Wizards of the Coast have been working away on a new edition of the iconic tabletop pencil-and-paper roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons for some time. It’s prompted much speculation on the net over direction the new edition might take.
The previous 4th edition had radically changed many aspects of the game, and had rather divided the fanbase. To make things worst, they open-sourced the rules for the previous third edition, which resulted in them competing with several rival versions of the game, from Paizo’s well-supported Pathfinder RPG based on the superseded Third Edition, to a slew of small-press games under the loose banner of the “Old School Renaissance”, all based on much earlier editions.
With the new edition, they announced ambitious plans to reunify the whole thing, a seeming impossible task of reconciling different groups of fans who really want to play what had in effect become several completely different games. One wonders whether such a thing is even possible, let alone desirable.
When the lead designer quits mid-project, it’s a sign things are not going well.
Last week I decided that I would leave my contract position with Wizards of the Coast. I am no longer working on Dungeons & Dragons, although I may provide occasional consultation in the future. My decision is one based on differences of opinion with the company. However, I want to take this time to stress that my differences were not with my fellow designers, Rob Schwalb and Bruce Cordell. I enjoyed every moment of working with them over the past year. I have faith that they’ll create a fun game. I’m rooting for them.
Due to my non-disclosure agreement, as well as a desire to keep things on a professional level, I have no intention of going into further detail at this time. (Mostly, I just hate drama, and would rather talk about more interesting things.)
The net is awash with talk of the whole thing going horribly pear-shaped. Now, I know nothing about the direction the game was supposed to be taking, and haven’t played much D&D since 1st/2nd edition (I’m that old!). But it does sound a bit like an archetypal failed large-scale IT project, doomed from the start by over-ambitious and contradictory requirements. Add a few egos and some corporate politics, and it’s easy to see how easily such a project might run into trouble.
It’s worth noting that Dungeons and Dragons is relatively unusual in that the entire game has changed almost out of all recognition between editions, and other games which had done similar things had unhappy histories. Call of Chulhu, for example is still recognisably the same game as it was back in the early 1980s, while Traveller, after a complicated and somewhat messy history has now reverted to something looking a lot like the classic late 70s rules, under the stewardship of Mongoose games.
I don’t really have a dog in this fight, since my tastes have moved away from the rules-heavy combat-centric approach of D&D to more lightweight games that emphasise story and setting. But it will be very interesting to see how this all pans out.
Call of Cthulhu is my favourite tabletop RPG, in large part for the very same reason that I don’t have much truck with the Official D&D (and off-shoot) systems that developed after the 3rd edition… basically, the whole point of roleplay gaming is to roleplay, and a lot of over-developed systems become really bogged down with the rules and format, rather than just letting the players get on with the fun part of being someone else.
Instead of creating new systems and rules and whatever else they might have planned, I would love to see it just rebooted to make it appealling to the next generation – create a game that promotes imagination over rule-mongering, and entices modern teenagers into trying out something that, when done right, can be truly magical.
But big companies are in it for the profit over game-play these days (look at the ever-spiralling cost of wargaming minatures) and I imagine the final product will be hefty tomes that cost a fortune and spoon-feed the players every step of the way.
Bring back the dungeonmasters who only needed a die and a group of friends to have a good time…
The problem with later editions of DnD is that they spent too much effort targetting fans of completely different games – 3rd Ed appeared to be trying to copy GURPS and RIFTS, and resulted in a complex and cumbersome system where you needed a spreadsheet to generate a 1st level character.
4E I don’t really know, but it sounds like a complete ground-up re-write to me, and 5E aims to re-unite the sundered fanbase to pick up disaffected fans of earlier editions. Sounds like a recipe for a sprawling, incoherent mess. What has forked cannot be unforked.
There are a lot of great little small-press games out there which do precisely what you’re wanting. Some are essentially rewritings of early DnD (the so-called “Old School Renaissance”), others have a more story-orientated approach with very simple mechanics. All strip away decades of accreted cruft (“Do we really need a rule for this? No? Let’s toss it then”) for a back-to-basics approach.
You’re quite right – the small-press stuff you mention is what I like… and there are some games produced by bigger companies (like Eden Studio’s “All Flesh Must be Eaten” and even White Wolf’s “Adventure!”) where I love the idea of the game and really don’t care how complex they became with expansions and new rules and such… the novelty is all in the ideas behind them – and original fantasy D&D struggled to keep up with it all when a mass of new gaming books exploded onto the scene about ten years back (I say exploded – I just suddenly remember there being a heck of a lot more choice!!!)
There’s a wealth of games to choose from now, and I don’t envy the D&D folks trying to come up with something to capture their share of the audience / participators (and re-capture the old guard). But the biggest problem they face is trying to get people out from behind their computer desks and back into face-to-face gaming.
Do you think they really have any chance, even if they somehow produce something utterly amazing, of competing with the growing gaming culture of solitude? <— actual question, not rhetorical
As someone who played a bit of 3.0 (and even 3.5), I have some insight on what happened.
When WotC bought TSR, they were riding high on Magic: The Gathering. I even spoke with Peter Adkison once at great length about their plans, and he was incredibly enthusiastic. He LOVED D&D.
What happened was WotC took the ideas of M:tG and applied them to D&D. Feats, etc, were like cards, and encouraged a certain amount of min-maxing (granted, that was ALWAYS in D&D, back to White Box 1E, which I still have somewhere). When Hasbro got into the mix by acquiring WotC, things changed. Peter left (a very wealthy man), and the nonsense started. 3.5, and then 4.0.
And now, this.
Me, I’m an old d100 fan, of RQ2 and CoC days. West End’s TORG remains possibly my all-time favorite, but you know what? 3E *was* fun to DM and play.
I last played D&D at 3.0, and didn’t enjoy it much. Was a convention-style scenario with high-level characters, and all versions of D&D tended to break down at high levels.
Know what you mean about targeting powergamers; always a risk of power inflation
I’m part of the playtest for D&D Next, and I have to say that I am enjoying it. It’s not AD&D, or 3rd ed., or 4th ed., and yet I am enjoying the playtest. In that, if they keep things going the way they are, I think the game will be a success. As to the game changing over the years, I think that the core has remained the same. Mechanics will change. I’m sure someone who is a rules lawyer will be frustrated to learn a whole new book full of minutiae, but for the grief they cause me at the table I think they can suffer a bit. ; ) I think the most satisfying thing about the game is the ability to craft a story among my peers, so I’ve never been dissatisfied with the product. Sometimes the group I’m with lacks the interests I have, and they prefer a constant tide of blood rather than storyline or plot advancement. They constantly ignore my attempts to create additional ties between the characters. In this, my struggles have mostly been with the players. I’ve had some really good DMs though. Those problems aren’t because of an edition.
I have not played D&D since 2nd edition, my last character being a mage who made it to 35,000 xp short of 18th when the campaign folded. Does D&D fail at high levels? Only if you let the mechanics over-rule the story. And if you stop and think about it, that is when any system will fail.
Champions is the best system I know of for the Superhero genre. The mechanics fit the frame of reference: I remember having to borrow dice so I could roll a 30d6 Power Neuteralisation (Fire) attack to absorb a huge fireball being thrown at the Houses of Parliament. But those same mechanics do not work anywhere near as well at the “Agent” level, where skills and degrees of success matter more than raw power.
If you want to game in the “Action Hero” world then you need the Torg rules. But, despite being specifically designed for genre hopping, the Torg system only really worked in that one style of play. Its fantasy subsystem simply did not work.
For fantasy, well it depends what you are after. I was in a rotating GM world which used the Torg rules for a “police procedural” set in a fantasy world. That worked very well, and better than D&D ever could.
I have used Pacesetter rules for their Space Opera and Time-cop campaigns. Both worked quite well, though I suspect I would use Torg for Space Opera mechanics in future, Space Opera being a subset of Action Hero, though I might well use the Pacesetter campaign world.
So what sort of world would I use the D&D rules for? Sorry, but I can’t think of any which cannot be done better in another system.