What's really at stake in the Edition Wars

[Jack99]

"Better dead than red!"

Please give yourself a couple of days vacation for this highly charged political comment...

 

[Celtavian]

re

When you've been playing something a long, long time...over 25 years for myself...you obviously enjoyed that game. Then when the company decides to move in an entirely different direction with the game you have been playig for 25 years, it feels like you are being driven out when the rules change enough that you don't like the game.

Up to the point where 4E was released, I had liked every edition of D&D that had been released. I liked playing the most current game and having tons of support from whatever company owned D&D. I liked that they kept the original tropes of the game while advancing the ruleset to provide a greater number of options for players and DMs.

Now 4E was the most radical change to D&D ever. It tossed out just about everything in previous rulesets and built an entirely new ruleset. Once again I'm either in or I'm out.

And D&D is not just an RPG. You spend 3 hours to days with a group of people over the course of many months working as a team and building characters. Over the years you develop alot of friendships around the gaming table. When the game changes, it's not just you that has to makea decision. It's usually the group you play with. I've been playing with my group for 20 years. And all of them are good friends and we still enjoy a good D&D game even though we're all in our late 30s and early 40s.

So what did I have to lose?

1. A game I've enjoyed for 25 plus years.

2. A breakdown of the group that I've been playing with for 20 years as arguments for and against the new rules create acrimony.

3. No support from the company any longer as they abandon the old ruleset for the new. No new modules, no new splatbooks, no new magazines or articles.

4. All your old books you know intimately becomse useless. The thousand dollars you spent on books is now worthless for the most part.

5. When a ruleset changes this much, all your old characters become worthless. No way to transfer them over and get the same feel as the old characters because the changes are so radical. That guy you spent years getting to level 20 plus is now just a scrap of worthless paper if you switch unless you can stomach him being a shadow of his former self.

6. The game moving from about literary/simulationist to about balance focused/gamist. D&D previously focused on a literary model to some degree with touches of simulationist philosophy thrown in. 4E moved away from fantasy tropes to focus on balance and gamist philosophy. Most of my love of fantasy came from books before games, so I prefer that a fantasy game be built like a fantasy novel. 4E did not do that while previous editions had included certain fantasy tropes like the ancient wizard being very powerful. Fighters being straightforward fighters good with weapons. Not the case with 4E.


So I felt I had alot to lose in this edition wars. I am alot more relaxed now that Paizo has released a game more in line with my preferences. I could not stomach 4E. I read some 4E material not too long ago, and it irritated me even though I'm not playing it. I read the bard and his ranged abilities are using Charisma to hit even though they are described as rays or bolts. I felt relieved because I am able to play a game where a spell such as scorching ray uses dexterity to hit. To me that makes sense. It's important that a game mostly make sense when I play it.

 

[Garthanos]

Any of you ever played a Fantasy Roleplaying Game like RuneQuest...
seems like it would be a similar game right? came out only slightly after D&D
Well it had magic and monsters and people fighting them and discovering treasures.... but here is a list of things it didnt have.

1. Classes
2. experience points
3. levels
4. an every expanding number of hps to buffer the heroic. (save or die for most intents and purposes every attack was close to a save or die)
5. single basic attributes benefiting a single action or skill.
6. 20 sided polyhedron
7. Alignments (replaced by religions with tenets your character tried to follow).
8. gnomes ...no it had daffy and donald as yes sentient duckoids... arent gnomes pointy hatted garden statues.

Aside from the gnomes... most of the above things have incredibly real defining impact on the feel of game play.

Think about zero niche protection or role specialization.... generalists only
Think about zero support for heroic behavior/bravery unless you count dying as the ultimate in heroism, dont care how competant your character is....

Somebody dropped mustard on your hamburger dudes they didnt give you a salad.

 

[Dice4Hire]

4. All your old books you know intimately becomse useless. The thousand dollars you spent on books is now worthless for the most part.

I could call out a few comments here, but I just do not see this one in particular.

How does 4E make your books of whatever edition useless? Did they spontaneously combust? Are they rancid now that the use-by date has passed?

Now if your group decided to go the new way and you did not, then I can see how the books are not as useful as they once were, but that is not really WOTC's fault. It is a group-level thing.

There really is a lot of hyperbole in this thread thus far. A whole lot.

 

[Garthanos]

I felt relieved because I am able to play a game where a spell such as scorching ray uses dexterity to hit. To me that makes sense. It's important that a game mostly make sense when I play it.

This purely imaginary attack form wrapped in the miraculous is controlled by something mundane like "hand eye coordination" instead of spirit and imagination and creativity and divinely gifted talent (you know the real definition of "charism" its "divine gift") , hence the association with both creativity and guidance by the divine.(alah Paladins). People followed where the charismatic lead because the charismatic are lead by the divine.

Shrug I think I prefer the mysticism to your "he throws the spell" with his hands.

 

[The Shaman]

So...

...for you, what's really at stake?

In many ways not a whole heckuva lot.

I first learned to play blue box and 1e AD&D, but never played 2e AD&D; at the time the latter was released, about all I played was Traveller, Boot Hill, and Marvel Super Heroes, as I've always preferred non-fantasy rpgs. Around 1989, I stopped playing rpgs altogether

3e D&D brought me back into gaming after a thirteen-year hiatus. In time I grew frustrated with the game and as I was never much of a fantasy fan to begin with, I transitioned to d20 Modern.

Soon after I renewed my interest in (original, 'classic') Traveller and the floodgates of my own personal 'old school renaissance' opened: Boot Hill, Top Secret, Flashing Blades, and others. Through Dragonsfoot I participated in two one-shots, one playing OD&D, one 1e AD&D, but the whole of 4e is passing me by; I've never so much as thumbed through any of the 4e books. The closest I've come to regularly playing any edition of D&D again is scribbling a few conceptual notes for a 1e megadungeon I'm not likely to ever make game-ready.

So the Edition Wars, whether we're talking OSR versus newer editions - btw, my recollection of the OSR is that an increasing number of veteran gamers like myself grew frustrated with 3e and began seeking out older editions to play, swelling the ranks of the gamers who never switched, and OSRIC resulted from the desire by both these cadres to legally publish new materials for the older editions - or 2e versus 3e or 3e versus 4e would seem to have very little direct impact on me and my rpg interests.

As a result my personal involvement in the Edition Wars of the various forums is largely peripheral, mostly confined to correct various misapprehensions. I have no issue whatsoever with people liking and playing what they like, but I find that some people have very poor memories or understanding of older editions, so sometimes I'll post corrections to assertions which are just clearly and demonstrably incorrect. Call it my interest in preserving the historical record, which would be my first (and most direct) stake.

The other is much less direct: the changing tastes in gaming. This is much broader, more cultural than rules-related. It's been my experience that the sucessive generations of D&D reflect the state of speculative fiction, and I would argue that since the success of 1e AD&D there has been a feedback process, of varying strength, between gaming and spec fic. As the eight hundred pound gorilla of tabletop gaming, D&D exerts a disproportionate influence over what players expect from a roleplaying game. I have a vague sense that this may influence my player pool: it's easiest to find players for the most current iteration of the game, with older editions next, followed by contemporary games in other genres, and finally 'classic' games in non-fantasy genres.

Now go back and look at my tastes in games, and compare them to the largest pool of current gamers. That's my other stake in the succession of editions of "The Worlds' Most Popular Roleplaying Game."

 

[Windjammer]

One reason that the 3e to 4e edition wars raged so hotly may well be the (right or wrong) perception of how the change was characterized by WotC.

When 3e was coming, WotC did a large customer survey. I recall well the Dragon Magazine articles that said "Here's what you said you wanted, and here's how we're responding." This seemed to me to be inclusive and respectful.

When 4e was coming, the presentation seemed more like "This is what D&D is going to be like, whether you like it or not. We hope you like it." I know I certainly read it that way, although I admit (again) that this was an overreaction.

1. The situation surely wasn't helped by WotC designers coming out with highly misleading statements on their part which invited overreactions such as yours. Dave Noonan's "The clouds are moving and you can't do anything about it. 4E is coming and you can't do anything about it" comes to mind. He later clarified that he didn't mean to convey that the edition's arrival couldn't care less for the feelings of those awaiting its arrival. Which is exactly how this statement came across initially, and why a clarification was in order.

2. Your perception of the 3.0 arrival is right, of course. Historically, this is exactly how the 2E arrival was pitched - "we did a survey and YOU asked for this new edition". See the 2E preview booklet which got recently linkified here on Enworld. Glance it through, it's really informative, as is this advert for 2E.

So why did this change for 4E? For my money, it was the negative reaction to 3.5. If you look at the sidebars in the 3.5 books near the beginning of these, entitled "Why a Revision?", WotC really tried to hammer home the point (not just once but thrice per sidebar) that it was the customers who asked for a costly reprint of the core books. In short, they wanted to pull a 2.0/3.0 launch on their customers. Which backfired badly for them. Yes, everyone wanted a useful trimmed errata PDF. No one wanted to shell out $90 to have that. The disingenious suggestion, in print, that WotC only complied to customers' desires here just added insult to injury.

Hence, when 4E was to arrive, no one at WotC was deluded that they had developed this edition because customers asked for it - or, that it would be wise to iterate the 3.5 error of trying to communicate that sentiment when it was blatantly false.

If anything, WotC knew they had to convince customers that 3E was an obsolete product, in design and commercially, which was the opposite of a wideshared sentiment in their customer base. WotC didn't delude themselves for one moment that 4E's arrival was initiated by the fans. As Mearls once put it, during the days immediately prior to 4E's release the mood at the WotC office was so TENSE because they feared everyone might hate it. Everyone. How's that for rhetorical emphasis?

I really think WotC had no realistic alternative to pitch 4E as anything other than "Here's what we've concentrated our efforts on. We hope you like it. It may not be for everyone, but it may be for you."

 

[Lanefan]

Reading through all of this very interesting thread, it occurs to me there's one way in which it could be made so much better:

We should all be sitting in a pub somewhere - a pub with copious amounts and varieties of beer available - each with no real reason to be elsewhere anytime soon, and having this discussion in person.

And pretty soon, after some obligatory yelling and edition defending and finger pointing and have-another-beer-ing, I suspect people would vaguely gravitate toward 5 different tables - one for each edition (0-1-2-3-4) - whereupon at each of these tables a game in that edition would spontaneously break out. And they'd all be fun!

Even better if all 5 tables were playing the same adventure, tweaked for edition.

Lan-"hey, I can dream, can't I?"-efan

 

[JohnRTroy]

I could call out a few comments here, but I just do not see this one in particular.

How does 4E make your books of whatever edition useless? Did they spontaneously combust? Are they rancid now that the use-by date has passed?

While I see this as basically correct, there is a grain of truth to this.

The big difference between 4e and the 1-3e is that most maintained a level of backwards compatibility. 2e, at least the core (I'm not talking about Players Option stuff) was pretty much a streamlining of the 1e ruleset. I would say the ruleset is about 95% compatible with 1e.

While 3e introduced changes, they still kept what I would call a recognizable baseline. Rules such as saving throws were changed, more definitions were introduced, and etc, and there are new innovations like feats, skills, and rules for things like poison. But your core expectations are intact. There is still a wizard that has fireball as a third level spell, most of the spells are the same as they were in 3e, Gnomes are what we expected in the game system, the cosmology of the outer planes is similar to what started in 1e, and while magic items were streamlined, you still had your familiar Staffs, wands, rods, rings, etc, and they worked as similar as possible to 1/2e rules. (Maybe a few staffs or wands became rods). I would say you have maybe a 75%-80% compatibility if you wanted to adapt old supplements.

Whatever the motivations of the 4e team, we don't have what I call a very similar or compatible game system. It really fails the "familiar" test. Now everybody has powers, you only have at most half a dozen powers, abilities that have nothing to do with combat have been moved to rituals, the combat system is very tactical, magic items have changed, and the first release didn't preserve even all the iconic classes and races. Many things like monster lore and planar cosmology have changed as well. I'd say in terms of compatibility with older games of the line we are talking maybe 50% or less.

Simply put, if I played AD&D in the 80s, then was away for 10 years and wanted to start a new game, I can see a gamer more easily recognizing and enjoying the 3e game system. I can't see it with the 4e system. At minimum, even if they like the game, there's a big learning curve that's going to be involved, much larger than the 1/2 to 3e curve.

So yes, I see the point that the 4e books do invalidate older supplements. While this might have happened with 2e to 3e as well, it's probably a LOT easier to convert older modules from 1/2 to 3 than from 1/2/3 to 4. My 15th level Mage or 12th level paladin can go from 2e to 3e and still be very familiar. A 1e module can be converted to 3e and while it may be a little work it's still going to be familiar. When I played ToEE on the PC, it felt as close as you could get to the old 1e adventure with the new ruleset.

If you've invested a lot of time into 3e, especially considering the huge third party market, I can see 4e being a turnoff.

In the business world, there's a thing called "change management". It's what a company does when making changes - it manages them, because people often don't like them. It makes efforts to control customer expectations and views about the change.

Interestingly enough, I saw this mentioned in the 40 years of GenCon book, when they talk about 3e. Change management was undertaken by WoTC as well. I think the key differences were the following. First of all, WoTC as run by Peter and Ryan seemed to want to keep the D&D identity strong while also making the game a little more progressive--and they were actively seeking both old fans and new, especially fans who became disillusioned with the game. They reached out to creative types long ignored by the company. And the marketplace was a little different--D&D had just missed the bullet and TSR might have disintergrated, taking the game with it. I'm not really sure there was as much pent-up demand for a new edition of D&D this time around.

And I remember the playtesting and excitement building being a little more open and less secret. I was a playtester, and while I was under an NDA I was able to discuss some things without making WoTC paranoid--heck, this whole site started as a 3e news blog. But they seemed different this time around. If I remember correctly, a while back Andy Collins had asked playtesters who had criticisms to not speak to the public about them. It was also harder to get any news about mechanics.

I think only time will tell if the change management of WoTC with 4e was good or bad. Maybe after years have passed, this will either be a case study for success or failure.

 

[DaveyJones]

What, now a restaurant now has to never take a dish off the menu, ever? Does that sound reasonable to you?

if the chinese restaurant changed and suddenly became italian i wouldn't expect to find my favorite egg roll there anymore. but if it is still claiming to be chinese. they had better provide the dim sum i have come to enjoy if they want my business.

As above, think about the implication of that. Once a business offers something, they can never take it off the market again?

I hate to tell you folks, but books, movies, music, and media in general - they all occasionally go out of print. When sales dip below a certain level, the one who owns the rights has to decide if it is worth keeping the product on the market.

That sales have dropped does not imply that the product was bad - it merely says that the sales are down. Maybe it is because the product was bad. maybe it is because the market has changed. Maybe it was because the product was good, and saturated the market. Who knows.

they are the only one holding the license to sell the product. if they sold the license to another company or let another company make the product i would be fine with that too.