D&D General Why TSR-era D&D Will Always Be D&D

[GMforPowergamers]

Invoking unspecified people having the information tucked away in unknown places does not help you.

okay... then umbran doesn't believe me. Got it. in most circles I travel in people like to say "I don't owe you research or labor" but I generally don't do that... but when I say why I don't have something at my finger tips and someone tries to turn that into "unknown places" I think that is BEYOND rude. I expected much better of you, but I am fine with you just not believeing me then since I don't have my PC on me at work all the time.

If you are going to step up to someone and just flat say, "Wong," you ought to back that up when you say it.

and if you are going to ask for someone to show you proof and they tell you they don't have it on them they will show you later and you pretend they just said "My imaginary friend told me" you ought to expect people not to take you seriously.

If you don't have the information, maybe be honest about that, like, "I'm not sure that's correct - I seem to recall X...."

I was honest. When asked I said the information I had (It came from WotC I think mearls) and that both I and others HAVE shown this before but I didn't have it on me at this time... but you turned me trying to be honest into a challenge... so I will not be responding to you on this thread again.

 

[Mercurius]

I will chicken in the egg this... Paizo (again they had to eat I understand, and wotc put out the ogl then tried to abandon it so there bad) and the PF crowd were VERY vocal and in some cases still are (It's all magic, everyone regrows lost limbs every night, you can shout someone back from the dead).
I compare it to a youtube channel CinamaSins... they are a couple guys that make fun of movies (if you find them funny is up to you) but they blew up to have millions of viewers... and they took the jokes serious. So then people repeated the joke as critisms. then people who heard that critisism repeated it again... soon it looped around and people who don't watch and have no idea what the channel is said it to someone who liked the channel. When that happened it reinforced that it MUST be right because people without seeing it new it.

The same way I see debunked movie complaints repeated without knowing where it came from, I see with 4e (and other things it isn't just them) it is a memification of complaints.

In my experience day 1 didn't bring them all back. However it DID bring back alot by going back to 3e styles (and adjusting for the meme complaints) However as pathfinder aged more people looked to new things (like every edition) and when PF went 2e a big influx to 5e happened when if you were changing anyway...

I agree that there was a bit of a snowball effect - but really, a lot of this had to do with WotC's initial role out, from the "survive/thrive" marketing to the presentation of the core rule books that many found off-putting (remember when the PDFs were pirated before release, so a lot of folks saw them early?), to just a general style and approach that seemed deliberate geared towards a younger generation of players that didn't yet exist.

None of this is an indictment of the game itself - that is kind of my point, that 4E could have "thrived, not died" within a different zeitgeist. But we'll never know.

As I said, when 4E started there was a burst of popularity and people coming to the game day (I had been active in 3.5 days as well) that I had not seen before. Many of them were younger, for the first year or so we were going gangbusters. Then that crowd we initially attracted slowly faded away.

I do think there are several factors that have led to 5E's success, I attribute less of it's success to CR than you do. Mercer and company only switched to 5E from Pathfinder because it worked better for streaming, CR started after 5E was already vastly exceeding expectations and they started out with quite a small following. Who knows how many people started playing D&D first and then tuned in to watch the stream? To this day the number of people that watch CR is dwarfed by the number of people that play D&D according to the best estimates we have. That, and many of the things that make 5E popular are also what makes for an enjoyable streaming experience. I watched some streams for 4E back in the day, the same reasons it didn't work as a stream are many of the same reasons I wouldn't care to play in a 4E campaign again.

There are many reasons for 5E's success. People wanting a way to connect on a more personal level. Streaming. The rise of comic book movies making it okay to admit that you like things that were considered for the geek crowd only. But I don't think any of it would have mattered without a solid game with broad and ongoing appeal.

I'll say again (I think for the third time): we'll never know. You could be right, but my contention is that if you take 4E in its own right without an previous association, then it looks different than if you had been playing D&D for 10-20+ years back in 2008, and it felt jarring for many.

I'm trying to imagine into the mind of a 15-25 year old who never played D&D until the last few years. If 4E had come out in 2014 and caught the rising tide of non-mechanic related trends that we've talked about, I don't think such a person would have the same issues that you or I did back in 2008. But again (fourth time!), we'll never know.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I thought it was generally accepted that 3.x outsold 4E but I am willing to accept that I could be wrong but I would need evidence.

yeah evidence of any sales is hard, WotC keeps that, but it was Mearls who in a video (90% sure maybe it was written) said 35 out sold 3e and 3e by best acounts out sold 2e and 4e out sold 35.

Also, it's a hard thing to measure. Are you just comparing core rule books, the line as a whole from WotC or all of the 3.x products sold across different publishers?

tbh some of that may be impossible to measure (how do you measure over time with different number of products and of course value of money changing... but it is what the only source we have said.

I call wrong becuse the ONLY sources we have say it outsold 35 and PF(when competing) and we have NO source for 35 out selling... now spin happens maybe mearls lied... maybe someone lied to mearls, but it is all we have.

Was there third party content for 4E and if so how much? I didn't play 4E so I am not well versed in the product line.

there was 3rd party I had a book early on that had bard before bard came out in year 2, I had 2 or 3 settings. But not as much the GSL was harder to use then the OGL

 

[Mercurius]

I'm not a business person, but with my limited knowledge, I'm fairly certain that when you come out with a new iteration of anything, if sales aren't significantly better than the previous iteration, it is deemed an economic failure - or at least, disappointment.

So it may be that @GMforPowergamers is technically right, that the 4E core rulebooks outsold the 3.5 or 3E core rulebooks, but it may not have been by much - which would be viewed as disappointing. And more to the point, it didn't bring in a new generation - it only really lost some of the older generations.

Furthermore, while core rulebooks are the biggest cash-cow, ongoing sales are important, too. And here it seems very likely that 4E fell behind 3.X. Again, I don't know the actual figures, but I can remember the overall temperature of the D&D community back in the early-to-mid Aughties vs 4E era. The 3E community was strong and robust, while the 4E community was limping from the start - and Essentials in 2010 was a bit of a Hail Mary that got intercepted, which led to WotC ending the edition and beginning work on 5E (they continued publishing, of course, but 2011 saw half as many products as 2010, and 2012 had just a few remaining trickles, and at least a couple cancellations).

I feel like I have to repeat a disclaimer, because of the possibility of misinterpreting what I'm saying as an indictment of 4E as a game - that isn't at all what I'm saying, and really making no value judgments either way on the worth of 4E as a game (except in saying that it was innovative relative to previous iterations of D&D - and "innovative" is generally a positive thing). But as far as economic success--and reception by the D&D community, both existing and in terms of drawing in new fans (or inability to do so)--I think the proof is in the pudding.

 

[Oofta]

I agree that there was a bit of a snowball effect - but really, a lot of this had to do with WotC's initial role out, from the "survive/thrive" marketing to the presentation of the core rule books that many found off-putting (remember when the PDFs were pirated before release, so a lot of folks saw them early?), to just a general style and approach that seemed deliberate geared towards a younger generation of players that didn't yet exist.

None of this is an indictment of the game itself - that is kind of my point, that 4E could have "thrived, not died" within a different zeitgeist. But we'll never know.

I'll say again (I think for the third time): we'll never know. You could be right, but my contention is that if you take 4E in its own right without an previous association, then it looks different than if you had been playing D&D for 10-20+ years back in 2008, and it felt jarring for many.

I'm trying to imagine into the mind of a 15-25 year old who never played D&D until the last few years. If 4E had come out in 2014 and caught the rising tide of non-mechanic related trends that we've talked about, I don't think such a person would have the same issues that you or I did back in 2008. But again (fourth time!), we'll never know.

Not sure how you could have told me for the 4th time since this is my 3rd response.

I just disagree based on what I experienced and what we saw based on estimates of sales. But I didn't mean to get into edition wars, carry on.

 

[Hex08]

It isn't only about raw sales, though - it is also about the cohesion of the D&D community. 4E fractured the base unlike any edition before or since. And I wouldn't blame Paizo - Pathfinder was a response to 4E's mixed reception, not a cause of it. In other words, they filled a need: for folks who were basically happy with 3.5 and wanted 4E to be a revision of it, not a revolution.

This was me and my gaming group. I had decided that, after buying different editions from TSR/WotC since the D&D Basic & Expert boxed sets and every edition since (I spent TONS of my money of 2E products), that I was done changing editions. I had more than enough content to run 3.5 games for years plus a bunch of other games I also owned. I did switch to Pathfinder when it was in beta but mostly because it was backwards compatible (although most of my 3.5 stuff was quickly abandoned). Couple that with me not liking what I was seeing about 4E and I was done and haven't looked back. I finally even got burned out on Pathfinder and abandoned it shortly before PF2E was announced and don't plan on running another Pathfinder campaign again since there are tons of other D&D-like games out there thanks to the OSR plus, once again, all of the other games I own.

 

[Minigiant]

A lot of it, but not purely so. Clerics and Rogues/Thieves for example. Clerics in particular as a spellcasting armored undead hunter/healer are so unique a creation of D&D. Or character levels and spell levels.

But yeah, there's a lot of truth to this too. How ability scores function/what they do has changed a lot. How saving throws work has changed a lot. How combat works mechanically has changed remarkably little- mostly a lot of hit point inflation. But the fundamental math of attack vs. AC is nearly identical. Experience Points are there, but how they're handed out has changed a lot since 1E (arguably the big change there was in 2E)

But it's still mostly name.

Like 4e kept all those names but changed the mechanics and had enforced the base premise of dungeon crawling. And the community freaked out positively and negatively.

5e doesn't keep much of TSR mechanics, lore, design, nor goal either. And it's widely beloved.

 

[Minigiant]

But the thing is 5e, the most successful edition, is closer to 4e than the TSR editions. 5e is basically 4th Edition Essentials on a 3rd edition skeleton.


The only real TSR elements in 5E are the names of the terms and the forcing of TSR PC and NPC archetypes into working the base system. And the latter is the most complained about "flaw" of 5e and is the part WOTC has been moving from the most.

 

[Mannahnin]

But it's still mostly name.

Like 4e kept all those names but changed the mechanics and had enforced the base premise of dungeon crawling. And the community freaked out positively and negatively.

5e doesn't keep much of TSR mechanics, lore, design, nor goal either. And it's widely beloved.

Hmm. I think they do use a fair amount of old lore.

One thing I think they're sensitive to in 5E design that they were less so in 4E design is look and feel. Does Fireball look and FEEL like Fireball? How about Magic Missile? How about Wizards? Does the Wizard class do the stuff a player expects a D&D Wizard to be able to do?

Where 4E had (for example) a Daily spell called Fireball, it represented a much more significant mechanical departure. The square (cube) shape, for example. The base damage being much lower on first glance. The fact that as a Daily power you couldn't "memorize" it multiple times.

The 5E design hearkens back much more to the look and feel of 1E Fireball. Even the fact that they boosted the damage above what would be expected by the general design guidelines, to better fulfill the memetic IDEA of Fireball in the mass consciousness.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

But the thing is 5e, the most successful edition, is closer to 4e than the TSR editions. 5e is basically 4th Edition Essentials on a 3rd edition skeleton.

I do agree with the first part (not quite so much the second...but I can see how you see it)

3e 4e and 5e are all built on the same frame, and it is a frame called the d20 system. At the end of the day good or ill TSR era was not. the stats work different the entire idea of unified mechanic the concept of how saves work... 2e and 1e were very different.