What will happen to 4th edition?

[Scrivener of Doom]

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. (snip)

Interesting.

I can certainly understand your point-of-view, even if I don't entirely agree as I quite like some of the Essentials classes.

What I found astonishing about the whole Essentials debacle was that there was no book actually called a PHB that you could point people towards. (And, yes, I realise there still was the original 4E PHB but it had so much errata that a new one really was required.) The takeover of TSR by WotC and the subsequent professional business analysis that was performed revealed very clearly that EVERYTHING had to drive sales of the PHB. The advent of DDi has not changed that.

Frankly, it was just a half-assed revised edition that, at the time, seemed to be a way to buy a few more months for the edition and which was then subsequently revealed to be exactly that: a way of stretching out the inevitable. Honestly, though, who in their right mind would publish an effectively new edition of D&D in paperback using a book size that D&D had never used before?

It made no sense at the time and makes even less sense with the benefit of hindsight.

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.

Yeah, the way WotC just let the line languish - thus, inter alia, destroying any goodwill from distributors and retailers - while they took three or so years to rewrite AD&D2E just shows that the tabletop RPG is not a core part of their business. You can also see that in terms of Mike Mearls job title compared to Bill Slavicsek's - Mike is far less senior - and also in the reduced headcount and publication schedule. Let the game tread water while they hope for a big win from a movie or something else that can produce real revenue and real profits from the IP.

Anyway, I am thankful that WotC took a risk and published 4E because it is my favourite edition. Now if I only I can find a way to get offline versions of the DDi tools I will be set for the rest of my gaming life!

 

[Jer]

Interesting.

I can certainly understand your point-of-view, even if I don't entirely agree as I quite like some of the Essentials classes.

What I found astonishing about the whole Essentials debacle was that there was no book actually called a PHB that you could point people towards.
(And, yes, I realise there still was the original 4E PHB but it had so much errata that a new one really was required.) The takeover of TSR by WotC and the subsequent professional business analysis that was performed revealed very clearly that EVERYTHING had to drive sales of the PHB. The advent of DDi has not changed that.

As an outside observer, it seems like the guys in the D&D offices took that lesson to heart TOO MUCH for 4e. The original plan for 4e was very much "we're going to sell Player's Handbooks" - by publishing a new PHB every year. A decision that I kind of thought was questionable at the time, but in retrospect really looks like a bad move. PHB2 & 3 were "Player's Handbooks" in name only - so they didn't have the "essential" nature that a PHB has. But their original PHB was kind of crippled out the door since classes that many people feel are "core" to D&D (druids, barbarians, monks, bards) and races that many people feel are "core" to D&D (gnomes, half-orcs) weren't included. So they became essential to some and pointless to others - which only served to piss off the folks who just wanted to have their favorite "core" class in play (In retrospect making the core of the game just Heroic and Paragon tier and including those classes and races in the PHB would have been a better idea. And the PHB2 could have had the Epic tier stuff in it along with some new races and classes. It also would have given them more time to playtest the Epic tier and realize that their monster designs weren't quite right for higher level play).

By about the third year of release they'd figured out that it wasn't working, but by then so many of their marketing decisions had risen up to bite them in the ass that a simple adjustment wasn't going to work. So the Essentials marketing idea came along. Which had a lot of good ideas, but as a stealth point-five release was never going to do anything but piss people off. Especially when they kept saying "it isn't a point five release" when everyone could kind of clearly see that it was. I mean it was nice that it really was all backwards compatible, but that doesn't mean it isn't a point five release. And then they very clearly realized that it underperformed so fast that everything after the initial product release got re-tooled.

(Personally I think that missed a boat by not having a fully-erratad printing of the PHB on the shelves for the Essentials release. But by that point they had realized that their initial decisions about the 4e PHB had been a mistake that pissed people off, and they wanted to keep beating that "this is not a point five release" drum - especially since they initially promised "no point five release this time" during the initial roll out. So I can see why they didn't do it and went the Rules Compendium route instead.)

What is interesting to me is that unlike a lot of other folks when I look at 5th edition D&D I see not warmed over 2nd edition or 3rd edition, but a lot of retooled Essentials presented to make it look like 3rd edition (and rescaled down from +level to +prof bonus, of course). The classes seem to still be built on a powers framework, but they're actively hiding the fact that there's a powers framework from the players this time around even more than they did with Essentials. One that just jumps out to me is the "multiple subclasses" thing - they're basically just different Essentials builds with a different presentation style for the powers for that build. (The powers framework seems more like 13th age than 4e to me, in that each class's powers have a lot more quirky individual ticks to them so that there isn't the uniformity of play across classes like you get with 4e, but its there if you look for it.)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What is interesting to me is that unlike a lot of other folks when I look at 5th edition D&D I see not warmed over 2nd edition or 3rd edition, but a lot of retooled Essentials presented to make it look like 3rd edition (and rescaled down from +level to +prof bonus, of course). The classes seem to still be built on a powers framework, but they're actively hiding the fact that there's a powers framework from the players this time around even more than they did with Essentials. One that just jumps out to me is the "multiple subclasses" thing - they're basically just different Essentials builds with a different presentation style for the powers for that build. (The powers framework seems more like 13th age than 4e to me, in that each class's powers have a lot more quirky individual ticks to them so that there isn't the uniformity of play across classes like you get with 4e, but its there if you look for it.)

Interesting. I think I agree that there is a certain aesthetic of game design that is probably MM at work that informs Essentials and 5e, but I don't think 5e really incorporates anything significant from 4e. The elements of the classes present in 5e all have direct antecedents in earlier editions and while you can call the idiosyncratic hodgepodge of class features each 5e class has 'powers' I don't see how they have anything to do with 4e's powers, which the very point of was that they were modular and swappable etc. Granted that E-classes had a lot of more hard-coded options, but that's exactly the way in which they undermine the very central concept of 4e, so saying that some things in 5e evoke that design isn't IMHO '4e like'. In fact it seems to me to help illustrate the depth to which Mike and the devs he put around him lacked any sort of buy-in to the concepts that 4e was built on. 5e is mostly a REPUDIATION of everything 4e in my opinion.

 

[neonagash]

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.

Nope, such a game will not fail eventually. thats a fallacy. Games are entertainment and entertainment doesnt need to make fundamental changes to stay alive for the simple reason that there are always new people growing up and trying it for the first time.

What might be boring old hat to you that needs to change is brand new to new players. It doesnt matter when it came around. 1e would be just as shiny and new to a first time player as 4e or 5e would be.

And yes a lot of people dont want things to change either. Just like my analogy when I want a cookie, i want it to taste like a cookie. I dont want to order a cookie and get a brownie, thats false advertising and if i wanted a brownie I would have ordered one.

Theres nothing at all wrong with different games each having their own niche and doing a good job of filling that niche.

 

[Jer]

The elements of the classes present in 5e all have direct antecedents in earlier editions and while you can call the idiosyncratic hodgepodge of class features each 5e class has 'powers' I don't see how they have anything to do with 4e's powers, which the very point of was that they were modular and swappable etc.

I disagree - the more I look at the 5e classes, the more I see a consistent structure within the powers framework for each class. It's not a hodge-podge, but it is absolutely presented to make it look like a hodge-podge. Which might seem crazy (why would you want to make your game look like a quasi-random collection of ideas?) until you remember that the community at large rejected a number of different things about 4e design and among those things was the regulated structure of class design.

Granted that E-classes had a lot of more hard-coded options, but that's exactly the way in which they undermine the very central concept of 4e, so saying that some things in 5e evoke that design isn't IMHO '4e like'. In fact it seems to me to help illustrate the depth to which Mike and the devs he put around him lacked any sort of buy-in to the concepts that 4e was built on. 5e is mostly a REPUDIATION of everything 4e in my opinion.

Again I disagree - the concepts are there. They're obfuscated so that people who thought they hated them don't realize that they're using them, but they're there.

What has changed is the presentation. In 4e the developers were very open with the design and treated the players as fellow game developers. This backfired on them horribly, and so for 5e they seem to have taken the approach that they're going to hide all of the implementation details under a layer of obfuscation so that the players who hated having the curtain pulled back and the guts of the system exposed don't see it. Essentials started this approach - the engine under Essentials is the same as earlier 4e, but the options are fixed down a path so that players who don't care about (or worse - get actively angry at) all of the levels of customization don't have to worry about it. Essentials also started the approach that class powers were going to feel differently per class rather than having all powers have the same feel - and 5e has continued on that path as well. (13th age also picked up on this, so it seems to be an objection that people had that needs to be taken seriously because no game growing out of 4e - other than Gamma World which has no classes as such - has preserved that part of the feel of the game.)

I prefer 4e because it is so obvious what's going on and that makes everything so easily customizable. But 4e didn't work out for Wizards and presentation seems to be perceived as a large reason why by the folks in charge, so 5th edition has a completely different attitude in presentation. But it's core is recognizably on the same design path that the last 15 years of D&D have been walking down. It's just that now you have to sit with the book and reverse engineer things to figure out what the core is because the design team has hidden it from us.

(I think scaling is the other thing that the folks at the top see as problematic for 4e - 4e was built to be a heroic high action game, and it does a lousy job as a game for running street-level schmucks scrabbling for loose change to get by. Since much of the history of D&D had the first 3-4 levels of the game being "street level schmucks scrabbling for loose change" as a theme, I can see why some folks would be upset by 4e completely ignoring that kind of game. 5th solves this by tacking on about 3 levels of "schmuck" to each character class at the beginning and rescaling things downward via proficiency bonus and "bounded accuracy" so that the bonuses don't look so big and DCs don't sound so ridiculous - again mostly presentation. It'll be interesting to hear how high level play in 5th goes, because I suspect it will be much much better than high-level play was in 3rd edition precisely because of the bits of the engine carried over from 4th.)

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

(snip) (Personally I think that missed a boat by not having a fully-erratad printing of the PHB on the shelves for the Essentials release. But by that point they had realized that their initial decisions about the 4e PHB had been a mistake that pissed people off, and they wanted to keep beating that "this is not a point five release" drum - especially since they initially promised "no point five release this time" during the initial roll out. So I can see why they didn't do it and went the Rules Compendium route instead.) (snip)

Absolutely. That may have been the biggest mistake of the Essentials pseudo-reboot... other than putting someone who detested 4E and never grokked it in charge.

Interesting. I think I agree that there is a certain aesthetic of game design that is probably MM at work that informs Essentials and 5e, but I don't think 5e really incorporates anything significant from 4e. The elements of the classes present in 5e all have direct antecedents in earlier editions and while you can call the idiosyncratic hodgepodge of class features each 5e class has 'powers' I don't see how they have anything to do with 4e's powers, which the very point of was that they were modular and swappable etc. Granted that E-classes had a lot of more hard-coded options, but that's exactly the way in which they undermine the very central concept of 4e, so saying that some things in 5e evoke that design isn't IMHO '4e like'. In fact it seems to me to help illustrate the depth to which Mike and the devs he put around him lacked any sort of buy-in to the concepts that 4e was built on. 5e is mostly a REPUDIATION of everything 4e in my opinion.

Yeah, that's very much my own opinion as well.

Nevertheless, I am happy I still have 4E and the DDi tools... for now.

 

[billd91]

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.

That's an exaggeration and it's not really helping the discussion. There's room for new material in D&D - any edition of D&D. That some very strong changes were largely rejected by the market of D&D players doesn't mean that D&D is intellectually dead. And I wouldn't be surprised if people found the claim that it is so to be fairly insulting. Again, one only has to bring up the example of games that are fairly set in their rules like Chess to show that your assumption, that the game will eventually fail or fade into irrelevancy, has no more predictive power than a guess. I might even venture to pose the idea that a more static rule system simply changes the focus of the intellectual activity - it move the burden from the game designers to the game players.

 

[Balesir]

Again, one only has to bring up the example of games that are fairly set in their rules like Chess to show that your assumption, that the game will eventually fail or fade into irrelevancy, has no more predictive power than a guess. I might even venture to pose the idea that a more static rule system simply changes the focus of the intellectual activity - it move the burden from the game designers to the game players.

Leaving aside the fact that chess is really the exception that proves the rule (because dozens, probably hundreds, possibly thousands of games like it are now simply forgotten by most people), I really don't think that D&D has the tightness of rules structure that would sustain its identity as a specific game for the long haul.

Chess has a simple but rigid set of rules that allow so huge a number of combinations in play as to make not only play but analysis and exploration of the play space intellectually fascinating. All D&D as conceived in the "rulings not rules" era has to offer in that sphere is "do stuff your DM thinks is cool and you'll win", in the final analysis.

Roleplaying in general will certainly continue - it's a concept for a whole universe of exploration with endless variation - but I doubt very much that any single system will achieve even chess' degree of longevity (which, in the context of the history of mankind, is actually not that long, in its current form).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Obviously there are just as strong opinions on this subject as there ever were at the heart of the recent great Edition War. Just remember, many of the people here were participants, and now its interesting when criticism of the game is met with such unhappiness! Obviously nobody wants to start a flame war and go back to the dark days of 2010 though...

Still, I don't see anything like a 'power structure' in 5e. The 4e powers system's beauty was that you had one set of rules to learn, AND that ever other subsystem of the game only had to reference one power system and could thus apply to any PC of any class. Honestly I think 4e took far less advantage of this than it probably should have, and I can come up with a long list of things that I'd change, as anyone who's played 4e probably can. Still, I want my rules to be structured explicitly so I can make flexible use of them, and 5e doesn't do that. I had no problems with presentation of 4e's classes, and I didn't see that arise in play either. If you play strongly, in a way that emphasizes the narrative of the game and with strong imagery then you aren't really worried about fighters and wizards all having powers. Heck, they all have hit points, nobody complains about that because its an old convention!

As for the 'gritty low levels' thing. I dunno guys, all I saw from 2e players after they'd been through the mill a couple times was "screw this, lets just get to 4th level quick, eh?" and while I always thought there was a lot of good low level material for AD&D it was also a lot more limited than what was out there once you hit mid levels. So again this is one of those hypotheticals where lots of people gnashed their teeth about it online, but its hard to find people that actually wanted to play whatever part of the game 4e missed.

Personally I think the problem wasn't the mass of players out there, who were perfectly OK with the game when they had good adventures and a DM that was cognizant of the strengths of the system. It was more a problem of people in places like enworld, 'thought leaders', who seem to now be largely 'thought anchors' since so many don't want change. I know I'm annoying EVERYONE in this post and I'll get lambasted for every word, but we endured a lot of crap for the last 6 years, a LOT.

 

[prosfilaes]

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.

You're genuinely are not trying to cast that as a terrible thing? I'm not buying that in the least.

My goal is to have a game I enjoy. If I want things to change and evolve radically, I will try a new game. If I want to play faro, it does not help me one bit if a casino is advertising faro with evolved, reinterpreted rules that look like poker. Not only that, evolution kills things; many things have tried to make leap to a new niche and lost their old customers but been unable to bring in enough new customers to survive.

Would contract bridge, a game once played by 44% of Americans, really have been better off if they had tried to reimplement it as a CCG during the heyday of Magic? Or if the World Bridge Federation had FFG design a new contract bridge with plastic sculpted meeples in an $80 box (mandatory for tournaments, of course)? No, contract bridge will continue to slink into the darkness, instead of disrupting its players and probably dying prematurely in the process by reinventing itself.

Leaving aside the fact that chess is really the exception that proves the rule (because dozens, probably hundreds, possibly thousands of games like it are now simply forgotten by most people)

If we're asking what makes a game succeed, it is not the exception that proves the rule. The fact that the vast majority of games with any set of properties have just disappeared says nothing one way or the other about the properties of those which succeed.

Personally I think the problem wasn't the mass of players out there, who were perfectly OK with the game when they had good adventures and a DM that was cognizant of the strengths of the system.

A game has the players and DMs it has, not the ones it wants. I've talked to several average players who weren't happy with 4E.

It was more a problem of people in places like enworld, 'thought leaders', who seem to now be largely 'thought anchors' since so many don't want change. I know I'm annoying EVERYONE in this post and I'll get lambasted for every word, but we endured a lot of crap for the last 6 years, a LOT.

I don't know why calling people anchors because they don't want your particular brand of change would get you crap. (Sarcasm.)