4E, PF, and us - from my PoV

If we/I disliked 4E so much, why didn’t we switch to Pathfinder (PF), or an OSRIC type game?
There’s no single answer for that.

First off let’s say that money had a part in it.
For us to stop playing D&D and play another game, we individually would have to invest in at least one player’s book each, plus the GM would probably need more. Even PF having an SRD wouldn’t make that as easy as would be preferred. We all prefer to have a book to read versus a pdf on a tablet.
Having 4-7 people spend $40+ each when many of us aren’t in a position to just casually spend that much forced us to pass.

Second, 3E had developed a large bunch of power gaming munchkins, and rumor had it that PF fed them more.
We met so many people who played that just abused the hell out of the game, making the most insane and over the top PCs. And PF gave them more options?
So we labeled the game as munchkin-bait, and passed.

Third, rules and math and math and rules make a game un-fun.
Pathfinder had been described at 3.75E, meaning it updated the 3.5 rules set.
While we heard it made changes to a lot of the game itself, we heard nothing about improving high level play. So we passed. (In case you’ve not read it on this blog before, we loved 3E until it hit high level play, at that point the game became progressively slower.)

Fourth, we were burned out on reading rules.
While this isn’t as big as the others, reading yet another giant book of rules just felt distasteful.
Rules fatigue made us pass, even though we didn’t know the extent of rules difference from 3.5 to PF.

Fifth, and quite importantly, getting players means playing the latest editions.
At the time we saw PF as a niche game, and not the D&D competitor it is now. And it was being played by munchkins, people we didn’t want at our table.
You really can’t play anything but the newest games unless you know the right kind of people. This applies to OSRIC as well.
So we had no choice but to pass.

Later we would find out that PF had grown beyond its original munchkin player base, but it was too late to grab our interest. The window had closed.
While we heard encouraging words from those who played PF and we trusted their opinions, there wasn’t enough to light any fires of interest.

I did buy the PF core book, but that’s as far as our group has gone. I’ve opened a few times, casually read some things, said “just like 3E”, and closed the book.

But what I want to know is, happened to 4E?
Why did a whole edition change so radically that the designers had to know it would cost them players?
Why did they stop releasing product, effectively handing their player base over to PF?

I’ve heard rumors, guessed at some things, and read internet postings by people who are on the inside or were once on the inside of the decision-making processes.

Individually, these rumors mean little. But if more than one hit about the same time, then the damage grows.

First rumor: World of Warcraft was killing tabletop gaming.
That’s not quite right. Easy access online gaming was and is killing tabletop gaming.
Why read complicated books and hope others join you someday when you can just tap a button on a tablet, phone, console, or PC?
Starfleet Battles was a huge game 25 years ago, but it is dead now. No one wants to play a game for hours that requires hours and hours of reading to play, especially if there is something easier and faster to play on an electronic system.
The amount of work that is needed to play a pen and paper game can be over the top when compared to playing a casual MMO (unless you play hardcore).
Tabletop gaming is losing more and more players to MMOs and those who do play are getting older.

Second rumor: 4E tanked.
Sure the core books sold well, but most books afterwards sold progressively fewer than the book before.
Even the novels, supposedly a nice bit of income for WotC/Hasbro, weren’t doing well.
I only owned seven 4E rulebooks, and four of them were Christmas presents. Guess what the other three were.
While I haven’t interviewed or surveyed anyone, I believe this to be a common thing. 4E just didn’t click with enough established gamers to create a sustaining force for it to continue.

Third rumor: There were legal issues about D&D and D&D-related properties (such as PC-games and movies) that threw a lot into question about who owned what.
This may mean nothing, and my research into it is slight, but I include it because of the timing. If one of these lawsuits crippled the profitability of the D&D brand, that loss of revenue has to be made up.
WotC stopped releasing books around this time. Was it because the books didn’t sell anymore, or did they not want to write a bunch of books any receive nothing for it if a lawsuit ruined things for them?

Now add in a few things like the total lack of a real OGL/SRD (which gets others to support your game with their stuff), the all-but-needed online-only tool for $10 a month (no thanks), broken promises (online PDFs and a virtual tabletop), and so on and you have yourself a bad situation for a game that leads an entire market.
Mix all of that together and you get yourself a nasty downward spiral.

Third Edition created a new golden age of D&D. The D20 system lured other publishers to use it with the OGL and new publishers appeared just to use that OGL. This created a larger and larger player base.
Fourth Edition threw it all away, including our interest in D&D.
Pathfinder wasn’t for us either.

First Impression of 5E

Recently I had the opportunity to buy the 5E PHB and read a large amount of it.
Prior to that I’d read little on ENWorld. What I read barely interested me. I would mainly just skim the headline and think “whatever” or “meh”. I was still too irritated by 4E to trust anything from WotC.
I had also been to a playtest on a Wednesday night. It did absolutely nothing to impress me. The DM was good, but I was playing with 13-18 year old kids for two hours and all I saw was a battlemat and no role-playing. It reminded me of 4E with a few changed mechanics.

4E destroyed D&D for me. And from everything I’ve heard, the people who made 5E made 4E and Eberron. The direction D&D was heading was not for me.
4E created a schism in the D&D rpg world. It brought in a lot of new players, but older players (like me) did not see 4E as D&D at all, but instead as some miniatures game dressed up in a D&D skin.
I had bought the Pathfinder core book, but it didn’t do anything for me. It was 3.5 updated and smoothed out, but it didn’t fix what was wrong with 3.5 – it still breaks down at higher levels.
By the time we dropped 3E as a group, we were truly done with it as we had explored it pretty thoroughly. We’re not a group who just changes campaigns every few weeks and we like to hit the higher levels.
4E was supposed to fix all of that. It not only didn’t do that, it made it worse.
Now they’re saying 5E will fix that.
I’m sure you can understand my skepticism at such a claim.
But money talks, and Hasbro wants their money. They hosed up 4E and thanks to some legal issues, they stopped printing books a while ago and allowed Pathfinder to grab the lion’s share of the market. So 5E has to please the 4E people and lure back both the Pathfinder players and the grognards who abandoned D&D entirely.
And that leads to the 5E PHB. I really wanted to just give the finger to Hasbro and find something else to play, but there is nothing really that interests me and interests others.
I’m not going back to WoW, that’s for damn sure.
A lot of people were saying how 5E fixed things, and not all of them were fan boys of 4E. So I figured that I need to at least take a look at 5E and give it a fair shake.
I was going on a weeklong vacation, with plenty of opportunities to read, and the PHB was released the day before that vacation. The alignment of coincidences was perfect.
I read through it and, well, I was a tiny bit impressed and not irritated with what I read.
Nothing jumped out at me that screamed awesome, but they definitely have put the effort into the books to bring back pre-4E D&D while keeping the one thing 4E did well (balance).
There appears to be no front loading of classes, which makes “dipping” style multiclassing less desirable. Multiclassing appears to be mostly the same as 3E, but you often get less value from multiclassing, but not so little that it would be stupid to do it.
An example from 3E: you make a fighter, and then add some barbarian levels to get the rage ability, and the rest are all fighter levels. This nets you a barbarian with a lot of feats, in spite of mostly being a fighter.
In 5E, fighters get multi-attacks and barbarians don’t, so if you had a fighter who took some levels in barbarian to get rage, you get your multi-attack a little later in levels. It’s about an equal trade.
That way you could do it for role-playing reasons, but not be crippled in combat because rage is nice, but perhaps not as nice as bonus attacks a few levels later.
Melee classes have subclasses that have spells built into them, rather than having to cripple themselves to get a little of both.
Pure caster classes appear to be able to mix without watering down their abilities, or have to add in hybrid prestige classes.

Also, every two levels you don’t double in power like in 3E. You definitely do get more powerful, but it’s not exponentially so. That should make balancing combats less of a nightmare for the DM. 3E combats were often either perfectly balanced, boring pushovers, or TPKs. There were no shades in between.

Combat on a grid is no longer required, but there are enough rules there that you could if you wanted.
Grid combat is a slippery slope.
When you start playing D&D, you don’t need minis or a map, until something happens that forces you to.
We’ve all had that player who could magically be anywhere immediately. Then there’s the argument that stems the miscommunication of who was where.
So you add a simple map to represent generally where people are.
At some point the map becomes less vague and more exact.
The next thing you know you’re planning combats on a grid and somehow the role-playing and storylines take the back seat to the combats.
At that point you’ve stopped playing a role-playing game and are instead playing a combat simulation game.
And I was very guilty of this. I slowly transitioned into it during 3E, and was fully fledged doing it during 4E.

I disliked 2E pretty harshly for all the worthless junk it had released but I had some of the best memories from the 2E era because of the role-playing done then.
I hated 4E for turning the game into a pure miniatures game and nothing more.
I grew tired of 3E for the math and rules bloat.

5E has to somehow not publish a ton of pointless junk splatbooks, lure players back, reduce the math, make the battle mat purely an option, keep options open, and open it up to role-playing again.
And from what little I’ve read so far, the potential is there.
You’ve got my interest again WotC.
Now try to keep it.

What We Have Been Doing

Well it’s been over a year since I updated the blog, so it’s way past due to do so.

What have we been doing?
We kept playing 2E up until January when we had to stop due to number of players.
I had to stop DMing because my work and home life had gotten way too busy. I couldn’t even half-ass prepare a game night, much less update the blog.
I even stopped playing WoW, but that was more out of boredom and the cost of time invested versus time enjoyed.
So I handed over the DM reins to Dale. Then he got sick and basically we skipped nearly two months of playing. And that of course kills the mood.

Instead of calling nights off, we started playing board games. And we started enjoying that more than D&D.
D&D was becoming un-fun to us. It was almost turning into a chore. We goofed off more than actually played.
Discussions of how to fix it came up with nothing. We couldn’t agree on a version of D&D to play. Additionally, we weren’t sure we wanted to play D&D at all. Ideas of role-playing games other than D&D didn’t catch any traction either (spending money and finding time to read books isn’t as easy as I’d like).

But we did enjoy the board games.

It started with Mike, Aaron, and I playing Lords of Waterdeep a couple Fridays when Dale had to cancel at the last minute. Then we added Settlers of Catan. And we really enjoyed both games.
A few months later we tried out Stone Age, Arkham Horror, Eldritch Horror, Zombies!!!, Starfleet Battles, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic, No Thanks!, Discworld: Ankh-Morpork, Small World, Munchkin, Tsuro, Fury of Dracula, Zombie Dice, Castle Ravenloft, and probably a couple I’ve forgotten.
Each game was received with varying levels of interest, but we tried to give every game a reasonable chance. No one wants to spend $25-$80 on a game and never play it, and we were all pitching in and buying a game or two.

We’ve determined that Dale loves cooperative games and I’m not a fan. Dale likes the teamwork while I feel that playing against a set of rules is not fun.
Settlers of Catan and Lords of Waterdeep are probably our most liked games.

But we can’t keep this up.
Mike and Will have not shown up much since we stopped playing D&D. And we’ve had few people join us to play board games.
The advantage of board games is that you don’t usually need to learn a ton of rules like D&D does and you don’t have to worry about showing up from one week to the next and lose out on XP or story. So that allows some freedom of who can join in.
We’re still a role-playing group, so we’re probably on a time limit of when we need to choose to switch back to RPGs or just disband (again).

We discussed this for a bit a week ago (we being Aaron, Dale, and me).
The conclusion we’ve come to: After the shiny newness of D&D 5th Edition has worn off, we’ll take a solid look at it.
We’ll get the general views of people on ENWorld and others, and see what their collective opinions are.

If 5E has been a big success, we’ll give it a chance.
If it’s received a neutral opinion, we may still give it a chance.
If it’s flopped, we’ll have to go back to the drawing board.