What will happen to 4th edition?

[SteveC]

Which late edition products are you referring to? (I am still so enamoured with, inter alia, the Neverwinter Campaign Setting that I may be missing some dogs! )

For me, 4E was the only edition of D&D where the designers actually got better as the edition's life extended. You can see this particularly in the adventures where 4E began with rubbish authored by Mike Mearls and Bruce Cordell (I can still remember when the latter actually wrote good adventures) to new classics such as Reavers of Harkenwold and Madness at Gardmore Abbey. And the few post-Essentials splat books were generally well-received, other than Heroes of Shadow which had Mike Mearls as its lead designer. (I must admit, though, as someone who stays in the levels 1-12 range in my games, I quite like Heroes of Shadow.)

Good question. For me I like to divide the game into the rules and the adventures/setting books.

I'd say that as the edition went on, the quality of the adventures got much better (but, you might argue, it was hard to go anywhere but up). At the same time, about the time they announced the Essentials series, about the time they cancelled all of the books I was looking for, the rules quality went way down.

Obviously this is my opinion only, and I mean nothing negative towards the folks who worked on some of them ... but I just thought they were awful.

I remember wondering why the Essentials books were released in a format where you were paying for redundant material, and the class designs started to show individual tables for level advancement again.

And then the Heroes of Series started to show up and it was clear that there were a new vision behind the rules, someone who either didn't like the earlier designs, or really wasn't involved enough with them to begin with.

I know that's by no means a universal assessment, but it is mine.

Now as far as adventures go, I really enjoyed some of them. The last product I remember buying as a DM was Murder at Gardmore Abbey, and my group had a lot of fun with that. Similarly, I got some real use out of the Neverwinter book (as you mention).

I don't mean to harp on it, but I think the second half of the 4E lifespan was a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy where books weren't selling, so they changed them up or simply stopped releasing product. Of course that meant a reboot was coming... I'm just shocked that WotC was content to basically stop making product for a couple of years.

 

[neonagash]

Because I like D&D? Why SHOULDN'T there be D&D that I appreciate? There are a ton of things about D&D's various elements that I am quite happy with. I guess this is a more legitimate question post-OGL, but even with the OGL and etc we still have basically a 3.5 clone and some older edition clones and some other variations that haven't scratched my itch. 4e did, and does.

And I dunno, but I don't see why this argument should be in your favor anyway. If you want to say "because I've been playing my game since times of yor and its always been thus" that's OK, but I started playing in 1975 when the game barely existed, so I'm probably as entitled as anyone around here to say what the game should be on that basis. So clearly this is nothing but a preference difference between us. So there's no way to settle it by reference to who should get what.

Because thats like saying "I love chocolate chip cookies, today I want brownies, and expect to get a brownie, but the name on that menu for the item had damn well better say chocolate chip cookies. I aint ordering no brownies, no matter what".

If you want brownies, just order the brownie. You dont need to have them called cookies to still be good and you wont hurt cookies feelings if you skip it and order something else now and again.

 

[Hussar]

[MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] - what other games allow you you grant actions to other players when it's not their turn? I'm drawing a blank.

As far as games changing, Shadowrun saw many new elements through editions. New and Old World of Darkness games are very, very different.

 

[prosfilaes]

they were built specifically to do things differently than D&D... thus my point still stands, their "innovations" were to be "not D&D" in various ways...

If their innovations were to be D&D, they wouldn't be innovations, would they?

EDIT: To add to my final paragraph, I think there's a reason none of Ron Edward's games have sold anywhere near the number D&D has... and I think maybe instead of chalking it up to "Old grognards stuck in their ways" he should have maybe examined what the majority of people find fun in running and playing rpg's (and especially in D&D)... I (and I think most people) don't play a game just because it has the new shiny, I play it because it's fun and if the new shiny isn't adding to that or is in fact actively taking away from it I'm not going to play it... just a thought.

New Coke was a better cola then Coca-Cola Classic. Objectively--the Coca Cola corporation spent millions of dollars doing taste tests establishing that. Even with all the weight of the Coca Cola corporation, who could put it into every store in the country, even actually tasting better, it still couldn't beat the product with the name and the reputation.

I think there's a reason why none of Ron Edward's games have sold anywhere near the number D&D has... and that's because most people have never even heard of a game by him. The fact that every game store that carries RPGs carries D&D and everyone who has played an RPG has heard of D&D is the primary reason D&D sells more. You can talk about the mass market appeal of his games, though I'm pretty sure he wasn't trying for a mass-market competitor to D&D, but comparing it to the D&D sales is pointless.

 

[Sadras]

I think there's a reason why none of Ron Edward's games have sold anywhere near the number D&D has... and that's because most people have never even heard of a game by him. The fact that every game store that carries RPGs carries D&D and everyone who has played an RPG has heard of D&D is the primary reason D&D sells more. You can talk about the mass market appeal of his games, though I'm pretty sure he wasn't trying for a mass-market competitor to D&D, but comparing it to the D&D sales is pointless.

Agreed, but lets take a smaller sample of the people who have heard of him, like those of us on Enworld. How many people are interested in his game or of those who have, still play his games? I'm not suggesting he is a poor designer, just that theorycrafting and psychoanalysing the hobby only gets you so far, understanding your audience and the fun they seek, as @Imaro mentioned, gets you further.
Better yet, don't even compare his games' success to Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder, compare it to WoD.

 

[Hussar]

Ummm, outside of maybe WoD, no one's games sell very much. Few thousand copies is about it. Heck, as unpopular as 4e may have been, it was still outselling everything other than Pathfinder for a couple of years even without producing any new material.

There's DnD and then there's everyone else.

 

[Jhaelen]

There's DnD and then there's everyone else.

As I've pointed out time and again, that's really only true within the US. In Europe DnD is small potatoes. In Germany there's not even a localized version anymore. For DnD 5e, German-based Pegasus Spiele is the exclusive distributor for the whole of Europe!

In Germany, Pathfinder is a lot bigger than DnD these days but it still has a smaller player base than FFG's various rpgs, Shadowrun or even Vampire.

DnD traditionally had a bad reputation as a 'hack&slash' system here. In the beginning I mostly enjoyed being a DM for DnD, precisely because it was easy to come up with a 'fun' adventure by simply using a random map filled with more or less random combat encounters. As a player I always prefered one of the 'more sophisticated' systems, be it Ars Magica, Runequest, or Earthdawn.


To shortly summarize my personal journey through time and the various editions:
I started playing DnD with the 1e AD&D rules and continued to play after 2nd edition was released. But after that I turned my back on DnD for many years before 3e caught my interest again, because it had adopted many of the 'innovations' I had learned to appreciate in other systems, most notably a real skill system and streamlined rules that applied equally to pcs and npcs/monsters.

3e in turn became extremely tedious to DM when the pcs in our campaign reached two-digit levels. I was quite relieved when 4e appeared and turned my job as a DM into something that was fun again rather than a chore. Fortunately, it wasn't hard to convince my players that 4e was the greatest edition of DnD ever. A single session was enough for almost everyone to win them over.

But I still prefer to play a different RPG system in parallel with a different group of players that is more concerned about storytelling. It's a welcome change of pace and focus, even though I really enjoy 4e.

5e doesn't really interest me (yet). It's a backwards-looking edition, concentrating on 'classic gameplay'. I don't want that anymore - or at least right now, I don't.

 

[Imaro]

@Imaro - what other games allow you you grant actions to other players when it's not their turn? I'm drawing a blank.

I'll have to check to make sure but I have a feeling there were charms in Exalted that allowed this (haven't played or read the books in years). Mage I believe would also allow one to do this... I'm also pretty sure there are some superhero games that would grant this as a power as well.

As far as games changing, Shadowrun saw many new elements through editions. New and Old World of Darkness games are very, very different.

I don't know about Shadowrun, so I'll take your word for it... I'm curious though how has it's fanbase done with these drastic changes? Has their fanbase grown or shrunk with them? And either way why do you think that is?


nWoD on the other hand was specifically called out and marketed as a new game, not a new edition or continuation of the oWoD... but a new game with similar themes. That's a re-imagining/re-creating of a game not an innovation of the oWoD.

 

[Imaro]

If their innovations were to be D&D, they wouldn't be innovations, would they?

And that's my point, once they established their own identity... how much "innovation" as described in this thread (things totally new to the hobby) actually took place? Just like D&D most of their "innovation" took place in the creation of the game, once created though rpg's very rarely if ever innovate in the way people are using the term in this thread... for the most part new editions are refinements, clean-ups, and revising what is there already.

New Coke was a better cola then Coca-Cola Classic. Objectively--the Coca Cola corporation spent millions of dollars doing taste tests establishing that. Even with all the weight of the Coca Cola corporation, who could put it into every store in the country, even actually tasting better, it still couldn't beat the product with the name and the reputation.

That's interesting and it might even be an apt comparison to Ron Edward's games if there was any objective data to support his games being objectively better... but there isn't so this analogy kind of falls apart there.

I think there's a reason why none of Ron Edward's games have sold anywhere near the number D&D has... and that's because most people have never even heard of a game by him. The fact that every game store that carries RPGs carries D&D and everyone who has played an RPG has heard of D&D is the primary reason D&D sells more. You can talk about the mass market appeal of his games, though I'm pretty sure he wasn't trying for a mass-market competitor to D&D, but comparing it to the D&D sales is pointless.

So let's drop the bar some... have his games ever been ranked on ICV2? Have they been in Amazon's top books, are they top sellers on rpgnow?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Because thats like saying "I love chocolate chip cookies, today I want brownies, and expect to get a brownie, but the name on that menu for the item had damn well better say chocolate chip cookies. I aint ordering no brownies, no matter what".

If you want brownies, just order the brownie. You dont need to have them called cookies to still be good and you wont hurt cookies feelings if you skip it and order something else now and again.

But this is just EXACTLY the attitude that I'm talking about. Nothing can change, the game must be exactly what it was at whatever point in the past the poster is most fond of. Its museum piece thinking. Intellectually dead. I really genuinely am not trying to cast that as a terrible thing or criticize the people that want this, but they do have to realize that such a game will fail eventually. Everything has to change and evolve and be reinterpreted in culture if it is to remain relevant.