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Wednesday, February 15, 2012

One Name, Two Games

I wish I could take credit for this idea, but it's come up more then once with my fellow players in our Saturday Night game sessions. Why doesn't WotC keep D&D 4e, rebrand it D&D Tactics or some such, and then put out D&D Renaissance - or whatever they want to call D&D Next when it releases.

D&D 4e is still a young game. Heck, the Essentials reboot is even more recent. While it's not the game for me, it is most certainly the game for many, and it has a very loyal following. Many of them feel they are being betrayed but WotC's decision to kill off their game so soon after it's birth. There are also enough major differences between 4e and prior editions of D&D that making one game that covers all is sure disappoint most.

Build into D&D Next a way to integrate some of it's modules into D&D Tactics, and I think you'll cover most of the bases in a way that should satisfy most of the players.

More importantly, your 4e players won't need to feel the same betrayal the 3e and prior players suffered when their rules of choice were canceled permaturely.

4 comments:

  1. Good suggestion. I wonder if this kind of idea was the basis for the board games and the skirmish game that was being playtested late last year.

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  2. That is a very good idea. Kudos to the original thinker. Except for the glacially slow character creation 4E strikes me as a beer-and-pretzels type game. With its encounter-based paradigm and all it is very tactical in nature, from the perspective of the dungeon crawl. It is almost the encounters are a string of related scenarios in something like Squad Leader. Oh, I just aged myself again, didn't I?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I've been arguing that they should support multiple lines of D&D, each uniquely branded, for some time.

    They need to justify their salaries though - so it's one D&D to rule them all.

    ReplyDelete
  4. There's never a right time to force a game out of print.

    TSR D&D had a 25 year history as the king of RPGs (heck, I'd even argue the king of _games_) when they killed it off.

    ReplyDelete

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