The Death of D&D

So, the 5e playtest started last Thursday. After a great deal of messing around, I finally got my hands on the playtest materials, and have had a quick read through. And... I like it. I'm actually surprised by how much I like it - it seems to be much simpler, should play more quickly, and seems a generally nice, fun system. Huzzah!

(There are a couple of things I didn't like. In particular, I was dismayed that they seem to have thrown out just about everything from 4e, except for stuff that I really didn't like - the overnight healing rules and the Elf/Eladrin split being the big two. On the other hand, I was rather gratified to see they're handling surprise the same way I was planning to do so in Nutshell.)

However...

It's probably important to note that the goal for WotC isn't "create a good game", or even "create a great D&D". They've set themselves two key goals: to "reunite the fans" behind a single version of D&D, and to sell significantly more than 4e.

And in those two areas, I suspect they have two chances: fat chance, and nae chance.

Let's consider for the moment the audience for the game. Now, this can be divided into a number of camps:

Non-gamers: By far the largest group, this is basically everybody who has never played before, or who has perhaps played a few times but never gotten into the game to any extent.

Lapsed gamers: By far the second-largest group, being both a long way behind the non-gamers and a long way ahead of the largest 'gamers' group, this is everybody who used to game but now does not. Depending on the estimates you use, there are somewhere between five and twenty times as many lapsed gamers as current D&D players.

4e players: Obviously enough, these are the people who play 4e.

Pathfinder players: Likewise, these are the people who play Pathfinder. This group is probably about equal with the 4e group.

3e players: There seems to be a distinct group of people who never moved beyond 3e (specifically), adopting neither 4e nor Pathfiner. There are a number of distinct 3e offshoots that should probably count in this group (such as the "Mutants & Masterminds" fantasy supplement). This group is, however, both fairly small and gradually shrinking.

Old Edition Players: This is the group playing OD&D, B/X D&D, BECMI D&D, 1st Edition, 2nd Edition, or any of the retroclones (or, indeed, the pseudo-retroclones, such as "Lamentations of the Flame Princess"). It's not actually clear how many people there are in this group - it's entirely possible that they actually outnumber either 4e or PF players.

Other Gamers: People who play RPGs other than D&D (or PF). If you include Warcraft and the like, this group is huge. If you don't, and only include tabletop RPG gamers, this group is now fairly small.

(Note that these groups are exhaustive, since everyone either plays D&D, plays another game, or doesn't play; but they're not exclusive - many people play multiple games.)

So, chances of reuniting the fans behind one version of D&D?

None whatsoever, for a key reason: Paizo basically do all the same things that WotC do, and in almost every area, they do them clearly better. They have a wide and vibrant product offering. They offer almost all their products in electronic form (with free PDF downloads for their subscribers). They produce excellent adventures, where WotC have only ever produced a handful of good ones. They have the beginner box that D&D hasn't had for literally decades (although Dragon Age has a good box, too). They have excellent community support, community relations, and customer service. And they have a stable of extremely good, extremely loyal designers, and go out of their way to identify and recruit new talent.

In other words, they have gone to great lengths to earn their customers' trust and loyalty. They now have that loyalty, and deservedly so.

For 5e to reunite the fans, WotC would need Paizo to drop support of Pathfinder, and switch to supporting 5e. And Paizo, having taken a huge risk in setting up the Pathfinder Adventure Path line after the Dragon/Dungeon licenses were not renewed by WotC, and after taking another huge risk in setting up PF rather than supporting 4e (and having seen WotC's willingness to try to kill third-party support with the GSL)... after all that, Paizo would be insane to drop Pathfinder to support 5e.

It's also worth noting that the reason we don't have a clue how big the "old edition" group is is because many such groups just don't have any internet presence - they get together for their game, same as they always did, but they neither recruit online, they don't advertise their presence online, and they probably don't follow gaming online to any extent. It's entirely possible that many of them don't even know 5e is coming; and just as many saw the announcement, shrugged, and went back to what they're doing.

So, no, 5e won't be reuniting the fans to any extent.

Chances of D&D selling significantly better than 4e?

Well, there are four ways they can do this.

1) Sell more products to existing players. But the problem here is that most gamers have a library of books, they tend not to get rid of those books, and those books don't wear out. Many of those players have shelves of 4e books, and shelves of 3e books, and shelves of other books. If WotC produce a 5e that clearly expects the user to invest another several hundred dollars in supplements, just how many are they going to turn off?

(Once upon a time, WotC hit on the solution to this - the D&D Insider, their electronic offering. For a low, low monthly sub, you would get access to a marvellous array of tools for your game, online magazines, and all sorts of other stuff. And if they had 200,000 monthly subscribers, the future of D&D would have been secure forever. Unfortunately, for a bunch of real-world reasons, it hasn't delivered either on its promises or on the expected subscriber numbers.)

2) Reunite the fans. If they can carry across the majority of 4e fans, reclaim the majority of PF fans, and pick up a significant chunk of 3e/old-edition/other game fans, then they'll be in great shape. But here's the reality: they'll get the majority of 4e fans, a small number of PF fans, and a small number of old-edition fans. They may well get the majority of 3e fans, but they're largely negligible.

Which to me looks an awful lot like selling "about as well as 4e".

3) Reclaim lapsed players. This seems a good idea, right? After all, there are huge numbers of lapsed players out there, they were sold on the game once, so let's get them! Of course, they've already tried that - the Essentials line, and especially the new Red Box were aimed at precisely that goal.

The big problem here is that those lapsed players are lapsed for a reason. Maybe they developed other priorities - they got married, or had children, and found they no longer had time. Maybe their groups broke up, and they just never found another group. (And, since most people don't make new friends after the age of 30 or so, forming a new group now is tough.) Maybe they just lost interest.

And, of course, even if they did decide to try the game again, in many cases they could just go use their own books, or download an RPG for free off the net, or whatever. Or, of course, they could get online, and play WoW, without the endless reading, and without the scheduling conflicts.

(Now, it is worth noting that WotC did get one thing very right recently. They identified that a number of lapsed gamers just wouldn't have the time, especially for the "homework" part of the game. What was needed, then, was a game you could quickly unpack, play for an hour, have fun, and then put away. And so came about the excellent, and well-received, D&D boardgames. So, credit is due there.)

Reclaiming lapsed players, certainly in large numbers, isn't happening.

4) Bring in new players. This is the big one.

The thing is, D&D has had a very high bar to entry for a long time. The core rules, for 3.5e, 4e, and Pathfinder, require an investment of $100 or so, and run to the better part of 1,000 pages. Before you can play, someone needs to buy and read those rules, create an adventure (or buy one, at further expense), create characters, explain the rules to everyone else (or they have to read a significant portion of them for themselves)... and then you get to start having fun.

And, as mentioned above, D&D has not had a good starter set for decades.

So, there is certainly scope for D&D 5e to do extremely well in this area. If WotC produce a really good starter set, and make the core rulebook(s) similarly easy to approach, and if there's an untapped yearning to get into the game if only it were a bit less arduous, then they could do spectacularly well.

But those are two really big 'ifs'. (Besides, if that was WotC's strategy then there would be no need or incentive for a 5e - they could just do a really good 4e starter set.)

All in all, the chances of 5e doing significantly better than 4e are virtually nonexistant. The likelihood is that 5e will do about as well as 4e, and that almost regardless of the quality of the game itself.

"Okay, Stephen," you may be thinking, "but how does that equate to the death of D&D?"

D&D is basically a tens-of-millions property, in the hands of a corporation that only really cares about hundreds-of-millions properties. And whenever times get tough, Hasbro's standard operating procedure is to focus on their "big guns", and cut everything else. Now, at the moment, Hasbro are humouring D&D, because times are reasonably good - they'll let it continue to bounce along, because it's not doing any harm.

But the next time there's a financial storm on the horizon, and Hasbro look to get rid of the "small fry"... game over, man.

(Incidentally, the last time there was such a financial storm, the WotC-D&D team were able to forestall it by laying out a plan to expand to be a hundred-millions-of-dollars property. They would revise the game to a Fourth Edition, and introduce a suite of online tools to go with it. If they could get 200,000 regular subscribers... That was enough to call off the hounds last time, and by the time it had failed the storm had passed. But that won't work again.)

It's a shame. As I said, I'm surprised by how much I like what I've seen of 5e. But it seems pretty certain that it will be the last edition.