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Forget the cosmology stuff, I have met actual human beings who were unreasonably mad that 4e basically discarded the alignment system.  ProfessorCirno posted:Don't forget that, like, half of them are literally pointless. The plane of air is literally just air. There's nothing else there. It's just neverending air with no land or water or anything else. Sounds like a great place to do some adventuring, right? Or you can head over to the plane of positive energy, which is just nothingness, and then you explode from cancer. Or hey, you can go to the Neutral Evil plane of Hades which is in fact a featureless grey flat land that goes on forever. Don't get it confused with the Neutral (Lawful) Evil plane of Gehenna, which is just a few volcanos floating in space, or the Neutral (Chaotic) Evil plane of Carceri, which is just a bunch of random layers of bad times stuck together. You see, that's different from the Lawful Evil plane of Baator, which is just a bunch of random layers of bad times stuck together, in that Baator has more layers.
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Apr 29, 2016 05:37
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gradenko_2000 posted:Elemental Plane of Gravy. Or as it's also known as: Goon Heaven.
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Apr 29, 2016 05:52
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Kai Tave posted:I might be off base since I'm not a full fledged D&D historian, but wasn't Planescape basically created because someone said "hey, maybe we should make a reason for people to care about all these planes and alignments" and the setting basically grew up around that idea (also they wanted to make a D&D setting that involved a lot of ideological politicking and philosophizing because Vampire: the Masquerade had been published three years prior and TSR wanted something they could point to to try and court that same sort of clique-y political roleplaying)? I'm not sure how integral the Great Wheel was to D&D players' experiences prior to that but my understanding is that Planescape is the first real thing D&D did that made people care about all that stuff, and that it made enough of an impact to really stick in peoples' minds even though it hadn't really been that big of a deal before. The Great Wheel cosmology existed to an extent before Planescape, but Planescape spruced up the names and provided a lot of the setting information that has passed down the editions. 3e was where it started being referred to as the Great Wheel though iirc because I like pictures, have the outer planes as they were laid out in 1e wooo 
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Apr 29, 2016 05:53
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I like to imagine that the Happy Hunting Grounds were named by an innocent child-deity who, upon entering into his angsty teenage years, hung up a sign on his bedroom door reading "THE BEASTLANDS: KEEP OUT".
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Apr 29, 2016 05:57
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Nuns with Guns posted:The Great Wheel cosmology existed to an extent before Planescape, but Planescape spruced up the names and provided a lot of the setting information that has passed down the editions Yeah, I knew it existed in some primordial form, but did anyone really care about it until Planescape did something cool with it? My impression is that Planescape was really the first and only thing in D&D to make the whole plane/alignment thing into something halfway compelling and it had that effect where something resonates so strongly with people that they sort of mentally backport it into everything that came before so suddenly Planescape's exploration of Great Wheel cosmology is "how it's always been." Now that I'm no longer furtively phoneposting about elfgames while at work, let me see if I can't articulate my point re: edition changes and the ire surrounding them a bit more clearly, because my point to JerryLee isn't so much that he shouldn't necessarily be bummed that WotC decided to go a different direction with 4E and he preferred 3E and this makes him Dumb and Bad. It's totally fine to not like a new edition or version of a game and prefer an older one, or feel like you don't want to keep going on the treadmill and stop where you are, that's okay. What I look askance at are the people who spent a not inconsiderable amount of time and effort ginning up a narrative that 4E D&D was some deliberately calculated slap in the face of all true and right-thinking D&D fans, because to put it bluntly this is horseshit. It's not just horseshit because a lot of it is hyperbolic nonsense or in some cases based on erroneous information and outright falsehood, it's horseshit because it ignores the abundantly clear reality that RPGs change editions. This is a thing that happens, and has happened since the dawn of this hobby, and will continue to happen, so someone unreasonably aggrieved that WotC didn't continue to simply stick with 3E forever and ever amen is being exactly that, unreasonable. AD&D2E doesn't really resemble BECMI. 3E doesn't really resemble AD&D2E. There's shared genetic material there, but the editions are different from one another in ways both major and minor. I can understand that if 3E is someone's first D&D and they aren't prepared for the notion that one day sales of that game are going to peter off and require a new edition to prime the money pump again that the transition might be a jarring one, but it's how a lot of traditional tabletop games operate. Magic rotates blocks out of standard play, Warhammer and 40K have undergone over a dozen new editions between the two of them, and D&D has new editions. This is simply the way of the world. Now WotC has had issues with their marketing in not simply letting their new editions speak for themselves, instead couching things in terms of "the stuff this previous edition did was broken and bad so now we've fixed it with new and improved D&D!" They did it with 3E, they did it with 4E, and they did it with 5E. They should probably knock that poo poo off because it's dumb and counterproductive (or not, since it's not like the D&D department is really in the business of giving a poo poo about anything these days), but at the same time I highly, highly doubt that any of these games were intended to jettison old fans en masse. Even 5E which I am clearly on the record as not liking or finding to be a well designed game, I don't think that 5E is literally the Spite 4E Edition that some people hold it to be, I think it's infinitely more plausible that 5E is basically Mike Mearls' chance to make his own dream D&D and that's really all it is. All of which is to say that I don't actually find 4E to be radically different to any other given edition change D&D has undergone either prior to or following it. It's perfectly valid to be disinterested in it or even dislike it, but treating it like it's some radical break from the norm just doesn't hold up under scrutiny. People point to the cosmology changes, the ability formatting, monster statblocks, but if you look at the breakdown of changes from 2E to 3E it's going to be just as broad and deep...3E changed a whole bunch of poo poo, from how monsters were made to how multiclassing worked, it made point-buy stats standard and got rid of THAC0, it introduced feats, it added Monks and Sorcerers as core classes, it changed how combat worked from initiative to Attacks of Opportunity to the amount of time a round was, it changed the expectations of how an encounter was supposed to be crafted and how magic items were meant to be handed out, it changed all sorts of math and basically ramped the caster/non-caster dichotomy to 11 and it also introduced the OGL and d20 System License which was kind of a big deal which had significant impact on the retail market and TRPG landscape for years. Planescape got quietly shuffled off to the side and never really recovered from the whole Faction War thing which killed off a bunch of the big groups, Sigil got mentioned in the Manual of the Planes but it never again got a big campaign setting treatment, which is still more than Dark Sun or Spelljammer ever got, meanwhile some newfangled thing called Eberron got introduced with trains and not-robots and playable shapeshifters. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Apr 29, 2016 |
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Apr 29, 2016 06:09
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Kai Tave posted:Yeah, I knew it existed in some primordial form, but did anyone really care about it until Planescape did something cool with it? My impression is that Planescape was really the first and only thing in D&D to make the whole plane/alignment thing into something halfway compelling and it had that effect where something resonates so strongly with people that they sort of mentally backport it into everything that came before so suddenly Planescape's exploration of Great Wheel cosmology is "how it's always been." My understanding of this part is that yes, it was the first time something cool had been done with the idea, but not the first time the idea itself came up. Something real similar to the great wheel is in the back of the AD&D DMG or PHB, there was the manual of the planes (the rulebook, not the in-game item), there were astral spells/items etc, but Planescape was the first time anyone cared about it on a broader level. I mean, people liked the idea of storming the gates of hell or visiting valhalla or whatever else* earlier than Planescape, but Planescape tied it all together into a "cosmology"  where all the pieces were supposed to work together.*Because of course they were, because it's D&D. My PCs were breaking someone out of actual Hell when my knowledge of the product line was that I was vaguely aware that there was a blue "expert" box I'd need to get one day, and that only because it mentions in in the basic set. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Apr 29, 2016 |
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Apr 29, 2016 06:15
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The only really evocative thing about the planes before Planescape was in the 1E DMG writeup of the manual of the planes (The item) which suggested that at some point a wizard hit on using it to conquer a literal city of efreeti with the goal of collecting himself an unlimited supply of limited wishes, and thus references to the City of Brass drifting through D&D stuff forever. "I am going to conquer genietown and get myself all the wishes" is a pretty loving ambitious plan, though, good job on the wizard megalomania, that guy.
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Apr 29, 2016 06:20
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ProfessorCirno posted:Don't forget that, like, half of them are literally pointless. The plane of air is literally just air. There's nothing else there. It's just neverending air with no land or water or anything else. Sounds like a great place to do some adventuring, right? gradenko_2000 posted:The best way I know planar travel used is when it's a handy "Wizard did it" explanation. The police in Payday come from the Elemental Plane of Cops. My quiver is a portal to the Elemental Plane of Sharp Pointy Objects. Here's a pot that pours out a stream directly from the Elemental Plane of Gravy.
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Apr 29, 2016 06:24
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ProfessorCirno posted:Don't forget that, like, half of them are literally pointless. The plane of air is literally just air. There's nothing else there. It's just neverending air with no land or water or anything else. Well, by the time we'd gotten to stuff like Planescape, there were floating islands and communities and wizard citadels and lightning-shooting birds. While it's not a place you'd likely center a campaign around, there was at least an attempt to liven up a lot of the planes, even if some of it wasn't until late in the line. Personally, I always saw stuff like the Quasielemental Plane of Salt as a standing challenge to make adventures happen there. (Of course, since I got to write material for the Doomguard, it wasn't hard for me to work out ideas for that sort of thing.) There was usually at least some seed to work with. The Astral isn't inherently exciting, for example, but there were still dead gods to explore, gith to gently caress around with, and holes to unknown worlds. Asimo posted:Pretty much. Planescape was basically unplayable as an actual D&D setting unless you were basically ignoring all of the game's actual rules, which is something I've come to realize that most people who play D&D do. The fact there was exactly one good video game based off it doesn't justify decades of useless fluff. I wouldn't say that at all; it had fairly clear tiered environments. The intent was one started out having adventurers in Sigil, branching out to the Gatetowns after leveling up, and didn't do deep Outer Planes delves until later on. Of course, having those sorts of artificial "region tiers" is its own issue (much like leveling in general, really), but it was at least helped by the fact Planescape was less likely to rely on you stabbing things to finish an adventure than your average D&D game. A lot of adventures hinged more on puzzles and mysteries, though stabbing things usually came into play at some point.
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Apr 29, 2016 08:30
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Planescape remains the best D&D setting to never play using D&D rules. ( Eberron is the best D&D setting to play using D&D rules and probably any rules )
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Apr 29, 2016 09:12
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ProfessorCirno posted:Planescape remains the best D&D setting to never play using D&D rules. A correct opinion.
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Apr 29, 2016 09:16
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Other reasons the Great Wheel is dumb: 1) Dividing up real estate by alignment fucks up pantheons. Odin (Lawful Good) and Loki (Chaotic Neutral) have to commute across several planes every day in order to hang out with Thor in Valhalla (Chaotic Good). 4Es much more casual approach to planes made a ton more sense - somewhere floating in the astral sea is Valhalla and somewhere else is Olympus and somewhere else is the Nine Hells etcetera etcetera. What is gained by locking everyone into one of precisely seventeen slots on the alignment graph? 2) The loving cosmic wheel alignments don't even match the alignment rules and player alignments. The rules recognize nine alignments (the classic 3x3 grid we've all seen a zillion times), everyone is sorted into one of those nine bins, no exceptions - except for the entire overstructure of the multiverse, which recognizes halfway spaces between alignments and has entire races and planes and subplanes filling up those spaces. 3) The giant overstructure that encompassed all known and possible D&D worlds was actively ignored or contradicted by the vast majority of published D&D worlds. Faerun's planes were organized not in a Great Wheel but a big Yggdrasil-style tree. Dragonlance only had one outer plane, called The Abyss. Eberron had its orrey of outer planes that would into and out of alignment with the world as plot required. Dark Sun and Ravenloft took place in weird, edge-case, one-off exceptions to the Great Wheel. And on and on. Why even bother with a giant overstructure (much less pitch a fit when it gets modified) if it's so lightly discarded by the actual settings that are obsentsively placed within it?
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Apr 29, 2016 14:30
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going back to the last page, IIRC the only thing that straight up got blown up (or, well, crushed) in 4e Faerun was Maztica. And I'm going to take the view that maybe the setting is better off without Cortez' Conquest Of The Aztecs But With WIzards.
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Apr 29, 2016 16:15
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Der Waffle Mous posted:going back to the last page, IIRC the only thing that straight up got blown up (or, well, crushed) in 4e Faerun was Maztica. No, Fantasy Egypt got crushed too because it was impossibly racist. 5e brought it back.
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Apr 29, 2016 16:25
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JerryLee posted:I don't know what to say if you don't think the cosmology changed significantly between 3E and 4E. I can only assume that you just didn't notice because the ways in which it changed weren't things that was important to you, which is perfectly reasonable, but that's no reason to disparage the idea of its being important to anyone. For the record, I didn't know about the Spellplague or whatever it was (I may have heard of it but that's about it); I'm talking about the core multiverse. It's actually interesting to me that so many people jumped to assuming I was speaking from a FR-centric point of view. I don't mean this in a snide way, I just find it curious that this was the default thing for people to read into my comments about setting. quote:Narrowly focusing on Planescape/Great Wheel is somewhat of a red herring. It's one of the first examples to come to mind for me, yeah, but the fact is that my brother and I had a giant stack of 3.x source material that was abruptly deprecated and for which there was no timely replacement to be had even if I'd wanted to pay for it. It was that whole experience that, probably more than anything else, jolted me out of my cycle of happily consuming new D&D publications and made me think that maybe there was a better way to do things. This alienation is similar to what I've seen some people report as they jump ship from GW to any of the other, better miniature games, which is the sort of reason why I bring that comparison up; I'm obviously not saying that WOTC actually fractured Faerun into reality balls and made adventurers roll endless buckets of 3+/4+ dice to kill goblins. I'd bet money you don't have to do anything at all, if we're talking about setting and not rules. moths posted:Except where WotC targed the younger adult crowd, GW went for children. Age of Sigmar went straight for happy meal toys: bright colors, simplistic rules, and no limit to how many toys you could buy or play with. The entirety of the fluff (a 30-year game of Exquisite Corpse / wannabe-Silmarillion) was replaced with "Good Gold Guys vs Bad Blood Bros." Similarly, they replaced a 300+ page game with a 4 page pamphlet. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Apr 29, 2016 |
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Apr 29, 2016 16:32
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Hell, in 4e's Scales of War, you end up on astral skiffs and spelljammers somewhat frequently and end up all over the Elemental Chaos and Astral Sea to gently caress with the owners/wannabe owners of various real estate. Epic in that path fully sold me on the 4e cosmology, which I already thought was fine.
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Apr 29, 2016 16:42
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Personally I'd have preferred that they just remake Maztica and not-Egypt into actually interesting and not racist not-MesoAmerica and not-Egypt locations. Just destroying them isn't terrible either but it'd have been a cool chance to get people interested in those cultures on staff and giving their own fantasy versions.Halloween Jack posted:My understanding of AoS was not that they decided to go for children, but collectors. That GW was huffing their own farts so deeply, they started truly believing their own marketing hype that their customers derived enjoyment primarily from collecting and painting their finecast minis, and that having rules to play a game with them was secondary. Hence the expensive minis with extremely sketchy, bullshit rules. This fosters in their diehard fans a very culty mentality. Warmahordes has decent rules with actual depth? Oh lord it is nothing but horrible WAACs all the way down, it's impossible to have fun playing that game. X-wing is pre-painted, actually fun to play, and takes way less time to play than Warhammer? Oh that must be awful because pre-painted minis allow WAACs to get away without any investment in the "hobby". Flames of War is a good game you say? Everyone must be WAACs because who else would want to play in something as boring as the real world, it's impossible to customize your guys because it's all base on real world armies.
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Apr 29, 2016 18:03
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This is a bit of a tangent to this entire discussion, but I guess 4th Edition proved it was not, in fact, actually wow4babbys after all by being retired and replaced with something else, instead of having supplements and expansions and revisions released for it forever. Asimo posted:Forget the cosmology stuff, I have met actual human beings who were unreasonably mad that 4e basically discarded the alignment system. But specifically about the alignment system...I think the only good thing D20 Modern actually did was replacing alignment with loyalties or whatever it was, because it is cool to have some sort of mechanical concept of how your character might generically behave, it is just that there only being 9 distinct ways to behave is probably not such a useful thing.
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Apr 29, 2016 18:04
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Halloween Jack posted:My understanding of AoS was not that they decided to go for children, but collectors.  This is a promo image from a forthcoming 40k release. Q4 is going to be a really interesting time for Games Workshop. I assume AoS was testing the waters for a full-blown kid's game, which looks like where they're taking 40k in at least some form.
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Apr 29, 2016 18:24
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Terrible Opinions posted:GW is attempting to go for "hobbiests", "young new blood", and "beer and pretzels gamers". They seem to think that the problem with their rules is that Win At All Costs players have poisoned the well and driven everyone from the hobby. Their solution was to make a game with no real rules to speak of. The problem is that WAAC is boogeyman label they throw onto anyone who has the audacity to examine rules in even the most simple of ways. In particular if someone has the audacity to claim that GW makes bad rules. This is a fine thing to complain about (supposing the bolded claims are backed up by some facts, as I assume they are), but hasn't got anything to do with what became of 4E. There was no conscious effort to evict a particular class of gamers, they just wanted to make a better game. It also hasn't got anything to do with Diablo 3, for much the same reason.
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Apr 29, 2016 18:28
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LordSaturn posted:This is a fine thing to complain about (supposing the bolded claims are backed up by some facts, as I assume they are), but hasn't got anything to do with what became of 4E. There was no conscious effort to evict a particular class of gamers, they just wanted to make a better game. It also hasn't got anything to do with Diablo 3, for much the same reason. What. I've never claimed this was related to 4th edition D&D. I just enjoy talking poo poo about GW, and didn't both to look at the larger context of that particular quote train.
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Apr 29, 2016 18:34
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Bieeardo posted:One of the advertisements for their last 2E adventure path offered it up as a high-test cleaning agent, useful for getting rid of stubborn campaigns, complete with badly photoshopped images of the PHB and poo poo being chopped into coleslaw.
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Apr 29, 2016 19:05
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Terrible Opinions posted:What. I've never claimed this was related to 4th edition D&D. I just enjoy talking poo poo about GW, and didn't both to look at the larger context of that particular quote train. Actually, you're right, that was JerryLee drawing that particular line: JerryLee posted:I actually think that there's a lesson 4E could have taken from GW's release of AoS (assuming that doing so wouldn't have, you know, required time travel). My mistake!
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Apr 29, 2016 19:13
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moths posted:
 FTFY LordSaturn posted:This is a fine thing to complain about (supposing the bolded claims are backed up by some facts, as I assume they are), but hasn't got anything to do with what became of 4E. There was no conscious effort to evict a particular class of gamers, they just wanted to make a better game. It also hasn't got anything to do with Diablo 3, for much the same reason. I don't think he was, but he's right about games Workshop. The AoS rules were designed to force old school players to face ridicule if they actually wanted to win with their old armies, instead of buying the new sets like good consumers. Kurieg fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Apr 29, 2016 |
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Apr 29, 2016 19:23
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I do think maybe, 4e could have managed to present itself more "traditionally" while still doing all the mechanical updates that made it a great game. As it was, both the crunch AND the fluff were changed quite a bit so it took a while to adjust to the new status quo (and if you didn't want to adjust, here comes Paizo/the OSR to the rescue!) That said, the new fluff was also awesome so I dunno.
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Apr 29, 2016 19:25
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NGDBSS posted:Have a link to those images? I'd gathered that the 2E -> 3E transition was more forceful than people give it credit for with meatgrinder modules like "Die, Vecna, Die!" but I've not actually seen any of that stuff. Not handy, I'm afraid. Most of my old Dragons suffered water damaage and had to be tossed, but I can check my surviving ones and see if there are any relevant ads in that PDF archive they put out near the end of 2E's life span. It'll need to wait until later this weekend, but I really hope I can find them-- either to exorcise my own lovely memories, or illustrate some really bad ads.
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Apr 29, 2016 19:29
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I love the look on the boy's face in the second picture. "Hmmm, yes, a very interesting move..."
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Apr 29, 2016 19:43
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Evil Mastermind posted:I love the look on the boy's face in the second picture. "Hmmm, yes, a very interesting move..." "Hmmm, this girl is moving her guys around without VRROOOM and PEWPEW noises . . ."
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Apr 29, 2016 19:47
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homullus posted:"Hmmm, this girl is moving her guys around without VRROOOM and PEWPEW noises . . ."
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Apr 29, 2016 19:48
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They're really going for that "child models from my 6th grade social studies textbook" demographic.
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Apr 29, 2016 19:49
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They didn't give her a pink Khorne army so points for that.
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Apr 29, 2016 20:07
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The transition from 3e D&D to 4e D&D was the first D&D transition to take place during the age of online social media. Yes, the Internet absolutely existed the first time, and there were firestorms on USENET and AOL chat rooms I'm sure, but a significant majority of people - including, presumably, roleplayers - weren't online in any significant way, yet. This makes it quite difficult to gauge the degree and direction of the presumed outcry of edition changes prior to 3->4. You might get a sense of it if you attended lots of game conventions, and you can still get a sense of it if you chat with lots of people who played D&D around that time, but it's all pretty hard to quantify. Well, even harder to quantify than 3->4, which is still impossible to perfectly quantify, because of course the most vocal online complainers (in any context) rarely represent a real-life majority. I can tell you that personally I was delighted with third edition D&D compared to the mess of 2nd, but my financial investment in 2nd was limited to a single hardback PHB, plus a one CD-ROM copy each of CORE RULES I and II, both purchased at a discount a fair amount of time after release. Oh, and I had hard copies of a handful of adventures, too. I was also delighted with the move from AD&D to 2nd edition, and in that case I had an investment of a dozen of the yellow back books. I also had red box basic plus Expert D&D. My gaming group, which at that point consisted of myself and my friend who hadn't played in a few years, were quite happy with 4th edition. When 4th ed. came out I was here on SA playing PbP games and it was generally very well received here, with a minority of (extremely vocal) detractors of course. There were immediately dozens of games, there were arena games, we were analyzing the system and deconstructing it and a sort of long-term narrative developed in the SA TG threads that was generally very positive about the game. Those discussions still exist in the archives. I was not giving a poo poo about other forums by then (I had spent a couple years hanging out on the Giant in the Playground forums, but abandoned them not long after getting an SA account) but mostly I never read or posted on the other major RPG forums. Even so, we had grogs.txt and so this community was hyper-aware of the worst of the garbage critics and idiots. Broadly, though? Broadly, 4th edition was successful and well-received. It sold millions of books and made WotC lots of money. D&D Insider was also very successful almost immediately. The point I'm hopefully winding my way towards here is that sometimes it's easy to overstate the prevalence of the edition wars. I suspect, although I cannot prove it, that a large majority of D&D Players over the last 30 years have welcomed and embraced new editions, for the most part. Every group has had its grumblings but most went ahead and bought new books, converted campaigns and characters as needed, and moved on. Most players do not spend all day every day in RPG forums. Maybe not even most DMs. We can't really say concretely anything more than that, though. Or even that much. I'm very skeptical of absolute statements about this or that change being broadly well-received or poorly-received. We don't even have actual sales numbers, much less reliable surveys that cover the full scope of "people who ever played D&D of some kind." We can get a broad sense of each edition's popularity by how well or poorly it performed in game stores, but we can't divorce that from the rest of the trad games marketplace during each era... sometimes D&D was more or less popular in part because of the attraction (or lack of it) to other RPGs, or to new forms of gamelike entertainment (computer games, online computer games) and social media and so forth. There's business factors - TSR vs. Wizards, how much each invested in marketing, the pricing of products vs. competition, etc. etc. The explosion of garbage supplements in the 2nd edition era, a recurrence of it in the D20 third-party era, the life and death of print magazines, D&D Insider and how it altered access to supplements, adventures, etc., the rise of PbP, it goes on and on. What I'd like to see (probably a vain hope) is less focus in these discussions on whether or not each new edition was stupid and dumb or good and smart on the basis of the in-game features and rules. To me that's been hashed out endlessly and has little to do with trad games as an industry. The question of how TG companies relate to their customers is more germaine, and to that end, I thought Jerry Lee was at least proposing an interesting parallel: how does GW view and relate to its existing customer base and desire/need to attract new customers, and conversely, how has and how does Wizards approach those things? Forget about whether D&D 4th edition did or did not discard a beloved cosmology, that's a red herring. We can assume Wizards had a business goal: to re-establish D&D as the top RPG, sell a new edition to its existing customers, but also (and I think almost definitely more importantly) release an edition that appealed to a new generation of younger people, in an attempt to grow the market itself, be the leading product line in that new segment, and thereby trigger (and take maximum profit from) a new era of growth for RPGs in general. To some extent, I think Wizards was successful, and in part they were stymied by the competing requirement of appealing to their existing, conservative fan base. (Conservative in the sense of disliking and resisting change.) Every TG company contemplating an edition change has to weigh those factors against one another. Done well, they're not necessarily in competition. Done poorly - and I can think of no worse example than the Age of Sigmar release - a company releases a product that fails in both directions, being totally alienating to existing customers while simultaneously failing to attract new customers. Can we name an example of the opposite? Any TG franchise that managed to make a significant new version/edition/release that both delighted its existing fanbase, but also significantly appealed to new customers who were not already interested in their old edition? How and why did that company manage to do it?
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Apr 29, 2016 20:13
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Leperflesh posted:Broadly, though? Broadly, 4th edition was successful and well-received. It sold millions of books and made WotC lots of money. D&D Insider was also very successful almost immediately. All available evidence points to this, yes. The problem is that a small subset of D&D designers bought into the anti-4E Koolaid and proceeded to make 5e.
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Apr 29, 2016 20:16
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Lemon-Lime posted:All available evidence points to this, yes. They would have made 5e anyway. It probably would have been a little later, and it definitely would have been different.
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Apr 29, 2016 20:30
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Leperflesh posted:Can we name an example of the opposite? Any TG franchise that managed to make a significant new version/edition/release that both delighted its existing fanbase, but also significantly appealed to new customers who were not already interested in their old edition? How and why did that company manage to do it? Warmahordes and Malifaux both seem to have done that with their second editions. Malifaux in particular saw a tightening of the rules and removing a lot of the newbie-unfriendly elements of the rules (wounding someone in 1st edition took no less than 11 steps to resolve), and only a very minor subset of the fanbase was upset about the changes. And those people were only upset that their rules mastery no longer made them easy trounce people.
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Apr 29, 2016 20:30
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Leperflesh posted:Can we name an example of the opposite? Any TG franchise that managed to make a significant new version/edition/release that both delighted its existing fanbase, but also significantly appealed to new customers who were not already interested in their old edition? How and why did that company manage to do it? Granted if you leave card games I am personally at a loss to think of anything other than 3rd Edition, but as you pointed out I am sure there were plenty of haters even though from what I could tell people had pretty much gotten sick of 2nd Edition and were totally excited by the prospect of a new edition--though as much because they were excited to see the game still alive after TSR died as anything, I think. It certainly seemed to expand the D&D audience after its slow 1990s decline. Unless that is a myth I am propagating. But I think it is true.
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Apr 29, 2016 20:33
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Magic has a very clear view of market churn. They expect old players to phase out and new ones to phase in pretty much constantly, due to various life changes - Magic's mostly a game for the young, with free time and independent income being the key points, after all. They try to ensure more new blood comes in than old players leave, and go to great efforts to poll and market test their stuff to ensure the complexity is not too intimidating. And they get plenty of people loudly complaining about it, but mostly ignore them.
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Apr 29, 2016 20:36
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homullus posted:They would have made 5e anyway. It probably would have been a little later, and it definitely would have been different. Well, that's the thing- maybe if they hadn't bought into the edition war rhetoric, 5e wouldn't have thrown so much of 4e out. Maybe we would still have cool useful fighters, and warlords who can heal, and monster math that's easy to use, etc. And I still feel like there was a lot of design space left in 4e that went unexplored. Good support for Epic-level play, cracking open Power design, streamlining Feats. Instead we get a game where you can't do half of what you used to be able to do and that's good because Player Entitlement is the scourge of our times.
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Apr 29, 2016 20:49
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homullus posted:They would have made 5e anyway. It probably would have been a little later, and it definitely would have been different. When I say "5e" I mean the game that is currently available, not "literally any possible new edition of D&D."
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Apr 29, 2016 20:55
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Something that's being overlooked in most of the Warhammer / AoS discussion is that AoS is absolutely not being marketed or presented as the 9th edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battles. It's a different game that uses some of the pieces from a previous game. This isn't a situation where the new edition irks edition grumblers; One popular game line was cancelled, and an unpopular line was introduced to replace it.
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Apr 29, 2016 21:00
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