But if it is so lousy, why, exactly, is it so popular?
It's a good point and there is a very easy answer. Gate Keeping.
The 5e community is super militant about shutting down anyone who even mentions that there are other games out there that might serve a gaming group better.
But if it is so lousy, why, exactly, is it so popular?
It's a good point and there is a very easy answer. Gate Keeping.
The 5e community is super militant about shutting down anyone who even mentions that there are other games out there that might serve a gaming group better.
Not really. I don't think I go a week on here without someone extolling the virtues of switching to pathfinder.
The PF people are the Jehovah's witnesses of the TTRPG world.
I see PLENTY of coverage of d&d alternatives on YouTube and from D&D content creators.
On here, there's plenty of people including you that extoll the virtues of earlier editions (even if they are a PITA to find and get).
It's brand recognition and when you're looking for a group, it's the most common denominator and democratically (i.e. agreeable to the biggest majority) that always wins.
I mean, there's never been and likely never will be a D&D that's truly easy to run.
For the record, you are wrong, for everyone else, here is a list of D&D and fantasy games that exist and are easy to run like a pro-DM.
Old School Essentials Forbidden Lands 13th Age Castles & Crusades Labyrinth Lord Lamentations of the Flame Princess Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Astonishing Swords of Hyperboria Swords and Sorcery Five Torches Deep Dungeon Crawl Classics Dark Dungeons
I could do this all day. All of these games you can purchase today, read tonight and be running like a pro-DM by morning. Most of these games the core rules fit on a napkin.
But if it is so lousy, why, exactly, is it so popular?
It's a good point and there is a very easy answer. Gate Keeping.
The 5e community is super militant about shutting down anyone who even mentions that there are other games out there that might serve a gaming group better.
Not really. I don't think I go a week on here without someone extolling the virtues of switching to pathfinder.
The PF people are the Jehovah's witnesses of the TTRPG world.
I see PLENTY of coverage of d&d alternatives on YouTube and from D&D content creators.
On here, there's plenty of people including you that extoll the virtues of earlier editions (even if they are a PITA to find and get).
It's brand recognition and when you're looking for a group, it's the most common denominator and democratically (i.e. agreeable to the biggest majority) that always wins.
My recommendations always depend on the problem people have and yes, usually I will advise a different game or a supplement for this one that fixes issues. Most of the advice people get on this forum is "D&D is modular, just fix it yourself". Which to me, is less than useless.
For the record I do not spout the virtues of past editions, I rarely even recommend them and even when I do, it would come in the form of a modernized retro-clone that addresses issues with the original games.
I don't disagree with any of that, but as you point out, which is my point, it all needs fixing, the burden of fixing it is on the DM and I'm just wondering at what point WotC will make a game of D&D that simply works as written?
5e is a model of clarity and good game design compared to AD&D. People complain about encounter design in 5e... but AD&D didn't even have encounter design.
Rules-wise, the cleanest version of D&D was probably 4e. Unfortunately, a significant contributor to that cleanness was that they fixed a lot of problem mechanics by simply removing them.
But if it is so lousy, why, exactly, is it so popular?
It's a good point and there is a very easy answer. Gate Keeping.
The 5e community is super militant about shutting down anyone who even mentions that there are other games out there that might serve a gaming group better.
Not really. I don't think I go a week on here without someone extolling the virtues of switching to pathfinder.
The PF people are the Jehovah's witnesses of the TTRPG world.
I see PLENTY of coverage of d&d alternatives on YouTube and from D&D content creators.
On here, there's plenty of people including you that extoll the virtues of earlier editions (even if they are a PITA to find and get).
It's brand recognition and when you're looking for a group, it's the most common denominator and democratically (i.e. agreeable to the biggest majority) that always wins.
My recommendations always depend on the problem people have and yes, usually I will advise a different game or a supplement for this one that fixes issues. Most of the advice people get on this forum is "D&D is modular, just fix it yourself". Which to me, is less than useless.
For the record I do not spout the virtues of past editions, I rarely even recommend them and even when I do, it would come in the form of a modernized retro-clone that addresses issues with the original games.
It's funny because my perspective is in order to solve how clunky it is, it should be EVEN MORE modular
The ad&d and 2e seem good as the are of you drop some of the unbearable mechanics. I have no.issues with them, but even if castles and crusades is what you say it is, I'm going to get far far less people interested in trying something they probably haven't heard of rather than an old version of something with brand recognition.
And without player agreeing to play, I have no game.
Which is why you can't stray too far with home brew. Just talking about home brew being dropped into a module to replace cheesy content can make a new group nervous... speaking from experience on that one...
I don't disagree with any of that, but as you point out, which is my point, it all needs fixing, the burden of fixing it is on the DM and I'm just wondering at what point WotC will make a game of D&D that simply works as written?
5e is a model of clarity and good game design compared to AD&D. People complain about encounter design in 5e... but AD&D didn't even have encounter design.
Rules-wise, the cleanest version of D&D was probably 4e. Unfortunately, a significant contributor to that cleanness was that they fixed a lot of problem mechanics by simply removing them.
Well yeah AD&D was a pretty crap game, the DMG offers great advice, but as a game mechanic, it was pretty terrible and suffered from many of the same problems. You would think after 5 editions and 50 years of experience someone would have learned how to fix it.
THe 20% figure on the number of DMs holds up outside the corporate measure as well. One of the funny things about becoming a sociologist because of D&D is that I tend to follow a lot of work that studies it from outside (both in terms of the broader stuff being talked about here and in terms of my love of mechanics).
The McDonald’s comparison is not as apt as one might think. For one, if McD’s *didn’t* taste good, it would not exist. I wouldn’t call it the most popular food in the world (that would be “Chinese”) either, but that kind of thinking is exactly the same kind of thinking that is going on around D&D — McDonald’s is almost synonymous with fast food,and in some regions the name is used exactly that way because the place has a global reach that only recently excluded CHina.
The mention of people’s food allergies or diets is an interesting angle, but ignores the fact that among the underlying drives for that in the last “15 years” (it has been much longer) is a legal responsibility and the ever present power of “bad press”. 15 years ago is 2009, and that was the year that the iPhone competitors really took off, significantly changing a huge portion to the way the entire world operates. It was three years after it was introduced, and so deep was the impact you cannot do structural analysis of large scale trends without including it because it changed everything.
Pathfinder is not easier to run. Not even close, not even a little bit factual. I may think it is a bloated warthog unworthy of a good haggis, but it is way harder on DMs who try to be creative, and relies on systems and tools that are cumbersome, degenerative, and not linked to each other. “Easier” in that regard places it on the level of World of Darkness, which dumps 60% of running the game on the players. Easiest game to run I have ever played was called Paranoia. And it is a mostly comedic game (was? I dunno if it is still around and ain’t on a google right this sec).
In my experience (which includes science shit), the vast majority of players have tried DMing at least once. Usually within their own player group. Never went back. Players are also statistically more likely to homebrew things than any DM ever will be. To argue that 5e’s basis is “the dm can fix it” is sophistry, but aside from that fails deeply when you consider that the game can be and is run very often using nothin more than the core rules books on a wildly popular world without any kind of homebrew at all.
It also ignores the fact that a huge number of games have used all the assorted “SRD’ sets dating back to the original d20 System release and built their own games around the same core, central mechanics. Among them Pathfinder, which wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for 3.5.
5e is popular because it has a tremendously low bar to entry. It is, from the player side, fast to learn, easy to pick up, and shockingly cheap. So much so that that underlies one of the major problems with DDB not enabling more homebrew by DMs: you can get a brand new, never touched an RPG before young buck and set ‘em down with their blinking Android phone and they can create a character and the only thing it has cost them is time.
it isn’t a shoulder shrug “just fix it” — the game works as advertised. It is meant, intentionally, to have very few real “rules”, and that isn’t a “just fix it” basis, that is a “don’t sweat that other stuff, this is pretend” outlook. In terms of how the marketed the B/X and AD&D sets, B/x was the “beginner’s” version and AD&D was the “advanced player” version. 5e is the beginner version of D&D for this era, done after an attempt to make something very different that failed so horribly people won’t put it on their resumes, lol.
The Monsters are shifted, no doubt, compared to early monsters.But 5e’s core idea is still that you don’t face a single monster in a room, you face a collection of monsters in a room. That is such a terrifying thought to old 1e players that I recall the gasp when we talked about it in my group. Yes, that can be more of a challenge to run, but there it is.
I m spoiled: my players already know all their bonuses and modifiers and subtractions and have a pretty reliable understanding that they have 10 second to describe what they are doing with their turn. There is very little “I, um, ah, err, well, no, so maybe” in our combat. I play with groups as large as 25 at a given time (usually 7), so we don’t let combat drag on, and among the other things we do is pre-rolls and I can do that because I can trust them and they can trust me.
But combat *is* slow in D&D (and there are games where it is much worse, because they all went for the gritty realism side of things and so have to make eight rolls to resolve a single hit). And yes, having to deal with more monsters who are easier is harder because of the structure of the players — they are supposed to struggling. I just watched a play test game of several of my classes going through the tomb of horrors. They one shotted it. All the players had done it before more than a few times, and so they could. Te big fight at the end with a soul stealing gem (this is old school) was a trip because of a distinct difference between the world of that DM and the world the classes were made for. Chief among those differences is the way that a Demi-lich is classified. As a result, a character That had been pretty much less than useful for most of the dungeon was able to block the soul stealing since that class is essentially the anti-undead class. It was still a knock down drag out fight, and there was blood and there was mayhem and there was chaos, but it was still comparatively fast for a fight in that DM’s style. And he had been throwing random vegepygmy squads at them the whole way. One little change between worlds, and a new way of doing things can change a lot.
But 5e was created by players. B/X were created by hybrids. 1e, 2e were created by a dedicated DM and a hard core mechanics fanatic. All of them saw the game in a different way, and that was reflected in the way the game came out.
So there is a lot in 5e that works right out of the box — the issue there isn’t 5e. That is an issue of folks like you and I having expectations that if this game is a “be everything to everyone”, and we are part of everyone, why doesn’t it work for me? In science, we call that entitlement.
No game is everything to everyone. Understanding that right off the bat is important. D&D has held up for 50 freaking years and it wasn’t even the first ttrpg. 90% of all rpg games out there (who, I note, all share a chunk of the pie that is half of what D&D has) were inspired in some way by D&D.
I saw comments that “magic items were more conservative” — poppycock. Magic items are way more diverse and daring. They just aren’t murderous anymore, lol. Gygax stole Vecna straight out of Vance’s Dying Earth, hand and eye and all, and these days the Vecna this game gives us is noting like the source material — the game has evolved itself. Most of the players today have no clue who Jack Vance was or what he wrote and all they know is old people complaining about “vancian magic” and so they figure there must be something wrong with it.
Ubiquity is its own curse.
There really is a lot more focus on role playing in 5e to solve or resolve encounters. By modern standards, 1e was a brutal, violent game — so much so that it is forbidden in many prisons *even now*. There are military commander who won’t let troops play 5e in their off hours because it glorifies violence. People are coming here to literally say they wish that WotC would put racism back in the game *as if they ever got rid of all of it* just because they want to have some kind of way to make their characters more special — and that’s part of the role playing thing.
I remember laughing out loud when reading the description of traps in the new DMG. There is a shift to towns and cities and people interactions, but not so much the old style dungeons. There is a lot less wilderness stuff — because people were doing very little wilderness and the last time they tried to make it a whole thing (Wilderness Survival Guide) it did not do well.
What I do is create a world and let folks run off. I *hope* they will bite on the stories, but it isn’t necessary. That is a new play type for me, still. new being, you know, the last 15 years or so, lol.
That world is my character, my PC. WHy shouldn’t 5e give me, a DM, the same kinds of tools and toys that it gives players?
yes, I can — and will — complain about 5e. It doesn’t do things how I would have done them. But I want to play D&D. Not PF, not T&T, not Champions or whatever OSR built off nostalgia for B/X happens to be.
I have nothing against them (except PF), but they also don’t do things the way I do, or they don’t hearken back to the days hauling a stack of nine AD&D books in a backpack, or…
Whatever.
Balance of classes is a big deal — but when you step back and look at them as a whole, you realize a major underlying cause of that is simply the loss of strong identity of the core classes — indeed, you have to have a subclass (even if one of them is the core identity), and the powers and abilities of all those subclasses begin to merge because they are genuinely trying to make them work for all kinds of players.
And in that sense, they are balanced. it cost the old Rogue pretty much everything that made them special in terms of things they could do but others couldn’t, it diluted some of the potency of others, but also…
everyone gets something at every level. There is no level that a player does not get a goodie for their tool box, and it is pretty freaking glorious. Yes, some of the special abilities are wildly overpowered. Some folks spend hours pouring over math and numbers to figure out who does the most damage in a turn, who has stying power, who has the ability to do something about that group there.
That’s all a player side thing, a minmaxers approach. And if you follow all of it, you can see the sense it makes and the decision they made and to me it is cool that they introduced new mechanics (sub systems I heard them called in the recent video, lol). yay.
5e is not endless homebrewing, says the gal who has spent five years homebrewing a whole mess. I didn’t do it because 5e was bad. I did it because 5e allows me to do that.
However…
The players outside of my group don’t. THe Systems and tools that are available now that were not available when I started playing (VTT, DDB homebrew tools and the app in general, apps with all my books if I pay for the privilege of borrowing them) do not.
And not only do they not let me, they push back against doing it, they act to limit who I can share it with — and I don’t mean other DMs, who often (but not always) want the same thing.
Oh, on the topic of the differing powers of the Avengers not ever stopping the writers, or Superman and the Flash not being stopped either.
Um, as a note, you do realize that most of the changes in writers were because they stopped being able to come up with stories for them, right? Freaking Denny ran out of Batman stories but couldn’t pass it on. Jurgens left Superman because he had done everything he could think of. Byrne ran through so many characters that aside from his conflicting with others, he too burned through all the ideas he could think of — and poor Perez was the guy everyone went to as a pick up until they could find someone who did still have ideas (which often broke canon, but meh, it’s comic books).
Yeah, I write walls of text. Deal.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
I don't disagree with any of that, but as you point out, which is my point, it all needs fixing, the burden of fixing it is on the DM and I'm just wondering at what point WotC will make a game of D&D that simply works as written?
5e is a model of clarity and good game design compared to AD&D. People complain about encounter design in 5e... but AD&D didn't even have encounter design.
Rules-wise, the cleanest version of D&D was probably 4e. Unfortunately, a significant contributor to that cleanness was that they fixed a lot of problem mechanics by simply removing them.
Well yeah AD&D was a pretty crap game, the DMG offers great advice, but as a game mechanic, it was pretty terrible and suffered from many of the same problems. You would think after 5 editions and 50 years of experience someone would have learned how to fix it.
All those games you mentioned? THey are all attempts to fix it, and every single one has major issues themselves.
You can’t “fix” ttrpg so that everyone will be happy. Just not possible. What you can do is is create a game that works for the greatest number of people. Do that, and you “win”.
Guess who won.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
I don't disagree with any of that, but as you point out, which is my point, it all needs fixing, the burden of fixing it is on the DM and I'm just wondering at what point WotC will make a game of D&D that simply works as written?
5e is a model of clarity and good game design compared to AD&D. People complain about encounter design in 5e... but AD&D didn't even have encounter design.
Rules-wise, the cleanest version of D&D was probably 4e. Unfortunately, a significant contributor to that cleanness was that they fixed a lot of problem mechanics by simply removing them.
Well yeah AD&D was a pretty crap game, the DMG offers great advice, but as a game mechanic, it was pretty terrible and suffered from many of the same problems. You would think after 5 editions and 50 years of experience someone would have learned how to fix it.
All those games you mentioned? THey are all attempts to fix it, and every single one has major issues themselves.
You can’t “fix” ttrpg so that everyone will be happy. Just not possible. What you can do is is create a game that works for the greatest number of people. Do that, and you “win”.
Guess who won.
Hasbro definitely won.
All that is left to look forward to is the death of the hobby with one surviving member behind a paywall where playing D&D is about buying digital skins for your online avatar.
The D&D player base has won a future of mediocracy, the equivalent of every restaurant being McDonalds because it is such "good food".. not convinced... just look how popular it is, you must be wrong!
All that is left to look forward to is the death of the hobby with one surviving member behind a paywall where playing D&D is about buying digital skins for your online avatar.
The D&D player base has won a future of mediocracy, the equivalent of every restaurant being McDonalds because it is such "good food".. not convinced... just look how popular it is, you must be wrong!
I lost my comment.
The iPhone is exactly what I was thinking and my point was that it had changed things and trends set into motion back then (and there were articles I read in the nytimes back then about all of the information availability making us pickier, and I was one of the first adopters of Etsy and I used eBay back in 2000, as well as an beta tester for hulu when that rolled out. I did web work in NYC for a guy who sold vintage silver and we were selected as beta testers for pinterest's ads, and I was doing social media management back before it was a viable career.. I KNOW the changes dammit).
We're actually probably in agreement. You can't call it a DM crisis unless you consider just what's happening all around and separating for that first.
Players homebrew all sorts of crap. It never sees gameplay. There's also a difference between homebrewing a one off weapon to make your little brother feel good and trying to tweak a class to fit better in your world.
Mostly because of the sameness that means if you fix one thing you unfix another and then you have to start adjusting everything. Adding mechanics that were never there? Great taking away annoying.ones? Easy peasy.
Tweak the system and you're asking for trouble.
The lore and history of the game is dense and needs to die and they need to be fresh and innovative.
They won't do it because the game is making all the money. Even though all signs point to needing something COMPLETELY new, they'll milk this game till the very last dollar is wrung out.
I don't think anyone's happy with mediocrity. But there's a degree of realism that's needed in the discussion. 5e is open license. Publish your own revised version.
I don't disagree with any of that, but as you point out, which is my point, it all needs fixing, the burden of fixing it is on the DM and I'm just wondering at what point WotC will make a game of D&D that simply works as written?
5e is a model of clarity and good game design compared to AD&D. People complain about encounter design in 5e... but AD&D didn't even have encounter design.
Rules-wise, the cleanest version of D&D was probably 4e. Unfortunately, a significant contributor to that cleanness was that they fixed a lot of problem mechanics by simply removing them.
Well yeah AD&D was a pretty crap game, the DMG offers great advice, but as a game mechanic, it was pretty terrible and suffered from many of the same problems. You would think after 5 editions and 50 years of experience someone would have learned how to fix it.
All those games you mentioned? THey are all attempts to fix it, and every single one has major issues themselves.
You can’t “fix” ttrpg so that everyone will be happy. Just not possible. What you can do is is create a game that works for the greatest number of people. Do that, and you “win”.
Guess who won.
Hasbro definitely won.
All that is left to look forward to is the death of the hobby with one surviving member behind a paywall where playing D&D is about buying digital skins for your online avatar.
The D&D player base has won a future of mediocracy, the equivalent of every restaurant being McDonalds because it is such "good food".. not convinced... just look how popular it is, you must be wrong!
Or just as likely, pay-to-win taken to the next level where players buy magic items with real money. Nerd Immersion laid that potential mechanic out in his last video describing the play-test he just completed of the wotc's new video-game. I thought that was a bridge too far, even for wotc, but a friend pointed out that wotc engages in that practice right now where players can buy OP sub-classes and incorporate those into their D&D Beyond based chars. DM'ing is going to be even less fun in the future. It is not a surprise that wotc has partnered with an AI company to develop "products". No one at wotc is working on an AI DM. But that does not mean that the people at Xplored are not playing around with the concept. You are 100% correct that DM'ing 5e is becoming less fun, every day. wotc has recognized that fact, and is taking creative steps to mitigate that problem, without actually addressing it.
I don't disagree with any of that, but as you point out, which is my point, it all needs fixing, the burden of fixing it is on the DM and I'm just wondering at what point WotC will make a game of D&D that simply works as written?
5e is a model of clarity and good game design compared to AD&D. People complain about encounter design in 5e... but AD&D didn't even have encounter design.
Rules-wise, the cleanest version of D&D was probably 4e. Unfortunately, a significant contributor to that cleanness was that they fixed a lot of problem mechanics by simply removing them.
Well yeah AD&D was a pretty crap game, the DMG offers great advice, but as a game mechanic, it was pretty terrible and suffered from many of the same problems. You would think after 5 editions and 50 years of experience someone would have learned how to fix it.
All those games you mentioned? THey are all attempts to fix it, and every single one has major issues themselves.
You can’t “fix” ttrpg so that everyone will be happy. Just not possible. What you can do is is create a game that works for the greatest number of people. Do that, and you “win”.
Guess who won.
Hasbro definitely won.
All that is left to look forward to is the death of the hobby with one surviving member behind a paywall where playing D&D is about buying digital skins for your online avatar.
The D&D player base has won a future of mediocracy, the equivalent of every restaurant being McDonalds because it is such "good food".. not convinced... just look how popular it is, you must be wrong!
Or just as likely, pay-to-win taken to the next level where players buy magic items with real money. Nerd Immersion laid that potential mechanic out in his last video describing the play-test he just completed of the wotc's new video-game. I thought that was a bridge too far, even for wotc, but a friend pointed out that wotc engages in that practice right now where players can buy OP sub-classes and incorporate those into their D&D Beyond based chars. DM'ing is going to be even less fun in the future. It is not a surprise that wotc has partnered with an AI company to develop "products". No one at wotc is working on an AI DM. But that does not mean that the people at Xplored are not playing around with the concept. You are 100% correct that DM'ing 5e is becoming less fun, every day. wotc has recognized that fact, and is taking creative steps to mitigate that problem, without actually addressing it.
This is why you buy physical and don't "rent" your materials. Or let a site hold your content hostage. Funny. Hostage since you literally now pay for your character to not get deleted
If it were a Wendy's employee survey. You're forgetting that this is a question for DM's.
They're popular because they hit all the points in a satisfactory way. There's nothing wrong with that. And maybe some of the people here would be better served by other games, but you may want a handcrafted microbrew, but if all your local pubs serve bud lite.... you drink bud lite and wish that at least the bud lite tasted a little better...
I'm a DM. The answers I have been giving have been from the perspective of a DM. If someone wants a handcrafted microbrew, go buy one, but complaining that others around them don't share their tastes is problematic, especially if the complainant goes on the Budweiser forums to say this. .
That's because they are drinking beer. Everyone knows only Tequila is worthy of drinking...
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
If 5e is 5/5 complex, I’m curious about your thoughts on Palladium Fantasy or Rifts. When my group moved on from that crazy system, we literally had a 2’ ring binder full to the nuts with codified house rules. By comparison, our house rules are less than a page for our 5e game.
As far as magic items go, my DM, who’s been at it for over 40 years, adores the attunement system. It’s fire and forget when it comes to loot. He doesn’t have to meter anything beyond the overall group wealth because the attunement system keeps us in check internally. Though there are small handful of exceptions (Illusionist’s Bracers I’m looking at you), it’s virtually impossible to break the game with loot in 5e, which was simply not the case in previous editions and is generally untrue of any other TTRPG’s I have played. Personally, I don’t understand how this problematic rather than a laudable, elegant feature.
If 5e is 5/5 complex, I’m curious about your thoughts on Palladium Fantasy or Rifts. When my group moved on from that crazy system, we literally had a 2’ ring binder full to the nuts with codified house rules. By comparison, our house rules are less than a page for our 5e game.
As far as magic items go, my DM, who’s been at it for over 40 years, adores the attunement system. It’s fire and forget when it comes to loot. He doesn’t have to meter anything beyond the overall group wealth because the attunement system keeps us in check internally. Though there are small handful of exceptions (Illusionist’s Bracers I’m looking at you), it’s virtually impossible to break the game with loot in 5e, which was simply not the case in previous editions and is generally untrue of any other TTRPG’s I have played. Personally, I don’t understand how this problematic rather than a laudable, elegant feature.
GURPS, Palladium, Rifts -- good heavens, all of them were nightmare rule sets in their original form -- I can only think it has gotten worse, lol.
The 5e DMG is *bigger* than the 1e DMg by at least 50 pages -- and yet the system is much, much simpler. 5e pours the extra into the role play and creation of aspects.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
If 5e is 5/5 complex, I’m curious about your thoughts on Palladium Fantasy or Rifts. When my group moved on from that crazy system, we literally had a 2’ ring binder full to the nuts with codified house rules. By comparison, our house rules are less than a page for our 5e game.
As far as magic items go, my DM, who’s been at it for over 40 years, adores the attunement system. It’s fire and forget when it comes to loot. He doesn’t have to meter anything beyond the overall group wealth because the attunement system keeps us in check internally. Though there are small handful of exceptions (Illusionist’s Bracers I’m looking at you), it’s virtually impossible to break the game with loot in 5e, which was simply not the case in previous editions and is generally untrue of any other TTRPG’s I have played. Personally, I don’t understand how this problematic rather than a laudable, elegant feature.
GURPS, Palladium, Rifts -- good heavens, all of them were nightmare rule sets in their original form -- I can only think it has gotten worse, lol.
The 5e DMG is *bigger* than the 1e DMg by at least 50 pages -- and yet the system is much, much simpler. 5e pours the extra into the role play and creation of aspects.
I used Rolemaster as my example, but, yes, that.
The original Campaign Law was a marvel of a primer for world building. And Rolemaster (Arms Law/ Claw Law) did give us all the original critical hit table that could get a whole group laughing at certain critical fumbles.
And yes, it absolutely belongs in that list.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
They won't do it because the game is making all the money. Even though all signs point to needing something COMPLETELY new, they'll milk this game till the very last dollar is wrung out.
I don't think anyone's happy with mediocrity. But there's a degree of realism that's needed in the discussion. 5e is open license. Publish your own revised version.
Well theory crafting aside, as a business I would not expect them to do anything but continue to milk the golden cow and from all official reports from the company, they intend to test the spending tolerance of the D&D community. We can expect the same level of crazy we have seen in Magic: The Gathering the last year. 1,000-dollar skins on their VTT, special one-time-only "deals" when you buy your digital copy of X book and I wouldn't put it past them to sell special collectors sub-classes, special DLC's and stuff like that.. what is referred to as whale hunting. I don't think it's a question of if D&D is about to get a lot more expensive, it's more a question of how much more of this sort of corporate BS we have seen from WotC this community will take. [REDACTED]
I think what we shouldn't expect and there is no evidence that would suggest otherwise is a focus on quality, the future is going to be all about quantity with each release one-upping the last to ensure the community shells out the cash for the latest and greatest toys on a monthly basis players can deploy on unsuspecting DM's on the VTT platform. In some way they are going to need to have control over the DM's on the VTT because if there is an option to not allow "purchased content" in a game, most DM's will want to do that to maintain the stability of their game, but that means players would be buying stuff that you can't use, a very unfair circumstance that will need remedy so its likely DM's will be forced to allow "anything a player owns" in their VTT game as a matter of policy. No Turtle people in your game... want to bet, Bob just bought the new Turtle Ninja Race/Class combo, he gets to play it!
There are of course darker scenarios as well, though I wouldn't put it past them. For example D&D books will likely have content excluded from them that is available in the online VTT, aka, VTT exclusives to push people online. You can smell that one in the air already, they have all but said this is coming at this point.
I don't know, maybe it won't be so grim, but there is nothing in Hasbro or Wizards of the Coasts corporate history that would suggest anything to the contrary, so if history is our way to measure the future, D&D and its community is entering a whole new world of BS.
If 5e is 5/5 complex, I’m curious about your thoughts on Palladium Fantasy or Rifts. When my group moved on from that crazy system, we literally had a 2’ ring binder full to the nuts with codified house rules. By comparison, our house rules are less than a page for our 5e game.
As far as magic items go, my DM, who’s been at it for over 40 years, adores the attunement system. It’s fire and forget when it comes to loot. He doesn’t have to meter anything beyond the overall group wealth because the attunement system keeps us in check internally. Though there are small handful of exceptions (Illusionist’s Bracers I’m looking at you), it’s virtually impossible to break the game with loot in 5e, which was simply not the case in previous editions and is generally untrue of any other TTRPG’s I have played. Personally, I don’t understand how this problematic rather than a laudable, elegant feature.
All terrible systems from a very unstructured era of game design. I don't think anyone has ever even tried to fix them in the OSR to the best of my knowledge.
The balance of Magic in modern retro-clones is largely countered by the difficulty scale of encounters and class abilities. In essence, you really don't have to worry about breaking most of these modern systems as the player characters are generally at such a massive disadvantage that a few good magic items are hardly going to have much impact.
In my ongoing campaign that has been running for nearly 3 decades now, I've never had to do any balancing of magic items and I use random treasures and let players find whatever they find or in the case I give enemies magic items they just find those. Generally magic items are highly sought after and a necessary lifeline for them. It however has never been a balance issue.
Issue I have with 5e is that you simply can't do that. You can't just let players find stuff, which is crazy as its one of the joys of the game. It is absolutely vital to the balance of the game that magic items are strictly assessed and controlled by the DM in 5e. In my game, if a guy gets lucky and finds a +3 Flametongue Longsword at 1st level... so be it, has zero impact on balance, just evens the odds a bit, gives them a fighting chance. In fact I'm always hopeful this happens, I'm always rooting for them during random treasure rolls. In 5e it would be catastrophically bad for a 1st level character to find powerful magic items, you sure as shit can't just give them random treasure.
They won't do it because the game is making all the money. Even though all signs point to needing something COMPLETELY new, they'll milk this game till the very last dollar is wrung out.
I don't think anyone's happy with mediocrity. But there's a degree of realism that's needed in the discussion. 5e is open license. Publish your own revised version.
Well theory crafting aside, as a business I would not expect them to do anything but continue to milk the golden cow and from all official reports from the company, they intend to test the spending tolerance of the D&D community. We can expect the same level of crazy we have seen in Magic: The Gathering the last year. 1,000-dollar skins on their VTT, special one-time-only "deals" when you buy your digital copy of X book and I wouldn't put it past them to sell special collectors sub-classes, special DLC's and stuff like that.. what is referred to as whale hunting. I don't think it's a question of if D&D is about to get a lot more expensive, it's more a question of how much more of this sort of corporate BS we have seen from WotC this community will take. Right now, they are swallowing the defecation like its liquid chocolate!
I think what we shouldn't expect and there is no evidence that would suggest otherwise is a focus on quality, the future is going to be all about quantity with each release one-upping the last to ensure the community shells out the cash for the latest and greatest toys on a monthly basis players can deploy on unsuspecting DM's on the VTT platform. In some way they are going to need to have control over the DM's on the VTT because if there is an option to not allow "purchased content" in a game, most DM's will want to do that to maintain the stability of their game, but that means players would be buying stuff that you can't use, a very unfair circumstance that will need remedy so its likely DM's will be forced to allow "anything a player owns" in their VTT game as a matter of policy. No Turtle people in your game... want to bet, Bob just bought the new Turtle Ninja Race/Class combo, he gets to play it!
There are of course darker scenarios as well, though I wouldn't put it past them. For example D&D books will likely have content excluded from them that is available in the online VTT, aka, VTT exclusives to push people online. You can smell that one in the air already, they have all but said this is coming at this point.
I don't know, maybe it won't be so grim, but there is nothing in Hasbro or Wizards of the Coasts corporate history that would suggest anything to the contrary, so if history is our way to measure the future, D&D and its community is entering a whole new world of BS.
I got my books. I got 5e and '83 basic and AD&D. I can bow out for a while.
Besides, ttrpg's aren't my biggest fandoms (I've been a diehard anime fan since I was 11 back in the early 90's) or even my biggest hobbies. (I spent probably about 8k on my garden in just soil, beds and trees, and every month that I have to settle for smaller woodworking projects over the big ones I want to make is another small death to me) . I just enjoy it for the social interaction it gives me at this point in my life.
Pre-covid I was overworked and an insane amount of social interaction. I dropped everything and left the situation. My games are my face to face social interaction that I'm ok with for now.
Hasbro can do whatever the hell they want. I'll be fine.
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It's a good point and there is a very easy answer. Gate Keeping.
The 5e community is super militant about shutting down anyone who even mentions that there are other games out there that might serve a gaming group better.
Not really. I don't think I go a week on here without someone extolling the virtues of switching to pathfinder.
The PF people are the Jehovah's witnesses of the TTRPG world.
I see PLENTY of coverage of d&d alternatives on YouTube and from D&D content creators.
On here, there's plenty of people including you that extoll the virtues of earlier editions (even if they are a PITA to find and get).
It's brand recognition and when you're looking for a group, it's the most common denominator and democratically (i.e. agreeable to the biggest majority) that always wins.
For the record, you are wrong, for everyone else, here is a list of D&D and fantasy games that exist and are easy to run like a pro-DM.
Old School Essentials
Forbidden Lands
13th Age
Castles & Crusades
Labyrinth Lord
Lamentations of the Flame Princess
Basic Fantasy Role-Playing
Astonishing Swords of Hyperboria
Swords and Sorcery
Five Torches Deep
Dungeon Crawl Classics
Dark Dungeons
I could do this all day. All of these games you can purchase today, read tonight and be running like a pro-DM by morning. Most of these games the core rules fit on a napkin.
My recommendations always depend on the problem people have and yes, usually I will advise a different game or a supplement for this one that fixes issues. Most of the advice people get on this forum is "D&D is modular, just fix it yourself". Which to me, is less than useless.
For the record I do not spout the virtues of past editions, I rarely even recommend them and even when I do, it would come in the form of a modernized retro-clone that addresses issues with the original games.
5e is a model of clarity and good game design compared to AD&D. People complain about encounter design in 5e... but AD&D didn't even have encounter design.
Rules-wise, the cleanest version of D&D was probably 4e. Unfortunately, a significant contributor to that cleanness was that they fixed a lot of problem mechanics by simply removing them.
It's funny because my perspective is in order to solve how clunky it is, it should be EVEN MORE modular
The ad&d and 2e seem good as the are of you drop some of the unbearable mechanics. I have no.issues with them, but even if castles and crusades is what you say it is, I'm going to get far far less people interested in trying something they probably haven't heard of rather than an old version of something with brand recognition.
And without player agreeing to play, I have no game.
Which is why you can't stray too far with home brew. Just talking about home brew being dropped into a module to replace cheesy content can make a new group nervous... speaking from experience on that one...
Well yeah AD&D was a pretty crap game, the DMG offers great advice, but as a game mechanic, it was pretty terrible and suffered from many of the same problems. You would think after 5 editions and 50 years of experience someone would have learned how to fix it.
Ok, that was a nice nap, lol.
THe 20% figure on the number of DMs holds up outside the corporate measure as well. One of the funny things about becoming a sociologist because of D&D is that I tend to follow a lot of work that studies it from outside (both in terms of the broader stuff being talked about here and in terms of my love of mechanics).
The McDonald’s comparison is not as apt as one might think. For one, if McD’s *didn’t* taste good, it would not exist. I wouldn’t call it the most popular food in the world (that would be “Chinese”) either, but that kind of thinking is exactly the same kind of thinking that is going on around D&D — McDonald’s is almost synonymous with fast food,and in some regions the name is used exactly that way because the place has a global reach that only recently excluded CHina.
The mention of people’s food allergies or diets is an interesting angle, but ignores the fact that among the underlying drives for that in the last “15 years” (it has been much longer) is a legal responsibility and the ever present power of “bad press”. 15 years ago is 2009, and that was the year that the iPhone competitors really took off, significantly changing a huge portion to the way the entire world operates. It was three years after it was introduced, and so deep was the impact you cannot do structural analysis of large scale trends without including it because it changed everything.
Pathfinder is not easier to run. Not even close, not even a little bit factual. I may think it is a bloated warthog unworthy of a good haggis, but it is way harder on DMs who try to be creative, and relies on systems and tools that are cumbersome, degenerative, and not linked to each other. “Easier” in that regard places it on the level of World of Darkness, which dumps 60% of running the game on the players. Easiest game to run I have ever played was called Paranoia. And it is a mostly comedic game (was? I dunno if it is still around and ain’t on a google right this sec).
In my experience (which includes science shit), the vast majority of players have tried DMing at least once. Usually within their own player group. Never went back. Players are also statistically more likely to homebrew things than any DM ever will be. To argue that 5e’s basis is “the dm can fix it” is sophistry, but aside from that fails deeply when you consider that the game can be and is run very often using nothin more than the core rules books on a wildly popular world without any kind of homebrew at all.
It also ignores the fact that a huge number of games have used all the assorted “SRD’ sets dating back to the original d20 System release and built their own games around the same core, central mechanics. Among them Pathfinder, which wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for 3.5.
5e is popular because it has a tremendously low bar to entry. It is, from the player side, fast to learn, easy to pick up, and shockingly cheap. So much so that that underlies one of the major problems with DDB not enabling more homebrew by DMs: you can get a brand new, never touched an RPG before young buck and set ‘em down with their blinking Android phone and they can create a character and the only thing it has cost them is time.
it isn’t a shoulder shrug “just fix it” — the game works as advertised. It is meant, intentionally, to have very few real “rules”, and that isn’t a “just fix it” basis, that is a “don’t sweat that other stuff, this is pretend” outlook. In terms of how the marketed the B/X and AD&D sets, B/x was the “beginner’s” version and AD&D was the “advanced player” version. 5e is the beginner version of D&D for this era, done after an attempt to make something very different that failed so horribly people won’t put it on their resumes, lol.
The Monsters are shifted, no doubt, compared to early monsters.But 5e’s core idea is still that you don’t face a single monster in a room, you face a collection of monsters in a room. That is such a terrifying thought to old 1e players that I recall the gasp when we talked about it in my group. Yes, that can be more of a challenge to run, but there it is.
I m spoiled: my players already know all their bonuses and modifiers and subtractions and have a pretty reliable understanding that they have 10 second to describe what they are doing with their turn. There is very little “I, um, ah, err, well, no, so maybe” in our combat. I play with groups as large as 25 at a given time (usually 7), so we don’t let combat drag on, and among the other things we do is pre-rolls and I can do that because I can trust them and they can trust me.
But combat *is* slow in D&D (and there are games where it is much worse, because they all went for the gritty realism side of things and so have to make eight rolls to resolve a single hit). And yes, having to deal with more monsters who are easier is harder because of the structure of the players — they are supposed to struggling. I just watched a play test game of several of my classes going through the tomb of horrors. They one shotted it. All the players had done it before more than a few times, and so they could. Te big fight at the end with a soul stealing gem (this is old school) was a trip because of a distinct difference between the world of that DM and the world the classes were made for. Chief among those differences is the way that a Demi-lich is classified. As a result, a character That had been pretty much less than useful for most of the dungeon was able to block the soul stealing since that class is essentially the anti-undead class. It was still a knock down drag out fight, and there was blood and there was mayhem and there was chaos, but it was still comparatively fast for a fight in that DM’s style. And he had been throwing random vegepygmy squads at them the whole way. One little change between worlds, and a new way of doing things can change a lot.
But 5e was created by players. B/X were created by hybrids. 1e, 2e were created by a dedicated DM and a hard core mechanics fanatic. All of them saw the game in a different way, and that was reflected in the way the game came out.
So there is a lot in 5e that works right out of the box — the issue there isn’t 5e. That is an issue of folks like you and I having expectations that if this game is a “be everything to everyone”, and we are part of everyone, why doesn’t it work for me? In science, we call that entitlement.
No game is everything to everyone. Understanding that right off the bat is important. D&D has held up for 50 freaking years and it wasn’t even the first ttrpg. 90% of all rpg games out there (who, I note, all share a chunk of the pie that is half of what D&D has) were inspired in some way by D&D.
I saw comments that “magic items were more conservative” — poppycock. Magic items are way more diverse and daring. They just aren’t murderous anymore, lol. Gygax stole Vecna straight out of Vance’s Dying Earth, hand and eye and all, and these days the Vecna this game gives us is noting like the source material — the game has evolved itself. Most of the players today have no clue who Jack Vance was or what he wrote and all they know is old people complaining about “vancian magic” and so they figure there must be something wrong with it.
Ubiquity is its own curse.
There really is a lot more focus on role playing in 5e to solve or resolve encounters. By modern standards, 1e was a brutal, violent game — so much so that it is forbidden in many prisons *even now*. There are military commander who won’t let troops play 5e in their off hours because it glorifies violence. People are coming here to literally say they wish that WotC would put racism back in the game *as if they ever got rid of all of it* just because they want to have some kind of way to make their characters more special — and that’s part of the role playing thing.
I remember laughing out loud when reading the description of traps in the new DMG. There is a shift to towns and cities and people interactions, but not so much the old style dungeons. There is a lot less wilderness stuff — because people were doing very little wilderness and the last time they tried to make it a whole thing (Wilderness Survival Guide) it did not do well.
What I do is create a world and let folks run off. I *hope* they will bite on the stories, but it isn’t necessary. That is a new play type for me, still. new being, you know, the last 15 years or so, lol.
That world is my character, my PC. WHy shouldn’t 5e give me, a DM, the same kinds of tools and toys that it gives players?
yes, I can — and will — complain about 5e. It doesn’t do things how I would have done them. But I want to play D&D. Not PF, not T&T, not Champions or whatever OSR built off nostalgia for B/X happens to be.
I have nothing against them (except PF), but they also don’t do things the way I do, or they don’t hearken back to the days hauling a stack of nine AD&D books in a backpack, or…
Whatever.
Balance of classes is a big deal — but when you step back and look at them as a whole, you realize a major underlying cause of that is simply the loss of strong identity of the core classes — indeed, you have to have a subclass (even if one of them is the core identity), and the powers and abilities of all those subclasses begin to merge because they are genuinely trying to make them work for all kinds of players.
And in that sense, they are balanced. it cost the old Rogue pretty much everything that made them special in terms of things they could do but others couldn’t, it diluted some of the potency of others, but also…
everyone gets something at every level. There is no level that a player does not get a goodie for their tool box, and it is pretty freaking glorious. Yes, some of the special abilities are wildly overpowered. Some folks spend hours pouring over math and numbers to figure out who does the most damage in a turn, who has stying power, who has the ability to do something about that group there.
That’s all a player side thing, a minmaxers approach. And if you follow all of it, you can see the sense it makes and the decision they made and to me it is cool that they introduced new mechanics (sub systems I heard them called in the recent video, lol). yay.
5e is not endless homebrewing, says the gal who has spent five years homebrewing a whole mess. I didn’t do it because 5e was bad. I did it because 5e allows me to do that.
However…
The players outside of my group don’t. THe Systems and tools that are available now that were not available when I started playing (VTT, DDB homebrew tools and the app in general, apps with all my books if I pay for the privilege of borrowing them) do not.
And not only do they not let me, they push back against doing it, they act to limit who I can share it with — and I don’t mean other DMs, who often (but not always) want the same thing.
Oh, on the topic of the differing powers of the Avengers not ever stopping the writers, or Superman and the Flash not being stopped either.
Um, as a note, you do realize that most of the changes in writers were because they stopped being able to come up with stories for them, right? Freaking Denny ran out of Batman stories but couldn’t pass it on. Jurgens left Superman because he had done everything he could think of. Byrne ran through so many characters that aside from his conflicting with others, he too burned through all the ideas he could think of — and poor Perez was the guy everyone went to as a pick up until they could find someone who did still have ideas (which often broke canon, but meh, it’s comic books).
Yeah, I write walls of text. Deal.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
All those games you mentioned? THey are all attempts to fix it, and every single one has major issues themselves.
You can’t “fix” ttrpg so that everyone will be happy. Just not possible. What you can do is is create a game that works for the greatest number of people. Do that, and you “win”.
Guess who won.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Hasbro definitely won.
All that is left to look forward to is the death of the hobby with one surviving member behind a paywall where playing D&D is about buying digital skins for your online avatar.
The D&D player base has won a future of mediocracy, the equivalent of every restaurant being McDonalds because it is such "good food".. not convinced... just look how popular it is, you must be wrong!
I lost my comment.
The iPhone is exactly what I was thinking and my point was that it had changed things and trends set into motion back then (and there were articles I read in the nytimes back then about all of the information availability making us pickier, and I was one of the first adopters of Etsy and I used eBay back in 2000, as well as an beta tester for hulu when that rolled out. I did web work in NYC for a guy who sold vintage silver and we were selected as beta testers for pinterest's ads, and I was doing social media management back before it was a viable career.. I KNOW the changes dammit).
We're actually probably in agreement. You can't call it a DM crisis unless you consider just what's happening all around and separating for that first.
Players homebrew all sorts of crap. It never sees gameplay. There's also a difference between homebrewing a one off weapon to make your little brother feel good and trying to tweak a class to fit better in your world.
Mostly because of the sameness that means if you fix one thing you unfix another and then you have to start adjusting everything. Adding mechanics that were never there? Great taking away annoying.ones? Easy peasy.
Tweak the system and you're asking for trouble.
The lore and history of the game is dense and needs to die and they need to be fresh and innovative.
They won't do it because the game is making all the money. Even though all signs point to needing something COMPLETELY new, they'll milk this game till the very last dollar is wrung out.
I don't think anyone's happy with mediocrity. But there's a degree of realism that's needed in the discussion. 5e is open license. Publish your own revised version.
Or just as likely, pay-to-win taken to the next level where players buy magic items with real money. Nerd Immersion laid that potential mechanic out in his last video describing the play-test he just completed of the wotc's new video-game. I thought that was a bridge too far, even for wotc, but a friend pointed out that wotc engages in that practice right now where players can buy OP sub-classes and incorporate those into their D&D Beyond based chars. DM'ing is going to be even less fun in the future. It is not a surprise that wotc has partnered with an AI company to develop "products". No one at wotc is working on an AI DM. But that does not mean that the people at Xplored are not playing around with the concept. You are 100% correct that DM'ing 5e is becoming less fun, every day. wotc has recognized that fact, and is taking creative steps to mitigate that problem, without actually addressing it.
This is why you buy physical and don't "rent" your materials. Or let a site hold your content hostage. Funny. Hostage since you literally now pay for your character to not get deleted
That's because they are drinking beer. Everyone knows only Tequila is worthy of drinking...
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
If 5e is 5/5 complex, I’m curious about your thoughts on Palladium Fantasy or Rifts. When my group moved on from that crazy system, we literally had a 2’ ring binder full to the nuts with codified house rules. By comparison, our house rules are less than a page for our 5e game.
As far as magic items go, my DM, who’s been at it for over 40 years, adores the attunement system. It’s fire and forget when it comes to loot. He doesn’t have to meter anything beyond the overall group wealth because the attunement system keeps us in check internally. Though there are small handful of exceptions (Illusionist’s Bracers I’m looking at you), it’s virtually impossible to break the game with loot in 5e, which was simply not the case in previous editions and is generally untrue of any other TTRPG’s I have played. Personally, I don’t understand how this problematic rather than a laudable, elegant feature.
GURPS, Palladium, Rifts -- good heavens, all of them were nightmare rule sets in their original form -- I can only think it has gotten worse, lol.
The 5e DMG is *bigger* than the 1e DMg by at least 50 pages -- and yet the system is much, much simpler. 5e pours the extra into the role play and creation of aspects.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
The original Campaign Law was a marvel of a primer for world building. And Rolemaster (Arms Law/ Claw Law) did give us all the original critical hit table that could get a whole group laughing at certain critical fumbles.
And yes, it absolutely belongs in that list.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Well theory crafting aside, as a business I would not expect them to do anything but continue to milk the golden cow and from all official reports from the company, they intend to test the spending tolerance of the D&D community. We can expect the same level of crazy we have seen in Magic: The Gathering the last year. 1,000-dollar skins on their VTT, special one-time-only "deals" when you buy your digital copy of X book and I wouldn't put it past them to sell special collectors sub-classes, special DLC's and stuff like that.. what is referred to as whale hunting. I don't think it's a question of if D&D is about to get a lot more expensive, it's more a question of how much more of this sort of corporate BS we have seen from WotC this community will take. [REDACTED]
I think what we shouldn't expect and there is no evidence that would suggest otherwise is a focus on quality, the future is going to be all about quantity with each release one-upping the last to ensure the community shells out the cash for the latest and greatest toys on a monthly basis players can deploy on unsuspecting DM's on the VTT platform. In some way they are going to need to have control over the DM's on the VTT because if there is an option to not allow "purchased content" in a game, most DM's will want to do that to maintain the stability of their game, but that means players would be buying stuff that you can't use, a very unfair circumstance that will need remedy so its likely DM's will be forced to allow "anything a player owns" in their VTT game as a matter of policy. No Turtle people in your game... want to bet, Bob just bought the new Turtle Ninja Race/Class combo, he gets to play it!
There are of course darker scenarios as well, though I wouldn't put it past them. For example D&D books will likely have content excluded from them that is available in the online VTT, aka, VTT exclusives to push people online. You can smell that one in the air already, they have all but said this is coming at this point.
I don't know, maybe it won't be so grim, but there is nothing in Hasbro or Wizards of the Coasts corporate history that would suggest anything to the contrary, so if history is our way to measure the future, D&D and its community is entering a whole new world of BS.
All terrible systems from a very unstructured era of game design. I don't think anyone has ever even tried to fix them in the OSR to the best of my knowledge.
The balance of Magic in modern retro-clones is largely countered by the difficulty scale of encounters and class abilities. In essence, you really don't have to worry about breaking most of these modern systems as the player characters are generally at such a massive disadvantage that a few good magic items are hardly going to have much impact.
In my ongoing campaign that has been running for nearly 3 decades now, I've never had to do any balancing of magic items and I use random treasures and let players find whatever they find or in the case I give enemies magic items they just find those. Generally magic items are highly sought after and a necessary lifeline for them. It however has never been a balance issue.
Issue I have with 5e is that you simply can't do that. You can't just let players find stuff, which is crazy as its one of the joys of the game. It is absolutely vital to the balance of the game that magic items are strictly assessed and controlled by the DM in 5e. In my game, if a guy gets lucky and finds a +3 Flametongue Longsword at 1st level... so be it, has zero impact on balance, just evens the odds a bit, gives them a fighting chance. In fact I'm always hopeful this happens, I'm always rooting for them during random treasure rolls. In 5e it would be catastrophically bad for a 1st level character to find powerful magic items, you sure as shit can't just give them random treasure.
I got my books. I got 5e and '83 basic and AD&D. I can bow out for a while.
Besides, ttrpg's aren't my biggest fandoms (I've been a diehard anime fan since I was 11 back in the early 90's) or even my biggest hobbies. (I spent probably about 8k on my garden in just soil, beds and trees, and every month that I have to settle for smaller woodworking projects over the big ones I want to make is another small death to me) . I just enjoy it for the social interaction it gives me at this point in my life.
Pre-covid I was overworked and an insane amount of social interaction. I dropped everything and left the situation. My games are my face to face social interaction that I'm ok with for now.
Hasbro can do whatever the hell they want. I'll be fine.