D&D 5th Edition Announced

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Zinegata
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D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Zinegata »

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx ... l/20120109

Well, looks like they're making the ditching of 4E official.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by S.L.Acker »

Did 4E flop that badly or what? I mean it lasted almost as short a time as the gap between 3.0 and 3.5.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Zinegata »

Short answer? It flopped terribly, to the tune of reducing the playerbase from 6 million to 1 million. Video games contributed, but a huge chunk of the 6 million 3rd Ed players simply stayed with 3rd Ed.

It eventually got so bad that 4E Sales were equalling those of Pathfinder, which is a 3rd Party supplement for 3E.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by S.L.Acker »

Wow. I know that I personally stuck with 3.5 and eventually added in some of Pathfinder's fixes, but I never knew that 4E was that big of a failure. I tried running some games of it and the combat and mechanics were fun, but the players never really liked that fact that you couldn't personalize anything as far as builds went. I think it had some interesting concepts as well, it just didn't feel like D&D.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Zinegata »

Yep.

The long answer is that 1 million is "not bad" for an RPG (it probably still sold more than any other RPG in the same period), but very clearly not as good as the 6 million 3E players.

Mechanics-wise, 4E was much closer to a tactical boardgame than a true RPG. And for this reason, it got swamped by video games (which we all know is a huge market) and boardgames (who experienced a rennaisance) during the same period. Meanwhile, the folks who didn't really play for the tactical boardgame aspect either stayed with 3E or fragmented into other games.

It would have been a true success if it had kept its old players OR gained a significant chunk of the boardgame/videogame market. It did neither.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by S.L.Acker »

While 1 million isn't bad for an RPG, it's a poor showing for what is, arguably, the RPG. Though as you've said kids that might otherwise have picked up some dice are now simply playing video games instead so I might not entirely be the fault of the changes made in 4E. I'm only 23 and even people just a few years younger than I am see to have less imagination and more of a linear 'I want a story spoon feed to me with simple choices' attitude towards things.

I'm not sure if I'm even eager for 5E, I didn't bother with 4th and I have a ton of books for 3.5 already and not much spare spending money. That said I do want to see RPG's stay around and I think that D&D as a strong brand helps with that. I guess I'll see when we get more news about it.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Simon_Jester »

I never got into 4E, and most of my knowledge of 3E is academic (very little play time); what did 4E ever have that 3.5 didn't?
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by S.L.Acker »

4E gave everybody something to do. No longer could the Mage or Cleric do everything the Fighter could do and better. It also really played up tactical teamwork. From the DMing side of things it tried to make your life simpler as well. But that was really the whole system boiled into a single word, simple; and this fact also made it feel like it was never anything better than okay.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Zinegata »

Simon_Jester wrote:I never got into 4E, and most of my knowledge of 3E is academic (very little play time); what did 4E ever have that 3.5 didn't?
4E abstracted the game very hard towards the tactical boardgame aspect. For instance, distance was no longer measured in feet - it was measured in "squares".

It did away with Vancian casting, in favor of "Daily", "Encounter", and "At Will" powers. The nice thing about this is that even "Martial" classes also had these powers so they were on a much more even footing.

The bad thing about this is that people simply opened every match with an Encounter power (it recharges every encounter), unless it's a boss fight, in which case they'd open with a Daily power (recharges once a day). Then they'd just keep spaming their Daily powers (i.e. Magic Missiles) until the boss dies. Given their huge MMO-like HP pools, bosses take a LONG time to die.

Stuff like basic attacks still exist but are an urban legend.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Grandmaster Jogurt »

Where are you getting the numbers for the relative playerbases? Is that from sales of the core books or some other metric?
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

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Grandmaster Jogurt wrote:Where are you getting the numbers for the relative playerbases? Is that from sales of the core books or some other metric?
Number of players according to WoTC studies.

Six million players is an oft-quoted figure from the end of 3.X days. I can dig it up from a couple of news articles that quote it from WoTC, I think it was from the BBC.

The 1 million 4E players is second hand info from somebody who attended an event with Scott Rouse (D&D 4E Marketing Head) as the speaker. He was quoted as saying they had nearly a million players in 4E. This was a year into its cycle, and I doubt they got a lot more given how release of new 4E material began to slide at that point (and Rouse was soon let go).

It is now very difficult to get an accurate sales figure outside of ICV2 because WoTC muddles the issue by measuring sales in terms of "print runs" without defining how big each run is.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by DPDarkPrimus »

You don't think that maybe firing everyone who was doing good work on 4e had anything to do it? Or their shitting on all their empty promises of keeping their premium, paid-for online services not only useful but also up-to-date and functional? Not running like their "new, improved" online-only character builder, which is the most inefficient bloated piece of shit I've ever seen shoveled out to people while being called better than its predecessor?
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Zinegata »

The complete and total failure of DDO was a factor, but I don't think it was as big a factor as the complete shift in design paradigm from RPG to "sorta tactical boardgame".

Its failure was kinda easy to detect though. Almost all of the members of the online team were cast offs from Magic (i.e. Buehler). Bluntly, WoTC seems to send people they want to fire to D&D.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

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S.L.Acker wrote:4E gave everybody something to do. No longer could the Mage or Cleric do everything the Fighter could do and better.
Lol? That's more of a "group not suited for campaign" or "too much charged magic objects" issue (latter is pretty damn common). Wizards and clerics should have limited munitions, and keeping such for really important enemies or doing tricks none else can do is what they should really do.

That is even if they focus on the best attack for a magic user, evocation (pokemon yay!), they cannot keep spamming critters forever. Raw-damage-per-spell-cost the wizard sucks (even if it does not look like at first glance, just look at how much critters do have immunities or simply have good chances to not fail the relevant save and take half damage on average), and the cleric/druid even more so.

Unless there are plenty of wands-pistols or assault-staff-rifles to mow down anything with massed fire. That's a real damn game-breaker, ok they come at relatively medium levels (6th), but from that point on the game is broken since any real threat is faced with a rain of <favorite attack spell> from those magic objects while everyone else does very little.

Which is more or less what 4E is all about. They give everyone a wand of infinite attack spells with those powers they have. Gee now everyone can spam shit and stop thinking. :banghead:

I fixed that in my games by replacing the wands and staves with those from a Genius Games supplement that now has been adapted for Pathfinder and you find here.

I also added Vitality and Wound points as a modification to core hit-point handling, to make anything slightly more realistic (i.e. reasonably deadly) even in a Govblin Vs 20th level Warrior in full plate, and giving a major boost to anyone that can deal criticals. (in short, there are two Hp tracks, the first is just an indication of energy or luck the player can use to avoid taking serious damage, and grows as normal, while the second track is locked at the same value as the creature's Con score, and that's the track of its actual health status, criticals go and damage directly this track, bringing down opponents and characters much more easily)
Zinegata wrote:It did away with Vancian casting, in favor of "Daily", "Encounter", and "At Will" powers. The nice thing about this is that even "Martial" classes also had these powers so they were on a much more even footing.
The BAD, or at least the thing that turned off most people I know (and also myself) is that such powers cannot be rationalized in any fucking way nor explained in-game.

I mean why the fuck a fighter can do that move (power) only once every day? and how the fuck is defined "encounter" in-game?

It may mean nothing for a 12 year old exping in WoW, but hell, for a slightly more adult RPG player it fucking matters. It breaks immersion and makes this look like a crappy computer game.

Some supplements in D&D add similar stuff (the dreaded Book of Nine swords if I'm not mistaken), and quite a few feats/class powers in Pathfinder go the same way.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by White Haven »

I'm sorry, that makes any more sense than levelling up and being able to suddenly cast an additional sixth level spell per day? The numbers are going to come into play sooner or later, and I, personally, detested the spellcaster system in 3.x and earlier. That's not to say that 4th is without flaws, that's not the case either, but I'm extremely fond of the at-will system for basic, low-end attacks that aren't 'carry a crossbow, son.'
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by someone_else »

Leveling up is handled as an amount of time between adventures (as suggested in the DM books), where everyone trains/researches/does stuff on his own.

If you place it during an adventure, then it looks silly as you said.


Then again, if you don't like spellcasting system as a whole, that's another matter alltogether.

Magic users were never designed to be straight-attack kinds in D&D 3.5, it may cause frustration if they are used as such. Why the hell are you carrying a crossbow if you will suck balls at ranged anyway?

This is how a D&D 3.5 wizard should be played.
the advice works for most other spellcasters as well, and he made guides for druids as well.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Brother-Captain Gaius »

Zinegata wrote:The complete and total failure of DDO was a factor,
Hawhaaaaaaa?

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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Lupercal »

Me and some friends played 3.5 the other day and after roleplaying an hour or so, which was pretty fun, we got jumped by thirty goblins and hobgoblins in a mountain pass led by a frenzied berserker who wouldn´t just die and spent four hours fighting them back and the fighting system was so boring and obtuse I wanted to die.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Grandmaster Jogurt »

The concept of disliking 4th Edition because of the mere concept of daily powers astounds me. It's a gameplay conceit to provide you with an interesting decision to make regularly with some consequence. It's pretty easily rationalised as something that requires certain circumstances that only pop up rarely or are only set up when needed most. If you'd like, ask your DM to allow you to use them more than once per day with certain drawbacks or conditions or whatever it that makes you feel better, but the rules as intended are there to keep the game going and interesting.

The issue I've always seen had with 4th Edition compared to 3.5 is that it's hard to make characters that are truly distinct compared to 3.5. The issue is while 3.5 offered myriad ways to go about tasks with entirely distinct mechanics, you ended up with a mess where things never got balanced or the outcome is entirely different from what's intended (such as AC becoming largely irrelevant at high levels, replaced by finding ways to stack miss chances). This also hurts the flow of play by making everyone remember many entirely different sets of rules or necessitating constant lookups.

People also bring up that 3.5 is "more roleplaying" or "less wargame" but I think that's bullshit. 4th Edition doesn't have more rules for combat encounters than 3.5; they're just consistent. 3.5 might seem more roleplay-based because it basically has no rules for non-combat situations besides "diplomacy wins", or because people think spending three hours selecting a build and picking which loophole of the rules their wizard is going to exploit is more roleplay than spending 20 minutes making a character in 4th edition, but that doesn't exactly sound right to me.

Anyone who talks about how much better 3.5 is because oh hey we added house rule x and took out y just reminds me of people talking about how great a broken game is because some total conversion mods are fun to play Image
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

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someone_else wrote:Lol? That's more of a "group not suited for campaign" or "too much charged magic objects" issue (latter is pretty damn common). Wizards and clerics should have limited munitions, and keeping such for really important enemies or doing tricks none else can do is what they should really do.

That is even if they focus on the best attack for a magic user, evocation (pokemon yay!), they cannot keep spamming critters forever. Raw-damage-per-spell-cost the wizard sucks (even if it does not look like at first glance, just look at how much critters do have immunities or simply have good chances to not fail the relevant save and take half damage on average), and the cleric/druid even more so.

Unless there are plenty of wands-pistols or assault-staff-rifles to mow down anything with massed fire. That's a real damn game-breaker, ok they come at relatively medium levels (6th), but from that point on the game is broken since any real threat is faced with a rain of <favorite attack spell> from those magic objects while everyone else does very little.
I wasn't even going there as summoner/blaster wizards aren't always the ones to watch for. It's the Cleric with 24/7 buffs due to burning those worthless turning attempts to keep spells running all day, add in some magic items that seemed reasonable at a glance and you have something that does what the fighter does better and has magic to spare. Mages scouting with divination and using utility wands to bypass traps and locks is yet another way magic made the game break, or a fairly low level dexterity draining spell that worked sort of like Ray of Enfeeblement being able to three hit dragons. Mages weren't broken because they could spam out fireballs and summons, they were bad because they could replace other characters entirely with a very minimum amount of tweaking.
Which is more or less what 4E is all about. They give everyone a wand of infinite attack spells with those powers they have. Gee now everyone can spam shit and stop thinking. :banghead:
That was hardly the case in my experience. The players in my game liked thinking about where to place themselves so they could use their moves to best effect; partially because, unlike 3.x mages, they only got one of a specific really cool move per combat so really lining it up made sense. The hard bit was trying to RP things outside of combat because the books had no fluff at all and didn't give a reason for why things worked as they did. Even Vancian magic was offered a fix with the the optional spell points rule.
I fixed that in my games by replacing the wands and staves with those from a Genius Games supplement that now has been adapted for Pathfinder and you find here.

I also added Vitality and Wound points as a modification to core hit-point handling, to make anything slightly more realistic (i.e. reasonably deadly) even in a Govblin Vs 20th level Warrior in full plate, and giving a major boost to anyone that can deal criticals. (in short, there are two Hp tracks, the first is just an indication of energy or luck the player can use to avoid taking serious damage, and grows as normal, while the second track is locked at the same value as the creature's Con score, and that's the track of its actual health status, criticals go and damage directly this track, bringing down opponents and characters much more easily)
Making combat more random tends to make the game less fun, because they mean that no matter how smart a player is their character could die to sheer dumb luck. Sure it's realistic, but killing the characters off to something they had no say in and no matter how they prepared couldn't stop tends to be bad game design. Though I suspect it would make fortified armor more worthwhile...
The BAD, or at least the thing that turned off most people I know (and also myself) is that such powers cannot be rationalized in any fucking way nor explained in-game.

I mean why the fuck a fighter can do that move (power) only once every day? and how the fuck is defined "encounter" in-game?

It may mean nothing for a 12 year old exping in WoW, but hell, for a slightly more adult RPG player it fucking matters. It breaks immersion and makes this look like a crappy computer game.

Some supplements in D&D add similar stuff (the dreaded Book of Nine swords if I'm not mistaken), and quite a few feats/class powers in Pathfinder go the same way.
That's not a failure of the rules, which basically accomplished their balance goals, it's a failure of the books having no fluff to speak of. At least with 3.x it was still similar enough to 2.0 that you could draw on that old material for ideas on why things work. 4E went and fucked everything in the ear and then told you as a DM to deal with it. Had they even made an attempt at rationalizing things outside of making a mechanically sound but lifeless as fuck game they might have attracted more fans.

As for BoNS, most players of martial classes loved it. It meant that, while you still tended to be a guy who hit things in combat and had little to do outside of combat, that you finally had cool things to do in combat that didn't involve spiked chains and trip attacks. I mean mages are allowed to do high fantasy stuff for giggles at higher levels, but fighters are stuck being in low fantasy mode because unless you take some crazy feat path you basically just wail on stuff with a chunk of metal repeating the same style of attack over and over again.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by S.L.Acker »

Grandmaster Jogurt wrote:The concept of disliking 4th Edition because of the mere concept of daily powers astounds me. It's a gameplay conceit to provide you with an interesting decision to make regularly with some consequence. It's pretty easily rationalised as something that requires certain circumstances that only pop up rarely or are only set up when needed most. If you'd like, ask your DM to allow you to use them more than once per day with certain drawbacks or conditions or whatever it that makes you feel better, but the rules as intended are there to keep the game going and interesting.

The issue I've always seen had with 4th Edition compared to 3.5 is that it's hard to make characters that are truly distinct compared to 3.5. The issue is while 3.5 offered myriad ways to go about tasks with entirely distinct mechanics, you ended up with a mess where things never got balanced or the outcome is entirely different from what's intended (such as AC becoming largely irrelevant at high levels, replaced by finding ways to stack miss chances). This also hurts the flow of play by making everyone remember many entirely different sets of rules or necessitating constant lookups.

People also bring up that 3.5 is "more roleplaying" or "less wargame" but I think that's bullshit. 4th Edition doesn't have more rules for combat encounters than 3.5; they're just consistent. 3.5 might seem more roleplay-based because it basically has no rules for non-combat situations besides "diplomacy wins", or because people think spending three hours selecting a build and picking which loophole of the rules their wizard is going to exploit is more roleplay than spending 20 minutes making a character in 4th edition, but that doesn't exactly sound right to me.

Anyone who talks about how much better 3.5 is because oh hey we added house rule x and took out y just reminds me of people talking about how great a broken game is because some total conversion mods are fun to play Image
My players just never got into 4E precisely because of that lack of being able to make the rules match their idea for a character. Sure, we all had fun building the most broken combat things, but generally that tends to get old. Thinking up a cool character idea, and having every tool you need to make him play the way he did in your head is awesome. Yes you need to actually have some knowledge of many different books, or access to somebody who does while you build, but beyond that you just need to memorize the things you can do and run with it.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by open_sketchbook »

I don't hate 4th, but I also didn't go with it after running some test games. When I run my old-skool dungeon delves, I used 3.5 and I switched to Pathfinder, and I've moved on to Burning Wheel for RP games. 4th is extremely good for simulating MMO-style raiding, but not very good for Tomb Of Horrors stuff.

To be honest, I want my players to try and exploit the system and I want them to expect me to exploit it back. With human control over the game, I want to encourage creative solutions that hard rules might not cover. Everything in 4th ed was so neat and tidy there was no longer nearly as much room for people to do the fun, weird stuff we ultimately played the game for in the first place.

I think the problem is one of gameplay philosophy. They seem to think that players are supposed to burst into each room, team up to kill the monsters, loot the area, and move on, every time. I don't think monsters aren't supposed to be level-appropriate encounters, they have plot roles; the goblins the party slaughters with ease lead you to the lair of their master. The dragon ten levels above the party is an insurmountable obstacle, and the players need to find their way around, or find the magic sword that will let them kill it, or lure it away, or use an illusion, or something.

People need to stop approaching their games as a race to level 20 and more like a fantasy novel the players are in. Even the most straightforward beer and pretzels game should present more dungeon of rooms of mildly challenging enemies.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Kuja »

S.L.Acker wrote:Did 4E flop that badly or what? I mean it lasted almost as short a time as the gap between 3.0 and 3.5.
Take my opinion with a salt shaker, but I think the fact that 4E came so close on the heels of 3.5 was a blunder that the new edition just never made up for. While 4E was in design, running advertisements, and prepping for release, people were still buying 3.5 books, and the new edition dropped just a few months after the last 3.5 supplements came out.

As a result, virtually every single D&D player I knew raked the very concept of a 4th edition over the coals, steadfastly declaring that they would stick to 3.5. And honestly, it wasn't that surprising - those 3.5 supplementals weren't exactly cheap; as I recall they ran 30-40 bucks a pop, and as a result some of these guys had shelled out $200-$300 or more on the 3.5 books, none of them wanted to turn around and start dropping even more cash on a whole new set of books, content regardless.

Now, this is anecdotal, I know, but imagine what a blow it must have been to 4E if my experience was the norm amongst D&D gamers. D&D is a social game that relies heavily on older players introducing new players to the game, if the old guard really did close ranks and reject 4E as a whole, that would have been devastating.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Zinegata »

Yeah, not being able to explain why you can only do a "Critical Strike" only once a day or once an encounter rankled, but that's not enough to turn off 5 million players. It's really the shift in paradigm from an RPG (focused on building characters and with plenty of out-of-combat encounters) to a tactical combat game (focused on counting squares), and not a very good tactical combat game at that.

There is also a very real grain of truth behind the idea that the old guard closed ranks and rejected the new edition altogether. Most of 4E's success came when it was rolfstomping the market that was devoid of any real competition. Once they lost that early steam however and Pathfinder came out to give new material to 3.X players, 4E... frankly fell apart.

It got so bad that strictly speaking, they actually released a 4.5E to try and boost up sales again - which they called "D&D Essentials". It's supposed to be a simpler 4E D&D... but it turns out it's not actually that compatible with the actual 4E.
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Zinegata wrote:The complete and total failure of DDO was a factor,
Hawhaaaaaaa?

DDO is (or has been for some time, at least) a cocaine-infused profit-engine.
Sorry, I meant the promised tools for D&D Online play, not the D&D Online MMORPG. The latter is doing okay. The former was a complete and total fuck up alongside the "Gleemax" gamer social network thing they tried to hoist on all of us.
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Re: D&D 5th Edition Announced

Post by Grandmaster Jogurt »

How did 4th Edition move away from non-combat encounters relative to 3.5? 4th Edition is the first edition of D&D to actually have rules and guidelines for building and playing non-combat encounters!
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