[Not 4e] What will we see from 5e?

[Psychic Robot]

I honestly think that we're going to get a 5th Edition within the next three years after the current development team gets their naughty asses fired.

This got me thinking. What will we see from 5e (the actual 5e, not 4.5)? In 4e, we have a large paradigm shift away from simulationism into gamism (and before anyone shits himself in rage at the notion that 3e was simulationist, allow me to point out that saying that 4e is less simulationist than 3e is true). Of course, there were also large-scale system changes that were made outside of the scope of simulationism vs. gamism. Some things that are worth noting:

--Monsters made out of arbitrarium. Stats exist to do...well, skill checks, I guess.
--Monsters defined by combat roles.
--Abilities that work "just because," with little explanation of how they work or fluff describing them.
--Abilities that make no sense whatsoever (these are worse than the above).
--Healing surges.
--Static HP per level.
--Traditional saving throws changed to defense scores.
--New, retarded saving throw mechanic.
--Absolutely ridiculous economic system.
--No nonlethal damage.
--Non-magical classes and magical classes use the exact same system for their abilities.
--Almost everything is measured and defined by the battle board.
--Introduction of nonstandard races as Core material.
--Classes defined not by their flavor but by their combat roles.

I'm sure there are more, but they are eluding me. With those changes in mind, what do you expect 5e to change from 4e?

[Kaelik]

I think the major question is will they decide to try to go back or forward.

They might try to make more out of combat stuff and make attributes go back. Or they might just strip attributes in general and make it miniatures.

[Caedrus]

Indeed, it could easily go either way. For example, L5R 3e is basically the same as L5R 1e (except with all the spirit gone), as a reaction against L5R 2e.

[Koumei]

For the record, some of these aren't so bad. For instance:

--Monsters defined by combat roles.

This would be good if it worked or made any damn sense. The DM could say "I want a social-ish monster to confuse and/or seduce the players" and look that list up, or say "What CR X dumb animals exist in the tundra?" and look at that list.

--Static HP per level.

Again, not really a bad thing, and it's just an evolution that's been going on: 2E said "HAHAHA, YOU ROLLED A 1 AT LEVEL 1, YOU DIE.", whereas 3E said "Hope you roll well on future levels" (and then more and more DMs said "Take the average").

--Traditional saving throws changed to defense scores.

I like this. In the past, a Wizard character could go through without actually touching the d20 - cast SoD effects and only have attacks made against them (which miss because magic). This one lets everyone roll that dodecahedron of doom.

--Introduction of nonstandard races as Core material.

I don't mind this - but then again, I think they need to stop fellating Tolkien's corpse, so I look forward to dorfs being phased out, then the elfs and so on.

Note that this is a small number of the listed changes. The rest were "whatever" at best, shit at worst.

[Username17]

My prediction is that primary design on 5e is going to start pretty much the moment that the 4e PHB3 drops. Their original intention was presumably to make a 4.5 unified book that had all the basic classes from the first three PHBs and some minor but confusing rule tweaks probably a year after the PHB3 dropped, putting 4.5 for a 2011 release. That's probably not going to happen because 4e has been a relative financial failure.

The real question is what they are going to decide "the flaw" was. Remember that it's a business decision made by business men who don't necessarily know how the game works, so their idea of what made the game sell poorly compared to expectations may be pretty alien. Good candidates for that sort of thing might be:

• Incomplete Power Sources! You know how the primal and psychic and Necrotic(?) heroes aren't available in the basic book? That pisses a lot of people off. They may decide that the base PHB's problem was simply that, and make sure that the base book has at least one example of every power source type. This change is entirely procedural, and if that's the directives you could get pretty much anything happening in the game itself as far as actually meaningful structure. But I'd expect the basic book to include at the least: Fighter, Rogue, Paladin, Cleric, Wizard, Warlock, Druid, and Ranger. Given these directives, I would expect at least 4 power sources and at least two classes from each in the PHB. But I could easily see them keeping power sources at six and throwing in 4 more classes. Definitely expect the "roles" to be defined differently, because pretty much all the designers have let slip that one or more of the roles are basically meaningless as defined.
• Lack of 3rd Party Support! Every time a book sells poorly, it harms the company name of the company that made it in the eyes of retailers and distributors. Publishing books like Elder Evils and Dragons of Eberron really hurt the franchise. So it's possible that they'll grasp for a better means of getting 3rd party support. I wouldn't be surprised by a very simple license where you had to kick back a small amount of money for each unit sold. Something accessible to try to get companies like Green Ronin to go back to making (and taking the risks for) 2nd and 3rd tier materials. I wouldn't expect them to go all the way back to the open license, because that was a business decision in the first place, and the dude who made that call is never going to admit how fucking stupid revoking it was.

You can definitely expect that the idea of Roles is one we are stuck with. We pretty much had that all along, with Paladins being "Fighter Variants" and Druids being "Priest Variants" back in 2nd Edition AD&D. Now that we have explicit terminology for it we're stuck with it forever. However the roles themselves could and probably will be scrapped and replaced by different ones. At the very least, expect the "Controller" confusion to be cleared up. By 2012, the Mayan Calendar predicts that the D&D authors will finally decide whether they are talking about Crowd Control, Damage Control, or Battlefield Control.

The social impact of World of Warcraft is frankly less today than it was two years ago. Where in 2006 the lead designers apparently spent all their time grinding away at it, in 2009 the pallet is a bit more varied. By the time 5e D&D is being made, I would expect it to be made by people who have played a lot of action-oriented games like Diablo 3 and Bioshock 2. Expect the emphasis to be on very large numbers of enemies whether "minions" are involved or not. Action, not Grinding will be main selling point.

The Power Sources change every edition, the planar cosmology changes all the time too. With more of a Diablo 3 focus and less of a Warcraft focus we could easily go to the original 3 Alignments: Law, Neutral, Chaos.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

I also predict that they would probably start looking between 3rd and 4th Edition and finding out which differences stick out like a sore thumb and then siding with 3rd Edition.

I really think that multiclassing is going to become a lot more open. 4E is desperately right now trying to make multiclassing 'work' and in the process is finding out some ugly truths about the role protection system and ability system. I predict that the rails will be removed and we'll be back to the old system of 'front-loaded first level, every level thereafter has a benefit to it'.

The power system is pretty much going to stay the same way that it is, though, I believe. I can also guarantee though that people will be getting a lot more powers and Frank's prediction about combat being shorter and against more foes.

We're still going to have plus items. This is one sacred cow that D&D will never slay. +X and a property is going to be the norm for magic items, though. I don't think that they'll be purchasable with in-game currency; that seems to be one thing that 4E is really uncomfortable with so we'll probably move to people getting magic items from adventures like crazy and people handwaving the question of where they came from. Item crafting will be melting down old magic swords and pouring them on a new one.

I think that stats will be even more disassociated from game mechanics, too. Powers won't use them anymore (to go with the multiclassing thing) and skills will be 'keyed' to something else such as a fighter deciding that they can use their strength score for intimidate. However, in a nod to the 3E days, there will also be more skills so fighters will feel more different from each other. They'll probably get down to skills like 'profession: architect' and 'perform' and 'alchemy'.

Racial segregation will also be less pronounced, because it has the perverse effect of occupying book space while also appealing to less players. For example, in Martial Power, about half of the feats in the heroic and paragon tier are racial, which means that when people crack open a book to see what they have for their halfling fighter, they realize that there are only one or two things that pique their interest and put it back on the shelf because all of the cool things are for dragonborn or dwarves.

5E will also go back to the 9-alignment system or get rid of it altogether; the hybrid has made absolutely no one happy and all the games I've been at uses one or the other, not the current system.

[Caedrus]

That's probably not going to happen because 4e has been a relative financial failure.

Okay, do you think you could provide references regarding this? Because a lot of 4e-ites seem to be convinced that this isn't the case.

[Crissa]

No, because no one can keep the data on this, the last company that was doing this went out of business in 2004.

However we do know how little their income is, so we know it's not doing well.

-Crissa

[Lago PARANOIA]

Here's another big one I think that they will do:

5E will either embrace mundanization and decide that no adventure should be more 'power-levelful' than the first half of Naruto or the latter half of God of War... or (less likely in my opinion) it'll actually make epic Epic, complete with fighters kicking castles at demon princes and wizards using Zeus as Pokemon. Right now the half-and-half thing just doesn't work.

I do believe that 5E will go in the realm of mundanization because it's actually really hard work to deconstruct how magical effects like polymorph any object and mass raise dead affect the setting. So unless we get an entire new suite of game designers that's probably what's going to happen.

[Username17]

That's probably not going to happen because 4e has been a relative financial failure.

Okay, do you think you could provide references regarding this? Because a lot of 4e-ites seem to be convinced that this isn't the case.

As Crissa implied, those numbers are secret. We need to infer their sales figures from things they've said and things they have not said. But we get occasional juicy tidbits here and there. A particularly juicy one was a statement from a distributor that D&D sales were cooled down to the normal levels before the edition jump. Except, we also know from what WotC guys have said that those "normal levels" were actually going down the drain compared to the heydays of 3rd edition. So those statements together paint a very bleak picture indeed. The pre-edition jump "normal" sales included the Complete Champion and Elder Evils - and we know that stuff was all crap that didn't sell well.

It's kind of like how White Wolf has a catch phrase about how awesome they based on how many million books they've sold in total. Since we actually save those numbers from announcement to announcement we can track their rise and fall. The number of million books ever sold hasn't risen very much in the last two years, meaning that their current sales are shitty. We don't have exact figures because they don't release exact figures. But we do have a pretty decent tide marker - and their tide has seriously ebbed.

-Username17

[Starmaker]

--Introduction of nonstandard races as Core material.

I don't mind this - but then again, I think they need to stop fellating Tolkien's corpse, so I look forward to dorfs being phased out, then the elfs and so on.

Um... what? The elfs will always be there. It's the reason we had a metric fuckton of elf subraces in 3e. It's the reason we have pretty elfs, even prettier sparklypoo elfs and goffik bullshit who-s-the-prettiest-of-them-all emo elfs in 4e. It's the reason why elfs are overpriced in Shadowrun.

Dorfs, on the other hand, are testosterone elementals. These are often the people who excuse their "girly" roleplaying hobby to themselves by pretending they're playing Rambo in Ponyland.

Finally, Tolkien is there to stay for a long time, longer than Harry Potter or Eragon or Twilight or Final Fantasy VI-VII. So dorfs and elfs aren't going anywhere.

[Judging__Eagle]

I hope that Dorfs and Elves don't go anywhere. They're the original non-human races that humans came up with hundreds of years ago. They won't go away b/c of mother-f-ing traction.

I can tell -any- person "they're a dwarf" of "they're an elf", and people will probably know what I mean.

If I say .... "they're a teifling"; they'll be all.... "wtf is a teifling?"

Heck, just use Disney as your mythos litmus test, Dwarves exist, so do Dragons, and evil sorcers (and sorceresses), and demons, and djinnis. There will be dorfs and elves for a long time still.

Personally, I wish that they would go with races that have -more- general population traction, than -less- general population-based traction.

I want wolf-men, or ogres as races. Not dragon-things, or tall muscley dudes. I want things that people in the general population can recognize because the creatures in question are known by our cultural history.

Not some made-up bullshit race that some fucker in the design offices wrote up b/c it would be "cool."

Cool =/= Good.

Ogres = Good, anyone can understand that an ogre is a large muscular humanoid that is sort of dumb, and also a bit brutish.

.... that big humanoid race written up to 'count as large' = Bad. I don't even remember the fucking races -name-, that's how little traction it has with me.

The discussion on "Conceptual Spaces" that is going on in the aWoD thread is very important to a fantasy game like D&D.

[Meikle641]

Dorfs, on the other hand, are testosterone elementals. These are often the people who excuse their "girly" roleplaying hobby to themselves by pretending they're playing Rambo in Ponyland.

Me: Testosterone elemental. Awesome.
Player 1: -And the idea of a testosterone elemental is both hilarious and awesome.
Me: There's blood elementals, so why not?
Player 1: True!
Player 1: You have to love a game where an effective argument in favor of a bizarre monster is that there is something even more bizarre that's already canon.

[Previn]

That's probably not going to happen because 4e has been a relative financial failure.

Okay, do you think you could provide references regarding this? Because a lot of 4e-ites seem to be convinced that this isn't the case.

Actually we have some numbers, due to the court case regarding PDF piracy. As these are court documents, the must have a certain degree of accuracy. So we can say the following had have it be reasonable accurate:

The number of D&D players is approximately 6 million world wide. They have sold 'hundreds of thousands' of 4th edition books which is important because if they had sold over 1 million, even if it was 1,000,001, they have to state this in the court documents.

4th edition has had 3 print runs. If we assume that they're at the top end in size for print runs, that means 200,000 books per run, or 600,000 books total. Clearly not all of those have been sold.

Assume that a group of needs 3 copies of the PHB, 1 DMG, and 1 MM, that's 5 books per group, or 1 per person. So at best, the adoption rate of 4th is not even half the market, more likely that not, it is far, far less than half the market.

It is not doing well.

[Torko]

Taking their cue from Dragonborn, Tieflings, Eladrin, and Genasi, all PC races will be ugly as shit.

[Judging__Eagle]

Previn, that is fucking awesome.

Some real numbers about how much the 4rries game sucks at the only level that matters in the real world, the cash.

[Iron Mongler]

If I had to guess some reasons for sales not doing as well (which is ridiculously hard to figure out by the way, as every site mixes up just how 'well' the sales are going), I'd have to attribute it to:

1. Shitty marketing. Back in 2007, they had preview books for 4e that cost about the same amount as their other splatbooks (which are already ridiculously overpriced). Needless to say, no one wanted to buy that.

Jump to 2008 and they re-release the core books in a 'deluxe' set with all the errata...and then in this past January, release MORE errata! (not to say this is exclusively a 4e problem, as 3.5 had so much errata and rulings it was fucking unbearable).

2. Economic downturn, for obvious reasons.

3. Piracy. There is a reason why they flipped out over their online pdf's being leaked by Touhou, and if you take a look at the figures of pirated Player's Handbook 2 books, you start to realize just how much of a problem that really is.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Assume that a group of needs 3 copies of the PHB, 1 DMG, and 1 MM, that's 5 books per group, or 1 per person. So at best, the adoption rate of 4th is not even half the market, more likely that not, it is far, far less than half the market.

Even if we don't really know that the numbers of books sold, which could be anywhere from two-to-nine hundred thousand books, I think your distribution of books is way too generous. I play 4E in both groups and online and almost EVERYONE has at the very least a legitimate player's handbook--most people have all three books even.

[FatR]

Piracy was already thriving during the times of 3E. Getting books from IRC channels was not as effortlessly easy, as from torrents, but still easier than walking to a game store.

[Iron Mongler]

Piracy was already thriving during the times of 3E. Getting books from IRC channels was not as effortlessly easy, as from torrents, but still easier than walking to a game store.

Touhou made it even easier, and as far as I've seen the 3.5 books that were pirated were at that time all scanned which took forever and led to horrible quality.

Not to mention there are just easier places to get the books now rather than IRC, like you said. /rs/ and Demonoid being the prime examples.

[Previn]

Assume that a group of needs 3 copies of the PHB, 1 DMG, and 1 MM, that's 5 books per group, or 1 per person. So at best, the adoption rate of 4th is not even half the market, more likely that not, it is far, far less than half the market.

Even if we don't really know that the numbers of books sold, which could be anywhere from two-to-nine hundred thousand books, I think your distribution of books is way too generous. I play 4E in both groups and online and almost EVERYONE has at the very least a legitimate player's handbook--most people have all three books even.

As I said, in the best case, they don't even have half the player base using 4th (they have 1/6th I should have been specific on that, sorry). Realistically, they have have less than 1/10th using it.

That said, the same court papers put the number of downloads of the illegal pdf at less than 3,500 (I can't recall the exact number). However, there has never been a reliable link between pirated digital copies, and it's effects on sales.

I will note, at the risk of being non-factual, that piracy would be a great scapegoat for 4th doing so poorly in sales, and a public display of it would make sense for people trying to shift the blame in the eyes of Hasbro.

[sake]

which means that when people crack open a book to see what they have for their halfling fighter, they realize that there are only one or two things that pique their interest and put it back on the shelf because all of the cool things are for dragonborn or dwarves.

Speaking of which, I really hope the simulationist sacred cow 'small races must be mechanically disadvantaged' shit finally dies by 5th Edition.

Considering that most of the newer generation of players grew up on jrpgs and don't bat an eye at the idea of a human swinging a 6ft long great sword, finally allowing Gnomes/Halflings/whoever to use regular sized weapons and have the same running speed as the normal races would be nice. I'm still amazed that the 4E Devs actually thought that making some races do a whole die size less damage then others, with no real compensation for it, was perfectly fair and balanced.

[SunTzuWarmaster]

4. I don't know anyone that likes or plays 4e. This includes both people that play dungeons and dragons, people that have heard of dungeons and dragons, and people that buy games at games stores.

[Starmaker]

I play 4E in both groups and online and almost EVERYONE has at the very least a legitimate player's handbook--most people have all three books even.

Maybe your players are just naturally honest.

Ideally, I don't want to consult the rulebooks during the session. Ever. For that purpose, we use flowcharts and item cards and spell cards and of course character sheets, but that does not completely alleviate the need for books and we find that no matter the party size, not having at least three Shadowrun core rulebooks/D&D SRD printouts is annoying.

Now that splatbooks don't contain much in the way of core rules by definition, and there are pre-made cards for new powers, so there's no incentive to buy any splatbooks except honesty and the books having interesting fluff that you might want to read and re-read (they don't, but Dragon and Dungeon did, and that's why I bought the magazines for $20 per issue back in 2004).

So the sales are going to sink. And the podcast linked in another thread makes me raaaage. "Lol, we made a couple mistakes, the stuff we wrote earlier totally sucks balls. How funny!" No, that's not funny at all. At least the paizils have a sob story to tell about how they're working day and night to bring the best in gaming to the poor masses oppressed by the evil soulless corporation. They were actually clever bastards, pretending to look for designers and releasing alpha# and now beta to pull an "inb4 fail"*. WotC don't have version numbers, but they do have DDI where "You can shape the game!" That's not an excuse for not playtesting. Fuck you, WotC.

*Anticipating an obvious reaction as a defensive measure. Ex: "My girlfriend dumped me, what should I do? inb4 an hero"

[Kaelik]

That said, the same court papers put the number of downloads of the illegal pdf at less than 3,500 (I can't recall the exact number). However, there has never been a reliable link between pirated digital copies, and it's effects on sales.

As a simple example, how many people on this forum have downloaded the PHB for free, and how many actually play 4e?

For me, torrentting it was just like going to the Book store to look it over and find out it sucks and I don't want it.

I can image that if the PHB was downloaded 3,500 times, that only like 500 of those people would have bought it if they couldn't download, and probably half of them did buy it.