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Tibalt posted:I might have my timelines and facts all messed up, but didn't it start great, get gated behind a subscription, the person working on it died, Microsoft discontinued Silverlight, and it became effectively offline abandonware before D&D Next even started?
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May 10, 2022 15:45
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Glagha posted:Actual question because I see it come up a lot, is there actually any evidence that 4e didn't do well? I mean they printed a billion books for it over a long period and gave it a ton of support, there was just a very vocal set of detractors. A bunch of people yelling collectively on a forum about how not D&D it is has nothing to do with sales and how much play it gets though. Every version of D&D has outsold the previous version for almost 40 years. 4E was an unqualified success in that it (a) made a boatload of money and (b) kept the brand intact to set up 5E. I have zero nostalgia for 4E, but anyone who tells you it wasn't a smash hit is deluded and has an axe to grind. The Character Creator, despite being launched in stillborn technology Silverlight, was exceptional at the time, and should have been the basis for 5E going forward, something WotC is finally catching up on in 2022. It was only derailed by behind-the-scenes tragedy nobody could have predicted. Chakan posted:I’ve been wondering about the next edition of dnd because I realized 5th ed is creeping closer to a decade since release. It looks like wotc is happy to ride this wave of popularity by putting out splat books and improving the digital side of the game, so do people think they’re worried an edition shift would lose a lot of momentum? 5.5E has already been announced (although not named). They've already started making rulebook changes in advance of it. Just go look at the recent sourcebooks.
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May 10, 2022 15:49
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Tibalt posted:I might have my timelines and facts all messed up, but didn't it start great, get gated behind a subscription, the person working on it died, Microsoft discontinued Silverlight, and it became effectively offline abandonware before D&D Next even started? It was always a subscription service, even when it was downloadable. The murder/suicide led to WotC dropping everything that wasn't the character and monster builder, but those were still really good products until they switched from a downloaded program to a pure subscription service some time around Essentials. It became abandonware and obsolete and etc after that, but it was still a really good product for most of 4e's run.
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May 10, 2022 15:49
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D&D 5.5 will be one book titled "Sage Advice" and it's a compilation of Jeremy Crawford tweets.
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May 10, 2022 15:55
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Chakan posted:I’ve been wondering about the next edition of dnd because I realized 5th ed is creeping closer to a decade since release. It looks like wotc is happy to ride this wave of popularity by putting out splat books and improving the digital side of the game, so do people think they’re worried an edition shift would lose a lot of momentum? Siivola posted:The world does not need a new edition of D&D and WotC knows it. I'm willing to wager a box of donuts there will never be another version of D&D. Welcome to the world of games-as-a-service. "Editions" are a relic of printed books. There is just the one edition now. Like Twitter or Reddit or SomethingAwful. Things change, features get added or removed, but none of the users really know what version they're using. A new edition would be bad for WotC - one of the biggest barriers to people leaving D&D 5th is a lot of people don't want to learn another system. If WotC makes people learn "6th" Edition, they might go out and learn another, different system. Whatever 6th Edition is, there are people who would want to stay behind with 5th. Instead, the game will keep being "updated". Things will get folded into the "core" rules on D&D Beyond. New "Anniversary Editions" or "Collected Revisions" or "Revised Rule Books" will herald the next evolution of the game. The big new changes in 2024 are ostensibly going to be backward compatible with 5th Edition, so I think officially the most we can hope for is Edition 5.5, then 5.5.5, then 5.5.5.5. Lurks With Wolves posted:It was always a subscription service, even when it was downloadable. The murder/suicide led to WotC dropping everything that wasn't the character and monster builder, but those were still really good products until they switched from a downloaded program to a pure subscription service some time around Essentials. It became abandonware and obsolete and etc after that, but it was still a really good product for most of 4e's run. If 4E's character builder was loaded in Steam, it would probably be one of my top 10 played video games of all time.
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May 10, 2022 15:59
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Honestly, it seems like their entire strategy with 5e from the get-go was to scale the timeline of product releases way the hell back compared to previous editions, which makes a lot of sense from a business perspective considering that supplements never pull greater numbers than the core products. This is both the reason we're only now getting something resembling an edition change and only in the form of a .5 edition shift rather than a full edition change (I think that's also the reason why 5e's product output has been dominated by Forgotten Realms until fairly recently and its become the default setting for the edition; Wizards' deal when they acquired the license requires them to release a certain amount of products set in the Realms per year to maintain control of the IP and if they're only releasing 2-3 major products per year they're going to have to prioritize that IP over the ones they don't have to meet publishing quotas to keep). I think we're going to be in 5e territory for quite a while still given what we've seen up until now.
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May 10, 2022 16:04
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KingKalamari posted:Honestly, it seems like their entire strategy with 5e from the get-go was to scale the timeline of product releases way the hell back compared to previous editions, which makes a lot of sense from a business perspective considering that supplements never pull greater numbers than the core products. I think that's a key point. 4e was high maintenance and it needed a math rewrite within its own lifetime. It may have outsold previous editions, but did it outprofit them?
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May 10, 2022 16:16
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I'm pretty certain that Wizards literally own the Forgotten Realms IP and don't need to publish a thing to keep it.
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May 10, 2022 16:16
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CitizenKeen posted:If 4E's character builder was loaded in Steam, it would probably be one of my top 10 played video games of all time. The DM for my 5E campaign was going to try running 4E and didn't specifically because the digital tools were gone, or at least too hard to acquire. It's unfortunate, I was looking forward to trying it out again with someone with some experience.
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May 10, 2022 16:24
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Since we are talking about 5ed does anyone know how much core rule rewrite are 3rd parties allowed for their licensed products? If I wanted to put out my setting for 5 ed and abolish both allegiance and ability scores would I be allowed to do that?
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May 10, 2022 16:25
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Covermeinsunshine posted:Since we are talking about 5ed does anyone know how much core rule rewrite are 3rd parties allowed for their licensed products? If I wanted to put out my setting for 5 ed and abolish both allegiance and ability scores would I be allowed to do that? IDK about ability scores, but alignment is basically vestigial at this point and has virtually no mechanics tied to it, so you could safely ignore it.
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May 10, 2022 16:28
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Siivola posted:I'm pretty certain that Wizards literally own the Forgotten Realms IP and don't need to publish a thing to keep it. I don't know the full details, but the information I've seen suggests that the contract Wizards signed with Ed Greenwood to acquire FR was REALLY weird and had a bunch of provisions in it that Wizards has to follow or the rights revert back to Greenwood. Does anyone have more concrete information on this?
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May 10, 2022 16:37
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Siivola posted:I'm pretty certain that Wizards literally own the Forgotten Realms IP and don't need to publish a thing to keep it. KingKalamari is mentioning a term of the sale of the FR to TSR back in the 1980s which has been publicly discussed and confirmed by both parties in the past. However, I don’t know if it’s still in effect - part of it is specifically Ed Greenwood getting to write new products and that hasn’t happened in years at this point.
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May 10, 2022 16:39
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Covermeinsunshine posted:Since we are talking about 5ed does anyone know how much core rule rewrite are 3rd parties allowed for their licensed products? If I wanted to put out my setting for 5 ed and abolish both allegiance and ability scores would I be allowed to do that? You can't publish your original setting on DMs Guild, and I would assume anything published there has to actually interface with the rules of 5E to not get booted out.
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May 10, 2022 16:42
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KingKalamari posted:Honestly, it seems like their entire strategy with 5e from the get-go was to scale the timeline of product releases way the hell back compared to previous editions, which makes a lot of sense from a business perspective considering that supplements never pull greater numbers than the core products.
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May 10, 2022 16:47
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Arivia posted:KingKalamari is mentioning a term of the sale of the FR to TSR back in the 1980s which has been publicly discussed and confirmed by both parties in the past. However, I don’t know if it’s still in effect - part of it is specifically Ed Greenwood getting to write new products and that hasn’t happened in years at this point.
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May 10, 2022 16:49
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Yeah, my understanding is that TSR made some weird-rear end deals with the creators of the AD&D-era campaign settings that have had legal repercussions up through to WOTC and Hasbro. You saw a little bit of that with the recent legal kerfuffle between Wizards and Weiss/Hickman about the new Dragonlance novels. The moral is: Never underestimate the depths of weird incompetence the management of TSR was capable of!
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May 10, 2022 16:56
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AmiYumi posted:And also one that grogs constantly railed against because look how many powers you get, as a filthy martial, it must be OP It's interesting reading through 3e books and seeing clear evidence that the designers recognized that a lot of systems in the core rules were seriously underbaked, and the evolution of feats over time provides a pretty clear set of examples. Core 3.0e has feat support for a lot of subsystems that could be charitably described as anemic, and every significant 3e sourcebook and spinoff tried to simultaneously rectify that oversight without making the (bad and overvalued) core feats straight-out obsolete. The 3e-based spinoff games (Star Wars, Wheel of Time, Call of Cthulhu, and later d20 Modern) had a little more wiggle room, but not nearly enough since they were still being billed as 3e-compatible, and were still being designed by a lot of the same people who had made those design decisions in the first place. Fun fact: The Wheel of Time RPG recycled both the regional feats from the FR Campaign Setting and the broader selection of skill support feats from Star Wars, which led to the Stealthy feat being presented separately as both a background-exclusive feat (like in FR) and a general feat for all characters (like in SW). WoT also has several feat chains where the first feat in the chain does literally nothing but give you permission to buy the next feat in the chain, which I think is the only time that amazingly awful piece of design appeared in any first-party D&D book.
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May 10, 2022 17:47
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Toshimo posted:Every version of D&D has outsold the previous version for almost 40 years. 30 years, but yeah. No subsequent edition has sold as many copies of its PHB as 1e did (though 5e might be getting there), and the '80s Basic Set outsold even that. Though, as far as I know these numbers are only going by sales of the core rules, not the entire D&D product line for that edition. It's possible that 2e's massive glut of sourcebooks led it to outsell 1e overall, even though core 2e sold significantly fewer copies.
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May 10, 2022 18:00
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hyphz posted:I think that's a key point. 4e was high maintenance and it needed a math rewrite within its own lifetime. It may have outsold previous editions, but did it outprofit them? Absolutely. More people were playing dnd than ever at the time and places like PA were helping by broadcasting games for the first time. Plenty of us here and in other places were also tracking the sales rankings of tabletop rpg books on Amazon and 4e was anywhere from like 60 to 90 percent of the top 20 selling rpg books at any given time on Amazon, which means that even the splat books had excellent sell through.
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May 10, 2022 18:46
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my experience with 4e was despising it and thinking it was the worst system ever because the math was wrong so every fight took forever and the skill challenges always failed. which was a shame because once they fixed these things the game is actually quite fun
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May 10, 2022 18:48
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Idunno what the scene is like now, but we had local groups playing Encounters and Lair Assault in local stores. I don't know when support for those OPs ended for 4e, though it all seemed to collapse very quickly roundabout the same time we were doing the Next playtest.
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May 10, 2022 18:55
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My local store was run by a 3rd edition grognard so it turned into a pro-Pathfinder shop once Pathfinder picked up the mantle as D&D 3.75. Despite that, he still sold shitloads of 4e products in 2008, and then saw a year-over-year decline in 2009, partially driven by recession, that still consisted of 4e selling very well. This is the point where he was souring on 4e personally and I suspect that had some influence on in-store sales - folks in the store were running a lot of pathfinder games, hanging out with Gary and chatting about pathfinder, etc. Even then, for 2010 D&D sales continued to outsell Pathfinder two to one. At no point did Pathfinder actually outsell 4e in this store. I think his blog post in January 2012 is revealing: quote:The release of D&D 4 was the second biggest RPG release of the decade, second only to the release of D&D 3. Will we be as excited about D&D 5? Probably not. We don't know much about it yet, but it looks promising from what little we're hearing. D&D 4 came after a stellar, albeit somewhat flawed performance by D&D 3. D&D 5 will follow disappointment. D&D 5 will enter a marketplace dominated by a perfectly good version of D&D that they abandoned. Despite 4e always outselling Pathfinder in his own store, Gary calls 4e a "disappointment" and considers the market "dominated" by pathfinder and 3.5. His personal feelings about the game's flaws outweighed his own sales numbers (which in turn also ignored DDI's additional revenues for Wizards) when it came to characterizing the situation. This is exemplary of the entire discourse in the industry about 4th edition after the fact: it was a huge financial success, but because Pathfinder succeeded as well, and because many didn't like the game, it can only be described in negative terms. I guess the assumption is that every dollar that went to Pathfinder or to used 3.5 sales was a dollar that D&D4e could have had, but gave up. The influence of those same sales people on the game's popularity and perception is also typically not even discussed, even though most agree that in-store and organized play are big drivers of an RPG's success. 5e has been wildly successful, far beyond 4e in terms of raw sales numbers and profits, but we can also reasonably say that the whole market for RPGs has expanded (many more people are buying RPGs now than they did in 2008-10), and D&D continues to dominate that market with the biggest slice of the pie. I think new editions of D&D supported by stores and effectively marketed by popular entertainment media are inevitably successful, even if the games have mechanical or flavor flaws that turn off some experienced gamers. If I were an executive at Hasbro looking at the repeated successful sales numbers from previous new editions of D&D, I think I'd be pretty skeptical of a proposal to stop doing them. Of course, D&D remains a tiny also-ran compared to the elephant in that boardroom, Magic the Gathering, which absolutely dwarfs RPGs in terms of sales and profits, and Magic's online-only digital game service has been growing by leaps and bounds, especially during Covid. The prospect of developing and launching a similar in-house digital platform for play for D&D that exists alongside "paper" D&D would seem to fall into a parallel path that I'd guess Hasbro would find compelling.
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May 10, 2022 20:07
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Leperflesh posted:My local store was run by a 3rd edition grognard so it turned into a pro-Pathfinder shop once Pathfinder picked up the mantle as D&D 3.75. Despite that, he still sold shitloads of 4e products in 2008, and then saw a year-over-year decline in 2009, partially driven by recession, that still consisted of 4e selling very well. This is the point where he was souring on 4e personally and I suspect that had some influence on in-store sales - folks in the store were running a lot of pathfinder games, hanging out with Gary and chatting about pathfinder, etc. Even then, for 2010 D&D sales continued to outsell Pathfinder two to one. At no point did Pathfinder actually outsell 4e in this store. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:28 on May 10, 2022 |
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May 10, 2022 20:20
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I do wonder why they kicked out Rob Heinsoo so hard if 4e didn’t do badly.
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May 10, 2022 20:23
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Leperflesh posted:5e has been wildly successful, far beyond 4e in terms of raw sales numbers and profits, but we can also reasonably say that the whole market for RPGs has expanded (many more people are buying RPGs now than they did in 2008-10), and D&D continues to dominate that market with the biggest slice of the pie. Seeing the player base for table top RPG becoming broader with more players being PoC and LGBTQ+ has been has really made me glad, Its a good thing.
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May 10, 2022 20:24
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I suspect (but don't have any evidence, support, or insight) that D&D is going to become increasingly a brand first, and a product line second. Much like Marvel Comics is treated as much an IP farm as it is a product line for Disney, I think D&D the product is going to be overshadowed by D&D the brand. Which, good news! There will likely always be a D&D edition in print for the foreseeable future, and Hasbro will likely allow it to be run with minimum interference as long as nothing scandalous happens. Not so great news if you're not a big fan of the current way things are done, it's probably going to be a 'Changes happens with a retirement' situation.
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May 10, 2022 20:27
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hyphz posted:I do wonder why they kicked out Rob Heinsoo so hard if 4e didn’t do badly. They were doing a lot of things to appease grognards
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May 10, 2022 20:28
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What's funny is that Mike Mearls was the public face of 4e and thus a bete noire to the grognards for quite some time.Tibalt posted:I suspect (but don't have any evidence, support, or insight) that D&D is going to become increasingly a brand first, and a product line second. Much like Marvel Comics is treated as much an IP farm as it is a product line for Disney, I think D&D the product is going to be overshadowed by D&D the brand. hyphz posted:I do wonder why they kicked out Rob Heinsoo so hard if 4e didn’t do badly.
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May 10, 2022 20:30
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Not like there were D&D versions of electronic maze games, unrelated board games, colouring books, trivia quiz games, pencil sharpeners and a cartoon series way before 5e 
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May 10, 2022 20:37
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I liked 4e and ran my last actual home brew campaign in it (been doing modules and campaign books since then), but while the so so adventures and magic items could have been fixed I think the grinding gear shift between fairly slick out of combat play to rolling out the battlemat for another 45 minute srpg session was systemic friction that I don't miss. Good system though. Where it really shone was when you put the screws on, running the completely bonkers revenge of the iron lich was great fun.
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May 10, 2022 21:47
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I had lots of combats in 4E that KO'd half the party or more and the creative power combos that the survivors came up with to win were a pleasure to watch as a DM. With the revised monster stats that game is balanced to create some real nail-biters
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May 10, 2022 21:54
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KingKalamari posted:Yeah, my understanding is that TSR made some weird-rear end deals with the creators of the AD&D-era campaign settings that have had legal repercussions up through to WOTC and Hasbro. You saw a little bit of that with the recent legal kerfuffle between Wizards and Weiss/Hickman about the new Dragonlance novels. The thing is, I don't think they are particularly weird deals. Like the one with Weis and Hickman seemed like a pretty boilerplate "we'll hire you to write more books" thing, WotC just got cold feet and tried to back out midway through. The Ed Greenwood contract also makes a ton of sense if you look at when it was drawn up and why. Ed Greenwood was a prolific contributor to Dragon magazine with lots of very popular articles, and there was buzz about his homebrew setting being discussed in them. So if publishing it with TSR didn't work out, reverting the rights to Ed so he could publish them with another company (either as a D&D-compatible or using another RPG system) was a wise decision for him. Conversely, Ed's work was already extremely popular with fans of D&D, so why not let him keep doing what was working so well for everyone involved? It wasn't until 3e, thirteen or so years later, that the general player base thought of the Forgotten Realms as outdated or boring, and until then D&D books written by Ed Greenwood were marquee products (even during the couple of years after WotC bought TSR before 3e happened, they were still promoting new Ed stuff the whole way through.) TSR wrote the contract hoping the FR would be the new flagship D&D setting, and they got even more than they ever hoped for out of it.
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May 10, 2022 22:18
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hyphz posted:I do wonder why they kicked out Rob Heinsoo so hard if 4e didn’t do badly. Honestly, as far as I know that's just how the D&D team operated at the time. You work there for a certain number of years, and then you get shuffled out for new talent. Rob Heinsoo just happened to get shuffled out at a really inconvenient time for 4e's overall development.
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May 10, 2022 22:21
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Honestly, as far as I know that's just how the D&D team operated at the time. You work there for a certain number of years, and then you get shuffled out for new talent. Rob Heinsoo just happened to get shuffled out at a really inconvenient time for 4e's overall development. That seems like an excellent way to ensure you build a base of staff familiar with your core game engine and who are committed to the long-term future of the product.
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May 10, 2022 23:00
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Arivia posted:The thing is, I don't think they are particularly weird deals. Like the one with Weis and Hickman seemed like a pretty boilerplate "we'll hire you to write more books" thing, WotC just got cold feet and tried to back out midway through. Sorry, I should specify I meant "weird" in the sense of "weirdly permissive/favorable towards the rights holders". It's entirely understandable why TSR/WOTC wanted to make that agreement with Greenwood: While I'm pretty solidly on record as not a fan of the Forgotten Realms in general, the property has been majorly profitable for its owners with the revenue from the tie-in novels and video games alone being worth their weight in gold. The agreement is just weird in a modern context given the degree of creative ownership Greenwood was still able to retain over the setting following its acquisition. Call me cynical, but an agreement like that just seems very unusual in comparison to how a company like WOTC/Hasbro would approach a similar deal today. The sorts of deals struck with Greenwood or Weiss/Hickman I actually think are a lot better from the perspective of common decency, it just seems like a bad business move in hindsight...Which should give you a pretty good idea of my opinion of business negotiations in general...
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May 11, 2022 00:06
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Tarnop posted:I had lots of combats in 4E that KO'd half the party or more and the creative power combos that the survivors came up with to win were a pleasure to watch as a DM. The revised monster stats did not reduce monster HP. Except for one specific case, and that's Paragon/Elite solos. It did reduce their defenses and increased their offensive output. But HP were not changed, guys.
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May 11, 2022 03:46
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KingKalamari posted:The sorts of deals struck with Greenwood or Weiss/Hickman I actually think are a lot better from the perspective of common decency, it just seems like a bad business move in hindsight...Which should give you a pretty good idea of my opinion of business negotiations in general... "Bad business move" describes well nearly everything TSR did.
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May 11, 2022 16:10
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Can anyone recommend recommend actual play stuff for Blades in the Dark (or other Forged in the Dark stuff) and for a PbtA game (specifically Fellowship or MotW would be great, but anything is fine)? I'm gonna be running one of those fairly soon and I've never actually had the chance to play in them, so I'd like to see how they actually work in practice. I don't need a huge amount, just enough to get a decent feel for it.
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May 12, 2022 02:51
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5.5e is coming in 2014. Why do I think that? Because I can't see WotC not pushing the boat out for what is both the tenth and the fiftieth anniversary edition of D&D. And they know most of what they did well (subclasses make it easy for beginners to get extra layers to their characters and don't feel like bloat in the same way as prestige classes thanks to much better chunking) and what they did badly (they have a perfect opportunity to make the Tasha's ranger core, fix the bad subclasses (berserker, four elements monk) and upgrade the sorcerer subclasses, plus a few other tweaks. 5e is conceptually easy to understand for someone used to crpgs because CRPGs have been based on D&D to the point of being incestuous. 4e was pretty profitable, largely thanks to the character builder. I think it was something like $7 million that WotC made from DDI in 2013 after they'd given up on it - this wasn't public information but the number of people with access to the relevant Gleemax forum, and that they only were members while they were subscribers was hence the estimate. But that was just very profitable, not the silly money 5e has been raking in in the past few years. Its problem was that it was released at the wrong time - and I don't mean 2008 as opposed to 2020. I mean 2008 as opposed to 2009 or 2010. They were given a far too short two year deadline - and threw the whole first draft out after ten months. The 4e that was originally shipped had ... issues. Which got resolved and by 2010 4e was an excellent game - but what was released in 2008 was full of bugs and should have been the beta test.
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