When 5E D&D flops, will the designers go to the 3E D&D well?

fearsomepirate · Post by **fearsomepirate** » Tue Nov 11, 2014 3:55 pm

The biggest problem with 5e there appears to be no coherent business plan. The fundamental mechanics are fine, I guess. Having at least read over them, they don't seem worse than any previous edition and any less patchable. Actually, they seem pretty sound. Like others said, the content is so super-thin there just isn't much to even be mad about. It's just sorta...there. Indifference is even worse than hate.

They can't really commit to any particular vision because they're so afraid of angering anyone, and so desperate to please everyone. If everyone wants a different kind of cookie, the answer is not to make a bland cookie that has neither chocolate, nor raisins, nor frosting, nor peanut butter, nor anything else. That's because Hasbro needs to make a mass-market product for it to make sense for them to even develop. But a TTRPG is inherently not mass-market.

So that's why 5e has and will have a major problem. The content and mechanics could in theory be fixed with a 5.5, or a 6e, or an AD&D3, or whatever. But it appears that Hasbro is, as an organization, not capable of being a TTRPG company. They're just as bad at it as Pepsico was at being a restaurant company, or as Microsoft is at being a device company.

A TTRPG needs to generate a sizeable niche of passionate consumers. Is that the kind of product Hasbro makes? Not really. They make stuff to put on shelves for parents to buy at Christmas by the million. Pathfinder may suck, but Paizo is great at generating and growing a passionate niche. That's why they're succeeding and Wizards is failing.

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Tue Nov 11, 2014 4:16 pm

I'm curious how DnD5e will fail, largely because it is so bland. DnD3e "failed" from system bloat (even though that failure is in quotes, since that system bloat being recreated is keeping Paizo in the black), DnD4e failed because it was trying to do something clean (everything predefined, lots of status effects, strict power allotments) but couldn't have its design implement its design goals... but 5e doesn't have either of those shortcomings.

ADnD trundled along for a hell of a long time based on its lack of intrinsic fiddliness. I mean, sure you'd take a kit and some asshole wanted to be psionic, but in general there wasn't a lot of crap going on past your initial class and kit choices. Endless setting books and fluff pieces were the bread and butter for years and years.

fearsomepirate · Post by **fearsomepirate** » Tue Nov 11, 2014 6:49 pm

A product is a failure if it doesn't reach its goals. So did 3rd really "fail?" I doubt it. It seems to have done quite well for Wizards and the D&D brand.

4e failed for a lot of reasons.

5e will fail because its goals are unrealizable. It's trying to be something everyone will love and no one will dislike while simultaneously treating customers like milk cows. Nope. That's impossible. Therefore, it will fail.

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Tue Nov 11, 2014 7:54 pm

5E is cowardice, it is a retreat to yesteryear, to safety, to 2nd and 3rd edition successes.

Say what you will about 4E, but 4E was a MOTHERFUCK. It was a total overhaul and a shock to the system 4E said, "This ain't 3.75, baby. We're on some entirely new shit now." I remember being SHOCKED when I was reading the first box set. I thought they were going to be like SAGA or 3.5 and then they said "BAM! 30 LEVELS! NO NEGATIVE RACIAL MODIFIERS! COMPLETE SAVE SYSTEM SCRAP AND NEW BUILD" and on and on and on.

4E had ambition and vision. Sure, unrealized ambition and funky and flawed vision. The hope for a pure martial/magic parity led to stultifying sameness. There was needless character complexity to the point where a computer was basically mandatory to make a PC. Skill Challenges: Nuf said. The Modular Monster concept was cool but the Math was so fucked that they had to errata every single monster in their first two bestiaries. They didn't run anything mathematically and rigorously playtest so they had like, 200 pages of errata in 3 years and then they capped it all off with the 4.5 Essentials debacle which wrecked the edition. But at least it was TRYING to do something.

I see no reason why any player that has been seasoned in playing 3.5 and Pathfinder for at this point potentially the better part of 15 years, should play Next. It is just 3.5 with House Rules. You've already made 3.5 with House Rules on your own or you're playing Pathfinder at this point, with years of gaming and hundreds of dollars potentially sunk into it.

fearsomepirate · Post by **fearsomepirate** » Tue Nov 11, 2014 9:36 pm

I don't understand why it's so hard to hire someone with a background in stats or probability to run numbers for you and make sure your game isn't totally stupid. It took me only reading the manual to understand the +1/2 level slider is stupid.

Ghremdal · Post by **Ghremdal** » Tue Nov 11, 2014 11:21 pm

fearsomepirate wrote:The biggest problem with 5e there appears to be no coherent business plan. The fundamental mechanics are fine, I guess. Having at least read over them, they don't seem worse than any previous edition and any less patchable. Actually, they seem pretty sound. Like others said, the content is so super-thin there just isn't much to even be mad about. It's just sorta...there. Indifference is even worse than hate.

What the fuck are you reading? The mechanics are fucking terrible to the point that no mechanics would be better. At least that wouldn't deceive inexperienced players that the base of the game is nothing more then orally satisfying the DM.

You can replace all d20 rolls with a coinflip and no one would be able to see any difference over the course of a single session.

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Tue Nov 11, 2014 11:31 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Now conspiracy horror doesn't require that. Indeed, 21st century inventions have made the panopticon posited by most men in black conspiracies more plausible. If you were doing something like Doubt, it wouldn't be at all helpful to take peoples' smart phones away. The players might have to go retro on the portable phones to keep the Conspiracy from tracking them. But in any case you wouldn't expect to be able to accomplish much by calling the authorities or looking at public map databases, because dispatchers and online map providers are obviously in on the conspiracy.

So Night's Black Agents on steroids?

fearsomepirate · Post by **fearsomepirate** » Tue Nov 11, 2014 11:55 pm

Ghremdal wrote:You can replace all d20 rolls with a coinflip and no one would be able to see any difference over the course of a single session.

No, the probabilities don't all work out to 0.5.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue Nov 11, 2014 11:59 pm

Dogbert wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:Now conspiracy horror doesn't require that. Indeed, 21st century inventions have made the panopticon posited by most men in black conspiracies more plausible. If you were doing something like Doubt, it wouldn't be at all helpful to take peoples' smart phones away. The players might have to go retro on the portable phones to keep the Conspiracy from tracking them. But in any case you wouldn't expect to be able to accomplish much by calling the authorities or looking at public map databases, because dispatchers and online map providers are obviously in on the conspiracy.
So Night's Black Agents on steroids?

Night's Black Agents is fun, but it's only barely a game. The times I've played it have all been more Burn Notice with vampires than any real conspiracy.

Night Goat · Post by **Night Goat** » Wed Nov 12, 2014 1:02 am

I wouldn't say that 3e failed, it just ran out of ideas. With everyone already owning the core books and the splatbooks becoming increasingly bad, the solution was to create a new edition so you can sell a whole new set of splatbooks. Where WotC went Full Retard was with making a new edition that was vastly worse than the previous one, while ceasing publication of the edition that people actually liked. If you're going to put all your begs in one basket, it better be a damn good basket.

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Wed Nov 12, 2014 1:44 am

The big mistake was not yanking OGL for the most successful version of the game and putting in a terrible licensing agreement that straight-jacketed developers to 4E only.

I have no idea how they didn't see that a company that wrote 3.0 and 3.5 material for them for almost the entire edition's run wasn't going to spring 3.75 on them with a really glossy, slick presentation, put out a bunch of modules, put all the rules and mechanics online and at least cut their market share in half.

Pathfinder was a sexed up 3.5, 3.75 if you will, and in about 3 years it was outselling 4E and was the biggest pen and paper RPG going. If they could have made 3.5 a dead edition they might have been able to force people into playing 4E.

5E is their version of 3.75 but Pathfinder has been out for almost 5 years now. Pathfinder 2.0 will be Pathfinder 1.5 and it is gonna clean the clock of Next.

fearsomepirate · Post by **fearsomepirate** » Wed Nov 12, 2014 1:47 am

If 4e had been released by another company as "Swords of Valor: A Tactical Fantasy RPG," (and not been followed up with shamelessly incomplete companion volumes), it would probably have a much less polarizing and generally more positive reputation.

ANY radical change, even if flawlessly executed, is going to split a group of enthusiasts, because that's really the last thing they want.

TTRPGs are enthusiast products, not mass-market products.

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Wed Nov 12, 2014 1:51 am

If you didn't know anything about RPGs and just walked into a shop, you'd see Pathfinder with 80+ items of support and given the Cat Bird's Seat in a shop with Dungeons and Dragons in a corner somewhere. You'd think Dungeons and Dragons was a ripoff of Pathfinder, the first and most successful fantasy RPG.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Wed Nov 12, 2014 4:02 am

fearsomepirate wrote:But a TTRPG is inherently not mass-market.

I don't think that's right. There's no particular reason for D&D to sell less copies than Monopoly or Risk, with computer versions that don't suck and a social version that someone pays out the ear for. It's still got a pretty good brand name despite 4e, everyone has an idea what it is, unlike Pathfinder (which is an old Nissan).

Like, there's a lot of pieces in a Monopoly set, and the higher-priced versions aren't cheap. But fucking everyone has Monopoly, in case the power goes out and the phone isn't charged or whatever. Dr. Who monopoly just came out and sold a bunch more. Like they couldn't do D&D tie-ins to popular franchises. They just suck at writing rules people can actually use, it's a pretty good game under the hood if you've got someone who understands it to explain things for you.

#thread.

3e was slowly losing sales and losing players. Had been steadily since 2002, they kept up profits by switching to hardcovers full of player-stuff and hit gold with the painted plastic miniature sales until that saturated the market (and collapsed it when they responded poorly; quality cuts were particularly unpopular).

4e was an attempt to revive the RPG to promote more miniatures sales, by getting the minis guy in to lead the design and make them more compatible. About six months out from printing dates they realised they had a dog and changed a whole bunch of stuff that ruined the original design and didn't really solve any of the problems, tacking on new and untested mechanics at the last minute to try and appease marketing. Their sales pitch then alienated a bunch of their hardcore fans (what else could it do? The game wasn't any good), and their licensing attempt spawned strong new competitors to support those fans.

5e is a little department in a small department of a big company owned by a much bigger company. The have a budget because it seems like there's no real reason D&D shouldn't sell very well. But they put Mike Mearls in charge of it and the man just doesn't finish things. So like always for him it's the core of a good idea and then they just gave up and printed a bunch of begging for DMs to fill in the gaps, players to build their own classes with this or that, like this is still 1974 and they think people will want to do all that work themselves rather than pay for it to be done for them.

God knows what 6e will do. 2018? Or will that just be when they give up and sell the brand to Paizo? Or buy Paizo? Giant fat cheque to brand Pathfinder 2 as AD&D 3rd edition.

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Wed Nov 12, 2014 4:50 am

Insomniac wrote:You'd think Dungeons and Dragons was a ripoff of Pathfinder, the first and most successful fantasy RPG.

You know the funniest part? That is exactly what's going to happen fifteen years from now. Hell, some people already think the Vampire games were a ripoff of Twilight.

tussock wrote:Or will that just be when they give up and sell the brand to Paizo? Or buy Paizo? Giant fat cheque to brand Pathfinder 2 as AD&D 3rd edition.

Another funny thing: At this point, Paizo no longer even needs the "d&d" name anymore.

Xbone? PS 3? nWoD? 4E? If there's something this last decade has taught us is that, in this day and age, the power of "branding" is far from what it used to be.

Paizo has no need to steal d&d's thunder because, if the current hype happens to go out in smoke, d&d will have no longer a thunder to steal.

animea90 · Post by **animea90** » Wed Nov 12, 2014 5:20 am

fearsomepirate wrote:If 4e had been released by another company as "Swords of Valor: A Tactical Fantasy RPG," (and not been followed up with shamelessly incomplete companion volumes), it would probably have a much less polarizing and generally more positive reputation.

ANY radical change, even if flawlessly executed, is going to split a group of enthusiasts, because that's really the last thing they want.

TTRPGs are enthusiast products, not mass-market products.

It may have had a more positive reception but it would have sold a lot less. 4e still had major structural problems. It would have had some niche customers but been ignored by the majority of tabletop players.

fearsomepirate · Post by **fearsomepirate** » Wed Nov 12, 2014 1:32 pm

tussock wrote:
fearsomepirate wrote:But a TTRPG is inherently not mass-market.
I don't think that's right. There's no particular reason for D&D to sell less copies than Monopoly or Risk, with computer versions that don't suck and a social version that someone pays out the ear for.

Board games are mass-market products because the rules fit on one or two sheets of paper, and you don't have to schedule regular play time to make it meaningful. I explained the rules of Monopoly to my wife and her family (who had never played it) in about 15 minutes, and they play it twice a year. You can't do that with a TTRPG.

TTRPGs require a fairly significant time and social investment to play. Any product that requires a major up-front investment in time to enjoy is an enthusiast product.

Sure, the *brand* can be put on mass-market products. If Skyrim can sell millions of units, there's no reason a CRPG set in the Forgotten Realms couldn't. But the core game? No.

4e was an attempt to revive the RPG to promote more miniatures sales, by getting the minis guy in to lead the design and make them more compatible.

I don't think so. 4e, more than anything else, was an attempt to expand D&D to people who didn't play TTRPGs and as a consequence sell tons and tons of shit. Not just minis...everything. More books. Board games. Tiles. Maps. Etc. And I don't think it failed because it was a "bad" game in the sense of not playable without tons of modifications (in my experience, it requires the fewest house rules and least in-depth knowledge to fix of any of them). I think it failed firstly because it was not D&D; it was a different game with a D&D coat of paint. That was guaranteed to piss off core fans. The other reason it failed was its release schedule and content were so transparently cynical, selling incomplete content that they obviously were planning to complete later...and for another $35. That made sure to annoy the folks who did like it. Oh, and then Essentials broke everything.

I mean, look at me. I actually love 4e. (boo, hiss! it's an MMO! you're stupid! I hate you!) Everyone I've played 4e with loves 4e. But if 5e were to 4e what 3rd was to 2nd...I wouldn't buy it. Any chance Hasbro had to build the kind of customer loyalty you need as a foundation to build a TTRPG was completely shot with the blatantly cynical Manual of the Planes, the horribly mismanaged Essentials product, the painfully obvious use of giant images to truncate the content in MM2, and so on.

It's quite obvious Hasbro has no interest in treating me the way I want to be treated in order to get me to give them more money, and a lot of other 4e players feel the same way.

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Wed Nov 12, 2014 1:45 pm

tussock wrote:4e was an attempt to revive the RPG to promote more miniatures sales, by getting the minis guy in to lead the design and make them more compatible. About six months out from printing dates they realised they had a dog and changed a whole bunch of stuff...

More info on this please. This may just be my ignorance but I was unaware of the initial lead developer of 4e being from the minis aspect of the game. History lesson please?

Harshax · Post by **Harshax** » Wed Nov 12, 2014 4:03 pm

Two things:
For Gold & Glory does exist as a AD&D 2E Retro Clone.

If I wanted to do a Modern Monster (WoD) or Dark Conspiracy, I would probably want some kind of catastrophe to specific technologies to occur to enhance the isolation or conspiracy aspects of the game.

A simple 'what would happen without satellites' google search brought up this decent article:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2013060 ... satellites

When you consider how the internet is laid out physically throughout the US, specifically its backbone, it wouldn't be difficult to situate the core setting someplace isolated where computer access is not reliably portable and even when it can be is at best top-tier dial-up to the rest of the world.

In a sense, the campaign would be also be one part survival horror. The whole world isn't falling down, but the sudden lack of a omnipresent government or world community would probably cause some kind of local government break downs be it civil unrest, revolution and or succession.

Obviously somebody somewhere is working on the problem of trying to stitch the world or the government or just the military back together again, but this is the perfect time for werewolves or vampires or necromancers to counter these efforts.

So yeah, while I can agree that a lot of horror and WoD settings were probably at their best before the information age, solar flares have had minor impact on telecommunications in real life and a longer lasting catastrophe that destroyed all satellites is both very plausible and a great mechanism to set the tone of a game.

Sorry for the rambling post. Pretending to work....

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed Nov 12, 2014 11:21 pm

mean_liar wrote:
tussock wrote:4e was an attempt to revive the RPG to promote more miniatures sales, by getting the minis guy in to lead the design and make them more compatible. About six months out from printing dates they realised they had a dog and changed a whole bunch of stuff...
More info on this please. This may just be my ignorance but I was unaware of the initial lead developer of 4e being from the minis aspect of the game. History lesson please?

You forget, this is tussock. So he is almost certainly completely wrong, and also completely unaware of any history.

Krusk · Post by **Krusk** » Thu Nov 13, 2014 12:02 am

fearsomepirate wrote:The biggest problem with 5e there appears to be no coherent business plan. The fundamental mechanics are fine, I guess. Having at least read over them, they don't seem worse than any previous edition and any less patchable. Actually, they seem pretty sound.

What the fuck are you on about?

You've read the books and consider them "fine" or "Pretty sound"? This is probably the worst edition. I don't need to qualify this statement.

5e basically has no rules. At least with fucking 4e you had rules. They were shitty rules that everyone hated and no one enjoyed, but they existed. 5e's "rules" consist of the following statements.

"Blow your DM and see if he likes it. If so you win"
"Bend over and close your eyes. Maybe you will experience something you like. Maybe not. It depends on how lucky you are and what your DM is into."

5e is the worst.

If you've read 5e and say "Its pretty much fine" you are not qualified to evaluate RPGs on any level. You probably aren't qualified to really evaluate anything without a handler, and probably aren't qualified to read.

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Thu Nov 13, 2014 12:37 am

Now, I think they are already flopping out the gate. They have no setting and no adventure paths outside of the Dragon stuff, which is just the most generic crap in the world. I thought they'd try to beat Paizo at its own game and make money off quality settings materials and adventures but no.

How does 5E make money? Sell a gazillion core products (that aren't even out yet, like DMG and DM Screen and an Equipment book)? Then what? What is the release schedule? A Tiamat module every 4 months? The Martial/Caster/Rogue splatbooks coming out in Who Knows 20Whatever?

Is this really what they came up with after 3 or 4 years of effort? 4E was a dead edition in 2011 already. What were they doing, fiddling their pricks for 30 months? They don't even Stealth rules down right.

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Thu Nov 13, 2014 1:11 am

To beat Paizo at their own game they'd need 3PP content, PF doesn't thrive on APs and a semestral splat alone. Alas, 3PP is something 5E won't have because they're doing the same mistake they did with 4E and dragging their feet with the GSL as if they (again) didn't want anyone to support their edition.

No game is an island... but then, man is the only animal who trips twice with the same rock.

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Thu Nov 13, 2014 1:58 am

Not going OGL or some modification of that has to be Hasbro, right?

The designers were around for the 3.0/3.5 boom days. They've got to know that OGL and strong 3PP support (I particularly liked stuff from Goodman, Frog God and Necromancer) was what made 3.x the hit that it was.

Why are they stubbornly resistant to something with a proven track record of almost 15 years of success? Their GSL for 4E SUCKED. They are now second fiddle in the Dungeons and Dragons game and they've got Dungeons and Dragons on the tin! The team putting out a product called Dungeons and Dragons is the second place Dungeons and Dragons team! How embarrassing. That'd be like some Pepsi knockoff beating Pepsi 3 years straight.

Night Goat · Post by **Night Goat** » Thu Nov 13, 2014 3:01 am

Executives are not truly sentient. They're essentially machines running very complex algorithms - algorithms that usually work, but sometimes produce results that no thinking person would arrive at.