When 5E D&D flops, will the designers go to the 3E D&D well?

[ACOS]

Hold up there Krusk. 5e does indeed have a base mechanic, which is what he said (and that's really all he said).
There just isn't really any way to fully analyze it until the rest of the Core comes out (at which point we'll be able to really see how bad the system as a whole is). The basic mechanic is something that can be build upon; it just so happens that Mearls&Co. completely shit the bed with what they built on it. I mean, the classes do stuff - they just don't have anything sane with which to interact.

At least if WotC had a clear vision as to how they're going to market and support the damn thing, then they'd be able to actually keep this edition afloat for at least 2-3 years .... but they don't.

[tussock]

4e was an attempt to revive the RPG to promote more miniatures sales, by getting the minis guy in to lead the design and make them more compatible. About six months out from printing dates they realised they had a dog and changed a whole bunch of stuff...

More info on this please. This may just be my ignorance but I was unaware of the initial lead developer of 4e being from the minis aspect of the game. History lesson please?

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=54211

Various info down the page contributed by others. Heinsoo was an editor for WotC in the late 90's, co-designed Monsters of Faerûn and wrote parts of the FRCS for 3.0, then switched out to Chainmail, 3-Dragon Ante, DDM1, Dreamblade, DDM2, and then came back for his third ever RPG writing project to lead the 4e D&D design, which he based on his miniatures rules rather than on the history of the RPG.

---

The timeline for 4e development is roughly (depending on lead times here and there).

They write Orcus 1 ~mid 2005, and test it ~late 2005. It's an agreement to use Fighter and Rogue spells, basically. Tone down the casters a bit to match.

Tome of Battle and MM IV are designed as Orcus1 is being tested, but only developed, written, and published by August 2006. Things coming out during this phase are Weapons of Legacy and Magic of Incarnum, to see what feedback they were influenced by.

They write Orcus 2 ~early 2006. Heinsoo firmly in charge. Tome of Magic and Complete Psionic come out for 3e, and I think the reception there is what scared the dev team.

Star Wars Saga and the Magic Item Compendium show what the combat and gear structure looks like at this point, damage thresholds to drop common status effects and so on, upgrade-it-yourself gear tokens. Only instead of shitty d20Modern stuff you get Bo9S style fighter spells and probably something like the Shadow Mage and Binder from Tome of Magic for Wizards and Clerics. Various in-combat refresh and daily rebuild mechanics for a large handful of randomised effects from your character's deck.

They go to develop it May 2006 and for whatever reason, decide to scrap the last 12 month's work, and start from scratch. There's talk here and there of it "not feeling like D&D" without daily resource expenditure. June 2006 they set up the AEDU system as "Flywheel" to put all classes on the same schedule at all times. Class damage rates are cut back dramatically (at least by half at higher levels from hints I've seen).

July 2006 they decide "Points of Light" is the new setting bible in "Scramjet", because they're throwing out all the fluff for their previous power system and starting over and there isn't time to rewrite properly. MM V is designed about this time, bloated filler monsters, basically, Hobgoblin with bigger sword.

August 2006 Bo9S comes out and people basically love it, only they've just spent three months dumping on that internally and deciding against it.

October 2006 they are writing the PHB and MM, just the crunch. Powers and Monsters. Separate teams for each. Takes 7 months. Seems like zero testing.

May 2007 they write the prose for the three core books in 6 weeks. Reads like a first draft? Well, it basically is. The fluff doesn't match the crunch? No time for that.

Star Wars Saga edition comes out to good reviews. This is the Orcus 2 design they've dropped months ago.

June 2007 they write all the magic items in the game in 3 weeks. This is seen as a good thing, because formulaic items with short and bland prose make their job easier.

July 2007 they begin playtesting 4e. Announced in August.

September 2007 they kill Dungeon and Dragon mags, trying to kill Paizo.

The concept for Skill Challenges appears in September, but not with rules. The rules for it are re-written several times in the last three months, no one's even testing the same thing that was in the final book. I think Healing Surges are added right near the end.

About Christmas it's sent to the printer as the preview books come out. So far as I know, in the final months they added and changed all sorts of things in the powers without touching the related prose, added whole new sub-systems almost completely untested, all while the head designers where already working on the first dozen splatbooks. H1 uses different rules to the core books in several places.

At some point Wizards offers 3rd party companies the opportunity to sign their own death sentence and pay $5,000 to join the new GSL and get an early look at the rules. Paizo announced they were sorry but the GSL was company suicide and they would have to think of something else.

Febuary 2008, Paizo announces they're going to print a 3e compatible RPG to maybe keep their AP sales alive. Their fans go crazy with joy.

March 2008 Paizo releases the Alpha 1 of the Pathfinder RPG. It goes well.
April 2008 is Alpha 2.
May 2008 is Alpha 3.

June 2008 D&D 4 goes on sale worldwide. Sales are poor, probably their worst launch since '81. The pdfs cost more than the books. Perhaps because of the electron shortage? Who knows.

August 2008 Paizo puts the Pathfinder Beta out. People demand hardcopies of the free pdfs. It sells out multiple printings. WotC announces the GSL will be revised so it doesn't try to kill other people's companies, and sacks their licensing manager, which gets them more support in the long run. But Paizo has flown the coop.

---

May 2009 WotC suddenly take down all .pdf sales everywhere. Again, this is mostly attacking Paizo. Should've probably tried that a year ago.

June 2009 their production schedule undergoes a big stutter it never recovers from as the 4e publishing model is dropped and Essentials gets the go-ahead for development to try and fix sales and win back some of the 3e people before Pathfinder grabs them forever.

August 2009 Pathfinder goes on sale for real. Paizo is publicly very pleased with sales.

---

September 2010 WotC releases Essentials to a whimper. They never even bother printing most of the planned books for it. Mearls is surprised that the people who like 4e Fighters don't want a new Fighter class. Why didn't they just make new classes? Like the Bo9S did with Warblade and Swordsage and Crusader for the new Fighter, Rogue, and Paladin in 2006. Who knows.

---

The 2011 production run from WotC is terrible. I'm not even sure what fans were supposed to do with their money. Obviously not buy many WotC books. Paizo's run is endless: modules, adventure paths, system books, gear, new classes, new sub-systems, they want money for stuff and lots of people give them money for stuff. Like some sort of small-press publishing company.

---

Since 2012 WotC/D&D has been writing 5e, "D&D Next". For a couple months Monte was even there trying to get them to make Numenera. Instead Mike just wrote up his house rules for the Basic/AD&D game he played as an impressionable young man. And that's where we are now, three years later, him delaying some more printing to just keep his job another month or two. Clever man.

[fearsomepirate]

The biggest problem with 5e there appears to be no coherent business plan. The fundamental mechanics are fine, I guess. Having at least read over them, they don't seem worse than any previous edition and any less patchable. Actually, they seem pretty sound.

What the fuck are you on about?

You've read the books and consider them "fine" or "Pretty sound"? This is probably the worst edition. I don't need to qualify this statement.

5e basically has no rules.

That's a good point. I had not noticed that there's nothing about upgrade paths or how mods on your d20 work or what sort of things you can do on your turn or ability scores or anything! There are NO rules!

If you've read 5e and say "Its pretty much fine" you are not qualified to evaluate RPGs on any level. You probably aren't qualified to really evaluate anything without a handler, and probably aren't qualified to read.

If your tears were any angrier, I'd consider using them as the minions protecting the Big Bad of my current campaign.

[Kaelik]

If your tears were any angrier, I'd consider using them as the minions protecting the Big Bad of my current campaign.

Remember kids, if someone criticizes you on the internet, just claim that they care too much, or are crying. Because then you can deflect their (correct) criticism by claiming that they are getting too upset, even if you have no evidence of that.

u mad bro is the best defense against anything ever.

This message brought to you by 8 year olds on the internet.

[Night Goat]

September 2007 they kill Dungeon and Dragon mags, trying to kill Paizo.

Why were they trying to kill Paizo? They can't have known that Pathfinder would be a thing, so what beef did they have?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Dragon and Dungeon went to digital-only but the writing and art quality went way up after that move. Like, DMs would actually allow post-4E Dragon and Dungeon material into their game without line-item vetoes. That never happened with 3E stuff so I don't know how greatly improving the respectability of second-party content counts as killing unless you're the Spanish Inquisition or something.

[Eikre]

They "improved" the respectability of third-party content by eliminating the third party and doing it themselves.

http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp? ... /20070419a

[Lago PARANOIA]

If Nintendo thinks that a partially independent videogame division like Game Freaks or HAL Laboratory is sucking anus, usurps control of a subsidiary, then fires and restaffs their rank with more competent personnel from within their main hierarchy does that count as killing the product? Merges and reorgs happen all of the time; I'm really skeptical of the claim that a successful reorganization which soon produces an improved version of an old product counts as killing it.

[Previn]

Dragon and Dungeon went to digital-only but the writing and art quality went way up after that move. Like, DMs would actually allow post-4E Dragon and Dungeon material into their game without line-item vetoes. That never happened with 3E stuff so I don't know how greatly improving the respectability of second-party content counts as killing unless you're the Spanish Inquisition or something.

I don't think that that was as much about the quality of the material, so much as it was 'officially from WotC, so it's balanced and good, right?'

[mean_liar]

Bingo.

The official seal of approval is a bigass deal with RPGs.

[Krusk]

Hold up there Krusk. 5e does indeed have a base mechanic, which is what he said (and that's really all he said).

And he said it wasnt that bad.

There just isn't really any way to fully analyze it until the rest of the Core comes out (at which point we'll be able to really see how bad the system as a whole is). The basic mechanic is something that can be build upon; it just so happens that Mearls&Co. completely shit the bed with what they built on it. I mean, the classes do stuff - they just don't have anything sane with which to interact.

The monster book is out. All thats left is the dm book with magic items which specifically dont increase your numbers and maybe the stealth rules. (Mearls goes back and forth on whether its "make it up" as printed in phb or "going to be published in the dmg").

The majority of the rules are out. It just seems like they arent because they dont actually do anything or reference anything other than the dms dick. They imply the dm guide will have some actual content in it, but previews and mearls himself have said it wont.

[tussock]

September 2007 they kill Dungeon and Dragon mags, trying to kill Paizo.

Why were they trying to kill Paizo? They can't have known that Pathfinder would be a thing, so what beef did they have?

My thinking runs so: the early 4e GSL was an attempt to get everyone to sign away the rights to their OGL properties, put the genie back in the bottle. Bringing the market back to a permission model. Paizo were big users of and proponents of the OGL, they had OGL stuff in every mag, their web sales outfit was full of 3rd party OGL stuff.

If you're trying to neuter the OGL, and you've got a major proponent and retail outlet for them in one, that's an obvious target. Never mind the future, in 2007 Paizo is working against WotC company policy.

Paizo got notice of termination around when 4e was announced without any plan for making the mags in-house at Wizards, maybe to stop leaks as a surprise hit from outside the RPG division there. It left Paizo almost no time to generate new products at a low point in demand with 4e just announced. They said themselves they almost folded without a fight, as it took a lot of money at high risk to carry on without the brand.

What kept Paizo alive in the short term was the subscriber turnover, a lot of people had one to five mags left on it, so they made a linked series of six to sell them, get them to join again. Money back or the new Pathfinder adventure path, now with free pdfs, great deals for the set, and extra bla bla marketing.

But it was close. If Paizo had just closed, taken their money and gone and made PC/console games like most of them do, who else could've done that? Carried the flag at high costs on fuck all sales long enough for 4e to show it's problems and grab some of the audience. All the bigger names signed on with 4e soon enough, no one really expected Paizo and 3e to make it without the brand.


So hell yes, WotC was trying to kill them, they were really the only ones with even a hope of keeping the OGL alive, as they had their own little fan base, their own retail portal, great contacts within the industry at all levels, and a reputation for taking a dog and making it profitable like they had with Dragon and Dungeon mags. Dangerous.

[Dogbert]

Why were they trying to kill Paizo? They can't have known that Pathfinder would be a thing, so what beef did they have?

For the same reason they tried to crash the whole industry twice and, to date, keep doing the Borg thing of "assimilation or destruction."

The technical name is Predatory Marketing Practices. The long and the short of it boils down to institutionalized evil.

[TiaC]

So, I awoke to this message today

For you D&D players who haven't heard, dndtools.eu is shutting down. We have received a communication from Wizards of the Coast's legal counsel asking us to decommission the dndtools.eu site due to copyright infringemnet. dndtools is a free site that I and several other volunteers have maintained and developed for the past few years, offering a comprehensively organized compendium of information on every spell, class, feat, playable race, item, and god from all D&D 3 and 3.5 WotC published sourcebooks.
So the terms that they're shutting us down on are somewhat understandable. But many of those sourcebooks are now out of publish, which is part of the reason why we did what we did while we could do it. We sent them a letter years ago asking for permission, and now they're telling us to ask them for forgiveness. We don't think we're costing WotC any money by existing, if anything we're probably helping their sales of the core books by doing what we do.
Again, we've been completely volunteer-run. Volunteers that don't want to see all the hard work that we've put into compiling all this D&D content deleted and never seen again. I'm /definitely not/ one of the volunteers considering uploading a torrent of the site, continuing dndtools' legacy in the manner of the Inextinguishable The Pirate Bay, or bringing back the site under a different name with an invite-only system. It's pretty clear that WotC doesn't want that, and it wouldn't be good for our clearly identified leaders Aaron and John.
That's all, for now. Who knows what is to come, for the adventure of DnDTools. We thank you for all your patronage and support.

So it looks like they're trying to kill 3.5 again because of low 5e sales.

[zugschef]

Nooooooooo! That site was really helpful. =(

[souran]

The OGL is the reason why Hasbro will never let WOTC write new third edition material. If Hasbro has to release new versions of D&D every 5 years till they go bankrupt they will NEVER produce material that fills under the OGL.

Even if they made Frank the lead designer for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition, and let him do whatever the fuck else he wanted with the product the ONLY requirement from the Hasbro suits will be that it NOT be OGL compatiable.

Even peopel around here don't seem to get that WOTC didn't care that they slipped to the #2 sales position. They were MUCH happier taking their character builder subscription fees and printing 4E stuff that got mixed reviews than they were for the last 5 years of 3E D&D.

3E D&D, Not 4E is the Failure edition to Hasbro Suits.

Lets Remember that the Execuitives as Paizo, and pretty much all the other major 3rd party publishers, were going to switch over to 4E. They had seen the GSL, they new it was terrible for them, and they were signing up in droves ANYWAY. The only reason that the 3rd party publishers revolted and stuck with 3E/OGL was becasue WOTC/Hasbro wouldn't release the promised development packet to them in time for them to have products ready for the GEN CON release of 4E.

It was straight up Hasbro's greed that resulted in them competing against their own previous edition. Dancey sold the OGL to WOTC as a way for them to sell high profit margin hardbacks while small publishers would sell the low profit margin adventures.

WOTC/Hasbro STILL feels that what happened was that they did all the R&D and then they ended up creating a game that anybody could publish variations of without paying them anywhere near enough money. Additionally, they couldn't effectively prevent the whole thing from ending up on the internet as freeware.

The view from the Offices of the Suits who run D&D commerially is that 3E is the edition where they LET green ronin, and sword & sorcery press, malhovok press, paizo et. al; STEAL from them with impunity.

Stupid or not, realistic or not, accurate or not, the Suits at Hasbro will let 100 versions of Mike Mearls make 1000 versions of D&D before they EVER make another OGL product.

[Night Goat]

I predict that shutting down dndtools will provide a noticable boost in sales...for Pathfinder.

[Insomniac]

Hasbro is so petty. 3.0/3.5 and the OGL made Dungeons and Dragons a shitload of money and made Dungeons and Dragons the industry flagship for years.

They made hypothetically, 100 dollars doing that and other people made 40 dollars off OGL. Don't you see, they stole 40 dollars from them!

That is why it is better to make 60 dollars with nobody else making money. Even if your competitor is making 120 dollars with OGL. That 60 dollars is ALL YOURS. Nobody is STEALING from you.

[Eikre]

Nobody gave a shit when the third parties were still publishing for the same edition they were running. It was only a fucking issue when they dropped a new, mutually-exclusive product and Paizo appropriated their old one and made it an actual competitor.

Does anyone remember the latter half of the 3.X run? Nobody was buying fucking third-party material. What the hell were you going to do that for? There were like two hundred WotC sourcebooks you could spend your money on, first, and people actually let you use those at their gaming tables.

I am incredulous that anyone thought to kill the OGL as anything other than a bean-counting dontgiveafuck tweak. If anyone at Hasbro is hateful of it, it's gotta be 100% in retrospect, not an opinion they had formed when it was still their standing policy and they had the opportunity to make a new one with the next edition.

[mean_liar]

The OGL cost Hasbro only in the switch to 4e and partial player-base reversion to Pathfinder, but that was reason enough. They're competing against what is essentially their own product, and what they're doing is driven by smart business - I'm sure they have more data than we do on this. Without the Pathfinder reaction, 4e could've done much better and 5e for sure would be doing better.

This is why I think RPGs should be open license, basically treated like art. Massive budgets and backing doesn't lead to better games, just bigger ones and monetary incentives which are perverse with respect to gamers and games. I'm sure that After Sundown or any other amateur product could benefit from a larger budget (upgraded art, proof-reading, typesetting), but I don't think they need to be Hasbro big.

RPGs aren't boardgames. Naively perhaps, I believe they don't need high-end components and high-end budgets. They just need to be good.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Without the Pathfinder reaction, 4e could've done much better and 5e for sure would be doing better.

Pathfinder didn't really start to take off until late 2009, though; hell, their first core rulebook set came out late summer 2009. 4E D&D was caught in a death spiral before that.

4E D&D might have done better without Pathfinder around; but the best case scenario would've been more like squeezing out an extra year or two. Hell, you could make a case that 4E D&D only did as well as it did because Pathfinder was around.

This is why I think RPGs should be open license, basically treated like art. Massive budgets and backing doesn't lead to better games, just bigger ones and monetary incentives which are perverse with respect to gamers and games.

TTRPGs could benefit from large budgets, depending on how they spent their money. However, they should be using most of that money on research and promotional material. You know, shit like giving out free copies of the game to popular webcomic writers; flash animation series and promotional games and webcomics and tie-in novels; focus groups (actual focus groups, not self-selected fanboys); digital tools, so-on.

This of course doesn't change the fact that the base game needs to be good. The amount of money the Harry Potter and Star Wars franchise makes from book and movie sales isn't that huge, but if these things didn't get public goodwill in the first place they'd tank the follow-up lines of toys and video games and bedsheets.

Unfortunately for D&D, Hasbro has so much money and so many IPs it can churn through that it doesn't have to nurture any individual IP to be good enough to sell merch; all it has to do is wait for one of its IPs to catch on fire and then milk it for all its worth. I mean, really, in 2009 would anyone have predicted that MLP would soon evolve from 'lukewarm legacy franchise' to 'hot new talk of the town'?

Does anyone remember the latter half of the 3.X run? Nobody was buying fucking third-party material. What the hell were you going to do that for? There were like two hundred WotC sourcebooks you could spend your money on, first, and people actually let you use those at their gaming tables.

You know, I never even realized this until you pointed it out but third party material died a pretty ignominious death after 3.5E was released, didn't it? I distinctly remember using AEG and Relics and Rituals and Kingdoms of Kalamar and, because I fucking loved monks, Quintessential Mongoose material for the first few years. But after 3.5E D&D dropped it just kind of... stopped.

[souran]

Nobody gave a shit when the third parties were still publishing for the same edition they were running. It was only a fucking issue when they dropped a new, mutually-exclusive product and Paizo appropriated their old one and made it an actual competitor.

WOTC did becuase in 3.5 was when all the people with real money started producing 3rd party versions of their properties without paying WOTC a fucking dime. Blizzard paid a white wolf imprint to convert WOW into a campaign setting. Same thing with the everquest rpg, the SG1 rpg, L5R started doing all of its products as dual system. Seriously, the checkbooks opened after 3.5 came out and Hasbro saw everybody else raking in what they thought was their money.

Does anyone remember the latter half of the 3.X run? Nobody was buying fucking third-party material. What the hell were you going to do that for? There were like two hundred WotC sourcebooks you could spend your money on, first, and people actually let you use those at their gaming tables.

First, people did buy the stupid 3rd party crap. They were still their at every convention, they were still defending their cheesey cover art and terrible rules even as people were starting the edition war.

However, WOTC doesn't care if you play their game or use it as toilet paper. They don't care that your tiny little press company made a crappy "Maxtrix" rpg using the 3.5 rules. What they care about is that because anybody can print a rulebook that covers the basics of the 3.5 ruleset Universal pictures gave some shitty 3rd party the money and lisence for a crappy Matrix rpg instead of comming to Hasbro. Hasbro probably would have been happy if the crappy 3rd party rpg guys who were selling D&D knockoffs had to at least pay them a percentage but most of them got to sell whatever and pay nothing.

I am incredulous that anyone thought to kill the OGL as anything other than a bean-counting dontgiveafuck tweak. If anyone at Hasbro is hateful of it, it's gotta be 100% in retrospect, not an opinion they had formed when it was still their standing policy and they had the opportunity to make a new one with the next edition.

All you have to do is look at the GSL to see how much they hated the OGL. WOTC/Hasbro did hate it. The fact that 4E development started 1 year into 3.5 verifies that they hated it.

This site likes to point to the marketing campaign for 4E as what split hte playerbasse.

However, the split didn't really occur until after the 3rd party revolt. Even with the internet there wouldn't have been an edition war without one of the serious medium sized publishers picking up a variation of 3rd edition. 3.X would have withered away like everything else that goes through an edition change (Note how even though OWOD is a lot more popular than NWOD the internet was not able to "save" OWOD the way it "saved" 3.X")

Why did the 3rd parties revolt? Not because of how freaking draconian (in the legal sense, not the more usual game sense) the GSL is, but because WOTC decdied to screw them over before Gen Con just to make absolutely sure that everybody understood where they were on the totem pole.

WOTC hated the OGL, and the 3rd party printers who they to this day feel like were stealing what was rightfully theirs, that they didn't deliver the promised development package until it was far to late for them to be able to produce anything for GEN CON 08. Thats what caused Paizo to develop pathfinder. It didn't have anything to do with fan outcry.

[Username17]

I don't think WotC can produce a game that isn't OGL compatible. Look at the fucking OSR trolls in their dungeonous basements. They managed to take the OGL license for 3rd edition d20 materials and write addenda to them to total convert that shit into Advanced Dungeons & Fucking Dragons. There's no reason to do that, but they were legally allowed to do so and they did.

If people wanted to write OGL material that happened to be compatible with 4th edition or 5th edition, they could do that. They wouldn't be allowed to use the trademarks of those editions specifically, but they could always pull a Book of Erotic Fantasy and state "compatible with the world's largest fantasy roleplaying game!" or some shit.

You can't copyright game mechanics, and you're allowed to make whatever changes to a 3rd edition SRD monster that you want. Including rewriting it to have the rules of a fucking AD&D Monster Manual monster from 1977. Or giving it at-will and encounter abilities that happen to be on the same number scale that 4th edition uses if you want.

In fact, someone did pull an OSR on 4th edition - that's pretty much what 13th Age is, warts and all.

The only way WotC can be the big fish in the pond is producing a game that people like enough to want to imitate it. Otherwise, people will make their own games and someone will pull a White Wolf or a Paizo and become the biggest fish.

-Username17

[souran]

You can't copyright game mechanics, and you're allowed to make whatever changes to a 3rd edition SRD monster that you want. Including rewriting it to have the rules of a fucking AD&D Monster Manual monster from 1977. Or giving it at-will and encounter abilities that happen to be on the same number scale that 4th edition uses if you want.

The only way WotC can be the big fish in the pond is producing a game that people like enough to want to imitate it. Otherwise, people will make their own games and someone will pull a White Wolf or a Paizo and become the biggest fish.

-Username17

This is true as a matter of law of the land and in the world of consumers.

It is not true, however, in the minds of the guys running Hasbro. Like auto executives and southern rasists they are convinced that if they could just making things work like they used to in the good old days then everything would be great again. Sadly those days never really existed.

[Prak]

Nooooooooo! That site was really helpful. =(

Welp. Glad I got the app a while back.