Xaeyruudh's Index

Cynic’s Explanation

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This is one of several thoughts/suggestions regarding the upcoming fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons (5e). Relevant news items: nytimes and wizards.

This is conjecture. Cynical conjecture. It should not be taken as Wizards of the Coast’s real motivations… unless it turns out that Cynic is right. In the meantime, I don’t have the inside scoop on goings-on at WotC, and nobody is feeding me any information. I probably know less than what’s in the news. This is just one way of looking at things, from the outside where most of us stand. I anticipate at least one person proving himself (yea, I’m a sexist; I firmly believe men are the dumber gender) a complete dolt by ignoring this intro paragraph and pasting the following into a forum as a quote from Wizards… which it is not, just in case that somehow wasn’t clear.

Cynic thinks that somebody, somewhere, came up with an idea which is simultaneously brilliant and a huge slap in the face to players.

Ask the customers what they want. While they’re responding, we (the Ravenloft Powers) come up with a new version of D&D, maybe start by reverting to 3.5e and re-add the fun parts of 4e, with some different flavor text or whatever. We have creative people to come up with all that googah happy-rainbow garbage. We’ll take the suggestions that we can work in without wasting a lot of time on it, and while still maximizing appeal to our 11 yr old European-descent American male target demographic. Customers will be happy because we asked for their input, but the kicker is that they can’t hate 5e because hey… they asked for it. We asked what they wanted, and gave it to them. Close enough, anyway. How do you complain about that?

With the unspoken understanding, behind the scenes, that customers are not, by any stretch of the imagination, actually contributing anything meaningful to the process of creating 5e. The great thing (from a corporate standpoint) is that customers won’t know which changes came from other gamers’ suggestions and which ones came from WotC staff, the magic 8 ball, or the monkey that only the CEO can see.

It’s been theorized that Wizards feels that D&D needs to be more like WoW in order to successfully compete with WoW. This theory resonates with me (which is why I remember it) because 4e looks to me like it’s trying to be a tabletop version of an MMO. Trying too hard.

Anyway, here’s my point in introducing Cynic: I think your (WotC) success will depend on how well you can prove Cynic wrong. I honestly wish you a resounding success, because I would like to see D&D persist. However, I hope you’ll forgive me if I decline to hold my breath, and instead continue developing campaign material (and possibly game systems) on my own. Cynic and I go way back, and too often he’s been right.

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