OgreBattle wrote:
I figure that the most important thing for the new edition isn't really the rules but just how you sell them. 4e launched with a pretty terrible campaign that poo poo'd over 3e whose only result could be to split the fanbase.
Look at Pathfinder and their 'Open Playtest'. What it accomplished wasn't making the rules any tighter, it was to make the fans feel that paizo was doing something big and amazing, and by participating they were buying into a piece of a better D&D.
The trend of previous editions though, is the newer one is based on the tail end of the older one. You can see 4e in 3e's tomes, you can see 3e in Skills & Powers, and so on.
Actually I agree with this, the new rules need to not do what 4E did and act like the previous edition was a rotten terrible mess.
3.X D&D was super fucked by the time 4E came out. The last ditch effort to show what a "more balanced" version of 3.x D&D would look like (book of nine swords) did exactly what 4E did, it pissed off half the people and the other half thought it was freaking mandatory to make characters who didn't suck who used weapons. 3.X had been around long enough that people were super pissed about its flaws. There were people who complained about the magic system, metamagic, the need for healbots or wands of cure light wounds, save progressions, and save or sucks in general. People were ANGRY about these things, the WOTC message boards were NOT filled with people saying "make small changes please" they were filled with people saying "if you don't cut every wizards balls off there will never be a reason to NOT play a wizard"
Wizards thought that the mood of MOST people was real anger. However, then as now the mood of most people is FRUSTRATION. Thats very different. The angry people are vocal, the frustrated people just want the bullshit removed.
All of 4e could go in, it just needs to be printed in a book with parchment like backgrounds and formats in paragraphs where mechanics and flavor text are intermixed. All mentions of squares must also be changed to feet and so on.
The mechanics and flavor text need to be seperated for clarity. However, the magic card format was a turn off to people. The ability should be a little closer to spells where the flavor text leads the game text. However it should be clear where flavor text ends and game text begins because that was the problem with 3.X magic was that people argued the flavor text was mechanical. Thats a pathway to madness.
I would suggest that the mechanics be printed in
BOLD much like how 3.x attack mechanics were. Anything that is to be rules lawyer fodder should stand out of the page. Similarly keywords should remain, printed in bold italics at the end of the entry or in the ( ) defining what type of ability something is.
Every ability should say how many squares AND how many feet the ability covers. I would suggest something like "range 60 ft. (12)." Further, the gmae should assume that when played in abstract all distances are hard limits and when played with mini's/squares that all distances are soft (i.e. the default mode for the mini based game should be if an ability would be in any part of a space it effects that space this effectively would give you results like 4E "squared circles." The DMG can then give examples of playing with hard distances on a square grid. Seriously the 4E "diagnles are 1 space is so much easier/faster for minis play that its sad it took over a decade from the release of combat and tactics for somebody to figure out how to make minis play nice.
It's important for 4e to be viewed as a failure though, it's part of the marketing. 4e players will initially be pushed away, but if they see the rules are similar enough they'll play it anyways. Or WotC just continues making some dough with DDI subs.
Actually this is the exact WRONG thing to do. This is what was done with 3E and it was a disaster. 4E shouldn't be viewed as a failure, it cannot be viewed as a failure. That is what was done to 3.X and its what caused the edition war. 4E is still selling, 4E has a fanbase larger than any rpg except 3.X D&D. Seriously, more people have played 4E than have played pathfinder. 4E would be considered a huge sucess if 3E were not a COLLOSSAL sucess. 3E dominated the market to a point were companies with their own systems like the L5R guys decided to print materials in a 2 system format. 3.x was so popular that people were willing to by terrible books from tiny third party imprints that contained assloads of clearly broken stuff.
People wanted 3.X materials so bad that people were able to make money printing things like "the book of erotic fantasy" Thats REALLY messed up. You almost couldn't saturate the market for 3.X materials. You could print a book on renasiance banking and as long as it had 30 new feats, 30 new spells, and 5 new prestige classes you could make money.
So pissing on that legacy was NOT a good idea on the part of Wizards. 4E should have come out not saying "Boy, doesn't 3E suck, doesn't this stuff piss you off?" (even though it did) and 5E should not come out and say "Holy Shit was 4E a waste of time! Don't you hate this and that and the other thing?" It should be like the 2E to 3E tranistion where they said "2E was great, but we noticed things that were not working, so we fixed those, and took insperation from previous editions, and really tried to get at the heart of D&D." Which is what they said while they wrote what was in reality a game that was completly different and interely incompatible with 2E.
Also, the one thing that people are not really talking about is the OGL. the 3.X one was a masterstroke. However it was so good that Hasbro will never let it happen again. To many books were printed for a game from which WOTC/Hasbro never saw a dime. You will never get corporate executives to agree to something that open again. Without it, you won't get the 3rd parties you need to make the game feel huge like 3e did. The moment for that has passed and I really don't think you will ever see an era of gaming where stuff for one system was published by so many different entities.[/b]
