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D&D survived alot it will survive this.
azzamasin
Member UncommonPosts: 3,105
Taken directly from the Wiki:
As of 2006[update], Dungeons & Dragons remained the best-known[8] and best-selling[9] role-playing game, with an estimated 20 million people having played the game and more than US$1 billion in book and equipment sales.[10] The game has been supplemented by many pre-made adventures as well as commercial campaign settings suitable for use by regular gaming groups. Dungeons & Dragons is known beyond the game for other D&D-branded products, references in popular culture and some of the controversies that have surrounded it, particularly a moral panic in the 1980s falsely linking it to Satanism and suicide.[11] The game has won multiple awards and has been translated into many languages beyond the original English.
I am certain no amount of hate will hurt the over all brand of the game.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
Comments
The D&D brand has been crap since Wizards of the Coast bought them out years back.
I hear they are making a new ruleset, again.
Sounds about right, launch a game, then change the ruleset.
Again a bigger company buys out a smaller one and whores out the name.
Crap since 97 !
TSR fo life YO!
( Note to self-Don't say anything bad about Drizzt.)
An acerbic sense of humor is NOT allowed here.
Actually DnD 3.5 (under WoTC) is widely regarded as the best ruleset by a large margin, a sentiment with which I readily agree. It offers flexibility and complexity without being needlessly obtuse (such as AD&D). I mean come on, THAC0?
Also, they are most likely making a new ruleset because 4.0 is generally thought of as being sub-par, and more suited for a video game or miniatures game (which may have been the intent).
TSR were a bunch of assholes who sued at the drop of a hat, wasted money, and generally treated their playerbase like crap. If WoTC hadn't bought them, it's quite likely we wouldn't have Dungeons & Dragons today.
The problem is it is Dungeons & Dragons that crap.
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons has always been awesome (Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance I'm talking about here, not the other shitty universes and lores)
I think you're dealing with a little bit of romantic nostalgia there. TSR's problems and resulting sale to WoC was a direct result of TSR's (i.e. Gary Gygax's) own mismanagement. At the time, TSR was one of the bigger bullies on the block, having bought out Avalon Hill and SPI. They were going to declare bankruptcy when Gygax sold them to WoC. If you may remember, it was the TSR management that screwed over Dave Arneson, who help pioneer the original game.
TSR also engaged in their own versions of obsoleting rules systems every few years. There was AD&D, Basic D&D, Advanced D&D, Advanced D&D 2nd Edition, all of which were published before WoC bought the company.
WoC simply carried on the grand tradition.
- How can you talk if you haven't got a brain?
- I don't know, but some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don't they?
Please 3.5 was a power creep nightmare. Every new sourcebook printed would add new feats that would obsolete entire prestige classes. Not only that the feat system in and of itself while great when it was introduced in 3.0 as a way for characters to be improved upon, slowly became a system that pigeonholed characters on what they could and could not do. The question I heard over and over in the later years would be "do you have a feat that allows you to do tthat?". If you didn't you could not do it.
4th edition for me actually breathed new life into the game. Unfortunately they became lazy and stopped supporting it when essentials came about. Will not touch this new edition they are working on. If I roleplay it will either be Shadowrun, deathwatch , or the new Iron kingdoms RPG.
The 1983 Red Box Basic D&D Rules (and 91 rules compilation) will always be my favorite set of fantasy gaming rules. well explained, straight forward, and just plain fun for a group of frieinds without all the power creep and BS that entered other editions. 3.5 grew too bloated and scattered with way over powered magic users while 4E was too much a minatures game for easy play. But that shouldn't surprise anyone as more than one Hasbro owned game relies on extras to keep going. Look at Magic. 4E really would have been better on the PC. Sure D&D will always be here as a name if nothing else. But I am starting to think that more than the rules their game worlds both old and new are what will have value in the future. I'm really surprised no one has made Dark Sun, FR, Greyhawk, or Planescape into an MMORPG for the PC.
Dungeons and Dragons in my opinion died when Wizards of the Coast bought TSR and forced v3.0e(as well as 3.5e, 4.0e, and 4.5e) down our throats.
"Possibly we humans can exist without actually having to fight. But many of us have chosen to fight. For what reason? To protect something? Protect what? Ourselves? The future? If we kill people to protect ourselves and this future, then what sort of future is it, and what will we have become? There is no future for those who have died. And what of those who did the killing? Is happiness to be found in a future that is grasped with blood stained hands? Is that the truth?"
Maybe it's the romantic nostalgia, but I'm with those group as well.
Since we stopped at AD&D 2nd, I don't have first-hand experience the latter ones (beside DDO, and in the near future Neverwinter). Some people from our former rpg groups tried them, and since we have similar taste I trust their opinion, which is closely the above post: D&D 3 is a joke, 3.5 is more like an action game than an rpg, and for 4 I didn't hear a thing... I know only one guy who tried it, red the book and said 'no thanks'
But I do hope Neverwinter will be a good game regardless the 4ed...
Edit: to the truth I red the 3.5 players book, but I think that's not enough for a personal opinion about the system because I haven't tried it in an actual game - actually I just red it to get every inside joke from the Dorkness Rising
(awesome movie btw)
Whlle it may be your opinion, you can't argue the $1 billion in sales.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
Well for those that loved the 3.x D&D there is always Pathfinder. I also think 4th Ed. D&D is not suited for traditional PnP role playing, but it's pretty good for a hack&slash miniature game.
Incidentally, the 4th ed. is also vastly superior to 3.x in terms of making an MMO on top of.
Gary Gygax left TSR in 1985.
:pistol shot:
And the Brand Loyalty 500 is Off and Running!
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
If we're gonna wait for a studio we all trust then they will never be made
No matter how cynical you become, its never enough to keep up - Lily Tomlin
I will add my agreement to those saying D&D died after WotWC acquired TSR(TSR's mismanagement has no bearing at all ont he arguement).
Every addition after dumbed down the franchise and let palyers use less and less of their own imagination.It's now the WoW of PnP RPGs,popular amongst those who have only known it's current incarnation,which is a much larger audience than us old timers,and dumbed down for said wider audience.
EDIT: having said all that it has nob earing on Neverwinter being a good game.it jsut won't be true D&D for me personally.I ahve more issues with the Cryptic Game Factory developing it and PWE running it than what rule set it uses.
What people today do not understand is how you were supposed to play the actual PnP game.
The rules were never meant to be set in stone. The entire premise was their for the DM to add his own creative touch to the framework of the D&D ruleset. If you had a problem with THAC0.....you changed it. Duh. If you wanted to add rules....you added them in.
3rd edition was the beginning of what was termed as munchkinism by the D&D crowd. You would get your feats, role your dice, and collect your loot and go on to the next room in the dungeon. They made more rules but in doing so they cut out the actual role of the DM and made it more of a WOW experience before WOW even existed. Easy to play, easy to win.
The truly great D&D experiences were all done by DMs using their own worlds and their own mythos, and they (and the players) cherry picked whatever rules and regulations were needed to uphold that player created content.
With 3rd and 3th edition, your sole purpose was to acquire mass number of feats to the point where your level 8 character somehow was demi-god powerful. You can say that the DM is at fault for letting the characters get that powerful....but when you have entire books and rulesets devoted to ultra-powerful characters, what else do you expect.
Everyone had a dual weilding dark elf something...and they never died.
i think the munchkinism started with 2nd edition Unearthed Arcana (1985)
allowed players to be far too powerful
EQ2 fan sites
I have to say I am in disagreement with the anti 4th edition crowd. Yes it was definately designed to be able to be played on the table top using miniatures but that doesnt mean you had to. It just made it very simple to do so. Now what it did do is have more defined roles for the characters, but being a hack and slash game... That's just what the RPGA did to it with their Sunday adventure models. The group i ran was very much a ROLEPLAYING GROUP. we went entire sessions with no combat at all. Skill challenges and complex skill challenge rules were the best of any edition, and the ritual magic (something most GMs ignored existed) w great for bringing uitlity spells into the game.
all in all I really liked it. If you did like miniatures it definately allowed for more strategic play during combat. I started playing when I was 8 years old I turn 39 this year. 4th I think is actually my favorite edition. Guess it just depends on the group and the GM. that being said I did not like whole weekly encounters I think that made people believe it was a hack and slash only game.
It is most certainly intended for you to use the minatures in 4e. In 3 - 3.5 it wasn't a requirement, but it was very helpful and easier to do so based on the rules. 2e was designed with the intent not to use the minatures. 1e was a mixed bag depending on what part of the game you were playing and which books included.
That said. DnD isn't on top any more. Pathfinder is and is the ONLY reason WotC is dropping 4e into a pit of hell to never be heard from again.
All that said, Neverwinter actuallly looks pretty fun to play as its own thing. Curious to see how it plays out.
3.5 was a great system. But it was also slow and overly complicated (especially combat)
4 was supposedly attempt of making it simpler. But it was instead influenced by simplified computer games. Probably aimed in making D&D computer game aswell - but that never happened.
I gues they lost half of regular playerbase
And than they dropped the bomb with yet another edition comming ... so the players they didnt lose , they will lose now.
But D&D will never disappear as idea - doesnt mather which ruleset you are playing
exactly. IP will never die. But Pathfinder most certainly captilized on the misstep big time.
Agreed.
Today its like: "Lets play D&D , wait I am bringing my Pathfinder books"