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Ouze wrote:Yo dawg, i heard you liked closing and redirecting threads...

You know I just wanted to show off my Cthulhu scan!

As I was about to say in the other thread before KK decided to play Musical Forums, I view 4th Edition the same way I see C&C 4, Saints Row 3, 40k 4th-5th edition codices... it's disappointing when the creators of a sequel don't see fit to retain the things that I find fun. The most compelling character I've ever played started life as a whimsical build combining Body Outside Body, Incantatrix and Persistent Spell to make a one man pike phalanx. Scrap the mix & match nature of character building and I would never have created the character, and would never have had my best ever roleplaying experience.

juraigamer wrote:Sweet baby jesus, and here I thought they finally stopped spamming 4thed books.

Actually, there's been a lot of complaints that the release schedule for 4th has been pretty anemic for a year or two. Several books were canceled, and the outlook for 2012 looks thin.

Meh. I bailed out when 3rd Edition hit because of the 'feats'. No desire to play a pen & paper video game.

Crap, and here I am with my barely two-months old 4e books.

Still, I'm excited enough. Hopefully the change is for the better.

i'll undoubtable give the core books a read through, but i'm fairly happy with pathfinder and the ff stuff i have for now.
but who knows, 5th could be all kinds of awesome

About 5 people at my FLGS play 4th ed...



About 40 play pathfinder...


Neither of these include GMs or Pathfinder society days... they do; however, include 4th Ed D&D game days...


I'm not surprised at this news... I am surprised at how long this took.

The one saving grace 4th ed did have for it, was get my girlfriend into gaming... but as soon as she tried Pathfinder, she never looked back at 4th ed.

In 2010 I got back into D&D after a LONG layoff.

How long?

Well, I decided to get back in playing the game I originally played - so now I have a semi-regular gaming group that plays AD&D, you know, 1st Edition!

I am really looking forward to seeing what they come up with for 5E.

If it is good - fantastic!

If not, there's always 1E!

Well, for me there's that and my now in planning WFRP 2E game as WFRP 3E isn't for me...

(Wait... I'm sensing a trend here!)

Alpharius wrote:In 2010 I got back into D&D after a LONG layoff.

How long?

Well, I decided to get back in playing the game I originally played - so now I have a semi-regular gaming group that plays AD&D, you know, 1st Edition!

I am really looking forward to seeing what they come up with for 5E.

If it is good - fantastic!

If not, there's always 1E!

Well, for me there's that and my now in planning WFRP 2E game as WFRP 3E isn't for me...

(Wait... I'm sensing a trend here!)

I too am excited to see what they do. While 4e was not one of my favorite editions, it still wasn't bad. It brought a lot to the game that was needed but also let go of things that I really liked...but isn't that the case with ever new edition.

I am hoping that it will be flexible enough to allow for character individuality and growth.



Also, to clarify, PP will be launching their own system that is not connected to D&D. So it appears IKRPG will be it's own thing with some mechanics being the same from WarmaHordes.

Ahtman wrote:

Da Boss wrote:Seems a bit soon, but fairly solid evidence that 4th was not the success they hoped for. I will probably not buy in.

And that evidence would be?

How about ICV2 retailer polls placing Pathfinder as the top selling physical book RPG? How about Essentials coming out 2 years after 4E and now this announcement of 5e less than 2 years after Essentials? How about Amazon listing the Pathfinder book as #2 in gaming while the Player's Handbook is #18? Or that Paizo stuff has 6 of the top 10 slots on Amazon to WOTC's two? WOTC will never put out a public statement that says 4e wasn't as successful as they had hoped but there is plenty of other 3rd party data if you just open your eyes... unless you're saying that the marker for success is LOSING the top RPG selling spot they've held for 30 years? Regardless of whether or not you personally like the system, it hasn't been received very well by large swathes of gamers to an extent that makes the previous edition wars look like border skirmishes; the new 5E PR focus on inclusive gaming and playtesting is a result of the very fractured playerbase D&D has now.

warboss wrote:

Ahtman wrote:

Da Boss wrote:Seems a bit soon, but fairly solid evidence that 4th was not the success they hoped for. I will probably not buy in.

And that evidence would be?

How about ICV2 retailer polls placing Pathfinder as the top selling physical book RPG? How about Essentials coming out 2 years after 4E and now this announcement of 5e less than 2 years after Essentials? How about Amazon listing the Pathfinder book as #2 in gaming while the Player's Handbook is #18? Or that Paizo stuff has 6 of the top 10 slots on Amazon to WOTC's two? WOTC will never put out a public statement that says 4e wasn't as successful as they had hoped but there is plenty of other 3rd party data if you just open your eyes... unless you're saying that the marker for success is LOSING the top RPG selling spot they've held for 30 years? Regardless of whether or not you personally like the system, it hasn't been received very well by large swathes of gamers to an extent that makes the previous edition wars look like border skirmishes; the new 5E PR focus on inclusive gaming and playtesting is a result of the very fractured playerbase D&D has now.

Pretty good evidence if you ask me.

corpsesarefun wrote:I'll probably buy the core books and give it a go, whether I actually use I can't say until I try it.

+1 to this. I always like going back to D&D and seeing what the new rules are like.
Still have all my books from the original Red box to 4E and have played them all.

warboss wrote:

Ahtman wrote:

Da Boss wrote:Seems a bit soon, but fairly solid evidence that 4th was not the success they hoped for. I will probably not buy in.

And that evidence would be?

How about ICV2 retailer polls placing Pathfinder as the top selling physical book RPG? How about Essentials coming out 2 years after 4E and now this announcement of 5e less than 2 years after Essentials? How about Amazon listing the Pathfinder book as #2 in gaming while the Player's Handbook is #18? Or that Paizo stuff has 6 of the top 10 slots on Amazon to WOTC's two? WOTC will never put out a public statement that says 4e wasn't as successful as they had hoped but there is plenty of other 3rd party data if you just open your eyes... unless you're saying that the marker for success is LOSING the top RPG selling spot they've held for 30 years? Regardless of whether or not you personally like the system, it hasn't been received very well by large swathes of gamers to an extent that makes the previous edition wars look like border skirmishes; the new 5E PR focus on inclusive gaming and playtesting is a result of the very fractured playerbase D&D has now.

WOTC has a much more corporate-marketing-driven business philosophy compared to Paizo, one that pushes the "new" and "improved" over the last release. This is pretty much a standard practice for large corporations that have lost the basic idea of "if it's not broken, don't fix it." Personally, I've found 4e to be very enjoyable, at it's core simplifying the complexity that earmarked 3/3.5/PF and returning to it's roots in a way. It got my wife to start playing and more importantly, ENJOYING, an RPG so I'm happy for that.

I still own all my 1st and 2nd edition AD&D books, as well as my original Red and Blue Box D&D sets. I love reading them for the nostalgia and have run games for my son using the systems that I grew up with. He likes them just as much as 4e.

I think Alph hit the nail on the head for me - I hope 5e is good, nay great, but if it's not I have more than enough prior editions to refer to for rules and can always get the new books for source material and toilet reading.

Deffinitely seems like WotC trying to revive interest in the franchise after 4e bombed. I know a lot of people that got into RPGs (and many that got back into RPGs) becuase of 4e that had no interest before, but most of the people that had played for years hated it. It's too bad, 4e had a lot going for it, but I always felt it was marketed completely wrong. It focused too much on combat and not enough on characters actually roleplaying to truly be D&D, it felt too much like an MMO. That said, for every gamer that gave it an honest shot and still disliked it, there were 10 that hated it without even trying it. I worked at an FLGS when it released and it's amazing how many people just refused to even try it when we'd run demo days, just based on what they'd heard about it.

4e is actually a really fantastic game, however. The real problem was that 4e should never have been called 4e, it should have been D&D:tactics or D&D: Battles or something similar. It's not an RPG so much as a skrmish miniatures game with a story. Played as a narrative skirmish miniatures game, it's an AMAZING system, and it has a lot of appeal to wargamers looking for a deeper level of depth to their battles. Treat it like a Mordheim campaign with a far more in depth system and you'll enjoy it a lot more, I guarantee it. It's also rediculously easy to run compared to old editions, far easier than even 3.5/pathfinder. But as a proper RPG? not even close to older editions.

We'll see what happens with 5th. The public playtesting sounds good. Even if it's only because they're so out of touch with the roleplayers now, I'm always in full support of game designers putting an unfinished product in the hands of the gamers for a few months and using the feedback to make a better game.

Kalamadea wrote:Deffinitely seems like WotC trying to revive interest in the franchise after 4e bombed.*************4e is actually a really fantastic game, however.

While I'm more than willing to disprove the "success" of 4e (see my earlier post), I just as willingly would jump on the claim that it "bombed". Saying that (even though you actually like the system) just gives the WOTC apologists ammunition. It's still the gateway drug for plenty of new gamers into the tabletop RPG world simply due to brand recognition and (combined with DDI revenue) probably turns a substantial profit that would make any game company other than WOTC/hasbro and GW happy. The problem is that D&D is judged on a corporate toy scale as part of hasbro as opposed to an RPG scale and decisions at WOTC are made not on IF a product is successful/profitable but by HOW profitable/successful it is. When the D&D minis line was being cancelled, there were occasional frank posts by ex and current developers (who later echoed similar comments on the Star Wars line) that the products weren't making ENOUGH money. For example, a hypothetical line that took 8 full time people to develop and keep going but made $3 million in profits (after all costs) were not deemed a success as the company could develop other products that used the same resources and made $10 million; decisions to cut the former in preference for the later were made even though they were still making money on both. We've actually been discussing this in the RPG subforum on dakka with some links to industry insider articles in that thread.

Perhaps saying 4e "bombed' was a bit of an extreme term, but it certainly fell flat with many long time roleplayers. I can't speak for other stores or for the national market, but aside from the initial sales frenzy when it first released it sold terribly at my shop compared to 3.5 (which wasn't even truly a new edition). We sold about 3 times as many 3.5 core books on release as we did 4e. In the years after the initial rush we used to keep 4 copies of 3.5 in stock and still occasionally sold out even ordering twice a week. After 4e died down we only kept 2 copies of the core books in stock and very, very rarely sold both before we got a restock in.

Not the biggest test market, I admit, and gaming in general took a hit with the economy, but 4e simply didn't resonate well with the majority of gamers, and while it brought in a lot of people that had never been interested before, it wasn't as many as the people that went on to pathfinder or back to older editions. That had to have happened on a larger scale than just my shop since Essentials was released so fast and now a whole new edition. It had it's downsides, but I love 4e for what it is and it was nearly impossible to convince older gamers it was a good system.

Edit:
Penny Arcade has a pretty good response to the announcement that almost perfectly sums up my experiences playing with people fresh to D&D in 4e and my reaction to the intended goals of 5e. I've seen the same thing in 5th edition 40k, which i truly despise despite a few very solid improvements. But people that started with that edition love it and don't understand what I hate in it, any more than I understood what all the 2nd ed players hated about 3rd when I started. People tend to focus on changes they hate and it often overshadows the good changes, and people that are fresh into it don't have any former prejudice. it's just the way the game is to them. Bang-on with the "you can't please all the people all the time" remark, that part scares me a bit with the announcement.

Necroshea wrote:I've yet to see any real reason to leave 3.5/pathfinder.

Agreed. Its been a few years since I played D&D, but the 2 games I was in were Pathfinder & 3.5.

Hopefully this time around, the spiel about actually wanting playtest opinions to mean something will actually be true. Interesting tidbit from the article below about the efforts of one playtester and the results:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/9329-Speak-Your-Mind-in-the-Next-Version-of-Dungeons-Dragons

Previous editions of the game had play testing periods, but Wizards restricted access to freelancers or those connected to the company and those tests were ineffectual at best. I was in a play testing group for 4th edition back in 2007, and we submitted a 30 page annotated document of what we felt worked and what didn't work with the rules we played. Other than my name among the hundreds of play testers in the back of the 4th edition Player's Handbook, nothing I submitted made it into print. Our feedback was summarily ignored, and Mearls admitted that was essentially true of all the feedback Wizards received from the 4th edition play test.

Where did Mearls admit that all the plastering feedback for 4th was ignored?

Alpharius wrote:Where did Mearls admit that all the plastering feedback for 4th was ignored?

He's interviewed for the article in the link.. whether he said that there or elsewhere, not sure. It's not written as a direct quote but more of a comment.

Alpharius wrote:Where did Mearls admit that all the plastering feedback for 4th was ignored?

Greg Tito on the Escapist reported that one, seems when he did a big interview over at WotC last month, they fessed up.


Personally, Pathfinder is second only to 40k in my hobby expenses, so as far as I'm concerned, WotC can go feth itself. I've never forgiven them for closing Dragon Magazine as part of their marketing for 4th ed, and frankly, this whole thing stinks of them doing another 'idea reaping' where they get all the fans to write in their ideas and take them as WotC's own IP, to avoid paying for creative writers.

Well thats awesome while I wish I could have played 4th ed some more, it just had this stigmata from the internet and everyone was quick to damn it. 4th had its problems like rituals completely sucking and had no flavor at all but for the most part classes were useful.

warboss wrote:

Alpharius wrote:Where did Mearls admit that all the plastering feedback for 4th was ignored?

He's interviewed for the article in the link.. whether he said that there or elsewhere, not sure. It's not written as a direct quote but more of a comment.

BaronIveagh wrote:

Alpharius wrote:Where did Mearls admit that all the plastering feedback for 4th was ignored?

Greg Tito on the Escapist reported that one, seems when he did a big interview over at WotC last month, they fessed up.


Personally, Pathfinder is second only to 40k in my hobby expenses, so as far as I'm concerned, WotC can go feth itself. I've never forgiven them for closing Dragon Magazine as part of their marketing for 4th ed, and frankly, this whole thing stinks of them doing another 'idea reaping' where they get all the fans to write in their ideas and take them as WotC's own IP, to avoid paying for creative writers.

Well, +1 for honesty, I suppose.

And -1,000,000 for bad PR.

And it is doubly so when in the same breath they're saying that they want playtesting input (No really, we mean it this time!) to help design the new edition...

I'd still like to see Scott Rouse, the (former?) brand manager burned alive...

He is one of the few beings for whom I hold more hatred than Matt Ward...

Unfortunately, this whole try 5E out and give us feedback is just a marketing stunt.

There's very little that the public could do to influence the rules. Indeed, I think the more input from the fans, the worse the game will be.

Are there smart fans who come up with good ideas? Yeah. My grappling system for 2E is the exact same that Monte came up with in 3.0/3.5. ( I used to hang in a chatroom pre 3.0 with skip williams and sean reynolds...hmmmm lol)

Are there fans who come up with really dumb ideas or things that could ruin the game? Of course.

What's needed is a restrained approach to the game that won't let players abuse the system (pun pun for example, or the kensai class). Letting players chime in would be a disaster.

What we need is Hasbro or WotC to give the rights to Paizo. But that's not too likely.

Seems like 4th just come out ...

KGatch113 wrote:

Unfortunately, this whole try 5E out and give us feedback is just a marketing stunt.

There's very little that the public could do to influence the rules. Indeed, I think the more input from the fans, the worse the game will be.

Worst case scenario is that they put up polls about stuff that they're already planning on changing to give players the illusion of power. Best case scenario is that they actually take ideas freely submitted by fans to improve the game and use them.

Hm? Didn't they just release 4th edition?

Oh, wait...what year is it again? Time is too quick.

KGatch113 wrote:Are there smart fans who come up with good ideas? Yeah. My grappling system for 2E is the exact same that Monte came up with in 3.0/3.5.

That is nice, but can you give us an example of a fan with a good idea?



My 3.5 fighter is a grapple fighter.

BaronIveagh wrote:What we need is Hasbro or WotC to give the rights to Paizo. But that's not too likely.

That is a bad idea. I know they idea of rehashing 3.0/3.5 until we die is comforting but if the license goes away from WotC (and I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea) it should go somewhere that will give it a completely different take on the material. I'm a firm believer that if you are going to go through through the trouble of redoing something, and announcing it to the world, it should actually be different and not just tweeks. I would rather see them go head first into a wall with some radical and interesting ideas then shoot for mediocrity and nostalgia. Listening to fans is usually a no win for creative endeavors. If you go by trying to please fans you end up with Spider-Man 3*, not the Dark Knight. If the studio hadn't forced Raimi to put in Venom to make the fan base happy I think it would have been a very good movie, and if Nolan had listened to fans Ledger never would have been Joker. They need to have a vision and direction, not try to build it by committee from one of the most diverse and asinine groups out there. I have heard PF people say that Paizo didn't listen to much of the beta test feedback either, but I can only imagine some of the goofiness that any game company would get in their suggestion box. They shouldn't put it out there and pretend to take feedback becuase like others, I doubt it will be more than an illusion of inclusion. Do what GW did (or didn't) leak a play test and see what happens.