Quote from: fearsomepirate;1061525I don't think 3rd ed's success had a lot to do with its charop stuff. The big update in the art from the dated, 1980s-looking stuff, throwing the endless 2e splats in the garbage, massively cleaning up the presentation, clear rules, harmonized d20 approach, and Living Greyhawk were huge. Its sales were initially massive, well before charop culture took over. But all of that could have been done with a more AD&D-like approach of class being largely a statically defined thing with a small number of options. After all, that's how 5e does it, and we all know how that's been a smash hit.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1061531I don't know how much, but some part of 3E's success was the sheer length of time between it and 2E, and the buzz of a new company doing something with it.  That was enough to get people to enthusiastically try it, despite the somewhat difficult to read presentation and more than a few editing and organization problems.  That is, it had enough pent up goodwill to get people to steamroll any problem, and get a game working. That was a benefit that WotC had just by acquiring the license.  Then people had skills and feats to chew on for awhile, and most people didn't play over the low levels for some time.  

Exactly what cause the relative success of 3e is hard to split out. I think anything that fixed the perceived flaws* --of level limits balancing racial abilities, human-only classes, strictly-better perk classes as additional benefit for rolling well, individual (often perceived as arbitrary) xp charts for each class, thieves who weren't even good at their own limited niche, rules expectations that one would be playing the henchmen squad play and the name-level keep and castle play that apparently no one* used anymore, and so on and so forth-- would have done okay. In other words, any reasonable option they could have gone with for 3e would have done pretty well. As Steven mentions, a lot of it was just something new after 11 years (and a good 6 years of clear death spiral). I think charop culture, or at least having some character creation knobs and levers (much like weapon and non-weapon proficiencies eventually became in 2e) probably was inevitable in some form or another. What would have happened if a 4e or 5e or 13th Age style game had shown up instead of 3e is a question for the ages.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1061572Exactly what cause the relative success of 3e is hard to split out. I think anything that fixed the perceived flaws* --of level limits balancing racial abilities, human-only classes, strictly-better perk classes as additional benefit for rolling well, individual (often perceived as arbitrary) xp charts for each class, thieves who weren't even good at their own limited niche, rules expectations that one would be playing the henchmen squad play and the name-level keep and castle play that apparently no one* used anymore, and so on and so forth-- would have done okay. In other words, any reasonable option they could have gone with for 3e would have done pretty well. As Steven mentions, a lot of it was just something new after 11 years (and a good 6 years of clear death spiral). I think charop culture, or at least having some character creation knobs and levers (much like weapon and non-weapon proficiencies eventually became in 2e) probably was inevitable in some form or another. What would have happened if a 4e or 5e or 13th Age style game had shown up instead of 3e is a question for the ages.

Well one thing we do know is that the greater design space for CharOp, the greater number of books you can print, and some people actually bought all those books.

3e core books succeeded because of "D&D", even the 4e core books succeeded. 3e had interesting splat books, more so than even Pathfinder (which still had people buying every single book) and those couldn't exist to sell well without the design space (even if a lot of it broke balance into little pieces).

The success of Pathfinder showed just how much money can be made off of enthusiast buyers because the base rules were free/well documented (and 5e manage success without much in the way of free rules). I cite Paizo's glassdoor reviews for Pathfinder success. If Pathfinder employees receive above and beyond better treatment and benefits then it is safe to say Pathfinder was making bank.

Bank which they decided to piss away to focus on new games instead of Pathfinder (which those book buying fiends weren't going anywhere if they kept getting a steady stream of fresh content that was actually good). Which Pathfinder itself only really started fading next to 5e at the same time Paizo shifted to 2e development, and Paizo was already split in focus with Starfinder (which was also completely unnecessary to create a whole new system for that idea).

Quote from: Rhedyn;1061588Bank which they decided to piss away to focus on new games instead of Pathfinder (which those book buying fiends weren't going anywhere if they kept getting a steady stream of fresh content that was actually good). Which Pathfinder itself only really started fading next to 5e at the same time Paizo shifted to 2e development, and Paizo was already split in focus with Starfinder (which was also completely unnecessary to create a whole new system for that idea).

No, splat churn kills products. Everyone has an upper limit on how many rules they will tolerate. Some people hare happy with 100 pages of rules. Some people want 500. Some people want 5,000. Very, very, very few people will buy ad infinitum, which is why 2e, 3.5, 4e, and now Pathfinder all ran out of their ability to shove content at people. Paizo's rules expansions were already doing badly, showing they'd already hit most people's threshold for new rules.

You can model customer behavior like this:



Adding options makes a product less boring, but it makes it more complicated. Customers don't like being bored, but they don't like being overwhelmed or frustrated. Different types of customers have different thresholds for complexity. So as you increase complexity, customer satisfaction increases for a while, but it eventually turns around, and increased complexity is a liability. Nearly everybody has a threshold, only addict-like customers (who are never actually satisfied, because they're addicts, not normal people) will buy literally everything you print.

The peak on the graph is when the customer is at his most satisfied, and the farther you move to the right, the more likely you are to lose him as a customer entirely.

That's a nice enough idea, but I suspect both 3.5 and PF were carried by the addicts. Those are the same customers that carry the mobile games market and both those RPGs have F2P versions.

The trick is to keep the game playable for the F2P players while the addict whales buy everything.

Which PF retains playability, even if it is a different game 10+. The clunk starts really bogging things down at around level 16.

Now my group has found games that work for us better, but very few of us actually do not like PF. No one wants to run it though, which is more of an issue of Bestiary layout and a lack of prominent* GM guide.

*I personally have not read a single page from it or seen anyone reference anything from it as useful.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1061592That's a nice enough idea, but I suspect both 3.5 and PF were carried by the addicts. Those are the same customers that carry the mobile games market and both those RPGs have F2P versions.

3.5 was destroyed by catering to the addicts. Individual products were increasingly bought only by the most addicted/enthusiastic, and each additional book sold worse than the previous one. The whole thing collapsed after only a couple years.

QuoteThe trick is to keep the game playable for the F2P players while the addict whales buy everything.

Actually, the trick is to not fall into the trap of cranking up complexity to harvest more money from a shrinking customer base. It results in large short-term gains (the first player-facing expansion book for D&D always sells extremely well), and it's easy to get greedy and try to turn a short-term windfall into a long-term strategy. But it kills off your customer base. It is much harder to keep normal people engaged, but this is how you build long-term success instead of dying by attrition. If your revenue is growing while your customer base is shrinking, you're dying. You just don't know it.

WotC learned their lesson with 3.5 and 4E and wisely dialed back the splat books for 5E. They had enough data at that point, from sales and surveys, to know that the law of diminishing returns that fearsomepirate outlined is a trap for a big-tent game like D&D. Leave the niche publishing (which is what crunch-heavy RPGs are) to other publishers. D&D thrives when casuals are flocking to the game.

Idk, my primary RPG is Savage Worlds, which has tons of books and the net complexity doesn't increase that much, mainly because most of the books are setting specific and you don't assume every book goes into every game.

Even though I don't play it, it's not like Fate is getting MORE complicated with every book.

So this idea that you can't spam books is odd to me, because it's assuming a cumulative crunch stacking that just doesn't have to be the case. Most successful current 3.5 groups only used some of the books some of the time.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1061606Idk, my primary RPG is Savage Worlds, which has tons of books and the net complexity doesn't increase that much, mainly because most of the books are setting specific and you don't assume every book goes into every game.

Even though I don't play it, it's not like Fate is getting MORE complicated with every book.

So this idea that you can't spam books is odd to me, because it's assuming a cumulative crunch stacking that just doesn't have to be the case.

How many Savage Worlds books have ever made the Amazon top 100? Top 500? Top 1000? You cannot draw lessons about mainstream success from the dynamics of tiny, niche markets. It's like trying to learn about the ocean by looking at a goldfish bowl.

QuoteMost successful current 3.5 groups only used some of the books some of the time.

How many official books came out for 3.5 last year?

5e is not done yet. They haven't put out the Psionics system yet.

Would I switch to 6th Edition? It would really take some major convincing at this point. It would have to bring something entirely new to the table to really get my attention.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;10615943.5 was destroyed by catering to the addicts. Individual products were increasingly bought only by the most addicted/enthusiastic, and each additional book sold worse than the previous one. The whole thing collapsed after only a couple years.

The truly ironic thing about 3.5 was it was much sturdier game that played better at all levels if you actually banned all the core classes and uses only the splats.

The 3.5 PHB had the biggest concentration of tier 1-2 (wizard, sorcerer, cleric and druid) and tier 5-6 classes (fighter, monk, paladin) of any of the splats while the sweet spot in terms of classes is generally regarded to be the tier 3-4 ones (of the PHB classes, only the Bard is tier 3; Barbarian, Ranger and Rogue are tier 4).

The tier 3-4s were also generally less complex than the tier 1-2s, but more interesting than the 5-6s and could rarely outright break the game with their abilities.

D&D 5E is probably already at maximum participation numbers.  For every new player, someone else is moving on to another game.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1061608How many Savage Worlds books have ever made the Amazon top 100? Top 500? Top 1000? You cannot draw lessons about mainstream success from the dynamics of tiny, niche markets. It's like trying to learn about the ocean by looking at a goldfish bowl.



How many official books came out for 3.5 last year?

Sure the words you are saying make sense by themselves, but they aren't an argument or a logical response.

As in, you sent making any sense.

Quote from: Razor 007;1061621D&D 5E is probably already at maximum participation numbers.  For every new player, someone else is moving on to another game.

Maybe - but most people moving on to other games aren't selling their 5e books when they do.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1061510You could say the same about 5e.

All 5e did is make sure the game didn't radically change into "Wizard Chess" at high levels, it still breaks into little pieces. Mainly because your wizard is playing "Wizard Checkers" and the MM enemies are playing "Tic Tac Toe"

Yup, not massively enamoured with 5ed. It played like a cleaned up 3.5ed which is decent and playable but not my ideal and comes with a set of its own issues.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1061514I would agree with that. However, PF is not the competition I would like for it. Regardless of the vast differences between TSR/OSR D&D, 3e, 4e, 53, and PF, they are all within the same metaphoric genus (or maybe even just subspecies) of the larger cladogram of TTRPGs. They are level based, class divided, combat engine with tacked on skill system, abstract combat (hp, etc.) kludged together systems. And I love them for it, btw, but the point still stands that there is very little daylight between them, in the grand scheme of things. I would love it if, say, RuneQuest, GURPS or HERO system, Traveller (and the fantasy equivalent that could have appeared in a competitive market), and either a D&D or PF all controlling like 10% of the market each, with the other 50% controlled by everyone else.

I'm not sure if TTRPGs just happened to have stumbled into a hegemonic situation, or that that is a natural economic state for an industry of this size. It would be nice if it were different, though.

Don't much care for PF but my main issue is how it seems to promote the Frustrated Novelist school of DMing. It's a really hard mental trap to get out of since stuff that appeals to Frustrated Novelists often reads really good so when it doesn't work out in play it's easy for the DM to blame themselves for not Frustrated Novelisting hard enough for blame the players for not Taking the Story Seriously instead of finding a better way to GM.

Leads a lot of people who could be GMs into doing stupid shit.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1061525D&D 3.0 was a back-to-basics approach. Remember "back to the dungeon?" They didn't start flogging the splat treadmill until the authors of the original system left (weren't they mostly fired?), and a new crew came in and put out 3.5. Before that, the D&D 3 supplements were mostly given the same titles as 1e supplements.

What I meant by back to basic was more a streamlined AD&D 3rd edition rather than the rebuild around the d20 system what we got. Reading 3ed stuff for the first time made me think how logical, well-designed and organized everything was while the gazillion disconnected skill systems of AD&D 1ed just seemed crazy. Took a while playing with the system to see its warts and how the unified mechanics made scaling problems profilerate throughe everything and make problems hard to fix. Reading it for the first time felt like a relevation.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1061531I don't know how much, but some part of 3E's success was the sheer length of time between it and 2E, and the buzz of a new company doing something with it.  That was enough to get people to enthusiastically try it, despite the somewhat difficult to read presentation and more than a few editing and organization problems.  That is, it had enough pent up goodwill to get people to steamroll any problem, and get a game working. That was a benefit that WotC had just by acquiring the license.  Then people had skills and feats to chew on for awhile, and most people didn't play over the low levels for some time.  

PF1 had a similar dynamic on launch (though for different reasons, obviously).  PF2 will mostly stand or fall on its own merits.

Yeah, 2ed had pretty much completely outworn its welcome which made a big difference. Even the grognards bitching about 3ed mostly weren't playing 2ed anyway.

Quote from: S'mon;1061555I don't really dispute that in powergamer hands high level 5e casters are stronger. But that is true in all editions. Non casters are viable even without minmaxing and that is very unlike 3e/pf.

Well the balance is worse in 3ed than in any other edition. However, a lot depends on people playing the game with the sort of tactics that the system rewards. If the wizard sticks to blasting and the cleric mostly hangs back and heals in combat a lot of issues never come up. But all it takes to break the game is for wizards and clerics to use the good spells in the PHB instead of the sucky ones, no real minmaxing needed.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1061572Exactly what cause the relative success of 3e is hard to split out. I think anything that fixed the perceived flaws* --of level limits balancing racial abilities, human-only classes, strictly-better perk classes as additional benefit for rolling well, individual (often perceived as arbitrary) xp charts for each class, thieves who weren't even good at their own limited niche, rules expectations that one would be playing the henchmen squad play and the name-level keep and castle play that apparently no one* used anymore, and so on and so forth-- would have done okay. In other words, any reasonable option they could have gone with for 3e would have done pretty well. As Steven mentions, a lot of it was just something new after 11 years (and a good 6 years of clear death spiral). I think charop culture, or at least having some character creation knobs and levers (much like weapon and non-weapon proficiencies eventually became in 2e) probably was inevitable in some form or another. What would have happened if a 4e or 5e or 13th Age style game had shown up instead of 3e is a question for the ages.

Yeah, in retrospect it's hard to remember just how much "wheeeee, I can be a dwarf monk" felt like a game change But it did.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;10615943.5 was destroyed by catering to the addicts. Individual products were increasingly bought only by the most addicted/enthusiastic, and each additional book sold worse than the previous one. The whole thing collapsed after only a couple years.



Actually, the trick is to not fall into the trap of cranking up complexity to harvest more money from a shrinking customer base. It results in large short-term gains (the first player-facing expansion book for D&D always sells extremely well), and it's easy to get greedy and try to turn a short-term windfall into a long-term strategy. But it kills off your customer base. It is much harder to keep normal people engaged, but this is how you build long-term success instead of dying by attrition. If your revenue is growing while your customer base is shrinking, you're dying. You just don't know it.

It didn't help that most of the splatbooks were complete filler that nobody much read except for the feat list and new spells. Eventually you're going to have a hard time selling books if people only want them for 20% of their content.

Quote from: Chris24601;1061616The truly ironic thing about 3.5 was it was much sturdier game that played better at all levels if you actually banned all the core classes and uses only the splats.

The 3.5 PHB had the biggest concentration of tier 1-2 (wizard, sorcerer, cleric and druid) and tier 5-6 classes (fighter, monk, paladin) of any of the splats while the sweet spot in terms of classes is generally regarded to be the tier 3-4 ones (of the PHB classes, only the Bard is tier 3; Barbarian, Ranger and Rogue are tier 4).

The tier 3-4s were also generally less complex than the tier 1-2s, but more interesting than the 5-6s and could rarely outright break the game with their abilities.

I remember holding out some hope for PF1 until the devs said that since adding all of the splatbooks raised 3.5ed's powerlevel they needed to give ALL of the core classes a powerboost to make them balanced with the splatbook content (at this time they were still talking about Pathfinder core being compatible with 3.5ed splats) because surely wizards need a boost to be able to keep up with hexblades.