Is a 5th Edition coming soon? [Answer: NO, it isn't!]

[lachimba]

Originally Posted by PK

No. Ask again in 2022. (I was going to say 2020 if asked in January, but this whole "one month early" thing has messed up the time continuum so now you need to give it two extra years to settle out.)

Still not so far away. I wonder if the forums will make it till then though.

[kmunoz]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

I imagine there's still not a strong case to be made in support of a 5th edition. There's probably not enough worth changing, and not enough people who would really want or need a new edition.

Yeah there really isn't. 4E isn't broken in any appreciable way and the industry is as far moved on from GURPS-style gaming as it was when 4E was new, so it's not like there's additional drift that "requires" some horrific hybrid monster like D&D 4E was.

The only thing I'd ever want to see is a consolidation, integrating the most important rules expansions and addenda back into the main books (for example, the Create advantage from Powers, and a good chunk of the Social Engineering stuff). But that would be another Compendium-style book and SJG is most definitely not moving in that direction. It's moving in more or less the exact opposite direction.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

Pretty sure the CEO knows what he's talking about.

Do you not remember everyone in the know outright lying about 4th edition being a possibility right before it came out? Their business, their rules. But please don't rewrite history.

(I seriously hope I don't get an infraction for stating a basic fact, but if so, then I'll accept it.)

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by philreed

Agreed, we kept 4e secret for a few years. I can safely tell you, though, that we have no plans at all for a 5th edition of GURPS. We have discussed a second boxed set to follow Dungeon Fantasy -- which you can pre-order https://dungeonfantasyrpg.backerkit....sted_preorders -- but no discussions at all about a 5th edition game.

I understand how it would be an unsound business decision for a still shiny edition, but that's not quite what I meant.

[Andrew Hackard]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Do you not remember everyone in the know outright lying about 4th edition being a possibility right before it came out?

Pretty sure the marketing was "We don't have anything to announce about a Fourth Edition," not "We aren't doing Fourth Edition." I'm pretty sure because a lot of that marketing came from me or people who reported to me, and I was careful NOT to say we weren't working on something that we very definitely were working on.

SJ Games does not, as a rule, discuss unannounced releases (particularly major products such as GURPS 4E) before we are good and ready to do so. We have been burned too many times by premature announcements of things that, for one reason or another, never made it to market. It is our experience, however, that simply ignoring the "When are you doing XXX?" question just makes people ask it again, louder. And sometimes the honest answer is, "We don't have plans to do it but we aren't ruling it out down the road," which satisfies nobody.

Having said that, Phil's flat statement that we are not working on or even really thinking about GURPS Fifth Edition is true. We wouldn't be putting a LOT of time, effort, and money into a new Fourth Edition-compatible boxed set if we were moving on to 5E in a couple of years. In any event, the reasons we updated to Fourth Edition just don't hold true right now -- the system is NOT overloaded with options, we have NOT figured out enough different ways of doing things that we could fill two books and then some with house rules, and (most important) we do NOT believe that a Fifth Edition would be a good use of our limited time, effort, and money. If we did, we would have done that instead of the DFRPG.

[PK]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

We wouldn't be putting a LOT of time, effort, and money into a new Fourth Edition-compatible boxed set if we were moving on to 5E in a couple of years.

Just pulling out this quote to shine a spotlight on it. I can't think of many decisions that would be dumber than investing a ton of resources into producing a Fourth Edition-based box set, followed by deprecating those rules in favor of a new edition.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by PK

Just pulling out this quote to shine a spotlight on it. I can't think of many decisions that would be dumber than investing a ton of resources into producing a Fourth Edition-based box set, followed by deprecating those rules in favor of a new edition.

It seems like there's a little bit of contradiction in the explanations of exactly how 4e compatible the DFRPG actually is. Kromm said that is more compatible with 4th edition than 4e is with 3eR, but also called it "4.5". If that means it is as different as D&D 3 and 3.5, that is probably significant. I honestly don't have a really good feel for how compatible it actually is based on the statements that you all have made, and probably really won't until I read it for myself...

[robkelk]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

It seems like there's a little bit of contradiction in the explanations of exactly how 4e compatible the DFRPG actually is. Kromm said that is more compatible with 4th edition than with 3eR, but also called it "4.5". If that means it is as different as D&D 3 and 3.5, that is probably significant. I honestly don't have a really good feel for how compatible it actually is based on the statements that you all have made, and probably really won't until I read it for myself...

OTOH, if the DFRPG fills the same niche that the Third Edition Compendium books (which were sometimes called GURPS 3.5ed) did, then Fourth Edition is roughly halfway through its lifecycle, and we should stop pestering SJGames for statements about a Fifth Edition for a decade.

[kmunoz]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Kromm said that is more compatible with 4th edition than with 3eR, but also called it "4.5".

Did he explicitly call it that, or (as I recall) did he say that a person could call it that if they really wanted to?

Everything we've heard about DFRPG suggests that the changes are isolated and specific (changes to certain advantages, adjustments to individual spells) or reductive (eliminating/simplifying certain complex rules, which has the effect of making the complex versions "optional" from the perspective of Basic, in the same way that tactical combat is optional). None of it seems much more significant than a series of house rules designed to work in a DF setting. Nothing nearly as major as (off the top of my head examples) removing PD or altering the skill cost progression, both of which had knock-on effects that radically altered large chunks of the game.

[Refplace]

Yeah I think it was you could sorty of call it 4.58 if you wanted to and IIRC he said it was like 90% or maybe 95% comatbile.