Yesterday I talked about Robert J. Schwalb’s theory that 4th Edition’s formatting was a barrier for players of 3rd Edition.

It is interesting to note, however, that Schwalb is not the only designer from Wizards publicly trying to figure out what went wrong in converting 3rd Edition players into 4th Edition players. Earlier in the week, Mike Mearls actually argued for genericizing the D&D trademark in the name of recognizing that D&D isn’t a game, but rather an experience that we all share regardless of which rules we use. (Or possibly he’s arguing that it doesn’t matter what we’re playing, as long as it has the “Dungeons & Dragons” trademark on it. The essay is a little vague in its kumbaya.)

Ultimately, of course, the problem is that they had a specific game that had been revised multiple times but maintained its core gameplay from 1974 to 2008. And then, in 2008, they stopped selling that game. Until they accept that, they aren’t going to find the solution they’re groping for. (To be fair, even if they do realize that this is the problem, there’s not much they can do about it: Publishing a new edition any time before at least 2015 would completely poison their market. And writing off the development costs of the DDI as a loss by obsoleting the current platform would basically amount to corporate malfeasance.)

NEW vs. CLASSIC

The comparison to “New Coke” is often made here, but it’s not entirely apt: This is more akin to the Coca-Cola Corporation giving its original formula to somebody else before stopping their own production of it and then using the “Coke” trademark for New Coke. The result was completely predictable: WotC kept the people who were loyal to the trademark and they kept the people who prefer New D&D to Classic D&D. They lost everybody else.

How bad is it? Well, there are multiple reports that Paizo’s Pathfinder is either tying or beating Wizard’s 4th Edition sales. If Pathfinder represented the totality of 3rd Edition players who didn’t migrate to 4th Edition, that would still be bad news for Wizards. But, of course, Pathfinder doesn’t. How many 3rd Edition players are just continuing to play with their existing 3rd Edition manuals?

(It would be nice to imagine that Pathfinder‘s success can be attributed to the RPG market simply growing, of course. But there doesn’t seem to be any evidence for such a massive increase in the market.)

WHAT WENT WRONG

When consumers are faced with an upgrade, there’s always going to be some portion of the customer base that says, “Nah. I’m good with what I’ve got.” (This applies beyond RPGs: Look at the varying success of Windows Vista and Windows 7 at winning over existing Windows customers.) In the case of D&D, the two most effective transitions in the history of the game were the transition from OD&D to AD&D and the transition from AD&D2 to D&D3.

In my opinion, both of those transitions were effective because (a) they addressed perceived shortcomings in the existing rules; (b) they worked to form a bridge of continuity between the old edition and the new edition; and (c) they were effective at reaching out to new customers.

Now, the actual methods by which these goals were accomplished were radically different. AD&D (a) aimed to codify a more “official” version of the game while also expanding the detail of the rules in an era when “more realism” and “more detail” were highly prized. It was launched with a Monster Manual that was (b) designed to be used with the existing OD&D rules (by the time the first PHB came out, a sizable chunk of the customer base was already using AD&D products in their OD&D games). And it was released hand-in-hand with a Basic Set that (b) remained highly compatible with the 1974 ruleset and (c) offered a mainstream, accessible product for attracting new customers.

D&D3, on the other hand, (a) radically revised a game that was perceived as clunky and out-of-date, which allowed them to (c) reach out to a large body of disillusioned ex-customers. They simultaneously (b) released conversion guides and used a massive, public beta testing period to get large numbers of existing players onboard with the changes before the game was even released.

The conversion to D&D4 failed for several reasons.

First, no effort was made form a bridge between the old edition and the new edition. (A crazy French guy screaming “Ze game remains the same!” like some sort of cultic mantra notwithstanding.) In fact, WotC went out of their way to insist that there was no bridge between the editions.

Second, WotC was attempting to reach out to new customers. But I maintain that they made the fundamental mistake of trying to pull customers away from video games by competing with video games on their own turf. That’s just not going to cut it. If RPGs are going to be successful in the future, it will be because they emphasize their unique strengths. Tactical combat and prepackaged My Perfect Encounters(TM) aren’t going to cut it.

Finally, 2008 was misidentified as being another 2000.

In 2000 WotC was dealing with an overwhelmingly dissatisfied fanbase and responded with a new edition that largely addressed that dissatisfaction without overstepping the boundaries of its “mandate”. It wasn’t perfect. Plenty of people remained dissatisfied (or hadn’t been dissatisfied in the first place). But there were also a lot of people saying “3rd Edition looks just like my house rules for AD&D” or “it’s exactly what I’ve always wanted D&D to look like”, and success followed.

In 2008, I think it’s clear that WotC thought they had a similar level of overwhelming dissatisfaction. But either they didn’t or their sweeping and fundamental changes to the game exceeded the “mandate” of that dissatisfaction. Or both. (Personally, I suspect they were misled by the echo chamber of the ‘net and a corporate decision to prevent OGL support for 4th Edition. They tried to solve “problems” that most players weren’t actually experiencing and simultaneously “fixed” them in an unnecessarily excessive fashion.)

In some ways this takes us back to the “New Coke” metaphor: The taste tests for New Coke indicated it would be a huge success. But the taste tests were fundamentally flawed: They were “sip tests”. And in sip tests the smoother, sweeter taste of New Coke won. But nobody buys their soda by the teaspoon; they buy it by the can.

4th Edition radically overhauled D&D’s gameplay in order to respond to complaints driven by CharOp specialists, armchair theorists, and other lovers of spherical cows. For a lot of people on the ground, the game didn’t have those problems and 4th Edition was a solution in search of a problem.

THE OGL AND SRD

WotC’s corporate culture had clearly turned against the OGL by 2008. They no longer saw a massive network maintaining interest in their game and generating new customers who were all funneled back into their core products. Instead, they saw an entire industry profiteering on their IP.

The argument of whether or not WotC was right or not can be saved for another time. (Although I will note that every scrap of evidence I’ve seen indicates that the strategy works both in the RPG industry and outside of the RPG industry. D&D3, Pathfinder, and the OSR community all seem to have flourished under it as well.)

But given the existence of the OGL, the decision to stop making Classic D&D and start making New D&D was a disastrous one. The goal appears to have been to create an edition with enough fundamental incompatibility that the OGL couldn’t be used to support it, but the practical effect was to leave the largest network of material supporting an RPG in history all pointing towards a giant void.

A void into which it was absolutely trivial for someone to step.

THE MISSED OPPORTUNITY

My biggest regret is that I feel WotC missed an opportunity. There are, in fact, some significant problems with 3rd Edition.There are key abilities in 1st to 10th level play (polymorph, for example) that need to be fixed. And from 12th to 20th the game begins to crack and then break down. These problems require an overhaul of the basic foundations on which the game is built.

It is, however, possible to fix these problems without nuking the core gameplay which has been successful since 1974.

WotC chose the nuke option.

Meanwhile, Paizo couldn’t make those changes with Pathfinder while simultaneously stepping into the void vacated by WotC.

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.

Looking ahead, I think the time period right around 2014-2015 will be potentially very interesting: WotC would be able to theoretically roll out a new edition, and the question will be whether they’ll stick with improving New D&D or if they’ll try to revert to Classic D&D. (Or do something else entirely.) Meanwhile, if Paizo continues to solidify (or even build) their market share, then right around that same time they’ll potentially be in a position to attempt a 2nd Edition of Pathfinder that can be more radical in its efforts.

On the other hand, maybe not. The emerging long-tail economics combined with open licensing may mean that no revision of the 3rd Edition ruleset will ever be able to break 3rd Edition’s network of players and support material. The D&D trademark might have been able to do it in 2008, but in decoupling the D&D trademark from Classic D&D WotC seems to have created a massive player base that no longer has any loyalty to that trademark. The horse may have left the barn for good.

Robert J. Schwalb has a post hypothesizing that 4th Edition would have been more widely accepted if it had been formatted differently.

Fourth edition’s presentation abandoned nearly everything familiar about the game’s look. Eight years of 3rd edition, I think, created strong expectations about how the game should read and since the game didn’t match the visual expectations, it certainly must not match the play experience.

He goes on to argue that 4th Edition wasn’t as big of a shift from D&D if you compare it to the proto-4th Edition supplements being published by Wizards in the last couple years of 3rd Edition (Tome of Battle, for example). This is true. But I think Schwalb is ignoring the fact that their proto-4th Edition supplements were bringing with them proto-4th Edition critiques even before 4th Edition was released.

Schwalb also includes a PDF of what 4th Edition powers might have looked like if they’d been formatted more like 3rd Edition spells and asks, “I wonder if those changes might have been more palpable had we shifted back toward the old presentation, even if doing so meant that the game would be harder to learn.”

I doubt it. Oh, I’ve seen some people comparing the new powers format to Magic: The Gathering cards and the like. But when you dig down into the real complaints people have about 4th Edition they tend to be either dissociated mechanics, abandoning the traditional D&D gameplay that existed from 1974-2008, dissatisfaction with the “miniatures are mandatory” combat, or some combination thereof.

Personally, I think 4th Edition has some great formatting. I’ve been completely sold on the idea that monster stat blocks should contain all the rules for running the monster since at least 2000 (when my earliest adventure prep notes for 3rd Edition prominently featured monster stat blocks modded to do just that).

So count me down pretty firmly in the camp of “I like the format, I don’t like the rules”.

And to that end, consider this small sampling of 3rd Edition wizard spells formatted with 4th Edition stylings:

(The red hand indicates that spell resistance applies.)

And here’s a 3rd Edition Goblin using a 4th Edition styled stat block structured similarly to my own revised stat blocks:

I doubt that such formatting would really have been a turn-off for anybody. (In fact, Paizo’s reformatting of spells for Pathfinder spells is not terribly dissimilar, albeit slightly more conservative.)

In fact, let me go one step further: Schwalb hypothesizes that 4th Edition might have been hurt by its radical formatting shift. I think the opposite is true. I think 4th Edition’s superior formatting has attracted people who would otherwise have stuck with 3rd Edition. Significant chunks of the utility 4th Edition gets praised for (like including all of the rules necessary for running a monster in the monster’s stat block) is stuff that can just as easily be done in 3rd Edition.

For Christmas I got a copy of Betrayal at House on the Hill. It’s a great little game. I don’t really have much to say about it at the moment, but I bring it up because the game ships with eight 6-sided dice which are marked as 1d3-1 (generating results of 0, 1, or 2 pips). At one point during the holidays we had the game half set-up when everyone got distracted by some other bit of family business, which left a couple of people mucking about with the dice.

In the process, I was struck with the idea for a silly little dice game that proved amusing enough that I present it here:

1. The first player rolls all 8 dice from Betrayal at House on the Hill.
2. The target number is 6. If you fail to roll 6 pips on your dice, you have lost and the other player scores a point.
3. If you have rolled more than 6 pips, you are allowed to remove a number of dice from the pool equal to the number of extra pips you rolled. (Example: If you roll an 8, you can remove 2 dice from the pool.)
4. Hand the remaining dice to the other player to roll. The target number remains 6.
5. When a player scores a point, the other player rolls all 8 dice and play continues.

We either played to 6 points or swapped in new players in a tag-team style.

Not exactly a high-strategy game, but a strangely satisfying combination of Horse with the random rote of War. Plus dice. (Dice are cool.)

Reading Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief was a fairly fascinating experience. Taken on its own merits, the novel is a perfectly acceptable piece of light fluffery. On the other hand, the Percy Jackson series is clearly a calculated effort to cash-in on the success of Harry Potter, and reading the novel from that point of view gives a great deal of insight into not only Riordan’s creative process, but also the elements that made Rowling’s work so successful.

Basically, Riordan seeks to invert the structure of Harry Potter in every part. Thus, Potter’s magical school becomes Jackson’s magical summer camp. Potter hates his mundane home life, so Jackson loves his. The friendly headmaster Dumbledore becomes the hostile camp master Dionysus. And so forth.

You can also see this inversion being carried out on the larger structural level of the plot: Potter generally stays at his school and adventure must seek him out. Jackson, on the other hand, must venture forth on grand quests.

In general, this model of wholesale inversion is probably more effective at keeping the series fresh than if Riordan had decided to simply ape Rowling. But once you’ve spotted the trick, it becomes depressingly predictable. It also creates deeper problems for Riordan.

For example, one of the really beautiful things about Hogwarts was the irony of a kid who wanted to go to school. It’s an inversion of the natural order, and thus – on a subtle yet fundamental level – reinforces the otherworldliness of Rowling’s milieu. But a kid who hates school and wants to go to a summer camp? It’s bland vanilla even before you get to the random grab-bag of camp activities that make Quidditch look like a reasonable sporting event. (Riordan tends to tell rather than show. He wants the summer camp to be really cool, but he never spends the narrative time there necessary to invest the reader as deeply as Percy himself is apparently vested.)

The Lightning Thief also calls attention to another aspect of Harry Potter that sets it apart from the great bulk of fantasy fiction: Harry Potter is utterly humble in his origins. He is not born with any special powers. The only prophecy which applies to him is essentially exhausted before he hits his first birthday. Everything we see him accomplish, he accomplishes through hard work, determination, study, and the assistance of friends well-earned. (In this he shares much in common with Bilbo and Frodo.)

Percy Jackson, on the other hand, is Born Awesome. He’s the son of one of the most powerful gods, and so he’s inherently more powerful than everyone else around him. Ta da! And whereas Potter has his one small advantage stripped from him midway through the series, Jackson simply continues to accumulate power through divine fiat. We never see him work for anything. Or earn anything. At most he occasionally digs deep to find his hero genes and then unleashes the raw potential of his authorially-granted I’m So Special status.

Ultimately, the Percy Jackson series is to Harry Potter what The Sword of Shannara is to The Lord of the Rings: Riordan mugged Rowling in a dark alley, rifled her pockets, and shuffled the stuff he found into a slightly different order while scraping off the serial numbers. In the process quite a bit of the original’s charm and depth has been lost, which is perhaps only to be expected when you’re dealing with a knock-off.

On the other hand, Riordan’s writing, despite its shortcomings, is better than early Terry Brooks. And he also finds his own unique sense of grandeur and mystery (whereas Brooks only managed to turn everything he touched to mediocrity in The Sword of Shannara). So while the comparison may be apt, it is not entirely fair.

So while I can’t strongly recommend The Lightning Thief, I also wouldn’t dissuade you from it. It’s a bit of light fun, and the series as a whole tends to improve as it runs its course.

GRADE: C

Rick Riordan
Published: 2005
Publisher: Hyperion
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 1423139494X
Buy Now!

Video games are the only medium in which longer length became an inherent selling point. Is it any wonder that even their best narratives are generally bloated, flaccid, and poorly paced? And then combined with bland, repetitive grinding gameplay activities?

You can see a similar pattern in the serialized novels of the 19th century: When authors are paid by the word, they have an incentive to produce more words. But this impulse, at least, was counteracted by the fact that their readers still wanted a good story and weren’t particularly concerned with length.

Only in video games do you see media consumers focusing on length-of-play as an important feature in and of itself.

A couple years ago I thought this trend might actually be reversing itself as Final Fantasy XIII came under criticism for being too long. But it doesn’t seem to be sticking yet.