What would WotC need to do to win back the disenchanted?

[I'm A Banana]

It will be interesting to see if Essentials is an olive branch to the people they kicked off their lawn.

They didn't quite manage to kick me off, I just constantly gripe about the landscaping. . The Essentials line, as far as I've seen, does a lot to shut me up. Not everything, probably, not all I'd really like, and I can see why people would want more fundamental changes than that.

For me, though, it doesn't really matter that, two years ago, WotC may have said my 3e game sucked, and may have turned halflings into 3/4ling river-rats, and may have given Tieflings the look of a kid with down's syndrome. I'll keep calling out the junk I see, and I'll keep praising the awesome I see.

And, for one, making magic missile an auto-hit ability is danged awesome.

 

[Lanefan]

I can readily admit to buying books just because I wanted to see what they contained.

Ditto - I've bought the core 3 books for each edition on release, mostly to see what they had done to the system and whether there was anything I could use/convert/adapt. Ditto for all the various versions of Forgotten Realms up until 4e; and assorted other books from various editions.

I bought the "Worlds and Monsters" 4e preview book for the art, period. I've already dreamed up and run one adventure and have ideas for a few more, based only on pictures in that book. (I will say that after W+M set the pace I was somewhat disappointed in the art in the core 3...)

Lan-"I'll take a good idea from anywhere I can find it"-efan

 

[Obryn]

You are failing to grasp the difference between "prevents" / "can't provide the experience" and "does not provide the best possible support for maximizing the experience".

You can player poker with an old deck of wrinkled and dog-eared cards and all the players know 1/3 of the cards just by seeing their back.

And anyone can say it is a great poker experience.

But playing with a fresh deck provides a better experience. Both are still poker. And as I clearly stated, you can easily 100% roleplay a monk on top of the 4E mechanics.

Now, somebody who loved the tattered deck can stamp their foot and insist that there is no difference. And nobody can force them to say otherwise. And perhaps they just don't know the difference.

But there is a difference.

I haven't the slightest quibble with one or the other being the best fit for a certain person's tastes. There are a lot of people who would vastly prefer an evening of bridge or pokemon or whatever to any kind of RPG. Being bothered by the preference of 4E makes no more sense than being bothered by one of those preferences.

But to simply declare an equivalence is the nonsense. There are differences and those differences change the qualities.

Still with the tee-ball analogies, eh? Only minus the tee-balls?

You're still getting it entirely wrong, and I'm kind of surprised by it. There's no such thing as overall RPG quality or quality of gaming experiences outside of its interaction with a given group of people. You can talk about production quality, sure. And you can talk about textual density, and a rule-set's goals. What's more, you can evaluate the rule set and whether or not it matches up to specific goals - either genre (does this game emulate a given tv show or movie adequately?) or group-based (does this game present the degree of simulation that we want?)

Pretending like there's an objective measure of quality that rests outside of preference is asinine and condescending. You're basically saying, "It's objectively crap and objectively can't obtain the true levels of RPG awesomeness like my favorite game can. I don't find your preference of crap offensive, but ha-ha, I know that you like crap."

Now, if you said, "4e fails to provide the experience of 3e," I'd agree. If you said, "3e fails to provide the experience of 4e," I'd agree. But pretending like 3e experiences or 4e experiences are objectively superior to one another outside of a given group's preferences is 100% ridiculous.

-O

 

[Mournblade94]

They do, but I really don't think it's a great idea to hop into this thread.

I mean, if they're not making a game you like, you're gone for at least a while. I'm sure they'd like to sell you more things, but if you have zero interest in anything 4e-related, a sales pitch would be ill-advised. They'll have to concentrate on their current market, and look at expanding to new markets. Odds are, you're not in either of those groups at the moment, no matter how much you believe they need your money as opposed to someone else's.

If you are angry with them for whatever reason, it's not a great idea to get into that on a messageboard. Odds are you'd like an apology or an acknowledgement, but they probably don't think they have anything to acknowledge or apologize for. So if you're looking for an apology, this thread will only deepen ill-will.

If you feel they've offered you personal affront and insult, due to your love of gnomes or otherwise, I don't think there's anything they can do to combat a reaction that's not based in reality in the first place.

If I were with WotC, I'd probably read this thread, but damned if I'd comment. This is at the point where it's not about the game itself for a lot of people - it's about the company or the personalities or the ethics or all kinds of stuff which has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the game itself. Stepping into this kind of thread would be just throwing themselves to the wolves, IMO.

-O

I'm not referencing this thread. I'm refering to the boards in general. I would not expect them to respond in a thread such as this.

it seems to me that many boards of which I am a fan have had minimal WOTC presence of late. Not that I mind. WOTC no longer prints any games I wish to play.

 

[LostSoul]

There are differences and those differences change the qualities.

The best way I heard it described was by Vincent Baker on his blog. He said something like rules are like channels carved into the ground; when you pour water, the rules guide the water along certain paths. If you want to pour your water somewhere else, that'll work, but the rules help to guide it a certain way.

As I was saying on my playtest thread, the simple fact that I changed the names of the skills made big changes in the way that the game was played. I drew channels, the water flowed down them.

What really interests me these days is how all the rules add up over long-term play.

 

[Jack Daniel]

What would WotC have to do to get me back as a customer? Interesting question... and quite a thread it's spawned. One simply cannot discount the significant fraction of players who seem disillusioned with 4th edition and yet still want to be a part of the current and officially supported incarnation of D&D. Something here must be striking a chord.

Speaking personally, I'm turned off by the weird and inexplicable changes made to the implied setting of D&D -- the grinding-up of all those sacred cows into so much discarded hamburger, to beat a favorite cliche to death. Combine that with the relative complexity of the 4e rules, and you have an utterly unfamiliar RPG that I would have no reason to even discuss on a web forum, never mind actually buy and play, if it didn't happen to carry the D&D brand name on the cover of all the books.

So... what would WotC actually have to do to earn my money? They would need to make D&D into something very different from what it is now. They would need to release an edition of the game that (1) restores the atmosphere of pre-4e D&D and (2) makes complexity optional. They would have to release a 5th edition of D&D with the same emphasis on story, character, and setting that marked 2nd edition; an edition that makes "system mastery" and character "building" absolutely optional, ideally present in supplementary rulebooks and not in the core game; an edition with a greatly decreased focus on combat, to the point where the disclaimer from the 2nd edition rulebooks -- "AD&D is not a combat game" -- could appear in the 5th edition as well.

(Note that an overall, system-wide de-emphasis on combat does not mean eliminating miniatures and tactical battles. Keep the assumption of grids and minis, by all means. Just simplify, simplify, simplify.)

Ditch the whole "dungeon-punk skirmish game, now with tiefling warlocks and dragonborn nounverbers" shtick. Ditch powers and builds. Bring back spell levels. Scale hit points to the dice we're rolling. (I mean, for crying out loud, a longsword is supposed to be dealing 1 to 8 points of damage!)

Last time I checked, an adventuring party was supposed to consist of a human, a dwarf, an elf, and a halfling. Of course, to have a balanced party, those four adventurers have to fill each of the four major roles... warrior, wizard, priest, and rogue. (You can call them defender, controller, leader, and striker if you wish, but you're not fooling anybody. 2nd edition had classes and kits -- where 4th edition calls them roles and classes. Same difference.)

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I don't like swift radical changes. The changes were radical enough that I'm kind of of the self-delusional opinion that 4e has been a long, expanded, public playtest of new mechanics and system philosophies.

I rarely like participating in playtests.

Most of the time I feel like I will just wait it out until the playtest is all done and the most successful ideas get applied onto a D&D that is familiar with what I've played before.

 

[Particle_Man]

Mac compatibility for all of their software would be nice.

Having even one dedicated "earlier editions" guy on their staff, to fix errata (like ToB), add stuff to the 3rd ed OGL, manage pdf sales for earlier editions, be a "Sage" for earlier editions questions, etc.

An OGL for 4th ed. I would like to see what 3rd party folk can do if they have a free hand.

 

[Jack99]

Their loss since there always seems to be an about equal amount in the "not-4e" section and double the amount in General.

Why would you expect WotC guys spend their time in the section for games that they do no longer support and/or make?

 

[Orius]

I've said it before: WotC needs to turn DDI into a repository of all that is D&D - both past and present. This way, all D&D players would have an incentive to subscribe, regardless of their edition preference. Since the addition of older edition stuff would be a one-time-only endeavor, WotC could focus on the current edition and still make money off of its older products from those who prefer them.

For starters, take the AD&D core rules 2.0 and integrate them with the DDI database. Since it's all in a reasonably portable electronic format, this project shouldn't take more than 2 employee/months (if that much).

That would be good and not just for the older gamers who don't want to switch to new rules. How many younger gamers develop an interest in the classic stuff at some point? The problem is the old stuff is only legally available on eBay and some of the asking prices get nuts. It's all about rarity driving up the price, I see some of the same stuff with videogames which is just as irritating.

I think WotC handles these things very conservatively because of TSR's bad bsiness practices. Too many product lines, the D&D/AD&D split and so on really carved up the audience. So WotC seems to do everything it can to provide just one product line. However, there's still splits because D&D fanbase has grown to be massively unpleasable.

I want to believe that making the previous edition .pdfs available again without overly restrictive DRM will be a good thing for WotC and players. But honestly, I don't know enough about business to know whether this is actually true or not, I want it to be true so I don't have to rely on something like eBay to pick up a classic gem I missed out on before. Having limited reprint runs of classic materials might be a good alternative IF it can be done cost effectively. Or maybe comrehensive compiled classic rules, though the old Basic D&D rules could just reprint the old RC.

Having character builders for the older rules would be great for some of use, but there are problems there too. It diverts resources from developing stuff for 4e players, who are probably a bigger base of users. There's always the "no Mac support!" complaints. And WotC has had problems in the past with these things, particularly e-Tools and Gleemax.

I doubt either the OGL or printing new material for previous editions will ever happen. It's just not worth it for WotC. The OGL I think is something that isn't necessarily good for a company over the financial long-term; the fact that people can just download the SRD or go to a webpage that has it means less reason for even the core books to be bought. Printing new material for older edition risks splitting the fan base; 4e fans will be angry they're not printing material for them, and there's the risk that it won't appeal to older fans anyway. I'm thinking particularly of everything that's happened with the Greyhawk line, so many bridges had been incinerated there in the past that too many people didn't come back, and then there were those whose campagins had so greatly diverged to to point where the material was at best difficult for them to use.

If WotC spent any manpower/money on releasing new material for older editions that would be splitting the market . . . and it would be a bad business decision.

The whole problem with splitting the market is the market has already been split, and a lot of significant damage was done back in the TSR days. To their credit, WotC did try to repair a lot of that damage when Adkinson was running things, but it wasn't enough for some fans. The whole "you're playing wrong" approach to promoting 4e probably inflicted some damage as well, as well as some of the big changes in tone and/or rules and blowing up the Realms.

I know some of the flavor of the older material might not appeal to younger players or seem dorky to them. I don't think this is WotC's fault. I think it's a general pop cultural fault as a whole that emphasizes generation gaps. It's been going on for a while, with roots back into the 50s and 60s, and I'm not sure it's something that for society is healthy as a whole. Yeah, some aspects of generation gap happens naturally as parents don't realize their offspring aren't children any more but still treat them as such when the kids are feeling the need to be more independant. But to play things up to such an extent where whole generations get estranged from each other and can't relate to each other seems dangerous and/or wrong to me for some reason.

Besides you know your group didn't have to accept the spellplague as written. I know many campaigns that simply ignored it and are still using the Gray Box for it's Realmslore.

Easier said than done. Ask some long time Greyhawk players how easy it is to ignore the Greyhawk Wars. These sorts of things go a long way to fragmenting player bases.