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

Stubbazubba · Post by **Stubbazubba** » Thu Apr 09, 2015 12:53 am

Oh, don't worry. They'll fill the production gaps with errata. Just like the rules gaps.

Seriously, though, by issuing errata and these half-hearted adventure paths, I think they hope to keep people talking about it until their next half-hearted release. Just string something along, anything, and it'll work because it's D&D and no one cares or understands beyond that. Until they all get fired at Christmas.

Ferret · Post by **Ferret** » Thu Apr 09, 2015 3:05 pm

The current plan appears to be content expansion by way of PDFs called Adventurer's Guides that are associated with each Module. Princes of the Apocalypse gave us a couple extra races and backgrounds and some spells.

Devs have been quoted as saying they're interested in 're introducing Settings in ways that surprise and delight people" which appears to be code for "we might set an adventure in those settings but release no supplemental details outside of the adventure book"

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Thu Apr 09, 2015 10:29 pm

I keep waffling back and forth on picking this up out of morbid curiosity. Right now I can't quite bring myself to it.

I'm curious to see what the announced Pillars of Eternity TTRPG is going to shape up into being.

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Fri Apr 10, 2015 1:08 am

I'm telling you, Paizo's getting froggy with that Advanced Class Guide and then the Pathfinder version of Unearthed Arcana.

I'm thinking those are monetized playtests for Pathfinder 2.0 in the way that Magic of Incarnum, Tome of Magic and Tome of Battle were monetized 4E development material and concept testing.

They've got to kick it into gear, man. They don't have much time. Paizo is breathing down their neck and who saw the Pathfinder success happening? What if another competitor comes out overnight to d20 system dominance? Its a real long shot, but it could happen.

RelentlessImp · Post by **RelentlessImp** » Fri Apr 10, 2015 1:29 am

who saw the Pathfinder success happening?

Anyone who saw the 4E playtest material and could realize it was too great a divergence from the game we'd been playing for decades. Even if Paizo are scum.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Apr 10, 2015 6:20 am

who saw the Pathfinder success happening?

Both K and I did. That's why we originally urged people to go to Paizo.com and do actual playtests for free and stuff to try to make the game better. Only after the designers of Pathfinder came out and openly said they were totally uninterested in real testing of any kind did we give up and walk away muttering.

4th edition D&D was a pile of ass. That much was obvious from a bit before the books actually got released. Paizo was offering a straight 3e D&D plus good art. Even without the name, it was obvious that they were the horse to bet on. K and I tried to get them to make a better 3e, but even "some dude on the internet's house rules with good art" was still number one with a bullet when their opponents were a dying 4e D&D and a dead nWoD.

-Username17

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Fri Apr 10, 2015 10:48 am

FrankTrollman wrote: 4th edition D&D was a pile of ass. That much was obvious from a bit before the books actually got released. Paizo was offering a straight 3e D&D plus good art. Even without the name, it was obvious that they were the horse to bet on. K and I tried to get them to make a better 3e, but even "some dude on the internet's house rules with good art" was still number one with a bullet when their opponents were a dying 4e D&D and a dead nWoD.

-Username17

Well, playing Devil's advocate a bit here, it was just more than good art-It was also their OGL policy. Pathfinder has a giant, well organized and free wiki with pretty much all of their rules. 4e did not.

If you want to attract people to play Pathfinder, you can just point them to the wiki and let them check the classes and feats and skills and whatnot at their leisure without them spending a single dime. That's HUGE!

Meanwhile if you wanted to get a person to play 4e, you have to tell them first to get PHB I+II+III+vaults+whatever for hundreds of bucks up front. And then drag around hundreds of pages of errata. Or pay the online subscription.

Well, that and Pathfinder welcomed all manners of 3rd party publishers, while Wotc told them "If you want to do supplements for 4e, you gotta bend backwards to us".

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Fri Apr 10, 2015 9:25 pm

maglag wrote:Well, playing Devil's advocate a bit here, it was just more than good art-It was also their OGL policy. Pathfinder has a giant, well organized and free wiki with pretty much all of their rules. 4e did not.

If you want to attract people to play Pathfinder, you can just point them to the wiki and let them check the classes and feats and skills and whatnot at their leisure without them spending a single dime. That's HUGE!

It really is. Not only in making the introduction to new players easier (although it certain does do that), but in terms of making a character and especially in terms of prep-work for running game. Need a monster? Here's all the monsters, ready to copy-paste and print. Hell, here's some 3PP monsters too if you want that.

Also, I've come to feel that, with games that have as many options as 3.x / PF, having things separated by books and having to remember or care about what book a feat or something comes from is a clunky way to operate that belongs in the past. It's just so much fucking smoother to sort things by what they do instead of what paper they were printed on.

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Sun Apr 12, 2015 5:25 am

This is a dead edition to me already. Nothing they are planning on putting out within the year is grabbing me at all.

I want to call the official "Oh fuck, we gotta do something!" 5.5/Essentials Hail Mary within the next 24 months. The game on the whole will be dead before the end of 2019.

Does that sound about right?

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Sun Apr 12, 2015 5:27 am

I think the name for the next addition will be Dungeons and Dragons Future. They'll announce "The Future is...NOW!" around February 2020.

It will largely be a retreat to 3.5

Ferret · Post by **Ferret** » Mon Apr 13, 2015 2:41 pm

Before we see 5.5, we'll see a return to the PHB 1, 2, 3 treadmill with the Classplosion that Frank has been saying is necessary. It's an easy thing to change without trying to get folks to buy an entirely new core set.

That might push your timeline out to 36-48 months Insomniac.

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Mon Apr 13, 2015 10:52 pm

Ferret wrote:Before we see 5.5, we'll see a return to the PHB 1, 2, 3 treadmill with the Classplosion that Frank has been saying is necessary. It's an easy thing to change without trying to get folks to buy an entirely new core set.

That might push your timeline out to 36-48 months Insomniac.

I'd say that, but they've got no schedule for Class/Archetype/Feat/Equipment/SpellSplosion.

If their timeline was something like...

Spell Compendium Equivalent
Magic Item Compendium Equivalent
PHB II/Complete Series style books
Race guides or something like Pathfinder's Advanced Race Guide.
An Unearthed Arcana style book

With a new book like that every say, 3 to 4 months (this should not be difficult, this should be the very easiest type of material to put out), I'd say, yeah, the system can probably grunt and gimp along for another year or two under that output. Provided it its fairly comprehensive and delivered in a timely fashion, like they pump out 4, 5, 6 books like that in the next 18 months.

But they promised that in 4E and failed to deliver, and don't even have a time frame at all for the "Splosion" style books.

So I'm still gonna call a death by early 2019.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 3:02 am

Insomniac wrote:So I'm still gonna call a death by early 2019.

More like "dead" 2016 and merely "buried" well, probably still even earlier, 2018 by my entirely baseless speculative prediction.

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 5:44 am

PhoneLobster wrote:
Insomniac wrote:So I'm still gonna call a death by early 2019.
More like "dead" 2016 and merely "buried" well, probably still even earlier, 2018 by my entirely baseless speculative prediction.

Wow, and I thought I was being the doomsayer.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 6:02 am

Ferret wrote:Before we see 5.5, we'll see a return to the PHB 1, 2, 3 treadmill with the Classplosion that Frank has been saying is necessary. It's an easy thing to change without trying to get folks to buy an entirely new core set.

That might push your timeline out to 36-48 months Insomniac.

As Insomniac pointed out, the game is pretty much already dead. There are no expansion books on the schedule, and no real opportunities to put them on. The only thing they are really doing at the moment is "licensing" adventures back to friends of theirs who used to work for the company. This edition isn't about making products to sell for money, it's about figuring out a way to unfire Mearls' friends.

I mean, the people who wrote 5th edition like Robert Schwalb are now out there making their own freelance shit and selling it directly. Seriously, Schwalb contributed to Monte's Numinera and launched his own Kickstarter for a Grimderp D&D clone without actually even getting fired by WotC. The people "making" 5th edition aren't making it, they are spending their days at the office doing design work, and spending their nights selling those designs on the side.

The company is being defrauded and 5th edition essentially does not exist as a going concern. Presumably whoever is Mike Mearls' direct boss is complicit in these shenanigans or everyone would have been sacked in 2014. I honestly have no idea how high in the organization the tunneling goes, but it's clear that the lunatics running the asylum are also selling the office furniture out the back door.

-Username17

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 3:37 pm

So, 5E went from vaporware to business fraud.

I had not heard that term before. Looks like WOTC and Hasbro got "tunneled" by Mearls somehow. He helps people get swag and he knows where the bodies are buried so he can never get fired, even after repeatedly failing to live up to promises and deliver product on time, without him exposing the whole Tunneling scam. It all makes sense now

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 6:06 pm

Is it being done by more than Schwalb? Is what Schwalb doing, a private contractor with WotC according to his bio, necessarily even fraud? I'm kind of ignorant on the matter, so more education would be appreciated before I nod and agree with your assessment.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Apr 14, 2015 6:13 pm

Well, doing what Schwalb et al. is doing isn't necessarily (legally) tunneling as long as WotC can't prove that he was using company resources to pump out his own projects. Even if the courts decided to accept a 'time is money' argument, they would still need to show that Schwalb (et al.) didn't meet WotC's obligations. Which would be impossible to prove, since Schwalb could just say that he did the bare minimum while in the offices, spent his considerable free time brainstorming, while doing the actual design work for non-WotC projects during their own time. The latter might even be 100% true.

I mean, obviously the WotC crew (especially Schwalb) is intentionally underperforming because I know that they can put forth a much more prolific output of splatbook crap than what we've seen from them since August. But showing that they were intentionally defrauding WotC is basically impossible to prove; the first question from the defense would almost certainly be 'then why didn't you give us more work to do?'

erik · Post by **erik** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 12:23 am

I'm just surprised they don't have noncompete clause to prevent them from working for competition whilst employed at the very least.

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 1:27 am

I think it is absolutely amazing, given this company's penchant for firing people around Easter and Christmas, that somebody would be developing a competing pen and paper game, likely on WOTC time and dime, and be hocking a kickstarter for it. I mean, there's balls, and there's 10 ton balls, and then there's knowing you can do what you please because you know some dirty secrets.

CapnTthePirateG · Post by **CapnTthePirateG** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 2:10 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:But showing that they were intentionally defrauding WotC is basically impossible to prove; the first question from the defense would almost certainly be 'then why didn't you give us more work to do?'

Unfortunately true. You would think that having to relaunch the flagship product to get all the disaffected customers back would be enough work. You'd be wrong.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 5:17 am

Honestly, I suspect that Wizard's tendency to fire people every holiday season is probably the motivation for a lot of tunneling.

Anyway, it's really hard to predict what will happen with D&D because WoTC management is bizarre and nothing that D&D does matters materially to the company. If this were any other company, I would predict that after they fired everyone at Christmas, they'd bring in a pile of new freelancers to churn out the classplosion, but this is wizards and they honestly might not care enough to bother. Wizards also seems to have a big hang-up about reputation. I don't think they want to be seen as a company that would hire a bunch of freelance randoms. They make a big deal of their designer pedigree --consider the way they try to build up the Magic team as designer-celebrities -- and I think they really want to portray their D&D design team as a selective, elite brotherhood even if it means standing by designers who don't actually design anything.

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 5:21 am

It is the selective, elite brotherhood of the fuckups who didn't get purged last Christmas and all their friends from Seattle and Portland.

The firing probably inspires some guys over their to tunnel like the Viet Cong. They'll get theirs before anybody else.

Stubbazubba · Post by **Stubbazubba** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 6:04 am

They did put out a call for freelance adventure material a few months back.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 6:09 am

If WotC has anything vaguely like a non-compete clause, they don't seem to be enforcing it. Just look at Numenera. Monte Cook was rehired by WotC in the runup to 5th edition to say sagely designerish things on their website. Then he left (or was pushed) and immediately started selling Numenera for moneys.

The thing is, the whole Numenera thing is that weird bullshit where you convert bonuses to a bonus level and then reconvert back into bonuses. It's pointless, but that's the big Numenera deal. And Monte discussed it at length on WotC's design blog while he was working there.

So it's a matter of public record that Monte Cook was writing Numenera while on the clock at WotC, and then he sold it direct and shared zero of the moneys with Hasbro. That is a thing that happened. Also, while Monte Cook gets singular writing credit on basically everything Numenera based on wikipedia, and yet... Notice the date on that post. It's before 5th edition dropped. Rob Schwalb was not only "still employed" by WotC while he was contributing to the Numenera Bestiary, he was concurrently accepting Hasbro moneys for writing chunks of 5th edition D&D's Monster Manual.

People writing things on WotC's dime and then personally selling them via kickstarter is just a thing that's been happening to WotC for the last couple of years. It's like Schrödinger's Rat: both on and off the sinking ship at the same time.

-Username17