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Samwise wrote:

Believing the "roleplaying community at large" could gather the cash is one thing.
Believing Hasbro, notorious for not letting the least bit of IP escape its grasp, is quite another.



Well, seeing as how you believe it is possible Hasbro would give up the D&D IP, I suppose it is not that great a leap to believing this. Indeed, I am not even sure where to begin choking over the sheer . . . *something* . . . of this - I cannot even think of a word to describe it.
While I think many of the decisions made with 4E are utterly incorrect (to say the least), to truly believe that the great mass of any RPG system's fandom could collectively elevate the game system to a transcendent state of perfection is beyond anything I could even vaguely convince myself to believe.
Despite the few quality few quality designers out there, their efforts would be completely drowned out by the large quantities of material released by those who despite being decent, even exceptionable, adventure and setting book authors are completely incompetent to the task of actual rules design and development, and both would be utterly swamped by the tidal wave of absolute garbage that the "roleplaying community at large" would convert to pdfs or vanity publish, turning the D&D name into a trademark for nothing more than worthless and near-worthless fanfic.

I don't think that the entire group of RPG fans could elevate it to some perfect system. I do on the other hand believe that a select few could be voted in by said community that would be able to do it. Having a separate "council" if you will that decides on rule changes.

Then just like now the license would not allow the core mechanics of the D&D game to be changed or altered. Independent publishers could work within the system or tack rules on for their particular game products. This would work very well. If a supplement was seen to be too unbalanced. Players and DMs wouldn't buy it.

klausgreen wrote:

The real question is: Why even contemplate coming back for D&D5 ?

Because WOTC will SWEAR the the 5th edtion DnD computer tools will be ready on time and they will be great and not delayed like etools/ master tools or the 4th edtion tools.


Not like they have made promises like that before.

From what I understand, this is what happened witht he 4ed tools. This is just speculation from what I read online.

1. WOTC hires a young company to develop the 4th ed tools. They work on them and have basic demos/ mock ups ready for showing at cons, ect..

2. WOTC heavily promotes the tools, say they will be ready at 4th ed launch.

3. The company WOTC hired goes under, taking whatever code was done with them.

4. WOTC now has to start from square one. They don't want to hire another company and left with nothing again.

5. So they work on it themselves, getting out the character maker.

But one of the issues I see is the majority of people working on the DDi tools don't have much software programing experence. Plus IMO WOTC/ Hasbro does not want to hire the right people, so stuff gets delayed or dropped.

thaX wrote:

Any and all code is either leased by or owned by Wizards, not the company that was hired to produce the product. If this isn't the case, then it was a poorly executed contract.

While that is probably the case, there are some weird scenarios where if WotC pulled funding, the ownership of the code reverts to the development company. Of course this would be a rare case.

WolfStar76 wrote:

WotC learned from the backlash of the 3.0 to 3.5 leap that a 4.5 would be a VERY bad idea. They have stated that they have no intention of doing a 4.5.

I think the highly modular ruleset they went with does a good job of avoiding a 4.5 as well.

What is a "highly modular ruleset" supposed to be?
Do you mean something like Magic: The Gathering, where old sets are cycled out as new sets are released? When 4E-PHB4 is released, 4E-PHB1 is retired? I hated to break it to you, but such a modular system by definition increases the number of editions the game will go through, as is evident with M:tG.

Does that mean it ABSOLUTELY won't happen? No, WotC for better or worse, is flexible. But 4.0 would have to be proven to be VERY broken before they'd take that step.

Ah yes, the canard that 3.5 was broken, "VERY" or otherwise.
WotC has made a considerable effort to convince people of that, but every time they turn around they just prove it was more an issue of their staff attempting to force an edition change on the rules that caused the problems rather than any inherent flaw in the rules themselves.

They also said that they hope 4E will have a 10-year lifespan, as they see 10 years is sort of the natural progression for versions (if you count 3.x as a whole, instead of subdividing it into the two versions they meet that timeline well -whether that's a fair measuring stick or not is a matter that's subject to MUCH debate. I can see it as both fair AND unfair).

When did they say that?
And that directly contradicts the direct evidence and statements about 3E and 3.5 from Monte Cook.