The Internet is Full of Lies

Quick, what's the best-selling edition of D&D of all time in the USA? If you read a lot of gaming forums, especially the most passionate ones, you'll probably say, "Oh yeah, that's easy. 3.5. That's the one everyone loves the most and which spawned Pathfinder, the most popular RPG of all time!"

WRONG.

"Oh, well in that case, it's probably AD&D, maybe first edition? I remember AD&D 2e bankrupted TSR."

WRONG.

"Then it must be AD&D 2e for sure. Planescape was awesome!"

WRONG.

The best-selling edition of D&D of all time is the Basic Set. That's the edition that sold to millions of players. It's not even AD&D! The Basic Set tends to be regarded as "not real D&D" by the hardcore fans. And what's more, the next best-selling version is 3rd edition. Not 3.5, 3.0, which is widely regarded among fans as the most broken edition of the game.

The reason you are wrong is the Internet works a lot like classic rock radio. If you listen to much classic rock, and I asked you what the most popular songs of 1969 were, you'd probably say things like "Whole Lotta Love," "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," "Come Together," and "Proud Mary"...but none of those songs were even in the top 10!  When I look at Billboard's Hot 100 of 1969, I see only four songs in the top 20 that I regularly hear on classic rock radio.

See, classic rock playlists are put together by the most dedicated fans for the most dedicated fans. Enthusiasts' tastes rarely overlap with the masses. In tabletop games, D&D 3.5 has the most expansions, the crunchiest math, the most complex options, and the most detailed mechanics. It's an enthusiast's game through and through. But Basic D&D, which came in an attractive box, had simple rules (race and class weren't even separate, and there was no such thing as a "build"), and was sold in toy stores, achieved much greater success. So when 3rd edition completely discarded the framework of Basic under the theory that AD&D is the game that "everyone" played, they actually turned off a lot of players.

Online, forum chatter, blogs, and webzine articles create the most noise, but they're also a self-selected sample of the most dedicated fans. While 3.5 has the most dedicated, loudest following, it wasn't the most successful product.

Can Paizo Survive 5e?

According to Mike Mearls, 5e is blowing away sales expectations and has already hit its fourth printing. D&D is crushing Pathfinder on Amazon. The #1-selling PF book is the Core Rulebook, and it is getting beaten by all 3 D&D core rule books, the Starter Set, the DM Screen, and both the Curse of Strahd and Princes of the Apocalypse adventures. Then comes the Core Rulebook. Before we see another Pathfinder title, we see the rest of the published D&D adventures. To find a Pathfinder adventure, we have dig deep into the ranks of things that measure their monthly sales in the single digits (or worse!).

With the recent deployment of the DM's Guild allowing players to actually make money on their homebrew (yours truly has made $70) and the SRD bringing 3rd parties back into the fold, the question is whether Pathfinder can survive the onslaught.

My prediction is no.

The basic problem is that PF, to this day, maintains its identity as "D&D for people who want to play 3rd edition forever." This was a viable strategy as long as 4th edition was WotC's flagship product, leaving the market without a traditional d20-based fantasy game. So what are Paizo's options here?

1. Keep running with the 3E model forever. The problem here is that 3E feels like an increasingly dated, ancient system. 5e's as big an update to the structure of the d20 system as 3e was in 2000, and 3e now feels as old and cumbersome next to 5e as AD&D did next to 3e. If Paizo keeps on with the 3.5 SRD, it will enter a death spiral as old players gradually quit and it fails to attract new ones. Currently, its growth model seems to be almost entirely on selling new stuff to dedicated players, so it may already be in that spiral now.

2. Update to the 5e SRD. Paizo has spent years trying to promote Pathfinder as a brand that stands on its own two legs, and not merely the Fruity Frosted O's to D&D's Froot Loops...with little success. After seven(!) years, Pathfinder is virtually unknown outside of TTRPG circles, and is still spoken of as, "Well, it picks up where 3.5 left off." While updating to the 5e SRD would certainly modernize the game, it would cement its reputation as the generic knock-off version of D&D. But this time around, it'll be trying to compete with an in-print version of D&D rather than extending the life of a dead one. It's hard to imagine it gaining D&D players, rather than its own fan base dumping it to get the real thing.

3. Do something new.  Paizo could take its training wheels off, write a new d20 RPG system that doesn't have 3e's core problems or feel 15 years old, and market that. But this means dropping any ability to market itself as "D&D 3.75" and now relying entirely on the strength of the Pathfinder brand. And the fact is that Pathfinder isn't a strong brand. Pathfinder piggybacks off D&D. Period. No one cares about Golarion as such; it's merely an adequate grab-bag of classic D&D tropes, and everyone knows it. Paizo's big mega-dungeon; that was supposed to remind everyone that they're way ahead of the game compared to WotC sold like crap. If Paizo goes this route, a significant chunk of its audience will lose the only reason they played it.

I don't think Paizo will pursue the second option, despite it having the resources now to become the most prolific, best-known 3rd-party publisher for the 5e SRDs (sorry, Goodman Games). The first will gradually become more and more untenable as sales flag, at which point it will pursue the third. And that will be the end. The fact is that Dungeons & Dragons is the tabletop RPG. Pathfinder started life as a knockoff, and it will end life as a knockoff.

Observations at Half-Price

Last night, I went to Half-Price Books looking to see if I could find any old AD&D material (I didn't find anything I wanted, just some really crappy splats). A couple observations:

1. Nearly the full set of 4e books was there, including a couple adventure modules and prerelease promos. Someone clearly had unloaded his collection. Every time I go, I see a new load of 4e books. The size of the collection always indicates they came from someone who seriously played 4e and corroborates with my experience that 5e has definitely killed 4e.

2.  There was also a solid collection of 3.5 books. The core books were there, as were most of the Eberron books. I've been seeing a lot more 3.5 books in the last year. I'd say nearly every time I go to a used bookstore, there's a complete set of core 3.0 or 3.5 books on the shelf. It looks like people are offloading their 3.x stuff, too---either switching to Pathfinder or 5e (I rarely see PF books and haven't seen a 5e book yet).

3. 3rd feels ancient. I flipped through a monster manual and a couple adventures to see if there was anything worth converting to 5e. The awkward clumsiness of the NPC and monster stat blocks really jumped out. Once you've gone a while without seeing monsters with feats or DCs all over the place, they're really ugly.

4. Paizo's aggressively trying to hold onto its market. HPB is now selling new D&D Starter Sets and Pathfinder Beginner Boxes. But there's a lot more new Pathfinder stuff on the shelf besides that---the display suggests that Paizo's directly selling via HPB. There was some kind of card game, spell carts, little splat tools, and a whole bunch of other junk. Some people probably take this to mean that Paizo is way more successful, but I don't think so. PF's Amazon rank has never matched D&D's, and any time I find store data, PF and 5e are at best <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?2968-RPG-Sales-From-a-Game-Store-s-Perspective#.VsX7dJTWsw4">even in revenue</a>.

Problem is, there's way, way more Pathfinder product on the shelf. That implies that WotC's margins are significantly higher on D&D, and there are at this point probably more individual people buying D&D material. There just isn't that much stuff for one person to buy before he's got everything. Fewer SKUs generating the same revenue = more people buying.

I don't think their strategy is viable. Providing more and more crap to buy just soaks more and more revenue out of the same dedicated enthusiasts (you know, like how I bought every 4e book I found). It doesn't bring in new players. My experience with 5e is that Core Rulebooks + 1 Adventure = 1 Year of Gaming for a typical table. WotC's strategy of keeping the core books in stock, printing one adventure every six months, and letting third parties handle everything else seems to be a much better long-term strategy.

Looking Back At 4e

I'll be honest. I liked 4e. No, I loved this much-hated edition of D&D. I ran and played a number of campaigns in it over the last several years and enjoyed every minute of it. But I have to admit that it's done; I'm never coming back to it. The only question is how long I'll lug around these books before admitting they serve no purpose.

What 4e did well:

1. The Warlord rocked. This was by far the coolest class introduced by 4e. If you never played, he was somewhat like a fighter, but his powers were focused mainly on granting extra attacks and bonuses to other players. The Warlord was a fan favorite and returns in 5e...sort of. With the right character options and feats, a 5e Fighter can be a reasonable facsimile of a 4e Warlord.
2. Balance. As much as 3.5 fans insisted a godlike Wizard and a useless Fighter at high levels is somehow "core" to the D&D experience (this is in fact an artifact of 3.x), a game with "trap" classes is a broken game. Not every class in 4e was equally well designed, but you didn't have this problem of "Okay, Sam's wizard is basically godlike now and can do everything my rogue can do...so either you let me roll a new character, or I quit." Every class played its part, and every class was equally engaging to play.
3. Combat was deep and engaging. There's really nothing quite like a well-executed 4e battle. Each class's and monster's unique powers and abilities interacted to create interesting battle situations that I've not seen quite replicated since. Combat was probably the most fun part of the system. The Monster Manuals had lots of tactical options for nearly every race of monsters, which the 5e manual just lacks (which is why I'm converting my 4e manuals to 5e).

The flaws in the system have been beaten to death in countless blogs and forum posts. Suffice it to say that I agree with a number of them, like how the Wizard was ruined, combat took too long, and it felt like the world leveled up with you. I don't agree that it was "a tabletop MMO" or "every class was the same." This complaint always came from people who played no more than 2 or 3 sessions. Why I'll never go back has little to do with the common complaints.

1. You couldn't make a character sheet without that awful Silverlight app. We briefly tried just using books, and it was just too much of a pain in the ass. At $75 a year, the DDI app felt like a total rip-off, and I'm glad to be rid of it. With 5e, it's still best for casters to use cards rather than the book, but you only buy those once, and I prefer to buy an attractive, physical product rather than a digital app.
2. The monsters all need heavy adjustment. Without reducing monster HP and increasing damage output, a single 4e encounter was always a 2-hour slog. And, of course, it was easiest to do this using the DDI app!
3. I spent too much time staring at my computer. So much needed to be done in-app that 4e eventually made it feel like buying the books was a waste of money other than giving the players something to read when they planned their next level. As the DM, I spent a lot of the game hunched over at my laptop, clicking through the monsters I had saved in the app.
4. 5e doesn't need a sheaf of house rules. 5e is the first version of D&D we've played RAW and not had to make major adjustments. By the time I'd dropped 4e, I was removing the +1/2 Level slider from everything, had a list of banned feats, and limited OAs to one per round. It made the game more playable, but also slower to adjudicate. 5e...has no +1/2 Level slider, very few feats, and has bonus action/reaction/concentration rules that put fundamental limits on things that stop major imbalance before it happens. So to a large degree, it implements my 4e house rules already.
5. 5e's the cleanest, best-tested D&D ever. 5e is just so well put together that it's hard to want to go back to any older edition's flaws. It's that simple. It's so much harder to break, and the rules are so much more streamlined, that the older editions really are not worth going back to now.

Unpacking the Fighter

With my handy new AnyDice function, I thought it would be fun to look at just how our Champion Fighter's growth looks. In 5e, the Champion gets a higher chance to crit and various stat boosts at different levels. I plotted how a typical greatsword-wielding Champion would fare against a chainmail-wearing (AC 16) enemy from level 1 to level 20 (yes, in 5e, you will encounter enemies with 16 AC even at high levels). I assumed he started with 17 STR, went to 19 at level 4, and went to 20 at level 6. Plots are of the chance he does at least X amount of damage in a round.

Here he is doing a normal attack:

And here he is with advantage:

Advantage is important for Champions. Not only does it boost the chance to hit, but it nearly doubles their chance to crit. With advantage, 1 in 5 attacks should be a critical hit at levels 3-15, and 1 in 3 from 15 onward. If you're playing a Champion, it would be wise to delay your attack until a fellow party member can flank.

Each set of clustered lines corresponds to getting an additional Extra Attack. What we can see is that, by far, EA is a bigger damage booster than any other improvement,  due to each EA having exactly the same modifiers. This is a big change from 3.x/Pathfinder, where each Extra Attack had a decreasing chance to hit, with the 4th generally being little more than ceremonial gesture.

From level 11-19, damage output grows fairly slowly. The curve stays in the same range, with odds of various damage levels increasing by no more than about 12% over the entire spectrum. Players shouldn't regard this a dead zone, however. Rather, this is where the Fighter becomes increasingly versatile and harder to kill. Indomitable helps compensate for what are doubtlessly unimpressive CHA, WIS, and INT scores, and he gets more stat boosts or feats than any other class. Of course, this is where D&D simply becomes more challenging. The most rapid relative growth is from levels 1 to 10, and from then on, parties need to get better and better at working together.