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So, I guess Mike Mearls is now the head of D&D R&D, in charge of the entire brand name, Rich Baker took his old job, there's a new Elemental Heroes book coming out in 2012 mostly done by Robert J Schwaib (thus it will be an iredeemable pile of ass), and...that's about it.

So, while 5e may or may not be around the corner, why the hell did they promote Mearls while he's leading the flagship product into being outsold by its own derivative? And is Mearls going to also have a hand in designing 5e, because I really, really don't want to see stuff modeled on 4e. I don't think we've come up with a single 4e mechanic which positively adds to the game.

We can assume that Mearls will get to 5E faster because he won't bother finishing any of the projects he has now.

Well, I fully expect 5th ed D&D to expand on Essentials.

I mean, do you guys really thought that after all the Developer Hubris about how 4e D&D was the shit, they were going to back down and do a regression to 3.5? Specially with Pathfinder already on that market? Fuck no.

I think we can now officially give up on DnD ever being fun again.

I actually think that this could a good thing. There's no way in hell Mike Mearls would immediately start work on 5th Edition or that he even could at the moment, not without splintering the fanbase even further. So due to huge rate of turnovers for D&D masterminds (like once every 1.5-2 years) he runs a huge risk of being fired while waiting for the iron to become hot. So then the project gets passed off to someone else.

Of course there's always the possibility that he grovels and isn't subject to the routine staff purges before 5E is out the door. I hope that doesn't happen. The next year and a half is going to be intense. I'm actually hoping that 4E doesn't go down by my prediction of Spring/Summer 2012 now. How sad is that?

I think it's telling that the only book that seems to be coming out is mostly written by a freelancer. (Although given the limits of 4E I think Robert J Schwaib has done better work than most, the real problem has been lack of playtesting or someone to give the rules a mathematical once over.)

If Mearls and Baker are now mostly management how many people can they have left to actually do design work?

Yes, the fact that 4E content is slowing to a trickle (even the online offerings) is a troubling sign for the edition. I am wondering if they're going to decide to go along with releasing 5E after only 4 years on the market; if that happened the new edition would blow up in their face no matter how good it was. And as much as it would tickle me pink to have to see Mike Mearls get a real job I don't think taking down the IP with him is the way to go. Of course it's also possible that with the staff turnover this is really the best that they can do and they're just relying on their online offerings at this point.

They are clearly working on 5e. Development on 4e has slowed to a crawl and the game is in free fall. A Mike Mearls designed 5e would be a disaster. An unfinished turd covered in trendy buzzwords that would be a crushing disappointment to everyone.

The question of whether Mike Mearls will actually design 5e is a good one though. WotC's turnover these days is really fast, both for their own personnel and their design documents. In making 4e, they scrapped everything, what... 4 times? They started in 2006, and the actual released 4e was a super rush job that still had [W] notation multiplying your level bonus 4 months before final launch.

I frankly think that they don't have enough time to put together a 5e announcement for this GenCon. August is in a week. There is no countdown on their site, they haven't made any noises of having super secret announcements to announce, I just don't think it's happening. So the question is when? It is absolutely inconceivable that they won't at least announce 5e by GenCon 2012. And they could easily attempt a GenCon 2012 release.

So we basically have to pray for layoffs. Fortunately, the crown at WotC has rested uneasily during this edition. Heinsoo, Collins, and Slavicsek all held the top position at on point or another. That leaves James Wyatt and Mike Mearls unless Wyatt got fired too and I forgot. It's hard to say, because James Wyatt basically writes novels now and hasn't made an actual D&D-related thing in a long time. Now unfortunately, WotC stopped doing December layoffs for PR reasons (their "Christmas Layoffs" meme made them look like dicks). This year it was June Layoffs, and last year it was May layoffs. But both of them axed the top guy at the time. Heisoo went in December 2009, Collins in May 2010, and Slavicsek in June 2011. We can hope that Mearls gets the ax in 2012.

The question is really how much damage Mike Mearls can do in 10 months while 5e is in secret development. And the answer to that is, unfortunately: I don't know. MM's history is to cobble together unfinished and unworkable packages held together with market-speak ad "vision" before dumping it off on other people and wandering off to do something else. Best case scenario is that he gets a job offer from Paizo and jumps before he is pushed, leaving WotC in the fortunate position of having to scrap whatever the fuck Mearls was working on. But it's equally possible that he'll get some piece of buzzword injected crap like Iron Heroes "mostly finished" before leaving and WotC will be confused and think they have something worth inflicting on the public.

The timing is just way tighter than I'd like. It would have been much better had Mike Mearls been promoted to the top after the 2009 layoffs so that he could be already gone.

-Username17

Robert J. Schwalb is probably the only 4E-specific person that I would salvage from that team. He's a really good workhouse and for a period of time is the only one who produced any Dragon or Dungeon material at all, which gets Internet Pointz in my book. If he had better partners and better material to work with he'd be pretty swell.

Going back to the topic, I don't know if Hasbro is desperate enough to push 5E out of the gate after the edition lasted for four years. Even if the product is good (which it won't be) that would totally kill off the IP. All of my recommendations for 5E would be having the product die a slow death and letting it lie fallow for about a year and a half with no secret announcements or anything while it's being worked on. A year's worth of time is simply not freakin' enough time to let fan feelings die down, let alone pull off a quality product.

I do worry about the future of the game though. Then again if Squaresoft of all companies can pull their heads out of their asses, even only for a couple of weeks, anyone can.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
I do worry about the future of the game though. Then again if Squaresoft of all companies can pull their heads out of their asses, even only for a couple of weeks, anyone can.

You mean the company that went bankrupt and was bought by Enix?

The Essentials gambit failed. That was conceived in about May of 2010 and was an attempt to savage the line. The buzz at the time was that they would a few months to pull their shit together before the hammer started coming down.

It is objectively true that around four months in to the Essentials period, they started taking shit off the schedule. The core ten products got shuffled and reshuffled repeatedly and I have no idea what they were really supposed to be, but they did not actually release anything that could charitably be called ten evergreen products. By the end, they were claiming that various dungeon tile sets were part of the "core ten" and in any case most of that shit is now out of print.

So what does that leave for a timeline? In January, the returns on Essentials were bad, so they started throwing together a lame ass plan to unite Essentials and 4e into an interoperable package. That didn't actually come together, but that is why Heroes of Shadow and shit got delayed and reconcepted. That's several months of design work down the toilet for another gambit that didn't work.

So in May, Slavicsek got his termination notice. His final project was some board games, which was an interesting tangent to try to save his job. Various plans were then put on the table for what to do next to save the company, and Mike Mearls was given a shot based on whatever his proposal was.

If we're really lucky, Mearls' proposal wasn't 5e but some other bullshit holding pattern crap like a card game or an electronic tie-in. That would be ideal, because it would mean that he could get fired before 5e work starts in earnest in Q2 of next year.

-Username17

K wrote:I think we can now officially give up on DnD ever being fun again.

I thought the odd versions were supposed to be better than the even ones (as opposed to Star Trek, where the even ones are better than the odd ones).

I kinda gotta ask how you market 5e at this point, because while "hey, guys, we fucked up" might be what we want to hear, it's going to sound to the 4rries like the Tiefling and the Gnome video.

You don't think them saying:
"Only Mouthbreathers really played [4e, Gnomes, High Level adventures]" Will be a winning marketing strategy?

I'm not a marketing guy or anything and I'm pretty sure that Salem's Hypothesis applies to fields other than the 'hard' sciences here, so bear with me here.

If I was going to make a pitch for 5th Edition, I would market it as combining the best things from every other edition of D&D combined with some innovations stolen from other games. That's why it would be important to, as often as possible, slather names, concepts, and harmless mechanics from other editions as much as you can. Fortunately pretty much every edition of D&D had some salvageable components from it that other editions didn't had. I wouldn't even call my new edition 5th Edition; I'd call it something like Super Dungeons and Dragons or Dungeons and Dragons: The Revenge or something.

Instead of doing the thing where we dissed previous editions we'd go out of our way to praise what the other editions did and claim that no one edition was better than the other. When asked why we abandoned 4th Edition we would blame 'management' and 'executives' rather than the writers themselves; you know, the staples like not having enough advertisement, screwing us on DDI content, huge staff turnover that hurt morale, etc..

CapnTthePirateG wrote:I kinda gotta ask how you market 5e at this point, because while "hey, guys, we fucked up" might be what we want to hear, it's going to sound to the 4rries like the Tiefling and the Gnome video.

Well, I imagine they'd spin it more like "We asked what improvments you'd like and you answered!" or something like that.

If you're going to market a new edition of D&D, there is only one name it can have:

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: 3rd Edition

That is the way to win back Pathfinder devotees. That is the way to provoke interest in old schoolers, that is the way to alienate 4rries as little as possible. AD&D3. If they come out swinging with an AD&D3, then you'll know they are serious.

-Username17

Frank, that seems laughable on first glance. Can you explain why that idea is good, as opposed to ridiculous?

What makes you think that it won't allienate 4ed fans even harder than calling it 5th edition?

Gx1080 wrote:What makes you think that it won't allienate 4ed fans even harder than calling it 5th edition?

Because 4th Edition fans jump at anything new and official.

RiotGearEpsilon wrote:Frank, that seems laughable on first glance. Can you explain why that idea is good, as opposed to ridiculous?

It just sounds deliberately confusing. And at any rate, Pathfinder fans obviously aren't choosing their games based on the name, since the name "Pathfinder" itself is astoundingly generic and boring. It sounds like it should be a Nissan SUV or a movie about Vikings and Indians.

I wouldn't even call my new edition 5th Edition; I'd call it something like Super Dungeons and Dragons or Dungeons and Dragons: The Revenge or something.

Dungeons and Dragons: Super Turbo Championship Edition Hyper Fighting Alpha

Maxus wrote:

Gx1080 wrote:What makes you think that it won't allienate 4ed fans even harder than calling it 5th edition?

Because 4th Edition fans jump at anything new and official.

Like they jumped at Essentials? Guess again.

Gx1080 wrote:

Maxus wrote:

Gx1080 wrote:What makes you think that it won't allienate 4ed fans even harder than calling it 5th edition?

Because 4th Edition fans jump at anything new and official.

Like they jumped at Essentials? Guess again.

I said new. Essentials just wasn't really anything new or different.

I can see that.
Pathfinder won the editions wars, and people still play 3.5 etc... so you're going to have to recoup those fans.
Plus the 4rries, plus people who said fuck it anythings better than this.

Mearls...
I don't think he has many correct moves he can make right now. It's be really bonkers to see him put out X edition and still get outsold by 3.5'ers. I suspect that... there maybe a limit to how much any TTRPG can sell on this pattern. Dmg/PHB/Monsters book. Then you have to start selling MORE and MORE books, but I'm not sure it works like that with something like this does it?
Like the parent company says upon relase you have to earn at least 3 then 4 by the end of the year.
Even if you start of at 4 and keep that to the end of the year....
Won't the next year the company say "Now, you have to make 5. We know you can do it." just because they need to show an INCREASE in profit margin each year. I mean its D&D its not the oil industry.
While I think hard on "How will he fuck this up" like everyone else seems to, but I also think...

"Is there a way to make something right under those constraints?" I mean Magic... Magic can do that. I'm not sure how D&D can do that... yet. . .