In case you’re one of the few who missed it, Wizards of the Coast has finally joined the Information Age and decided to make all old D&D editions available for sale electronically at D&D Classics. (It’s a white label DriveThruRPG/RPGNow site.) B1: In Search Of The Unknown is free for their launch week!
They have loads of the classic modules up already and they say they plan to get everything up there eventually. Good on them!
The description of the new WotC Organized Play program made me throw up in my mouth a little.
I keep hoping 4e might come back from the brink. Mike Mearls keeps posting “Ah yes, the good things we are starting to remember from older D&D editions” posts on his blog. Maybe D&D isn’t degenerating into a tactical minis game forever after all, I think.
And then they just up and announce it’s a tactical minis game. No really, go read the link. The new OP is “tailored to groups of players who enjoy solving tactical puzzles, optimizing characters, and using rules to their advantage.” You come and minmax character builds and run them through a tactical simulation. If you die, it’s back to the save point and try again. Again, really, “Adventuring groups will often attempt a challenge several times before solving it.” The “D&D Fortune Cards are a required and integral part” isn’t even in the top 10 disturbing things about this.
Frankly, Organized Play is behind a lot of the bad stuff that started to corrupt 3e. It breeds a certain mindset and playstyle with very tightly constrained encounter difficulties, point buy min maxing, etc. that ends up corrupting the expectations of players. Now they are, as the kids today say, “Sticking it in and breaking it off” as far as that’s concerned.
I wonder how the people that always object to saying that 4e is becoming exactly like a computer game can even begin to continue to say that with a straight face now.
I mean, I don’t mind wargaming. I remember a lively game of Stargrunt II I played at a Gen Con. But WotC needs to start a separate tactical game line and stop making everyone think that it is a roleplaying game. It just breeds more “It’s only about the kill” goons that inhabit local game tables, Internet forums, and eventually the ranks of adventure and supplement authors.
P.S. If this is your first visit here and you just don’t understand WHY… I’m not gonna bother to link you to the past posts that explain how 4e is different from roleplaying games, etc.; if you can’t type “4e” into the search box above if you really want to find out, then you fall below the minimum INT required to care about whether you understand what’s going on…
A thread on TheRPGSite about “Games You Really Wanted To Like But Couldn’t” struck a chord with me. Here’s some of the games I really, really wanted to like but was sadly crushed by. Chime in with yours!
Rune. After Feng Shui, which I loved with an intense love, I was really looking forward to Robin Laws’ next game, and Vikings are cool, so it seemed like a shoo-in. Then when I got it, it was a weird budget-driven thing that I couldn’t even begin to attempt to run. You can’t put in a trap, you have to take the trap out of the budget for opposing elements… Spreadsheet time! To create a Rune adventure you’d have to do days of prep and math, there is no “winging it.” A warning shot of what has mostly gone wrong with RPGs since in many ways. Recently I saw the 2e clone Myth & Magic trying to put in an “XP budget” thing in their scenario building and it gave me post-traumatic stress disorder flashbacks to Rune, I said “Rip that out POST HASTE boys!”
Savage Worlds. With Savage Worlds there isn’t enough meat there unless the GM is willing to be off-the-cuffing stuff, and ours wasn’t. “I’m sorry, that seems like a valid Strength trick but the game only defines Smarts and Agility tricks.” “Oh well then this system is boring as all get out as written.” Also probably the GM’s style is to blame, he’d just suddenly take 15 minutes to build a big HeroClix battle mat and put the exact same generic goblin and dwarf minis down on it (we never fought dwarves or goblins, they were just stand-ins) and look at us and say “What do you want to do?” “To what? Where are we? What do those goblins represent? Are they attacking us or something?” But we gave it two campaigns. Once the final one ended with us getting killed by the traditional SW “guy you can’t hit ever except on super lucky dice explosions” we boycotted.
With FATE, I’ve tried Spirit of the Century and Dresden Files. Spirit of the Century was just too big. 411 pages for a “pick-up” RPG? There was no way to bootstrap a group into playing it. With Dresden Files, it wasn’t really the core mechanics that got us. Well, maybe it was. I just remember the wizard continually outshining other people in their specialty, and then us taking an egregiously long time to cast some detection spell. “Do we have enough juju to make it work? No? OK, we put in… Some grass, because he was on grass when he was abducted! Still not enough? We put in… A phone book with his name in it! How about now?” We stole Aspects and just added them to our Pathfinder characters in some campaigns, that works well enough. Might give FATE a try in another circumstance, but it’s operating at “two strikes.”
D&D 4e, because I actually liked D&D in Basic, 1e, 2e, and 3e; then 4e took a big steaming dump on everything the game stood for.
M&M 2e and Spycraft 2e. I loved 1e of both, and I was fine with upgrading and bought the books for both new editions sight unseen. And with both, they took a fine RPG and ladled on big levels of complexity and made it read like an encyclopedia full of definitions and not a game. They were completely un-charming and in both cases after reading some, even with my previous understanding from the earlier edition, I didn’t really want to power through reading the rest of the weighty tome. There’s a game design philosophy that sometimes comes into vogue that says “Make it read like a big ol’ dictionary, and they can just piece it together from all the individual definitions!” And that’s about as easy as learning a foreign language from a dictionary. Game designers, stop being lazy. Write a game.
I think it’s at this point I decided giant complex games were not for me any more and started eyeballing lighter approaches (though sadly Savage Worlds was supposed to be the lead candidate there).
Those are the games that I really, really wanted to like, that many people told me I should like, but that in the end I like so little that if our group was like “Let’s play X” I, who generally go along with whatever game system without comment, would have to say “Uh… I don’t know if I’d really enjoy that.”
Posted in talk
Tagged 4e, D&D, disappointments, FATE, M&M, Mutants & Masterminds, RPG, RPGs, rune, savage worlds, spycraft
There’s a good post by Clark Peterson of Necromancer Games on ENWorld where he explains how he got converted from the “biggest non-WotC cheerleader of 4e” to saying “bah” and now planning to support Pathfinder.
WotC has perfected the art of screwing things up with this edition. Hopefully all of Mearls’ Legends & Lore columns asking people about how they really like to play (hint: not the 4e way, is the general tenor of the responses) will culminate in a better D&D 5e sooner rather than later. And perhaps whoever is in WotC legal (and marketing, and product planning) will get tied to some railroad tracks.
Aren’t third party D&D publishers doing fine? No, we mean third party publishers for 4e. So you can see the problem.
Chris Dias wrote this Open Letter to WotC: Save 3rd Party Dungeons and Dragons Publishers, asking WotC to do something, anything, to help out their third party business partners, please.
Of course, this reasonable request brought out the psychos of the Unpaid WotC Defense Brigade, who rebut Dias by telling him that he and his whole grey market sub-industry should consider themselves lucky to be suckling at Wizard’s teats. Bonus, one 3pp’s “lawyer” chimes in to give his opinion on how draconic business practices are the only way to go.
Surprisingly, I’m on WotC’s side on this one. Well, at least kinda. Let me explain.
Q: What do you tell a third party D&D 4e publisher with two black eyes?
A: Nothing, they obviously don’t listen.
Look, man. Wizards has been making it clear for three years now that they would like every other company to die in a fire. They pulled all their licenses from third parties. Then they abandoned the OGL, dragged their feet on putting out any kind of license, and then when they put out the GSL it had a “poison pill” clause saying you couldn’t use the new license if you were doing anything OGL. (They retracted that eventually in the face of a firestorm of criticism.) They don’t let 3pps into the DDI, they don’t promote them at all, they clearly see them as leeches upon their largess that they’re not even clear themselves why they tolerate.
So by continuing to try to publish for them, you’re really just getting into battered spouse syndrome. “Hey maybe if you just beat me a little less I can really please you!” Why are these people still trying to do it? “I know WotC still really loves us, even though they treat us so bad!”
Sorry, baby, they don’t love you. And they’re not gonna stop whupping on you. It’s time to go find yourself a new man/woman. Try Paizo and Pathfinder, they cheerfully promote their third party partners and those guys are creating large amounts of great content and selling it. Open Design, Rite Publishing, LPJ Designs, Adamant Entertainment, and many more. Heck, I have personally bought Pathfinder stuff from those guys plus Green Ronin, Sagawork, and probably some others I’m forgetting. On RPGNow there’s 4x the number of third party products for Pathfinder than for 4e.
Morrus from ENWorld seems to be the only one happy about publishing for 4e, he says “it’s great being a big fish in a small pond.” I would hope you could sell SOME copies when you slather ads for your product over every single ENWorld page all the time. And I’m glad you’re happy with “a big slice of a small pie instead of a small slice of a big pie” – but that’s not really what real companies usually try for, and it certainly doesn’t breed innovation or excellence. Try using software written for a niche industry sometime; you’ll discover where all those Nazi scientists fled to and what they’re doing with their time – Gmail it’s generally not.
You’re left with two choices – embrace the indifference, mediocrity, and occasional ass-beatings, or break up with that abuser and find a new sugar daddy, one that’ll treat you right. Come on, baby. We’ll give you what you need.
Hm, that’s sad news - the prepainted plastic D&D minis were a great idea and were the only thing I still buy from WotC. My gaming group has a whole trunk full of them, and we don’t play the actual minis game or 4e, we use them for battlemaps for a lot of games. I still have old pewter minis from like 15 years ago I’ve never gotten around to painting, and I don’t want to have to.
It’s also strange news – so what will they be doing instead? In the same article, they proudly announce their latest dungeon tiles product, which it would seem you’d need minis for. You could do counters, and it sounds like they are putting some out, but there’s no profit in that. Issuing counters is a “we know you have to have something so here it is the cheapest way we could make them, mostly for free” kind of play.
Do they think they’re going to get their virtual table working and declare “all gaming is virtual now, death to the tabletop?” No – not just because they’ll never get the virtual tabletop working, but because they’re still selling cards and whatnot too, and pushing Encounters, which all are tied to tabletop.
Are they going to partner with someone else to do them? If so, this is a ham-handed way of announcing it; also, WotC’s model has been “pull it all in house” since the development of 4e, moving it back out would be an unprecedented shift in strategy.
Are they getting more expensive to produce as fewer 10 year olds are willing to be exposed to toxic fumes even in China or wherever? Seems like they’d just up the price or put fewer in a box if that were the case.
Are they planning to change the sales model (sell non-randomized or singles)? Again, this is a very bad way of announcing that – you don’t say “product terminated” if you’re just changing the model.
Are they just not selling well, so they don’t really give a shit how it fits into the product strategy or game experience? Maybe. They seem to be understaffed and floundering. I suspect this is the only reason that makes sense – the margin is down and so they’re canceling them, and they don’t have the time or people or energy to bother about product strategy.Sure, they’re adding the cards, but that can be done with excess staff etc. from WotC’s card game lines.
Even with the rumors going around that what we’re seeing is rampup to a 5e – and it makes sense, the cycle’s been like 3e – put out 3e, fairly quickly put out 3.5e, fire most of your staff, trickle out products and begin on a new edition. They put out 4e, put out Essentials (4.5e) fairly quickly and fired most of their staff… But even if that were true, why would discontinuing minis fit into that plan?
[Edit: I have seen Reaper's prepainted plastic minis line but they don't have many of them. And apparently to be more 'retail friendly' they just changed their name to "Hobby-Q".]
Well, I figured it was a matter of time when I saw them in a game of the new Gamma World being run at a local game shop. D&D 4e now gets collectible cards. Yep, you buy booster packs with cards of varying rarities, construct a deck, and use them along with your D&D character to give you all kinds of bonuses and whatnot. It’s a desperate attempt to convert D&D into a Magic: The Gathering kind of revenue stream.
Oh, they’re not “mandatory”, they say (except for D&D Organized Play games of course). You can show up and not have this super cool character boost. So of course, the more you spend the better your character is. Perfect.
It’s more gamist dreck. We shouldn’t be surprised. 4e powers have already given up on trying to have any in-game-world justification. “I get to reroll this saving throw… Because I have a card that says so!” And they’ve been careful to remove any oversight by DMs as to what rules/powers/etc. are allowed in the game, which is convenient when new rules can be thrown out on cards DMs and other players don’t have access to.
I would never, under any circumstances, allow the use of these in any game I ever ran. Essentials had somewhat tempted me to consider looking at 4e again, but this confirms to me “never mind, they are intent on running the concept behind a roleplaying game into the ground, then peeing on it, then stomping on it, then running off squealing.”
It’s antithetical to:
Yay. Unfortunately this really makes 4e D&D cross the line. They should have listened to Robert Downey Jr’s advice – you never go full retard.
[Edit: For all those out there saying "Well but the cards, you could use them as DM-given bennies or as a common deck or something and then they're not bad" - well, no shit, Sherlocks. But if you would bother to go read the actual Wizards of the Coast link on how the cards are to be used, that's not their intended use and the use that WotC will be enforcing in Organized Play. Decks are per-character, player-provided, and constructed, EXACTLY like having a Magic: the Gathering deck as part of your character sheet. I know you wish that's not the case, I know I do, and maybe you will be using them differently, but that's not a reason that WotC's intended use isn't a painful distortion of RPGs.]
Back in 2008, Mike Mearls wrote about whether open gaming had been a success… Right before Wizards pulled the plug on it. Death to open gaming was their clear intent, especially when they added a clause to the new very non-open GSL forbidding use of the OGL by people looking to use the GSL.
And now, by Wizards’ own numbers, the people playing D&D has gone from 6 million in 2007 to 1.5 million now. So is D&D dying?
Grognardia brought to my attention this post by Ryan Dancey (archtiect of the OGL) on the Paizo forums about his view of how the OGL succeeded.
In the end, D&D isn’t dying – it’s free. Hasbro can jack with it now all they want, but it was freed once and for all by Dancey, and so Paizo and the OSR and everyone else can play D&D and spread it far and wide, regardless of what kid film licensed property some suit wants to push this year.
Let Hasbro make all the soda and tennis shoes they want, and we get to play D&D and safely disregard whatever flavor of the month they are peddling. Power to the people!
Heh, I guess they were worried that the chronic history of failure surrounding the D&D Digital Initiative was starting to fade. So guess what! The one usable piece of the DDI, the Character Builder, is being converted over into a Web app so that you can’t use it without still having a subscription.
The old one was a desktop app, so if you stopped paying WotC you could still use it and your old characters, just not get new rules updates and whatnot. Well, that’s not a hardcore enough revenue stream. So the new one is in Silverlight, is only delivered as a Web app, and will only save your characters to the cloud – NOT to your PC. And of course they plan to “mine your data continuously.”
That’s some bullshit right there. And funnily enough it’s quite relevant to my real world life – this week, my company’s rolling out a Silverlight application people use to write code in. But since we don’t hate our customers, we allow it to be installed out of browser, and also allow code to be saved to the cloud or to the user’s desktop. It’s trivial to do – the only reason NOT to do it is if you want the people using your app to be completely dependent on you, and not be able to use it unless they keep paying you money. Which is obviously the case. Oh, and to prevent people from sharing it; I’m sure the plan is to force more people to buy subscriptions.
Fans are sad. But they keep playing 4e! Joke’s on you! You’re the enabler in this abusive relationship. From the GSL to pulling all PDFs to the DDI, WotC has shown its clear disregard for its customers as anything other than a source of money to squeeze. One might think that would backfire at some point. But some people like being dependent I guess…
OK, we all know I’m a 4e hater so just take this in that spirit. I was prepared to not buy but not hate on the new Gamma World. But I saw it being played in a game store today and noticed that they sell card “booster packs,” randomized and with “rares” just like Magic cards or whatnot, to players.
A stack of cards for random effects comes in the game box. But if you buy your own, you can construct your own “player deck” of mutation powers from them. Now, this is brilliant from a revenue stream point of view. They have always made great bank from CCGs and this means you can convert RPGs into that kind of a stream. But something in me balks at “players that spend the most money do better.” Maybe I’m just being old and grumpy. But I don’t like it in computer games either, the new “micropayments” where you can pay RL cash for better weapons or whatnot. Of course, I think the South Korean economy pretty much runs on that now, maybe it’s the wave of the future.
I didn’t actually like the old Gamma World – I played it once with Jim Ward GMing, no less, and its goofy and pointlessly random nature really put me off (I don’t mind that per se, I like Paranoia, for example, but there seemed to be a disjoint between the tone and the results). So it’s not like this is ruining memories from my youth or whatnot. I don’t know, I put my couple thousand dollars into Magic and then I swore it off, so maybe that’s the problem. Am I just being a grumpy grognard? Or what?
There’s an interesting post from Robert Schwalb about the rut 4e adventure design has gotten itself into. The comments are pretty interesting, too.
I hated the ‘delve’ format when it came out for 3.5e. I read one adventure using it, said “WTF,” and just ran out of Dungeon after that. And now I realize why! System matters, and format and presentation matter. These things encourage specific behaviors, and Rob seems to somewhat understand this – hence his post in the first place, he sees that the stultifying encounter description format is in practice encouraging frighteningly homogeneous slogs of encounters; it even influences larger dungeon design and cuts out page count and time for other secondary concerns like “story.”
But then of course Rob gets all offended at Landon saying in the comments that 4e’s mechanized approach has sacrificed organic feel and story at the altar of artificiality and predictability. Rob says “Well but there was wealth by level, and CRs, in 3e!” Yes, but (almost) no one used those as more than a suggestion. Formalizing that into “treasure parcels” and “XP budgets” is another huge step – rather than just having a guideline to help you understand “how much is this encounter likely to kick your PC’s asses” or “about how much loot will adventures and whatnot assume the PCs have” it is a lot different than having a mandatory prescription for it. And 4e in general is much more hostile to “just throw that rule out if you don’t like it” – you can say you can do that, but the book certainly doesn’t encourage it, and a tightly interlocking set of rules like that makes it difficult. When you read 4e, it clearly implies “You will do it this way.” Sure, apparently in later 4e books there are “alternate options” that are less rigid, but the game has set the general tone already. Just the statement that you need a supplement to give you an option for randomized treasure to replace the treasure parcel rule is fundamentally demented and indicative of the obsessive-compulsive lawyer mindset that 4e has become. In previous editions, whether there was a rule for it in a book or not, there was more of an understanding that “these are suggestions, use them if it makes your life easier as a DM.” They’ve done away with that, and now they get all surprised when story content shrinks and combat is seen as mandatory. You reap what you sow. If you present your game as a set of law books, then everyone starts acting like lawyers. Designers in most fields understand this.
I’m sure it’s not their intention for that to happen – but it’s the natural conclusion of how 4e is framed. There’s some bad natural conclusions to how 3e is framed too. But for me – I play for the story, for the inter-character interaction, for the immersion – and so I see that 4e is a hostile environment to that. 4e lovers will pop out of the woodwork and say “NO IT’S NOT I ROLEPLAY IN IT” but you have a lot of articles like this by actual 4e designers that recognize this is happening and are even starting to understand the reasons. You “can” create a story in 4e, but its nature is slowly discouraging that in players, play groups, adventure writers, and eventually that vicious circle spreads like a cancer through the hobby. If I was more into the combat part of D&D, and the new version downplayed combat and had sloppy rules for it and was presented in a fashion that would encourage less and less combat encounters over time, I’d be similarly upset.
When I design a location/adventure encounter, do you know what I put in it?
Whatever the fuck I want to.
See, isn’t that easy?
It makes me sad that these otherwise talented adventure writers are trying so hard to innovate within the bizarre restricted environment that the tactical encounter format dictates. “Maybe if we reorganize each tightly budgeted room as sectors…” No one is putting the restriction on you but yourselves! Rise up and cast off your chains!
ICv2′s latest sales channel reports indicate something very surprising – that Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder are tied for #1 in hobby sales! They’re followed by Warhammer Fantasy, Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader, and Dresden Files.
That’s pretty amazing, that a small company could rise to rival the historical keeper of D&D in such a short amount of time, and it’s a testament to the super hard work and high quality Paizo puts into their Pathfinder releases, and that they “get” what makes D&D great – it’s the adventures, stupid.
Of course these numbers aren’t based on unobtainable internal numbers and don’t include a variety of channels, it’s hobby stores/distributors only – DDI and Paizo’s subscriptions wouldn’t be included, for example – but it’s extremely notable.
Not only this, but hobby game sales are on the rise even while video game sales slump.
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