Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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Outright falsehoods are a killer as well.
The attempt to stoke a generation divide is a pretty transparent attempt to split and gatekeep the community. It is, of course, factually wrong. There are plenty of us players who got our start in pen and paper with physical books, who prefer digital for various reasons. Speaking for myself, it was a pain in the neck to get players over for the slow process of character creation, and it was seen as a bit of a turn off to some of my less invested friends who would rather skip out than use our precious game time in admin work. This has only become more true as I’ve become older - when we are together, we want to play D&D. Digital tools make admin work easier to do on one’s own alone time.
One also can look around these forums and see plenty of Gen Z users, who have grow by up their entire lives with this model, pushing back on a system they often lack the financial power to fully take advantage of.
I regularly see players - usually older players who wear their contempt for various elements of the modern game openly - try to split the community into the old guard (usually with a clear indication they were superior, both as players and as stewards of the game) and the new. I have never once, however, seen this argument accurately reflect the reality that no generation of D&D player is homogenous. OSR’s post above is no exception - the divide it seeks to stoke is materially and obviously false.
Yeah, no.
D&D in the old days was a game that somebody paid so you can play. It was books, dice, pen, and paper because that's all we had. If it were possible, some people would've paid for online tools to help them play, but the infrastructure didn't exist. (IIRC, there were computer programs you could buy to help you play D&D, even if they weren't published by TSR.)
D&D in the modern days is still a game that somebody has to pay for so you can play. Actually, with the free rules, you can play for free. You can even play for free online, using the DDB tools. Or you can still play with physical books, physical dice, and physical pen and paper, as many people of all ages are doing. But somebody has to buy the books.
We're paying for stuff on DDB because it makes things possible that we couldn't do without it. (Or that we could, but it certainly makes things easier.) The game I'm currently running has players in three states and two timezones. While we could do it by everybody buying books, and just maintaining their character sheets by hand, and reading out their dice on zoom, we pay DDB because the tools make it work better. (Particularly the live-updated character sheets.) Only three of us even have DDB subscriptions, and AFAIK, only two of those have ever bought books. And all three of us have been playing D&D a very, very, long time. (And are all running games on DDB.)
As opposed to TSR, who totally weren't into monetizing D&D?
Uh huh.
You love spinning this tale, of the heroic old guard keeping the True Way of D&D alive despite the betrayals of WotC. And it's nonsense. WotC are, if anything, more customer-friendly than TSR was. (For instance, TSR would've come down on all those OSR games that are just original D&D with the serial numbers barely filed off like a ton of bricks.)
But yes, WotC are in this to make bank, just like TSR was. So is most every other RPG publisher out there beyond the individuals putting their weird little games out there on itch. There's no old generation/new generation split. There's the people who want it to be just like it always was, and the people who are willing to use the new options, and your supposed old generation has plenty of those.
You can insist on playing D&D in person, with pen and paper and dice, but your experience is no more D&D than the kids using DDB, playing over the internet with Discord.
Hey OSR4Ever, was your comparison of "Pen and Paper vs Digital" getting at "Ownership Vs Renting" or are you dismissing digital tools as a concept?
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player.
The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call
To rise up in triumph should we all unite
The spark for change is yours to ignite."
Kalandra - The State of the World
They. Give. The. Game. Away. For. Free.
Never happened in the 1e days. You couldn’t walk into the hobby shop or waldenbooks at the mall and find a (stripped down, granted) version of the PHB sitting on the shelf for free. Then, as now, the DM bought the books and everyone else shared them. Someone was paying. Now, you can play without anyone giving WotC a penny.
Also now on beyond, you can share a book with I think it’s 60 people, all over the world. In practice the sharing digitally is much more generous than it ever was in person. Only one person can read a book at a time, but all 60 of those people can be reading the same page of the PHB at once — and all in different time zones. It is far more useful and functional, and I for one, am happy to pay a couple bucks a month for the service.
And, lordy, the monetize comment again. First, the person who said that is no longer with the company. Second, it was always about monetizing the brand, not the game. It’s why there’s stuffed toy displacer beasts and D&D Lego sets and I recall something like a D&D branded slot machine in development they licensed not too long ago.
The nut they’ve always been trying to crack as a company is that 20% of the players (DMs) make 80% of the purchases. They’ve always, even in the benighted days before digital tools, been looking for ways to expand that number.
And, as someone who’s been playing since the early 80’s and definitely has enough gray in my beard to qualify as “old guard,” we are a small and shrinking share of the player base. We’re not forcing anyone to do anything.
I'm amazed by the rewriting of history. TSR was notoriously litigious. The idea of third party publishers producing stuff for D&D was an innovation from 3e; the whole reason the OGL got written is because they'd acquired such a toxic relationship with their fanbase that something drastic needed to be done.
Well, sort of. There were definitely third-party publishers making D&D products in the 1e days. (Role Aids, Judge's Guild) I believe their relationship with TSR was a lot more fraught than the OGL era, and I don't know if the ecosystem persisted into 2e.
But yes, the WotC era is still qualitatively different in attitude toward third-party publishers and fan work. This is probably true even for the 4e era -- they still had a license, even if it was more restrictive than the OGL.
Well, there were companies with licenses that were negotiated individually with TSR. What 3e added was a license that didn't require those negotiations.
As a member of the "old Guard" a lot of us did and still do want to beat TSR and its business practices with a bag of bricks and leave it whimpering in a ditch.
This romanticism for the company specifically is not a generational thing, it is a.... well i don't know where it comes from.
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player.
The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call
To rise up in triumph should we all unite
The spark for change is yours to ignite."
Kalandra - The State of the World
Well, it might be a generational thing, but if so it's Gen Z or something; people too young to have actually ever experienced TSR.
There was at least one (Mayfair/Role Aids) who had no license. There may have been more, but there's a limit to how much I'm willing to go digging.
I think it's rooted in the older folks hearkening back to an idealized version of the good old days. The bad of WotC and modern D&D is recent and present, while the bad of TSR and old D&D is distant and fuzzy. It's the nostalgia instinct; if you remember your youthful/college days fondly, things associated with those days gain by connection. And the D&D we played back then probably was better in some sense -- when you have an easily-available group of friends who have the free time and stamina to play for 6-8 hours every week, you really were having more fun than you likely are now, when time, responsibilities, and the general problems of the world make it harder.
(Also, if you didn't have a connection to the industry news, TSR's bad behavior was unlikely to enter your awareness. I certainly heard about none of it until I got on Usenet.)
I have warm and fuzzy memories of playing D&D back in the day (mostly fuzzy, human memory is notorious for being selective and wildly inaccurate). But I also remember that the only way to play back then was with friends I managed to rope in to trying it or people I might meet at a game store, both of which were far more likely to flop than succeed. Now, there are so many ways to find games that I've found games to play and/or run without issue two or three times a week for the last 7 years (using at least 5 ways that I can think of off the top of my head). All but one of those methods required digital means/tools, even for the in-person games, and which is why I have many great memories of playing as recently as a few days ago.
WotC is going to try and find ways (sometimes new ways) to make a profit, just like every other for-profit company or business out there. The same way TSR did (Well, aside from WotC making the SRD available for free.) Different people will have different levels of access to different parts of the game for reasons other than just financial ones, and that has nothing to with WotC. (Like me not being able to afford The Dragon magazine back in the day, and not knowing anyone who had it to lend.) D&D is not worse now because of some sort of predatory practices of the evil empire or because "it used to be that..." D&D is better or worse depending on each individual player and his/her/their preferences, values and beliefs.
They could, at least, reduce prices on thinner books, & not have a flat 60/30 regardless of content and/or reception.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
Um..... the thinner books were less money? I'm confused by this comment.
Can you not do that now?