OSSR: 4th edition D&D.
Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2018 7:11 am
This is a personal consideration of the
4th edition Dungeons & Dragons
Disclaimer: I am not a fan of the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons, but I wanted it to be so good. Fuckers broke my heart.
Note: You can buy these things cheap on amazon and places, originals, still haven't sold out. Second hand ones go for a couple bucks each. Do not include the approximately two hundred pages of bullshit errata they need to be compliant with later expansion material (let alone the actual errata that fixed a few sizable problems), but whatever.
What lead here, as well as I've been able to decipher it from various sources.
2001: Peak sales for 3rd edition D&D, and also for all of D&D ever, easily beating the previous 1981 peak. Black & white softcover splatbooks, a few mechanically dodgy hardcover expansions, the legendary 3e FRCS tome, the original adventure path, and peak in core book sales after the Aug 2000 launch. Gave D&D a seat at the big kids' table at Hasbro.
2003: Having finished with all the good books, the 3.5 sub-edition is an attempt to repeat that sales peak by reprinting them all with trivial changes in more expensive formats. Probably thrown together in about six months, it doesn't work, sales continue to decline, though the more expensive new book format maintains individual profitability. The company clearly fails to distinguish between what's good for a particular book, against what's good for the game as a whole, and have no feel at all of the latter.
2005: Having finished the reformating, Eberron and everything else just following a traditional mid-edition decline in gross sales, management needs something new. They are required by corporate structure to have $100 million dollars of in-house sales per year, every year, to hold onto the full in-house development team. They do not have that. Rob Heinsoo has been sent from the D&D Miniatures division to join the lead team, as they have bigger sales than the D&D division at this point in time. By Hasbro rules, their combined sales don't count (because D&D Minis is a "different game"), nor do CRPGs or the novels or, well, anything really, which is nuts, but there it is.
I reconstruct the grand plan roughly as follows.
I wanted to read what the developers were writing on Gleemax, but it kept dragging my fairly modern computer to a dead stall while doing so, and it was obviously a mess compared to the old wizards.com webface.
tw: murder.
There's more than all that, if you dig around. The problems at late D&D 3rd edition (and right through 4th edition) are the same scale of problems TSR had on the way to bankruptcy in late 2nd edition, and it produced the same shit books that were not fun to play D&D with. But basically, they had no fucking idea what most people even did when playing D&D any more, no idea what the things they were selling were being used for, and were hyper-focused on oddities of the Hasbro corporate structure that buried the very idea of ever selling a complete RPG product. Then they started designing 4th edition, under the code name Orcus, and things got catastrophically worse.
4th edition Dungeons & Dragons
- Monster Manual 1
- Player's Handbook 1
- Dungeon Master's Guide 1
Disclaimer: I am not a fan of the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons, but I wanted it to be so good. Fuckers broke my heart.
Note: You can buy these things cheap on amazon and places, originals, still haven't sold out. Second hand ones go for a couple bucks each. Do not include the approximately two hundred pages of bullshit errata they need to be compliant with later expansion material (let alone the actual errata that fixed a few sizable problems), but whatever.
What lead here, as well as I've been able to decipher it from various sources.
2001: Peak sales for 3rd edition D&D, and also for all of D&D ever, easily beating the previous 1981 peak. Black & white softcover splatbooks, a few mechanically dodgy hardcover expansions, the legendary 3e FRCS tome, the original adventure path, and peak in core book sales after the Aug 2000 launch. Gave D&D a seat at the big kids' table at Hasbro.
2003: Having finished with all the good books, the 3.5 sub-edition is an attempt to repeat that sales peak by reprinting them all with trivial changes in more expensive formats. Probably thrown together in about six months, it doesn't work, sales continue to decline, though the more expensive new book format maintains individual profitability. The company clearly fails to distinguish between what's good for a particular book, against what's good for the game as a whole, and have no feel at all of the latter.
2005: Having finished the reformating, Eberron and everything else just following a traditional mid-edition decline in gross sales, management needs something new. They are required by corporate structure to have $100 million dollars of in-house sales per year, every year, to hold onto the full in-house development team. They do not have that. Rob Heinsoo has been sent from the D&D Miniatures division to join the lead team, as they have bigger sales than the D&D division at this point in time. By Hasbro rules, their combined sales don't count (because D&D Minis is a "different game"), nor do CRPGs or the novels or, well, anything really, which is nuts, but there it is.
In reality, the randomised pre-pained plastic D&D miniatures in the minis game were mostly being bought in very large quantities by unboxers who resold what people actually wanted for their current D&D games on ebay at a good profit. No one at WotC seemed to know this, nor did they understand the lag in market response when they changed to a cheaper, crappier, painting scheme, and most of the unboxers got caught holding a lot of unwanted product that D&D minis department thought had sold just fine.
They never did fix the painting back up. Never saw it as a problem. Didn't show up in their sales figures you see, so they could ignore those comments. Some other excuse was found somewhere. Exemplifies every response they had to 4e.
Hell, there is zero market research, Mearls once said there hadn't been any for D&D between the 3e playtest ending and the web surveys he did during the 5e playtest, and no one in house knew how to even try doing it (handily explaining Divine Metamagic going core in 3.5, and how they just kept on nerfing Fighters, because you know, lots of people want to play Fighters, so nerf!). By 2005 they reject everything so carefully surveyed from '96-'99 about what players actually do with the full game over years of play, declaring the past is a foreign country, and go with a model of what draws the most comments and epic cheering threads on their message boards (which is obviously just five fa/tg/uy trolling everyone else after learning to game the moderators), plus guesswork from other things that are popular at that time, and a seemingly distorted look at individual book sales numbers.
How could it not be a disaster, really?
They never did fix the painting back up. Never saw it as a problem. Didn't show up in their sales figures you see, so they could ignore those comments. Some other excuse was found somewhere. Exemplifies every response they had to 4e.
Hell, there is zero market research, Mearls once said there hadn't been any for D&D between the 3e playtest ending and the web surveys he did during the 5e playtest, and no one in house knew how to even try doing it (handily explaining Divine Metamagic going core in 3.5, and how they just kept on nerfing Fighters, because you know, lots of people want to play Fighters, so nerf!). By 2005 they reject everything so carefully surveyed from '96-'99 about what players actually do with the full game over years of play, declaring the past is a foreign country, and go with a model of what draws the most comments and epic cheering threads on their message boards (which is obviously just five fa/tg/uy trolling everyone else after learning to game the moderators), plus guesswork from other things that are popular at that time, and a seemingly distorted look at individual book sales numbers.
How could it not be a disaster, really?
I reconstruct the grand plan roughly as follows.
- Only core books sell enough, so they'll sell core books every year, a MM, a PHB, and a DMG.
- Every class will have an ability structure that can be readily added to so everyone can use each new PHB.
- Monsters must be constantly re-printable in a way that expands on the previous MM.
- World expansions will release each year that conform to the limits imposed on each successive DMG rule set, slowly expanding the playable space, increasing replay value.
- Online support content will be monetised on a monthly subscription format, based on Dungeon and Dragon subscriptions, bought in house to push for that $100 million.
- Digital tabletop included, for reals this time, honest, starting from scratch.
- Class balance will be achieved, by, uh, everyone is a Wizard.
- High level play will work at all, low level play will be survived. E6 was popular, right?
- Attention will be given to the wildly successful money machine that is World of Warcraft and it's division of characters into roles of DPS, Controller, Tank, and Healer.
I wanted to read what the developers were writing on Gleemax, but it kept dragging my fairly modern computer to a dead stall while doing so, and it was obviously a mess compared to the old wizards.com webface.
tw: murder.
The man in charge of digital development murdered his wife before killing himself not long after it switched on, and then it was later abandoned. I recall all the content on it was basically lost. So, uh, controlling sociopath with disturbingly authoritarian imagery, eh. Probably didn't help.
There's more than all that, if you dig around. The problems at late D&D 3rd edition (and right through 4th edition) are the same scale of problems TSR had on the way to bankruptcy in late 2nd edition, and it produced the same shit books that were not fun to play D&D with. But basically, they had no fucking idea what most people even did when playing D&D any more, no idea what the things they were selling were being used for, and were hyper-focused on oddities of the Hasbro corporate structure that buried the very idea of ever selling a complete RPG product. Then they started designing 4th edition, under the code name Orcus, and things got catastrophically worse.