Rumor Mill

[Kain]

I've been seeing a bunch of rumors online recently saying that Wizards if quite possibly going to sell off D&D in favor of buying Pathfinder as their main RPG platform. Supposedly stores are reporting that Pathfinder is outselling 4th edition by quite a bit; I know I'm shocked as well.

Also most people fully expected that 5th edition would have been announced at Gen Con this past year, but since it wasn't it led many to believe that Wizards is looking to unload D&D, or at the very least they are unsure if they want to invest any more resources into it.

I'm not too affected by this either way because I'm still happy with 3.5 and have so much time and money invested into it would take a lot for me to completely switch to a new edition, even if a 5th edition came out and it was absolutely amazing and superior to 3.5 in every way.

[black heart]

the funny thing is that pathfinder IS DnD 3.5, with some mild upgrades, most people refer to it as 3.75 or 3.P. so they'd just be buying theyre own game.

[Reno]

^ Which is exactly why I have trouble believing this is anything more than a rumor.

For starters, nothing guarantees that Paizo is willing to sell anyway. They've done a fine job picking up many of the customers that Wizards abandoned when they moved on to a new edition, and so Paizo is probably doing comfortably. I'd be surprised if they had any desire to sell, whether or not Wizards is interested in buying.

Aside from that, the Dungeons & Dragons name still has marketability. Despite two terrible movies and a bunch of mediocre video games, it's still by far the most well-known tabletop RPG in the world, with the most history to it. Wizards would be crazy to sell that off unless they're getting out of the tabletop business entirely.

Nothing's stopping them from simply dropping 4th edition rules and either making another new edition or resurrecting the previous one if they want to. Would it look bad if they invented yet another new edition like 4 years after the last one? Definitely. But they could if they wanted to.

And like Alex said, most of Pathfinder is just 3.5 with a few rules changes. The core system it's built on is Wizards' own game, which they made publicly available for other companies to work with if they wanted to. All they would really be getting if they did buy Pathfinder is the right to use those exact rules changes, whatever new stuff like alchemists that Paizo put into the game, and the actual world that Pathfinder uses.

Wizards already owns a bunch of campaign worlds, so I don't see why they would care to buy up one more that only has a couple years of history to it. They've already got the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Ravenloft, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Dark Sun, Birthright, Spelljammer, and several others. Hell, if they wanted to they could convert some of the planes and worlds from Magic into campaign settings.

So really, all Wizards would be buying is a slight modification to their own game, and in exchange they would set aside the most famous RPG name in the world? I doubt it. If they really wanted to abandon 4th edition (and I'd be surprised), why not just bring back 3.5? I could see them maybe working out some sort of deal with Paizo where they also publish under the same rules in exchange for something, maybe Paizo getting to use some of the non-Open Game Content monsters or something.

But then who knows, maybe I'm wrong. It wouldn't be the strangest thing Wizards of the Coast ever decided to do.

[Reno]

To throw some fuel on the rumor fire:

www.examiner.com/rpg-in-national/is-monte-cook-working-on-5th-edition

The long and short of it is, Monte Cook (one of the main designers of 3rd edition, who also has his own publishing company Malhavoc Press that did the Book of Eldritch Might line and some other stuff) has been re-hired by Wizards of the Coast, and he's being secretive about why. Some people are speculating that he's been signed on to help design a 5th edition.


Now personally, if it's true I think it's a mistake. I don't have a lot of opinion one way or the other about Monte Cook, but a 5th edition is the last thing they should be doing right now. The fact is that they fractured the D&D community when they released 4e because a lot of people stuck with 3.5 or moved to Pathfinder. Of course, there have always been people playing the older editions, but I think (based only on my own observations, not any sort of real data) that the number of people who held on to 3.5 is significantly large.

A lot of people like 4th edition as well. So if Wizards of the Coast puts out a 5th edition, it's not going to win over most of the 3.5 folks because we're still playing what we play, and it's going to win over some but not all of the 4th edition folks. Some of them will just move on to play whatever the newest and currently-supported edition is, but 4e will have its people who refuse to move on just like 1st, 2nd, and 3rd had.

So if they DID design a 5th edition, it's going to accomplish two things:
1. fracturing the D&D community even further, which they do not want, and
2. adding fuel to their reputation for pumping out a new edition every couple of years, which is NOT a very good reputation to have.

It's possible that a hypothetical 5th edition could be more like 3.5 or Pathfinder, and could be WotC's attempt to recapture the customers they lost when they moved to 4e. I have my doubts that that will work though.

[black heart]

heh, i just had a stupid (or maybe genius) idea, what if they started releaseing source books, with stats and such, for each edition. In example, they print a new monster, and then give it 4 stat blocks, one for each edition of DnD. that way they can make money from all the people who play DnD, in all its forms!

though depending on how thorough they want to be, they'd need more like 6 stat blocks (ODnD, ADnD, 2nd edition ADnD , 3rd, 3.5, 4th.)

[Reno]

It seems I have overestimated Wizards of the Coast. I'm not sure why, since it's been pretty obvious to me that they haven't had a clue with regard to Magic for several years now, but I thought that when it came to D&D, they weren't this dumb.

That's right, they have officially announced a new edition. You'll notice that they specifically avoid using the term 5th Edition in that article, and I believe that's because on some level they know this is not a good idea.

If I was in charge at WotC, what I would do is continue to make 4th edition, but change the name. Don't call it D&D anymore since it's really not. Derisive comments about it being a pen & paper version of WoW aside, it abandoned way too many of D&D's signature elements (or call them sacred cows if you want) to deserve the name Dungeons & Dragons. It bears little to no resemblance to the game that's existed since the 70's, because it was designed as a completely new fantasy gaming system from the ground up rather than a revision or improvement of the game. Some people like it, so rather than abandon them the way Wizards abandoned the 3rd edition players, keep making products for that edition (but perhaps on a relaxed schedule) and call the game something else.

Then, as for this 5th edition, the best thing to do is what they should have done in the first place - make another revision to the 3.5 rules that actually builds off that edition rather than scrapping it and starting over. So, something more like what Pathfinder did, although I'm not familiar enough with specifics to say how much of Pathfinder's exact changes they should adopt.

Now supposedly they're going to try really hard to get customer feedback in developing this, and have people actually playtest the game this time around. So there is hope that we might actually get something that resembles Dungeons & Dragons this time, though I'll believe it when I see it.

[Kain]

Yeah I'm not surprised to see this honestly. They needed to do something because 4th edition crashed harder than a fat man sitting in a tiny chair. The only people that I found liking 4th edition were the morons at Astro that never played anything else prior.

[Reno]

Well those are the same doofuses that thought Wizards were terrible in 3rd edition, weren't they? Shows what they know.

And of course I remember Andy posted that he was converting to 4th, but that seemed to me more like misplaced hatred of the 3.5 changes than actual pro-4th edition sentiment. But then I never played a game of 4th with you guys (you did play one or two, didn't you?) so maybe I'm speaking in ignorance.

[Kain]

Yeah I played a couple games and it just felt too controlled and like I was playing World of Warcraft on a table. For example, wizards don't have spells anymore, they have abilities; but all classes have those, so wizards just have different abilities than say a fighter would. Nevertheless the abilities that a wizard has is no where near the spells you have at your access in 3.5 and you can't just learn a new ability like a wizard could learn a spell in 3.5. Probably the most maddening thing for me more than how the game plays is Wizards marketing rip off scheme. What I mean is that they pumped out 2 or 3 player's handbooks within the first year because they purposely left classes like Sorcerer and Monk out of the 1st players handbook. Other things they did was move magic items to the player's handbook, they moved templates to the DMG, and just did stupid little minor changes like saying magic items lose their value once they are bought; sort of stealing World of Warcraft's idea of binding gear to your soul once it is equipped.

They changed movement from 30 feet to 6 squares; which is great and all except when you have to use distance as a measurement; scale goes out the friggin window.

And of course you have the campaign settings that they butchered, even Forgotten Realms from what I read.

And just to comment a little more on the abilities that players have. Besides their standard abilities they get based on their class they get certain abilities depending on their hit points. At half hit points your considered bloodied, or something like that, and I think there is another state further down the hit point ladder. Also, everyone is able to heal!?!?!

[Reno]

I think I know what you mean about the way they changed classes. I felt a little bit of the same thing in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 - compared to the first game it felt like everybody basically played the same. You didn't have as wide a variety of powers to choose from, and it seemed like certain characters were way lower in power in order to make them play the same as everybody else. Honestly the only difference between most characters to me was the animation of their attacks because functionally most characters had similar abilities.

And yeah, they fucked up the Forgotten Realms pretty bad. They killed off a bunch of gods, revealed that some other gods weren't real, but just other gods in disguise for some dumbass reason, advanced the timeline by something like a hundred years which means inventing ways to keep certain characters alive and killing off a whole bunch more, and had some cataclysmic event called the Spellplague to give an in-world explanation for why magic is so much different in 4th edition. They probably did more besides that, but that's what I remember.

I mean obviously there needed to be some kind of in-world explanation for the difference in magic system, although personally I feel that ditching Vancian spellcasting (as the spells per day system is called) sort of makes it not really D&D. Anyway, I think they went way overboard in changing the world, and it's pretty clear it's just because they wanted to get away from the established canon so they could make it their own. I suppose I should be glad they didn't reboot it entirely, but I still think it's a bunch of bull.