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I've talked about it up-thread, but I strongly suspect WotC/Hasbro are playing out the string on 5E until enough time passes for them to license the RPG line to another company. I still would guess Fantasy Flight as who ends up with it in the end, if only by default. I don't think it was inevitable, though. D&D might have more value for its branding, but it's still beneficial to have the TTRPG line out there as a touch point. Not having the game erodes the customer base for the other stuff, at least a little. I don't think Hasbro even needs the game to make a ton of money to be worth keeping; it just needs to pay for itself, basically. That's where the problems come in. Dating back to the TSR days, there's pretty good evidence the margins get very thin at towards the end of an edition's life cycle. Now, I suspect the only thing that was required to greenlight 5E was some scheme to stabilize returns across the life cycle. But what Mearls et al appear to have pitched was something else entirely. They seem to have promised an edition that would make the big bucks by arguing that 4E had divided the player base, and that they could retain most of the 4E players while bringing back a good chunk of the 3.x players who left for Pathfinder. Also, 5E initially promised to have a significant online component with a subscription, finally delivering on a promise 4E had made but missed (though for fairly legitimate reasons). All that together had to have looked really attractive to the brand managers. What we actually got was a game that turned off a lot of 4E players and didn't offer enough to recoup most PF players, and then the online portion crashed and burned again. Now, by everything we've seen 5E has been reasonably successful in RPG market terms - less than 3.x and 4E, which seem to have been pretty close, but not far off. Unfortunately that's not what the D&D team promised, and along the way they - or, specifically, Mearls - stepped in it multiple times on a PR level, which poses a risk to the other licensing. Not a big risk, but enough to make brand managers unhappy. In the end WotC/Hasbro probably came to the conclusion that the RPG line couldn't be bigger than what 3.x and 4E had done, and there just needed to be some effort made to control cost or stabilize returns at end-of-cycle. And if that's what they had gone into 5E expecting, we'd probably be seeing a normal release schedule on 5E. Instead they'd been promised a lot more, and the way the D&D team missed delivering on those promises probably soured corporate on any other proposals that team put forward. So they've got two choices - revamp the team and reset expectations, or let the line run out in a way that causes minimal damage to the brand and sell the license later. The return on both is probably similar, but the latter is lower risk (or at least, is lower risk when you think the team you have doesn't know what it's doing) and lower effort, and it's pretty much a no brainer which one a corporation is going to pick. It's a bit ironic. The common wisdom is that Hasbro doesn't care about the RPG line because it's too small potatoes, but I honestly think they'd have been happy to let it continue the way it had with minor tweaks. It was hubris on the part of the D&D team that seems to have sealed their fate. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Sep 13, 2017 |
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Sep 13, 2017 23:22
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Peas and Rice posted:Yeah for some reason it's stuck in my head that they care about using the D&D brand to start a movie/entertainment franchise a la the MCU, but I can't find anything online to support that right now. Ah, yes, the rich franchises of D&D, there's... the amiable wizard, the cool elf, and the edgy wizard. Unless they surprise us with Bigby: Origins or Rise of the Wulfgar or Volo's Big Adventure.
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Sep 13, 2017 23:25
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Ah, yes, the rich franchises of D&D, there's... the amiable wizard, the cool elf, and the edgy wizard. Let's be honest here, The Legend of Drizzt would be their first go, and possibly the only time in history that hollywood whitewashing something would be a good idea.
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Sep 13, 2017 23:28
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I just remember an article from someone who was discussing the D&D license with some hollywood insider types who all seemed to think the brand is a pretty thoroughly poisoned well but that was back in 2013~14 so who knows now.
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Sep 13, 2017 23:28
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The content wars are hot enough that someone would greenlight a movie or limited series for a streaming service.
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Sep 13, 2017 23:42
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Exactly. This was from conversations before Hulu, Netflix, et al were engaged in putting out as much original content as providing existing media. It's a new environment entirely.
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Sep 13, 2017 23:45
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Peas and Rice posted:Yeah for some reason it's stuck in my head that they care about using the D&D brand to start a movie/entertainment franchise a la the MCU, but I can't find anything online to support that right now. Here's the thing about Hasbro, nobody predicted that a movie franchise based on a kid's toy line would turn into a regular multi billion dollar blockbuster franchise, but it did. Even the GI Joe movies which had much less staying power than Transformers made pretty decent money. Nobody wants to be the guy who sells D&D thinking "ah this property is worthless" and see a competitor make a bazillion dollars from a successful D&D media blitz. They might license the game side of things out if they decide it's not worth doing it in-house anymore but they'll retain the actual property until the heat death of the universe. Is D&D a blockbuster-worthy franchise at the moment? Probably not, but 10, 15, 20 years from now? Who knows. More pertinently there is actually some vague noise about a new D&D movie being worked on. If and/or when it bombs Hasbro will simply shelve it for however long it takes to convince someone the time is right for another go.
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Sep 13, 2017 23:45
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Comrade Gorbash posted:I've talked about it up-thread, but I strongly suspect WotC/Hasbro are playing out the string on 5E until enough time passes for them to license the RPG line to another company. I still would guess Fantasy Flight as who ends up with it in the end, if only by default
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Sep 13, 2017 23:52
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dwarf74 posted:This whole thing reads like fanfiction. It's possible they just let the line lie fallow for a while and try again later, but they've certainly let the team atrophy to the point that they'd have to restaff almost entirely just to get back to a normal release schedule on 5E, let alone launch another edition.
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Sep 14, 2017 00:29
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Cubicle 7.
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Sep 14, 2017 00:31
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Lemon-Lime posted:Cubicle 7.
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Sep 14, 2017 00:36
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I run a toy nerd/poo poo scalping outfit with my brother & came across this. https://www.hasbrotoyshop.com/en/htsusa/-c44220000 Hasbro cant farm the game out quick enough.
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Sep 14, 2017 00:47
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It really feels like D&D doesnt make enough money because nobody knows what to do with it and nobody who could figure that out will ever be employed because D&D doesnt make enough to justify paying that person.
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Sep 14, 2017 00:54
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Kurieg posted:Most of the Essentials class design was definitely skewed more towards 3.5 era design sensibilities than 4e's, when it wasn't just being objectively terrible. Essentials was deliberately geared to steer 4e towards 3.5e design: Martials lost daily abilities and gained "always-on"/passive abilities Casters had an easier time swapping around powers because spellbooks Class abilities were on a locked path, similar to the standard 3e level-1-to-20 table lay-out Treasure was randomly rolled/generated again Treasure was assigned a rarity again This ended up pissing off everyone, since it wasn't enough to win back 3.x/Pathfinder holdouts, while also making GBS threads on the game for everyone who liked 4e as-is
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Sep 14, 2017 01:03
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gradenko_2000 posted:Essentials was deliberately geared to steer 4e towards 3.5e design: And then it introduced poo poo like the seeker and the binder.
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Sep 14, 2017 01:20
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seeker was phb3
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Sep 14, 2017 01:29
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Kurieg posted:And then it introduced poo poo like the seeker and the binder. The Seeker was the PHB 3. And I actually liked there being the simple martials - but only once the Elementalist turned up. D&D has long been crying out for a simple blast mage. And as well as Cubicle 7 there's Evil Hat and Pelgrane Press.
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Sep 14, 2017 01:33
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I'm sure there will always be a D&D movie just about to be made. There are three joker movies in production and the longest lasting IP in Hollywood is Stretch Armstrong. It's an inside joke around screenwriters that you're not anybody until you're fired from Stretch Armstrong.
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Sep 14, 2017 01:35
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Red Metal posted:seeker was phb3 The PHB3 was honestly where the mechanical quality of 4E's player-facing crunch began to hit a bit of a downward slump after PHB2 was a solid home-run. The power-point psionic classes suffered from a gimmick that simply wasn't very good and none of them really had an outstanding identity the way that other 4E classes had such as the Warlord, Avenger, or even the 4E Fighter. The Monk was pretty decent if more obtuse than it needed to be in places (so we'll make a martial artist character only they won't actually use normal attacks, they'll instead target non-AC defenses like a weird spellcaster that uses their body as an implement, but we'll give them a bigger unarmed attack damage die even though they'll rarely if ever use basic attacks, and all of this is because ????????????) but despite the fact that it was labeled as a "psionic" class it was clear that the Monk was a refugee from their earlier goal of making a "Ki" power source that had simply been salvaged. Psionic classes never really gelled and felt like a half-formed idea pushed out the door, and hybrid character rules were very clearly labeled as "we didn't test this, caveat emptor" and were like the dumb sort of charop exercise where 90% of a thing is garbage while 10% is good, and I don't even recall the new races being all that interesting or memorable. I remember minotaurs I guess? I dunno, I certainly wouldn't say it was worse than Essentials but at the same time 4E wasn't coasting on an uninterrupted wave of top quality crunch until Essentials came out. e; gently caress, I completely forgot about Runepriests too. I never did figure out what their deal was.
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Sep 14, 2017 01:56
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Shardmind kick rear end. The rest of the PHB3 races besides them and Minotaur felt kinda half baked though.
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Sep 14, 2017 02:04
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gently caress! I even forgot about Shardminds! Like I don't disagree that they're pretty cool, but man something about the PHB3 was eminently forgettable.
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Sep 14, 2017 02:05
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Yeah you could really tell the design team needed a break from all the projects they were working on before Mearls even showed up, most of the classes and monsters in the third books were really scraping the barrel for ideas.
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Sep 14, 2017 02:07
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PHB3 was incredibly underwhelming other than the Shardmind and the Monk. MM3 was amazing in every way.
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Sep 14, 2017 02:25
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Honestly, its hard to blame them. By then most iconic traditional player races, and some nontraditional ones, had been tapped. Lemme do a quick demographic breakdown. PHB1 had the holy quartet of human, dwarf, elf, and hobbit. It had Eladrin as an attempt at reconciling two separate elf motifs of "tricksy woodsman" and "pretty mage", tieflings and dragonborn as new experimental options, and also included half-elves. Classwise, it had a martial defender, two martial strikers, a martial leader, a divine leader, a divine defender, an arcane striker, and an arcane controller. Coming out first, I can see why people were turned off. It lost a lot of good options like druid, bard, and half-orc, even if some like sorcerer and gnome I can't really mourn. However, each class had a clear niche and inspiration besides maybe ranger, but tbh I can never understand the ranger's deal in DnD. PHB2 took what PHB1 did and expanded it perfectly. Gnomes became more than lovely dwarves, half-orcs got to be better than a stack of penalties. Shifters were great for being wildmen and devas are probably the most interesting concept across both books. Goliaths are a bit redundant with half-orcs, but giants are cool so whatever. The classes are where things really get interesting. The primal source was off to a great start with reps for all four roles, bard and sorcerer got kickass reimaginings as leaders and strikers, and divine got unorthodox yet really interesting concepts like monastic assassin and voice of the gods to fill in the striker and controller slots. This is the peak of 4E ideawise in my books. Most every niche but arcane defender and martial controller is represented, and tbh a martial controller would likely be a defender. The classes explore beyond the base concepts and hit upon other interesting core motifs without straining credibility too much. PHB3 only had 4 races, so I guess being 2 for 2 isn't bad. Wilden are weirdly designed and step on the shifter and gnome toes super hard, and githzerai/githyanki/githwhatever have always been my least favorite part of the whole planescape deal. Deva fit their monastic role so much better. Shardmind are brilliant though, and if you're gonna add another I AM THE STRONG race minotaur are a fun choice. Kinda would've preferred goblins though. Goblins always get ripped off. Classwise, I could not tell you which class had which role even if you gave me the cheat sheet. Instead of tackling the two unused roles they doubled down on divine leader and primal controller, too. I do dig that they made a proper ranged class, though. Especially one that supports thrown weapons. I love how Monk was implemented, too. Using leverage, wit, and stability to target an opponent's non-armor defenses is brilliant, and gives a unique melee niche. So is having unmatched mobility. I'm liking the PHB3 more than I remembered, but it still left me cold halfway through when every other book left my imagination pumping nonstop. And that's not even getting into hybrids. I can see why to many this is where the downturn starts, but having some cool classes after two other PHBs and a hefty supplement schedule isn't too shabby.
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Sep 14, 2017 02:33
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To me the thing that always stuck out at me is why they didn't use the PHB3 as an opportunity to embrace a lot of the "monstrous" races that a bunch of people found fun/funny/cute/etc. Kobolds and goblins especially seem like natural choices, kobolds have long since been a kind of beloved underdog and Paizo's goblins are one of their more iconic creatures, then to that you can add minotaurs sure, then maybe hobgoblins, I'd even spot them gnolls even though they already sorta appeared in an early Dragon article, rip off Privateer Press and make not-trollkin, go nuts and make playable medusas or something. And yeah, keep shardminds. Of course one of the many criticisms frequently regurgitated against 4E was that there were too many "weird options" and that WotC had moved things too far from the game's "traditional fantasy roots." Disparaging comparisons to the Mos Eisley cantina were a common go-to. You could ask why GMs couldn't just restrict the pool of available options if they really had a vision they had to fulfill at all costs but this simply led to further complaints about a culture of "player entitlement" which had come to mean that players now expected to be able to play whatever they want. GM empowerment was a big talking point surrounding that particular edition war, I remember now.
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Sep 14, 2017 02:48
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PHB3 is kind of a mess, but each class has it's own separate problem. Ardent is just bland - it doesn't really do anything you can't get with another leader. Psion works, but the play style it uses is just not fun, for either the player or the DM. It was built to be a reliable debuffer, and it does that well. The issue is that this just ends up wasting time - the monsters can't hit anything so it's just a waiting game as they whiff every round until the PCs put them down, except there's still an outside chance they'll hit or the psion won't be able to lock them down, so you end up playing out the string. Battlemind and monk were interesting side-ways approaches to their roles - a striker that was best when dealing with multiple foes and is absurdly hard to hit, and a defender that was built to truly lock down one opponent and literally interrupt the enemy's turn. Both were over-complicated and created some weird corner cases with their mechanics, but they're the stand out classes because they can actually keep up with PHB1 and PHB2 classes, and have their own shtick that no one else can quite duplicate. I'm of two minds about the power point classes in general. On the one hand I like that they were trying something different with the AED structure, but it feels like they didn't really commit to it fully. For the psion and ardent in particular, it really feels like less choice. The battlemind doesn't suffer from this as much, I think because spending power points tended to change their At-Will's effects more. There was less "this, but more so" effects, and more cases where the power point really changed what you'd use the power to do. I think ultimately the battlemind suggests the power point concept can work, but that they didn't do the development necessary to get there with the psion and ardent. The Runepriest actually occupies an interesting design space that gets explored more (and somewhat more successfully) with the Berserker. The core concept is it does state changing - every power has a protection and a destruction benefit, and you flip between the two states, depending on what the party needs at a given point in the encounter. Need more defensive buffs and healing? Turn on the protection rune. Time to finish something off or focus fire? Turn on destruction. In power terms, it's major issue was a lack of reliability (most of its benefits only triggered on a hit) and generally weak bonuses. It's about where the original Paladin was, but it never got the benefit of additional support the way the paladin did. As for the Seeker, I buy into the theory that it was supposed to be a ranged defender, but that they backed off that for some reason and ended up with a half-assed controller. So there's two classes that are actually worth playing, one that could have been something special with more support, one that meets its design goal except that's actually not good, one that's a cop-out on a good idea, and one that is just kind of there so they have a psionic leader. Not a good batting average.
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Sep 14, 2017 03:04
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Balancing a ranged defender would be a nightmare.
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Sep 14, 2017 03:09
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How would a ranged defender differ from a controller, really? They always seemed kinda like similar implementations of the same motif of lockdown and manipulation.
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Sep 14, 2017 03:11
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The Bee posted:How would a ranged defender differ from a controller, really? They always seemed kinda like similar implementations of the same motif of lockdown and manipulation. The most basic way a defender stays up is lots of HP and high AC. A ranged defender, however, would probably be built around making it hard to actually attack them - basically, they'd kite opponents. Lots of ways to disengage, and "soft" control that keeps enemies from closing effectively. The difference between that and a controller is that they controller just wants to keep enemies away, period. A ranged defender would be staying just close enough to entice opponents to give chase all the time. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 03:23
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Er, sorry, i didn't mean the Seeker, I meant the other ranged controller that got introduced in essentials and used nothing but stances and at wills.
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Sep 14, 2017 03:34
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Kurieg posted:Er, sorry, i didn't mean the Seeker, I meant the other ranged controller that got introduced in essentials and used nothing but stances and at wills. Hunter (it did get an encounter power)
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Sep 14, 2017 03:39
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FMguru posted:D20 vs BRP Call of Cthulhu wars were so bad, Yog-Sothoth Dot Com had to impose a blanket No Edition Discussion policy in order to keep their forums from burning to the ground. I earned my Scarlet G!
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Sep 14, 2017 03:49
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Well, basically defenders punish enemies that attack other targets, right? They couple that with survivability features to stay up in the fight. At core, the defender is the worst target to pick, but then they do something to force you to target them anyways. In a number of respects you basically described the Swordmage.
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Sep 14, 2017 03:55
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Kai Tave posted:In a number of respects you basically described the Swordmage.
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Sep 14, 2017 03:56
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The Bee posted:The classes are where things really get interesting. The primal source was off to a great start with reps for all four roles, bard and sorcerer got kickass reimaginings as leaders and strikers, and divine got unorthodox yet really interesting concepts like monastic assassin and voice of the gods to fill in the striker and controller slots. This is the peak of 4E ideawise in my books. Kai Tave posted:Nobody wants to be the guy who sells D&D thinking "ah this property is worthless" and see a competitor make a bazillion dollars from a successful D&D media blitz. Comrade Gorbash posted:It's a bit ironic. The common wisdom is that Hasbro doesn't care about the RPG line because it's too small potatoes, but I honestly think they'd have been happy to let it continue the way it had with minor tweaks. It was hubris on the part of the D&D team that seems to have sealed their fate. It all comes back to Mearls as the linchpin of the team. I can't help but wonder at what traits he possesses that keeps him in that position as frankly more talented developers have come and gone.
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Sep 14, 2017 05:00
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Halloween Jack posted:It all comes back to Mearls as the linchpin of the team. I can't help but wonder at what traits he possesses that keeps him in that position as frankly more talented developers have come and gone.
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Sep 14, 2017 05:17
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Halloween Jack posted:Another thing I liked about 4e is that different role/power source combinations spurred the creation of new archetypes like the avenger. Agreed. Some people say it doesn't feel as natural of a base class, but I don't see how "templar" is any harder to sum up than the difference between a wizard and sorcerer, or what exactly a ranger does. Honestly I wouldn't mind expanding striker into Artillery (Sorcerer-style), Skirmisher (Rogue or Avenger style), and Brute (Barbarian style), similar to the monster roles. I bet you could get some interesting archetypes applying 4 power sources to 6 roles like that without stepping on too many toes. That'd be, what, 24 classes assuming no overlap by the end of it?
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Sep 14, 2017 05:46
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The Bee posted:How would a ranged defender differ from a controller, really? They always seemed kinda like similar implementations of the same motif of lockdown and manipulation. An evade tank that punishes enemies that attack allies? * Ranged damage/lockdown effects that trigger off "if the marked target hits anyone but you". * Evade effects that trigger when you get hit and do something extra if you are hit by a marked target. * Effects that take an ally out of danger and put you into danger (eg, when an ally is attacked, immediately trade places with them and mark their attacker).
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Sep 14, 2017 06:41
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The worst part about the Essentials Binder is that it turned one of the coolest 3.x classes which would have worked great as a straight up 4E class with minimal adaptation into some Essentials garbage.  A 4E Binder done well would have been a stand-alone class that picked vestiges instead of individual powers, with each vestige literally just being a package of one each of Encounter/Daily/Utility powers, maybe with a small rider unlocked for the whole package when they've learnt all three powers from a vestige. Instead, we got a lovely watered-down Warlock build. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 07:11 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 07:06
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You know, I just wish they'd do away with per day abilities entirely. "Per day" is just such bad design that perforce skews campaign/adventure design. Even if you have to give some classes an expendable resource and others not, there are better ways to handle it.
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Sep 14, 2017 07:22
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