My poor inbox (which was already wallowing under an inundation of holiday e-mails I have been unable to keep on top of) has been getting hit hard this morning with people asking me what I think of the freshly announced 5th Edition of D&D.
Short answer: I don’t really think anything about it. We know absolutely nothing about it, after all.
Slightly longer answer: According to ENWorld, the news was leaked to them in “early winter last year” and, at that time, the game had been “under development for some time” (to the point where they had a rough rules draft ready for playtesting by the press).
From this, it’s pretty easy to conclude what was already obvious when Slavicsek left the company and they started cancelling products: The Essentials product line was deemed an immediate failure by WotC . (Just as the early release of the Essentials rulebooks in 2010 told you that 4th Edition, as a whole, had failed.)
LOOKING AHEAD
I’ve said in the past that I currently don’t see a winning business strategy for WotC with a 5th Edition. Unsurprisingly, nothing I’ve heard in the last three hours has changed that opinion.
It should be relatively self-evident that the goal of a 5th Edition at this juncture is to re-unify the D&D customer base. (All the talk of “unity” in the announcement, of course, only confirms this.) But for all the talk about a “public playtest” and “asking D&D fans what they want in a new edition”, I’m not really seeing the mechanism by which 5th Edition solves WotC’s problems.
WotC, ultimately, faces an immutable truth: No reboot edition of an RPG has ever succeeded unless there is clear, deep, and widespread dissatisfaction in the existing customer base. And, as far as I can tell, there is no such dissatisfaction in the 4th Edition customer base. The biggest gripes they seem to have (if any) are the mini-revision of Essentials, the lackluster DDI support, and the lack of printed supplements. None of those complaints suggest a deep dissatisfaction with the system itself (quite the opposite, in fact).
Of course, there is widespread dissatisfaction with 4th Edition among players of previous editions. But that doesn’t actually help WotC.
Basically, the current D&D customer base consists of three broad groups:
(1) 3rd Edition players (either using the original rulebooks or having migrated to Pathfinder). These players, almost by definition, have said, “We’re happy with what we’ve got.” Which isn’t to say that many of them, including myself, aren’t open to new experiences. But the only way WotC can appeal to them en masse is to restore classic 1974-2008 D&D gameplay to 5th Edition.
(2) Unfortunately, restoring the classic gameplay of D&D is almost guaranteed to alienate the existing 4th Edition players.
(3) Finally, you’ve got a relatively small contingent of old school players. These guys are inherently even more conservative than the 3rd Edition players and, frankly, it’s impossible to publish anything new that will appeal to them en masse.
Honestly, I think the most likely outcome is that WotC will produce a game which attempts to return to classic D&D gameplay. But in an effort not to lose their existing 4th Edition players, they’ll try to strike a compromise between the two. The result may or may not be a great game, but commercially it will almost certainly fail: 3E players will reject the 4E elements and stick with the best-supported RPG in history. 4E players will reject a return to “wizard win buttons” and other spherical cows (which will presumably be even less true in 5E).
Things get worse when WotC cancels DDI support for 4th Edition (which seems likely) and creates another group of disenchanted customers who feel alienated and betrayed. Without an OGL to fall back on, a large percentage of this group will exit the game industry entirely.
Basically, my prediction here is that WotC will split their existing 4E fanbase (to one degree or another). They will pick up a relatively insignificant portion of the 3E and OSR fanbases. In short, WotC produces a 5E which performs even worse in the marketplace than 4E.
Things that could mitigate this doomsday prediction:
(1) WotC starts mending fences in really meaningful ways. Specifically, they need to look long and hard at some of the really unpopular decisions they’ve made and work to reverse them: Put previous edition PDFs back on sale. Make Dragon and Dungeon available in print again (even if it’s just POD).
(2) Reach out aggressively for new customers. I don’t know exactly what form this takes, but if WotC can find a way to replenish their customer base with new players then the continued schisming of the RPG marketplace won’t be as significant.
(3) Part of that, however, might be revamping the core products and methodology of your product line. Finding a way to truly abandon the proven failure of the supplement treadmill burnout cycle would also help.
(4) Restore the OGL.
There are also, unfortunately, a lot of things WotC could do that would make things worse.
WHAT WOULD I LIKE?
In an ideal world, I would like the version of D&D that became a missed opportunity in 2008. I talked about it a little bit here:
That’s the missed opportunity here: WotC had the chance to polish and improve Classic D&D; to take the next step with the game. Instead, they side-stepped and gave us New D&D instead.
Meanwhile, Paizo couldn’t make those changes with Pathfinder while simultaneously stepping into the void vacated by WotC.
In short, keep the core gameplay of D&D, fix the handful of problematic abilities at low levels, revamp high level play so that it doesn’t fall apart. Grab the utility of page 42 without the railroading advice and implement a cleaner/quicker system for creating monsters and NPCs.
I would also:
- Look to the OSR and reintroduce game structures that have been slowly stripped out of the game for the past 30 years.
- Embrace the D&D core sets strategy I’ve talked about previously featuring a stripped-down system very similar to what Legends & Labyrinths looks like.
- I would re-introduce the AD&D brand name to produce a Player’s Handbook, a Dungeon Master’s Guide, and a Monster Manual. These would be 100% compatible with the D&D product line. (If you’ve got a D&D module, you can run it in AD&D without conversion. If you create a monster with AD&D, you can run it in D&D. If you’ve got a D&D character, you can start using the AD&D character creation rules any time you level up. And so forth.)
- I’d go back to Dancey’s concept of “evergreen” products and try to make it work by focusing my actual supplement line on opening up new game structures. For example, I wouldn’t produce a book of “rules for ships”. Rules for ships are worthless unless you have a game structure that involves being on ships. What needs to be developed is a game structure for “being pirates” that’s as effective as the game structure for “being dungeoncrawlers”. Pull that off successfully and you’ll have created an entirely new market for adventure products.
- I’m hoping that I can buck the burnout pattern of the supplement treadmill by locking adventure content, rule content, and physical goodie content together into the boxed sets. If that doesn’t pan out, I’d just turn the boxed sets into limited editions and cycle them out of print.
- I would probably do everything in my power to avoid publishing splatbooks like Complete Warrior or Arcane Power. These books are not only the metastatic cancer of the supplement treadmill, but they make it actively more difficult for people to embrace non-“core” classes because the non-core classes never receive the same support. I’d rather have people reach for new experiences rather than glutting and then sating themselves on the supplement treadmill for fighters and wizards.
- Bring back the OGL if the legal department will let me get away with it.
If we got my “perfect edition”, would it make 5th Edition a success? Unfortunately, no. I believe it probably would have been a huge success in 2008 (particularly if released under the OGL) when the D&D trademark would have helped transition existing players to it.
But in 2011, at least half of WotC’s former market no longer has any loyalty to WotC or the D&D trademark. There is no easy mechanism for leveraging those players into a new edition, which means that you’re competing not only with their existing investment (of time, money, and experience) but with the most expansive library of support material ever produced for an RPG.
They want to replicate the success of D&D 3rd Edition, but they’re making the exact same mistakes as they did with 4th edition. What they may be forgetting is that 3rd edition was successful because it managed to unify the TRPG market around Dungeons and Dragons, or more specifically, the D20 system. It meant that players could transfer between groups and modules without worrying about learning a brand new set of rules each time. The OGL allowed (and still allows) indie publishers to concentrate on creating compelling worlds, adventures and characters without needing to homebrew a brand new RPG just to publish it. 3rd Edition was a totem around which players, DMs and writers could rally around.
The release of 4th edition created two large camps within D&D, those playing mainly 3E/Pathfinder and those playing mainly 4th edition. Throwing another system into the mix is unlikely to change the situation, other than creating a three-way split in an ever-contracting market.
That said, short of doing a ‘Pathfinder’ on Pathfinder and reprinting Pazio’s content in an official D&D cover, I don’t really see what else Wizards can do.
I’m beginning to think that the best course of action for WotC is just to take a break from D&D.
This doesn’t have to be a bad thing for the fanbase – it works wonderfully for movies and television franchises.
Star Trek and Batman are excellent examples of this. The next-generation movies are all barely above mediocre and all of the latest Next Gen movies were entirely ill-received. The batman franchise of the 90s went through a similar phase.
So perhaps if D&D took a step back from releasing actual game materials (perhaps they don’t have to retire the franchise completely, but instead just produce a few cheaply made products, like modules, miniatures, and keep their content going (like DDI) but just relax on the ‘primary materials for a few years, come back with heavy market research and playtesting, and try to make that “Batman Begins” or “Star Trek (2009)” instead of just Batman 5 or Star Trek: The Tired and Old Enterprise Crew in a Cliche Overused “Action” Plot.
I think that’s their best shot at any kind of success.
My personal opinion is that WotC should try to sell of D&D to Paizo. They’ve been basically handling 3.5+ very well, have a stable base, and can easily transition existing material. The sad fact is, we never needed a 4th edition. The vehement supporters of 4th edition aren’t as numerous as they think they are. The “fixes” that the 4th edition supporters believe in weren’t really fixes but just elements that they preferred–elements which basically divided the entire fanbase.
Frankly, 4th edition was the death-knell. D&D won’t survive past 5th edition–WotC will either sell or terminate it and it will become a thing of the past. Once the fanbase was fractured beyond repair, there was no going back. If Paizo gets it and they don’t really change it beyond the occasional 5-year tweak, they’ll be able to keep a consistent fanbase and just merge it with Pathfinder. Otherwise, I see Hasbro pushing WotC to just drop D&D altogether as simply not worth the time/effort/money.
I posted something on my blog about this. I am cautiously optimistic. I think they may be going back to a 3.5 type of character mechanics with 4e-style game mechanics. The S/M/M method was interesting.
Hopefully you’ll be able to create an elf rogue that uses a bow and be effective. (No, you could not in 4e).
We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
I didn’t post a blog link: http://jpchapleau.blogspot.com/2012/01/5e-i-told-you-so-with-dates-and-times.html
What if rules and set up can be simple enough to appeal to a novice or an intermittent player (like people who play Jenga at a party) and have expandibility and customization options to appeal to hobbyists (people reading this website)?
If this is possible, would this be a worthwhile version of the D&D?
@jdh417: By and large, that’s the set-up I’m proposing. A simple core that’s accessible to new players; an Advanced line of books
I think such an edition would be very worthwhile. And if WotC can somehow market it to non-gamers, it might even be great for them. (But let’s not forget that both 4E and Essentials were meant to be products they thought they could reach out to new gamers with… They really, really weren’t.)
But even if they can reach out to new gamers, it won’t fix the split in the customer base.
What I’m even more fearful of is that WotC will implement the “modularity” into the core product as some sort of options spreadsheet. If they do that, they might as well put a gun in D&D’s mouth and pull the trigger. It will make the game completely inaccessible to new players.
A simpler D&D seems like the way forward for WotC.
As you’ve eloquently stated, Pathfinder captured the people who liked 3.5e D&D in all it’s byzantine glory: feats, +2 modifiers everywhere, character-building par excellence, precious encounters, etc. I don’t see Pathfinder capturing a lot of “new to D&D” players (although I haven’t seen their Basic box, which I’ve heard is excellent, so I might be completely wrong here).
4e was something completely different that appealed to many people, but it also wasn’t an easy product to get started with. It still had a heavy emphasis on the number of options during character building, combat, was a long, slow game, required $100s in outlay to play… and eliminated half the player base.
A simpler, inexpensive edition of classic D&D gameplay (with some of the excellent mechanical additions to the game from 3e and 4e) would set the bar low enough that even people heavily invested in Pathfinder and 4e could try it out. And if it’s simple enough (ie sit down and play) we might actually get some new players into the hobby.
I’m hopeful! Monte Cook was part of the team that IMO got it right with 3e (never mind where the game went after they released it). With some luck, he’ll be able to get it right again.
One thing they really need to change is their marketing team. They have zero credibility.
Caveat: I’m one of the small number of old school players, so naturally I think the way forward is a New Basic D&D. 🙂
Agreed with the general sentiment of simplification. D&D in order to survive, short term and long term, needs to be able to attract new players. Here’s what happened to me, and what happened to all of my friends.
We had a regular RPG gaming group that met every week to play for about 5 years from 1999 to 2000. We immediately switched to and loved 3rd edition and between us spent thousands of dollars on D&D products including about 20 books/splat books and hundreds of figures. But we grew up, went to out of town colleges, got jobs in other cities, and now I’m the only one left who plays.
Who do I play with? My new friends in the new city I moved to, not one of whom had ever played D&D before in their lives. How did I get them to play? Not with 20 books of 3rd edition, that’s for damn sure. I made a homebrew system that fits on 34 pages of A4 11 pt font and created a homebrew world that I can create or plug in existing materials from any source. It’s simple enough that I can adapt monster stats in my head on the fly, basically using the rule ‘How would this monster, as I described him, compare to the PC’s stats’ and then add/remove HP, AC, BAB, in whatever way I feel is reasonable.
What would be better? If I had pretty much exactly that, but nicely published with nice maps (both single page, and figure-ready blown up, multipage maps) and plot arcs, NPCs, magic items cards, and whatnot already made for me; instead of a reem of printed sheets of A4 paper messily stapled and duct-taped together and scribbled maps on printed out hex-paper.
But no D&D product has ever offered that much before that I’m aware of. It’s as if someone just printed the rules of Monopoly and then said to you ‘Ok, you’re the game master, so you get to make the gameboard yourself, draw and print the money yourself, get ahold of figures/counters yourself, get your own dice, and that’s all you need!
Like why are you selling me anything? I can make up my own damn rules to a game and I did and I’m perfectly happy with them. I need from you something that I can’t make myself so easily: professionally made actual game materials. But there’s no unified source for those materials; you have to go all over the place to get ahold of miniatures and you generally have to paint or even assemble them yourself. A ‘game board’ is right out.
If it turns out Legends and Labyrinths can offer all that, I’ll be very interested in it by the way. But I gotta go. Disorganized rant over–players have arrived. Game on!
Hautamaki has hit on something that I’ve been thinking about after hearing this news.
One thing that I think is desperately needed in a new edition is some kind of “Dungeon Design 101” – I’m still, effectively, a newbie DM, and this has been a huge problem for me, since in none of the core books has it ever been laid out how to effectively create content for your players. My guess at the reasons behind this is that it’s a huge blind spot for experienced game designers – when someone like Monte Cook with years of dungeon design experience asks “When I read these rules, what do I need to know in order to create dungeons?” and we end up with a section in the DMG with rules about various dungeon features – movement on different types of terrain, hardness and hit points of doors and walls, etc – and not a single word on how to put it all together. In fact, IIRC the 3.5 DMG doesn’t even have a reference for the conventional symbology of dungeon cartography!
To me that’s incredible – and when I put my hand to drawing a dungeon myself, I found myself propping open my copy of the Red Box (the real one) DM’s book so I could see that list. I think the 4e DMG managed at least that but still had nothing on actual basic dungeon design, and so the result is that I’ve had to teach myself through piecing together bits from different books, published modules, and various blogs – and I still have essentially no idea what I’m doing.
I can’t imagine that they really expect new DMs to have that kind of determination – yet they expect to have sold you $105 worth of core books and then go on to shell out for adventures on top of that? They gave you rules, but no content, and no instruction on how to create any – so what is a fledgling DM to do?
This isn’t a problem unique to D&D, of course – I’m as lost, if not more so, in creating adventures for Shadowrun or other games, in particular anything that leaves the self-contained environment of the dungeon, and that is something very difficult to overcome for someone like me. I can only hope that if/when I get the opportunity to put in feedback for 5e I can say again what I’ve said here – and possibly to raise the issue in others’ minds so they can say it too.
@ Hautamaki and Austin: Right on! Rule books go through such hand-holding for character creation and how to run combat, but only provide a sample dungeon for how to create an adventure. For a more mass market game, there needs to be something like an adventure generator that can create an adventure quickly beforehand or even on the fly (possibly even without a DM). This would have to be something more complex than a Pick-a-Path story. It should offer many possibilities. Supplements can be sold to expand the generators. With this, there should also be really good guidelines for people to make up their own adventures, if they are so inclined.
@Austin: The breaking point was 3.5. The 3.0 DMG still included a lot of the traditional dungeon-building stuff — random stocking tables, a sample dungeon, map keys. All of this quietly disappeared in 3.5.
One of the projects currently on my back-burner is So You Want To Be a Dragon Master?, which is exactly the kind of “practical shit you actually need, not 150 pages of what type of pizza to order” advice for new DMs. Not just building dungeons, but also examples of alternative and advanced game structures.
I’ll be talking about some of these issues regarding the “invisible game structures” of RPGs later this month, hopefully. (You could also call them the neglected game structures.)
I feel like what WOTC is attempting would work better without the D&D brand. If they want to bring in new players then using a name with 40+ years of established preconceptions and expectations is a big mistake. Any new gamer who picks up D&D has likely already heard of it and that isn’t always the best way to bring in new people. A new product with new branding could do anything WOTC wanted it to do and more importantly people wouldn’t know what to expect causing any potential consumer to at least pick it up out of curiosity. More importantly you don’t have to do anything to your D&D fanbase except keep selling 3.5 add ons because 3.5 sure wasn’t broken. It just didn’t do what WOTC wanted well enough.
This is a bit off topic and I’d be willing to bet that Mr. Alexander does it with a level of professionalism and polish that few could match, but I was inspired by the discussion above to try throwing together my thoughts on “dungeon design 101,” for what it’s worth. It’s in progress, but feedback would be appreciated. (http://landofnu.com/2012/01/14/dungeon-design-101/)
It is four years after you’ve posted this article on 5th edition, and I happened to stumble upon it. It’s interesting to see your list of items that you wanted from 5e. Wizards of the Coast essentially incorporated every single one, although not quite in the format you asked for.
(1) Your general list of “wants” was addressed in the release of the fifth edition core books: They kept the core gameplay, fixed some of the problematic lower level abilities, and worked very hard to keep higher level play still interesting. And there was a return to some of the OSR ideas that you asked for.
(2) They embraced the “core” strategy you talk about with the new Basic rules available online, and a solid Starter Set.
(3) They are bundling rules and content together with their “storyline” products. How well they’re doing at that is a different question.
(4) They killed the splatbook treadmill, per your request.
(5) They brought back the OGL, but in a slightly different fashion. The new DM’s Guild website seems to be an effort to tap into that creativity and give it a home.
I would be interested to read a follow-up post commenting on what you see from 5e, and whether you think it’s a positive development.
adding onto rob’s comments: it’s also wildly popular. the glum outlook was the most jarring aspect of this article to a 2019 reader.
Yeah. In 2012 WotC had spent the better part of a decade consistently screwing up when it came to D&D. I had no expectation that they would suddenly start making good decisions (although, in retrospect, perhaps the departure of Bill Slavicsek at the end of 2011 should have been seen as significant).
If you look at the four things I said WotC could do to make 5th Edition successful, they did every single one of them.
They also, from the What Would I Do? list looked to the OSR for inspiration, revamped and improved the basic set, and abandoned the supplement treadmill.
The only things they haven’t done is (a) created an “advanced” line of supplements for those who want more mechanical complexity and (b) created new game structures as evergreen pillars for new product development.
One thing I completely failed to predict was the importance of actual play. This is something that could have been predicted in 2012, since I Hit It With My Axe had premiered two years earlier.