D&D 4E Would you buy 4E if it were not open/had no licenses for 3rd party companies?

[TwinBahamut]

I'm completely ambivalent about whether or not 4E is open or not. I am interested in 4E on its own merits, and whether or not other companies can make money off of it is not important to me. The only third party stuff I bought for 3E was Iron Heroes, and I don't foresee much need for me to buy third party products in the future. Thus, I voted for the third option.

 

[pdiddy]

I am a busy guy. That is one of the reasons 4E appeals to me. However, if there are no 3rd party adventures that is a deal breaker. I use a lot of publisher adventures and frankly, while they make great rulebooks, WotC adventures are subpar at best.

 

[Hussar]

I'm with the above three opinions. I hope that it is open. Certainly open enough for module support. But, open or closed has little bearing on whether or not I'll buy the game.

 

[Nyaricus]

I would purchase 4E even if it were completely closed... but I wouldn't like it :\

 

[WayneLigon]

Certainly. It would be no different from any other game, or other versions of D&D before 3E.

 

[Jack99]

I would purchase 4e even if completely closed. It would annoy me to no end, because I love especially Necromancers' and Paizo's stuff, but at the end of the day, the most important to me is the game system, and no amount of love for their adventures can keep me playing 3.5 or 3.75. Thus 4e it is.

Cheers

 

[Aus_Snow]

I won't be buying it, regardless. Just like most gamers around here (locally IRL, not on EN World), that I know of anyway. One guy, a dedicated collector of RPGs (and D&D in particular,) cancelled his pre-order of the 4e core rules set just last week, in fact. :\

If it had been less disappointing as a ruleset, and maybe even an improvement over 3e, *and* open, as per the OGL, I would've pre-ordered it myself. . . and not cancelled it.

As it is, if I want to run D&D from now on, I'll stick with 3e and the mountains of material - mostly 3rd party - available for it, though I'll also consider the Book of Experimental Might, and the Pathfinder rules when they're complete. Might work out slightly better, who knows.

 

[I'm A Banana]

No.

Some of the best game material in the world has been produced by companies who are not WotC. Core be damned, if you are not checking out the 3rd party stuff, I kind of pity your games. There's stuff with production values on par with WotC products that contains daring, original, well-balanced, and incredibly imaginative stuff, and scads more things with slightly lower production values that utterly rock in ways WotC could only dream of.

3e has been a vast and intriguing menagerie of excellent game design, and I kind of pity those who don't partake of what is out there.

It's true, they're not all awesome, but it really doesn't require much work to find something that is. Entire threads have been dedicated to the awesomeness, and that awesomeness needs every bit of support it can get!

A 4e without 3rd party support would be unbearable to me. Having had the Tome of Horrors or Denizens of Avadnu or Oathbound or Testament or Nyambe or Iron Heroes or Arcana Evolved or the Dungeon Crawl Classics or True 20 or Spycraft, I could not endure an edition where these things could not exist anew. Even the Book of Erotic Fantasy, for all it's hullaballoo, is a feather in the cap of 3e, if for no other reason that it was produced and allowed to be part of a galaxy of options.

As it is, one of the only reasons I'll go to 4e is under the banner of Necromancer Games' supplements, which go a long way toward embracing the ideals of 4e while fixing what is, IMO, totally backwards in some areas.

WotC by themselves simply isn't good enough for me anymore. I've been spoiled by the amazing things that they would never, could never touch, even with a twelve-foot pole. I'd be disappointed if they basically made the GSL a "Make D&D Supplements For Us" agreement, though I could still probably live with it. The more open it is the better it is, though. From all accounts, the 3rd party 3e experiment was a pretty good success, and I think in tinkering with it, WotC is kind of messing with a good thing and being overly analytical about something that needs a light touch.

Making a totally closed 4e is ensuring that I'll buy Pathfinder and continue to play 3.75 at least until 5e.

I don't NEED 4e. 4e needs me.

 

[Hussar]

From all accounts, the 3rd party 3e experiment was a pretty good success, and I think in tinkering with it, WotC is kind of messing with a good thing and being overly analytical about something that needs a light touch.

See, I really question the truth of this.

When 3e hit the bricks, you had dozens, several dozen at least, of 3rd party publishers cranking out books. By the time 3.5 rolled around, the herd had thinned considerably. By this time last year, even before the 4e announcement, you had what, 4 maybe 5 companies producing D&D supplements?

In 8 years, we went from more companies than you could comfortably count, to about one hand worth of 3rd party publishers. And, of those, companies like Green Ronin were barely doing any 3e material.

Is that really a success? When the overwhelming majority of companies drop out of the field within 5 years? When you have basically five companies competing for the 20% of the market not dominated by WOTC? ((Note, that figure is totally made up))

For the vast majority of gamers, losing the 3rd party publishers would have zero impact on their games.

I'm one that it would impact honestly. My shelves are much more 3rd party than WOTC, but, even so, I know that in the group I play in, no one would miss a step if 4e was completely closed.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

A great majority appear to be willing to buy into 4th Edition without any outside support. I am quite surprised at the magnitude of "pro-WoTC" feeling.

I'm willing to buy (and play!) 4e even if closed, but I still think of open gaming as a great idea.

Early on in the 3e era two players have used Cook's Books of Eldritch might (variant bard and spells, mainly). I' ve used maybe five different 3rd party adventures as gamemaster. And that's about it.

Dozens of third party books are collecting dust on the shelves, not because I don't like open gaming or 3rd party books are bad quality (though not a few of them are), but because they don't enhance our games very much. I'm sort of experiening my private D20 glut. It's much easier to manage the WotC-books only and not to hunt through thousands of pages for some interesting spell or creature.

I'd hate to see 3rd party companies closing their doors due to a closed nature of 4e, but even this would not affect our private gaming.

It's not a "pro 4e feeling." It's faith in the WotC designers' abilities to deliver a solid, fun game, which we'll love to play.

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Huldvoll

Jan van Leyden