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Dec 17, 2012 -- 2:46AM, Zardnaar wrote:

Blaming essentials though for 4th ed failing is probably a bit to simplistic. 3rd ed had a large pile of crap source books even if you liked 3rd ed (Epic Level Handbook, Deities and Demigods, the 3.0 psionics handbook).

That is not a very good comparison though. Any edition can have books that just aren't very good or are books that a wide audience doesn't need / want, but the Essentials line contained a number of books and a large swath of 4th edition players didn't want any of them, so when you go quite a while without seeing any releases that you want from a product line, people can wander away and might never come back. If instead, you release six new books in a row and even if only 40% of your audience likes each individual book, as long as it is not always the same 40% the likes / dislikes the books, then can you maintain audience attention.

Dec 17, 2012 -- 2:46AM, Zardnaar wrote:

I think the main problem is that alotof 4th ed players in the backlash against the edition wars got it in their head that 4th ed was a perfect ediiton and essentials was a it different.

So, your premise here is that 4th edition players didn't understand that Essentials wasn't a major departure from 4th edition and were wrong to not buy it?

I think it is more likely that because of DDI, any 4th edition book had to pass a threshold of useful flavour text before it was seen as a "good" purchase, because any random selection of classes, feats, powers, monsters, and magic items would show up in the various online tools without needing to buy the book. The essential products didn't really bring anything new to the table that players of 4th edition didn't already have since a big part of the books was dedicated to "how to play 4th edition" and who needs four copies of that? There were rule changes, but only small handful, so there was little need to buy two new PHBs and a new DMG for them. If Essentials had brought on larger changes, it probably would have sold better.

Dec 17, 2012 -- 2:46AM, Zardnaar wrote:

The hard core 4th ed fans were claiming things like yearly campaign settings and PHB/DMG etc were greeat ideas when they were not really. I mean what would you put in a PHBIV, V and VI? let alone a DMG III.

Well, let's unpack what you are saying here.

First, yearly campaign settings were a good idea and you can get a lot of coverage with this sort of thing. WotC seems very capable of creating interesting places for adventure (just look at what their creative department does over in MtG every year), and the 4-5 settings they made for 4th edition barely scrapes what the previous editions already displayed, let alone showing anything new. These books are fairly crunch light compared to regular splat books and you can get away with some new races, some new themes, some new options for existing classes, and handful of campaign-approparte paragon paths and epic destinies. Adding a new class is nice, but not really required once you add the crunch of all of the other things. Throw in some new monsters and a world description and you're done, or if you have a different enough location, like Dark Sun, maybe have a book dedicated to monsters as a way to throw in a bunch of desert-related ones that have been sitting around for a while.

Second, the yearly PHBs were glorified splat books with new races, classes, feats, and magic items. They released books like Heroes of Elemental Chaos, Heroes of Shadow, Heroes of the Feywild and they were all essentially the same thing, just more dedicated to a particular theme. To put it another way, PHB2 could have been called "Heroes of the Primal" and then trimmed of the crunch that didn't fit that theme and then filled with some extra background text to expand upon Primal stuff. As for what to put into PHB4 if it were to be placed today, I don't know, but I haven't spent any time really thinking about it. Maybe the days of adding new full classes are over and moving to parrallel classes like they did with the Skald and the Slayer and the Knight is a better way of moving forward, and if you are going to do that, there are probably a lot of options left to explore.

Third, the yearly DMGs are certainly a harder thing to continue, which is why they stopped after the second one. However, I think there was a place for a DMG3. The second DMG (DMG2) was mostly dedicated to Paragon-level things (encounters, adventures, and campaigns), and so it would feel natural for DMG3 to be mostly dedicated to Epic-levle things, to help DMs create interesting adventures at the hardest to use tier. The book could also have included the latest progress that WotC had made on Skill Challenges (a few more years of familiarity with them since DMG2 has probably offered new insights). I think there would be enough material to fill a book. After that, no, I don't think there would be much to go into a DMG4 or DMG5, but I don't really see anything wrong with that.

Dec 17, 2012 -- 2:46AM, Zardnaar wrote:

No edition of D&D could sustain that level of bloat for longer than maybe 5 years as you will start scrapping the bottom of the barrel in terms of design options (later 3.5 books had this problem and they had less crunch than 4th ed).

The nature of how they first created 4th edition classes, each with their own sets of unique powers, made it hard to create brand new classes without creating duplication in powers. This was made even worse by the dedicated feats that many classes got, which were limited to just that class. .But they solved this problem with Essentials when they created the sub-classes that got to leverage any of the parts of other classes that the designers wanted For example, the Slayer gets to use the Fighter's utility powers, feats, paragon paths, and epic destinies without any need for duplication, while still being a "new class" that felt quite different from the PHB Fighter. They also created Skill Powers and Themes, which allowed for a common pool of powers for multiple classes to draw from in place of their class powers. It is unfortunate they didn't think of that from the beginning, but it is certainly something that they could have exploited going forward to both continue to print splat books without creating too much bloat.