Is it unlikely? Board games were already growing fast. Even CCGs were growing fast, not only through video games but still as physical games too. People want to sit down and get offline and spend time with each other, _and_ people who used to do that want to get online and hang out with each other.
All the RPG market needed was one publisher with good production values and broad distribution to discard a big chunk of its worst, thorniest rules. Wizards was happy to oblige...
Pathfinder saw it too with their precursor Beginner Box, which also threw out a big chunk of its worst, thorniest rules and sold like crazy off a Humble Bundle. They just didn't get the distribution (or the right YouTubers on board) until it was too late, and never plugged their Beginner Box into other content as elegantly as Wizards did.
> All the RPG market needed was one publisher with good production values and broad distribution to . Wizards was happy to oblige...
I think you can make a very good case that D&D 4e in 2008 was where they decided to “discard a big chunk of its worst, thorniest rules”, and that the big innovation in 5e, released in 2014, was less about discarding thorny rules and more about reconnecting the streamlined rules with the fiction, in a way to preserve (mostly) the mechanical streamlining of 4e while reconnecting with the feel of earlier versions (not just one of those, but supporting the different appeal of multiple of them.) Changes like swapping encounter and daily powers for powers recharging with a short or long rest aren't a big deal mechanically, but they are a shift from pure metagame balance to something that is better tied to actions in the in-game milieu.
4e wasn't “discard[ing] a big chunk of its worst, thorniest rules”, it was a re-write to sell splat books and accessories, to try and turn it into pen and paper World of Warcraft, and make it a miniature focused expensive game. It failed. It was D&D in name only and an abomination to those who really cared about it.
5e was the streamlining and modularization that was needed so you could play it like it was 2e, or 3e/3.5e, or even 4e if you wanted to. 5e was a return to D&Ds roots bringing along only the good stuff it had learned in 35 years.
> 4e wasn't “discard[ing] a big chunk of its worst, thorniest rules”, it was a re-write to sell splat books and accessories
The two are not mutually exclusive: the former is game design, the latter is business aim motivating game design, product strategy, and lots of other things. It was both.
> 5e was the streamlining and modularization that was needed so you could play it like it was 2e, or 3e/3.5e, or even 4e if you wanted to.
Some modularization, sure, but it many ways it took small steps back from 4e's mechanical streamlining. Which is a good thing, 4e's extreme mechanical streamlining without regard to the role of the mechanics at the table in service of RP is a big part of why 4e ended up flavorless and dull. 5e kept most of the mechanical substance of that streamlining, but refocussed on serving RP and, in so doing, made some compromises to the mechanical streamlining. This made it more accessible for the same reason a lot of programming languages that have less refined, pure, coherent, generalizable abstractions than Haskell are more accessible.
(Also, I think you are doing the people working on business strategy at WotC a disservice if you think 5e is any less well designed to sell splat books and accessories than 4e. In 5e, the choices matter more to players -- which makes having more choices more valuable. And returning to OGL and adding DMs Guild means that there is more opportunity for third parties to supply the relatively low-margin long-tail supplements that each have a small market but collectively provide a strong ecosystem that keeps people buying the higher margin core books and major supplements and accessories that Wizards dutifully churns out.)
>It was D&D in name only and an abomination to those who really cared about it.
That's just demonstrably false and sounds like gatekeeping. 4E had a lot of good ideas that didn't always have the best execution. And a lot of the grid-based stuff was pushed so that an online toolset could be released alongside it, but it never actually happened. I think it's telling that even in 2018/2019, D&D Beyond has only JUST started being good enough to be truly usable, and it still doesn't have an online grid/board system (ala Roll20). Imagine how much of a mess it was in 07? Even the character generator that you could get back then was insanely clunky.
D&D didn't need 4E to get people into buying minis, that's just ridiculous if you look at MinatureMarket or any other site that sells oldschool minis. You can disagree with design decisions or the marketing, but to say that it's not D&D is a bit much.
I'd disagree that 4e was far from D&D's roots. D&D evolved from miniture-based wargames, and it remains a combat-focused P&P system. In my view 4e had two primary problems: combat was complex took a long time to resolve, even by D&D's standards, and it was different to what people were used to.
I agree D&D has evolved into a different game, but it's still a lot closer to wargaming than a lot of other P&P systems, like Fate or Fiasco for example. D&D is a system that revolves around simulating party-vs-party fights in a fantasy setting, with some roleplay rules tacked onto the periphary. I felt 4e very much continued with that theme; the problem was fights in 4e were just too complex and laborious, even for a system built primarily for combat.
I learned 4e first (modulo a one-shot 3rd ed game a long time before). I think it has excellent potential as a system that allows you to tell stories, even if the actual game mechanics are a bit too simple for most AD&D-heads. Check out the Critical Hit podcast by Major Spoilers, to see where a very effective DM can turn even 4e into a compelling story.
(I now play 5e whenever I run a game, because I can get people to actually play it with me.)
My biggest complaints about 5e are illusion magic rules and the lack of more core classes. I look forward to more source books for different planes in the future, but I can make do without those right now.
It's not just that. 4e greatly simplified the rules, which made it far more accessible and playable, but it made many classes feel very much the same; every class had daily powers, encounter powers, and at-will powers. 5e managed to make every class feel unique again, and brought many of the classic D&D players back.
That's the enthusiast perspective. I think closer to the truth of the article (which is talking about broad market share among non-geeks) is the fact that 5e made D&D accessible to kids again.
I've been suckered into running a weekly game for a gaggle of 10 year olds. They seem to love the game, but have absolutely zero interest in rules crunch. They're very happy having to be reminded about which die to roll and which bonus to apply (and which special abilities might be appropriate) every single round. Fourth edition has nothing to offer these kids beyond needless complexity and edge cases.
But my son will spend hours reading through the rulebooks and stat blocks. The game hooked him even if the rules haven't. And when I think back to my own experience learning the game at 9 at the dawn of AD&D... that's just about right.
I agree, the streamlining of the rules from 4E -> 5E is a big deal, perhaps the single most important difference is the fact that 5E is simpler to play.
Ask ten people and you'll get ten different explanations for what's wrong with 4E. For me, the problem was that combat is time-consuming. The time it takes to resolve a single combat encounter might be one or two hours! I really enjoy the combat in 4E, but I feel like this kind of crunch has narrow appeal.
For other editions, earlier and newer, it seems more natural to just ignore rules you don't want to play with and end up with a simplified game very naturally. With 4E, it felt like you couldn't do that with the combat system.
> They seem to love the game, but have absolutely zero interest in rules crunch.
I ran a campaign for my brothers when they were more or less at the same age.
They picked up interest in bionichles and kid being kid their way to play them was screaming "I hit you" in a growing brawl at each other until mom intervened.
of course I did not use dnd or any other crunch system, just contested rolls on every action and some rules based on range, and I did it so it could be used both for storytelling and wargaming, and they had a blast.
it's a GREAT way to start channeling their ruffle play into something more structured, rules be damned. just pick whatever some group of kid likes, throw some game rules and they'll figure out a way to make it work. it took less than six month for my brother to start playing at school with the rule given and then grew up into dnd.
> 4e greatly simplified the rules, which made it far more accessible and playable
I think it made it more playable as as an abstract combat game, but the divorce in presentation between the rules and the in-game fiction (particularly acute in the—albeit streamlined, simple, and consistent—way powers were defined) made it less accessible as a RPG in the deeper RP sense usually associated with TTRPGS as opposed to CRPGs.
For that, rule simplicity helps, but equally important is keeping mechanical actions grounded in the fictional world rather than abstracted from it.
And I think that's the unique strength of TTRPGs in a world awash in digital entertainment.
5e wasn't, IMO, in net a mechanical streamlining compared to 4e. It may have even made things a little more complex as an abstract game. But the presentation and the tie between the rules and the fiction was improved (and, as you note, things like class choices were given enough more weight in how characters played as to be more mechanically interesting.)
Incidentally, I'm one of the players of most previous versions of D&D (starting with B/X, missed OD&D, but played everything else) that it brought back to being a fan.
I do agree with that entirely. Our 4e group threw out half the explicit rules and did a lot of improvising.
One of 5e's greatest strengths was explicitly telling the DM how and when to wing it and improvise, rather than giving a rule for everything. The 5e DM's guide tells you that you can skip the encumbrance rules, that you can just give a level after every session or two rather than counting XP, that you don't need to do as many combat encounters if your players like story more, and spells out how to make new monsters.
The only decent D&D games I've played threw out at least half the rules. But at that point wouldn't you be better off starting from a more rules-light system? On the whole I've had better experience with games in the World of Darkness family, and even better with those at a FATE-like simplicity level.
The rules most commonly thrown out around my table are things like "carefully track how much all your equipment weighs to make sure that picking up that loot won't make you encumbered", or "track the exact number of experience points you need to level up". Those aren't the most interesting bits of D&D, those are just the "if you really need a rule for it, here's one" bits.
I enjoy rules-light systems as well, for certain types of games that don't fit at all into a D&D-ish framework. But for anything that roughly fits the parameters of 5e, our group tends to gravitate towards 5e and enjoy the majority of its structure.
It's very simplified compared to 3.5 or pathfinder and arguably gives players less customisation options - also some classes have been nerfed (rangers for example) look at how Laura Baily has to expend a lot of effort to protect Trinket
this a big point about 4e i recall more than a few pre 4th edition game circles that degenrated into pouring over books and arguing about the rules.
wHEN I dm there are modifications to the rules that make more fun. for example sometimes characters dont "die" they meet thier maker and discover something about themselves or the deep lore of the campain world you have made, and then you can recycle them as if ressurected, by a deity.
I think this is a very rewarding style if you have players that love to discover the story.
no not switching PCs unless you like.
suppose a character "dies" they have an afterdeathexperience,
a fireside chat with god so to speak.
and are told some things about why the world exists the way it does, why the PC is so special, and perhaps a deal is made with a deity of some sort to fix the world [carry out the dietys plans] and they are ressurected perhaps as per the ressurection spell? or better/worse having a deity holding a debt against you, but having interst in keeping you going?
Interesting, I’ve been doing that in my Runequest games for years, but then the setting (Glorantha) has a really rich mythology that provides great context for things like that. I shouldn’t be durprised though. Rob Heinsoo the chief designer of 4e is a long time Glorantha and Runequest fan.
Board games were already growing fast. Even CCGs were growing fast, not only through video games but still as physical games too. People want to sit down and get offline and spend time with each other, _and_ people who used to do that want to get online and hang out with each other.
A friend of mine used to say, "Sometimes you just have to get offline, get real, and face each other over a tabletop with some dice." Shortly after we met, we went to a haunted house together, and she won us the special T-Shirt prize by using her "spot the secret passage from the blank spot in the map" skills in real life.
I mean, a haunted house is undeniably "real life" in the "IRL" sense, but it wasn't like she used her new skills to actually save a life, or find a way out of hostile territory, or uncover lost artworks or something.
Not trying to be a downer, just saying that this is kinda stretching the definition of "real life application of game skills" for me. More like "applying a board game skill to a different kind of game"
It's one thing to apply such a skill in your imagination, looking down from a godlike top-down POV. It's another to do it in real-time, under an actual deadline, while being accosted in the flesh by people trying to scare you.
Also, those weren't "new skills." She was a veteran nerd's nerd.
FWIW: Pathfinder didn't win because it didn't have the name. The game itself is fine. But there can be only one D&D, and once WotC managed to figure out that the edition upgrade mill was a death trap and released a streamlined 5e, there wasn't much niche left for Pathfinder to fill.
Given a "Pathfinder" vs. "D&D" choice, and no overwhelming community consensus either way (the community rejection of the fourth edition is the reason Pathfinder exists as a commercial product at all), everyone's going to buy the game with the famous name.
> Pathfinder didn't win because it didn't have the name.
And the history. '80s nostalgia is a big thing right now, and D&D can drink at that well. Quite a lot of people who made it in Hollywood and are powerful right now, were D&D players 30 years ago when they were kids; so they supplied the glam factor that helps keeping games out of the "nerd" niche.
> FWIW: Pathfinder didn't win because it didn't have the name. The game itself is fine. But there can be only one D&D, and once WotC managed to figure out that the edition upgrade mill was a death trap and released a streamlined 5e, there wasn't much niche left for Pathfinder to fill.
5e was the second D&D edition released after Pathfinder, so I'm not really sure what “edition upgrade mill” you are talking about.
> (the community rejection of the fourth edition is the reason Pathfinder exists as a commercial product at all),
Pathfinder was released to wide acclaim before 4e; it's true that with sufficient acceptance 4e might still have displaced it, but the real reason for PF was the announced imminent replacement of the 3e Open Game License with a more restrictive Game System License for the upcoming 4e, and what that said for both Paizo (who made Pathfinder) and other third-party players in the 3e/3.5e ecosystem.
It's perhaps worth noting that 5e returned to an OGL core.
OMG, we're actually having an edition war on HN! D&D really has broken through!
Pathfinder beat 4e to market in a technical sense, but it absolutely exists because WotC announced it was moving away from 3.5e and the OGL with a new edition. Paizo never intended to release it to compete directly with 3.5, and it would have been insane to do so.
Pathfinder's entire market was "people who didn't like 4E and wanted to keep playing [/selling OGL supplements for] for 3.5," and on that basis they were one of the only games to come close to matching D&D's success. (They may actually have outside D&D for a few years; it's hard to be sure because WotC doesn't release those numbers.) It was only 4E's divisiveness that let them find a niche, and they started slipping as soon as WotC released a new edition that fixed most of the things that pissed people off about 4E.
Yeah, there's a resurgence going on; Warhammer is getting more popular too again, even with the youth. I want to like it, but I can't bring myself to shell out €50 for a starter kit which looks like some plastic figures and a cardboard box on the back (some assembly required).
Fairly cheap per hour. I think it realistic to be less than 25 cents per hour. I suppose it depends how much effort you put into detailing, and playing.
How much it is per hour depends entirely on how often you play it. A Warhammer army can easily cost hundreds of dollars, and over $1000 is not unheard of. It can be cheaper, but RPGs can be completely free and eat up as much or as little time as you want.
Though I suppose if you count the time spent painting the minis as time spent playing, it's likely to end up fairly cheap per hour.
It's not so much that Pathfinder was too late; Pathfinder has been incredibly successful and has even outsold D&D in a couple of years. But D&D has and will always have the biggest brand recognition outside the hobby, and will therefore always be the game with the largest number of new players. And the largest number of old players too.
Speaking of CCG's, any collectors who happen to be coders? I haven't met too many at the local shops I stop by so I always figured collecting cards wasn't very popular amongst engineers.
I'm a very avid boardgamer (>100 games stored in a dedicated room) but CCGs never really interested me. I played some MTG way back but it was always very obvious that those games are a money sink. I like LCGs a lot more because you know what you get and can plan. For CCGs I always ended up buying a deck to play instead of "collecting". I tried again with Star Wars Destiny and enjoy the game a lot but I just can't bring myself to buy lots of booster displays just to get the stuff I want. My rational brain simply refuses to do it. I can buy a great board game for less than a booster display or I can buy a cool but expensive game for less than two booster displays (Gloomhaven).
And I can get the feel of a CCG from any of the great LCGs if I want that (Netrunner, L5R etc.). I get that in a CCG you get more carddrops and boom the entire meta shifts etc. but it's the corner of board/card gaming that interests me least by a wide margin.
I collected the 1996 Netrunner CCG for years; last year I found someone who was more or less selling off their complete collection (I didn't have any of the 2.0 cards or the majority of the 2.2 cards, and was also missing a handful of the 2.1 rares - inheriting a couple boxes of all the miscellaneous spares was fine by me if it meant a 100% complete binder) so that very expensive chapter of my life has closed.
I also went out and finished my "first TCG appearence of the original 151" Pokémon collection with one of my first few paychecks after graduating (had to shell out the money for Charizard and a couple others that were never in my collection from childhood). I really wanted to retroactively declare myself the coolest kid on the playground at recess, otherwise what was all that work for? :)
Sadly, while card games were an important part of my life growing up, a lot of mental switches flipped over the last year or so and I honestly regret spending so much money and time in the card game world over the entire first part of my life. In 2012 Android: Netrunner introduced me to the LCG model and made me realize that the CCG model was exploitative and a terrible use of my money (obvious in retrospect, but when you're in the thick of it, you try and rationalize it, you know?). Then, working towards my degree for a few years after that kept me out of the tournament ecosystem for so long that I found myself not wanting to go back - there were simply more productive uses of my brain cycles than deck construction and playing games. I know they say "time enjoyed wasted is not wasted time" but if I would have programmed or learned a few languages or focused on competition math or read classical literature or learned to cook or any number of other things in that first 18 years, I'd be so much better off [1]. It's possible many coders feel the same way, and that's why you're not seeing them.
[1] In fact, should parenting be in my future, I don't think I'd let my kids have nearly as much post-pubescent "non-skill-building" fun as I was allowed to have; competition for income is fierce and it's only going to get worse.
> I know they say "time enjoyed wasted is not wasted time" but if I would have programmed or learned a few languages or focused on competition math or read classical literature or learned to cook or any number of other things in that first 18 years, I'd be so much better off [1].
Better off in what sense? If we're talking about skills that apply to the rest of life, I honestly feel like deck optimisation was much better preparation for a real-world career (where the problem scope is never fully defined, the measure of success always involves an element of randomness, and hidden interactions abound) than competition maths was. And while it exercises a different kind of imagination and storytelling, I'd argue that games in a shared-world fiction can give a more intense practice of the things that classical literature give you.
My company has a number of MTG players at our office. We've done a number of booster box drafts, and one co-worker even ordered a proxied Vintage cube online so we can draft whenever we want without needing to buy new boxes (plus, it's the only chance the younger people like me will ever get a chance to play with stuff from the first few sets that are now way too expensive to actually play with even if you are willing to shell out the money)
That doesn’t match my experience at all. From backgammon to poker to sports gambling I’ve experienced way more positive bias towards gambling in tech jobs than negative.
Back when I was in university (during the 1990s) everybody in the CS department played Magic: the Gathering. There were always people playing in the coffee room, we held plenty of tournaments.
Woah really? At my company (and others, at least according to my friends), MTG is really big among software engineers. Look around for sure - you'll find plenty of people like us!
All the RPG market needed was one publisher with good production values and broad distribution to discard a big chunk of its worst, thorniest rules. Wizards was happy to oblige...
Pathfinder saw it too with their precursor Beginner Box, which also threw out a big chunk of its worst, thorniest rules and sold like crazy off a Humble Bundle. They just didn't get the distribution (or the right YouTubers on board) until it was too late, and never plugged their Beginner Box into other content as elegantly as Wizards did.