The End of 4e D&D.

[Data Vampire]

Further adjustment to the catalog: PHB Races: Humans ha been canceled. There are no longer any 4e books scheduled after GenCon.

-Username17

I managed to find Player's Handbook Races: Humans's product page, but it seems that no references to it outside that page exist on the site.

[Windjammer]

It also comes out 3 months after the last material made for use with 4th edition D&D (the Rules Compendium, which according to Greg Bilsland's Twitter will have "significant updates" to the core rules).

I looked up the Rules Compendium, and it is part of the essentials line.

Weird. It originally wasn't. And indeed, on the Catalog, it's still separate - part of the 4e D&D structure. But if you look at the Specific Entry, you see that it's been changed to be in the Essentials line.

That's weird.

-Username17

That is indeed weird. I remember that at an earlier point there were TWO versions of the Rules Compendium on the WotC [upcoming] product catalogue, one pitched at "core" players, one at "essentials" players. I can't any longer find traces of the former product on the 'web. The indication seems to be that they folded both products into one. Now that's a strange change of events, because they now basically expect "core" players to buy "essentials" product to keep up with their own game. I understand the economic rationale for not producing two books when you can do one, but I must say, this "core"/"essentials" split is really only getting more and more confusing instead of getting clearer.

[Username17]

That is indeed weird. I remember that at an earlier point there were TWO versions of the Rules Compendium on the WotC [upcoming] product catalogue, one pitched at "core" players, one at "essentials" players. I can't any longer find traces of the former product on the 'web. The indication seems to be that they folded both products into one. Now that's a strange change of events, because they now basically expect "core" players to buy "essentials" product to keep up with their own game. I understand the economic rationale for not producing two books when you can do one, but I must say, this "core"/"essentials" split is really only getting more and more confusing instead of getting clearer.

No kidding. And to throw more crazy on the fire, the one they went with for the singular final version is actually the original 4e version in item code. It even still has the original 4e description.

It contains the complete core rules for the 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Roleplaying Game.

The flak sheet still lists it as being in the category "D&D Rules Supplement" and not "An Essential D&D Game Accessory" like the Essentials books say. And to add confusion, it drops two weeks after the Essentials box now instead of a month before.

I don't even fucking know what they think they are doing. I predicted back at the beginning that they would likely quietly drop PHB Races: Humans, and they did. But none of the rest of this shell game makes any sense to me. Maybe they are trying to keep interest in 4e up by obfuscating the removal of the line? I would have thought they would be more interested in getting people excited about the new line...

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Maybe some market research is showing that D&D Essentials is going to be a bomb so they're trying to delay the inevitable?

I hope that D&D Essentials turns out to be a bigger trainwreck than 4E. Hopefully this will inspire Hasbro to sell the IP or to completely turn over the entire D&D staff.

[Alansmithee]

Please excuse my ignorance I've been out of the gaming loop for awhile. But why is 4th failing? And what are seen as the big problems with it? I've been playing around with the system a bit now, and from what I see, it's pretty solid. It seems to do a much better job of keeping people close in power level, and giving everyone useful combat options. There's still some things that are obviously "better", but it doesn't seem to be the game-warping that occured in 3.5. And it also seems they're actually working to fix things that are considered too powerful with errata rather than just saying Rule 0 or sticking their heads in the sand.

[Crissa]

There's alot to talk about, but apparently it does appear solid at the beginning.

The things people do in combat is not actually tactically important. +1 this and one square that don't amount to much over all. And then there are failed design goals, which is where they said they intended to do X and do not supply X when played.

My biggest peeve is that the characters have all the life and detail of clicktech figures, and that none of the flavour actually is written down about the monsters and whatnot. If I wanted a plain dungeon crawl, there's many far more suited products which will give me a fun evening.

-Crissa

[Username17]

Please excuse my ignorance I've been out of the gaming loop for awhile. But why is 4th failing? And what are seen as the big problems with it? I've been playing around with the system a bit now, and from what I see, it's pretty solid. It seems to do a much better job of keeping people close in power level, and giving everyone useful combat options. There's still some things that are obviously "better", but it doesn't seem to be the game-warping that occured in 3.5. And it also seems they're actually working to fix things that are considered too powerful with errata rather than just saying Rule 0 or sticking their heads in the sand.

"Why" it is failing is an open question. Could be that it was released during a poor economic period and never achieved the kinds of strong opening presence needed to become a cultural icon. Could be that the limited initial release of playable character types turned off many potential players who never ended up giving it a shot. Could be that the game's incredibly awful and failed skill challenge system ended up forcing the game into competition with war games and board games as well as RPGs. Could be that their insistence on releasing large numbers of books like Open Grave that were ostensibly all about undead but didn't even have a playable necromancer in them offended and turned off potential buyers. Could be that the continuous nerf-centered errata cycle made people reluctant to purchase material on the grounds that it was going to get phased out before the end of the campaign anyway. Most likely, it's a combination of those things.

4e materials aren't being printed after GenCon. From December on, we get "D&D Essentials" which is similar to 4e, but has "substantial differences" in the core rules. As well as all new classes. This makes the fastest turnaround for a complete overhaul of the rules into a new edition that any version of the D&D rules have ever had.

But why it's in that position? I blame this essay by Ari Marmell, who is one of the people working on 4th edition for WotC:

I don’t really houserule anymore.

There was a time, a while back—a long while back—when I houseruled my games so far up the wazoo that it was practically a delve in and of itself. (Which now gives me images of a party of adventurers investigating the twists and turns of a giant colon and series of intestines, which is utterly disgusting and must therefore appear in one of my future campaigns so that I may spread my misery.)

This, mind you, was back in my 2E days. I didn’t have the “full three-ring binder” of houserules that you see mentioned so often online, but I had a lot. I did not, for instance, require any of the spellcasters to choose their spells ahead of time; they could just pick and choose (like sorcerers wound up doing in 3E) from whatever spells they knew. For clerics, this meant all of them; for wizards, it meant whatever they had in their spellbooks.

Yes, it was broken as all hell. But we didn’t really know that; after all, it already took wizards more XP to advance than almost anyone else, so surely that still made up for the increase in power, right?

Well, no. Not right. But like I said, we didn’t know better.

We created magic items, with all kinds of nifty little effects, without thought to whether those effects would prove unbalancing in the long run. I made up all kinds of funky familiars and paladin’s mounts and the like, without any concern for whether the powers granted by or to those companions could be abused. On occasion, we even went so far as to make up new races—up to and including, when I was a lot younger, basically a were-dragon—when players got tired of the same-old.

It was early in the advent of 3E that I seriously pulled back on the houseruling, from “a lot” to “almost none,” and the latter is a rate I’ve maintained ever since, throughout 3E, 3.5, and now into 4E. I houserule almost nothing these days, and if I do, it’s usually as small as a nerf to a particular power I find overpowered, a “reskin,” or something else so minor it barely qualifies. (For instance, we created a duelist by taking a rogue, swapping out Sneak Attack for the ranger’s Hunter’s Quarry, and replacing Thievery with Acrobatics. I don’t consider that to be hard-core houseruling.) I’ll tweak a monster here and there, or come up with my own, so I guess, yeah, there’s some houseruling. But again, it’s infrequent—and more to the point, it’s all minor and not nearly as game-changing as the 2E stuff.

So what changed?

Well, part of it—like I talked about before, in my column about DMing less than I used to—is that, having been doing this professionally for ten years now, coming up with game materials often feels too much like work. When I’m trying to create six days a week, I don’t necessarily have the inclination, or the mental/emotional energy, to do so as part of my leisure time as well. But once I’ve broken through that particular mental barrier enough to DM in the first place, there’s no reason that developing a few house rules should tip the balance. Besides, I’ve been focusing more on fiction and less on game design for the past year or so, and while my urge to DM has indeed been rising, it has done so at a faster rate than my urge to start fiddling with the system. (I have a few things I want to tweak, yes, but not many—and I honestly don’t know if I’ll wind up bothering even with the ones I do want to change.)

So if that’s not it, or at least not all of it, what else?

It’s certainly not that I feel the game is perfect as is. I liked 3E, I like 4E, but both editions have aspects of which I’m not fond and wouldn’t mind messing with.

No, I think ultimately it’s a case where ignorance was, indeed, bliss—and I’ve ceased being ignorant. (Well, on this topic, anyway. )

See, 3E had a very different design philosophy than the prior editions had: It was, or at least tried to be, mechanically balanced. The classes all advanced at the same rate, and therefore were (ostensibly) equal to one another. Monsters had a measure of difficulty that was—again, at least in theory—far more accurate and meaningful than the XP values of prior editions.

This was, to me, something of a revelation. “Balance” was no longer something that only arose in extreme circumstances, when something was either blatantly too good or too bad; it was a design philosophy. It permeated the entire game. I don’t think that idea had ever even occurred to me before then.

It was also right about this same time that I began working in RPGs. Granted, I got my start in Vampire: the Masquerade, where this wasn’t so much of an issue, but still, it came up from time to time. And I very quickly began working for some of the new D20 companies, so I was almost immediately immersed in the 3E mechanics.

And the problem is, once Balance became a major part of my process, in terms of creating RPG materials, I lost the ability to turn it off. I can’t just make random, spur-of-the-moment tweaks—I can’t run with every idea that comes to mind, no matter how cool—without first examining it carefully to see if it’s broken, or looking for unanticipated consequences.

Sure, in some ways that’s a good thing. I mean, it’s not as though we want broken elements in our games. It’s one of the most troubling things as a DM, to introduce something that your players really like—a spell, a magic item, a house rule, whatever—and then to realize, later, that we have to either take it away or suck up the fact that our campaign is permanently out of whack. Believe me, I’m not decrying balance as a design goal.

But at the same time, it’s difficult, and it’s limiting. When every house rule, every tweak and change, needs to be examined and studied and then perfectly designed, it often becomes more trouble than it’s worth. It’s just easier to go with the RAW, even when you think the game might be better moving beyond those particular parameters. The question doesn’t become “Will the game be more fun if I change X or add Y?” but rather “Will it be fun enough to justify the hassle of implementing said changes?” Unless the answer is a blatant yes, it’s just easier to err on the side of inertia.

And yes, it’s somewhat creatively limiting. Even as a vocal champion of balance in D&D, I don’t pretend otherwise. Sometimes, a really cool idea just can’t be mechanically balanced—either because it’s overpowered (or under) by its very nature, or because it’s too open-ended to be numerically quantified. (The 3E version of polymorph—and especially the higher-level variants—are perfect examples of this.) So either you add them anyway, and accept the innate imbalance, or you reject an otherwise really cool/interesting idea because it can’t be balanced. I usually go with the latter, myself, precisely because—now that Balance has its hooks in my mind—I find myself uncomfortable with the other option. I fret over it, and it bugs at me, until it’s simply not worth the trouble. But I’ll readily admit, I miss the days when I wasn’t so hung up on keeping things balanced, when I could throw the wild and wacky into the game without ever worrying about it.

This has, much as I hate to admit it, been an issue for me—thankfully, only on rare occasions—in my professional endeavors as well. While I’m happy with the majority of my mechanical work on both 3E and 4E, I’d be lying if I said there weren’t times where I failed to get a concept across—or, on occasion, even abandoned a concept entirely—because I couldn’t find a way to make it work in any mechanically balanced sense. I’m working on learning to move past that, to take more mechanical chances, but it’s not easy.

And of course, with my professional stuff, I know that if I come up with something that’s too far out of whack, I’ve got the development team to catch it. With my own stuff? No safety net. So once again, it’s usually just easier not to mess with it. To take the safer and simpler route, and just stick with the RAW.

I’m glad to have had the chance to learn the various tricks of the trade. I’m glad that, for the most part, the last two editions have focused on creating a balanced and equal experience for all the players. And of course, I wouldn’t trade the last ten years of my career for almost anything. But I’ll admit, there are disadvantages to having seen the man behind the curtain—because once you have, you can never entirely give yourself over and immerse yourself entirely in Oz’s magic anymore.

TL;DR: Ari Marmell has found that he isn't actually good enough at game mechanics to be able to tweak things so that they work better. This despite the fact that tweaking things to work better by writing new rules is his actual fucking job.

They made an edition of D&D whose sole claimed reason for existence was mechanical balance during combat sequences. And they took o a set of designers bad enough at math that they couldn't even do that.

-Username17

[Jilocasin]

Huh, well I was in the middle of writing something, but that blurb by Ari whatshisface explains much of the problem quite well. I would like to just say that one of the major things in my mind was their concept of roles. Unfortunately I can't find that post that linked to some designer talking about how they're so super important and using some weird ass circular logic involving mmorpgs. I still don't understand how they thought that having the number of roles be smaller than the expected number of players was a good idea.

[Username17]

Huh, well I was in the middle of writing something, but that blurb by Ari whatshisface explains much of the problem quite well. I would like to just say that one of the major things in my mind was their concept of roles. Unfortunately I can't find that post that linked to some designer talking about how they're so super important and using some weird ass circular logic involving mmorpgs. I still don't understand how they thought that having the number of roles be smaller than the expected number of players was a good idea.

You are thinking of David Noonan's Blog.

He basically blames roles on MMOs and decided on four roles because there were 4 basic classes in AD&D (Fighter, Magic User, Priest, Thief). Then he waves his hands about how there isn't any evidence of such a role distinction being functional or even existing in any source material. And glosses over that with some hand waving that doesn't make any sense.

-Username17

[Jilocasin]

Yup, that'd be it. Thanks.

[Edit] Ugh, I just reread it, it's even more nonsensical than I remembered.

[Crissa]

So wait, what?

There are roles because of X, so we should have roles, so here's four, but they make nose sense, have no history, and then what?

What was the point of that essay?

-Crissa

[Jilocasin]

Looking at source material and trying to find justification for putting mmorpg roles into 4e. Failing, admitting that failure, and then saying it doesn't matter. Sooo... as far as I can tell no point at all except to illustrate poor reasoning.

[Username17]

So wait, what?

There are roles because of X, so we should have roles, so here's four, but they make nose sense, have no history, and then what?

What was the point of that essay?

-Crissa

The point of that essay was to explain why he demanded a system with four roles.

He demanded that there be roles because that's how MMOs get people to work together. And he demanded that there be four roles because there were four basic classes in AD&D.

That's it. Then he talked about how he tried to find some source material to back up the idea and couldn't. But he went ahead with it, because roles like Tanking, DPS, and Healing worked in EQ, and he was going to put that kind of idea into 4e D&D come hell or high water.

The real point of the essay is that David Noonan is so myopic and stubborn that even after being confronted with literal mountains of contrary evidence, he will not abandon an idea he got while raiding at 1 AM.

-Username17

[sake]

Honestly, I think roles could actually work if they just got rid of the god damn dps role and had every class fall into either the Tank, Healer, or Debuffer/Crowd Control niche. It's the striker role that makes the whole system go pear-shaped.

[Vnonymous]

Honestly, I think roles could actually work if they just got rid of the god damn dps role and had every class fall into either the Tank, Healer, or Debuffer/Crowd Control niche. It's the striker role that makes the whole system go pear-shaped.

Unfortunately that's also usually really, really boring.

[Doom]

But that's more of less the system we have now. The 'tanks' are built for damage (2hw Warden, anyone?), the crowd control guys still do plenty of damage via auto-damage/area effects, and healers, well, do the damage indirectly via buffs/debuffs or even more indirectly by keeping the damage dealers up.

Getting rid of the striker would just put more honesty into the situation. There's already so little role protection that reducing the arbitrary roles would probably open the game up to more interesting character building.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Role-protection is a sucker's game anyway. I can see where they're going with this, they're trying to make a system where everyone feels wanted and needed.

But in addition to all of the problems 4E implemented on top of that, the fact remains that role-protection is a really bad idea to have in a tabletop game. People don't show up or are bad at combat or just don't want to play a necessary role for whatever reason and it causes the game to collapse. Back when I still played 4E I have occasionally had to insert a DMPC with the sole purpose of being the healer because they were just so necessary at low levels and the person who played one for the party had to work on Sundays.

So the role protection needs to be rebuilt from the ground up in one of two ways. Either roles have generic synergy with each other with none of the roles being necessary or get rid of roles entirely and/or enable schtick protection. In either case, this requires eliminating the paradigm that parties HAVE to do a required activity every combat like tank or heal.

[RandomCasualty2]

The whole concept or roles is just boring. If you're a system that's going to emphasize tactical combat, you have to allow tactical choice and that has to allow some ability to reconfigure yourself on the fly. That is, one battle the wizard might act as a defender, and another he may be a controller.

Having one set role and specific thing that you always do every battle is a bad idea for PCs. It's fine for monsters, but in a tactical game, you have to be able to actually have tactical options. If your only schtick is "I shoot people with a bow", you really don't have much in the way of tactics. In fact your entire group is going to be just doing whatever the fuck it is that they do well and hoping it works.

To have real strategy and tactics, you actually need to allow people to have comparably useful options which are actually different.

Now having monsters with fixed roles is fine. In fact, you probably want a lot of monsters with a fair amount of predictability so that PCs can adequately plan strategies. It'd be hard to play any strategy game if you had no idea what the other enemy pieces can do.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Frank is also missing a couple of factors.

- How the hell could Frank have missed the extremely punitive GSL system? We've written threads about this before, but suffice to say that after a year -- when most game sales start flagging -- they didn't have advertisement or hype from other people to boost the product. I don't know how many people wouldn't buy any D&D material unless they need it to play the World of Warcraft RPG book, but you have to admit that the number is non-zero.

- Extremely stupid handling of campaign settings. 3E released a glut of Forgotten Realms splatbooks and 4E has released 2. It's not because of restraint on the producers' part, it's because the setting is dead and buried. That's really sad, because Dragonlance 3.0 managed to churn out three books. I don't know why these books failed as hard as they did, I only have conjecture, but suffice to say I don't really understand the lackadaisal attitude 4E had towards its campaign setting books what with putting them in the hands of known hacks like Noonan and Cordell. If you release a bad sourcebook, it hurts the brand and kills that book. Releasing a bad setting book, especially if it's the first one, kills off a product line.

- The DDI service is almost required at this point to have any chance of hopelessly sorting through all of the materials. 8 core books my ass. I never pirated the service because I used to, you know, want 4E to succeed but I knew more than a few people who did.

- The DDI promised features that never came about. Again, I was pretty fucking steamed that the Character Visualizer or the Tabletop Module never came out.

- The power of the World of Warcraft brand. Tabletop gaming has always had people who want an MMORPG-like experience but couldn't get anything better. We inevitably lost those players when something better came along.

- No hype-vehicle video game. 4th Edition D&D is being killed off so quickly that we can't really be sure if a hype vehicle would've saved the game. But there's none currently in the works. Neverwinter Nights came out at a pivotal time and had millions of sales, which undoubtedly sparked mainstream (as far as nerd hobbies go) interest and strengthened the brand.



That said, when fingers start getting pointed how much money do you think that the bad points are going to be distilled down to:

- Tabletop RPG is dying! Even if our edition was pure honey it didn't work!
- We had a too-aggressive release schedule and saturation the market!
- Recession!
- Okay, we had a couple of bad writers but on the whole we're the tops!

[TheFlatline]

- Extremely stupid handling of campaign settings. 3E released a glut of Forgotten Realms splatbooks and 4E has released 2. It's not because of restraint on the producers' part, it's because the setting is dead and buried. That's really sad, because Dragonlance 3.0 managed to churn out three books. I don't know why these books failed as hard as they did, I only have conjecture, but suffice to say I don't really understand the lackadaisal attitude 4E had towards its campaign setting books what with putting them in the hands of known hacks like Noonan and Cordell. If you release a bad sourcebook, it hurts the brand and kills that book. Releasing a bad setting book, especially if it's the first one, kills off a product line.

That stupid fucking "design a campaign setting contest" killed Dragonlance. Pure and simple. Hell, I'll suggest it doomed 4th ed.

Eberron is shit, but Wizards LOVED it because it's design "philosophy" was "you can use every single printed word of D&D in our setting! It has EVERYTHING!". And Wizards loved that. At that point there was a de-emphasis on campaign settings, because there wasn't an in-setting justification to purchase every single D&D book printed.

Eberron is also now the default D&D setting, which means we get dragon kin and golems as PCs rammed down our throats even if we don't think this is anything at all like D&D.

Part of the other reason why 4th ed failed is that they're mixing business models now. I have no doubt that Wizards would give their firstborn sons if they could figure out a way to make D&D's business model identical to Magic's, where you have to buy a new batch of books every 6 months in order to keep playing with other people. The glut of "core" books supports this idea, and I kind of felt it coming along back in 3.5 with the DMG 2 and PHB 2.

Another problem with 4th ed is that there *is* like 6 or 8 core books. It's insane. I can't think of another RPG out on the market that has 6 or 8 "core" books. Hell, you need *three* books just to be able to "play" the game. Every other game on my shelves only needs one core book to play (except nWOD, which requires 2 core books minimum to play any supernatural beastie).

And now it seems like they're redesigning 4th ed to better suit their preferable, CCG style business model with this essentials line. Now we'll get to plop down what, 30 bucks for a 4 pack of characters and some monsters? Sounds like a booster pack to me. I'm surprised we're finding out what characters are actually *in* the essentials line, instead of taking the booster route and just making you find out randomly.

I don't care much though. I'm suffering from generic fantasy fatigue. No amount of massaging done by 4th ed is going to get me around that. I, and the gaming community I know, am utterly burned out on D&D. To be perfectly honest, I'm surprised I lasted the 17 years that I did. 3rd ed was a great revitalization, but 4th ed filled me with apathy and revulsion at how MMO the game went.

[TheFlatline]

Role-protection is a sucker's game anyway. I can see where they're going with this, they're trying to make a system where everyone feels wanted and needed.

But in addition to all of the problems 4E implemented on top of that, the fact remains that role-protection is a really bad idea to have in a tabletop game. People don't show up or are bad at combat or just don't want to play a necessary role for whatever reason and it causes the game to collapse. Back when I still played 4E I have occasionally had to insert a DMPC with the sole purpose of being the healer because they were just so necessary at low levels and the person who played one for the party had to work on Sundays.

So the role protection needs to be rebuilt from the ground up in one of two ways. Either roles have generic synergy with each other with none of the roles being necessary or get rid of roles entirely and/or enable schtick protection. In either case, this requires eliminating the paradigm that parties HAVE to do a required activity every combat like tank or heal.

The other problem with party roles is that no one individual in the party can particularly shine any more. The tank soaks, the DPS monster dishes out the damage, the healer heals, and the crowd control guy casts his AOEs. Over, and over, and over again. The party may succeed, but there's very little chance for individual merit in such a design. This is both good and bad. It's good in that it helps everyone feel "needed" to an extent, but it's bad in that it also undermines the individual's effort and prevents someone from shining.

4th ed roles are sort of like communism. Instead of encouraging you to be excellent when the opportunity arises, it encourages you to stay as a cog in the machine. Maybe that's why it's so boring to me. It also leads me to:

Looking at source material and trying to find justification for putting mmorpg roles into 4e. Failing, admitting that failure, and then saying it doesn't matter. Sooo... as far as I can tell no point at all except to illustrate poor reasoning.

Even worse. He's missing the forest for the trees.

Every example he illustrates exemplifies a core concept: Each of these people... these, dare I say it... "heroes" (or anti-heroes as the case may be) does every "role" by themselves normally. The tank can DPS. The nuker can crowd control and is pretty tough to boot. They're *competent* in a wide variety of roles, but they excel in one or two.

What he's done is fail to understand the purpose of MMO roles. MMO characters are extremely limited by design, to encourage large groups to assemble. If you can only do one thing, and your task involves 30 roles to be filled, then you're going to need 29 other people.

In a tabletop game, you're dealing with traditionally 4 people, sometimes less, but never more than say 6 or 8 (which is the beginning of LARP territory). Narrowing your character down to one repetitious function isn't fun unless you have a highly addictive personality. In fact, it's extremely boring. If it wasn't so boring, the only spell wizards would have for 20 levels would be fireball.

The more I read about the people who designed 4th ed, the more it seems like they "didn't get it".

[Lago PARANOIA]

The LotR setting fatigue has always been an uneasy point of contention with tabletop gaming fans.

While it's really, really fucking old to us to the rest of the nerd (and non-nerd) community at large, Generic Fantasy is a cyclic thing that gets fans for a few years, bleeds them off, then gains brand new fans once the Next Big Thing comes around.

While I agree that redesigning a new campaign setting that's not so Generic Fantasy (like Dark Sun) would reduce grognard fatigue, the fact remains that you risk alienating new fans who want that easily-grokked, yet novel (to them) allure of Generic Fantasy.

Then again, Professional Wrestling and Soap Opera fans have been toiling under this paradigm where concepts have to be continually recycled to the point of irritation for the longtime fans because the producers don't want to alienate newcomers for much longer. So while I have some sympathy towards the idea of wanting 'something new', the state of tabletop gaming right means that the first order of business should be trying to grow the pie higher instead of pandering to fans. Which unfortunately means forcing the grognards to put up with another 8 years of Generic Fantasy.

[TheFlatline]

The LotR setting fatigue has always been an uneasy point of contention with tabletop gaming fans.

While it's really, really fucking old to us to the rest of the nerd (and non-nerd) community at large, Generic Fantasy is a cyclic thing that gets fans for a few years, bleeds them off, then gains brand new fans once the Next Big Thing comes around.

While I agree that redesigning a new campaign setting that's not so Generic Fantasy (like Dark Sun) would reduce grognard fatigue, the fact remains that you risk alienating new fans who want that easily-grokked, yet novel (to them) allure of Generic Fantasy.

Then again, Professional Wrestling and Soap Opera fans have been toiling under this paradigm where concepts have to be continually recycled to the point of irritation for the longtime fans because the producers don't want to alienate newcomers for much longer. So while I have some sympathy towards the idea of wanting 'something new', the state of tabletop gaming right means that the first order of business should be trying to grow the pie higher instead of pandering to fans. Which unfortunately means forcing the grognards to put up with another 8 years of Generic Fantasy.

I understand just fine, but of all the publishers who can afford niche lines, Wizards/Hasbro has the money. I mean, I'm sure some of the supplements that they've put out have sold worse than a new planescape edition would.

I guess my point was that in 3rd ed, with OGL, I had pirate games, spy games, no-magic games, Wheel of time games, star wars games, wild west games, and a half dozen other genres that I could look to when I got fantasy fatigue. All of which still used the PHB for basic stuff. OGL gave life to the setting when Wizards didn't want to invest money in those niche markets.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Oh, oh hell yeah. I don't know why they decided to ditch OGL since it injected cool, refreshing morphine into the veins of 3E when it was starting to flag. Greediness, I guess. The kind that kills the goose that lays the golden egg.

Hopefully they'll recognize what a moronic decision that was in time for the next edition and release something a lot less punitive. Assuming that WotC still owns the IP. Which I hope that they don't.

[DragonChild]

Eberron is also now the default D&D setting, which means we get dragon kin and golems as PCs rammed down our throats even if we don't think this is anything at all like D&D.

No it's not. And the dragonborn weren't even from Eberron originally, and didn't appear in Eberron until 4e made them. Also, "what is like D&D" hugely varies from person to person - D&D has rarely been "one thing", and is more just a mess of jumbled ideas from whatever is popular at the time.