NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7669080" data-attributes="member: 42582">No correction needed!Yep. I've really not got anything to add on the issue of 4e's success/failure to this post I made on these boards over 4 years ago:Was 4e a financial failure? I don't know, but it seems unlikely, given the RPG group were given a chance to have another go.Was 4e a project failure, in the sense of not meeting its internal goals? Probably. Certainly, the digital stuff seems not to have realised its aspirations.Was 4e a cultural failure? In one sense, yes - as per my self-quote, it did not bring the D&D community with it in the way that (presumably) WotC hoped. In another sense, obviously not - there is clearly now a large and flourishing culture of "indie"/"light narrativist" FRPGers, whether playing 4e, or DungeonWorld, or 13th Age, or other systems, and 4e undoubtedly helped build and reinforce that culture.You didn't ask me, but it's probably fair for me to reply. I'm not a business person, I am an academic lawyer and philosopher. My knowledge of commercial matters draws on my teaching of various aspects of commercial law, and my personal and professional contacts with commercial lawyers. Upthread I've indicated the bases for my speculations: I've sketched out some conjectures for DDI revenue (based on likely number of subscribers plus monthly rates), and have equally said that I don't know much about the cost of maintaining a system like DDI.Here, repeated, are my conjectures on revenue: over 2 years, I'll call it 50,000 subscribers for 18 months (I'm deliberately contracting the time period to allow for drop-offs in subscriptions towards the end of the period). And I'll call it $5 per month. (There is no DDI option that cheap, but I'm allowing for transaction costs.)That makes it $4.5 million. Which is $2.25 million per year.I then suggested this is enough to pay 15 employees, at salary + on-costs of $150,000 per year. Again,that is conjecture in relation to salary scale but doesn't seem too crazy (salaries of $100,000 plus 50% on-costs).I don't know how big the D&D team was during the playtest. I also don't know what the revenue from boardgames and reprints was. And I don't know how much it costs to maintain DDI, though I've guessed around $100,000 per year for a part-time software person plus some hardware and power costs. If that's a crazy underestimate I'm happy to be corrected - it's just a guess on my part.I've reposted a four year old quote of mine above, in relation to 4e's popular uptake.As for design issues, from the same post:Other well-known design flaws in 4e, besides the gaps in its GMing advice, are:* The differential scaling for attacks/defences vs skill/DCs, which makes it hard to integrate the two in action resolution, especially at Paragon tier and above; * Adding to the above, the abstraction of skill challenge resolution can be hard to integrate with the concreteness of movement and positioning in combat resolution; * PC building has needless fiddly bits (eg the use of stats and items in generating attack bonuses, some of the issues around defence scaling, etc; I gather that 4e Gamma World showed how a lot of this could be cleaned up); * Related to the above, many feats are largely redundant and some powers could be improved too (eg building in scaling where feasible rather than having improved versions be completely new powers); * The game could give explicit advice on integrating the rest cycle and the disease/condition track to help support lingering injuries, gritty exploration, etc.Those are probably the main, widely accepted flaws among those who play and enjoy the game.</blockquote>

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