To be fair to the person who said that, it did come after a couple pages of discussion on how the systems are different, what that person found to be better about 5e compared to 3.5e, and the revelation that 5e is orders of magnitude more popular than any other iteration of the game has been in the past. If it had been the first and only thing they had said, I'd agree with you, but it was simply a summary of the situation after all of the explanation.
Fair enough.
"I think what you're trying to do is change the way people think about 3.5e"
Not quite. How most people think about 3.5 is not the way the design expects them to think. My system is designed for a similar mindset. 3.5 serves as a good example that people will not always bring the same expectations to the table that the design is built around. Thus, I want to be able to make the design expectations clear. I really want the mindset 3.5 was built on to be more popular and recognizable, regardless of who or what system, but for my system in particular, I'd rather players walk away from it understanding what the system was trying to do than to be shoved in a trash bin because they bring the same mindset as 5e and when it fails to be any good under that mindset call it trash because they never actually saw what it was trying to be.
To use a metaphor, it's like calling a car a really bad design because it can't pull a 52' tractor trailer fully loaded, when the car is supposed to be a speedy little sports car.
3.5 was judged according to a mindset very dissimilar to the expectations of the design. This is the fate I'm trying to avoid. And to avoid that, I need to be able to present the rules that makes the expected mindset clear. And I can't even make the mindset clear after multiple pages of forum posts. Admittedly, this particular thread is more about generating discussion and understanding the more popular mindset, but still, it is not like this is my first thread.
"I'd even go so far as to say that your average player is more interested in smooth gameplay than making sure the DC is set "appropriately" by looking it up in some obscure table."
3.5 isn't about getting appropriate DCs. It is about making sure that when the DM sets the DC, it A) communicates something about the world and task beyond simply chance of success, and B) it does not feel outlandishly low or high to the players.
For example, due to having looked up the world records on long jump, if the DM of a game set the DC for a 60' gap so low that a common farmer has a fair chance of success, then that would seem to me really messed up and far outside expectations, because I know that a 60' gap should be impossible for a normal human, even at peak athletic ability.
But not everyone has looked up the world records of long jump, so where is the line that the DC seems unreasonable will be different for different people, unless you all write something down or otherwise agree on something already written. 3.5 was that already thing everyone could see and thus have closely aligned expectations and also understand intuitively what was communicated when the DM gave a DC. For example, if the DM set the DC for a lock at 35, then everyone knew that the lock was an amazingly well crafted lock of supreme quality, thus the maker of it had to be a really talented master smith, and that the lock was very expensive and hard to acquire, etc. But that communication only works when everyone has their expectations in line with each other and particularly the DM.
I like 5e because it is fun to play with rules that are easy for newcomers to grasp. It is a wonderful way to introduce people to TTRPGs and that certainly was my experience.
I don't think this is true.
One thing I've found, is that introducing players to certain other mindsets first tend to be better able to learn different mindsets later, especially if multiple games of different mindsets early on. But basically every player I've met that is introduced to the mindset 5e promotes first, has a massive load of trouble figuring out how to use mechanics with any other mindset.
I would say therefore, teach that mindset first that remains easy to discover new mindsets, rather than teach the mindset that makes it harder to discover other mindsets. This tends to be orthogonal to how easy or difficult the mechanics are to use.
When was the last time you saw anyone playing dnd or pathfinder confront a trap and come up any idea other than rolling the anti-trap skill? Past 2nd edition dnd anyway.
Saturday and Sunday past.
There is no "Detect Traps" skill -- there is a perception skill, however, which is meant to replace that (because they got rid of all the special abilities of Thieves). There are also Thieves tools, but they can only disarm traps, not locate them. Anyone can buy them and gain the proficiency. So the only thing 5e has that is close to an "anti-trap skill" is a set of tools. Folks are really bad about using tools in 5e -- they forget they are there.
However, yesterday and the day before, in two separate sets of ruins (one desert that heading towards a thing I was not prepared to reveal yet, the other a fairly standard forest ruin with an underground chamber) they avoided both a deadfall (forest) and a spike trap without using either of those skill sets.
They didn't even try to roll to disarm the traps -- they just said "this looks like an area she gonna trap" and so got really interesting about how they solved. And the cleric had a set of thieves tools!
The desert one used bags of sand.
The forest one used a fallen log they had spotted last session on the way to the ruin (as color, not intentional).
That was in 5e -- I may have different classes, races, and magic system, and I may have added a lot to the system, but the core basis is still 5e for everything.
Sounds great. Though I'm not sure how Perception plays into it, but I also notice they didn't use any other mechanics in a creative way, and they didn't have a go to mechanic as a default action. Of course, neither trap was something to be disabled anyway, since they were just pits it doesn't make sense to "disable them," but it's nice to know that 5e doesn't have an anti-trap skill (no idea how I missed that). The weird mindset I am looking at is the ability to actually have a mechanic like Disable Device, without it preventing you from seeing solutions that wouldn't use them.
People still do play 3.x and Pathfinder 1.0 and really if you want to look into the evolution of the playstyle you're describing, you're really talking about Pathfinder 2nd edition for the most part.
Um, not really. Pathfinder moved away from 3.5's design intention. Sure they kept most of the fundamental mechanics, but the changes they did make were mostly in service to an ideology that is contrary to 3.5's design. And on the axis of playstyles I speak about, PF2 and 5e are basically identical. The mechanics are slightly different, and definitely evolved, but the direction of that evolution has still been in the same direction as 5e. I am designing to evolve systems in the other direction.
Just as an example of what I mean. When was the last time you saw anyone playing dnd or pathfinder confront a trap and come up any idea other than rolling the anti-trap skill? Past 2nd edition dnd anyway. You generally have to go to osr or freeform or some storytelling system that doesn't have an anti-trap skill.
3.5 is in this weird space, where you are supposed to be in a freeform gaming like mindset yet using a set of mechanics that can get as broadly applicable as you desire. This is weird because the more broadly applicable the mechanics, the more people treat them like laws and make decisions like they are laws. You even get players who will twist the mechanics against the obvious design intent, so long as they can say it is "technically" within the laws, just like how laywers deal with legalities. This also shapes thinking to be about using the mechanics instead of the narrative environment. But 3.5 was not designed for this, and that is what makes it weird.
I disagree, it was very much designed for this purpose. 3rd edition was a game designed in such a way that you could play it and never do any free-form role-play at all and you had all the rules to execute every last detail of every action you could think of. Everything you do, could be executed with a mechanic and a dice check.
I mean quite literally 3e had a very specific Anti-Trap skill, it was called Disable Device and that was the only purpose of the skill, to remove locks and disable traps. You also had Disguise, Move Silently, Forgery, Escape artist.... All PF2e did was lump those into a single skilled called Thievery to streamline the game.
Pathfinder 2e as was Pathfinder 1e is just an evolution of the exact same design as 3rd edition, the same playstyle, the same philosophy to execution of mechanics, they are practically indistinguishable. A playerstyle hyper focused on executing rules over DM Fiat and free-form role-playing and role-playing decisions. It was a game about rolling dice and very intentionally.
5e was a major pushback against this style of play. It brought the game back to an almost pre-non-weapon-proficiency era. Think about it. If you want to put on a disguise or disable a trap or forge a document... what skill would you apply in 5e? Which skill is the "anti-trap skill?"
My group played Pathfinder 2e for 2 years and the reason we gave up on the system was because it was too mechanized, we missed actual role-playing.
Another aspect here though, is that big backing, marketing, and investment by companies affects what "everybody does." It is a feedback loop. WotC makes a game that better fits a popular style, which makes that style more popular, and WotC makes more products that fit the style even better which makes the style even more popular, and so on. We need other games to counter WotC, not to hurt them or anything, but because we need the feedback loop to not be so uniform. If we don't it'll be a long time of a fairly uniform experience, much like how for a long time, what we know as classical music, was the only kind of big professional music there was. You had folk music, where country and western come from, but a big production was classical music. Then you had a few stand outs like the Beatles. Now we have concerts of a wide variety of styles, including rock and pop and hip-hop and rap, etc. If WotC succeeds, we will basically, like music, have an entire era of just classical on the big stage with everything else pushed to the fringes.
I don't disagree with you, I do think people should be open to trying alternative styles of play, different RPG's and even go back to old editions of the game with an open mind and try to understand "why" these old styles of play where once THE way we played the game.
That said, most DM's, myself included, rather live in the now, in the current method and participate in the current culture, than simply sit around not playing at all and being angry that "our way" is no longer popular.
5th edition D&D as a ruleset and as a culture is a fun experience, its actually really fun and Im not at all surprised or have any confusion about why. Its a good rule set, its easy to use, very approachable. There is lots of reasons to like it.
On the flip side, as much as I love for example 1st edition B/X and AD&D, I do get why people see its flaws and might not be as interested in its playstyle or its philosophy both as a culture and game design... It in a lot of ways is directly opposed to the things people like about 5e.
Now you could claim that modern D&D players are closed minded and I sometimes feel that way and its frustrating, but I think the truth is that people are just having fun, they enjoy their way of doing it and if you like something that much, why change? Why seek out things that are different, especially things that see less support, smaller player basis and just generally have more barriers.
All I'm saying is I get it. I do think people are missing out on a lot of stuff in the modern era. A good, meaty 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Survival game is ... amazing. Its truly a unique experience, it has a tension and challenge that far exceeds anything you will ever get out of 5e.. but, I've kind of given up trying to convince people who are already very happy with the game they are playing to try something else.
So I do get your views and I do get what your saying, I'm just kind of illustrating the reality. Some styles of play are just destined to go extinct, at best maybe surviving as a nich throwback, but as I said before, I don't see things like 3rd editions style of play coming back anytime soon. Maybe some day it will be cool again when its sufficiently retro. Right now the best your going to do is like PF2e where you can find the evolutionary string within the system to those old school games. Then again, you can find a lot of the old school strings in modern 5e as well.
I like 5e because it is fun to play with rules that are easy for newcomers to grasp. It is a wonderful way to introduce people to TTRPGs and that certainly was my experience.
What 5E does it does well. But it is one of the worst game systems with which to introduce newcomers to the hobby. The core mechanic is rather simple. Roll d20. Roll high. But it's playing at make believe to pretend that 5E is as simple as this. Even at just 1st level characters start with so many things and with so many choices to be made the game can be overwhelming for anyone who hasn't spent a whole weekend reading the Player's Handbook. Never used to be that way. I typically run games for newcomers. I use a version of D&D in which characters can be rolled up in mere minutes. Those to me will always be the superior iterations of the game.
RPG's have definitely become a lot more involved compared to the old 1e B/X days when you rolled 3d6 down the chain and just from that act you were reduced to a single decision.. what class to play and your character was ready.
The thing is and this is the important part of the story, that wasn't enough for players back then either. I mean even the Basic D&D set eventually shipped with the Expert set as well and by the time B/X was 10 years old you had the BECMI system and the D&D Cyclopedia and already that was waaay more complex of a system than what 5e is today.
The growth of complexity is a natural evolution of the game, but its worth noting that the 2024 PHB is not for novice players, its not a starting point for new D&D players. 5e has starter sets for that and they come with pre-generated characters and easy to follow adventures just like the B/X 1e set did. Things really haven't changed, we just have a different perspective.
What made systems like 1e B/X for example not that great for beginners despite the ease of rules was that the game was very hard to be successful at. You were never more than 1 small error in judgement from a character death, the game was incredibly unforgiving. It also was driven by gaming philosophies that are quite advanced, I think even expert modern role-players struggle to understand how you can run D&D without a skill system for example or how do you balance encounters without a CR system to help you.
Running B/X 1e well, I would argue requires you to be a borderline master DM, it is incredibly tricky with tons of nuance to create a good experience for players. I love it mind you, it still is to this day my absolute favorite system to run, but yeah, I sort of don't agree that it was "simple". The rules were simple, but to run it and play it... that took a lot of experience and skill to do well.
I might even argue that once you have run 5e long enough, you might be sufficiently skilled to take on a real challenge and run a 1e B/X game. That in my opinion, is a real test of DM skills.
I like 5e because it is fun to play with rules that are easy for newcomers to grasp. It is a wonderful way to introduce people to TTRPGs and that certainly was my experience.
What 5E does it does well. But it is one of the worst game systems with which to introduce newcomers to the hobby.
It seems to be doing ok at it, all things considered.
The core mechanic is rather simple. Roll d20. Roll high. But it's playing at make believe to pretend that 5E is as simple as this. Even at just 1st level characters start with so many things and with so many choices to be made the game can be overwhelming for anyone who hasn't spent a whole weekend reading the Player's Handbook.
It's really not bad. The new PHB improves on the cueing, and provides suggestions for most or all of your lower-level decisions, but it wasn't much different before. (This is the reason for level 3 subclasses.) It's just:
pick your class
pick your species
pick what you did before
You don't need to know any of the stuff outside of your character, and the leveling process is pretty good at introducing new things gradually.
Is ancient D&D simpler? Yes, but that simplicity comes with a lack of options for everyone.
Is ancient D&D simpler? Yes, but that simplicity comes with a lack of options for everyone.
That's just not true. What that "lack of options" meant was more negotiation at the table so that players could play characters they wanted. Balance was an afterthought in what was a game more about having fun and telling stories not unlike those we encountered in fantasy masterworks than it was about the rules.
What that meant was the options were limitless.
Go crack open some of the spellbooks out there that have come out of the OSR. The spells and magic items in these things are the sorts of things that would likelynever make an appearance in a 5E game. And certainly never in an official product. So just who is experiencing a lack of options?
Saturating the rules with options has ironically limited the options now available to players.
To play within the confines of the rules and only ever make selections from the menus available to you will never provide the infinitude of options or provide the experience old-school play provides.
It's an interesting premise, but I don't think it quite worked as you describe it unless you freeze time at a very specific point in AD&D's history right around 1980ish.
Consider what the lack of options triggered in classic D&D? TSR printed books with more options. Why? Because players wanted more options. They printed a lot of books. In fact by 1995, 2nd edition had more character options available than any other edition of the game since. Was the game ruined then? I guess that is the question, at what point did creating supplement books that offer options become a bad thing? Was it the Expert set? The Companion set? Arcana perhaps? Survival Guides? Kit books? When did D&D have too many options and was there ever a point when there weren't enough?
What you are describing certainly existed for a very brief moment, but the reality is that the reason we have more and more character options, the reason there is the DM Guild pumping out 10+ new books full of options every day, 365 days a year since the Guild launched is that that's what players want....
It happens in the OSR as well. Think about it. Old School Essentials comes out, then immediately Advanced Fantasy is launched and right after that they start pumping out Caracas Crawlers and today there are at 200+ books of options for OSE on RPG Drive Thru.
Is that bad? I don't know, maybe. But I don't know how anyone can suggest something everyone wants is bad? Especially in a place like a hobby where you pretend to be a warrior or Wizard so you can fight monsters.
Is ancient D&D simpler? Yes, but that simplicity comes with a lack of options for everyone.
That's just not true. What that "lack of options" meant was more negotiation at the table so that players could play characters they wanted. Balance was an afterthought in what was a game more about having fun and telling stories not unlike those we encountered in fantasy masterworks than it was about the rules.
What that meant was the options were limitless.
Go crack open some of the spellbooks out there that have come out of the OSR. The spells and magic items in these things are the sorts of things that would likelynever make an appearance in a 5E game. And certainly never in an official product. So just who is experiencing a lack of options?
Saturating the rules with options has ironically limited the options now available to players.
To play within the confines of the rules and only ever make selections from the menus available to you will never provide the infinitude of options or provide the experience old-school play provides.
Limitless?
I guess if you never wanted a dwarf who could cast a spell or elf who could pick a lock. But there were some very non-negotiable limits BECMI. Limits which are only now, finally, fading away.
And your assertion that earlier editions were more about storytelling is patently false. At some tables it may have been about the same as it is now, but it was certainly not more about it then. No version of the game has a monopoly on any playstyle.
I'd rather crack my actual books from that period, when I played the game.
"Old School" is rather hilarious to me, because I am Old School, and what they play bears jack in relation to what I played.
What it should be called is Basic School. Because they aren't looking to AD&D, they are looking to the B/X/BECMI stuff that was removed from the entire product line up once Hasbro paid off Arneson.
And the only reason it even made it past X was the lawsuit that forced them to produce it. Hasbro culled the entire line out when they took over -- so if that's what folks think of as "old school" then they only have half the old school -- and not even that (AD&D was more widely played, which is why it is 1e in the current schema).
As for options in 5e, well...
I have 20 classes. None of them are found here, and none of them are or have subclasses. I have 25 Species. None of them are found here. I have an entirely new magic system based on spell points that has a couple hundred spells not found here -- and it uses the base game spells but allows for players to create their own.
What does that have to do with 5e?
I could make those classes and the system that supports them because of 5e -- its very structure gave me way more options and flexibility to design the systems and classes and such that my players wanted, and that are not entirely beholden to a eurocentric basis and so not possible here.
The *game* is flexible and presents options out the wazoo. The website does not.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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
But you are comparing apples and oranges. You are missing my point. It's not about "options." It's about how when people limit themselves to official options and official supplementary material how they are then ironically limiting their options.
D&D Beyond has a huge and thriving homebrew section. DMsGuild and DriveThru RPG are thriving. Third party supplements from big names can take in huge amounts of cash. The most popular D&D setting remains “homebrew” followed by “homebrew campaign in an official D&D setting.”
Reality not only does not support your narrative, if actually disproves it. People are clearly going outside of the official options all the time - by homebrewing on their own, by using others’ homebrew, or by purchasing third party content.
Is ancient D&D simpler? Yes, but that simplicity comes with a lack of options for everyone.
That's just not true. What that "lack of options" meant was more negotiation at the table so that players could play characters they wanted. Balance was an afterthought in what was a game more about having fun and telling stories not unlike those we encountered in fantasy masterworks than it was about the rules.
What that meant was the options were limitless.
Go crack open some of the spellbooks out there that have come out of the OSR. The spells and magic items in these things are the sorts of things that would likelynever make an appearance in a 5E game. And certainly never in an official product. So just who is experiencing a lack of options?
Saturating the rules with options has ironically limited the options now available to players.
To play within the confines of the rules and only ever make selections from the menus available to you will never provide the infinitude of options or provide the experience old-school play provides.
This. To have this and yet have a set of mechanics that support the negotiations and make it easier to utilize the limitless options. This is how I was introduced to 3e. 3e was a language for the above and advice for new DMs to achieve it.
It's about how when people limit themselves to official options and official supplementary material how they are then ironicallylimiting their options.
um, I do not think that's actually ironic at all. I think that's the entire point of limiting one's self to just official stuff -- limiting one's self. Maybe you have an different understanding of irony, but it certainly doesn't fit any "official" version of it.
But more so, there's nothing in 5e, as a product or a game or even the marketing, that limits the creative player. I am at a loss here trying to figure out how folks think that it does (when the explanations have all been about how people limit themselves, which, you know, is a choice, like limiting yourself to game editions other than 5e).
As I noted above: I do not use any official classes. I do not use any official races. My classes do not even follow the standard structure, and do not have any subclasses.
I use a completely customized magic system that use spell points, an additional ability score, 5 forms of magic, has nulls, takes longer than 1 action to cast spells in, unfies damage by spell level and caster level, and ultimately ignores most of the basic sell stat blocks because they are already accounted for.
I have an entire vehicle system with maneuvers.
Nothing in 5e *limited me* in making those things -- I started all of them except the classes from something already found in 5e -- I just made it work for my table.
So I am at a loss for understanding how this is 5e's "fault" or the fault of Hasbro/Wizards. Care to catch me up? What did the game or the company do to limit what is possible in 5e?
Genre? Hell, I've got space pirates cruising between parsecs, gunslingers shooting train robbers, skyships raining hell on a crusade against the cannibal goblins of Lemuria.I run urban fantasy, mystery, comedy, thriller, western, gangster, heist, and more all in my games. Right now I am in the midst of the early stages of a romance subplot that's totally film noir, all by itself -- and that's alongside a supernatural "monster of the moment" hunt!
Nothing in the game has stopped me from doing any of that -- and I am not an outlier here in the sense that I create my own stuff. (ok, I am in other ways like having played for decades, but, eh).
The game isn't holding me back or stopping me or limiting me at all.
Edit
But with more recent editions of the game increasingly more and more about combat to the point that now every single class is practically as adequate as any fighter is at it as far as dealing damage goes and with so many players today optimizing solely for purposes of damage and with next to zero official content about domain-level play despite how quickly characters become powerful it shouldn't be hard to see why so many 5E tables constantly have to endure the type of player who just can't wait to fight the next thing and who grows bored of anything that happens outside of combat.
This came in while I was typing.
Each new edition being more and more about combat is not a limiting thing.
In 3.x, the got rid of to-hit tables. That was one of the balancing features of the game -- the more magic you have, the less good at fighting you are. That was a limitation -- one a lot of folks ignored. But that was the game adding a limitation in. And that was in both Basic and Advanced, btw.
5e removed that limitation. (technically, it was done earlier, but this about 5e limiting people).
I am a worldbuilder as a DM. I have all manner of limitations on stuff -- no, you cannot play a class or race from the books. That's a limitation. Not one the game creates, but one I -- as a player -- create.
You know who else are players? so many players today optimizing solely for purposes of damage . <-- they are.
That's not the game doing that. That's the players doing it. That's not the fault of 5e, as a product. Again, note that I don't have that problem -- because in my dungeon crawl, which is a 5e raw game -- there's only about 20 to 25% of the whole thing being combat. The rest is exploration and some light role playing.
The game didn't do that, I did. By designing a decent dungeon. Which is a real, nonsensical, old school, grimtooth's traps type of hellscape.
next to zero official content about domain-level play
This is the first thing I have seen that can be said to be the COmpany's fault, but is still not the game's fault -- the guidelines for creating a high level dungeon are right there in the DMG. My opinion of them is not printable, but they are there, and my opinion does not change that as a fact, nor does it make them "bad at it".
because "bad at it" is an opinion, and we all have them.
the rest of that stunningly constructed sentence is questionable becaus eit returns to blaming either the game or the company for players not being creative and coming up with solutions. There are some high level play option -- Domain level, you called them. Five of them, i think, though since I never use the published adventures I don't recall for certain.
So that comes across as them not giving you what, in your opinion, they should have given you. or us. And, lo and behold, what is coming in the 2024 DMG and the 2025 MM? Oh! All new options and guidance on high level campaigns and adventures.
So apparently they are hearing you as a company, but, again, how is that limiting on the part of the game when you just finished complaining about ow the use of the products themselves is limiting -- something done by the players to themselves, and not forced on them by the game or the company.
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 guess if you never wanted a dwarf who could cast a spell or elf who could pick a lock. But there were some very non-negotiable limits BECMI. Limits which are only now, finally, fading away.
And your assertion that earlier editions were more about storytelling is patently false. At some tables it may have been about the same as it is now, but it was certainly not more about it then. No version of the game has a monopoly on any playstyle.
Yes. Limitless. Because a DM had it within his or her power to allow a player to play whatever he or she wanted. Regardless of what those "non-negotiable" rules said.
In one of the very first games I ever ran using the B in BECMI one of the players played a humanoid fox terrier as a character. We just made up any features for this playable race.
Did TSR come to my home and scold me for breaking their "non-negotiable" rules? They did not.
You are acting as if home-brewing started five minutes ago. We were doing in back then so players could play whatever they wanted.
No version of the game has a monopoly on playstyle. You are correct. But with more recent editions of the game increasingly more and more about combat to the point that now every single class is practically as adequate as any fighter is at it as far as dealing damage goes and with so many players today optimizing solely for purposes of damage and with next to zero official content about domain-level play despite how quickly characters become powerful it shouldn't be hard to see why so many 5E tables constantly have to endure the type of player who just can't wait to fight the next thing and who grows bored of anything that happens outside of combat.
Well, obviously a DM can allow anything. That’s as true now as it was then. But that’s irrelevant to the argument. We’re talking about what we like about a system, not what we like about our house rules. And if you think people now don’t house rule and change things to fit what they like, I’ve got news for you. And the idea that the game is now more about combat does not match my experience playing in those days. Early editions were dungeon crawls with monster hotel dungeons and traps that existed for no discernible reason. The plot was mostly, get more money and better loot. Repeat until your character dies. Role play meant giving your character a name other than Bob the VI, because your previous 5 Bobs had died.
Yes, some people optimize characters now, but that’s because they have options, feats and subclasses which help differentiate them. Early edition fighters only distinguished themselves by weapon choice, because after character creation, there were no more decisions to be made (except a thief choosing where to put their increases in thief abilities). It wasn’t some golden age of role play, it was that there was no choices to make.
And early editions didn’t even have the suggestion of what you’d do out of combat. There were, eventually, non-weapon proficiencies. The name alone should tell you how early editions worked. The designers started to realize, wait, people want to do things out of combat? I guess we’ll tell them what they can pick up besides a sword.
It's about how when people limit themselves to official options and official supplementary material how they are then ironicallylimiting their options.
um, I do not think that's actually ironic at all. I think that's the entire point of limiting one's self to just official stuff -- limiting one's self. Maybe you have an different understanding of irony, but it certainly doesn't fit any "official" version of it.
You had to pretend half of the conversation hadn't even taken place so you could fail to grasp the irony of what they are doing. In this very same thread there are some saying having "fewer options"—when what they really mean is having fewer choices to be made in line with the rules—is limiting. But it isn't. Not if you've a DM or players with a drop of creativity who do not see the rules as written as laws by which to abide. What's limiting is tethering yourself to a ruleset to the point you can't even begin to imagine the possibilities for a class or for a spell that might stretch beyond the rules as written. That is limiting. Whether they seek to limit themselves to just official stuff is beside the point. It's still limiting. And their then calling the very opposite of what is limiting "limiting" is ironic. (And don't tell me I don't know what irony means. I teach students to identify it in literature for a living.)
Ok, that's fair. Also, I teach it for sociology and psychiatry. I can give ya that. Glad I checked while you did your edit -- the original was a tab bit different, but same point, and I would still have to give it to you.
But you still need to acknowledge that 5e is less limiting that B/X/BECMI as a ruleset, which was their point.
and the point that was made previously was that 5e is more limiting that earlier editions -- the original point was not that players limit themselves, the point was the the game itself is more limiting. You are now speaking about the players limiting themselves again -- which is not about 5e, which is still the core part of th e discourse as far as I am aware.
I am not seeing how this makes 5e a worse version -- all the points raised so far are about 5e being more restrictive than OSR -- and yet everything that can be done in OSR exct C/P the rules verbatim can be done with 5e.
So that isn't a benefit of something older over 5e. That's a difference in the players, and that's not the fault of either the company or the product (the published game, specifically).
I'm an old AD&D player, and disliked Basic -- and I still know a lot of old Basic players who disliked AD&D. It was a whole thing back then. The OG edition wars, in current terms.
I keep reading that B/X and 3.5 are somehow better than 5e, but the explanations I am being given are "it gave us more freedom" and there's nothing taking away that freedom in 5e. Hell, I'm still doing it and there's arguably more freedom, as I pointed out in my edit above.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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
But you are comparing apples and oranges. You are missing my point. It's not about "options." It's about how when people limit themselves to official options and official supplementary material how they are then ironically limiting their options.
D&D Beyond has a huge and thriving homebrew section. DMsGuild and DriveThru RPG are thriving. Third party supplements from big names can take in huge amounts of cash. The most popular D&D setting remains “homebrew” followed by “homebrew campaign in an official D&D setting.”
Reality not only does not support your narrative, if actually disproves it. People are clearly going outside of the official options all the time - by homebrewing on their own, by using others’ homebrew, or by purchasing third party content.
How many of those here versed in the current ruleset who are drunk on optimization use things that are unofficial?
Do you? Or will you only use what Wizards provide?
How many would be happy to sit at a table where a class doesn't work the way they have come to expect? Very few I suspect. Because they tend to approach character creation with their knowledge of the existing rules in mind to make decisions typically more about how they can do the most possible damage than anything else.
Home-brew settings is not at all relevant to the discussion.
Neither is really what home-brew rules you can dream up.
My point has been about allowing players to think outside of the rules. To make available to them—within reason—options limited only by their imaginations.
Ok, sorry about the formatting and such, but it is to make the points clearer.
First, the underlined bits. Unofficial stuff inherently includes homebrew. You cannot in good faith fix a goalpost and then move it. Pick one -- unofficial or not. If unofficial, then homebrew everything counts -- or narrow your specificity.
1 - How many out of 19,029,053 members? At least 9,514,526 -- all homebrew worlds. That "over half of all worlds are homebrew" data point has been solid for at least 40 years. Was up to 65% during the early 5e era. Has come down to just under 60% today. High was in AD&D where it was in the 70% range. By definition, those worlds use things that are unofficial. Less than one third of all games take place on official settings, and that third is divided up among all the setting as a whole, and then again by those who just use the setting and then dump their own homebrew on top of it.
2 - I use unofficial stuff all the time. Just never, ever 3rd party. We create it ourselves -- so it is all second party. Indeed, I am a bad girl: I use the PHB, DMG, TCE, XgE, MM, and MMotM. And only some of those are for anything other than ideas. My homebrew house rules is bigger than any one of those books at 600 pages. 2nd party is not official.
3 - Your first good point, but here you are blaming players again for the faults of the game itself. I can say that I agree -- hang out in any of the forums here and you'll see a ton of theorycraft. Head to r/dnd and it is worse; plus they punish homebrew and more. So there is certainly a sizeable chunk of the online community who thinks that way. I wonder why they they think that way.
Could it be that the games they play in are mostly about combat? Or, and hear me out, could it be that they are doing the same thing today that they did back in the old days, the hard edged days, the days when I ran an open game with all comers who would bring in the most optimized to kill shit PCs with all the fanciest magical items? That was 80 to 83. The goal of optimizing PCs is not new, not a "recent or sudden change in the player base".
That has been around since 0e. If there is math, math people will use it. If there is a way to game the system, engineering fans will game the system -- 1981, June, first time someone tried the dust explosion on me. LORDY i was pissed. I was also a teenager, but meh.
And additionally, a hell of a lot of players just want to smash the ugly monster with the big ass sword. That's all they want out of the game. So that's an appeal that falls apart on examination in context.
Now, you get to what you say your point is. I accept that, and on that basis apologize for the earlier confusion.
How does 5e not help that be accomplished? if anything, WotC's entire ethos from day one of taking over the company has been all about allowing players to think outside of the rules. To make available to them—within reason—options limited only by their imaginations. That's not something that they can change or fix, though, and certainly not something that is the fault of problem of the game...
... and not the fault or problem of the players. It is patent that the majority of players (who are not represented entirely online) are more than willing to indulge their imaginations and be stunningly creative. I have a freaking ball joint doll as a species in my game, who is very androgynous until they imprint on the person they encounter first, and then they shift slightly to a form that is considered unthreatening. This is a playable race in my game that I would never have thought of on my own -- it came from one of the kids in our group.
She wanted to play a robot maid warrior.
I'm just not seeing how you think that players are limited by anything, how they have their imaginations curtailed or how they are limited unable to think outside the box by 5e.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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
Why do i like 5e: I want to preface this with a little information I have son he just turned 15 he suffers from Epilepsy and Cerebral Palsy, and he is nonverbal. He is generally happy and watches the world with a smile on his face. He enjoyed it when we used to host our gaming groups on saturday and sunday (the pandemic killed that). He will never be able to play the game, my groups have always made an effort to include him even when we are on discord. This is important because almost two years ago i got to do the next best thing. My youngest sister Mandi who used to watch us play and steal our dice when she was a toddler, she came to me asking advice on which edition to use to introduce her children to D&D. I bought her the core books, and her family now has a regular game night. I got to pass on D&D to another generation; it does not get any better than that.
I disagree with this. The "a rising tide lifts all boats" was true of the OGL. Imagine if Hollywood only supported Marvel superhero films. Movies like the Green Mile or You've Got Mail or Harry Potter or LotR or Star Wars or Star Trek would not exist, or if they did, then they would be low budget off brand "b rated" films that would not attract much attention.
The same applies here, which is why WotC and Hasbro tried to end the OGL, because they do not want all boats to rise. They want a monopoly. If they succeed in truly making a monopoly, it will hurt the scope of rpgs, limiting them greatly. Sure, you continue to get the little indy dev games, but ultimately, no one but WotC would matter to the general direction of the hobby. Paizo is thankfully big enough to stand, but even then you can still get a duopoly, similar to how Marvel and DC are practically the only superhero brands. Sure other companies have done supers, such as the Megamind film, but honestly, Megamind is literally the only non-game superhero anything I can thing of that isn't Marvel or DC. We are very likely facing a similar outcome with WotC and Paizo, a situation in which most roleplayers won't be able to name a rpg company beyond those two except for a few players on the fringes of gamer society. ANd if Paizo doesn't get some good VTT options of it's own pretty quickly, there is a good chance WotC might even overshadow them.
I explicitly stated more than once that the "rising tide lifts all boats" aphorism is rarely true, and it being true of TTRPGs is one such rare case. However, I also pointed out upstream how common it is to see franchises in other media attracting mainstream popularity to the point of annoying fans of that media who prefer less mega-popular examples, yet other contenders in those media segments continue to flourish. Regardless, the TTRPG space doesn't "only support" D&D 5E, as your metaphor about movies suggests.
Hasbro and WotC didn't try to "end" OGL. They tried to update it, and they stated their reasons for doing so. If you don't believe those statements that's fine, but I caution against making assumptions based on information you don't have. At any rate, that episode saw several companies that create third-party 5E content commit to making their own systems. Whatever you think Hasbro and WotC were trying to do, they ultimately encouraged more growth in the non-5E segment of the TTRPG space.
It's interesting that you bring up superhero comic books. While you're right that Marvel and DC have the most well-known stables of superhero characters, other publishers have superhero comics that have achieved lasting popularity and led to TV shows, movies, and games. Spawn is likely the most well-known because it's the longest-running indie superhero comic, but there are plenty of other examples. But the comic book industry is an interesting comparison because the big two - Marvel and DC - cater to the superhero fans and ignore a lot of folks who want other kinds of comic book stories. And while there are indie publishers who have popular superhero franchises, Image, Dark Horse, Dynamite, IDW, Valiant, etc., publish comics that appeal to folks who want more than just superhero fare. If all you focus on is lamenting that indie publishers don't have their own Superman or Spider-Man then you miss out on amazing titles like Saga, The Walking Dead, Paper Girls, Resident Alien, Archie, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. And this is just like the way so many TTRPG systems have been developed that don't follow D&D's formulas (or even use a D20, let alone a D20-based system!). Yeah, I love playing D&D, but I also love playing Marvel Multiverse, Blades in the Dark, Girl by Moonlight, Deadlands, Tales of Xadia, and Monster of the Week.
If it's hard to imagine a world where the TTRPG space doesn't have room for anything but D&D just... try to be more imaginative. Like all the people imagining up other games and systems. Don't let the "what ifs" of the slippery slope fallacy lead you into doom and gloom. D&D is the most popular it's ever been. Which I love. But everything else in the TTRPG space is more popular now because the space as a whole is getting more players, more attention, and more creativity.
I am going to risk it, and I hope I don't dinged for it, but I have kept thinking about some stuff while working on those damned books of mine.
A guess about Summation:
My read on some of this is that the problem is not the game itself, it is the way that many players of the game -- notably players who spend time online, in forums and on websites dedicated to D&D -- have an inordinate amount of focus and devotion to the concept of RAW, and are condemnatory of anything that is not RAW.
They will bad mouth people and ideas, and they will not join games on LFG sites or other places where the game is not played RAW or with too much homebrew -- which is often relegated to back corners or separate groups and forums by the larger sites and groups.
It is a culture, filled with more players than ever before -- the percentages may remain constant, butthe per capita is dramatically different. At least half the players engaging with the game today are uninterested or uncaring not only about the 50 years of lore and history in the game, they are even less concerned by the shifts in mechanics and playstyles. They have a set of expectations that they want met, and they are uninterested in changing or learning something new or different, because it affects their enjoyment of the game they do not take as seriously as some who have, perhaps, played long enough to watch all their hair fall out.
This makes it more difficult for those who have a strong idea of what they like (the different types of DM's, for example, in the video i lined to instead of an article because apparently video does better with folks these days) and a style of play that does not mesh well with what folks have seen in other forms of media about D&D, such as BG3, or Critical Role/Dimension 20, Stranger Things, Influencers on video streaming sites, or some NYT/Medium/Slash post.
This media is successful, and popular, and affects a sizeable chunk of the population, even those who are not found online.
This makes it more difficult for folks who operate, think, and create in a different/separate paradigm from the dominant one(s) to indulge their own way of interacting with the game, in whatever edition, form, or altered state.
In anger, frustration, and possibly some degree of resentment, they have laid the root cause for all of this at the footsteps of the design and implementation of 5th Edition, and, by extension, Hasbro's Wizards of the Coast division.
It is not that they "dislike" or "fail to understand" 5e or how it works or what it has or lacks (it has not been their cup of tea, which is perfectly cromulent), it is that the "kinds of players" that 5e has attracted are not considered good for their way of playing or style of game, and that previous systems with which they are more familiar (or variants of previous systems) are better suited, in their opinions, to the way that they play, and that is a further point of frustration and resentment.
In the Initial case, it is a challenge of a particular play style and approach that folks who have engaged with 5e appear to be unable to successfully comprehend the distinctive style and approach to playing the game that is sought. This is puzzling, as it appears that only when people encounter 5e before their approach do they have a problem adapting to their specific play style and approach, while those who encounter them first do not.
In a separate case, the core challenge is the obsessive nature with which online folks treat official products as the final arbiter of right and proper. They are also not fond of 5e in general -- as valid and fine an opinion as any other -- and feel that the particular part of the larger community around D&D and similar games is preferable to the majority of that same larger community that is, as they noted, seemingly obsessed with rules as written.
In this secondary case, they asserted that older versions were limitless, allowed for more negotiation with DMs, and were more personally preferable to them than the current game, due in large part to the seemingly endless number of persons for whom there is and only ever will be RAW 5e. They have a subtext of an older style and approach that placed the DM in a more primary role than today -- 5e is a Player Centric game, and there does seem to be some subtle course correcting going on with the 2024 version. They feel that in some way the company or the edition has made it so that the community is self-censoring their own imaginations.
If I am wrong about any of the above, please let me know.
I want to note that I do not disagree with this as a general premise. I do not, however, place the fault with the company or the game itself -- that is a function of a secondary market and the broader sociocultural shift away from in person to virtual gaming, necessitating the development and use of Virtual Tabletops (including and not limited to the upcoming Sigil).
The game itself is adapting to meet this need -- it is still a product, and the goal of the product is to appeal to the greatest number of people possible (understanding that it cannot reach all people even in doing so) at which the 2014 edition has been wildly successful by any competent measure. The environment in concern, though, is a programmatic one, which by its nature tends to limit things in some way that is inescapable given current technological limitations. For example, I am less excited about Sigil in large part because of the aesthetic of it, the look of it. But I am interested in it because of the first person perspective and the ability to modify the setting. However, even should I find it of value, it will remain outside any real use on my part as intended, because I have so heavily modified my games.
This is not just true of DDB, however, this is true of any VTT. They remove the math solving need on the part of a player, they roll the dice, they take away the book keeping and such that was a large part of us older folks' experience with the game. They are only able to because they are structured to mimic the official rules -- and only the official rules. The RAW. This, in turn, creates a feedback where it becomes more and more difficult to find people who are not playing RAW because the tools and methods they use to interact with the game are entirely limited to RAW.
And those tools and systems are, unintentionally, hostile to any sort of homebrew that is not rigidly controlled and specific in format and style. And it is this system that I think has the greatest impact on the thinking and ideation of the second party -- if the majority of new players only know how to use character builders and Roll 20, then how will the adapt to a table top game that is far more imaginative and has broader ideas, bigger ideas than is possible with merely the default ruleset?
But that isn't 5e, specially, that is the root cause, or even Hasbro -- if anything, Hasbro is late to the game and playing catch up. This problem impacts OSR developers, as well -- many get their systems into these VTTs, only to find that the game play, well, sucks. because of the limiting and programmatic nature of the tools. It is, to borrow the phrase, an Innovation Shift -- VTTs are a disruptive influence akin to the introduction of the iPhone (to borrow an earlier comparative), upending the entire way that a whole industry operates.
And those of us who have a desire to be not late adoptees but laggards (to use Rogers' terminology) and cling to the previous model and approach will be left out. It truly is a precarious moment for anyone whose systems cannot be effectively programmitized and whose style does not mesh well with the resultant outcome of that programmatization.
Such as OSR folks, older edition players, and weird ass folks like myself who take the base rules and make them into something we think is cooler than all get out.
It isn't there quite yet, but if you follow the diffusion of innovation principles, then we are already past the tipping point -- critical mass is achieved.
It is that point which puts the criticism of 5e against the like of 5e in the crosshairs, such as this post and thread has done.
That's my thoughts for now and a while.
If I misrepresented the sides of the other two, I apologize and invite them to offer corrections.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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
But you are comparing apples and oranges. You are missing my point. It's not about "options." It's about how when people limit themselves to official options and official supplementary material how they are then ironically limiting their options.
D&D Beyond has a huge and thriving homebrew section. DMsGuild and DriveThru RPG are thriving. Third party supplements from big names can take in huge amounts of cash. The most popular D&D setting remains “homebrew” followed by “homebrew campaign in an official D&D setting.”
Reality not only does not support your narrative, if actually disproves it. People are clearly going outside of the official options all the time - by homebrewing on their own, by using others’ homebrew, or by purchasing third party content.
You are missing the point. All a homebrew rule is, is an official rule for your DM. It is still rules over rulings.
Here are a couple anecdotes from the first campaign I played, run by the DM that taught me and was taught by a DM that learned from Arneson.
First) My party had arrived at an elven city, and as important guests they wanted us protected but it would look bad if we went around in armor, so they made us clothes enchanted with protection. Easy enough mechanically to just give the otherwise ordinary, if well-made, clothes an armor bonus. Well, my character having had trouble hiding asked for black clothes. Another player asked me why, and I responded that I tended to get better rolls when I can in my mind how and why my character would be successful, and black clothes are hard to see in shadows. The DM said it made sense and not only described my character's clothes as seeming to almost suck in light, she also gave me a bonus to hide from the clothes. No one else got any skill bonuses from their enchanted clothes, and no one cared. No one derided it as unfair or unbalanced. But more importantly, The DM didn't go searching through the book to see what options were available. The DM simply translated what they wanted into mechanical terms and said that. It made it easy to communicate that my clothes really did make it easier to hide, and I wasn't even a rogue. Further, it was also specific. There was no question about how much it helped me hide, and more importantly, it did actually help me hide by affecting my rolls when I rolled to hide, and unlike 5e's advantage, helping me hide was scalable, allowing the DM to set the hide bonus to be a measure of how much it helped me hide. Advantage can't do that. Advantage (at least as 5e does it) is an all or nothing affair.
Second) in the same game, each player took turns rolling the random encounters. One player kept rolling an eagle, an ordinary eagle. Notable here is that it was never a combat encounter, cause guess what, encounters did not need to be combat. Anyway, she rolled this eagle several times in a row it was her turn to roll. The DM had it be the same eagle every time. Then the player finally rolled something other than the eagle, which surprisingly fit because we were in a dungeon, Then on her next random roll, she rolled the eagle again. As we had just walked into an animal handling room with pens and cages of various animals, the DM worked into the game that the eagle was trapped in one of the cages. Then, when the player freed the eagle, the eagle became her animal companion, even though she did not have the class feature. Didn't matter that was getting an extra class feature. It fit the story. But it was quite handy that she could just take the feature and have a general guideline on how to handle her new companion. This shows two things done that are not really done these days. First, the DM used the existing mechanics as shorthand. The DM didn't need to explain anything about what the player could do with her animal companion, nor what skills she would need, just had to give her the animal companion feature and done. Common understanding. Second, the DM took randomness and worked it into the narrative. Sure some still do this in some form, but it is almost always just another combat encounter with an unknown enemy. But my DM here did not just make the encounter happen as some stand alone unexpected event. She worked it into the narrative tying it both back into the history of the campaign and setting up for the future of the campaign (as she had told us that she had figured the bbeg had captured the eagle when the player rolled something else for once).
Notice how in both of these anecdotes, mechanics were used in ways outside the traditional use of mechanics, and they were not homebrew options, but rather just unique situations not dictated by the mechanics yet the mechanics served as shorthand communication and the ability to make something actually matter to rolls that normally would not.
The DM didn't treat the rules as a "how to play," instead she played first and used the rules as mere aids to accomplish her goals. Additionally, none of us looked at the rules for what to do or how to do it. I didn't even expect the bonus to hide, but rather I asked for roleplay reasons and the experience of seeing things in my mind as I made choices or when I rolled. I didn't look at the rules choose something from some table.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Fair enough.
"I think what you're trying to do is change the way people think about 3.5e"
Not quite. How most people think about 3.5 is not the way the design expects them to think. My system is designed for a similar mindset. 3.5 serves as a good example that people will not always bring the same expectations to the table that the design is built around. Thus, I want to be able to make the design expectations clear. I really want the mindset 3.5 was built on to be more popular and recognizable, regardless of who or what system, but for my system in particular, I'd rather players walk away from it understanding what the system was trying to do than to be shoved in a trash bin because they bring the same mindset as 5e and when it fails to be any good under that mindset call it trash because they never actually saw what it was trying to be.
To use a metaphor, it's like calling a car a really bad design because it can't pull a 52' tractor trailer fully loaded, when the car is supposed to be a speedy little sports car.
3.5 was judged according to a mindset very dissimilar to the expectations of the design. This is the fate I'm trying to avoid. And to avoid that, I need to be able to present the rules that makes the expected mindset clear. And I can't even make the mindset clear after multiple pages of forum posts. Admittedly, this particular thread is more about generating discussion and understanding the more popular mindset, but still, it is not like this is my first thread.
"I'd even go so far as to say that your average player is more interested in smooth gameplay than making sure the DC is set "appropriately" by looking it up in some obscure table."
3.5 isn't about getting appropriate DCs. It is about making sure that when the DM sets the DC, it A) communicates something about the world and task beyond simply chance of success, and B) it does not feel outlandishly low or high to the players.
For example, due to having looked up the world records on long jump, if the DM of a game set the DC for a 60' gap so low that a common farmer has a fair chance of success, then that would seem to me really messed up and far outside expectations, because I know that a 60' gap should be impossible for a normal human, even at peak athletic ability.
But not everyone has looked up the world records of long jump, so where is the line that the DC seems unreasonable will be different for different people, unless you all write something down or otherwise agree on something already written. 3.5 was that already thing everyone could see and thus have closely aligned expectations and also understand intuitively what was communicated when the DM gave a DC. For example, if the DM set the DC for a lock at 35, then everyone knew that the lock was an amazingly well crafted lock of supreme quality, thus the maker of it had to be a really talented master smith, and that the lock was very expensive and hard to acquire, etc. But that communication only works when everyone has their expectations in line with each other and particularly the DM.
I don't think this is true.
One thing I've found, is that introducing players to certain other mindsets first tend to be better able to learn different mindsets later, especially if multiple games of different mindsets early on. But basically every player I've met that is introduced to the mindset 5e promotes first, has a massive load of trouble figuring out how to use mechanics with any other mindset.
I would say therefore, teach that mindset first that remains easy to discover new mindsets, rather than teach the mindset that makes it harder to discover other mindsets. This tends to be orthogonal to how easy or difficult the mechanics are to use.
Sounds great. Though I'm not sure how Perception plays into it, but I also notice they didn't use any other mechanics in a creative way, and they didn't have a go to mechanic as a default action. Of course, neither trap was something to be disabled anyway, since they were just pits it doesn't make sense to "disable them," but it's nice to know that 5e doesn't have an anti-trap skill (no idea how I missed that). The weird mindset I am looking at is the ability to actually have a mechanic like Disable Device, without it preventing you from seeing solutions that wouldn't use them.
I'll get back yo you on the video.
I disagree, it was very much designed for this purpose. 3rd edition was a game designed in such a way that you could play it and never do any free-form role-play at all and you had all the rules to execute every last detail of every action you could think of. Everything you do, could be executed with a mechanic and a dice check.
I mean quite literally 3e had a very specific Anti-Trap skill, it was called Disable Device and that was the only purpose of the skill, to remove locks and disable traps. You also had Disguise, Move Silently, Forgery, Escape artist.... All PF2e did was lump those into a single skilled called Thievery to streamline the game.
Pathfinder 2e as was Pathfinder 1e is just an evolution of the exact same design as 3rd edition, the same playstyle, the same philosophy to execution of mechanics, they are practically indistinguishable. A playerstyle hyper focused on executing rules over DM Fiat and free-form role-playing and role-playing decisions. It was a game about rolling dice and very intentionally.
5e was a major pushback against this style of play. It brought the game back to an almost pre-non-weapon-proficiency era. Think about it. If you want to put on a disguise or disable a trap or forge a document... what skill would you apply in 5e? Which skill is the "anti-trap skill?"
My group played Pathfinder 2e for 2 years and the reason we gave up on the system was because it was too mechanized, we missed actual role-playing.
I don't disagree with you, I do think people should be open to trying alternative styles of play, different RPG's and even go back to old editions of the game with an open mind and try to understand "why" these old styles of play where once THE way we played the game.
That said, most DM's, myself included, rather live in the now, in the current method and participate in the current culture, than simply sit around not playing at all and being angry that "our way" is no longer popular.
5th edition D&D as a ruleset and as a culture is a fun experience, its actually really fun and Im not at all surprised or have any confusion about why. Its a good rule set, its easy to use, very approachable. There is lots of reasons to like it.
On the flip side, as much as I love for example 1st edition B/X and AD&D, I do get why people see its flaws and might not be as interested in its playstyle or its philosophy both as a culture and game design... It in a lot of ways is directly opposed to the things people like about 5e.
Now you could claim that modern D&D players are closed minded and I sometimes feel that way and its frustrating, but I think the truth is that people are just having fun, they enjoy their way of doing it and if you like something that much, why change? Why seek out things that are different, especially things that see less support, smaller player basis and just generally have more barriers.
All I'm saying is I get it. I do think people are missing out on a lot of stuff in the modern era. A good, meaty 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Survival game is ... amazing. Its truly a unique experience, it has a tension and challenge that far exceeds anything you will ever get out of 5e.. but, I've kind of given up trying to convince people who are already very happy with the game they are playing to try something else.
So I do get your views and I do get what your saying, I'm just kind of illustrating the reality. Some styles of play are just destined to go extinct, at best maybe surviving as a nich throwback, but as I said before, I don't see things like 3rd editions style of play coming back anytime soon. Maybe some day it will be cool again when its sufficiently retro. Right now the best your going to do is like PF2e where you can find the evolutionary string within the system to those old school games. Then again, you can find a lot of the old school strings in modern 5e as well.
RPG's have definitely become a lot more involved compared to the old 1e B/X days when you rolled 3d6 down the chain and just from that act you were reduced to a single decision.. what class to play and your character was ready.
The thing is and this is the important part of the story, that wasn't enough for players back then either. I mean even the Basic D&D set eventually shipped with the Expert set as well and by the time B/X was 10 years old you had the BECMI system and the D&D Cyclopedia and already that was waaay more complex of a system than what 5e is today.
The growth of complexity is a natural evolution of the game, but its worth noting that the 2024 PHB is not for novice players, its not a starting point for new D&D players. 5e has starter sets for that and they come with pre-generated characters and easy to follow adventures just like the B/X 1e set did. Things really haven't changed, we just have a different perspective.
What made systems like 1e B/X for example not that great for beginners despite the ease of rules was that the game was very hard to be successful at. You were never more than 1 small error in judgement from a character death, the game was incredibly unforgiving. It also was driven by gaming philosophies that are quite advanced, I think even expert modern role-players struggle to understand how you can run D&D without a skill system for example or how do you balance encounters without a CR system to help you.
Running B/X 1e well, I would argue requires you to be a borderline master DM, it is incredibly tricky with tons of nuance to create a good experience for players. I love it mind you, it still is to this day my absolute favorite system to run, but yeah, I sort of don't agree that it was "simple". The rules were simple, but to run it and play it... that took a lot of experience and skill to do well.
I might even argue that once you have run 5e long enough, you might be sufficiently skilled to take on a real challenge and run a 1e B/X game. That in my opinion, is a real test of DM skills.
It seems to be doing ok at it, all things considered.
It's really not bad. The new PHB improves on the cueing, and provides suggestions for most or all of your lower-level decisions, but it wasn't much different before. (This is the reason for level 3 subclasses.) It's just:
You don't need to know any of the stuff outside of your character, and the leveling process is pretty good at introducing new things gradually.
Is ancient D&D simpler? Yes, but that simplicity comes with a lack of options for everyone.
It's an interesting premise, but I don't think it quite worked as you describe it unless you freeze time at a very specific point in AD&D's history right around 1980ish.
Consider what the lack of options triggered in classic D&D? TSR printed books with more options. Why? Because players wanted more options. They printed a lot of books. In fact by 1995, 2nd edition had more character options available than any other edition of the game since. Was the game ruined then? I guess that is the question, at what point did creating supplement books that offer options become a bad thing? Was it the Expert set? The Companion set? Arcana perhaps? Survival Guides? Kit books? When did D&D have too many options and was there ever a point when there weren't enough?
What you are describing certainly existed for a very brief moment, but the reality is that the reason we have more and more character options, the reason there is the DM Guild pumping out 10+ new books full of options every day, 365 days a year since the Guild launched is that that's what players want....
It happens in the OSR as well. Think about it. Old School Essentials comes out, then immediately Advanced Fantasy is launched and right after that they start pumping out Caracas Crawlers and today there are at 200+ books of options for OSE on RPG Drive Thru.
Is that bad? I don't know, maybe. But I don't know how anyone can suggest something everyone wants is bad? Especially in a place like a hobby where you pretend to be a warrior or Wizard so you can fight monsters.
Limitless?
I guess if you never wanted a dwarf who could cast a spell or elf who could pick a lock. But there were some very non-negotiable limits BECMI. Limits which are only now, finally, fading away.
And your assertion that earlier editions were more about storytelling is patently false. At some tables it may have been about the same as it is now, but it was certainly not more about it then. No version of the game has a monopoly on any playstyle.
I'd rather crack my actual books from that period, when I played the game.
"Old School" is rather hilarious to me, because I am Old School, and what they play bears jack in relation to what I played.
What it should be called is Basic School. Because they aren't looking to AD&D, they are looking to the B/X/BECMI stuff that was removed from the entire product line up once Hasbro paid off Arneson.
And the only reason it even made it past X was the lawsuit that forced them to produce it. Hasbro culled the entire line out when they took over -- so if that's what folks think of as "old school" then they only have half the old school -- and not even that (AD&D was more widely played, which is why it is 1e in the current schema).
As for options in 5e, well...
I have 20 classes. None of them are found here, and none of them are or have subclasses. I have 25 Species. None of them are found here. I have an entirely new magic system based on spell points that has a couple hundred spells not found here -- and it uses the base game spells but allows for players to create their own.
What does that have to do with 5e?
I could make those classes and the system that supports them because of 5e -- its very structure gave me way more options and flexibility to design the systems and classes and such that my players wanted, and that are not entirely beholden to a eurocentric basis and so not possible here.
The *game* is flexible and presents options out the wazoo. The website does not.
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
D&D Beyond has a huge and thriving homebrew section. DMsGuild and DriveThru RPG are thriving. Third party supplements from big names can take in huge amounts of cash. The most popular D&D setting remains “homebrew” followed by “homebrew campaign in an official D&D setting.”
Reality not only does not support your narrative, if actually disproves it. People are clearly going outside of the official options all the time - by homebrewing on their own, by using others’ homebrew, or by purchasing third party content.
This. To have this and yet have a set of mechanics that support the negotiations and make it easier to utilize the limitless options. This is how I was introduced to 3e. 3e was a language for the above and advice for new DMs to achieve it.
um, I do not think that's actually ironic at all. I think that's the entire point of limiting one's self to just official stuff -- limiting one's self. Maybe you have an different understanding of irony, but it certainly doesn't fit any "official" version of it.
But more so, there's nothing in 5e, as a product or a game or even the marketing, that limits the creative player. I am at a loss here trying to figure out how folks think that it does (when the explanations have all been about how people limit themselves, which, you know, is a choice, like limiting yourself to game editions other than 5e).
As I noted above: I do not use any official classes. I do not use any official races. My classes do not even follow the standard structure, and do not have any subclasses.
I use a completely customized magic system that use spell points, an additional ability score, 5 forms of magic, has nulls, takes longer than 1 action to cast spells in, unfies damage by spell level and caster level, and ultimately ignores most of the basic sell stat blocks because they are already accounted for.
I have an entire vehicle system with maneuvers.
Nothing in 5e *limited me* in making those things -- I started all of them except the classes from something already found in 5e -- I just made it work for my table.
So I am at a loss for understanding how this is 5e's "fault" or the fault of Hasbro/Wizards. Care to catch me up? What did the game or the company do to limit what is possible in 5e?
Genre? Hell, I've got space pirates cruising between parsecs, gunslingers shooting train robbers, skyships raining hell on a crusade against the cannibal goblins of Lemuria.I run urban fantasy, mystery, comedy, thriller, western, gangster, heist, and more all in my games. Right now I am in the midst of the early stages of a romance subplot that's totally film noir, all by itself -- and that's alongside a supernatural "monster of the moment" hunt!
Nothing in the game has stopped me from doing any of that -- and I am not an outlier here in the sense that I create my own stuff. (ok, I am in other ways like having played for decades, but, eh).
The game isn't holding me back or stopping me or limiting me at all.
Edit
This came in while I was typing.
Each new edition being more and more about combat is not a limiting thing.
In 3.x, the got rid of to-hit tables. That was one of the balancing features of the game -- the more magic you have, the less good at fighting you are. That was a limitation -- one a lot of folks ignored. But that was the game adding a limitation in. And that was in both Basic and Advanced, btw.
5e removed that limitation. (technically, it was done earlier, but this about 5e limiting people).
I am a worldbuilder as a DM. I have all manner of limitations on stuff -- no, you cannot play a class or race from the books. That's a limitation. Not one the game creates, but one I -- as a player -- create.
You know who else are players? so many players today optimizing solely for purposes of damage . <-- they are.
That's not the game doing that. That's the players doing it. That's not the fault of 5e, as a product. Again, note that I don't have that problem -- because in my dungeon crawl, which is a 5e raw game -- there's only about 20 to 25% of the whole thing being combat. The rest is exploration and some light role playing.
The game didn't do that, I did. By designing a decent dungeon. Which is a real, nonsensical, old school, grimtooth's traps type of hellscape.
This is the first thing I have seen that can be said to be the COmpany's fault, but is still not the game's fault -- the guidelines for creating a high level dungeon are right there in the DMG. My opinion of them is not printable, but they are there, and my opinion does not change that as a fact, nor does it make them "bad at it".
because "bad at it" is an opinion, and we all have them.
the rest of that stunningly constructed sentence is questionable becaus eit returns to blaming either the game or the company for players not being creative and coming up with solutions. There are some high level play option -- Domain level, you called them. Five of them, i think, though since I never use the published adventures I don't recall for certain.
So that comes across as them not giving you what, in your opinion, they should have given you. or us. And, lo and behold, what is coming in the 2024 DMG and the 2025 MM? Oh! All new options and guidance on high level campaigns and adventures.
So apparently they are hearing you as a company, but, again, how is that limiting on the part of the game when you just finished complaining about ow the use of the products themselves is limiting -- something done by the players to themselves, and not forced on them by the game or the company.
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, obviously a DM can allow anything. That’s as true now as it was then. But that’s irrelevant to the argument. We’re talking about what we like about a system, not what we like about our house rules. And if you think people now don’t house rule and change things to fit what they like, I’ve got news for you.
And the idea that the game is now more about combat does not match my experience playing in those days. Early editions were dungeon crawls with monster hotel dungeons and traps that existed for no discernible reason. The plot was mostly, get more money and better loot. Repeat until your character dies. Role play meant giving your character a name other than Bob the VI, because your previous 5 Bobs had died.
Yes, some people optimize characters now, but that’s because they have options, feats and subclasses which help differentiate them. Early edition fighters only distinguished themselves by weapon choice, because after character creation, there were no more decisions to be made (except a thief choosing where to put their increases in thief abilities). It wasn’t some golden age of role play, it was that there was no choices to make.
And early editions didn’t even have the suggestion of what you’d do out of combat. There were, eventually, non-weapon proficiencies. The name alone should tell you how early editions worked. The designers started to realize, wait, people want to do things out of combat? I guess we’ll tell them what they can pick up besides a sword.
Ok, that's fair. Also, I teach it for sociology and psychiatry. I can give ya that. Glad I checked while you did your edit -- the original was a tab bit different, but same point, and I would still have to give it to you.
But you still need to acknowledge that 5e is less limiting that B/X/BECMI as a ruleset, which was their point.
and the point that was made previously was that 5e is more limiting that earlier editions -- the original point was not that players limit themselves, the point was the the game itself is more limiting. You are now speaking about the players limiting themselves again -- which is not about 5e, which is still the core part of th e discourse as far as I am aware.
I am not seeing how this makes 5e a worse version -- all the points raised so far are about 5e being more restrictive than OSR -- and yet everything that can be done in OSR exct C/P the rules verbatim can be done with 5e.
So that isn't a benefit of something older over 5e. That's a difference in the players, and that's not the fault of either the company or the product (the published game, specifically).
I'm an old AD&D player, and disliked Basic -- and I still know a lot of old Basic players who disliked AD&D. It was a whole thing back then. The OG edition wars, in current terms.
I keep reading that B/X and 3.5 are somehow better than 5e, but the explanations I am being given are "it gave us more freedom" and there's nothing taking away that freedom in 5e. Hell, I'm still doing it and there's arguably more freedom, as I pointed out in my edit above.
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
Ok, sorry about the formatting and such, but it is to make the points clearer.
First, the underlined bits. Unofficial stuff inherently includes homebrew. You cannot in good faith fix a goalpost and then move it. Pick one -- unofficial or not. If unofficial, then homebrew everything counts -- or narrow your specificity.
1 - How many out of 19,029,053 members? At least 9,514,526 -- all homebrew worlds. That "over half of all worlds are homebrew" data point has been solid for at least 40 years. Was up to 65% during the early 5e era. Has come down to just under 60% today. High was in AD&D where it was in the 70% range. By definition, those worlds use things that are unofficial. Less than one third of all games take place on official settings, and that third is divided up among all the setting as a whole, and then again by those who just use the setting and then dump their own homebrew on top of it.
2 - I use unofficial stuff all the time. Just never, ever 3rd party. We create it ourselves -- so it is all second party. Indeed, I am a bad girl: I use the PHB, DMG, TCE, XgE, MM, and MMotM. And only some of those are for anything other than ideas. My homebrew house rules is bigger than any one of those books at 600 pages. 2nd party is not official.
3 - Your first good point, but here you are blaming players again for the faults of the game itself. I can say that I agree -- hang out in any of the forums here and you'll see a ton of theorycraft. Head to r/dnd and it is worse; plus they punish homebrew and more. So there is certainly a sizeable chunk of the online community who thinks that way. I wonder why they they think that way.
Could it be that the games they play in are mostly about combat? Or, and hear me out, could it be that they are doing the same thing today that they did back in the old days, the hard edged days, the days when I ran an open game with all comers who would bring in the most optimized to kill shit PCs with all the fanciest magical items? That was 80 to 83. The goal of optimizing PCs is not new, not a "recent or sudden change in the player base".
That has been around since 0e. If there is math, math people will use it. If there is a way to game the system, engineering fans will game the system -- 1981, June, first time someone tried the dust explosion on me. LORDY i was pissed. I was also a teenager, but meh.
And additionally, a hell of a lot of players just want to smash the ugly monster with the big ass sword. That's all they want out of the game. So that's an appeal that falls apart on examination in context.
Now, you get to what you say your point is. I accept that, and on that basis apologize for the earlier confusion.
How does 5e not help that be accomplished? if anything, WotC's entire ethos from day one of taking over the company has been all about allowing players to think outside of the rules. To make available to them—within reason—options limited only by their imaginations. That's not something that they can change or fix, though, and certainly not something that is the fault of problem of the game...
... and not the fault or problem of the players. It is patent that the majority of players (who are not represented entirely online) are more than willing to indulge their imaginations and be stunningly creative. I have a freaking ball joint doll as a species in my game, who is very androgynous until they imprint on the person they encounter first, and then they shift slightly to a form that is considered unthreatening. This is a playable race in my game that I would never have thought of on my own -- it came from one of the kids in our group.
She wanted to play a robot maid warrior.
I'm just not seeing how you think that players are limited by anything, how they have their imaginations curtailed or how they are limited unable to think outside the box by 5e.
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
Why do i like 5e: I want to preface this with a little information I have son he just turned 15 he suffers from Epilepsy and Cerebral Palsy, and he is nonverbal. He is generally happy and watches the world with a smile on his face. He enjoyed it when we used to host our gaming groups on saturday and sunday (the pandemic killed that). He will never be able to play the game, my groups have always made an effort to include him even when we are on discord. This is important because almost two years ago i got to do the next best thing. My youngest sister Mandi who used to watch us play and steal our dice when she was a toddler, she came to me asking advice on which edition to use to introduce her children to D&D. I bought her the core books, and her family now has a regular game night. I got to pass on D&D to another generation; it does not get any better than that.
Just published a map on DriveThruRPG The Forgotten Temple
I explicitly stated more than once that the "rising tide lifts all boats" aphorism is rarely true, and it being true of TTRPGs is one such rare case. However, I also pointed out upstream how common it is to see franchises in other media attracting mainstream popularity to the point of annoying fans of that media who prefer less mega-popular examples, yet other contenders in those media segments continue to flourish. Regardless, the TTRPG space doesn't "only support" D&D 5E, as your metaphor about movies suggests.
Hasbro and WotC didn't try to "end" OGL. They tried to update it, and they stated their reasons for doing so. If you don't believe those statements that's fine, but I caution against making assumptions based on information you don't have. At any rate, that episode saw several companies that create third-party 5E content commit to making their own systems. Whatever you think Hasbro and WotC were trying to do, they ultimately encouraged more growth in the non-5E segment of the TTRPG space.
It's interesting that you bring up superhero comic books. While you're right that Marvel and DC have the most well-known stables of superhero characters, other publishers have superhero comics that have achieved lasting popularity and led to TV shows, movies, and games. Spawn is likely the most well-known because it's the longest-running indie superhero comic, but there are plenty of other examples. But the comic book industry is an interesting comparison because the big two - Marvel and DC - cater to the superhero fans and ignore a lot of folks who want other kinds of comic book stories. And while there are indie publishers who have popular superhero franchises, Image, Dark Horse, Dynamite, IDW, Valiant, etc., publish comics that appeal to folks who want more than just superhero fare. If all you focus on is lamenting that indie publishers don't have their own Superman or Spider-Man then you miss out on amazing titles like Saga, The Walking Dead, Paper Girls, Resident Alien, Archie, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. And this is just like the way so many TTRPG systems have been developed that don't follow D&D's formulas (or even use a D20, let alone a D20-based system!). Yeah, I love playing D&D, but I also love playing Marvel Multiverse, Blades in the Dark, Girl by Moonlight, Deadlands, Tales of Xadia, and Monster of the Week.
If it's hard to imagine a world where the TTRPG space doesn't have room for anything but D&D just... try to be more imaginative. Like all the people imagining up other games and systems. Don't let the "what ifs" of the slippery slope fallacy lead you into doom and gloom. D&D is the most popular it's ever been. Which I love. But everything else in the TTRPG space is more popular now because the space as a whole is getting more players, more attention, and more creativity.
I am going to risk it, and I hope I don't dinged for it, but I have kept thinking about some stuff while working on those damned books of mine.
A guess about Summation:
My read on some of this is that the problem is not the game itself, it is the way that many players of the game -- notably players who spend time online, in forums and on websites dedicated to D&D -- have an inordinate amount of focus and devotion to the concept of RAW, and are condemnatory of anything that is not RAW.
They will bad mouth people and ideas, and they will not join games on LFG sites or other places where the game is not played RAW or with too much homebrew -- which is often relegated to back corners or separate groups and forums by the larger sites and groups.
It is a culture, filled with more players than ever before -- the percentages may remain constant, butthe per capita is dramatically different. At least half the players engaging with the game today are uninterested or uncaring not only about the 50 years of lore and history in the game, they are even less concerned by the shifts in mechanics and playstyles. They have a set of expectations that they want met, and they are uninterested in changing or learning something new or different, because it affects their enjoyment of the game they do not take as seriously as some who have, perhaps, played long enough to watch all their hair fall out.
This makes it more difficult for those who have a strong idea of what they like (the different types of DM's, for example, in the video i lined to instead of an article because apparently video does better with folks these days) and a style of play that does not mesh well with what folks have seen in other forms of media about D&D, such as BG3, or Critical Role/Dimension 20, Stranger Things, Influencers on video streaming sites, or some NYT/Medium/Slash post.
This media is successful, and popular, and affects a sizeable chunk of the population, even those who are not found online.
This makes it more difficult for folks who operate, think, and create in a different/separate paradigm from the dominant one(s) to indulge their own way of interacting with the game, in whatever edition, form, or altered state.
In anger, frustration, and possibly some degree of resentment, they have laid the root cause for all of this at the footsteps of the design and implementation of 5th Edition, and, by extension, Hasbro's Wizards of the Coast division.
It is not that they "dislike" or "fail to understand" 5e or how it works or what it has or lacks (it has not been their cup of tea, which is perfectly cromulent), it is that the "kinds of players" that 5e has attracted are not considered good for their way of playing or style of game, and that previous systems with which they are more familiar (or variants of previous systems) are better suited, in their opinions, to the way that they play, and that is a further point of frustration and resentment.
In the Initial case, it is a challenge of a particular play style and approach that folks who have engaged with 5e appear to be unable to successfully comprehend the distinctive style and approach to playing the game that is sought. This is puzzling, as it appears that only when people encounter 5e before their approach do they have a problem adapting to their specific play style and approach, while those who encounter them first do not.
In a separate case, the core challenge is the obsessive nature with which online folks treat official products as the final arbiter of right and proper. They are also not fond of 5e in general -- as valid and fine an opinion as any other -- and feel that the particular part of the larger community around D&D and similar games is preferable to the majority of that same larger community that is, as they noted, seemingly obsessed with rules as written.
In this secondary case, they asserted that older versions were limitless, allowed for more negotiation with DMs, and were more personally preferable to them than the current game, due in large part to the seemingly endless number of persons for whom there is and only ever will be RAW 5e. They have a subtext of an older style and approach that placed the DM in a more primary role than today -- 5e is a Player Centric game, and there does seem to be some subtle course correcting going on with the 2024 version. They feel that in some way the company or the edition has made it so that the community is self-censoring their own imaginations.
If I am wrong about any of the above, please let me know.
I want to note that I do not disagree with this as a general premise. I do not, however, place the fault with the company or the game itself -- that is a function of a secondary market and the broader sociocultural shift away from in person to virtual gaming, necessitating the development and use of Virtual Tabletops (including and not limited to the upcoming Sigil).
The game itself is adapting to meet this need -- it is still a product, and the goal of the product is to appeal to the greatest number of people possible (understanding that it cannot reach all people even in doing so) at which the 2014 edition has been wildly successful by any competent measure. The environment in concern, though, is a programmatic one, which by its nature tends to limit things in some way that is inescapable given current technological limitations. For example, I am less excited about Sigil in large part because of the aesthetic of it, the look of it. But I am interested in it because of the first person perspective and the ability to modify the setting. However, even should I find it of value, it will remain outside any real use on my part as intended, because I have so heavily modified my games.
This is not just true of DDB, however, this is true of any VTT. They remove the math solving need on the part of a player, they roll the dice, they take away the book keeping and such that was a large part of us older folks' experience with the game. They are only able to because they are structured to mimic the official rules -- and only the official rules. The RAW. This, in turn, creates a feedback where it becomes more and more difficult to find people who are not playing RAW because the tools and methods they use to interact with the game are entirely limited to RAW.
And those tools and systems are, unintentionally, hostile to any sort of homebrew that is not rigidly controlled and specific in format and style. And it is this system that I think has the greatest impact on the thinking and ideation of the second party -- if the majority of new players only know how to use character builders and Roll 20, then how will the adapt to a table top game that is far more imaginative and has broader ideas, bigger ideas than is possible with merely the default ruleset?
But that isn't 5e, specially, that is the root cause, or even Hasbro -- if anything, Hasbro is late to the game and playing catch up. This problem impacts OSR developers, as well -- many get their systems into these VTTs, only to find that the game play, well, sucks. because of the limiting and programmatic nature of the tools. It is, to borrow the phrase, an Innovation Shift -- VTTs are a disruptive influence akin to the introduction of the iPhone (to borrow an earlier comparative), upending the entire way that a whole industry operates.
And those of us who have a desire to be not late adoptees but laggards (to use Rogers' terminology) and cling to the previous model and approach will be left out. It truly is a precarious moment for anyone whose systems cannot be effectively programmitized and whose style does not mesh well with the resultant outcome of that programmatization.
Such as OSR folks, older edition players, and weird ass folks like myself who take the base rules and make them into something we think is cooler than all get out.
It isn't there quite yet, but if you follow the diffusion of innovation principles, then we are already past the tipping point -- critical mass is achieved.
It is that point which puts the criticism of 5e against the like of 5e in the crosshairs, such as this post and thread has done.
That's my thoughts for now and a while.
If I misrepresented the sides of the other two, I apologize and invite them to offer corrections.
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
You are missing the point. All a homebrew rule is, is an official rule for your DM. It is still rules over rulings.
Here are a couple anecdotes from the first campaign I played, run by the DM that taught me and was taught by a DM that learned from Arneson.
First) My party had arrived at an elven city, and as important guests they wanted us protected but it would look bad if we went around in armor, so they made us clothes enchanted with protection. Easy enough mechanically to just give the otherwise ordinary, if well-made, clothes an armor bonus. Well, my character having had trouble hiding asked for black clothes. Another player asked me why, and I responded that I tended to get better rolls when I can in my mind how and why my character would be successful, and black clothes are hard to see in shadows. The DM said it made sense and not only described my character's clothes as seeming to almost suck in light, she also gave me a bonus to hide from the clothes. No one else got any skill bonuses from their enchanted clothes, and no one cared. No one derided it as unfair or unbalanced. But more importantly, The DM didn't go searching through the book to see what options were available. The DM simply translated what they wanted into mechanical terms and said that. It made it easy to communicate that my clothes really did make it easier to hide, and I wasn't even a rogue. Further, it was also specific. There was no question about how much it helped me hide, and more importantly, it did actually help me hide by affecting my rolls when I rolled to hide, and unlike 5e's advantage, helping me hide was scalable, allowing the DM to set the hide bonus to be a measure of how much it helped me hide. Advantage can't do that. Advantage (at least as 5e does it) is an all or nothing affair.
Second) in the same game, each player took turns rolling the random encounters. One player kept rolling an eagle, an ordinary eagle. Notable here is that it was never a combat encounter, cause guess what, encounters did not need to be combat. Anyway, she rolled this eagle several times in a row it was her turn to roll. The DM had it be the same eagle every time. Then the player finally rolled something other than the eagle, which surprisingly fit because we were in a dungeon, Then on her next random roll, she rolled the eagle again. As we had just walked into an animal handling room with pens and cages of various animals, the DM worked into the game that the eagle was trapped in one of the cages. Then, when the player freed the eagle, the eagle became her animal companion, even though she did not have the class feature. Didn't matter that was getting an extra class feature. It fit the story. But it was quite handy that she could just take the feature and have a general guideline on how to handle her new companion. This shows two things done that are not really done these days. First, the DM used the existing mechanics as shorthand. The DM didn't need to explain anything about what the player could do with her animal companion, nor what skills she would need, just had to give her the animal companion feature and done. Common understanding. Second, the DM took randomness and worked it into the narrative. Sure some still do this in some form, but it is almost always just another combat encounter with an unknown enemy. But my DM here did not just make the encounter happen as some stand alone unexpected event. She worked it into the narrative tying it both back into the history of the campaign and setting up for the future of the campaign (as she had told us that she had figured the bbeg had captured the eagle when the player rolled something else for once).
Notice how in both of these anecdotes, mechanics were used in ways outside the traditional use of mechanics, and they were not homebrew options, but rather just unique situations not dictated by the mechanics yet the mechanics served as shorthand communication and the ability to make something actually matter to rolls that normally would not.
The DM didn't treat the rules as a "how to play," instead she played first and used the rules as mere aids to accomplish her goals. Additionally, none of us looked at the rules for what to do or how to do it. I didn't even expect the bonus to hide, but rather I asked for roleplay reasons and the experience of seeing things in my mind as I made choices or when I rolled. I didn't look at the rules choose something from some table.