Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Is the world leaving without me?

It came to my attention today, thanks as usual to Crwth, that WotC is pulling the rights for third parties to sell pdfs. The WotC party line is that it's a move to curb piracy. The conspiracy theorists see it as an evil plot to force 4E on the non-adapters.

Personally, I'm somewhere in the middle. Mainly because I can't quite believe that they'd cut off even a small trickle of income. Not in this current economic climate when any income is good income.

Mostly I find it hard to believe that my fellow "hangers on" would spend their money on 4E products simply because we can't buy 3.5 (or older version) pdfs. The way I see it, if I can't get 3.5 material I'll be happy with what I have and keep my money, thanks.

So, ideally WotC's little game of "I'm-taking-my-ball-and-going-home" will backfire.

Yet, realistically I have little doubt that without 3.5 pdfs to buy more than a few gamers will shrug and buy a 4E book or two. A few of them might even like it enough to stick with it. A few others will continue to shrug and just buy the game that's currently supported.

The rest might buy 4E soley because of some odd fear of "falling behind". Like there's some sort of natural selection taking place among gamers, where the early adapters thrive and multiply with their roles and powers.

Meanwhile the players like me cling to our anachronistic multi-classing and Vancian spellcasting systems.

In ten years time when my son is playing (5th edition?) will I be unable to relate to his Spellscorched Paragon Striker? Will DnD themed web-comics cease to make sense to me?

Will I find myself extinct from the gamer gene pool?

2 comments:

Matthew Lane said...

You'll probably just switch across to a different game.

I have this feeling that the combat system for 4E is great. We have over 350 ways to kill a man & only 3 ways to do anything else.

Its fun to play, but not fun to create with. I'm annoyed that WotC is pulling all the 3.5 stuff from 3rd party producers, however it doesn't suprise me.

WotC has become quite greedy at the moment. Look at how they are producing their books at the moment.

Most of the new stuff has been left incomplete so you have to purchase more books then you would normally want to.

The DDI is another example of people feeling the need to "keep up" at the expense of a fair amount of money for essentially nothing.

As one person said "i have to sak myself, - am i just buying a name here? if i fell in love with a gal named Wanda ten years ago, does that mean that every Wanda that comes along is going to be just as groovy? i like the old Wanda, this new Wanda looks like high maintenance."

TommyLight said...

you are wrong t hey are doing it to stop piracy of their products thru peer2peer. and ill have you know there is plenty of room in 4th edition. who says you need concrete rules on the roleplaying experience. hell when i played vampire the masquerade i worried more about rping and less about rolling the dice. also i am dming 4th edition adventure for my group and the ease of assigning the treasure and setting up the opposition made it easier to focus on the roleplaying aspects and setting up my npcs and story. as a 4th edition player i still add story to my character. granted you may think teifling warlock is very generic but im a vestige warlock and so i play like the pact binder of 3.5 in combat i may curse, move, spell almost every round but outside of combat im conning the count into allowing us access into the secret library to pore over some antiquated tomes in the hopes of gleaning some new arcane secret. i still roleplay not just roleplay. the game is only what you make it. i learned a long time ago the rules dont make the tabletop experience its the playe4rs. so quit griping and roleplay.