Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition: The Meta-Support

I've been playing in a Warhammer Fantasy RPG now for many moons. Long enough for Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition to hit the shelves. A few of the players didn't buy it, but were soon swayed by those who had purchased it.

Rule wise, it hits some of the things I like but not all of them. For example, my group had a very short discussion about the benefits of random rolling character bits, like stats and hit points and almost unanimously went with point buy and fixed hit points.

In terms of gaming, I've been reading Hoard of the Dragon Queen, it's the first 'separate' adventure for the new edition. I know that the basic set has it's own adventure mind you but I figured I'd start with something that Wizards of the Coast has been promoting on their home site.

Bad news is I'm not too thrilled with it. It's a little too open and feels incomplete to me. Others have less kind things to say about it on such regular locals as RPG.net.

My dislike of the only print adventure, only 'official' print adventure, has me wondering about the 'meta-support' if you will.

First off, there appears to be no OGL or even GSL. Mind you, that hasn't stopped some like Goodman Games from offering 3rd party support and Necromancer Games has decided to disregard waiting for a license and has already run a Kickstarter to fund some support for the game. Honestly wish that Necromancer Games had the conviction of their legal ground when they had the license to do Tegal Manor mind you but what can you do? The past is the past.

Now the other thing, is back 'in the day', Dungeon and Dragon magazine acted as useful tools in order to bring hype, previews and all sorts of other fun things to the game. I know that during the transition from 2nd to 3rd they were very handy to have and even had things like the game stats for Bahamut and Tiamat.

More importantly, it also acted as a monthly source of adventurers.

Now Wizards of the Coast, in my opinion, has always been weak about supporting its games with print adventurers. 3rd edition had the OGL and SRD and all sorts of other things that meant Wizards of the Coast didn't necessarily have to put those resources in place. But when they killed the print version of the magazines and then when 4th edition didn't engage a lot of 3rd party interest due to its restriction license, WoTC did NOT step up the published adventurers. Sure Dungeon magazine continued its online support but WoTC did weird things in that era.

So you'd think with a new edition of Dungeons and Dragons coming out, that we'd see some new incarnation of either magazine? Something that might allow Game Masters, who at this point don't have the Dungeon Master's Guide or the Monster Manual, some quick adventures.

No such luck.

This to me is a failure on Wizards of the Coast part.

I remember when 3rd edition came out. There was a conversion document. It was a nifty little thing. Wasn't perfect by any means mind you but it was handy.

Anything like that on the WoTC home site? Nope.

Failure again.

Mind you, it's not like WoTC didn't KNOW they were coming out with a new edition for oh, say the past year.

But what about miniature support? While the new game doesn't require miniatures, Wizards of the Coast is doing some new Dungeons and Dragons miniatures thanks to Wiz Kids help. Something like Icons of the Realms?

And it's possible my own internet skillz are failing me here because I can't find a listing of what those miniatures actually are. I see a brief product synopsis on the WoTC site, but in the past, they'd have a gallery of what the miniatures actually were. I GET that it's a Wiz Kids product but sending people to another company's website is stupid.

And even the Wiz Kids website is terrible. Maybe I'm missing it but there are supposed to be like 44 figures (50 counting the non-random pack) and I count 24 images including the non-random pack and a picture of the booster pack. Argh!

Fail!

One of the things this set is supposed to do, is support the adventure.

If so, it doesn't do a fantastic job of it.

This being the first miniature pack of the game, you need to have miniatures available for players to pick from. So with a LOT of ground to cover, because the Player's Handbook is jammed with race and class options, every pick for a miniature should be important.

Eight of the miniatures are 'invisible', see through plastic. Out of 44 miniatures, eight of them are duplicates to be 'cool'.

Imagine that you're a game company. You pay people money to illustrate characters in a setting book.  Say one of them is Langdedrosa Cyanwrath, a halfdragon, blue, champion of the bad guys.  A named character that makes several appearances in the adventure. You have a great illustration of him in the book. Perfect for making into a miniature right?

Nope. They have a 'generic' half red dragon. So you PAID someone to make miniatures that should probably have some type of visual reference and for the adventure itself you PAID someone else to make numerous illustrations that you don't bother using for the miniatures that the game is supposed to be supporting?

Okay, but at least all of the 'core' races are supported right? It's not like 4th edition, where again, Wizards of the Coast KNEW they were introducing dragonborn to the core rules and we have a few Dragonborn miniatures to select from right? They're not going to have to reprint an old dragonborn that looks nothing like the current version of the race right?

Wrong! You may get an invisible gnome that's a copy of the visible gnome, but ain't one dragonborn in the whole pack. And yeah, any of you drow players who aren't doing the whole two scimitars thing aren't going to find anything useful either.

It's like the guys making Dungeons and Dragons want to push the 'standards' of the game by including different things like tielflings and dragonborn but then FAIL to support it.

You want to make some fixed packs? Since the Dungeon Master is probably the one whose going to be buying a lot of these, how about, oh, I don't know, some kobolds, cultists, and ambush drakes? A pack for those times when you need 'em? To me, the whole thing is like Wizards of the Coast going, "Yeah, let's tap into that Star Wars and Star Trek market with this Attack Wing stuff but throw a bone to the miniature players of the role playing game".

To me, they're essentially saying, "Yeah, go buy the Reaper Legendary Encounters line and we'll blame the lack of sales on a soft market or something." For those who can paint, the Reaper Bones, while not prepainted, offer an even better value.

In terms of 'support', on one hand, WoTC has a supplement online with all the monster stats. They need this because you know, those stats aren't in the book.

On the other hand, if you're not going to support the game with miniatures, despite having a miniature set dedicated to it, perhaps, like Fiery Dragon and other companies have done, there can be some counters made? A nice little download for either stand up or lay flat counters since in many cases you already have the art made?

While miniature mapping isn't required, some like it in order to simply keep marching order straight and area of effects straight. When you buy the product, you don't get large resolution sized files that you can print out and use for your game. I've seen some people buy them directly from the artists and make their own maps that way.

I have no problem with an artists supporting themselves through secondary use of their work, but maybe, just maybe mind you, Wizards of the Coast, and Paizo and other companies for that matter, can pay the map makers a little more and get scale sized maps that the people trying to support the companies can then download for their own games? Just putting it out there.

Another venue of what I'd consider failure on the part of Wizards of the Coast is the lack of a PDF product. "Hey, we're sorry we abandoned PDF years ago and stomped off like children who didn't like the way the game was being played. We're back and have a ton of old material for you to buy. Oh, you'd like to support the new material or want it for reference? Uh... no see, we have this digital thing that is not ready yet even though, you know again, we've had something like a year or more to have a product launch..."

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that these elements will "doooom..." the new Player's Handbook. Sales have been very brisk in various online stores and it'll have its moment in the sun. I've never argued against that. I've argued that due to the lack of official product that initially sales will be awesome and may even be some sell throughs of the first printing.

But long term I don't think WoTC is going to be able to compete.

Let me boil down my "you fail" list for Wizards of the Coast.

1. Miniatures that don't actually support EITHER the player's options from the core rulebook or the adventurer that they were designed to, you know, support.

2. Lack of adventures.

3. Lack of Dragon/Dungeon magazines as marketing tools.

4. Actual digital tools that people can use.

5. Conversion documents.

6. OGL/GLS/something official to let third party companies know what they can do. Mind you, Necromancer Games and Goodman have already given WoTC the finger on this one so maybe it'll be irrelevant in the future.

7. PDF support.

8. Adventure Support with full scale maps that people can use in their home games.

9. Better website. When you're sending readers from your website to Wiz Kids website, you fail. Get a gallery up and some real information.

10. Price. Still think that $50 bones for three books is too high a buy in.Sure Amazon and other methods of acquiring the books can reduce that but that slaps the whole "play in your friendly local store" in the face.

I'll be curious to see where 5th edition is this time next year because once the shine wears off, if WoTC isn't firing on at least a few of those cylinders, people have a TON of options out there including supporting companies that, you know, DO fire on those cylinders.

How about other games out there? Everyone happy with how WoTC is handling the Dungeons and Dragons line outside of the rules? Any of these points strike home or are all these just minor things? Let me know what you think!

And a Fifth Horseman Shall Appear and his name shall be Next

I'm going to admit it right up front, I haven't been paying much attention to what's going on with Dungeons and Dragons. When they dropped 4th edition and dropped Dungeon and dropped Dragon, neither of which I'd been subscribing to for a while, I pretty much lost interest.

But lo and behold, the internets are ablaze with the new information about 5th edition. The obvious news? It'll be at Gen Con, or at least, one of the books will. That strikes me as odd since AFAIK, the books are not printed in the United States and any changes that need to be made aren't going to get incorporated into the later books anyway. Live by the China, die by the China.

In addition, the price point for the core set is too high. Mind you, let me be clear, that's my opinion. I also don't think it will hurt initial sales at all. I think that there is every possibility of a sell through at Gen Con. Right now Amazon has the Player's Handbook for just under $30 bones. That's $10 more, at Amazon, than 4th edition.



For those that find that too expensive, there's even a starter box set that's under $13 right now. There are supposed to be some online rules to complement that which allow some further play than just the boxed set itself.



Let me be clear. It's not that I think these are bad values mind you. For $150, if you're only getting the core three books, you can probably get many moons of game play from.

But well, that $150 can buy a tablet. It can buy a few board games. It can buy dozens of supplements for free rule sets of the OSR that are readily available right now.

Mind you, some will point out that Amazon discount brings that down to $90 if you get them all at a heavy discount. But that's now. What happens if Amazon tells Hasbro they want more money like Amazon has done with a different publisher and cuts their deep discounts out? Companies need to stop pricing their books to account for the Amazon discount if they don't want to be beholden to Amazon's pricing.

Anyway...

It's not that it's a bad price, I just think it's a bad price for the core books for Dungeons and Dragons. Pathfinder has a core book that is the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide combined. If $100 for two books is great value, what does that put the Pathfinder system at? Awesome value?

In addition, there is some weirdness going on. Let's look at the adventurers. For many people, the adventurers of a system are what a system lives and dies by. People talk about great campaigns for decades after the games have been run. It doesn't matter what system either. Talk about Warhammer and people will instantly pipe up with The Enemy Within and their favorite parts of that, or even smaller adventurers like The Three Feathers. Others will mention things like the Orient Express for Call of Cthulhu.

Both third and fourth edition didn't necessarily have a lot of great adventures in that vein. Wizards of the Coast has a real weakness when it comes to doing adventure paths. When they lost Paizo, the former caretakers of the print magazines Dungeon and Dragon, they lost the ability to do well regarded adventure paths, which for better or worse, are a standard for Dungeons and Dragons or D&D like games these days.

But the new edition has some starting adventures. In this instance, done by Kobold Press, a company that has supported Pathfinder, 3rd edition and even 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. The first I believe is Hoard of the Dragon Queen, but that strange Amazon pricing comes through as this book is over $25 dollars and only has an 11% discount. Are you going to pay almost as much for a single adventure as you are a core book, with discount?

Strangely enough, despite being done by a third party and published by Wizards of the Coast, indications seem to be that any OGL will not be immediate.

That makes me wonder why then they picked Kobold Press. Let me be clear. It's not that Kobold Press is a bad publisher. They have a wide range of products and a wide range of materials ranging across different editions.

But not everything has gone smoothly.

Take their recent book Deep Magic for example, is a weighty tome available in hardcover and PDF. But right after it came out, there was an addendium. That's not a good sign.

Or how about some of the material that's currently late for their Kickstarter projects? For example, if you backed their adventure anthology, Midgard Tales,  you've been waiting for Freeing Nethus for over a year.

If you backed the kickstarter for the miniatures for the Midgard setting, those were due either a year ago, or just under a year ago.

And Wizards of the Coast chooses them?

I'm sure that they'll pull through and that the various issues that Kobold Press is having with those different aspects are aberrants and of course, not standard practice, but if you've been waiting for either of those and you see their name associated with the new D&D that may not give you the warm fuzzies.

I think that not supporting an OGL right off the bat is potentially disastrous for Wizards of the Coast in terms of longevity of Dungeons and Dragons. Mind you, if they have their character creation software so heavily integrated, it might not matter anyway as that more than the limited third party support 4th edition received, keep players I know from buying material that wasn't in the software.

Why buy Goodman Games or other material that you would have to manually tally when everything else was so fairly well done within the system itself?

If you're a new player and you see Dungeons and Dragons and limited support only through Wizards of the Coast, and you see Paizo and Pathfinder and you see dozens of publishers being actively supported by Paizo, on the companies home page and receiving high praise from many of the people who make Paizo the community it currently is, which company are you going to buy from?

Mind you, there are some people who dropped buying things from Wizards of the Coast when WoTC stopped printing physical copies of Dungeons and Dragons magazines. There are some that stopped when WoTC pulled down the PDF's. There are some who stopped when WoTC dumped 4e and went with Essentials editions. There are some who stopped when WoTC took their character generation from a downloaded software to an online only software.

Here's the thing. Many of those players are NEVER coming back. Either they've fond something that met their fantasy need, ranging from Pathfinder or 13th Age for 'new school' players, or any one of the many OSR products already out and fairly compatible with the hundreds of 1st and 2nd edition products already out in the wild.

Me? I've got the boxed set and Player's Handbook preordered. I'm not a 'D&D' player do or die or anything like that. Those reading the blog on a regular basis know I'm a player in a Warhammer 2nd edition fantasy campaign. And if you look at that, an old system that's not supported and was replaced by Fantasy Flight Games with weird dice and an expensive core book, you might see some potential futures for a new edition of Dungeons and Dragons that doesn't' take into account that not only are they not the only fish in the pond in terms of what people can spend their money, and more importantly, their time on, their not the only Dungeons and Dragons game that people can spend their money and time on.

Random Observations on 4e

Over on RPG.net, there's some talk about Paizo Pathfinder and WoTC 4e.
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?670531-Comparing-the-D-amp-D-and-Pathfinder-Product-Lines-to-Discern-Why-4E-Failed

Here's what I posted there and my take on it.

Why 4e 'failed'? Well, it failed WoTC that's for sure. For anyone else it would probably have been like Nirvana but here's my 'gamer' theories.

1. Reputation. Firings every X-Mas. Taking down the DDI and claiming about 6 different reasons why but boiling it down to "thieves in the temple!", calling your consumers thieves on the PDF front and taking your toys and going home with them. Minor things but...

2. PDF Consumption. While we can say that the DDI takes the place of PDF that's not quite true. After WoTC sold out of PHB2 they claimed to have suffered damages by PDF files that were released into the wild that were legally bought and cancelled that line of revenue NEVER to replace it directly.

3. Adventure Support. There was one print adventure path and it was not viewed well. There was Dungeon online and it's one adventure path... also not viewed well. In print adventurers, especially towards the tail end?

4. OGL. While Paizo is the big dog, they've done a lot of enhance the OGL and have been very friendly towards 3rd party publishers. This includes putting their products on the front page of their own web site and talking them up. WoTC took interest in the GLS out back and shot it in the face. When Necromancer Games goes, "I will support 4e or nothing at all" and it turns out to be nothing at all? You know WoTC done fucked up.

5. Setting Support: That solution they had of fire and forget wasn't going to make a lot of people happy.

6. Setting Support 2: Trashing the Forgotten Realms YET AGAIN did nothing to help convince older players that may be coming back that this is what was needed.

7. Rule Mastery Failure. The first printings of the first few books are compatible with later books but there are a ton of errata's and updates and the monster math changed greatly from the original MM to MM2 to MM3. People felt robbed. It's been a while but I also believe there was some flubbing with the new introductory boxed set with the Larry Elmore cover of classic days.

8. Essentials or "Which way am I walking?" Initially announced the changing of product lines to smaller books that lasted for about ten seconds.

9. Release Schedule Panic: People like some steady releases and like to know when they're coming out. Cancelling books left and right and reshuffling them looks like something a small third party company would do, not the leader of the pack.

10. Novel/Tie in Support. The comics weren't bad but not huge sellers. Their book selection has bounced a bit and while there were a few series set after the Spellplauge, it was nothing like it was when it was at its peak.

11. Dungeon and Dragon Utility = m'eh: When they took the DDI off the download, I still had like two months on it. I was NOT impressed with it as it lost a lot of utility it used to have. I understand that came back but in the meanwhile, for a while Dragon and Dungeon were simply put, not good values in and of themselves. The adventurers were okay, the format kept changing, the focus keept changing, the magazines had articles late, and hey by the way, for "your convenience" we've gotten rid of the compiled issue and you have to download articles individual one by one. I think they've back pedaled on that one too.

12. DDI Misses: I went to an interview with the guys doing the DDI before 4e launched. You can read about it on EN World from back in the day. But there were a ton of things that were supposed to be there at ground zero that I think are only NOW starting to pop up like the VTT.

13. Miniature Mishaps: Hey, we're going to introduce two brand new races to the game and make almost all the miniatures for at least one of them super hard to get. Sure, you can sub for them but really, is that what the consumer wants to do? What? They don't want to pay inflated prices for repaints? What? They're not happy with the massive drop in quality that accompanied several price increases? They want to know why the adventurers never have miniatures to go with them and that those miniatures come out months or years later? Foolish mortals! It's hard keeping communication lines open in a big company. We have no idea what games are being written or what core races are in the book.

14. Holding back material to boost further sales. In the 3.5 era, the PHB2 was a massive seller. MM2 and others... not quite so much. In order to boost sales of future core books, Gnomes, barbarians, frost giants, and a host of other material was deliberately split from the 'normal' core material and put into future volumes. Nothing like forcing people to pay for a few monsters more eh? Anyone remember the old 1st edition Monster Manual where you had Orcus and Asmoedus? Dispather and Demogorgon? Stop holding back the goodies dudes.


WoTC as a company has been handicapped in competitng in what is a niche industry. Their main benefits are useless when the main competition has access to all the same resources as you. Wayne Reynods? Monte Cook? Other fan favorites? Being the people who saved D&D only gets you so far when you showcase that hey, you're not a niche industry provider, you're a corporate entity that must met X, Y, and Z goals and your lengths gone to to protect your IP are hurting you among the people in the niche fandom. You know, the very same people you're trying to sell to? Yeah, them!

But again, those are gut shots from a fan, nothing more.

DDI versus OGL

I'm reading The Folding Knife by K. J. Parker. I bought it when Borders was closing. I also have The Hammer. Man, this guy can write. It's almost all character based. There are no elaborate magic systems like the Mistborn series and no big epic arc like too many fantasy series but it's going quick and well.

But as I'm reading that, and reading some Pathfinder material, I'm also wondering about the future of Dungeons and Dragons.

While much has been made of the OGL versus the more restrictive license the GSL, I think that in terms of overall utility in getting people to buy material, the DDI also played a role.

When you have a massive database for creating characters or looking up monsters or finding rules, but it only covers those rules that are official, what are the chances that you're going to put a lot of effort into getting 3rd party sourcebooks and supplements? For me as a player its not a huge issue to write out something and as a GM its again, not a huge issue.

For others, well, if you're paying a monthly fee to use something, why punish yourself with material you can't use?

I believe that if WoTC is serious about uniting the fan base, one of the things they'll need to do is have a license that allows 3rd party publishers to upload their game mechanics to the DDI.

Crazy? Possibly.

Worth WoTC time and money to invest in that and monitor it? Probably not.

Something that the gaming community would benefit from? Yup.

It's one of those things where I honestly don't think WoTC is going to be able to push aside corporate interest in the name of gaming interest and that as a whole, will be another missed opportunity.