Best Version of DnD?

[TheAuldGrump]

2 hours ago, Dr.Bedlam said:

 

Yup. We tried for a while, we really did. But it came down to "We could be playing WoW on LAN, and it'd be easier on the DM."

 

 

Well, the Drizz't stuff has been a big pushy moneymaker. And yesterday, I was surprised to see a wall of 40k novels at Barnes & Noble... as well as omnibus reissues of "The Dark Elf Saga." In multiple volumes.

My main gripe with this is when the tail wags the dog. I liked the 40k Ciaphas Cain novels, because they were FUNNY, to an extent -- more than just grimdark GRIMDARK DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA DIE HERETIC, if you know what I mean. The author was allowed some flexibility, and he ran with it. Seems like the last few 40K and D&D novels I've read, this is no longer allowed. In particular, the time skip from 3rd to 4th edition covered a hundred years, turned Elminster into a sad old hermit, and wiped out Drizz't's entire supporting cast; Salvatore had to do some fancy dancing to save popular villain Artemis Entreri. Yeesh! Toy executives need to stay out of the writing decisions; these were the people who thought a Battleship movie would be a good idea...

 

Mad Jack, I ain't gonna quote your large post, but I agree with you for the most part (Heh. "Talking about Fight Club." NICELY put.) D&D is an example of a cultural phenomenon what just GREW, not an example of a well designed game. It evolved from war games by Avalon Hill and the like, and a fondness for miniatures. The first games of D&D I ever played, we didn't even USE minis. They were barely mentioned in the books because the assumption was that you were so immersed in the culture, you WERE using minis, so why belabor the point? And part of the problem is that there's enough old grunts like me left that we didn't WANT a beautifully designed game with lots of moving parts and accessories... we wanted D&D.

Hasbro lost touch with the base, and they paid for it; now they've realized, and suddenly, I can buy PDFs of old books and modules ...as opposed to the old paradigm, which was "If we let them have PDFs, others will just pirate them and cut into our profits. Better to sit on our catalogue and make NO money than to enable PIRATES!"

...which I interpreted as "You're so afraid of pirates, you're going to make certain that the only way to get old product is by piracy?" Fortunately, wiser heads seem to have prevailed. In particular, Tales From The Yawning Portal is just a big love letter to the grognards. 

As to healing surges... yes, I understood the REASON for the game mechanic. And I was aware of the fact that I didn't like it because THAT'S NOT HOW WE USED TO DO THINGS! &%$#@ IT, USED TO BE IF NO ONE WANTED TO PLAY THE %$#@ CLERIC, THE PARTY HAD TO SUCK IT UP! Yeah. Whining. And 4th edition addressed that. And that's one of the reason 4th didn't feel like D&D -- worrying about your hit points, nursing your potions, and when to find a secluded place to camp and heal up was part of the GAME... in my day.

Hell, so were interactions with the gate guards, and the fairies. 4E just tried too dratted hard to codify what was and what wasn't fun... as opposed to earlier editions of the game that just said, "Here's a bunch of rules and other stuff. Use what seems right at your own table, and go have fun."

And there lies the difference between a bunch of grognards turned game publishers... and a multibazillion dollar toy company...

One minor correction - it was not Hasbro that chose the direction for 4e, nor were they the ones that decided to get rid of the PDFs - that was all WotC. (Somewhere, out there in Interweb Land, is a video of a Hasbro exec publicly claiming that they had nothing to do with 4e, that as far as the parent company was concerned 3.X and the OGL were doing their job.... He looked... cranky - enough so that I kind of suspect that he was among the folks that had been disgruntled by the new edition.

 

Mind you, if the new target number was what spurred WotC on their charge into lunacy, then Hasbro was not exactly blameless in the matter - just not the folks that were the active participants.

 

The Auld Grump

[Auberon]

I located my $50 million figure.  The information below comes courtesy of Ryan Dancey, he of OGL fame.  First, a short summary for those that don't want to read a block of text.

 

In 2005 3.5E D&D was a $25-30 million dollar company as Hasbro counted such things.  Hasbro set a target of $50 million for core brands with a growth path to $100 million.  The D&D team needed a plan or else the brand could get the ax, and in 2006 gave a presentation for a new edition of the game, combined with a subscription toolset (D&D Insider) and a virtual tabletop (VTT).  Unfortunately Melissa Batten, who was working on the VTT, was murdered by her estranged husband and the full DDI experience wasn't ready in time for launch.  In fact, it was never completed, which is why you sometimes hear 4E referred to as "half a game."

 

Let's just think about that required growth for a moment.  $25 million to $100 million for an established brand.  If you can't do it, the brand is gone.  What ideas would you come up with?

 

Quote

Sometime around 2005ish, Hasbro made an internal decision to divide its businesses into two categories. Core brands, which had more than $50 million in annual sales, and had a growth path towards $100 million annual sales, and Non-Core brands, which didn't.

Under Goldner, [Brian Goldner, Hasbro's COO in 2006 & CEO in 2008] the Core Brands would be the tentpoles of the company. They would be exploited across a range of media with an eye towards major motion pictures, following the path Transformers had blazed. Goldner saw what happened to Marvel when they re-oriented their company from a publisher of comic books to a brand building factory (their market capitalization increased by something like 2 billion dollars). He wanted to replicate that at Hasbro.

Core Brands would get the financing they requested for development of their businesses (within reason). Non-Core brands would not. They would be allowed to rise & fall with the overall toy market on their own merits without a lot of marketing or development support. In fact, many Non-Core brands would simply be mothballed - allowed to go dormant for some number of years until the company was ready to take them down off the shelf and try to revive them for a new generation of kids.

At the point of the original Hasbro/Wizards merger a fateful decision was made that laid the groundwork for what happened once Greg took over. Instead of focusing Hasbro on the idea that Wizards of the Coast was a single brand, each of the lines of business in Wizards got broken out and reported to Hasbro as a separate entity. This was driven in large part by the fact that the acquisition agreement specified a substantial post-acquisition purchase price adjustment for Wizards' shareholders on the basis of the sales of non-Magic CCGs (i.e. Pokemon).

This came back to haunt Wizards when Hasbro's new Core/Non-Core strategy came into focus. Instead of being able to say "We're a $100+ million brand, keep funding us as we desire", each of the business units inside Wizards had to make that case separately. So the first thing that happened was the contraction you saw when Wizards dropped new game development and became the "D&D and Magic" company. Magic has no problem hitting the "Core" brand bar, but D&D does. It's really a $25-30 million business, especially since Wizards isn't given credit for the licensing revenue of the D&D computer games.

It would have been very easy for Goldner et al to tell Wizards "you're done with D&D, put it on a shelf and we'll bring it back 10 years from now as a multi-media property managed from Rhode Island". There's no way that the D&D business circa 2006 could have supported the kind of staff and overhead that it was used to. Best case would have been a very small staff dedicated to just managing the brand and maybe handling some freelance pool doing minimal adventure content. So this was an existential issue (like "do we exist or not") for the part of Wizards that was connected to D&D. That's something between 50 and 75 people.

Sometime around 2006, the D&D team made a big presentation to the Hasbro senior management on how they could take D&D up to the $50 million level and potentially keep growing it. The core of that plan was a synergistic relationship between the tabletop game and what came to be known as DDI. At the time Hasbro didn't have the rights to do an MMO for D&D, so DDI was the next best thing. The Wizards team produced figures showing that there were millions of people playing D&D and that if they could move a moderate fraction of those people to DDI, they would achieve their revenue goals. Then DDI could be expanded over time and if/when Hasbro recovered the video gaming rights, it could be used as a platform to launch a true D&D MMO, which could take them over $100 million/year.

The DDI pitch was that the 4th Edition would be designed so that it would work best when played with DDI. DDI had a big VTT component of its design that would be the driver of this move to get folks to hybridize their tabletop game with digital tools. Unfortunately, a tragedy struck the DDI team and it never really recovered. The VTT wasn't ready when 4e launched, and the explicit link between 4e and DDI that had been proposed to Hasbro's execs never materialized. The team did a yoeman's effort to make 4e work anyway while the VTT evolved, but they simply couldn't hit the numbers they'd promised selling books alone. The marketplace backlash to 4e didn't help either.

 

[Jokemeister]

7 hours ago, BlazingTornado said:

Aside from the obvious Kobolds, what kind of henchmen could a young white dragon out for revenge coerce/bribe/hire into his service?

 

I guess the obvious one would be cultists.  That way, you could use any of the "normal" races (ie humans, dwarves, elves etc) as henchmen.

[Club]

young white dragon. Arctic Environment.

 

Crazy druid(s) or witches

Wolves; winter wolves; Intelligent winter wolves - I've (un)fond memories of those last ones.

Ice Mephit

Giants of some flavor, Yeti

remorhaz

[BlazingTornado]

1 hour ago, Jokemeister said:

 

I guess the obvious one would be cultists.  That way, you could use any of the "normal" races (ie humans, dwarves, elves etc) as henchmen.

I kinda want to stay away from cultists because they're their own plot thread in this campaign.

7 minutes ago, Club said:

young white dragon. Arctic Environment.

 

Crazy druid(s) or witches

Wolves; winter wolves; Intelligent winter wolves - I've (un)fond memories of those last ones.

Ice Mephit

Giants of some flavor, Yeti

remorhaz

Unfortunately, in this case, he is tracking the party, and they are hanging around some southeast asian-style jungles at this time. So most of this is unavailable.

I could see witches working, especially if he hooks up with local ones.

 

The idea in my head for the adventure is that on their way south to one of the bastions of civilization of my world they stumble upon a wrecked, primitive village that had been protected by a relative of the dragonborn ranger's... So there's a case of mistaken identity as they think the ranger is their protector reborn, they also react hostilely to the kobold NPC that tags along, the natives speak of the "white death and its hounds", hopefully they're smart enough to put 2 and 2 together and set out to deal with the dragon once and for all.. Along the way finding pitfalls and squads on the lookout for the "rest of the party" (as the dragon thinks he already slew one of them), ending with the dragon's hideout for the final fight.

 

Figured after a lot of dungeon crawling I'd do an outdoorsier adventure...

[Club]

Lizardmen, Bullywug, Yuan-ti, any of the previous with character classes

barbarian tribesmen.

Green hag.

apes, giant apes, king kong

black dragon(s)

 

If it's only a young dragon, there is a chance it's not in charge of the relationship anymore. And if you're already in a jungle, dragging them through a swamp is an option - shambling mounds and assorted venomous snakes, go.

[BlazingTornado]

I liked Green Hags up until I read their features... Apparently all they can do unless they join a coven is... spam vicious mockery and claw at people.

 

Might still use one.

Might also use dinosaurs as beasts the kobolds and other hirelings use.

 

 

... I also want to stick a bridge somewhere, with a helm horror, animated armor or shield guardian protecting the way, and a Magic Mouth spell on it saying "None shall pass". Just to lighten the mood.

[CthulhuDreams]

5 hours ago, Auberon said:

I located my $50 million figure.  The information below comes courtesy of Ryan Dancey, he of OGL fame.  First, a short summary for those that don't want to read a block of text.

 

In 2005 3.5E D&D was a $25-30 million dollar company as Hasbro counted such things.  Hasbro set a target of $50 million for core brands with a growth path to $100 million.  The D&D team needed a plan or else the brand could get the ax, and in 2006 gave a presentation for a new edition of the game, combined with a subscription toolset (D&D Insider) and a virtual tabletop (VTT).  Unfortunately Melissa Batten, who was working on the VTT, was murdered by her estranged husband and the full DDI experience wasn't ready in time for launch.  In fact, it was never completed, which is why you sometimes hear 4E referred to as "half a game."

 

Let's just think about that required growth for a moment.  $25 million to $100 million for an established brand.  If you can't do it, the brand is gone.  What ideas would you come up with?

 

 

 

The funny thing is, isn't the team less than 20 now per Mearls? It's not clear anyone has a strategy that works to grow the market that much given Piazo's revenue is ~10 million a year. 

 

DDI was a plan that could have worked, but WoTC is awful at anything online: see the storied history of magic online and the massive gaping hole in the market that man + dog has charged into with hugely successful (400 million in revenue for hearthstone alone) platforms. Magic the gathering has ~20 million of revenue despite a massive headstart on the concept.

 

The bottom line is WoTC is a terrible, terrible company that doesn't know how to take its products digital (Funny question, given that WoTC has failed to defend its patch against not one, but two new market entrants that both make as much money in a month as WoTC makes in a year with their online operations, is WoTC worse at this than GW?) 

 

I actually wonder how much money DDI makes. It was $6 million a year in 2013 (of 80k subscribers). That will have obviously gone down, but they seem weirdly reluctant to turn it off, so I suspect it's probably a good chunk of revenue. You cannot find out how many subscribers there are anymore due to them decommissioning the forums. 

 

Man, I just remembered about that. How good is WoTC at online operations! 

Edited April 24, 2017 by CthulhuDreams

[Club]

I can't think of a board game or RPG in existence that would net in that much money for more than a year after release, bar maybe monopoly (ew).

 

[Pingo]

Who owns the video gaming rights to D&D?

[CthulhuDreams]

4 hours ago, Club said:

I can't think of a board game or RPG in existence that would net in that much money for more than a year after release, bar maybe monopoly (ew).

 

 

It would be pretty easy. You'd just need 300k DDI subscribers.

 

5e outsold 3.5E according to Mearls so you can see how you'd do it.

3 hours ago, Pingo said:

Who owns the video gaming rights to D&D?

 

Its some Byzantine nightmare that involves a bunch of lawsuits. I think Atari has the current rights which are licensed from Hasbro and WOTC but they may not be exclusive rights, as someone else has the MMORPG license rights and another party is doing a licensed 5e game that may never materialize.

Edited April 24, 2017 by CthulhuDreams

[BlazingTornado]

Well Daybreak is apparently currently the ones in charge of DDO while Perfect World is behind Neverwinter...

[TheAuldGrump]

A few years ago my then roommate was a huge fan of DDO - and I know exactly when he discovered that he liked the game.

 

He was trying, and failing, to get into an enclosed area - and while he was complaining he said 'in a real game, I'd be able to jump up, grab the top, then pull myself over the wall!'

 

Demonstrating this by making his character jump - which then grabbed the top of the wall, allowing him to pull himself over the wall.... My roommate hadn't tried actually jumping - he just knew that trying to do that didn't work in a MMORPG.

 

Until, of course, it did.

 

***

Unfortunately, tying the game to the DDi also meant redefining the game as being almost universally about combat - which lead to the 'traipsing through the faerie Rings' and 'guards at the gate' statements - which is, I think, what led to a lot of the negative attention the game garnered during pre-release.

 

Charging $20 for each of those preview books likely did not help - those were the kinds of articles that would have been in Dragon Magazine, if the hadn't, you know, killed both Dragon and Dungeon magazines as part of the lead up to 4e....

 

The Auld Grump

[Lars Porsenna]

@TheAuldGrump Differing experiences certainly have an impact. The gaming group I'm with (playing 20 or more...) tends to be pretty deadly, and a lot of the times Clerics were busy just trying to keep the front-line fighters up so that they can hold back the monsters while the mage(s) do what they do. But I think some of this was influenced by 2e playstyle too, where Clerics could not swap spells, so tended to take a lot of heals supplemented with a handful of choice cleric spells. But especially at low level, if you're a 1st level cleric back then and you DIDN'T take cure light wounds, you were doing it wrong (opinion, but...). Naturally that spilled out over into 3e, PF and now 5e...

 

Damon.

[Gargs]

There's no doubting that there was a fair amount of MMO inspiration in 4ed.  That said, while in hindsight this was obviously a mistake, I do think its understandable why they went that route.  At the time that 4ed was being developed, MMO's were a really big business.  I think WotC/Hasbro were really hoping that they'd be able to tap into that market and bring new customers to the table.  I mean lets face it, MMO's were already essentially based on D&D.  I think they were hoping to cater to both markets (i.e. the MMO player and the long time Pen and Paper gamer).  Its certainly easy to say in hindsight that this was just a stupid idea, but if you are WotC and needing to please the Hasbro overlords with increased sales, the only real way to do that is to generate new customers. Personally, I don't think it was a huge stretch to think that D&D could potentially appeal to some of those MMO players.  Unfortunately for WotC, it turned out that most MMO players were not at all interested in sitting down around a table for a few hours a week to play something similar to, but not quite, Everquest, WoW, etc. and the old school D&D players were not interested (in large part) in playing a D&D game that was inspired by MMOs.  This was then also coupled with Paizo coming out with what was essentially D&D 3.75 and partnering it with free online rules and really great adventure support.

 

As for a Hasbro exec claiming that they were really content with 3.5 and that they didn't want 4ed, I have to take that with a grain of salt.  The higher ups always blame those below them.  Its like when a sports team has a bad year.  The general manager fires the coach/manager because the only other explanation is that the general manager put together a bad team.  I have a hard time believing that Hasbro was not fully on board with the transition to 4ed, even if there were individual people at Hasbro that questioned the move.  Ironically, in some ways, the biggest failing of 4ed may have been the 3.5 OGL which enabled Paizo to create Pathfinder as a game that was so closely similar to 3.x D&D.