I think one of the biggest reasons was that the marketing was so insulting. One of the first thing they teach you in marketing is not to piss off your installed base. This would seem to be the most obvious thing in the world to an experienced salesman like myself. Although Games Workshop has always marched right up to the line and kicked sand in their players’ proverbial face, it generally hasn't been the scorched Earth, take no prisoners kick in the face that Wiz Kids’ Mage Knight 2 was. Games Workshop has withered on the vine slowly because of their policies. Mage Knight is history, almost taking the entire company with it.
The Brain Trust at HASBRO decided that none of us ever had any fun playing D&D before, but we would now. I don’t know about you, but some of my fondest childhood memories involve D&D, and their marketing campaign for Fourth Edition really pushed all the wrong buttons in my mind. I felt betrayed, and even more so once I actually read the rules. Important tip here, and a point in several recent discussions on RPG.net and elsewhere, it is important to actually read, and even play the game before forming your opinion, but I digress.
I am not happy with D&D Fourth Edition. I’ve talked to several people whose opinions I trust, and many of them don’t agree with me. I’m fully prepared to go this alone, but in the long run I don’t think I will. Once the honeymoon is over I think many people will feel like I do. If not, I can be as wrong as I was about Magic in 1993 when I first saw it.
I knew that there were a lot of changes in store for Fourth Edition, which I’ll call 4e from here on. What I didn’t realize, maybe naively, was that the game would become more complex and more like MMORPGs. The new version even goes so far as to use common MMO terminology to discuss character types and player roles. While I understand that this market is probably very important to the survival of D&D, I didn’t think it was necessary to abandon much of the installed base, as I mentioned before. It also seems like much of the added complexity of 4e are all of the things that I disliked about Second Edition. I also admit that much of this complexity may be invisible to the players of the online version. I think that may be the rub.
It appears that the people at HASBRO feel that tabletop roleplaying is simply doomed and they are attempting to port as many players as possible in to their online platform before the bottom falls out. They may be right, but I hope they aren’t. While I see, and have had demonstrated to me many times that the vast majority of players get ninety percent of the fun for ten percent of the effort with MMOs, I think the real compelling aspects of RPGs are completely lost in the shuffle. That is I think that the vast majority of players who have abandoned tabletop games in favor of MMOs will slowly start to realize that the camaraderie and social aspects of RPGs are sorely lacking in comparison. I think some of them are seeing the effects now.
Once you have gamed the system, and done all of the necessary quests to get your magic boots and your divine steed. Once you’ve reached the top level and have nowhere to go. Once you become bored enough to just stop playing, they may begin to realize that the point of RPGs wasn’t just to kill things and take their stuff, it was the storytelling and the friends that they made that mattered. No MMO has ever held the possibilities of those little paper books. Until an MMO does, which will probably occur in my lifetime, abandoning the market and making the games harder to play is probably in everyone’s worst interests. That hasn’t stopped them though. I mentioned to a friend that 4e reminded me of Second Edition, and he commented back that it reminded him of Chanmail. I don’t think we need D&D to be a tactical wargame, but it is.
Adding insult to injury is the new General System License, or GSL, that replaces the OGL and D20 licenses. It doesn’t replace them in my opinion, and it is so restrictive and one-sided that I think that anyone who uses it might just be a bit crazy.
There are a couple of rationales for this. One is that they may just not want anyone to release anything at all. They want all of the pie to themselves. I have mentioned before how much of a bad idea I think this is. I think the lack of OGL support for D&D 4e will make it a much weaker game. I also think sales will suffer because of it. The second rationale is that this will force several large companies to negotiate separate licenses with HASBRO that will force revenue-sharing through license payments. Neither of these ideas make any sense to me, and it has been bandied about that there is a third option. HASBRO wants no licensees at all, but someone felt that they had to have something after two years if waiting. Management and legal came back with something so insulting and one-sided that no one would sign it and the whole OGL problem would go away, only it won’t.
Several people have commented over the last several years that the OGL community is a genie out of the bottle. Other companies are developing and releasing new material and even new games under the OGL. Added to this will be the quiet backlash away from 4e that I think is coming.
Maybe I should just be patient and wait for Pathfinder?
