Monte Cook IS working on 5th edition...

[OgreBattle]

Ugh. Doesn't that just fragment the game and make it impossible to write products that appeal to both Mr. Microlite and Mr. Bells-And-Whistles?

and the most popular edition of D&D was played just like that.

No. Just about everything in the core rulebook(s)...

That's not the most popular era of D&D though, that was a reboot to try and catch its former glory.
I apologize for wording it incorrectly as I'm lumping together Red Box-AD&D and 3e/3.5. What I mean is more of an era than a strict edition. Mixing up AD&D and 2e wasn't unheard of either.

At the height of its popularity D&D was a game personalized by every DM who ran it. The era of standardized rules was never as popular. This of course can have plenty of reasons unrelated to rules, but standardized rules weren't around when D&D was at its height.

[Stubbazubba]

And this is his 6th. The author is, in fact, Mike Mearls this week. I don't know why he's back (maybe Monte has a cold?), but more importantly I don't know why he's trying to re-introduce this idea he's already been talking about in this very column for so long.

The column's credited to Monte Cook, unless you're suggesting that Mearls killed him and posted this wearing a Monte Cook skinsuit.

Hm. Earlier, it was not. I double-checked. Must have been a glitch they fixed. Now it's just Monte rehashing Mearls' bad ideas. Not sure which one is better.

[shadzar]

At the height of its popularity D&D was a game personalized by every DM who ran it.

yup.

The era of standardized rules was never as popular. This of course can have plenty of reasons unrelated to rules, but standardized rules weren't around when D&D was at its height.

well the standardized rules didnt stop the personalization...just made some people see it as NOT worth personalizing and others wanting it "as-is" so a DM couldnt personalize it even for their own players....

more of a push button game, than a game to be played when you have standard rules.

[Swordslinger]

Hm. Earlier, it was not. I double-checked. Must have been a glitch they fixed. Now it's just Monte rehashing Mearls' bad ideas. Not sure which one is better.

He's not even rehashing ideas, he's pretty much just polling the community. Thus far I haven't actually seen Monte bring up many actual ideas. He's just asking if people want complex character creation or simple character creation. He has presented no ideas at all yet.

[Chamomile]

We can give him a few points for honesty, then.

[hogarth]

I don't think this is as hard to make work as most people in this thread are making it out to be. Although they're not really to my taste 4ed Core and Essentials mix OK and back before 3ed you could take some basic D&D stuff and mix and match stuff from 1ed or 2ed with it just fine. I played for years like that, if you design the system around having a basic starter box and then having advanced stuff that adds on to it then it shouldn't be that hard to make it workable.

I agree that you could do that.

But from reading the comments of people who worked at TSR in that era, they have repeatedly said that customers would rarely buy products that weren't in their favourite product line, compatibility notwithstanding. E.g. BECMI players wouldn't buy as many AD&D products as AD&D players, AD&D players wouldn't buy as many BECMI products as BECMI players, Dark Sun players wouldn't buy as much Ravenloft/Birthright/Dragonlance/Spelljammer/Al-Qadim/Council of Wyrms stuff as those respective players (and vice versa).

You do know TSR went bankrupt, right?

[ishy]

Here I was thinking essentials was a failure, partly because of all the retroactive errata in the book and mostly because people didn't have a clue what its intended purpose was. And last I checked(granted been a while) everytime a new 4e product was announced the main questions were if it was either 4e compatible or essentials compatible.

[Daztur]

I don't think this is as hard to make work as most people in this thread are making it out to be. Although they're not really to my taste 4ed Core and Essentials mix OK and back before 3ed you could take some basic D&D stuff and mix and match stuff from 1ed or 2ed with it just fine. I played for years like that, if you design the system around having a basic starter box and then having advanced stuff that adds on to it then it shouldn't be that hard to make it workable.

I agree that you could do that.

But from reading the comments of people who worked at TSR in that era, they have repeatedly said that customers would rarely buy products that weren't in their favourite product line, compatibility notwithstanding. E.g. BECMI players wouldn't buy as many AD&D products as AD&D players, AD&D players wouldn't buy as many BECMI products as BECMI players, Dark Sun players wouldn't buy as much Ravenloft/Birthright/Dragonlance/Spelljammer/Al-Qadim/Council of Wyrms stuff as those respective players (and vice versa).

You do know TSR went bankrupt, right?

Yup having different versions of D&D competing against each other makes for a lot less profit for the copyright holder of D&D. However right now whatever WotC does there will be different versions of D&D competing against each other. You can't put Pathfinder, the Retroclones and d20 spin-offs like the Tomes and True d20 back in the bottle and make everyone play 4ed. Their best bet at this point is to try to bring as much of the different kinds of D&D under WotC's aegis rather than trying to make everyone play one kind of D&D (which they just can't do anymore in the way that TSR could have).

Also, they probably shouldn't make different product lines but a limited core (ideally one small boxed set) that everything else is compatible with. Basically the opposite of 4ed's "everything is core."

[Username17]

BECMI was discontinued in the late 80s. TSR went bankrupt in the late 90s. Now you could throw around suppositions about how D&D did in reality can BECMI while keeping the AD&D franchise, I think it's unrealistic to blame the basic set for causing the downfall of TSR.

Hell, I don't think you can blame TSR's downfall on Birthright, Maztica, or even Alternity. A weird setting book may not take in very much money, but it doesn't have to cost very much either. TSR's collapse came from disinterested and therefore terrible management. I don't have real figures, but according to some of the people who worked there TSR was doing exciting stupidity like giving the same budget to a core rulebook as to a setting regional supplement and giving them equal print runs to boot.

You can make money on a 3000 book print run of some Maztica adventure. But you aren't going to make any money if you print as many of those as you are printing Complete Thieves Handbook or whatever.

-Username17

[Fuchs]

What I read about TSR's demise was the same - that they printed far too much stuff that never sold.

[hogarth]

BECMI was discontinued in the late 80s.

The Rules Cyclopedia came out in 1991. Wrath of the Immortals came out in 1992.

What I read about TSR's demise was the same - that they printed far too much stuff that never sold.

Isn't that what I've been saying?

[Fuchs]

What I read about TSR's demise was the same - that they printed far too much stuff that never sold.

Isn't that what I've been saying?

Yes.

[hogarth]

Oops...I didn't realise that you were agreeing with me.

[tzor]

If you could take his ideas and boil them down into a basic argument you have a reasonable argument. In fact you sort of have the “institutively obvious to the casual observer” reasons why all supplements eventually fail big time. Additional rules for customization and specialization when strictly limited to those two points can easily be layered. But no one ever does that. No one.

Let’s assume a base character generation system. On top of this you then add the first layer of customization and specialization. The first layer might produce a generic fighter – sword shield and armor. The second layer might produce a type of fighter that doesn’t need armor. That fighter is, more or less equal to the first fighter; he’s just customized more. He’s not better; there’s no special sauce that is added to the second fighter. Both can dispatch the same level opponent more or less the same.

Both can fight the first layer generic orc fighter and feel good about it at the end.

Now we change the idea somewhat. We start out with a generic very simple resolution system for non combat. Then we add a customization layer of a skill system. The system exists solely to provide customization and specialization. It doesn’t make anyone “better” than those using the previous system.

The PC wants to climb a wall. The player uses the second layer. The NPC wants to climb a wall. The DM uses the first layer. Since additional layers do not add special sauce the results are, more or less, the same.

But supplements never do this. They always add more power in the process. You are forced to use them because not using them puts you at a disadvantage. This results in edition creep and eventually the whole edition collapses and you need to reset the game with a new edition. Optional rules always add power. It is impossible to balance between using and not using them because of this.

But if you could create optional rules that do not present power creep, you could easily balance any layer of optional customization rule allowing a module of the first level to run players using a module of level N (and yes vice versa)! The system would be the greatest thing since sliced bread.

[hogarth]

If you could take his ideas and boil them down into a basic argument you have a reasonable argument.

Just to clarify -- I agree that from a player's perspective, it's a fine idea to have all kinds of optional bells and whistles. But from a business perspective of wanting to sell the maximum number of books to the maximum number of people, it's a lousy idea.

[Username17]

If you could take his ideas and boil them down into a basic argument you have a reasonable argument.

Just to clarify -- I agree that from a player's perspective, it's a fine idea to have all kinds of optional bells and whistles. But from a business perspective of wanting to sell the maximum number of books to the maximum number of people, it's a lousy idea.

I think it's quite salvageable from a business standpoint. Consider an example: you have a book like Frostburn. Now imagine you had three or four "complexity levels" that allowed you to fill space in the book with rules and discussions of basically the same stuff three or four times. Now, here's the best part: imagine that you actually had three or four design teams working on this shit independently so that books came out wicked fast.

Basically by running AD&D and BECMI not just side by side but embedded in the same product, you could have Gygax running with a crew of writers and Mentzer running with a crew of writers and compile their musings into theme books like Frostburn and Sword & Fist that sell well and don't offend people. And then you could claim that the fact that the goods produced by your multiple developers are only semi-transparent with respect to each other was OK. A feature even.

D&D editions struggle with basic paradoxes: if books come out too slow people lose interest; if books don't have enough wordcount people feel ripped off; if your writer teams don't talk to each other enough you get books that don't fit together well. The "complexity levels" shit seems like a fairly straightforward way to address those problems. You can get the book speed you need with the wordcount people want by having multiple projects with multiple devs and multiple writing teams going at once. But if you do that, things are going to diverge over time as the different dev teams build on their different ideas in different directions. But if you have the different teams working on different "rule layers" you can probably convince people that the divergence is intentional and not a problem.

At least, for a while.

-Username17

[ishy]

If you have people working on a product without talking to each other, you'd get a clusterfuck. Both might for example give different rules for similiar things and you can't fix that by saying the complexity is different. Because then you just have 2 different editions. Which is not something that they appear to want to do.

[Stubbazubba]

I'm trying to grok what Frank said about a business model. Is this right?

So, if, for instance, in the simplest layer of a skill system, characters added their Ability Bonus and Level/2 to a d20 roll, and the threshold for success was always an arbitrary number, and that was your non-combat action resolution mechanic, then in the next layer you would be able to train skills in something like a 4e fashion, also add Ability Bonus and a d20 roll and have floating DCs, and the final layer of complexity would have a pool of skill points to be distributed, and increasing skills unlocks certain special abilities (i.e. Spider Climb becomes an SLA for someone with enough Climb ranks). This is the scenario.

Basically, you would have the Non-Combat actions chapter divided into three sub-chapters which would explain each of these mechanics, correct? Each system would be worked on independent of the others and then combined into the final book before printing, and those same dev teams will be responsible for additional material in later splatbooks that correspond to their complexity layer. So, in the MM, each monster will have several stat blocks depending on what layer of complexity the DM is running, and each dev team will only be responsible for their stat block. That way you have three times the crunch-to-fluff ratio, so your books get bigger and can be printed faster than they otherwise would. Am I getting this right? Eventually they would diverge to the point of being completely incompatible one with another, but you can convince people that this is intentional. At the point where it becomes completely unrealistic to continue all three "layers" under the same banner, you break the rulebooks into the different layered pieces, recombine them with each other, and release Ultimate [Low-, Mid-, and Hi-Complexity] Handbooks, and let the three "co-editions" continue on their own as long as they can while someone makes the next edition. Tell me if I'm way off base here.

[tzor]

I don't see why parallelism is necessary or even multiple teams.

(How to avoid edition creep - keep them occupied - and no power creep.)

Release Core D&D (CD&D which is so much better than BD&D)
Release Advanced D&D (AD&D yea, screw alphabetical order)
Release Expert D&D (ED&D)

If you keep power creep away, then all supplements for CD&D will work with ED&D since all of the additions are on the player side not on the monster / NPC side. Yes sometimes you have to use the 4E idea that the rules for the players aren't always the rules for everyone else, but really, who cares if the ends are the same.

[fectin]

There's a difference in kind between many settings (using the same ruleset) and many rulesets (in the same settings). The first is much more salvageable, but there are plenty of GURPS/Rolemaster setting books that did okay.

Fundamentally, TSR failed because they relied on collectors, and Magic is much more fun to collect.

[Daztur]

Another thing that WotC is doing wrong is it's not doing enough to bank on 80's nostalgia. There are a decent chunk of people who played a lot of D&D in the 80's and have no intention of playing it now but who have a lot of fond memories of it. These people sure as fuck aren't going to buy 4ed but I think it could be a small but profitable niche market to cash in on without too much effort on WotC's part. Every crappy 80's cartoon get turned into a movie, there's money in this shit. Note that I don't really mean the OSR types (not enough to them) but more the people who would think "hey, I used to have a lot of fun with that as I kid, it would be fun to read."

[shadzar]

This is why TSR didnt want to jsut make D&D...they wanted to make a variety of games, but when investors came in and bought out shares in the company they decided to go full stream with one thing.

be that a single game or edition, it is found to not be profitable. WotC has MtG and a few other things, always had, so it doesnt solely rely on D&D.

having jsut one edition and ALL your competitors able to freely use past editions, means that there is no more reason to follow the edition treadmill.

WotC and HASBRO would be smart to just accept it and make products for all the editions. they dont have to over produce now. they can make the core rules for each edition and keep print more as needed, and make things like the anniversary reprints of older modules...limited supply for ALL editions. then gauge what people are buying more of and make more of those products.

dont put all your eggs in one basket as it were.

they need to understand they need a few departments not jsut D&D RPG, and board games depratments...

they need a miniature department of a few capable people that make and design minis based on what is needed for ALL the products that use them.

they need story writers that dont work with rules or mechanics or design them, but can actually make things read well...and make the fluff. then the mechanics designers can hand the mechanics over for someone that CAN write to write readable content.

they need to have a playtesting day. the weeks work is tested with previous work.

they can use the MtG artists and dont need any for D&D.

all they need to do is have a couple people for each edition that could take new material like an adventure and tailor it to that edition, as well make sure fluff/story writers can make it so it work for EACH edition. leaving setting specific fluff like eBerron marks, forgotten realms spellplague, etc...to the settings themselves.

i wonder if they still dont have all the rights to AD&D itself due to the Dragon Magazine Archive WotC released and HACKMaster?

[OgreBattle]

Another thing that WotC is doing wrong is it's not doing enough to bank on 80's nostalgia. T

That's exactly what Essentials was. They even put it in the same Red Box. If it's a question of if they tried, then yes they tried and did bank on 80's nostalgia.

If anything, the success of Pathfinder, continued interest in retroclones, and profitability of 4e has shown that many D&D fans just like staying in the edition that got them in the game. This evidence does make looking for "the Perfect Edition" seem unobtainable, while it shows quite plainly that people will continue buying new product for 'outdated' editions.

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I don't think popularity of D&D or a resurgence really has anything to do with the rules though. We who anguish over the mechanics are a minority, if you weren't then Pathfinder would've been a failure instead of supposed industry leader. It's fun to think about how to make a 'better' D&D, a more 'balanced' game, but that has very little effect on what sells or not.

It's a matter of marketing, not game mechanics. If you really want to make 5e a success, figure out how to get kids to play tabletop RPGs again. Like, getting kids to play basketball isn't about anguishing over how to make superior rules and a better ball, it's about getting them to play basketball.

[ModelCitizen]

I don't think popularity of D&D or a resurgence really has anything to do with the rules though. We who anguish over the mechanics are a minority, if you weren't then Pathfinder would've been a failure instead of supposed industry leader. It's fun to think about how to make a 'better' D&D, a more 'balanced' game, but that has very little effect on what sells or not.

It's a matter of marketing, not game mechanics. If you really want to make 5e a success, figure out how to get kids to play tabletop RPGs again. Like, getting kids to play basketball isn't about anguishing over how to make superior rules and a better ball, it's about getting them to play basketball.

I disagree. People feel the impact of the rules even if they don't understand them. A lot more people don't like X Edition or X Game than can articulate why. It's not because the reason isn't real, they're just not good enough at evaluating rules to state it in a clear way.

Lots of people state their problem with 4e as either "it's a wargame" or "combat takes too long." They don't know the rules well enough to talk about why but they're still unhappy. Rather than just trying to change their perceptions, it's up to a good game designer to look at the rules and figure out why some 4e players spend more time on minis combat than they want.

[Daztur]

That's exactly what Essentials was. They even put it in the same Red Box. If it's a question of if they tried, then yes they tried and did bank on 80's nostalgia.

Yeah, slapping some old fashioned art on a box isn't really going to cut it... But I meant things more along the lines of doing a rerelease of some of the old books or the kind of coffee table book that Zak suggest here: http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/20 ... zards.html

If you really want to make 5e a success, figure out how to get kids to play tabletop RPGs again.

That'd be hard. Probably what they need is a better "find local RPG players in your city" system as a starting point.