.

The game doesn't revolve around minis. The game tries very hard to make you think that it revolves around minis by using 'squares' instead of 'inches' or 'feet'. But we know that 1sq=5ft. I don't even really read "5 squares", I see "25 feet". Honestly, I have never once, in all my years of gaming, played in a game where minis were used. Not once, ever. Closest I've come it some impromptu items set up in a basic "Okay, the ogres are over here, kinda like this, and you guys are here. There's a wall here, blocking your view like this much". No battlemat, no board, no measurements, no minis.
And I really like it that way. Visual aids can be The sometimes, but I don't want a "move my piece" RPG.

Have you seen some of the D&D minis - they are pretty cool!

I'm in favor of online versions, too. NWN and DDO are great. I don't have a computer new or strong enough to play DDO (or the money for it) but I still have NWN and I still enjoy it. But if D&D 4E was NWN, D&D4E would have lost my business and most everyone else's I know.

Thats why I have been arguing that the boardgame is more important. Its the successor to the book format. The online experience is something different altogether. But it could be cool in its own right. I like the idea of virtual gaming in homebrewed worlds.

The online apprach requires certain things from a user that a board game doesn't. System Requirements being a not-small one of those.

While it's fine and grand to say "Practically everyone has or can afford a computer that can meet the requirements", that's like saying "Practically everyone can use sanguine in a sentance, or spell Existentialism". It's fine because obviously You can, but you don't know how many others can, really. I've been trying to manage to upgrade my computer for over 6 years because it's over 10 years old. I still haven't gotten the money together to do it. My system is pressed to it's limit to play Baldur's Gate 2, still, and I have to use my partner's computer to run NWN. Some people can't afford to upgrade TO the New Thing is what I'm saying, and you lose those people when you go to something that requires them to do it.

You can cut that problem out with X-box live.

I take it from your collected posts so far that by "the same approach" you mean "Books", and that's mind boggling because nearly as long as books have been published there have been claims that something was just about to make them obsolete. And so far, that's not even a realistic possability.

There would be RuleBOOKS and Adventure BOOKS within the boardgame. I'm not saying we abandon the written word altogether.

Now game shops, those are on the way out, but they've been slowly on the way out since at least 1987. I remember previously successful game shops just closing one day that far back because they couldn't hold their business together on the business they were getting. And that was before the Internet came along and gave us Internet Publishing.

All the 'gaming' stores I know are multimedia, usually comics, videogames and rpg stuff.

So yes, the way gamers meet and gather and gossip and all that previously game shop stuff will likely have to change. Luckily for us, it slowly has been changing, moving to the internet.

True.

2E managed to sell retreads of the same stuff just fine. 3E managed to sell retreads of the same thing dandily. 3.5E even managed to do it. Why shouldn't 4E be able to?

3rd Edition had a number of advantages over 2nd Ed. (Remember also that 2nd Ed was basically 1.25 Ed.). Firstly it had a 15 year gap. Secondly it was full colour, glossy pages - it looks great. Thirdly it addressed a lot of the things people wanted to see (play as monstrous races for example).

4th Edition would have a 4 year gap (from 3.5), look no better than 3rd Edition and has very few major elements people debate over which haven't already been covered as optional rules in one book or another - sure, people debate over minutiae. But 4th Edition will not be the major difference in either time, aesthetics or rules changes.

Especially if the rules system includes (or is built around) enough significant changes that the material in those books prospers from an update to reflect the new, different way things are done that apply to those topics? It's been done again and again. But you still have to have that mark in the sand that says "Pas this point, you hold something different than what you carried over it", and must decide if coming out the other end with an apple when you went in to save your orange was worth it.

I just don't see it working this time around.

If I were WotC I would have made every foray into attacking the mass market (and knowing full wll going in that the discernable results would make baby jesus cry a little) in as many ways as possible, but I would (and still would continue to) attack that mass market with the product I was trying to interest them in in the first place.

But would you alienate 3rd Edition with another pen & paper edition?

I mean with the jump to 3rd Edition you could at least make the excuse you were targeting the next generation of gamers. Not so with a 2008 4th Edition. All you would be doing is alienating gamers who have purchased dozens of 3rd Edition books.

U_K, mate, you have just done a wonderful job of selling me on Heroquest, which is in pretty much EVERY way the game you just tried to sell us. Actually, going only on what you posted here, you are in EVERY way selling HeroQuest. And you know, I bought HeroQuest about 14 years ago. Still have it, plus 1 expansion set, somewhere.

What I am proposing (in terms of content and quality) would make HeroQuest look like the Wooden Box D&D Rules compared to my D&D 3.5 Ed.

I admit the current D&D Boardgame is like HeroQuest 1.5 Ed. But I have studied and isolated all the weaknesses of the boardgame format and I believe that I have all the answers (I should just point out that I have kept a number of things to myself and only spoken of the basics herein).

I think that under my design auspices you would EASILY sell 1 million boxed sets in the first year, possibly ten times that many. You could have D&D in every home. How? Easy - themed game boxes. Don't like the sound of Dungeons & Dragons? What about Dungeons & Dinosaurs, Dungeons & Pirates, Dungeons & Ninjas, Dungeons & Vampires, Dungeons & Drow.

Can't get the Harry Potter license? Who cares, lets bring out a Dungeons & Wizards (Wizard's Guild) set.

Transformers movie coming out? Dungeons & Robots (remember that Expedition to the Barrier Peaks module).

Go for nostalgia, Dungeons & Harryhausen, boxed set(s) featuring his heroes & monsters, perhaps a Sinbad set and a Greek Myth set.

Videogame homage, Dungeons & Halo.

I draw the line at Dungeons & Pop Idol...then again.

If WotC want anymore 'free' ideas they can email me. I've only scratced the surface.

Haven't touched it in at least a decade.

When was the last time you played 1st/2nd Edition?

But HeroQuest DOES always remind me that there was at one point a company that managed to provide me with a good number and assortment of plastic minis, PLUS an endlessly configurable board, PLUS configuration flats, PLUS room decoration pieces (doors, weapons racks, torture devices, a vanity, a chest of drawers, etc),

One funny aside...in my current research I read a HeroQuest review where the reviewer in question kept being turned down by his group in his request to play as the Bookcase...which I thought was pretty cool!

managed to tell me all I reasonably needed to know about what pieces I was buying in that box (read: NO RANDOMIZATION), PLUS a fully-playable set of game rules... all for like $20-$25 or so. And THAT, more than anything else I've read so far, shots Merrick's "Laws of Minis" straight through the forehead for MY money.

Dare I ask, what is 'Merrick's Law of Minis'?

But in the end, HeroQuest is NOT D&D, and should never be made to try to be.

What I am proposing could be so much more than both.