Did 4th edition kill D&D?

Did 4th edition kill D&D?

Estimated by whom?

Yes. Good riddance.

This chart is extremely inaccurate. It's basically nothing but a sourceless lie.

Yes, temporarily.

3rd and 3.5 were around for a really, really long time. 4th kind of came and went.

Autists killed d&d. It was an ongoing project that started with Hasbro buying the franchise and reached peak bullshit with D&D 5e's Online Playtest.

This.

Mike "4e was a mistake" Mearls had to admit (probably while fighting back tears) that each successive edition sold more than the last.

You could still claim that 4e increased this number the least I guess.

>3rd and 3.5 were around for a really, really long time
That's a funny way of saying "AD&D was around for a really, really long time".

4e was around for only a brief time, but it is still being played at least (just like all editions of D&D except, I think, OD&D).

>OD&D

I mean, there are so many spinoffs it may as well count.

If 4e wasn't a mistake, how come they went back to old tried and true formula for 5e?

Surely if it was a success they would continue in the direction that 4e took?

How do 4rries explain that?

>This thread again
Go back to bed, Virt

Never said it wasn't.

I just said even Mearls (who hated it) admitted that it sold more than the previous edition.

No. The waning attraction of D&D killed 4e.

Source?

WotC don't ever discuss sales figures so the only thing we can go by is the collected data reported by various retailers.

What the fuck is that scale?

It was in an interview with him. I couldn't find it in a quick google, since his twitters drown out everything.

To try and bring angry grognards back into the fold.

This just accelerated D&D's depreciation: grogs left D&D because they hated 4e, found superior alternatives to D&D, and not all came back; 4e fans left D&D because 5e was a clear abandonment of direction, and similarly found superior alternatives to D&D. Every move just shakes up their base and exposes them to market forces, bleeding market share. And it does matter, even growing in absolute numbers is no protection from obsolescence.

We're around 7 billion now; even if birth/mortality rate stays at replacement levels only, we are going to hit 10 billion because of the upward fill effect. You need to grow with the market to maintain your position; you need to outpace the market to achieve real growth.

The problem of DnD 4e wasn't that it was a bad game (because it wasn't).
The problem of DnD 4e was that it alienated DnD audience, because it wasn't what they expected.

It's like selling Cyberpunk 2020 in the Shadowrun packaging, or selling a Mario game in the Metroid packaging.
It's a great game on its own, but the marketing targeting is off the mark, and this, both the intended and the actual audiences are pissed off - the former because it's not what they like, while the latter because it's marketed as something they don't like.

are those units in thousands of games? is it over the game's entire career or first quarter/year? What is that bottom bar for?

Not only does this graph not relay any useful information, it also doesn't take into account outside factors, such as 4e and Pathfinder competing for players whereas 1st, 2nd, and 3rd ed had no real competitors. 5ed's only real competitor right now is PF which has been out for so long that many of it's players have jumped ship out of boredom and bloat.

because 4e is still widely available and played, and it makes more sense to redo flavors that have been out of print the longest?

The warlock, additionally, is a straight up 4e class (as in it has at wills, encounters, and dailies), although gayly (it doesn't have the attractions of the 4e warlock).

I think everyone can agree that the fighter etc. would be far better off if it had 4e perks.

Them saying "We made everything NOT a clusterfuck" got me, a veteran since 1992, to love it.

>4e was around for only a brief time, but it is still being played at least (just like all editions of D&D except, I think, OD&D).
Trust me, OD&D's still being played.

Probably because it's the best edition. No joke.

>What is that bottom bar for?
BECMI sold a lot of copies. The Red Box is the best selling RPG ever, I think?

Which combat resolution mechanic do you prefer? OD&D is amazing.

5e's simple yet familiar mechanics is what brought my group to abandon PF and start playing it.

That said, I liked 4e's combat mechanics, but i am also a big fan of games like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

btw, I'm not the guy you replied to, thought i should mention that.

It sold well and your graph is retarded. No sources cited, no scale? Get real.

4e's problems were interior and departmental. It took a lot of man hours to produce all that content internally--a book a month for almost its entire lifespan, plus boxed releases--and while 4e as a whole was commercially successful it wasn't deemed worth all the effort put into it on WotC's end. After a point, while it was profitable, it wasn't 'good enough'.

>Did 4th edition kill D&D?
Well people still play D&D, so I'm gonna take a huge leap and say that it's not dead.

Unfortunately no.

Also the whole murder-suicide dealie. That was a bit of a problem.

Yeah, they really had a lot banking on their digital front for 4e.

They were able to do it well with 5e by making deals with roll20 and DriveThruRPG while also making the game more open in general. They've got a positive feedback loop going, plus the game's so much more visible for all that.

>murder-suicide
Mind elaborating? Kind of hoping that it's meant figuratively and not that someone at WotC snapped.

That's exactly what happened. Lead programmer of the 4e online client snapped, killed his ex-wife and then himself.

The rest of the crew couldn't untangle his project, had to start from beginning. Then that fell through when the 4e crew got downsized and Mearls got brought in for essentials iirc.

Literally speaking.

4e died not because of its perceived OR REAL(!!!!) faults, but because it was designed to work along some amazing webtools.

But that was destroyed by a murder suicide and 4e with it.

DISCLAIMER: At no point am I saying that 4e's flaws are not very real. I am only saying the killing blow was a literal killing blow and not the figurative one.

I was honestly not expecting that to be the answer, truth be told, Christ.

Kind of a shame since up until they stopped supporting the online tools they were pretty fucking good. CB was especially great before browsers stopped using Silverlight and now it doesn't work anymore (thank god for the clever souls who jury-rigged the downloadable CB).

On that subject though, fuck Fantasy Grounds. £250 for all the DnD shit just isn't worth it.

Your chart is stupid. But the answer even without numbers is Yes.

Sure there are always people that would stick to an Older model, but since 4e? Huge swaths of people diverged into Pathfinder and 4th. Now we also have a second split of 5e

There are still people that play "1st", 2nd, 3.0 strictly, and 3.5 Strictly. And good on them I recon these groups at least know what they want. (Even if it is ass backwards.)

The people that splintered into the three remaining?
They could all be playing ONE edition if wizards had they fucking act together.

Yep. The guy was actually developing a virtual tabletop that plugged into the Character Builder, and all of its consolidated content. It'd be a big powerful offering now, and was tremendously ahead of the curve for 2008.

Mearls trying to obliterate the line with Essentials and WotC having an autism1 freakout over pirates and canceling their PDF sales certainly didn't fucking help. 4E was still selling more than PF until that stupid shit happened.

There is no common ground between people who WANT charbuilding versus who want most player skill to be in how you play the game versus how you make your character. There was never hope for a truly unifying edition because only a stupid person would expect to satisfy all the people all the time, but 5e is still the most agreeable upon universal edition.

I still don't like it. My 2 fav are 1e and 3e.

As much as I'd like just using man-to-man for everything, things get clunky enough with fantastic creatures that I honestly prefer just using the ACS tables with those rules.

The dream is definitely to convert everything over into the 2d6 system, but it's not really all that feasible. Each addition to the table increases the number of entries needed, and it makes it really tricky to add new critters unless you just go "oh, it fights like a Werewolf" or whatever.

Hence the Alternate Combat System tables.


To be honest, what draws me personally to OD&D is less the combat systems and more the world it sets up within its rules - none of the later editions have anywhere near as interesting keeps, for instance.

Not really, I would never play anything that catered to 5E players or PF players and a game that tries to cater to all three is going to be fundamentally weaker for everyone than a dedicated game.

Not exactly. That chart is sourceless drivel and 4e sold more than the previous edition - every edition in D&D was sold more than the previous.

Wizards dealt the game a grievous blow by not sticking to their guns. By the time they released 5e most of the self-harming grognards that liked 3.5 had left for Pathfinder, and everyone else had found superior, generally non-D20 systems to mess around with. The people that liked 4e didn't move on because the saw 5e as a step back whereas the people that hated 4e had left the building already.

>every edition in D&D was sold more than the previous.
The one exception being Red Box Basic D&D, of course, because that thing was in fucking toy stores (and, from what I've heard, book stores?) and was kind of a fad for a while.

Googling around has Tim Kask estimate it at at least three million copies - which is kind of insane, to be honest.

graph is bullshit, iirc i just read that 5e was the best selling edition of all time. the hobby is more popular than ever.

>iirc i just read

You have short term memory problems? That explains why you forget to use your shift key then.