The State of the Game

If you pay attention to the community, particularly the Wizards boards, you’ll know that the fandom, or at least a vocal few are in turmoil over the future of 4th edition. Some books have been cancelled, the magazines are being changed, the minis are cancelled, and this is all on top of the new online character builder and essentials and the strong reactions that those evoked. Much of the furor seems to centre around WotC’s ability to communicate effectively with the community, or rather the lack of it. At the very least, they have handled the past six months... poorly, in terms of communication.

What’s Happening?

While reactions to the online Character Builder and Essentials were decidedly mixed, the majority of the reaction to the current events has been negative. In fact the matter of dispute doesn’t seem to be whether things are going down the drain, but rather how far down and how fast it is going. The problem with all of this is that it is still all just speculation. Wednesday's announcements in Ampersand and the FAQ that came shortly after told the community very little that they hadn’t already worked out themselves. That is, that the primary minis line was now over, with only occasional special releases such as the recent Beholder set and the slightly less recent Orcus; as well as the fact that Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Emporium, Class Compendium: Heroes of Sword and Spell, and Hero Builder’s Handbook are not going to be released in print.

So then... what is happening going forward? Heroes of Shadow has shifted to hardcover and been pushed back a month, and the Dragon and Dungeon magazines will no longer be compiled into a single PDF at the end of each month. And what else? Well... we don’t know. We don’t know because Wizards hasn’t told us, which naturally has led to speculation. And also there’s been speculation. Finally, some people have chosen simply to speculate. In short, Wizards isn’t telling us anything, so people have fallen back on wild mass guessing and paranoia.

The Theories

Much of the speculation revolves around three basic theories. The first is that 4th Edition is over; some people say that essentials fell flat on its face, or alternatively that it did well but that Wizards needed it to do spectacularly. The solution is to do the simplest thing possible to encourage people to buy new books, which is to start over from the beginning again. Oddly, much of the speculation in this vein suggests that Wizards will simply expand on the core concepts of Essentials for the next edition. This seems logical at first, but remember that many of the advocates of this theory blame Essentials for the edition’s downfall, so why would Wizards continue with the product that killed the last edition when starting a new one? We are left only to wonder.

The second theory is that Wizards is planning on going all digital with 4th Edition, or as far as they reasonably can. Some even say that they’re planning on going the MMO route so that in order to maintain access to anything you have to continue to pay your monthly subscription. With the recent shift in tack with the character builder, the ongoing beta testing of the virtual table, and an online version of the monster builder expected this theory is not entirely without merit. At first glance it doesn’t seem a horrible notion; Blizzard is able to make a significant amount of money by squeezing their player base each and every month, but many other MMOs are taking the lesson of the Battle.Net of Blizzard’s previous RTS games and charging for the content but not the access to actual play. The question Wizards would have to ask itself if this were the route they were planning to take is “How committed are the fans to D&D?” In other words, is it D&D that people like, or would they be just as happy or happier playing Pathfinder, or Dragon Age, or Earthdawn? This would be a dangerous route to take, and if the edition isn’t on its way out already, such an action could very well be the final nail in the coffin. On the other hand, great reward often comes from taking great risks, and this potential shift to a primarily digital format might just be the realization of all the promises that Wizards failed to fulfill with D&D Insider in the past few years.

The third theory seems to be that Wizards, or perhaps Hasbro, has decided that they don’t know how to make money from Dungeons & Dragons and so are going to cancel the game, either literally or effectively. This may simply be a down-time of a few years until the franchise can be revitalized with a new vision (ie 5th Edition) like Star Trek had following the failure of Enterprise, or it could mean that they plan to get what they can out of D&D by publishing board games and other tangential products before selling it off to someone else. Many people have cited similarities between what appears to be happening to 4th Edition and Wizards’ treatment of Star Wars: Saga Edition before they let go of their license agreement, suggesting that it heralds the end for D&D.

And So...

All this of course is ultimately just guesswork. I find myself concerned by the state of the game, and worried about the fate of the game in these uncertain times. It would certainly be nice if Wizards were to let us all in on the secret, whatever it may be. But perhaps the secret is that they have no more idea where they’re going than we are and letting that out of the bag would be potentially even more damaging to the game and the community. Hopefully at the D&D Experience, coming at the end of this month, we’ll learn more.

I’ve said very little about what I actually think so far in this post, and the truth of it is that I’m not entirely certain myself. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised at any of the theories being correct, but the truth could just as easily be something we don’t know about, perhaps something brilliant and revolutionary that will make everyone sit up and say “Oh”. I’d like to hope that maybe there is some insane and brilliant new path they’re going to take, but I’m not really expecting that to be the case.

What I really think is that to Wizards, publishing D&D isn’t really about making a great game, it’s about making a great deal of money, and in a world that is changing as quickly as ours, they’re having a difficult time figuring out how to actually accomplish that goal. The cost of publishing physical books are high, especially when compared to publishing PDFs, but a PDFs strengths are also its weaknesses, it is easily copied and redistributed, and even pulling PDFs of their books from online vendors hasn’t stopped pirates (at best it has slowed them.)

People always point out that corporations are... well... corporations, and that their main goal is to make money, but perhaps that’s putting the cart before the horse. Wizards might have been banking on the strength of the D&D brand to hold onto their customers, but with so many other RPGs out there, and PDFs making it easier than ever for newcomers to publish and distribute their own products, the brand may not be enough to keep the game alive. I think that money has become too much of a focus, and that the focus should, even must, be shifted back toward making a high-quality game that bolsters the strength of the brand rather than sapping it. As the line goes, “If you build it, they will come.” Maybe that’s naive of me, maybe it’s foolish to ignore that a company exists largely to make money, but Wizards became the company it is by making quality games, maybe it would do them well to focus on what makes the game good, rather than just what makes the game profitable.