D&D 5e has failed

[MGuy]

So does this mean Hasbro actually cares about wotc or they just noticed that there seem to be no plans for producing actual in house material?

[erik]

I want to make hay of his last name, but I'll take the high road, until the temptation overwhelms me.

Anywho, I'm a bit discouraged that they continue their trend of hiring people only within arm's reach. I guess the big question is whether he's a 5ucker, a 4rry, a 3tard, or 2upid. Doesn't look old enough to be a 1oser (or whatever clever 1337ism 1st edition has).

[CapnTthePirateG]

I think you guys are far too hopeful about this, personally.

I mean, while Magic is still making bank there are probably not going to be large overhauls at WotC. The D&D brand is now surviving on licensing (as I understand it) and they are making yet another movie in the hope of cashing in.

I'm also not sure where they think they are getting the fanbase from, because 5e has its own little brand of "rules R bad" diehards who will probably not be impressed by a game we think is good, and vice versa. I have no idea where the 4e fanbase ended up, and the 3.5 fanbase is either holding out on sites like this one or playing Pathfinder.

Granted, its way too early to tell if steps are being made to make 6e not suck, but I'd imagine more devs would be brought on.

[Dogbert]

I want to make hay of his last name, but I'll take the high road, until the temptation overwhelms me.

Someone was gonna end up doing it anyway...

[MisterDee]

If the guy ends up sacking Mearls and SKR, can this image become the official Den mascot?

[Mechalich]

I'm also not sure where they think they are getting the fanbase from, because 5e has its own little brand of "rules R bad" diehards who will probably not be impressed by a game we think is good, and vice versa. I have no idea where the 4e fanbase ended up, and the 3.5 fanbase is either holding out on sites like this one or playing Pathfinder.

A successful edition of D&D is not dependent on having good rules. It's still the most powerful IP in TTRPGs and its not like there are a whole lot of competitors with corporate backing in the league of WotC. Having to compete with Paizo is a thing - but it's a manageable thing. 5e pretending to offer a system that was less intensive and requiring less system mastery and effort to play was not necessarily a bad idea. 5e's biggest problem is not that it fails on its own terms as a system, but that it's abandonware and isn't linked to any cool pitch (which is compounded by 4e blowing the Forgotten Realms up).

Heck, I'd bet you could still salvage 5e to a degree if you managed to market a suitably cool new setting for it or rebooted an old one with a suitably hardcore following like Planescape.

[Prak]

And then what?

Like it or not, 5e is the current flagship D&D product. Now you could reorganize the department, purge the game designers who aren't actually designing games, bring in new people with new ideas, and start releasing splatbooks with rules for shit, but you're still chained to the bad design decisions of D&D 5e and people will riot if you release a new edition after a year.

Well, step one is to not announce the new edition until you have salable product. D&D pulled a really stupid move when they announced 4e before it was finished and then asked people to continue buying 3e stuff because they needed to remain financially solvent until they had new shit. So WotC needs to put marketing on promoting 5e, and R&D on making a new edition. And by R&D, I mean the R&D people they hire after booting the 5e crew.

Alternatively, what they could do is rebrand 5e as D&D Basic, and then get competent designers, maybe MtG designers that they've gotten drunk and then asked "hypotheticals," to make D&D Advanced with actual rules instead of "roll a d20, add a small number, ask your GM if that's enough."

If the guy ends up sacking Mearls and SKR, can this image become the official Den mascot?

I second this.

[DSMatticus]

A quick glance at Chris Cocks' past employment suggests he was brought on to fix WotC's abysmal digital offerings. If so, he's operating on a very specific mandate, and I think he'll be hesitant to make big changes outside of that mandate.

[Username17]

Well, step one is to not announce the new edition until you have salable product. D&D pulled a really stupid move when they announced 4e before it was finished and then asked people to continue buying 3e stuff because they needed to remain financially solvent until they had new shit. So WotC needs to put marketing on promoting 5e, and R&D on making a new edition.

Meh. I think they probably sold some extra copies of Fiend Folio and Savage Species because 3.5 had been announced and there were some previews in the book. People actually fucking bought those 4e preview books with actual money. Having a release schedule that includes some world books and shit that have teasers for what the new edition is going to do is totally reasonable. It makes money and hypes the new edition. I would say one of the big issues that 5th edition had is they didn't release anything in the runup to release. Yes, they put those insultingly bad web articles up in places, but the reality is that even in the second decade of the 21st century, Dungeons and Dragons is still a game played with books by people who meet up in book stores. So trying to do everything through web articles and Amazon sales is fucking doomed from the get-go.

The lead time from inception to release of 3rd edition was 3 years. The ball was started rolling soon after WotC bought TSR in 1997 and they released in 2000. Now, obviously they had a bunch of D&D veterans who had been working with the previous edition for literally a decade, so the development time was sort of much much longer than that. But if you are willing to go back to a lot of 3rd edition core concepts (which you obviously should be), then those same advantages are even more available now. The internet lets us share our homebrew concepts and see who has a big block of homebrew concepts brewing. And 3rd edition is old enough to drive a car. People who learned to read on a 3rd edition Monster Manual the way I did on an AD&D Monster Manual are old enough to write D&D content today. To say that D&D couldn't get a new good edition on the table in less than 3 years today is simply wrong. They could do it in a year and a half if they started with a decent crew and had a reasonable set of design goals.

And if they spent the year and a half leading up to the release of their new edition putting out setting books that hinted at new edition concepts they were going to push, that would be reasonable and also probably sell better than the nothing they are putting out at the moment.

The 3rd edition system pretty much works for low level play on both sides of the DM screen. The game needs kingdom management and high level combat to work better (some uncharitable types might say "at all") and that's going to take some fundamental changes to how things are done. But there are lots of homebrew concepts out there which overhaul things in one or more ways that solve your key issues. It's not terribly hard to pick one and iron out the new issues they bring in. At least, not when you have a five person team working full time who are able and willing to math hammer shit.

-Username17

[Korwin]

people will riot if you release a new edition after a year.

That would only happen, if enough People would care about 5e. Also it's more than an year allready (at least I think so) and it would take some time, if they wanted to design/bring out 6e...

[zugschef]

They could simply make a new edition of AD&D and not declare 5E officially dead.

[MGuy]

What would they even do with a 5.5edition? Add rules? No because then all the no rules = good game people will be mad. Add content? Then all the people praising 5th for the lack of content will be mad. I don't know what you could do with 5e that actual 5e fans would want. Every fucking 5e fan are not just complacent with 5e's lack of content but see it as a feature. I've seen people call it genius that wotc has basically let 5e sit practically unsupported.

[violence in the media]

What would they even do with a 5.5edition? Add rules? No because then all the no rules = good game people will be mad. Add content? Then all the people praising 5th for the lack of content will be mad. I don't know what you could do with 5e that actual 5e fans would want. Every fucking 5e fan are not just complacent with 5e's lack of content but see it as a feature. I've seen people call it genius that wotc has basically let 5e sit practically unsupported.

Goodness. Whatever would WotC do if the dozens of people that actually enjoyed the vaporware/abandonware state of 5e had to continue playing it with the knowledge that WotC was no longer not supporting D&D and had moved on?

[MGuy]

Yes those people who make up the bulk of your current fans. The people you are actually banking on buying anything with the 5e label on it. How do you get those people to actually buy more 5e after you sink it?

[mlangsdorf]

There's always a tension, when releasing new product, between attracting new customers and alienating old ones. If the current customer base is too small, it's more profitable to alienate the current customers and replace them with new ones.

If your customer base are people who think, "the product is perfect and I don't need or want to buy anything else," then you almost definitionally have to alienate them in order to make new profits. They've already said they don't want anything for you. They aren't really your customers any more and you can't make any more money off them. Find some new customers.

Pathfinder demonstrates there is a huge market for D&D type supplements. D&D 6 or Advanced D&D 4 or whatever you want to call it should plan for classplosion and capitalize on that market. The current fans of D&D 5e might be upset, but they're not worth any money so why would WotC worry about catering to them?

[Eikre]

AD&D was ostensibly complementary to a "basic" set. You can write an "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: 5th Edition" under the pretense that 5E is still current and relevant. It's not like it's some byzantine rules-dense backlog that all need to be accounted for when you write your expansions; 5E's chief inadequacy is that it is, in fact, full of gaping voids. Write a Rules Cyclopedia with sidebars to explain where you've thrown out shitty rules that actually did exist in the basic set, and then move on with your life.

[deaddmwalking]

I'd go with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition.

Sure, it'd cause some confusion, but it could attract all the gamers that think a prior edition was the 'best' (either AD&D 1st and 2nd or 3.x).

[Prak]

Yeah, I really think that WotC would be better served by making some kind of "Experienced" expansion, rather than an all new edition. They can maintain 5e with sparing supplements and a glut of adventures and let it be the "Intro and Beer&Pretzels" product, and then produce a more mechanically complex product to try to recapture the 3rd edition crowd.

[Chamomile]

AD&D 3rd edition is a potentially good strategy. An alternative that's even more stealth mode would be to hide new rules in the adventure paths that have been the only thing they've consistently released. So far the only new rules contained in any of them have been a handful of new monsters and magic items, and not even particularly interesting monsters and magic items, but the very fist Tiamat-focused path did make some feeble gestures towards a sub-system to do with local politics. Going further in that direction might allow you to write new rules even if "no rules supplements" was an explicit corporate directive.

[Dogbert]

Goodness. Whatever would WotC do if the dozens of people that actually enjoyed the vaporware/abandonware state of 5e had to continue playing it with the knowledge that WotC was no longer not supporting D&D and had moved on?

It's not that people didn't play it, lots of people seem to do. The problem is that no one is buying it. Even if it suddenly became a presidential mandate to play (or worse, love) 5E, to WotC it still means jackshit if no one is putting their money where their mouth is.

Money-wise, WotC has nothing to lose by alienating the 5uckers, but WotC has no faith in d&d anymore, and it's probably no longer willing to send any more money in d&d's way beyond commissioning canned adventures to keep their product in life support.

d&d has hit the tabletop equivalent of "Maintenance Mode," and MM is a one-way ticket. Knowing Hasbro, it's amazing they haven't decided to finally disband WotC's d&d division and can the I.P for a decade in order to give people time to forget and miss it properly before re-launching it for a new generation.

[erik]

Hasbro must not be looking too hard, since if an exec at Hasbro and saw their D&D line failing hard while team members were openly wasting money and working on company time for their own projects to sell privately, there ought be a cleansing of firings right away. It seems like the only fix at this point is to get rid of the entire culture down to the roots- which should be pretty easy now since the entire team will fit in a van.

Whoever they hire to start anew, they should definitely set up a D&D office nowhere near the chucklefuck factory that Seattle has become after they find some new blood. Cocks could take the show over to Atlanta or something.

[CapnTthePirateG]

This is assuming that word gets to Cocks at all about the state of the product.

I will be eagerly watching post June 6.

[violence in the media]

So, basically, we're all hopefully waiting for Cocks to give WotC a good reaming?

[Ferret]

Maybe they can import some of the Magic talent, now that there's an official Magic: The Gathering setting document for D&D 5e, based on the Zendikar set and The Art of Magic The Gathering?

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/ar ... 2016-04-27

[CapnTthePirateG]

They should have statted up the Eldrazi Titans.

Emrakul is not a match for the Tarrasque statswise.