LogFAQs > #900328120

I_Abibde posted...

Most of my current players are young enough to have started at that point, but they all either 1) started at 3.5, never mind that it had already technically run its course by then, or 2) started at Pathfinder.

Just judging based on most of the online gaming groups I've seen, it sometimes seems like almost no one ever really started with 3e. All the old school grognards seem to be people who started with 2e or earlier, while most of the new players all seem to have started with 5e (with at least a few who picked up 4e from the Penny Arcade games).

The only group that seems to have started with Pathfinder were the Critical Role guys, but that group also had three older RPers who had started in 2e (or even 1e AD&D), and they mostly picked it because Matt Mercer was already running 3e games and was more familiar with them. And they switched to 5e almost immediately once the opportunity for them to do so was available.



I_Abibde posted...

The failures of 4th Edition led directly to the rise of not only PF

I'd argue that the success or failure of 4e had absolutely nothing to do with PF, period.

What led to PF was the fact that 4e was so radically different from earlier editions, it tended to split off people who weren't willing to change, or who didn't like the new direction of the game (to mimic MMORPG design). Those people were driven off long before 4e had a chance to succeed or fail. And their leaving didn't necessarily offset newer players brought in by the new design and more visually mapped version of the game.

But overall, I'd say that 4e almost certainly made enough money for the company, and brought in enough newer players, that they don't necessarily see it as a failure at all (even if they did want to redesign 5e to try and recapture a lot of the players who had defected to PF).

Basically, I don't think most of the people who complain about 4e would have complained at all if it was run as a separate alternative version of D&D run parallel to the main line (in the same way Basic D&D and AD&D were separate and differed in some radical ways). Had WotC released a 3.75/Pathfinder edition of their own rather than willingly giving up on that portion of the audience, those players would have had less reason to care whether or not 4e was different, and 4e still could have brought in new players.

With 5e, I think there was a definite desire to sort of toe the line between the two versions (in exactly the same way 3e originally tried to pick up for AD&D while not completely forsaking Basic). It's not condemning one or the other as a failure, as much as it is trying to pick out the parts of each that are successful, to make an even more successful (and profitable) version.



I_Abibde posted...

It also says a great deal to me that 4th Edition had such a short life span compared to the other versions of Dungeons & Dragons.

4e was officially supported for about 7 years. That arguably makes it one of the longer runs, when you consider 3e was only supported for about 7 years (but was also basically divided into 3e and 3.5), while the original version of the game only really existed for 3 years before they rereleased it as two separate lines (Basic and Advanced).

Meanwhile, Basic D&D wound up having like 5 different versions over 20 years, while AD&D had 2 different revisions over the same span.

AD&D 2nd is probably the edition of the line that lasted the longest, and that only lasted for about 11 years (but almost entirely unsupported for the last few years - realistically, it was probably more like 7-8 years active).


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