16 ms·

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

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.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> 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.
- JoshTriplett 8y ago
  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.
  - ajross 8y ago
    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.
    - klodolph 8y ago
      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.
      - wlesieutre 8y ago
        I’ve heard 4e described as “D&D Tactics”
    - tapland 8y ago
      When 5e launched my local store started hosting dungeon nights, and they started to fill up eventually competing in space with the MtG-players. It was great and not heavily relying on maps and figurines makes it so smooth.
    - LoSboccacc 8y ago
- shemnon42 8y ago
  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.
  - malnourish 8y ago
    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.
  - tehwalrus 8y ago
    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.)
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > 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.)
- e12e 8y ago
  Wasn't 4th Ed when they did an Oracle move, and walked away from d20/open gaming license too?
ajross 8y ago
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.
- toyg 8y ago
  > 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.
  - p1necone 8y ago
    I wonder if Stranger Things featuring DnD made a significant impact.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > 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.
stcredzero 8y ago
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.
- kochikame 8y ago
  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"
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    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.
smaili 8y ago
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.
- lbotos 8y ago
  I'm in NYC, a Lot of MTG players are Developers/Programmers/SREs/Webmasters etc.
  - busterarm 8y ago
    Same but they'll almost never admit to it at work. That, essentially, is the issue. If you don't already know they play Magic, you won't know they play Magic. Gambling, in most traditional forms, is seen as low-class and stupid, while in reality many, many people in this industry are compulsive gamblers.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      It's called cryptocurrency.
      - busterarm 8y ago
        That is what I was alluding to.
    - kasey_junk 8y ago
      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.
      - naravara 8y ago
        Ditto. Maybe it's because I work in data science though. Stats nerds are in their element with games of chance.
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
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).
- mcv 8y ago
  Warhammer (Fantasy Battle and 40K) is a beautiful but incredibly expensive hobby. But Cubicle7 Games has just published the 4th edition to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, so that aspect of Warhammer is back too.
  - VLM 8y ago
    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.
    - mcv 8y ago
      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.
mcv 8y ago
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.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> 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.

JoshTriplett 8y ago
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.
- ajross 8y ago
  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.
  - klodolph 8y ago
    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.
    - wlesieutre 8y ago
      I’ve heard 4e described as “D&D Tactics”
  - tapland 8y ago
    When 5e launched my local store started hosting dungeon nights, and they started to fill up eventually competing in space with the MtG-players. It was great and not heavily relying on maps and figurines makes it so smooth.
  - LoSboccacc 8y ago
shemnon42 8y ago
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.
- malnourish 8y ago
  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.
- tehwalrus 8y ago
  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.)
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > 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.)
e12e 8y ago
Wasn't 4th Ed when they did an Oracle move, and walked away from d20/open gaming license too?

ajross 8y ago

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.

toyg 8y ago
> 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.
- p1necone 8y ago
  I wonder if Stranger Things featuring DnD made a significant impact.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> 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.

stcredzero 8y ago

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.

kochikame 8y ago
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"
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- stcredzero 8y ago
  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.

smaili 8y ago

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.

lbotos 8y ago
I'm in NYC, a Lot of MTG players are Developers/Programmers/SREs/Webmasters etc.
- busterarm 8y ago
  Same but they'll almost never admit to it at work. That, essentially, is the issue. If you don't already know they play Magic, you won't know they play Magic. Gambling, in most traditional forms, is seen as low-class and stupid, while in reality many, many people in this industry are compulsive gamblers.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    It's called cryptocurrency.
    - busterarm 8y ago
      That is what I was alluding to.
  - kasey_junk 8y ago
    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.
    - naravara 8y ago
      Ditto. Maybe it's because I work in data science though. Stats nerds are in their element with games of chance.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

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).

mcv 8y ago
Warhammer (Fantasy Battle and 40K) is a beautiful but incredibly expensive hobby. But Cubicle7 Games has just published the 4th edition to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, so that aspect of Warhammer is back too.
- VLM 8y ago
  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.
  - mcv 8y ago
    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.

mcv 8y ago

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.