Steely_Dan
First Post
As for core Core (chassis), I dig, favourite edition yet, and easiest for conversions.
D&D 5E What will core really be like?
That depends on what you'd consider "failed".
Taken from the standpoint of finances... I would bet they made more money from '08 to '12 selling 4E core product than they ever would have made still selling 3.5 "extended" product. And while Paizo got away with creating and selling 3.75... had WotC tried to do that instead of creating 4E... I think they would've gotten so lambasted by the gaming populace that they wouldn't have even come close to 4E's sales. We bought into 3.5 a mere 3 years after 3.0... but a 3.75 would've been looked upon even less fondly.
Now if you're taking it from the standpoint of a "longterm game solution"... then yes, absolutely. 4E's window for product release looks to be around the same as 3.0s and a little less than 3.5s. So it was not the "end all and be all" Dungeons & Dragons game that people might've thought it was supposed to be.
Of course... anyone who thinks that D&DN is going to be that "longterm solution" I think is fooling themselves too. ;-) Regardless of how good or not good it ends up being... we're still going to see a new edition about five years hence, because that's just now the way this niche hobby sustains itself year to year.
I don't know, man.....while I think it (4E) certainly made a ton of dough (more than the vast, VAST majority of RPG companies ever will), if Lisa Steven's descriptions of the timeline of Pathfinder's ascension are to be taken at face value (and I see no reason not to), then by the end of 2010, Pathfinder had overtaken D&D as the big money maker in fantasy RPGs.
And if having Paizo come up to your table and take your lunch with a revisited older edition isn't some kind of failure, then I'm not sure by what metric you judge failure. Think of that kind of loss of market share....it is really quite astounding, and whether you think of it as 3.X doing insanely well, or 4E doing remarkably poorly, I'm not sure the end result can be considered anything other than a failure.
Cheers,
Colin
Last edited:
Tony Vargas
Legend
An excellent example of the point I was making.4e got yanked because it caused D&D to stop being 'the" TTRPG and in many markets ceded that to pathfinder.
Its anacedotal sure but take a look at meetup.com sometime, or the gamers wanted here, and in pen and paper RPG, and Giants in the playground, And the other big online forums.
Hardly anyone is running 4e games, lots of players say they will play anything but 4e.
It was simply a failed idea. It appealed to a niche of the market and made the mistake of thinking that niche was a majority.
It wasnt.
Activism had nothing to do with it. It was sales, interest, and ultimately market share that told them to can 4e and go back to the drawing board.
I dont think their current approach will make what I think is the perfect game. At all. But I think it might make a game I am willing to play and pay for. And maybe some of the of people playing pathfinder right now too.
Because really lets face it. Pathfinder is 3.75 and it has most of the issues of 3e and some new ones all its own. Is it better then 4e? Yes. But only by the barest of dirtyhairs.
WoTC could blow PF out of the water if they wanted to. But they need to do it while keeping a majority of 4e fans too. And thats why they are dancing on a hot stove there.
Unless you equate "being reasonable" with "playing 4E" then no.
5E is not in development because of an internet edition war, but because the books said that 4E didn't make enough money for Hasbro to continue to support it.
Like I said... it depends on what you're using to define "failure".
If you want to use 'Market Share of the RPG community' as your metric... then sure. But then again... you don't pay your bills with market share. You might own 100% of the market share of some product... but if that product only sells $1000 in an entire year, then what good is it?
So sure, from a outsiders perspective... losing market share might mean WotC doesn't have the top product line right now. But if they sold (just making up numbers as an example) $2,000,000 worth of 4E product the last 4 years as the #2 company... whereas they would've sold only $750,000 of 3.5 or 3.75 product the last 4 years had they stayed the course with the current edition (or done another incrementable update rather than work on 4E), but not allowed for PF to come into existance to be "#1"... what truly is the failure?
Is being #2 but selling twice as much product than you otherwise would have being #1 really considered a "failure"?
Depends entirely on how you are measuring things. And from an internal company perspective... I would imagine you'll take the increased sales numbers over the idea of "being #1!" any day of the week. You can't pay your rent just by being #1.
Hmmmm....I hear you, I really do. It is entirely likely that the numbers on 3.5 books towards the end of its lifespan were so abysmal that anything would be an improvement. And (as I said) there is little doubt that for the first year or two of its lifespan, 4E was kicking butt and taking names. But after that....
I just really think that you pay one heck of a lot less of your rent when your sales and percentages of total RPG sales place you in #2, yeah? Because that loss of market share doesn't just come with something metaphorical like the loss of the hearts and minds of a particular segment of the RPG buying population, it also comes with a loss of their revenue/purchasing power.
I don't think Scott Rouse said "4e is broken as a game and business and it needs to go away." because the D&D brand was/is thriving at any level that could be defined as a success. Now I realize that just because something is not a success doesn't necessarily make it a failure (the real world is thankfully not quite that binary {yet}), but c'mon, man.....
Cheers,
Colin
I don't think that that is what [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] is saying. It's not "being reasonable = playing 4e". It's "being reasonable = not trying to kill 4e off by a sustained campaign against the game, those who play it and the company who publishes it."
You may think that there was no such campaign. Fine. But Tony Vargas does, and I'm pretty sympathetic to the notion, and that's what he has in mind (I'm pretty sure) in talking about "being reasonable".
His follow-up edit is very interesting.
He's not saying that 4e is broken as a game in the sense of delivering a bad play exeprience. He's saying that its broken as a commercial game product that WotC is relying on as its flagship RPG. What caused that breakage? Rouse outlines a few factors:
* DDI failures;
* GSL failures;
* Essentials.
My own feeling is that the apparent lack of a strategy to deal with a large-scale 3PP attempt to keep 3E alive seems to have been the biggest failure. This is bigger than just not having the GSL good to go (and remember that Rouse, back in the relevant period, defended WotC's prerogative to license a game it had spent millions developing in a more restrictive fashion than the OGL). It's about lacking a marketing strategy to respond to the sort of campaign that [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] is talking about.
I agree that Essentials was also a debacle from the marketing point of view - and so obviously a debacle that it's hard to credit rational business people endorsing it as a strategy - but by that point I think the damage had already been done.
Indeed, its almost as if, as a professional game designer he realized he shouldnt napalm the bridge to the historical best paying and most often hiring company. And thus decided to just singe it some. In edit.
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