Dungeons & Dragons Retreats, Goes Back to the Drawing Board?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 11, 2012

On Monday, Wizards of the Coast (WotC, part of Hasbro) officially announced development of yet another new edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and the story has surprisingly been picked up by such publications as Forbes and The New York Times. Fourth Edition, we hardly knew you.

Why change now (which still feels sudden)? Besides the fact that WotC has gotten into the habit of changing editions the moment the current edition has started to feel to “mature” and players are finally used to the rules? Well, a lot of things have been said, but what it boils down to as best as I can figure is this: Third Edition (probably not coincidentally with an Open Gaming License) blew away their wildest expectations, and Fourth Edition (without nearly such an open gaming license) failed to meet expectations.

WotC even clamped down and removed all copies of older versions of their games from digital sales channels. Why? Because players were stocking up on older edition stuff. Why? Sounds like there was a perception that the older games were superior among the fan base. This has always been an issue amongst a subset of the fan base – but that wasn’t a problem with 3E. If that perception is so high amongst your fans that the new version is inferior to your previous offerings, you have a real problem that just making your older product hard to acquire isn’t going to solve.

And it didn’t. Among other things, open-gaming-license-powered Pathfinder came along – largely as a response to Wizard’s clamping down on the “open gaming” thing and trying to put third-party publishers “back in their place.” The new GSL for fourth edition really put the fate of the third-party publishers completely in the hands of WotC. So Paizo decided (late into the process) to do their own thing, with a fraction of WotC’s clout and cash, and over the last couple of years  pretty much eaten D&D‘s lunch. I understand it is now out-selling D&D 4E, though I strongly doubt its total sales have been able to trump 4E’s totals since 2008.  But it doesn’t need to. It’s a major victory regardless.

Now, I don’t know how much the open gaming license(s) affected the success of these games. Maybe there are people at WotC/Hasbro who think that the Open Gaming License, which enabled Pathfinder to happen, is the source of all their woes (and there are folks who formerly worked at WotC who now work at Paizo and elsewhere who seem to feel like the “open gaming” thing was the primary source of 3.0’s success, too).

I can only relate my personal experiences. I may be unique and weird in all this, but that’s how it worked out for me. This is entirely “my take on things,” which reveals more about my own mindset and play style than it does about D&D. It’s colored heavily by my own perceptions (and frustrations).

I (mostly) gave second edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons a miss. Oh, I bought the core rulebooks (eventually), and played some 2E in its computerized RPG incarnation (Yay, Baldur’s Gate!).  But around the time 2E came out, I had moved on to the Hero gaming system from 1st edition.

Why? Mainly because I liked the flexibility of the Hero system. Which turned out to be its biggest fault, as well, but at the time, with the highly constrained class-based 1E and 2E systems, it was exactly what I needed. (This was before they came out with all the splatbooks with a hundred class variants which, of course, everyone needed a copy of the splatbooks on-hand to use, though they did have a tiny rule section on constructing your own classes.) I was also not too thrilled with the tone and style of the second edition — I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, but it “felt” too clean, too lacking in whatever mysterious charm the earlier editions had possessed.

Later, I discovered that TSR (then the owners of the D&D property) had largely changed hands and creative staff, and had made a concentrated effort to… well, “dumb down” the game. They’d deliberately written the game to appeal to younger readers, and to remove any material that had ever been used to generate free publicity from fringe groups in the early 1980’s. Evil could never be characterized as competent and powerful (this was in the writer’s guidelines for TSR). Demons and devils were no more… and were later brought back with an explanation that they were simply evil alien races from an alternate dimension. Um, yeah. The “flavor” thing. Sure, for a good Dungeon Master it didn’t make a lick of difference… the new rules were cleaner and more complete but basically the same, and a good DM could provide his own flavor. But it just didn’t hook me.

Hero had its own problems and frustrations, some of which I noted in a recent article on skill-based and class-based RPG systems. We were ready for a change when third edition Dungeons & Dragons was announced. It had three things going for it:

1. Old-school flavor. At least that was the perception from my end, having played Hero system as our primary game for a decade. It felt like it was written, once again, for adults (or reasonable mature teens). It felt like an old, familiar friend. (And in the meantime, we’d gone back and played a one-off D&D game and remembered how fun it was).
2. A radically redesigned game system that tried (and largely, IMO, succeeded) to combine the best of class-based and skill-based rules system. It had built-in flexibility not present in earlier editions. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a giant leap in the right direction.
3. The “open gaming license,” which for me (remembering the years of TSR sending C&D’s to fans for their D&D websites) meant one thing: Huge third-party support. And that was exactly what happened. Too huge, actually, as even the huge demand couldn’t keep up with the exploding, pent-up supply of materials.

I was thrilled. I was converted. My gaming group made the (somewhat painful) switch to D20, gradually figured out the rules, and had a blast for several years. We switched to 3.5 somewhere in there, which caused a bit of confusion and frustration for a bit as we’d forget what rules had changed, and everyone had to upgrade to new books. It seemed we’d barely hit our stride with 3.5 when Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons was announced.

That was one strike against it – it felt far too soon for us, especially considering it was going to be another radical redesign of the system. But then, once it was released, it had none of the three benefits 3E had enjoyed (in my mind). The licensing was really not “open” at all and potential third party publishers were alarmed and disgruntled. On paper, the game seemed a totally different fantasy game that had little in common with previous editions of D&D, so there wasn’t a perceived need in my mind to “keep up” with the game… the new system was a totally new game that was D&D in name only. And finally, the rules system felt like it went into the completely opposite direction, trending towards less flexibility and even more rules-bound than 3.x had been (which made the Game Master feel like more of a referee than a participant and storyteller).

And most importantly – we were still having fun with 3.5, and the radical redesign of the game system didn’t address any of the perceived weaknesses in 3.5 that we felt needed to be fixed. It was filling a need that didn’t exist. I guess it did exist – the need to attract new players to the game system rather than appealing to us old gaming farts – but it wasn’t our need.

And that’s where Pathfinder came in. In my mind, the biggest boost Pathfinder could have received came from Wizards of the Coast’s decision to cancel all digital distribution agreements on their older systems. This total jerk move on WotC’s part made staying with 3.5 an expensive proposition (if you wanted to do it legally), and extremely difficult to bring in new players for. It torpedoed any potential for lingering third-party support of 3.5.  It painted Wizards of the Coast as the “bad guys,” especially when digital sales channels had to explain to customers why they would no longer be able to re-download copies of PDFs that they had purchased. And it sent a signal to many of us that WotC had no confidence in their newest edition of the game, as they had to protect it from older versions.

But here was Pathfinder, all ready to fill all those needs. It was readily available, happy to have third-party support, addressed many of the weaknesses of 3.x D&D without radically transforming the experience, and still maintained much of that “old-school” D&D flavor (not as much as 3.x, but a lot more than 4.0, in my mind). Plus, it was every bit as polished and cool as D&D had been (partly because many of the same people who’d worked on the previous editions were now working on Pathfinder).

Also, the Pathfinder guys were very, very active in soliciting playtesting feedback from the community during development – a playbook page that Wizards of the Coast now seems to be trying to emulate for their next edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

For me, it feels like WotC destroyed a lot of the faith and goodwill they gained from me in the early 3E days. I think some great game designers put some really hard work into making a good game system that looks to be a lot of fun to play. To me, 4E was unnecessary, and the decision to make it was a money- and control-grab on the part of the higher-ups at WotC / Hasbro, cannibalizing its fanbase to go after some larger potential market. They didn’t make the game for me, and they didn’t make a game I really wanted to play. Paizo did.

Paizo acted like the white knight, rescuing the game system in a lot of ways for me, and doing a really solid job making Pathfinder a game I really, really enjoy. So I now look at the upcoming new edition of D&D with mainly academic interest. I can’t say I’m excited about the game system at this point.  And part of me just wants to say, “Neener, neener!” to WotC for having treated me poorly in their revenue-generation calculations.  For my gaming group right now, there’s really not much chance that a new edition of D&D will win us over. Its only chance would be to capitalize on some act of massive stupidity on Paizo’s part – the same way Paizo capitalized on WotC’s massive blunders. Otherwise, I don’t see us being very enthusiastic to buy a NEW set of rulebooks for everyone in our group and learn a whole new set of rules for our Saturday night games.

I really hope that doesn’t happen.

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