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Mar 9, 2013 -- 9:00PM, Zardnaar wrote:

Mar 9, 2013 -- 7:53PM, strider13x wrote:

I think D&D Next has the potential to be the simplest, easiest version of the game yet which could bring in many new players! Hasbro doesn't make GI Joe's and My Little Pony for people that played with them 10 years ago, they reinvent them for the current audience. To me, Bumblebee will forever be a VW bug, but my son only knows him as a Camaro. All of those toy lines disappeared for a while, but came back when the kids of the 80s started having kids of their own. Now D&D is looking to reinvent itself and allow those 1st and 2nd edition folks to come back and introduce D&D to their kids. I'm one! My son and I are looking forward to D&D Next! I am sure Hasbro has a good grasp on what they are doing.

Original D&D was aimed at kids and teenagers. AD&D ate it up though and the released the Rules Cyclopedia in 1990/91.

 I went from BECM to AD&D 2nd ed in 1995 as I wanted some level of complexity. They may be able to bring in a new generation of D&D players but 4th ed had starter sets and so did AD&D and  IDK about 3rd ed. 

 D&DN is not that simple at least not like orignial D&D all those years ago was sime where monster could have a 1 sentence or pargraph stat block and the classes had no class features. We had a AD&D session scheduled today for example and instad of playing we have spent the day as a group looking through the Myth and Magic retro clone which is basically a 2nd ed and 3rd ed hybrid with some elements of 4th ed in it. it is better balanced than 3rd ed, better balanced than 2nd ed, is simple to play, d20 mechanics, and offers 10 classes (3rd ed ones minus sorcerer) and it offers a decent level of customsation via overhauled proficiencies from 2nd ed and talents which resemble feats from 3rd ed but there are not so many of them.

 Put simple it has most of the advantages of 2nd and 3rd ed and few of the negatives although I suspect balance at elast as 4th ed players would understand it is not there at the higher levels and level 1-3 maybe. No CoDzilla is good enough for me and I can tweak the attack numbers if need be for levle 10+ by adding 3rd ed BAB for the Rogue and Cleric to help them out. The game also feels like a professional product, art is not brilliant but it doesn't suck either and avoids the cartoony aspects of Pathfinders art. Its also not that hard to convert 3rd ed and D&DN things to it either and I can run the game on Gloarion, or the Realms and I can mod in things from the Tome of Magic.

 It feels like D&D anyway and D&DN is a beige bland boring mess. I know its a playtest but it looks like we're gonna be stuck with things like bounded accuracy and boring classes. 

Your history is almost entirely wrong. The original D&D was aimed mostly at existing wargamers, generally a college-age-and-up crowd. That it turned out to be accessible enough for Gygax's kids (younger than that at the time) was a nice bonus. The first ("Holmes" or "Blue box") basic set and AD&D were developed at about the same time in the late 70s, both with the goal of making it into a stand-alone game comprehensible to people without a wargaming background, but didn't really aim to bring down the target age. The first products that aimed to be accessible to kids - though even they were not aimed solely at that audience - were the "Mentzer" or "BECMI" rules, which were the third go at a basic set, and contrary to popular belief, came several years AFTER AD&D.

By the way, it would be very hard to find ANYTHING that is balanced so poorly that Myth and Magic would be an improvement! You'll have a great deal of difficulty making combat of any kind challenging under those rules, I think - the polar opposite of "old-school".

Mar 10, 2013 -- 5:39AM, Samrin wrote:

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It really isn't. It just takes a barebones core that you can plug the modular options into. The fact that they've gone with a core that lacks the ability to do that and has controversial elements locked in is what is preventing it from being a modular system.

This is a really important point. Either they're really not thinking things through, or at the very least design and marketing aren't on the same page about what they're trying to accomplish.

Mar 10, 2013 -- 11:58AM, jeff-heikkinen wrote:

Mar 9, 2013 -- 5:26PM, CarlT wrote:

Point of Order:  THey didn't 'choose' Atari.  Atari bought the electronic division of Hasbro games and along with that got the license to the electronic versions of all games made by Hasbro.


D&D just happened to be a part of that deal - not a separate outsourcing decision.


Carl

Initially that was true, but they separately renewed the license for D&D at least once after it was already pretty obvious that this was a bad idea.

It's important to remember,  Hasbro had no idea what to do with video gaming at that point,  and didn't see it fitting into their core business direction.  At that point in time,  break even for a video game was around 100,000 units,  which is probably less than the number of barbies Hasbro shipped in one week.

Even MMORPG's at that point in time were only a few hundred thousand players at very best,  and commonly more like 100,000.

Hasbro wanted some kind of ROI on the Microprose brand they bought,  and tossed in the D&D brand probably figuring one publisher was as good as the next.  They completely misread the market and did not foresee the digital conversion of the early 00's that occurred after they signed the 15 year agreement IIRC.     

Mar 10, 2013 -- 12:44PM, anjelika wrote:

The biggest problem that I see is that DDN is trying to merge two distinctly seperate playstyles into some kind of hybrid amalgamation: the world-gamers and the game-gamers.

Well you might be right on some level, this kind of observation can only lead to onetruewayism....

Now I won't say one is superior to the other or anything like that

Good luck with that.  

Any kind of 'there are two kinds of gamers...' analysis is going to be wrong, because it's only one of many possible ways to slice the group down some imagined middle.  Here's another, I honestly believe it, but it's not any more valid than yours:

There are two kinds of D&D.  Classic (20th century) and Modern (21st).  

Classic D&D is a DMs game, and the players are his playthings.  The game is what the DM makes of it.  If he makes it 'storytelling,' or 'worldbuilding,' the players influence the telling of the story or building of the world only in as much as the DM lets them.  If he makes it a game about gaming, the players win or lose at his whim.  If he uses D&D as a jumping off point to build his own system through extensive house rules his players don't question it.

Modern D&D is the players' game.  Their characters are the center of it, and whether they're contributing to the narrative with a storytelling emphasis, or optimizing in a play-to-win campaign, their fate is in their hands.  The DM is a moderator, he interprets the rules when necessary, but has to justify changing them, if the group will tollerate deviating from the 'RAW' at all.


I have to prefer the player-empowered game.  It's just more participative, and lets 5 or 6 people take responsibility for their own fun, rather than one take responsitivity for everyones.  And, while it's not the same power trip to DM, it is a lot easier.


But, I doubt very much that a game can really do both.  I doubt a game could give you both your 'world gamer' ideal, and the alternative that you find incompatible with it.


However, it may be that in any of these dichotomies, there's one that's more compatible (less incompatible) with inclusion and flexibility.

In my division, for instance, a DM-empowerment game would necessarily allow a DM to re-craft the game into a player-empowering one.  Thus it's the more flexible/inclusive approach.  Hmm... I rather hate that conclusion.  Damn logic.

In your division, the game-gaming approach leaves open the possibility of filling in fluff to match the mechanics to the world you imagine.  Thus it's the moreflexible/inclusive approach.


Combine the two, and you have a very flexible game.  

That requires a lot of creative and game-design mojo from the DM.

Probably you could then sell 'genre' or 'style' or 'world' books that customize the game to settings or add in player-empowerment options or whatever is missing but desireable to the less inclusive half of any fan-imagined dichotomy.

Mar 9, 2013 -- 4:53PM, stoloc wrote:

One thing I have seen from ex-wotc folks or folks very close to the situation is a major difference between wotc and companies like paizo is that wotc is run by the suits for the suits while paizo (and others) are run by gamers for gamers.
 

Thank God for that. Gamers writing games for other gamers results in a tiny subsection of the bookstore carrying any RPG material, and their inecxplicable *total absence* from toy stores.  Maybe the suits can carry out some actual market research and find out what the public at large wants out of a game and help the designers put a product on the shelves which might appeal to more than a few scanty niche gamers.