Quote from: deadDMwalking;642123I don't think D&D will be successful by 'any measure'.  As I said up thread, people that were happily choosing to be dependent on WotC for content during the 3.x era have had years to develop a 'new fix'.  

OK, "any measure", that leaves room for a lot of success.  Heck, if they make #1 sales for 1 quarter, they are a success by "any measure".

QuoteBunch of whiny shit about what you think WOTC did wrong

Maybe someone here cares what you think about that other topic, but that someone is not me, and that topic is not this one.

QuoteSo, what would I consider a successful D&D Next?  

1) Number 1 in sales by a large margin for 3-5 years.

OK so when you say "by any measure" you meant "Not by any measure".  Gotcha.  Some questions:

a) What does "large margin" mean to you?
b) What measure of "sales" do you plan to use?
c) If 5e surpassed 3e-peak levels in terms of number of people playing it, would that be a success, even if Pathfinder surpassed even that level (due to an expansion in the number of total players)?

Quote2) Robust 3rd party support (including settings and adventures)

Something cannot be a success in your opinion without third party support? Why? LOTS of things succeed on closed platforms with no third party support.  Can't it be a smashing success with no third party support? Heck, didn't AD&D do damn well with almost no third party support (it certainly wasn't what I'd call "robust")?

And what is your measure of "robust"?

Quote3) A ruleset that is light but flexible, readily adapting to a wide variety of play styles - but not modular.

I think there is some confusion here. I was not asking what you think would help make 5e a success, I was asking what measures would you use to determine whether or not 5e is a success once it comes out, IE whether your prediction turned out to be correct or not.  That's why I asked to drill down on the specifics of your prediction of failure.  You liking the game is not related to whether or not it is a success.  I am sure there are lots of things in life that are wildly popular, which are not your thing.  

Quote4) An edition that I am personally inclined to try

Again, this appears to be "what appeals to me" as opposed to "what is a success".  I am sure there are things in life which are wildly popular but which do not appeal to you to even try them out.

So we are left with "Number 1 in sales by a large margin for 3-5 years," with some questions to answer about that, and possibly an explanation for why "robust third party support" would be a requirement of an RPG being measured as a success.

Quote from: Killfuck Soulshitter;642149I used to go hunting with a guy who knew the bush in that part of New Zealand like the back of his hand.

Hope he doesn't go hunting with Mistwell.

Experienced back country guy (glancing at the sky):
"I think it's gonna rain tonight. Might be heavy."

Mistwell: "That's not very specific. Let's drill down a little. How many millimetres of rain will fall between midnight and 2am? What will the wind speed be? Will the splatter be strong enough to heavily obscure 2 day old scat, or just moderately?

Come on - you're making a prediction. Be precise, my good fellow!"

I think my point was just proven.  At least one person thought "5e = failed RPG" if he didn't like it (even if everyone else does and it sells a million copies and goes on to another golden age of D&D).  

"I think it will rain" is a fairly generic, well understood thing that does not vary from perspective to perspective.  We know it means water will come down from the sky and make us wet in some material quantity.  We might not know how much, but we know it means it will rain, and we know what rain is.

"I think it will fail", obviously, does have wide variation depending on perspective. Some people will think sales in retail stores, some will thing total dollars earned, some will think relative to competitors, some will think relative to Hasbro expectations, some will think total books in print, some will think praise on message boards, etc..  It's not a "will it rain" type prediction.  Success for one person may well be failure for another.  

It's also the kind of prediction people can and will use to weasel around being wrong, if left too vague.  Did it rain? Check the weather report for how many inches it rained, and if they had a measurement, it rained.  Did it fail? There is no unifying standard for that, so you have to ask what people mean by failure.

So, what do you mean by failure?

It's more than just the gamebooks.

Don't underestimate the influence / revenue of online sales (D&D Insider) and the brand itself (D&D movies etc).

Quote from: Piestrio;642115I don't know if it'll happen but that's absolutely the best thing that can happen to D&D under WOTC.

Release an evergreen game, keep it in print and STOP "DEVELOPING" for it.

No more supplements, no more "splats", no more feats/powers/skills/ponies/etc... no more editions, no more nothing.

Let them whore out the IP for money, board games, video games, card games, woodburning sets, "My little Beholder" cartoons, whatever, and leave the RPG alone.

If they want they could release an occasional "themed" version of game (IP tie-ins, D&D: Forgotten Realms, D&D: Gamma World, D&D: Dragonlance, etc...). Or maybe adventures but since they suck at those probably not.

Coming Soon From Hasbro: MONOPOLY Live-Action

Quote from: Bobloblah;641230Anyone actually know if those are included in the available numbers?

It never will.

When PF 'overtook' 4e they talked to a couple places in California and Wisconsin, then somehow extrapolated everything else.  

They dismiss everything not related to their own network.

Quote from: jgants;641952In order to really win people back, they will need both a great product and some major brand overhaul; and I don't just mean the D&D brand - I think the WotC brand itself has major issues (not unlike the final days of TSR).

I can agree with that, although I think their biggest issue is Hasbro itself.  Hasbro's corporate model doesn't fit well with RPG companies, and the concept of an RPG with steady sales doesn't sit well with the incessant desire for ever increasing corporate profits.  

RPGs just aren't the mega millions in sales type of product, and WotC's gyrations and design decisions have been based upon trying to please their corporate overlords in the short term rather than making a product that will sell well in the long term.  I'm almost 100% certain that the lack of an 3.x-esque OGL in 4e was driven primarily by greed, to pull back in house the "lost profits" caused by third party products.  The fact that third party support helped to drive profits of the primary game was lost or minimized by the bean counters.

Having WotC be cut loose from Hasbro might actually improve things a bit by eliminating the financial pressure from Hasbro.  However, I don't know what might happen long term because of WotC's self-inflicted wounds.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;6421233) WotC had an abysmal record regarding providing online content.  They had consistently promised a digital table top and failed to deliver.  E-Tools was released on CD and was perpetually buggy.  For a company that was able to successfully launch an online 'Magic: The Gathering', they clearly couldn't put together the resources to deliver the online content that had been promised.

4) 4th edition, when it was finally released, seemed 'gamist' to too many gamers.  Maybe nobody wanted a 'story game', but counting squares and making every class work the same (albeit flavored differently) was unsatisfying to a large portion of the player base.  4th edition was essentially alienating.

I think the two points are connected. Ryan Dancey tells a convincing story about this one. If it's true, it'd have to be based on knowledge from what contacts he still had in WotC given that he'd been gone for years before the events in question, but frankly it explains so much that I consider it to be at least the best working theory on why 4E is the way it is and not the whole truth, and the whole Forge deal is really a side issue in it.

To summarise the picture as I see it from what Dancey and others have written, the downfall of 4E was DDI, and specifically its virtual tabletop. The two entities were never meant to live apart: like a pistol shrimp and a goby fish or you and your gut flora, they were meant to have a symbiotic relationship from the start, and the absence or dysfunction of one would be fatal to the other. 4E was designed from the ground-up to be nice and easy to implement in DDI's tabletop - hence the grid, hence the "pick a power from a menu" style of play which the presentation of the game promoted. (Yeah, yeah, sure, there's capability in 4E to go off-script and improvise actions, but in play the path of least resistance and highest effectiveness is often to just pick a power from the menu, unless the GM is largely abandoning grid-based combat as the focus of the game - at which point you're ignoring the thing 4E does best and might as well be playing a different game.)

The problem was that the virtual tabletop wasn't actually ready for 4E's premier in June 2008 - and a couple of months down the line, there was a nasty murder-suicide perpetrated by Joseph Batten, who was one of the key virtual tabletop team members. It's a bit of the story people tend to gloss over, and there's good reasons for that - considering that people died in that situation, the disruption to a project schedule for a roleplaying game accessory is truly small beans in comparison - but I don't think it's a part of the story which can be entirely ignored because let's face it, it did disrupt the project. All of the team members would have known Batten, and it's likely that many of them would have also known Melissa, and losing both under any circumstances would have shaken everyone, but under those circumstances... the mixture of sadness and anger in the people working on that project must have been incredible, and I'm sure several of them must have contemplated walking off the project. I know if I were on that team and I knew that I'd have to work with Batten's code or dredge up old e-mails from him to continue my work on it, I'd have serious thoughts about resigning, because who wants to live with that sort of reminder every working day?

That left Wizards with a game optimised for a virtual tabletop environment which they weren't able to complete on time, and in the wake of the killings they were staring down the very real possibility that the work would never get done at all. So, the optimal environment to play 4E in, the one the game had been specifically designed for, was unavailable for months, crawled out in a hamstrung beta version after a long delay, and was quietly cancelled last year. Meanwhile, a bunch of absolutely lovely system-agnostic alternatives like Roll20 have come out which beat the pants off the VTT (and don't even lock you to the grid if that isn't what you want!).

Maybe, if Wizards had been able to have their vision for the VTT in place when 4E came out, it'd have been more of a hit - not so much with the face-to-face tabletop crowd, maybe, but I can imagine a parallel universe where there's a sizeable number of folks using a really good VTT with 4E because they aren't in touch with other gamers or don't have time to schedule face-to-face games (squeezing in a quick hour on the VTT here and there rather than scheduling a weekly four-hour session), as well as people who actually get all the face-to-face gaming they want who approach the VTT as a related but not identical pastime.

But that's a parallel universe where the VTT is really excellent, of a high enough standard that you're able to forgive being locked to the grid and being expected to pick powers from a list most combat rounds because the VTT provides a sufficiently fast-flowing and exciting game experience that you're able to treat is as a sort of boardgame-computer game hybrid. Who knows, maybe in such a universe Wizards would have been glad to concede a large part of the tabletop market to Paizo and others.

But of course, that's not the universe we live in.

In retrospect, changing the tabletop RPG as part of a process of setting up this robust VTT environment is something which never needed to happen. There's no reason why D&D couldn't have had mildly divergent editions tailored to different mediums - a "Classic Tabletop Experience" edition optimised for face-to-face gaming, and a "New Hotness" edition optimised for the Virtual Tabletop. The New Hotness could have been held back until a suitable VTT was ready to go, and the Classic Tabletop Experience would have been liberated from having to try to replicate fiddly game mechanics and book-keeping and encounter assumptions more suited to exciting videogame fights than to RPGs not tailored towards being skirmish wargames in disguise. The trick would be to make sure that the flavour was consistent between the versions, rather than to slavishly make sure the system is exactly the same.

But, of course, Wizards fumbled the ball. It would be grossly unfair to blame them for all of it - nobody could have predicted the Batten situation, for example - but the Wizards of 2013 has to play with the hand the Wizards of 2008 dealt. The fact is that Wizards have not only lost the initiative in the tabletop RPG area, they've also completely conceded the VTT zone - and they're still no closer to clawing back the computer game/MMO rights they were hoping to snag. That means they have literally no choice but to make D&D Next the best tabletop RPG experience they can possibly make it. That'll involve rolling back a heap of 4Eisms because those were designed for a medium (the virtual tabletop) that Wizards has no interest in.

Quote from: Mistwell;642113You too, same questions.  You're making a prediction of the doom of 5e, so nail down the specifics of what you think would objectively measure failure and success.

I'm not predicting doom for 5e so much as predicting it won't be much of a hit - those aren't equivalent statements for me.

If I had to guess something more precise, I'd say it will get sales somewhere within 10% (either direction) of the sales Essentials got and that sales will drop off at around the same rate. That would still put it up in sales at or near the top for a while. RPG releases are like movies - even terrible movies can be #1 at the box office when they're brand new if there's not a lot of competition.

There's always a group of people willing to buy the next edition, particularly the first couple of books. It will sell. It will make a modest amount of money. But I don't think we'll see the level of interest or long tail that some of the previous editions had. I think we'll see the continuation of the "market splintering" effect that 4e and Essentials had.

And since WotC clearly didn't consider 4e much of a success, I'm guessing 5e will look even less like one to them / Hasbro.

Quote from: Piestrio;641278I really hope not. I'm not a huge PF fan but they've done the hobby a huge favor by validating that adventures can sell and they'd do us an even greater service by showing us the edition treadmill isn't the only way to profitability.

Agreed. And I think they have already shown that they don't need to release new system supplements to remain profitable and attract a big market share. I don't know why it's so hard for some people to admit that adventures and setting material can form the foundation of a successful RPG company.

Quote from: Haffrung;642269Agreed. And I think they have already shown that they don't need to release new system supplements to remain profitable and attract a big market share. I don't know why it's so hard for some people to admit that adventures and setting material can form the foundation of a successful RPG company.

My uninformed impression is that the key to Paizo's success is that they sell subscriptions. They don't need to re-convince their costumers to by each new installment that comes out.

I suspect it's harder to make money selling individual titles through retail channels. Goodman did that pretty well...but then hasn't he kept his day job the entire time he's been running Goodman Games? I could swear I read that somewhere.

Quote from: Mistwell;642154OK, "any measure", that leaves room for a lot of success.  Heck, if they make #1 sales for 1 quarter, they are a success by "any measure".

Yeah.  I don't think they'll be #1 for even a single quarter.  

So, while I stand by what I said for ways to measure 'obvious success', let's talk about what you think would indicate a success.  

Then I'll be happy to predict whether it will achieve any of those benchmarks.

Not being a hater here - I'd like to see D&D succeed.  I just think that boat has sailed and it's going to take something spectacular to revive it.  

I expect WotC to sell the D&D IP in 5-8 years.  That would be a clear mark of failure, don't you think?

Quote from: deadDMwalking;642360I expect WotC to sell the D&D IP in 5-8 years.

Never gonna happen. Tv, Book, Movie & Video Game rights will never leave the Hasbro fold again.

Quote from: bryce0lynch;642362Never gonna happen. Tv, Book, Movie & Video Game rights will never leave the Hasbro fold again.

Agreed. Hasbro simply will never sell - it's an anathema to their whole operation.

Hasbro would shelve D&D before they would sell.

Most you could expect would be for Hasbro to licence out the tabletop RPG rights to D&D whilst keeping hold of more lucrative aspects of the IP like novels, board games, computer games, etc. They may well decide that there's no point in them directly investing time and effort into making tabletop RPGs but reason that it doesn't do any harm to licence that stuff out and at least get some royalties on it whilst their development budget goes on stuff which gets a better return on the investment.