Zero Buzz on 5E...Is It Dead Out The Gate?

[Night Goat]

Also, here's a PHB preview with some new art:
http://boingboing.net/2014/07/21/an-exc ... new-d.html

[Username17]

Also, here's a PHB preview with some new art:
http://boingboing.net/2014/07/21/an-exc ... new-d.html

Those poses are terrifying.

Wat.

It's like every joint and body part was draw separately. The overall pose appears to be impossible. Where is her right thigh or her left foot?

Other than that, it doesn't look terrible. It's a lot like 4e art, which I don't like, but with some extra texturing to make it look more like a painting and less like WoW concept art, and that's a move int he right direction. But it really is pretty apparent that these things are drawn in pieces rather than as compositions. It's kind of weird.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

Dufflepuds from Narnia just went core!

[Voss]

That warlock progression makes me angry. I don't care if they can use their spells slots infinitely (which doesn't even make sense) the fact that they start with 1 and slowly progress to 4 over 17 levels is bullshit, and its also completely out of sync with spells known. What the fuck do you even do with 10 spells known over 5 spell levels when you still only have 2 spell slots?

I also very much dislike (and this is present in the 4 base classes) that your Real Class Feature doesn't even show up until level 2.

And a better fighter than a wizard because light armor and simple weapons is just... no. The only simple finesse weapon is a dagger and light crossbow is available to both, so that is what both classes fucking use and they attack with the same damn bonus. Except the wizard is also a high elf, so uses a short sword. And the wizard just casts fucking mage armor (especially at higher levels when his first level spell slots are worth nothing), and enjoys a 13+dex AC rather than a 12+dex AC. And maybe casts blur, just to rub the disadvantage on all attacks in. And laughs, because if the warlock did that, he'd be out of spells unless he was 11th goddamn level.

So far, the warlock is a trick or treat halfling. The tiefling is actually a bad choice because the int bonus is useless. If the playtest is any guide, the other warlock race is drow. Maybe half elf, but that might be horribly shitty.

[corneliusphi]

I've been asking at gaming stores whether 5th edition is selling well, and so far everyone I've asked (yes n = only 2) has said that it is in fact selling well. Does anyone know if we can get concrete numbers yet on how it is doing?

[Voss]

Since the starter set has been out a week, and the players handbook doesn't come out for another month, no. Real numbers aren't an option.

The amazon sales ranks for sf/fantasy gaming have it at number 1 (and the unreleased 5e books at 2,3 and 4), with pathfinder at #16. But there is a bunch of Minecraft guides and a WoW novel in between, so what that might be worth is...questionable at best.
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Book ... _3_16215_1

[Lago PARANOIA]

http://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2014/03 ... agons.html

Only the starter set is for sale right now. However, the fact that they're asking $50 for a book of similar size and production values of one that only cost $35/book 6 years earlier and when U.S. inflation averages at 1.4% annual since then is fucking ridiculous. A $120 asking price for all three books to keep up with inflation is reasonable, $150 is not. Especially since the previous edition went down in flames.

EDIT: The artwork for 5E isn't awful or anything, but, it just screams Pathfinder-style. C'mon, guys.

[Username17]

Not only are the primary books not yet for sale, but the industry in general and WotC in particular are known for playing weird games to obfuscate numbers. And I'm not even talking about Hundreds of Thousands. Wizards of the Coast made two very tiny print runs of the 4th edition Player's Handbook even though the first printing didn't sell out. In order to be able to announce that the product was selling well and they had just entered a third printing. Pathfinder one upped even that, making a first printing of Pathfinder that was equal in number to the online pre-orders, thus ensuring that they could truthfully announce that the first printing "had sold out" before they even started shipping books to stores.

So I would expect the 5th edition people to pull similar bullshit. Possibly even better levels of obfuscation. I don't know if they'll go as far as the Church of Scientology (which buys its own books through public channels in order to inflate their sales rank), but it wouldn't especially surprise me at this point. 4th edition managed to have more "pre-orders" than 3rd edition did, by dint of calculating that number in a different and more favorable fashion.

-Username17

[corneliusphi]

Ok so I'm going to preface this comment by saying that I don't even like D&D that much, because I don't want to be accused of being a shill. I'm just interested in the RPG industry and by the question posed by this thread.

It seems like one of you posted a comment about how you personally wouldn't be willing to spend as much as is being asked, which seems fairly irrelevant, and the other posted information that is actually weak support for it doing well (given that list of products for that Amazon category I would be frankly shocked if the starter set was not at the top of the list).

This thread seems to have largely consisted of posts of why the new edition of D&D *shouldn't* sell well or doesn't deserve to sell well. Now that at least a couple parts of it are actually for sale any arguments of that sort seem moderately irrelevant to the question at hand. Even if this is a terrible game it can still avoid being a commercial flop. Does anyone have info relevant to that question, or do we just have to wait for numbers to come out?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Now that at least a couple parts of it are actually for sale any arguments of that sort seem moderately irrelevant to the question at hand.

Sales of the boxed set aren't particularly convincing to me about the health of and therefore the success of 5E D&D. If 5E D&D's boxed set is between 'great success' and 'smelly turkey' it probably won't mean anything; I mean, yes, it'll generate buzz/razzes and give us a preview of fan interest, but it could just mean that the boxed set sucks or is uncommonly good or people don't want to pay money for the milk when they could have the cow for free or they're just not aware of the product line currently.

Sales of the core three books by the end of the year, that is when judgment is ultimately passed.

[codeGlaze]

Also, here's a PHB preview with some new art:
http://boingboing.net/2014/07/21/an-exc ... new-d.html

Fuck.

They went back to that shitty art style from original 3e.

And what the FUCK?!

[Voss]

Ok so I'm going to preface this comment by saying that I don't even like D&D that much, because I don't want to be accused of being a shill. I'm just interested in the RPG industry and by the question posed by this thread.

It seems like one of you posted a comment about how you personally wouldn't be willing to spend as much as is being asked, which seems fairly irrelevant, and the other posted information that is actually weak support for it doing well (given that list of products for that Amazon category I would be frankly shocked if the starter set was not at the top of the list).

This thread seems to have largely consisted of posts of why the new edition of D&D *shouldn't* sell well or doesn't deserve to sell well. Now that at least a couple parts of it are actually for sale any arguments of that sort seem moderately irrelevant to the question at hand. Even if this is a terrible game it can still avoid being a commercial flop. Does anyone have info relevant to that question, or do we just have to wait for numbers to come out?

We have to wait. But I'm not certain I agree with Lago about the end of the year, for the main reason that the DMG isn't scheduled until fucking november, so 5e isn't actually complete in its basic rules (really, exploration, getting lost and tracking have a 'see DMG' reference in the Basic Rules PDF) until the end of the year. At that point people will be able to get the full picture, and then a couple months after that, we'll see real numbers in february/march.

Now, I fully expect that everyone here but Cyberzombie will be able to go through the Players Handbook and seriously be able to determine the ultimate fate of the game (and the PDF is a prelude of things to come with bad math, One True Class/Race combos, and a level of disinterest that can only be called apathy). But the 'global judgement' will wait until the entire game is out, and people shake it down.

However, as far as sales go, initial sales are where its at. 4e also sold relatively well in release month, because the Name Recognition draws people in, and gamers love to draw their own conclusions, which means looking (and often buying) the first book so they can see for themselves. So morbid curiosity is actually a sales benefit for WotC.

On the other hand, the basic structure of the three books is such that there is the Player's Handbook and then for most of a gaming group, the Books That Are Not For You. Non-DMs don't need MMs and DMGs and that has a negative impact of sales of those books (which is why most companies don't sell things that way anymore, at least not a DMG, even if they still do bestiaries).

The other big factor is I'm not sure that a commercial flop matters, to anyone. WotC essentially broke the brand last time around, and its been on hiatus for several years now, and their former magazine publisher took over the Fantasy RPG market. It is also, to the parent company, not something they give a shit about. Magic the Gathering matters because it broke the $50 million mark (which is the point that they actually care about a property), and as far as Hasbro is concerned, D&D is the WotC pet project, which they don't care enough to axe as long as it isn't actively in the red (or otherwise taking away from Magic money).

Personally, I my prediction is this: After a couple months of moderate interest, 5e is going to fail to meet its sales goals (or they seriously lowballed the goals in the first place) and the 2nd and 3rd year releases are going to be scaled back and its going to going into hiatus again at year 4 or 5. At which point they're either going to (or possibly have already decided to) relaunch them game yet again somewhere in 2019-2020, or Hasbro is going to tell them to bury the main game, make board games and keep the novels, or say fuck it and sell the whole package. But by and large the consumer reaction is going to be 'meh' and people will forget about all the lessons they didn't learn from 3e and 4e. And at no point will anyone learn basic math.

Just the fact that they are reaching back to 2e for something (despite the fact that 2e fans are rabid and stick to that game like its a fucking cursed diamond or moved on decades ago) tells me they have no idea what the fuck they are doing. Some of the best bits of 3rd were discarded as too complicated, player choice was discarded as badwrongfun optimization ruins everything!, and the lesson they took from 4e was apparently that bad math should be carried forward and is inexplicably not grounds for firing a talentless hack.

[infected slut princess]

Also, here's a PHB preview with some new art:
http://boingboing.net/2014/07/21/an-exc ... new-d.html

Those poses are terrifying.

Wat.

It's like every joint and body part was draw separately. The overall pose appears to be impossible. Where is her right thigh or her left foot?

Other than that, it doesn't look terrible. It's a lot like 4e art, which I don't like, but with some extra texturing to make it look more like a painting and less like WoW concept art, and that's a move int he right direction. But it really is pretty apparent that these things are drawn in pieces rather than as compositions. It's kind of weird.

-Username17

This is crap. She has man hands. I prefer the days when fantasy art had hot chicks and studly dudes. These people are fucking ugly. If I saw a game with this art work I would totally never want to play it. Absolute shit. But I bet mike Mearls has lots of weird lotions at his desk and he frequently closes the door to his office so he can mastorbatorz to this picture

[Krusk]

I actually really like most of the art I've seen. Even the stuff in this thread. Especially in comparison to any edition of DND (maybe not PF) printed to date.

As to whether or not its selling, my FLGS has a giant box pile of the starters and as far as I can tell either hasn't sold a single one or restocks it frequently. They apparently took the pile down from their website (indications?), but they had it the night before release. I checked in 2-3 days later and over the weekend and its looked the same.

They do post sales records though, on a quarterly basis.

http://gamesandstuffonline.com/index.ph ... Itemid=139

Downside - They don't break down editions of RPGs. So I assume all my 3.5 stuff and general stuff pools into it.

Upside - Kobolds ate my baby outsold Bears pretty well. Which should be embarrassing on a pretty severe level.

[ishy]

However, as far as sales go, initial sales are where its at. 4e also sold relatively well in release month,

Relative to what?
The sales number of all the 'core books' (phb, dmg, mm, phb2, adventure's vault) in 4e is hundreds of thousands, correct?

That is really poor compared to 3E; 3E sold 300.000 copies of just the PHB in the first month.

[Voss]

However, as far as sales go, initial sales are where its at. 4e also sold relatively well in release month,

Relative to what?

Relative to after. Or, really to most other RPGs.

I'm not saying 4e sold well, just that the lion's share of sales were at the very front, and we're likely to see that again.

[Username17]

However, as far as sales go, initial sales are where its at. 4e also sold relatively well in release month,

Relative to what?
The sales number of all the 'core books' (phb, dmg, mm, phb2, adventure's vault) in 4e is hundreds of thousands, correct?

That is really poor compared to 3E; 3E sold 300.000 copies of just the PHB in the first month.

4th edition had the largest initial sales of any edition of D&D ever. Now, I forget how exactly they defined that, but it's pretty clear from today's standpoint that they made a careful definition of initial sales to make that be true. Kind of like how 5th edition Shadowrun boldly announces that it has more direct online sales than any other Shadowrun books (note: the best selling Shadowrun books were never sold directly online at all).

It's in a company's interest to convince stakeholders that the product is popular enough to warrant investment in. I would be very surprised if 5th edition can't figure out some baroque statistic that it beats 3rd edition in, no matter how much of turkey it is. 4th edition was dead on arrival, but they still managed to come up with "true" facts about how it was beating the pants off 3rd edition for nearly a year.

Actually, for more than a year. They were hyping their preorders before release in 2008, and people unpacked their bullshit in July-August of 2009. So they managed to spread confusion on the issue to the point that people who weren't in the company weren't sure they had met with catastophic failure for like fourteen months. If 5e is merely mildly disappointing, they can probably keep the masquerade going for longer than that. We could seriously not know whether 5e had performed badly or not for almost two years.

-Username17

[ishy]

Are you talking about this :

Bill Slavicsek[/url]] As I write this, it’s the two-month anniversary of the launch of the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I thought I’d take a moment to tell you how we’re doing. The excitement around the new edition is still as strong as it was at launch, and we anticipate carrying that excitement through Gen Con, PAX, and beyond as new products roll out and the full scope of the power of the edition becomes evident. From a business perspective, the core rulebooks are already well into their third printing, the H1 and H2 adventures are both in reprint. The new Dungeon Tiles product, DU1 Halls of the Giant Kings, is almost gone from our inventory less than one month after going on sale. This means that, using the current trends, we’re going to crush our original projections for 4th Edition in 2008!

Because notably absent there is any comparison to previous editions.

[Cyberzombie]

Now, I fully expect that everyone here but Cyberzombie will be able to go through the Players Handbook and seriously be able to determine the ultimate fate of the game (and the PDF is a prelude of things to come with bad math, One True Class/Race combos, and a level of disinterest that can only be called apathy). But the 'global judgement' will wait until the entire game is out, and people shake it down.

I don't need to see the Player's handbook, the basic online pdf and the few monsters they released were enough. This edition is going to suck. But not because of the hobgoblin. Sadly, the hobgoblin is the exception, and not the rule.

It's actually the ogre and Nothic that shows us why this edition is going to be bad. It's 4E design principles all over again. Massive buckets of HP with abysmal damage. The ogre takes literally over 4 hits to kill itself on average and the nothic is just as bad if not worse. We can also see how little damage the fighter and rogue are capable of doing too, so they're basically playing 4E. They'll be grinding forever doing ridiculously small amounts of damage. An 18 strength fighter takes 5 average hits to down an ogre with a greatsword. So now imagine what the trolls, dragons and balors are going to be like.

The only X-factor with the player's handbook is going to be the spells. Either the casters gets save-or-die and you're playing 4E with a 3.5 wizard, or all the save or dies are removed or made into damage spells. In either case, whatever the wizard is doing is going to be way better than what the fighter is doing, as the existing wizard's spells out damage the fighter and can hit multiple targets.

[Voss]

.... we already know what the spells are like. Save or dies are damage:
disintegrate, for example, is 10d6+40, save for 0. But the wizard gets exactly 1 of those at 13th level and it stays at 1 until 19th level. Finger of Death is 7d8+30, save for half. And free zombie if you kill it (and it is humanoid), but whatever, since I take that to mean bog standard zombie and not a zombie you'd actually care about at 15th level.

The real problem is the spells aren't very interesting. A few bonuses here and there, advantage/disadvantage, but mostly just damage. And a 3rd level combat rez. They're really computer game spells, as most of the interesting or complex spell effects just don't exist.


But unsurprisingly, again, your math is bad (and trying to frame it as a fighter vs ogre fight is ridiculous on the basic principles of the game). The ogre is 59 hp and AC 11. If the party takes more than 2 rounds killing that, they're doing it wrong. Everybody is inherently hitting on 6s, a greatsword fighter and rogue are doing about 11 damage each hit, and the cleric and wizard (assuming they don't break out the spells) will do 7.5 each. which is easily 26-31 per round, depending on who misses, and no one uses any abilities worth mentioning. As an ogre by itself isn't quite a challenging fight for a 2nd level party (about 90 xp short of that bracket) this is actually a reasonable encounter, and its over in 2 or 3 rounds. Hardly a long slog.

And regardless of what it can do to itself, it takes 2 hits to drop a level appropriate PC (which is level 2, if you don't understand what challenge: 2 means). It really does appropriate damage to the party.. Which notably hobgoblins, as they're doing 2 points less than that as Challenge 1/2 creatures (which means they come in, at minimum, pairs, for level 1 parties) are really not.

Now it isn't particularly interesting, but its a much more appropriate challenge for a party than the hobgoblins are for a 1st level party. Particularly if you add some things to fill out the the rest of the xp, a few goblins or a trap or whatever. Anything that adds something more to the resulting fight than dog pile on the ogre, oh looks its round 3, congrats all around.


Now something that I had missed previously which really does screw the fighter, is they changed short rest to be an hour rather than 5 minutes. Which is a crazy insane recharge time for second wind and action surge, which entirely diminishes the utility of fighters that are below level 5.


I picked that up while watching a play through of the Mines of Phandelver (which I understand is the starter box adventure).
If anyone is interested, here is episode 3 (episode 1 and 2 are long and wordy for essentially 1 small goblin fight each, and some in-character mucking about. Though fair warning, I haven't actually watched 3 yet):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJSjDl6 ... ZyPuBzEwZg

[Dean]

It's actually a really cute video in how exactly it meets your expectations. The party starts to be murdered after a Bugbear and a Goblin both basically one shot kill a PC apiece. After that the DM starts contorting the rules to allow the party to continue to live. You can really sense how "Mother May I" the edition is once the DM starts giving every monster disadvantage for no reason and using the nonexistent skill and action rules to allow the players to do things like "Hide in water, jump out of the water and shoot, hide again underwater all in one turn with no negatives and making every monster roll twice to attack you".

[Username17]

Are you talking about this :

Bill Slavicsek[/url]] As I write this, it’s the two-month anniversary of the launch of the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I thought I’d take a moment to tell you how we’re doing. The excitement around the new edition is still as strong as it was at launch, and we anticipate carrying that excitement through Gen Con, PAX, and beyond as new products roll out and the full scope of the power of the edition becomes evident. From a business perspective, the core rulebooks are already well into their third printing, the H1 and H2 adventures are both in reprint. The new Dungeon Tiles product, DU1 Halls of the Giant Kings, is almost gone from our inventory less than one month after going on sale. This means that, using the current trends, we’re going to crush our original projections for 4th Edition in 2008!

Because notably absent there is any comparison to previous editions.

I think it was actually GamerZero who claimed that there were more pre-orders of 4th edition D&D than any previous edition or had a better selling opening week or whatever the fuck it was he said. I can't find the original quote right now and don't really care. The point is that they were announcing things that were just barely true in an attempt to portray the game as doing well for quite a long time.

4vengers had a lot of meat to claim that people who were dubious of 4e's success were "in denial." I am totally confident in predicting that whatever fanbase 5e acquires will have official quotes to claim that D&DNext is a huge success and will continue spouting them well after it's obvious that the edition has stumbled.

Now I personally wouldn't be surprised if 5e did better than 4e. Once the evidence came to light, I was shocked at how poorly 4e had done. I had predicted that, bad game or not, it would stagger on being the edition de jure for at least five years. That it would have a hail mary half edition and still be down and out in 3 years was worse than my most pessimistic predictions. And it's very difficult for me to imagine 5e doing that badly, just as it was very difficult for me to imagine 4e doing that badly even when it was happening.

-Username17

[zugschef]

5th edition will probably do better than 4th edition based on the fact alone, that 3rd edition is now another 6 years older.

[TiaC]

5th edition will probably do better than 4th edition based on the fact alone, that 3rd edition is now another 6 years older.

Yeah, but PF is firmly established this time.

[Cyberzombie]

But unsurprisingly, again, your math is bad (and trying to frame it as a fighter vs ogre fight is ridiculous on the basic principles of the game). The ogre is 59 hp and AC 11. If the party takes more than 2 rounds killing that, they're doing it wrong. Everybody is inherently hitting on 6s, a greatsword fighter and rogue are doing about 11 damage each hit, and the cleric and wizard (assuming they don't break out the spells) will do 7.5 each. which is easily 26-31 per round, depending on who misses, and no one uses any abilities worth mentioning. As an ogre by itself isn't quite a challenging fight for a 2nd level party (about 90 xp short of that bracket) this is actually a reasonable encounter, and its over in 2 or 3 rounds. Hardly a long slog.

Wow, busting out the 4vengers arguments in force here. I feel like I'm back on the WotC forums. Are you going to tell me to run minion-only encounters next to speed up my games?

Look, one ogre against a 2nd level party isn't an encounter. It's a massacre. Maybe it won't take that long, but that's because it's so trivial, there's no tension at all. If that's all you throw at your PCs, they're going to be bored of out their skulls anyway, because crap like that is barely even worth the trouble of picking up dice at all for. Try building any kind of reasonably challenging encounters out of ogres and tell me it's not going to be a 4E-style grind.