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When poking around on Monte's site, I came across this stunning article concerning the OGL and Monte's predictions for 4th Edition. From the information (almost) included in the article, this was written in 2006. This is a great article no matter your personal views on 4th edition, written by one of the industry's biggest insiders.
Linkified here to save the lives of defenseless electrons everywhere.
A few quotes to whet your appetite:
Why aren't companies producing OGL material still selling great numbers? [....]Most people will tell you that the problem was just the sheer number of companies producing material, and the sheer number of products. But I don't think it was quite that simple. To be blunt, the problem was that so many of the products being published were crap.
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Regardless of when it comes, however, the issue at hand is: Will 4th Edition continue to be an open game? This is a complex question. I suspect that as the Wizards revolving door continues to toss out more and more of the so-called "old guard" (willingly or unwillingly), fewer people remain who believe in or even really understand the Open Game License.
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Will a new edition be good for the game? In my opinion, if Wizards is truly interested in what's good for the game, they'll wait until people really want a 4th Edition, which I imagine would come no sooner than 2008.
Edit: I have left a great many compelling statements out of this post because (a) what Monte says should be read in context and (b) he says a few things that will likely rub people the wrong way concerning 4e/WotC/Hasboro and that is something I did not want to focus on in my initial post. Read the article for yourself and see what you get from it.
Will a new edition be good for the game? In my opinion, if Wizards is truly interested in what's good for the game, they'll wait until people really want a 4th Edition, which I imagine would come no sooner than 2008.
And thats something that scares me about 4E. I don't see alot of people that really WANT a new edition. I see some people that really want a new edition, some people that don't really want a new editon, and a whole lotta people that see 3.5 as "good enough" and will probably change if one of two things occur, 1) 4E is a major upgrade and not just a few tweeks that can be covered in a $9 pdf, or 2) their DM upgrades. SO I really wonder just how good will 4E be for the game.
Grognard wisdom
pump'n'dump for 4e.Please splaine that to me... what is it?
Well... The kindest way I can think of would be "Love them, then leave them."
And if that still isn't clear enough... "A one night stand."
Sorry for the second post, but it is a completely different topic.
I wish I had read that article sooner.
Monte Cook can be called several things, some not-so-pleasant. But that man is smart.
I can't tell if he truly does have the pulse of the RPG business, or if WotC just reads his posts and adopts them as their market plan...
But I would recommend that everyone read that. If nothing else, it could give you insight as to why emotions are running high on the release of 4th Edition. I know it did for me...
This one caught my attention:
Will it be good for the industry? Too early to tell. It seems unlikely that lightning will really strike twice and that there will be a 4th Edition boom to roleplaying game sales as occurred with 3rd Edition. I hope I'm wrong -- if nothing else, as an RPG fan, I'd love to see them flourish. But in so many ways, 3rd Edition was a perfect storm. It was long overdue, people were hungry for a change, and yet (particularly at the outset) their expectations were low. Today, things seem to be just the opposite. A few forward-thinking gamers are only just now starting to even consider a new edition. The general public seems to actively not want it to happen. And yet, I think expectations are very high, and that if it did happen, people would be expecting the veritable second coming of RPGs.
I think he has a point there, and has put the finger to the point where it hurts (and why 4e has such a strong reaction): The situation was much worse when 3e came out. An overhaul was much needed. Now, many folks see 3.x as working fine or at least ok, and could have lived with another revision instead of a whole new edition.
But perhaps Hasbro did look at the numbers and demanded another hit like 3e, without caring for the hows and whys. With sales numbers going down, this is natural for a company. But is probably not possible to plan another success like 3.0 in the RPG scene, given the peculiarities of this market (the fanbase is a strange lot, and in are general quite demanding customers). Given the view some people take (according to Monte Cook) on other RPG companies (seeing them as competitors rather than licence holders and supporters), you might speculate that there might lie the reason why 4e seems, from what we have seen up until now, to be quite different from earlier editions of the game, and why it is coming out "early".
Stefan
I'm struck by this:
The game industry must never forget how smart our customers are. When a gamer buys three d20 supplements and they're all disappointments, he's not going to buy a fourth. Or when they go to the game store and they see a dozen new titles, all extremely focused -- many with topics seemingly chosen simply on the basis of "no one's done this yet" rather than "I'm sure lots of people would find this useful" -- gamers know they're not going to use them, so they don't buy them. Which is fine, but when that goes on for a year, pretty soon the gamers stop looking. Which means that even the quality books get overlooked.
This is the main contributor for declining sales at WotC, IMO. Their material over the last year or so has become more focused (new magic systems, "spell-like" weapon maneuvers, etc.), which hold less broad appeal and work poorly with other focused material.
This is also my main concern about 4e: From much of the released material, it sounds like it may be more focused on a certain style of play and certain assumptions instead of the broadly applicable sytem of 3.x (with the SRD). The whole attitude of "we think this is cool and different" over "this will be something as many gamers as possible will like and use" is what is making me skeptical as much as "some things in 3.x don't work as well as they could, so we need a completely new system."
His comments concerning the release of 3.5 are also interesting:
Wizards' release of 3.5 was a kick in the teeth for most d20 publishers, particularly those producing only material meant to directly support core d20 -- which is to say, D&D. Ironically, the ones Wizards hurt the hardest were the ones who were helping them the most. (And here's another secret: In the end, it was bad for Wizards' own long-term sales as well, as the sales of their own older products dried up. Their so-called "evergreen" titles -- the very ones that the OGL was created to help sustain -- stopped looking so green.) 3.5 was such a major revision that the buying public believed that 3.0 material was now useless to them (which is nonsense, but that's another topic). Lots of people threw up their hands and stopped buying much stuff. Oh, they bought the 3.5 core books, which reportedly sold well (but nowhere near 3.0 figures), but then they stopped buying. Or they bought only official D&D material.
It's possible that 4e will end up being worse for the industry and WotC than 3.5. That also concerns me, considering this comment:
Let me point out that the OGL is pretty much irrevocable. Companies could continue to produce books compatible with 3rd Edition, or with OGL games like Arcana Evolved, Spycraft, or Mutants and Masterminds. And even if Wizards took away the d20 license and didn't update the SRD, if 4th Edition still used hit points, Armor Class, six ability scores 3-18, and so on, it would be easy enough to create material under the existing OGL pretty compatible with 4th Edition. Arguably, to make the game airtight-closed, Wizards would have to change it so radically that it wouldn't even be D&D anymore.
Emphasis mine. A lot of the "rebranding" changes start looking more sinister in that context.
Will a new edition be good for the game? In my opinion, if Wizards is truly interested in what's good for the game, they'll wait until people really want a 4th Edition, which I imagine would come no sooner than 2008.
So I have a quick question. Who out there truly "wanted" a 3e before it was even announced?
I was more than happy with 2e, and thought, at the time that 3e was a money grab. It wasn't until I actually bought the PHB at GenCon and realised what a good game they had developed that I realised that I "wanted" a new game.
So who out there was sick and tired of everything up to and including 2e before 3e was announced?
Just curious.
Greg
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So who out there was sick and tired of everything up to and including 2e before 3e was announced?
It seems to me, from my hazy recollections, that at the end of 2nd edition, our group was finally getting into it (Al-Qadim, Spelljammer, etc. sucked us back in, after a lengthy diversion to play GURPS, Vampire, etc.).
I suspect this may have been atypical and it's possible that when 3E was decided upon, the powers-that-be may have felt that they were hemmorhaging players to games like Vampire or Call of Cthulhu or something.
It's possible that this is replaying itself, and WotC is trying to recapture players who have wandered off to look at True20 or Hackmaster or Exalted or Savage Worlds or whatever, even if, in my experience, games other than D&D are far less prominent than they were during White Wolf's glory days.
The 'other' game companies, White Wolf, Steve Jackson Games, etc. don't seem to make up nearly as large a segment of the games available at GenCon or Origins as they did 10 years ago, so it seems to me that 3.X did succeed in recapturing a lot of the market share, whether in attracting new gamers or in drawing back those who had wandered off to try new things.
When I sign up for GenCon, and see 400 D&D games, 5-8 Mutants & Masterminds games, two dozen Vampire/WoD games (half of them demos run by WW staffers!) and 3-5 GURPS games, I'm pretty sure that D&D isn't exactly suffering for the presence of competitors...
So who out there was sick and tired of everything up to and including 2e before 3e was announced?
I was.
Admittedly, I was skeptical about what the new edition would entail, but after the first couple of Dragon articles I was very willing to give it a try. And the Ranger alone was worth a new edition in my opinion.
And I'll go further and admit I was highly skeptical of 3.5. I put off even reading the books until well after their release. Then some of the supplements got me curious about the changes that were made. I still don't like many of he changes... But I can admit they were necessary.
Now there is 4th. And I am even more skeptical. After all the time and effort to "get it right" (by WotC) with 3.x, I find it very hard to swallow that they "got it right" with 4th, especially while they claim that 3.5 is so terrible. (paraphrased)
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So I have a quick question. Who out there truly "wanted" a 3e before it was even announced?
I didn't want a new edition as such, but I was not unhappy to see it either. A lot of the changes to the rules seemed almost intuitive to me (in fact my very few 2e houserules were all incorporated into the 3e rules) and after purchasing and reading the 3e PHB once, I knew that it was a vast step up in character creation rules. The fact that Monsters and PCs followed exactly the same rules was also a huge bonus for me. All in all, 3e was exactly what I wanted in Dungeons and Dragons rules, and still is.
Contributor
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I had totally bailed on D&D by the time 3E came out. I played other rpgs regularly, but I was done with D&D. When I heard about 3E it was already out. My initial reaction was "Who wants another edition of this crappy game?" Then a few people who I respected told me that it was a massive improvement so I took a look, and it was. Every member of my current group had given up on D&D entirely, but 3E brought them back (except for the guy that had never played rpgs before he joined my group) and only one of them is someone that I played with before 3E.
So I wasn't looking forward to 3E, but I was pretty jaded with 2E.
4e.....meh. I can wait for 5e in (my estimate) 4 or 5 years.
I agree completely with statement. In fact, I will probably be waiting 4 or 5 years before I move on from 3.5e. I guess my problem with Monte's statement is that if you wait until people "want" a new edition, then, at least in my experience, you'll wait forever, by and large.
Greg
So I wasn't looking forward to 3E, but I was pretty jaded with 2E.
I guess the way I've seen rpg-playing in the past, that when people get bored of a game they don't sit on it and wait for a new version to come out then tend to explore other games. (In fact, some people are probably even more cynical of new editions of games they have gotten tired of. "ANOTHER version of D&D? The last one was crap, the new one will probably be crap x2!")
I had a friend in university who had completely bailed on D&D even though that was how he cut his teeth in rpgs. He was running first a Rifts game, then a Deadlands game. I doubt to this day, even with 3e, if he's ever gone back to D&D.
Greg
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I guess my problem with Monte's statement is that if you wait until people "want" a new edition, then, at least in my experience, you'll wait forever, by and large.
I think the ruler to use here would be 'how are the competitors doing.'
If new game company X is selling their CraftHammer the Bludgeoning game hand over fist, perhaps it's time to look and see what the gaming community is so ga-ga over and in what ways your game could incorporate similar mechanics or a similar feel.
Say, hypothetically, that Albino Puppy games is getting a lot of buzz about their vivid and evocative stories (if not so much their rulescraft...), and they've got this dude named Ari Marnell working for them as a writer, scribing this prose that's got people talking about how just reading it makes them *yearn* to play these characters or in this kind of setting, then perhaps Sorcerers of the Seashore could hire that dude to write up some Heroes of Scary for them, to tap into that market.
Or, they might see that some game where the heroes are something Excited and seem like walking angels of retribution, with all sorts of crazily-named kung-fu powers and extended dice pools of mighty smiting, and then they come out with a Book of Nine Ninjas or whatever that includes all sorts of crazily-named maneuvers that involve extra dice and sound way cooler than the old, 'I Power Attack for three.'
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So I wasn't looking forward to 3E, but I was pretty jaded with 2E.I guess the way I've seen rpg-playing in the past, that when people get bored of a game they don't sit on it and wait for a new version to come out then tend to explore other games. (In fact, some people are probably even more cynical of new editions of games they have gotten tired of. "ANOTHER version of D&D? The last one was crap, the new one will probably be crap x2!")
I had a friend in university who had completely bailed on D&D even though that was how he cut his teeth in rpgs. He was running first a Rifts game, then a Deadlands game. I doubt to this day, even with 3e, if he's ever gone back to D&D.
Greg
For me, it was more about getting a game together. My reasoning was: there's waaaaay more D&D players than Rifts players, so if you can't beatem, joinem.
D&D--s'okay, but I like Rifts a lot. I don't care about "cloogy rules" and all that junk.
For me, it was more about getting a game together. My reasoning was: there's waaaaay more D&D players than Rifts players, so if you can't beatem, joinem.
D&D--s'okay, but I like Rifts a lot. I don't care about "cloogy rules" and all that junk.
I like Rifts a lot too. But for whatever reason, deep down, I'm just a "sword-n-sorcery" kinda guy. So, since I'm running the game I'd rather DM a D&D game.
Now if I had time, and one of my friends wanted to GM a Rifts game, I'd be in like Flynn. But save that, I'll be sticking with 3.5e for now.
Greg
I guess my problem with Monte's statement is that if you wait until people "want" a new edition, then, at least in my experience, you'll wait forever, by and large.I think the ruler to use here would be 'how are the competitors doing.'
That I can understand. I guess I was taking Monte too literally. If he was referring to using the market to determine if people "wanted" a new edition, then he has a point.
Greg
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So I have a quick question. Who out there truly "wanted" a 3e before it was even announced?
I was more than happy with 2e, and thought, at the time that 3e was a money grab. It wasn't until I actually bought the PHB at GenCon and realised what a good game they had developed that I realised that I "wanted" a new game.
So who out there was sick and tired of everything up to and including 2e before 3e was announced?
I was. I had gotten on board with 2nd Edition as soon as it came out (previously I had played Red box/Blue Box D&D, and held off on buying 1st Edition when I found out 2nd Ed was in the works). I played it all thru high school and college, mainly in Forgotten Realms and Dark Sun campaigns. However, after college, it fell by the wayside and I became more interested in other campaigns and rulesets, particularly Shadowrun 2nd Ed and White Wolf's stuff.
I initially became involved in RPGA because it was an outlet to play Shadowrun (as opposed to judge, which I was usually stuck doing). I joined RIGHT before the announcement of 3E and although I hadn't thought about whether D&D needed a revision or not, once the announcement was made, it immediately had my attention. I like D&D, but the revision was the shot in the arm it needed to get me really interested in playing again.
With 3E, I became very active in D&D and the D&D community again, particating in the various RPGA campaigns, even doing stints as Triad and Metaregion coordinator for Living Greyhawk (a setting I never really looked at prior to 3E). I played a LOT (during 2002-2005, I could easily say that I played an average of 10 hours a week, if not more). However, by 2006 I was starting to get that old innui again. I pretty much dropped off the radar except for one home campaign (Shackled City) and my interest in D&D waned.
4E is another shot in the arm for me. It has me interested again and I'm looking forward to it as much as I looked forward to 3E.
Rob
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Regardless of when it comes, however, the issue at hand is: Will 4th Edition continue to be an open game? This is a complex question. I suspect that as the Wizards revolving door continues to toss out more and more of the so-called "old guard" (willingly or unwillingly), fewer people remain who believe in or even really understand the Open Game License.
It was this line that struck me the first time I read it. I was hoping he was wrong in this assumption but that is apparently not the case. I guess we really won't know the restrictions of the GSL until that information is made public but creating a whole new license instead of extending the guidelines of the previous one seems to have a lot of people nervous.
The original OGL served a number of purposes. I would argue the d20 STL was there to provide income for Wizards, nothing wrong with that. But the OGL was remarkable in that it allowed many gamers to speak a common language. Even when the OGL spawned d20 variation the differences were more like dialects and not a whole different language. It gave small publishers a path to become major contenders and even allowed guys in their basements the chance to forge quality product that might have otherwise been lost in the noise ten years back.
But I am only repeating what most already know. Perhaps the OGL was a product of it's time. Maybe. I doubt it. In reality, I think the OGL was not a mistake and it is still something that makes sense today.
In the end, the GSL could make or break 4e for me. If it limits some of the sourcebook and setting material we have seen in the past and prevents publishers from producing product like Tome of Horrors 4e then I will be very wary of the new edition. If it fulfills Erik Mona's "worst case scenario" then I am definitely out.
So who out there was sick and tired of everything up to and including 2e before 3e was announced?
Well, I wasn´t playing any D&D at the time 3.0 was announced, and thought that AD&D was pretty much a thing of the past for me. Not exactly sick and tired, but AD&D held no appeal to me anymore.
The first time I heard of 3.0, I was pretty sceptic as well. What made me less sceptic were the previews in Dragon at that time. Today, I DM a 3.5 game and play in another, with another 3.5 campaign past me and one as a player also past me. So, D&D 3.x brought me back to playing D&D solidly.So, I was not exactly waiting for the new game, but when it was available, I came back to D&D.
Stefan
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Will it [4th Edition] be good for the industry? Too early to tell. It seems unlikely that lightning will really strike twice and that there will be a 4th Edition boom to roleplaying game sales as occurred with 3rd Edition. I hope I'm wrong -- if nothing else, as an RPG fan, I'd love to see them flourish. But in so many ways, 3rd Edition was a perfect storm. It was long overdue, people were hungry for a change, and yet (particularly at the outset) their expectations were low. Today, things seem to be just the opposite. A few forward-thinking gamers are only just now starting to even consider a new edition. The general public seems to actively not want it to happen. And yet, I think expectations are very high, and that if it did happen, people would be expecting the veritable second coming of RPGs.
This paragraph really stood out to me and captures one of the core issues around why some players feel that if 4e is going to be released it had better be great. The fact that so much is changing in 4e and those changes are not appreciated by all lies at the heart of the anti-4e backlash we see on these boards.
So I have a quick question. Who out there truly "wanted" a 3e before it was even announced?
Lapsed D&Ders. I hadn't played D&D in 5 years until 3e came out.
IMO, that's why 3e succeeded so well. It brought back a huge swell of lapsed gamers - people who had stopped playing and stopped buying.
joe b.
So I have a quick question. Who out there truly "wanted" a 3e before it was even announced?Lapsed D&Ders. I hadn't played D&D in 5 years until 3e came out. IMO, that's why 3e succeeded so well. It brought back a huge swell of lapsed gamers - people who had stopped playing and stopped buying.
Yep, me, too. We'd moved on to Amber Diceless and James Bond 007 for years after 2e was played out, and even went so far as to invent our own system. Then at the bookstore one day I noticed there was a third edition, and I flipped through it and realized that most of the things our system could do, 3rd edition could also do... and then I started looking at Dungeon magazine... well, to make a long story short, the switch to 3rd edition was a no-brainer.
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I was pretty much done with 2e myself when 3E was announced and it brought me back as well...
1e became...burdened...with house rules, dragon magazine articles (in those days, dragon was almost necessary for the "fixes"...we had no internet back then) etc. 2E cleaned it all up and re-organized...it really wasn't a new edition but rather a clean up of the old. But much of the 1E baggage continued.
It was the combat option book in 2e that sent me fleeing. Granted, they were "experiments" into a new system, but the implementation was a kludge-fix to 2e and really just became more baggage.
3E was a pretty good overhaul, a tear-down and rebuild: the math was cleaned up, things were scaled better (or rather, there was a scale, lol) and I really like the system, I think a lot of people do.
What I see now is that 3E now has baggage. Too many splatbooks, too many feats, too many kludge-fixes, etc. whatever your poison. From WotC perspective, this effects sales. Why would I buy a new splatbook when I can't keep track of the ones I have? From our perspective there is simply too much crap...baggage.
So here we are, time to clean out the attic and start anew yet again. I still think that if 3.5 NEVER happened, much of the animosity would be gone. 8 years of collecting baggage and most would be ready for a "clean up".
Another issue, of course, is that its not a "clean up" but a complete tear-down and rebuild in the same vein as 3E. Perhaps we are beginning to see the emergence of a natural pattern:
Game edition 1 - Release (1e)
Game Edition 2 - Clean Up (2e)
Game edition 3 - Overhaul (3e)
Game Edition 4 - Clean up (3.5)
Game edition 5 - Overhaul (4e)
The problem is that 3.5 was a pretty weak clean up (more of an errata) and 4E is such a huge overhaul that it breaks the feeling of "responsible" change to a game we love. It was simply too soon. If we never saw 3.5, and if in 2006 we were offered 4E as a "clean up" rather than an overhaul ( a more meaty 3.5), I think it would have been embraced. And then in 2012 or so saw 5E with much of what they are offering now I think it would be a very easy pill to swallow.
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Same story here. I dropped D&D entirely back in the 80's in favor of Rolemaster and MERP. I picked up the 3rd ed. PHB out of curiosity in a Borders, and 1/2 hour later I walked out with the core books. This was maybe 5 years ago. Same goes with half my group. Hell, the pbp game I'm running for Runelords is the first time one of those players has played any RPG since the Rolemaster days.
Frankly, I think I could go on a very long time before pursuing a new edition of these rules. I've house-ruled around all the things that annoy me about 3.5 anyway. It's the new adventures and settings that keep the game fresh.
I think I'd be more inclined to bust out all my old RM stuff again before moving forward to 4e. Only my players can change my mind at this point, and they're more against an edition change than I am.
So I have a quick question. Who out there truly "wanted" a 3e before it was even announced?Lapsed D&Ders. I hadn't played D&D in 5 years until 3e came out.
IMO, that's why 3e succeeded so well. It brought back a huge swell of lapsed gamers - people who had stopped playing and stopped buying.
joe b.
That seems to be a common theme, and one which hadn't occurred to me, but primarily because this describes me minus 3 years. I had been out of role playing for about 9 years (between 1988 and 1997) due to a lot of circumstances. But I got back into 2e in 1997 after I had moved to a new city (in 96) and found new friends willing to play. So I started buying up 2e stuff that I didn't have. That was my initial hesitation to 3e, because I was saying "didn't I just start spending money on this again?!!?" (which, oddly enough is my attitude now, having just moved to 3.5 a year ago).
So I guess that's why I'm hesitant now, is because for me it's the same feeling as 8 years ago. However, the kicker is that I did move to 3e when I had a chance to read the rules. Wonder if that will happen again.
Greg
In WOTCs defence they seem to be very much on the same wavelength as Monte. See His Other D20 Articles. Some of the things I've noticed is that he claims that they choose the exact wrong number of spells for 3.0 (and presumably 3.5) and feels that a better system would have some resource management and some powers that where constantly available. Sounds a lot like spells divided into categories like at will, per encounter and per day to me. Some resource management but its not the end all and be all of the spell casters.
Another good example is the feats articles. He laments that the feat system does not work. Feats are too rare and powerful. Thus there is nearly no point in putting in cool but comparatively weak feats because players have so few choices that they really must go after the gold standard feats. They can't afford to take something just because its cool. The only way to get a player to take your new feat is to make it more powerful then the best of whats already out there and down this path lies unbalanced games. His solution is to increase the feats or assign different values to them. Sounds like feats and talents to me.