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

[Blicero]

So. How are those 5E D&D sales going? Good? I doubt it; where the hell is our Alice in Wonderland-type setting? Or that 'Against the Giants' one?

Regarding Alice in Wonderland, it's possible that when Shitmuffin's book came out, wotc (not unreasonably) concluded that, judged by the standards WotC wants to be applied to 5E, anything they put out would probably not be as good as his book. And so the project got cancelled or something.

[Insomniac]

5E on the pen and paper side has a slashed to the bone non-staff with 6 people who have to be writers, editors, type-setters, printers, etc. whatever needs to be done to make 5E material is down to under 10 people.

We know that Paizo has several dozen people working for it. The last number I heard here and elsewhere was 60 to 70 people. They have third party support as well that naturally wants to put out Pathfinder material. Paizo isn't farming stuff off and outsourcing because they have to because they don't really exist as a gaming book company. That all supplements the adventuring and setting material and expansion material they put out in-house.

I cannot imagine that 5E is such a hit they decided to have nothing announced coming from WOTC on the pen and paper side, really. They have more coming out for miniatures and board games. There is no meat and potatoes here. Nothing. The pen and paper side of Dungeons and Dragons barely exists.

[Mistwell]

Now, 5th edition is seemingly tanking much harder than 4th edition did. With 4th edition, it was the heir apparent, and on release prophetic people like myself were loan voices in the wilderness when we said that 4th edition was going to fail to be the #1 role playing game. We weren't even saying it was going to get canceled early, just that it was going to fail to be #1. With 5e, I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that it's going to unseat Pathfinder as the #1 game, the only question is whether it's going to run a full three years. Signs are pointing to no at this time, what with the fact that there's nothing on the production schedule and the DMG is delayed.

I just wanted to quote this post for posterity. Because it's one of my favorite posts ever. That, and this one:

So I've stated that 5e is Vaporware. I'm pretty sure of it. The more of the release teasers I see, the more convinced I am. But I get questions like this:

Maybe I'm less experienced or maybe I'm less jaded, but Frank, why are you so sure about all this? You seem to be extrapolating heavily from a few paragraphs of text. Are the drawing from some source material I'm unaware of?

And yeah, that's reasonable. Why should you be convinced that 5e D&D is a Vaporware Product? It goes to who is making it, what they've said about what they are making, what they've made recently and in the past, and so on.

First, let's look at the track record of Mike Mearls. Remember when he fixed Skill Challenges? Sorry, remember the first seven times that he announced that he was fixing skill challenges? Remember Iron Heroes? The man has a history, going back several years and literally dozens of instances, of announcing with great fanfare that he was going to make a new subsystem, then announcing the subsystem was ready for publication, then announcing that criticism of that subsystem was unfair because it "wasn't really finished" and he was "working on something new and exciting".

Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twenty eight times, what the fucking fuck?

Now 5th edition is supposed to be layer upon layer of Mike Mearls blessed subsystem. Each one done up to the specifications of a different section of the fanbase. Each one interacting in some odd way with all the others, but every one of them optional. So, for example: if you make a cogent condemnation of the way they track movement or durations or whatever, they can claim openly that this version is "not for you" and is nebulously for some other group and obviously you should be using some other movement or duration tracking subsystem instead.

They have announced a platform that is perfectly suited for denial in depth of non-functionality. In order to show that there is a problem to the satisfaction of their ability to not simply dismiss it for you supposedly not being the target audience, you'd have to do each separate variant together. And then they could dismiss your complaint for being TL;DR.

In short: they've made an edition that would take months or years to expose as vaporware and the project leader is a man who has made nothing but vaporware since Kerry was running for president. And his second in command is a man who hired out his name to promote that guy's actual Vaporware in 2005. Remember: it was originally called "Monte Cook Presents: Iron Heroes" when it was originally released and sold for real money despite the fact that none of the subsystems worked properly and even Mike Mearls admitted that the magic system was just a draft taken from a brainstorming session. The number three guy is Bruce Cordell, who apparently didn't read any of the rules or setting material for 4th edition before writing rules and setting material for 4th edition. In short: a man whose design work has been literally monkeys on typewriters style vaporware paycheck writing for at least four years.

So the entire core group of authors have a clearly demonstrated history of making vaporware, and the hype is completely consistent with and even suggests a vaporware product. But how do we know that this is actually vaporware? Well, there are clues.

• Let's talk about they admit they haven't done: higher levels and hard numbers. That's... the entire design. It's a level based system, therefore if you haven't tested the leveling or the system, you haven't actually done anything. They are already putting up sign-ups for beta testers, but their actual product has been admitted to being in a pre-alpha state.
• Now let's talk about the things they've promised. They have promised that a character who gets pure numbers will be balanced with a character who gets abilities instead. We already know that's impossible, because we've played BESM and Champions. So we know we're being promised things that we know can't be implemented. Either they know that they can't really deliver and are jerking our chain because it's Vaporware, or they haven't actually gotten far enough down the design rabbit hole to recognize that fact, because it is fucking Vaporware.
• Now let's talk about the things they've actually shown people: Magical Teaparty. MTP, all the way down. The actions people took at the D&DXP were not on the character sheets, the DMs did not have DC charts. The DMs used their judgment to determine whether actions succeeded or failed. The actual game system, if there was one, was not used.

Now let's get into the "how did we get to this point?" part. In short: job security. WotC has held Christmas Layoffs every year (except last year, when the layoffs were in early Summer) for as long as they have been owned by Hasbro. The head of 4th edition D&D has been fired every year since 4th edition D&D was created. It's entirely possible that the people left at WotC believe that the only way they can keep their jobs is by releasing a faulty product that needs to be patched so that they will be retained. It's possible that they believe that their jobs are completely unrelated to their performance and that they will probably have to go look for work in the near future and are simply phoning it in.

Regardless of the motivations on the ground, it is clear that having an office filled entirely with new blood means that there is no process. There are no working relationships or project schedules, because heads roll too often for a corporate culture to actually show up. A half-assed, overly ambitious project is probably inevitable with a core set of demoralized hacks who are already looking for a new job leading a group of untested fanboys who don't know what they are doing.

But the promises being made for 5e are on the face of it absurd, the people in charge have a long and storied history of booting projects out the door in a totally nonfunctional state, they lack enough confidence in their mechanics to actually use them, and they've admitted that they haven't even tried to do so in-house. This is what Vaporware looks like.

-Username17

Just so precious.

[erik]

Fuck. Do they just respawn every 6 months?

[Iduno]

Fuck. Do they just respawn every 6 months?

Looking at Mistwell's post history, it's twice every year, so on average yes.

[deaddmwalking]

Fuck. Do they just respawn every 6 months?

It's the same guy. This is his first post in 4 months, but it's always the same thing. 5th edition is the most popular version of D&D EVAH!!! and it is SO AWESOME!!!

I'm playing 5th edition via play-by-post. Frank's post is prescient. There isn't a system. It's 'let's play the way we remember D&D from whatever edition we remember best' outside of the classes. And frankly, the classes aren't that exciting. As a 1st level warlock I spam eldritch blast if I want to hope to be useful, and I use a spear when I feel like I should avoid spamming the same move in combat. Most of out-of-character conversation is looking for a way to get advantage on the roll, either to negate disadvantage or to actually get the bonus.

It plays like:
Player: DM, can I get advantage because [reason].
DM: Sure [or: No, I don't think that applies]
[repeat as desired]
Player: *rolls*
[repeat until combat ends]
Player: What skill should I use to look for treasure? Is it investigate or perception. I have a proficiency bonus to investigate.
DM: *Picks whichever one seems best at the moment*

Basically, the game functions if you have a competent GM. That's true for every other system. There is nothing about 5th edition to recommend it over any other system unless you consider 'too many options' to be a problem. Lots of people do, but 5th edition is just so limited.

[Omegonthesane]

Basically, the game functions if you have a competent GM. That's true for every other system. There is nothing about 5th edition to recommend it over any other system unless you consider 'too many options' to be a problem. Lots of people do, but 5th edition is just so limited.

Motherfuckin' Bear World functions if you have a competent GM and arguably is better at solving "too many options".

(Although you do have to run it in a fashion that openly defies the rulebook's advice for it to be an actual game. So a fashion in which succeeding at a perception check does not literally spawn an autolose number of cultists.)

[Kaelik]

I love that his two examples are Frank referring to the lack of sales of an edition that has made less money than 4e for every year of it's existence until 4e was canceled (True) and a post explaining how all of Mike Mearls's promises won't be met, and then a list of promises ABSOLUTELY NONE OF WHICH WHERE MET.

And he thinks, because he can only read the first sentence of each post, that these are huge gotchas, instead of "hmm basically accurate."

[Aryxbez]

At first I thought he was literally agreeing with Frank, bringing up this post for posterity for how much this has come true, years later, and what Frank's said holds all too true.

[Username17]

I think it says a lot about 5th edition, the twice a year trolling by one dumbass who can't be bothered to make arguments is the best "goon squad" style invasion the edition can muster. I mean, I assume that asshole is copypastaing some stuff for purposes of mockery on grognards.txt or something similar. But... it's just one asshole. And he doesn't even have a script.

4e was a cavalcade of failure, and at least they could muster thread invasions by groups of 4vengers to shower us with groupthink. 5e's trolls can't even manage that. There just aren't enough of them, and their community isn't vibrant enough to have memes and talking points.

-Username17

[WiserOdin032402]

Given that this thread is back, I remember getting into an argument with a 5e player who I swear would have been more comfortable playing Chuubo's with how he regarded GMing, and one of my friends helped me out with him by pointing out that AD&D 2e put out more books in the same amount of time 5e has been around. You know, the game that was being made by TSR.

[Mord]

I hesitate to break up the "let's all suck Frank's cock" party, but Frank did make one statement in the posts Mistwell quoted that can be considered a prediction and turned out to be wrong:

With 5e, I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that it's going to unseat Pathfinder as the #1 game, the only question is whether it's going to run a full three years. Signs are pointing to no at this time, what with the fact that there's nothing on the production schedule and the DMG is delayed.

The 5e DMG went into publication in December 2014 and the line is still in print. This, of course, proves that D&D 5e is the most popular and best RPG ever written and that Frank is completely wrong in everything he has ever said on any subject.

I'm genuinely curious as to what 5e lifetime sales are relative to 4e at this point. In terms of evidence, we have the infamous "hundreds of thousands" quote from April 2009, regarding an edition that rolled out in June 2008 and continued to limp along until roughly the end of 2011 (when did D&D Essentials go out of print?). From August 2016, we have Mearls' Tweet "5e lifetime PHB sales > 3, 3.5, 4 lifetime", with all subsequent weaselly clarifications. ICv2 figures and Amazon sales rank figures are of no help because 4e and 5e were obviously never in print concurrently. As far as I know, that's basically it.

The release schedule is picking up of late, which is not hard to do because the previous standard for 5e was one book a year, but may nonetheless speak to an increased corporate confidence at Hasbro that D&D is worth the investment. It's possible that sales figures were the source of that confidence, though that's far from the only possibility, and it's worth noting that Hasbro's financial statements compartmentalize licensing revenue separately from retail revenue. Even if sales are the source of that hypothetical increased confidence, it's not clear if the sales in question were in physical books or other crap.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The 5e DMG went into publication in December 2014 and the line is still in print.

Is it, though? The production schedule is so pathetic that I think it's a genuine question whether it even counts as one. By the output standards of any other edition, 5e's been dead since the core books dropped.

[Vaegrim]

As someone only showed up to do a drive-by defense of 5E once a year or two ago, I think the reason you're seeing less drive-by shitposting is that 5E fans feel pretty comfortable in their cheer-leading for the game. That doesn't say anything about whether the game is good, just that all the people who care and disagree left a while ago.

I expect 4th edition fans felt besieged by haters in their time, and that created a sort of fanatic reactionary counter. Yeah, a big part of that was the conspicuous division of the community. It seems pretty obvious that a lot 3.5 players never came back for 5th, but the fact that they were already gone meant there wasn't the same backlash mentality.

[Judging__Eagle]

I guess everyone thinks that the post was a reiteration of the fact everything Frank said about 5e was true.

I didn't realize it was a condemnation of Frank being correct (yet again) about how game mechanics being a key part to why game systems succeed or fail.

[CapnTthePirateG]

"goon squad" style invasion

Interesting you mention that, because (and I've mentioned this before) the SA goon squad is still deep in the 4e kool-aid, and it's rather hilarious to watch them desperately slam 5e/PF2 with blatantly dumb shit. There's a guy in their 5e thread pointing out that yea 4e didn't actually sell all that well (with sources and quotes from industry insiders) and their reply is basically that Big Brother said it did and like 4e was totally cool and good so shut up now. They have drunk deep of the Kool-Aid, to the point where if anyone brings up that scaling DCs are kinda stupid or that the deal where an NPC halfling rogue gets abiliities PCs don't get and vice versa* they are immediately shouted down as grognards promoting Bad Game Design and how expecting a consistent world in RPGs is wrong and bad, and how 4e sold as the Best Game Ever until it was betrayed by a Mike Mearls conspiracy. I mean, it's all disingenious idiocy that's basically D&D's version of the worst of identity politics, but you can tell that they're dedicated at least.

5e doesn't have any of those cultists at all. The best I've heard from 5e defenders are that it's a "simplification" of the rules and that well everyone's playing it so we may as well. 5e defense comes mostly from ignorance, not passion such as when I'm told that 5e is more balanced or that having no skill system makes for a better story because you could totally succeed on your 25% chance to run down the bad guy as an unathletic mage.

I can legitimately think of no system-specific mechanical engagement with 5e, because it's just a bland, unremarkable mess.


*Even WoW is better about this than 4e.

[Username17]

The 5e DMG went into publication in December 2014 and the line is still in print.

Is it, though? The production schedule is so pathetic that I think it's a genuine question whether it even counts as one. By the output standards of any other edition, 5e's been dead since the core books dropped.

That's about where I am. If you include all the adventure modules (but not the pdfs, advertising pamphlets, DM's screens, and dice boxes that WotC pads the release schedule with to make it look less like abandonware) there are 17 books produced for 5e D&D. By contrast, the Birthright Campaign Setting was considered a failure and got canceled after 4 years and had 31 books and box sets produced for it.

The entire production of 5th edition, literally everything they've ever produced for it, constitutes less than a single year's output for any previous edition since 1989. The game's 5th rule supplement is scheduled to come out in November of this year. 4th edition had a rulebook every month for two entire years. The entire output of 5th edition D&D since 2014 doesn't match the output of 4th edition from just 2008. And in November, when the number of rule supplement books goes up by 25% (assuming that the Guilds of Ravnica tie-in book actually comes out on time), it still won't.

I confidently predicted that 5e was going to be empty and sputtering from a mechanical and design standpoint. But I think I and most other people thought that 5e would actually have product released for it on some kind of reasonable schedule. Instead the company virtually shut down the entire enterprise, and the entire D&D team is a skeleton crew.

-Username17

-Username17

[phlapjackage]

If anything, I think a case could be made for how much bigger a failure 5e is using the same argument about "more players than ever" and "more books sold than previous editions". If there are really this many players/new players/etc that LOVE 5e, then the fact that there are so few things for people to actually buy is another huge failure. If people are loving 5e so much, wotc are losing out on tons of money people would (theoretically) spend on new books and products.

[maglag]

One of the main selling points of 5e is indeed that you do not need to check thousands of pages accross dozens of books to build your character. You do not need to worry about constant power creep where next month a player brings the new book that makes a bunch of stuff obsolete or forces everybody to learn yet another subsystem.

We get it, you love 3.x bloated corpse and all the related system mastery. But many people out there want something simpler. But still not super 3 page lite simple. 5e hits quite a sweet spot in between and the ultimate proof is that Pathfinder themselves threw in the towel and are trying to make a completely new edition because it turns out super bloat of material is not that much of an advantage.

[Mask_De_H]

It's nice that maglag has a cute anime girl avatar, so when he posts something dumb I can imagine it's not from a real person.

EDIT: Unless you're playing Adventurer's League, there's still monthly power creep/learning new material. Mearls and Friends release playtest material all the time. Some of it is much better than the old stuff. The newest main splatbook released more dumb rules. You still need to cross reference at least four books for character options now, even in AL (PHB, DMG, FRPG, Xanthar's). The only reason you don't have to comb through more is because there isn't more in print for you.

Stop being such a bwaka, cute anime girl with bad gotchas.

[phlapjackage]

One of the main selling points of 5e is indeed that you do not need to check thousands of pages accross dozens of books to build your character. You do not need to worry about constant power creep where next month a player brings the new book that makes a bunch of stuff obsolete or forces everybody to learn yet another subsystem.

Do you have a source for that being a main selling point? What you said feels really strongly like revisionist history. My memory is hazy, but I mostly just remember modularity, adv/disadv, bounded accuracy, and "classic D&D feeling" as selling points. For example, your "not having to learn a new subsystem" thing seems in direct contradiction to the whole modularity idea, which I know was a main selling point.

[Whiysper]

Main selling point, yes, but never remotely delivered. That one evaporated with the morning dew!

Edit: Derp, modularity is the context here.

[Mord]

I'm not so quick to dismiss accessibility as a legitimate selling point for 5e. Among people who actually play 5e, it seems to be the most commonly-cited advantage over 3.X or PF1. The empty book publication schedule does factually keep the overall complexity of the 5e ecosystem down.

On the subject of lack of publications, I was going over some old posts that Ryan Dancey made on ENWorld in 2012 regarding the broader market situation surrounding D&D, and one thing he said seems relevant here:

80% of the profits earned by D&D come from sales of the 3 core rulebooks. The rest of the product line is effectively a self-subsidizing marketing campaign. The core rulebooks are reprinted endlessly, allowing their development costs to be amortized over many more units than anything else in the line. The core books are also the products with the widest footprints - they are the things new stores sell, and the beachead the game uses to open a new channel of sales.

You can (and should) think of the D&D business as the business of selling the core books. If you get distracted and think you're in the business of selling campaign setting or rules expansions you'll end up with a less profitable business.

The goblins at Hasbro/WotC are definitely running D&D for the profit motive, so the lack of books might be a deliberate strategy rather than just carelessness or neglect. If you view new books as hardbound ad copy for the core books rather than gaming products, then it makes sense to release them only at times when you think the market is in a condition where a marketing push will most effectively translate into sales volume.

One viable strategy would be to spend the first few years of the line building buzz around the core product through semi-professional Twitch streams and podcasts - this builds brand awareness while you get your initial installed user base. During this period you release a new book every year or so just to show the product line isn't dead and generate stuff for the streamers to talk about. Once you've got a certain critical mass of core books sold, or possibly a certain viewership on your streams as a proxy metric, you can ramp up book production in an effort to trigger a chain reaction.

Alternatively and more pessimistically, you might ramp up book production to shore up flagging sales of the core product and/or waning public interest in your regular marketing channel content. I don't know how closely Twitch viewership and corebook sales correlate, but obviously the goblins think they do and they probably make business decisions on that basis.

TSR was just barely worth buying in the 1997 fire sale, back when WotC was much much smaller (this specific piece of history repeated itself with White Wolf and CCP in 2006). Unfortunately, WotC blew up on the strength of MTG, Hasbro picked it up on that basis in 1999, and in 2005 decided to restructure their business to force D&D to compete directly with Transformers and My Little Pony.

D&D has always been a product that serves a tiny niche market that is just barely worth enough money to support a small and passionate group of weirdos. Now the market isn't much different, but products serving that market are being made by a company that posts $5B annual revenues and wouldn't piss on any brand that brings in less than $50m a year if it were on fire. That don't make no fucking sense. It's not good for Hasbro, it's not good for WotC, it's not good for the RPG market, and it's not good for players.

Hooray, the RPG business is terrible!

[Harshax]

Fuck. Do they just respawn every 6 months?

Maybe denners are spawn campers?

[Iduno]

Fuck. Do they just respawn every 6 months?

Maybe denners are spawn campers?

Nah. The first few posts didn't even bother with more than "this person. Again." Like 5e, Mistwell isn't worth the effort to make fun of.

After that, Denners jumped in, because shouting on the internet about stupid shit is fun. Especially when someone's arguments are bad.