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Honestly, I don't think it matters if a hypothetical 6e stays in-house or gets licensed out. I can't see the end result being a satisfactory update of the game in the hands of any of the big publishers. Maybe at best it'd be another rework of 3e with a few more 4e concepts plugged in by shaving the numbers off. Plus the 5e advantages/disadvantages that everyone seems to think is the most exciting thing? I guess they could re-unfuck monster math/encounter design? Pay attention to adventures outside of the early-to-mid-levels "sweet spot"? They'll never get rid of the d20 and I don't see them reverting to Basic/4e alignments. They could possibly sneak in some more nice things for melee classes, but they wouldn't dial back wizards at all.
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Mar 31, 2017 02:16
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What's more likely is that D&D gets put on life support for the next few years with little to no updates up until either a big game with the name attached to it is released or the supposed movie comes out.
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Mar 31, 2017 02:29
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Paizo gaining ownership of D&D would actually be 1000% hilarious because they have never made an actual game. Like, no, sorry, Pathfinder is not a game they made - it is an expansion on top of a pre-existing engine. They've never made the engine, ever, for anything - and they don't really even understand the engine they're using now. Even with their STARFINDER they're still sticking to the same engine that they didn't make. Also Pathfinder is better then 5e because Pathfinder wasn't created by actual vermin. Also all of this is nonsense because Hasbro is basically famous for not selling off properties. Slimnoid posted:What's more likely is that D&D gets put on life support for the next few years with little to no updates up until either a big game with the name attached to it is released or the supposed movie comes out. They would absolutely mothball it rather then sell it off.
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Mar 31, 2017 03:07
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I'm excited for starfinder because it will hopefully mean sci-fi/not-fantasy themed maps and pawns. That's really it though, the game sounds exactly the god-damned same. I'm assuming wizards will have psychic/tech powers and fighters will be too stupid to get anything like that. But that's not why Paizo's a good company. They're a good company because they can sell this poo poo. And they're really good at selling the adventure paths and paraphernalia surrounding the game. S.J. fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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Mar 31, 2017 03:07
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Lemon-Lime posted:I don't, because their RPGs since WFRP3 have not been very good. The FFG Star Wars RPG is pretty much WFRP 3.5 though
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Mar 31, 2017 03:11
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ProfessorCirno posted:They would absolutely mothball it rather then sell it off. D&D getting mothballed is a better outcome than anything apart from a miraculous "we made the 4E-but-better, crunchy-but-balanced game of your dreams" scenario anyways. It was eleven years between AD&D 2E and 3rd Edition and as much as people rag on 3rd Edition it has nothing on RAW 2E. The gap was helpful.
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Mar 31, 2017 03:50
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Yeah there's no way they'd sell off D&D. They might license it for a ridiculous fee, but there's no player in the business who could afford what Hasbro would charge for that kind of deal. Hasbro is normally savvy about how much things are worth, and the name Dungeons & Dragons is still worth a considerable amount to the right people.
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Mar 31, 2017 03:53
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homullus posted:The FFG Star Wars RPG is pretty much WFRP 3.5 though Except without most of the interesting decisions re: character abilities and the associated customization options.
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Mar 31, 2017 03:52
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Lemon-Lime posted:I don't, because their RPGs since WFRP3 have not been very good. are you including WFRP in the "not very good" column, because I will defend that game until the day I am buried in cardboard.
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Mar 31, 2017 03:57
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If nothing else, D&D 5e proves you can still get a notable amount of folks largely on account of familiarity and production values. Despite the anemic support, game's still one of the biggest in the market, because being the first often seems to be worth so much more than being the best.
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Mar 31, 2017 04:19
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ProfessorCirno posted:They would absolutely mothball it rather then sell it off. Nobody's really talking about them selling it though, Games Workshop didn't sell the 40K IP to Fantasy Flight but FFG wound up producing a ton of 40K (and some Fantasy) stuff for years because of licensing agreements. What people are talking about is the idea of Hasbro licensing out D&D to someone like FFG to make the game for them. Which honestly doesn't seem 100% implausible because subcontracting out the creation of a generally assumed to be unprofitable game is the next logical step of Hasbro's repeated slashing of the D&D department down to the bare minimum, someone might honestly decide that it makes more sense to lay everyone else in the department off and just outsource the whole thing.
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Mar 31, 2017 05:25
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Haven't FFG and Hasbro gotten into licensing spats in the past though? I'm pretty sure that Hasbro probably won't give a license to FFG as a result of that.
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Mar 31, 2017 05:51
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Does anyone actually know that Hasbro has anything to do with D&D, besides the fact that they own Wizards? Because the impression I had gotten is that they were content to simply own Wizards and collect income from (mostly, by a huge margin) Magic. I mean, in its absolute peak hayday, 4e D&D must have been making a small fraction of what Magic has pulled in annually for over a decade. There might be someone at Hasbro whose job is to periodically ask the Wizards execs how things are doing with D&D, but I doubt that person has a job title above Vice President and more likely is just a jr. VP. Hasbro probably spends more money on a single month's R&D on Barbie than has been spent to date on D&D 5e. I just can't imagine them caring so much as to be making plans about whether or not to license out the production of the RPG. They're gonna look at Wizards' bottom line, and either be happy with it, or put pressure to improve performance in some metric or another, which is probably going to affect nothing more than how much Wizards decides to spend on the marketing budget for the next Magic block or whether they decide to translate it into Tagalog this year or something. D&D has what, like ten full-time staffers? Twenty? Surely not more than that.
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Mar 31, 2017 05:56
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Right now? I'd bet around 5.
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Mar 31, 2017 06:12
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D&D is, at the very least, expected to meet certain qualifications in terms of earnings as a Hasbro brand, which is part of why its staff has been gradually whittled down by Wizards to a skeleton crew. (It has never met those monetary qualifications, AFAIK.) So yeah, the fact that it's a Hasbro brand means a lot. I wouldn't expect them to farm out a brand they aren't set to make money off of themselves. Bear in mind the main reason Hasbro bought Wizards at the time was because of the sweet Pokémon CCG dollars. Magic and D&D were relatively surplus. D&D had five staffers from what I last heard when I talked with Heinsoo last year? I might be remembering wrong, it might have been four. Definitely less than six.
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Mar 31, 2017 06:18
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I'm not really sure who it is, whether it's WotC or Hasbro or what, who's been responsible for deciding that the D&D department needed yearly rounds of layoffs to the point where it got to be a very bleak running joke every December but I'd say the effect it's had on the available talent pool is obvious given that Next turned out like it did. Assuming it hasn't reached some sort of minimum stability threshold by this point where else can they go? The D&D department is literally less than a half dozen people, projects grind to a halt if someone on the team has jury duty, they aren't even really putting in big convention appearances anymore. If whoever it is that's been slashing things continues to be unimpressed what's the next step then? edit; also I should point out that FFG technically already has a license agreement with WotC which is what allows them to make Android: Netrunner. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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Mar 31, 2017 06:28
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berenzen posted:Haven't FFG and Hasbro gotten into licensing spats in the past though? I'm pretty sure that Hasbro probably won't give a license to FFG as a result of that. Yeah, I believe it it was over Star Wars boardgames and how Imperial Assault crossed the line.
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Mar 31, 2017 06:31
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PJOmega posted:Yeah, I believe it it was over Star Wars boardgames and how Imperial Assault crossed the line. Specifically Hasbro is the company that Lucasfilm/Disney accorded license rights to for Star Wars boardgames, so FFG tried to be cute and classify Imperial Assault as a miniatures game. Hasbro flexed some legal muscle the end result I'm not entirely sure of, but in the end FFG still makes ImpAss and now also Rebellion though they have to sell through distributors and can't sell direct through their store so some sort of backstage deal has obviously been brokered. The Star Wars license in particular is a whole lot of confusing and sometimes stupid technicalities...FFG can't sell pdfs of their Star Wars tabletop RPGs because that would infringe upon Electronic Arts' exclusive rights to "digital Star Wars games" for instance.
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Mar 31, 2017 06:38
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Kai Tave posted:I'm not really sure who it is, whether it's WotC or Hasbro or what, who's been responsible for deciding that the D&D department needed yearly rounds of layoffs to the point where it got to be a very bleak running joke every December but I'd say the effect it's had on the available talent pool is obvious given that Next turned out like it did. Assuming it hasn't reached some sort of minimum stability threshold by this point where else can they go? The D&D department is literally less than a half dozen people, projects grind to a halt if someone on the team has jury duty, they aren't even really putting in big convention appearances anymore. If whoever it is that's been slashing things continues to be unimpressed what's the next step then? By Hasbro's normal standards, D&D isn't remotely profitable enough as a brand to support. Slashing the costs involved with it as much as possible is likely the only reason Wizards has been able to keep it alive at all. At this point they likely can at least just justify it with stuff like the recent Infinity Engine rereleases and keep it on life support.
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Mar 31, 2017 06:52
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Kai Tave posted:The Star Wars license in particular is a whole lot of confusing and sometimes stupid technicalities...FFG can't sell pdfs of their Star Wars tabletop RPGs because that would infringe upon Electronic Arts' exclusive rights to "digital Star Wars games" for instance.
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Mar 31, 2017 07:01
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Honestly the only way DnD is gonna make a comeback is if it gets turned into a freemium game. Hasbro isnt going to invest in a set of rules when at this point the value is almost exclusively the IP portions.
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Mar 31, 2017 07:08
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Kai Tave posted:I'm not really sure who it is, whether it's WotC or Hasbro or what, who's been responsible for deciding that the D&D department needed yearly rounds of layoffs to the point where it got to be a very bleak running joke every December but I'd say the effect it's had on the available talent pool is obvious given that Next turned out like it did. Assuming it hasn't reached some sort of minimum stability threshold by this point where else can they go? The D&D department is literally less than a half dozen people, projects grind to a halt if someone on the team has jury duty, they aren't even really putting in big convention appearances anymore. If whoever it is that's been slashing things continues to be unimpressed what's the next step then? Wouldn't this ironically be where a d20/OGL would have been able to come into play? As I wrote that I realize that DMsGuild is a thing, but besides the LOTR conversion I've not really heard of anything special come out of that.
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Mar 31, 2017 07:16
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^^^I mean maybe, but the thing about the great Dancian pitch of "you can make the corebooks and everyone else will make the lovely sourcebooks you don't want to waste your time on FOR you!" is that people are good at figuring out they don't actually need to do your scutwork, they can just make their own D&D with blackjack and hookers. That's how Bioware made Dragon Age to go to a slightly orthogonal example, they realized they didn't actually need to license D&D to make a fantasy CRPG with elves and dwarves and magic. The actual ability to make true D&D corebooks might be enticing enough for someone to go for it if a licensing agreement could be made, but I doubt anyone major is interested in becoming a 3rd party D&D sourcebook publisher these days.Barudak posted:Honestly the only way DnD is gonna make a comeback is if it gets turned into a freemium game. Hasbro isnt going to invest in a set of rules when at this point the value is almost exclusively the IP portions. The other way D&D could, theoretically, make a comeback is if this upcoming Forgotten Realms movie makes Transformers money. I'm skeptical that it will, but Hasbro is certainly hoping so. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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Mar 31, 2017 07:16
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I was going to make a post saying that the other way D&D could make a comeback if it was actually good again but honestly I feel like that train has sailed
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Mar 31, 2017 07:35
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Babe Magnet posted:I was going to make a post saying that the other way D&D could make a comeback if it was actually good again but honestly I feel like that train has sailed The RPG itself will never make the kind of money Hasbro expects. Even if they could win over everybody who's played D&D, Pathfinder, and an OSR game to buy in on every supplement published they still probably wouldn't make it. If it was owned by somebody else? Sure. But it likely will never get the support it needs under its current stewards.
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Mar 31, 2017 08:12
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dwarf74 posted:Pathfinder is serious trash. 5e is milquetoast but it's at least better than PF. You have those two mixed up, there. fr0id posted:are you including WFRP in the "not very good" column, because I will defend that game until the day I am buried in cardboard. No, WFRP3 was the last good one!
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Mar 31, 2017 09:26
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In my opinion, both Pathfinder and D&D 5e are hot messes but Pathfinder at least has more support and more levers to tool it into something enjoyable. That being said, 5e is probably less of a headache to run out of the core and involves less having to pick and choose what rules you use or emphasize like Pathfinder does. YMMV.
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Mar 31, 2017 09:34
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Alien Rope Burn posted:In my opinion, both Pathfinder and D&D 5e are hot messes but Pathfinder at least has more support and more levers to tool it into something enjoyable. That being said, 5e is probably less of a headache to run out of the core and involves less having to pick and choose what rules you use or emphasize like Pathfinder does. YMMV. My view is that 5e is more of a "headache" to run out of the core because the rules are vague, half-assed, missing, and contradictory, often all at the same time. More savvy/experienced GMs will know how to deal with this, but often they'll do so by importing stuff from other games that they have played before in order to do so, at which point you should probably be playing that other game to begin with. And if you're not coming at this from a position of knowing how to deal with "the player wants to craft a wand" or even "how much gold should I be rewarding the players with", and the rules aren't helping, then sorry, your game is Bad.
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Mar 31, 2017 09:44
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Alien Rope Burn posted:In my opinion, both Pathfinder and D&D 5e are hot messes but Pathfinder at least has more support and more levers to tool it into something enjoyable. That being said, 5e is probably less of a headache to run out of the core and involves less having to pick and choose what rules you use or emphasize like Pathfinder does. YMMV. The Pathfinder core rulebooks don't have much in the way of optional rules to pick among, really. The most consequential one is ability generation. The only actual optional rule I can think of in the core rulebook is Massive Damage. Oh, there's the lifestyle tracking thing too, and there's the section discussing post-level 20 advancement. Pathfinder has problems in its core rulebook that later books have solved, but that's true of 5e too. Pathfinder's core rulebooks are definitely clearer and more consistent making it easier to run, for sure.
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Mar 31, 2017 10:14
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Arivia posted:The Pathfinder core rulebooks don't have much in the way of optional rules to pick among, really. The most consequential one is ability generation. The only actual optional rule I can think of in the core rulebook is Massive Damage. Oh, there's the lifestyle tracking thing too, and there's the section discussing post-level 20 advancement. Pathfinder has problems in its core rulebook that later books have solved, but that's true of 5e too. Pathfinder's core rulebooks are definitely clearer and more consistent making it easier to run, for sure. I mean the tendency for people to skip over certain swaths of the rules, either by intention or ignorance. I've never seen a core d20 game run completely "by the book", though I'm sure they must be out there.
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Mar 31, 2017 10:22
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In Pathfinder you have to confirm crits abd take like, 3 feats to fire a bow into melee. It's trash.
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Mar 31, 2017 11:22
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alg posted:In Pathfinder you have to confirm crits abd take like, 3 feats to fire a bow into melee. It's trash. Actually, Precise Shot only has Point-Blank Shot as its prereq, so that's two feats, not three. And it does introduce a paradigm where a person who does not take that Precise Shot feat can still perform in combat, if they're instead shooting at enemies not engaged with friendlies in melee. Further, crit confirmation has a place insofar as it prevents the awkward intersection of "every hit is a crit" that you would get in, say, 5e.
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Mar 31, 2017 11:34
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Kai Tave posted:Specifically Hasbro is the company that Lucasfilm/Disney accorded license rights to for Star Wars boardgames, so FFG tried to be cute and classify Imperial Assault as a miniatures game. Hasbro flexed some legal muscle the end result I'm not entirely sure of, but in the end FFG still makes ImpAss and now also Rebellion though they have to sell through distributors and can't sell direct through their store so some sort of backstage deal has obviously been brokered. The Star Wars license in particular is a whole lot of confusing and sometimes stupid technicalities...FFG can't sell pdfs of their Star Wars tabletop RPGs because that would infringe upon Electronic Arts' exclusive rights to "digital Star Wars games" for instance. Don't forget that at the same time they were telling that to Hasbro they were telling GW that Imperial Assault was totally not a miniatures game, it was a boardgame! Because the terms of the agreement with GW was that they couldn't make miniatures games...
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Mar 31, 2017 12:04
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Lemon-Lime posted:
Hell yeah. So you're not a fan of the Star Wars RPG? I've played a bit of it and can see where they streamlined a lot of stuff (talents and action cards all get condensed into class-based talent trees), but I miss some of the customization you could get out of WFRP3, and the wounds system is an overly convoluted one from the dark heresy line that only exists because they wanted a "fair" way to have people get their hands cut off.
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Mar 31, 2017 13:23
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Kai Tave posted:The other way D&D could, theoretically, make a comeback is if this upcoming Forgotten Realms movie makes Transformers money. I'm skeptical that it will, but Hasbro is certainly hoping so. This is like saying because the Transformers movies are huge hits that of course the IDW comics have been selling a million copies a month. If the movie is a big hit, we'll see lots of D&D merchandise move like crazy and it WILL boost the game's sales but the Red Box days are forever gone. I think Hasbro should just accept it's a loss leader and something to keep WotC happy and making MtG and just license it out but let Mearls fart around a bunch as long as he's kept away from actual design. I hope the movie means we'll get more D&D board games and good video games myself Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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Mar 31, 2017 13:35
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gradenko_2000 posted:I daresay PF is still a better product than 5e. PF has such a terrible state of splatbook sprawl and power creep that it's essentially unplayable without the GM setting specific limits as to what content can be used. It's approaching Rifts, as each new sourcebook tends to have feats that are straight upgrades from previously published work. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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Mar 31, 2017 14:21
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Liquid Communism posted:What's it like to be utterly wrong? A thing said by someone who doesn't understand D&D 3.5 or pathfinder. A lot of the most powerful stuff is core.
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Mar 31, 2017 14:23
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gradenko_2000 posted:Actually, Precise Shot only has Point-Blank Shot as its prereq, so that's two feats, not three. And it does introduce a paradigm where a person who does not take that Precise Shot feat can still perform in combat, if they're instead shooting at enemies not engaged with friendlies in melee.
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Mar 31, 2017 14:24
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Piell posted:A thing said by someone who doesn't understand D&D 3.5 or pathfinder. A lot of the most powerful stuff is core. Pfft. I take it you never did the math on 3.5 Warlocks or PF's Witches, then.
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Mar 31, 2017 14:25
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"Pathfinder is actually good" - Goons, somehow, in early 2017
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