I think this is a stupid argument. There WILL be a sixth edition. 5e WILL eventually run dry, like it has with many people already.
I wouldn't call myself a very experienced player (around 4 years of DnD), but EVERY SINGLE ONE of my recent characters has been a re-fluffed multiclass build, most of the time to fit classes that should already exist.
If the interest keeps declining (As it has with every edition- hell every commercial item- ever), there will be some reboot to the system.
I think 5e is a GOOD system. It isn't too simple but not complicated either. That said, people will get bored. 3e and 3.5e combined lasted only 7 years, 4e lasted five before they started developing 5e. I think 5e is the best system yet, and that is why it has lasted so long without becoming stale, but nevertheless, there WILL be a new edition.
If I had one wish, it would be that the DnD beyond devs continue this brilliant site and add compatability with the inevitable new edition.
3.5 lasted much longer than that due to relative widespread rejection of 4e. 4e was shorter lived due to that, but 5e was really replacing 3.5e far more than replacing 4e.
Yeah, I kind of assumed that, however I was more talking about when the DEVs changed their focus. If 6e is bad, then 5e will last a while, but the Devs wont keep developing 5e.
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“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
I like 5e and I’m really happy with it, but inevitably there’s gonna be a 6e. Probably not for like another six or seven years or so though.
In a world run by logic, your numbers would make sense.
But in this era of "safe spaces" , that timeline will be accelerated. Even if WOTC stops printing Mord's (one of the best books I have read from WOTC) , and does a major censor job to ongoing reprints of the PHB and DMG, in the eyes of the tiny minority the damage is done. There are too many people out there with existing copies that are now "Bad". The only way that WOTC can eradicate all the mean words and concepts this tiny minority no longer likes is to create a new edition, rendering all those books obsolete.
I like 5e and I’m really happy with it, but inevitably there’s gonna be a 6e. Probably not for like another six or seven years or so though.
In a world run by logic, your numbers would make sense.
But in this era of "safe spaces" , that timeline will be accelerated. Even if WOTC stops printing Mord's (one of the best books I have read from WOTC) , and does a major censor job to ongoing reprints of the PHB and DMG, in the eyes of the tiny minority the damage is done. There are too many people out there with existing copies that are now "Bad". The only way that WOTC can eradicate all the mean words and concepts this tiny minority no longer likes is to create a new edition, rendering all those books obsolete.
I agree with you, to an extent, but boy that sounded caustic.
I think that they can easily keep developing 5e, no-one is saying they shouldn't. They just wished that some things are touched on with a little more thought, despite the fact that nothing is intentionally harmful.
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“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
6e is targeting VTTs just like 4e was targeting digital DMs. (Not fact. Just a guess.)
It is my personal opinion that it's the VTT's job to become compatible with D&D and not the other way around.
Don't put everything upon the rules to fix things that one thinks are broken. 5e DMG has a full chapter and a half on how to modify the rules to one's liking.
It would be unreasonable to think any officially-sanctioned service such as DDB could handle all the different ways to play D&D as allowed by chapters 8 and 9 of the DMG. They must stick with set rules. That doesn't mean they're the only way to play.
I saw a stream where the DM was looking up Mage Hand online and said, "Ooh! Look at me! I'm D&D Beyond, and Mage Hand can't be used to attack. Sod it. You use Mage Hand to punch the minotaur in the junk. Roll for an unarmed strike."
(4 of the 5 players were in the stands among the crowds watching the trials that the 5th player was forced to take, and they weren't supposed to interfere with the trials, but the 4 cheated as much as they could to help the 5th who was often confused as to what was happening in the trials as he refused all offers for them to help him cheat. "You watch in confusion as the minotaur stops charging at you and suddenly doubles over in pain.")
Fix your own game if you think it's borked or is keeping you from having fun. 5e allows you to do it. 6e might actually not allow it for all we know of 6e right now.
6e will happen. Enjoy 5e while you can. It's really up to you.
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Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
To be fair, 4e was targeting MMO players because MMORPGs are hundreds of times more profitable and successful than D&D is. Not just was, is. There are definitely lessons to be learned from MMORPGs and their success. Simply not the ones 4e learned. Or rather, not just the ones 4e learned. And one of the big lessons MMO developers have learned through the suffering of much pain and the shedding of much financial blood is that you don't engage players long-term by assuming they're too stupid to understand your game. The onboarding process for MMOs is not "hand the player a dumbed-down character that cannot do much of anything useful except click 'Hit Enemy'," it's "introduce elements of the game in sequence, not all at once, and don't overload the player with information - but make sure they do learn everything they need to know to enjoy the game to its fullest."
5e went too far in the not-MMO direction after the player backlash against 4e. You can tell Wizards agrees - every single sourcebook since the core release has come with new expansion rules to try and restore some of the options Wizards cut from the core 5e ruleset. That's fine - frankly, it's in line with what Wizards promised to do with the release of expanded optional rulesets for tables that were ready to get out of the Tutorial Zone and enjoy the game more fully than the PHB allows. But the whole thing's been haphazard and ad-hoc, with no real plan. It's all reactionary - it took them over six years to acknowledge that Session Zero existed and was a thing you should do, as one example. One of the most basic and critical tools for running games that last more than four sessions, and it took almost a dozen sourcebooks before they so much as agreed that it existed. The 5e DMG is a pointless tire fire that's three quarters Creative Writing 101, one quarter random tables stuck in weird places that may or may not actually be of any use, and zero quarters instructions on running a good game of D&D.
I said it before, when this thread was actually fresh - 5e was primarily driven by player feedback, not DM feedback. Especially with DDB and the slick digital character creator, players really like this edition. DMs do not find it nearly so rewarding and simple, especially new DMs without any experience in the unique brand of circus troupe cat herder improv story wrangling that is DMing for real people. 6e needs to do better by the DM than 5e did, and it needs to learn the right things from MMOs.
To be fair, 4e was targeting MMO players because MMORPGs are hundreds of times more profitable and successful than D&D is. Not just was, is.
Given the number of MMO's that simply went under, you might want to qualify that as 'can be more profitable and successful than D&D is.' MMO's need TONS more coding.
Without digging into any employee numbers, I am willing to bet my life savings that WOTC's 5e employee expenditures is a small fraction of that of Blizzard's. A top coder makes a lot more coin than someone who sits there and pumps out some UA material, and there are a lot more coders for a AAA comp game than writers for new 5e material. The abomination that shall not be named has 40 or 50 names listed in the Credits. Pretty sure Blizzard has a few more than that working on WoW.
If the interest keeps declining (As it has with every edition- hell every commercial item- ever), there will be some reboot to the system.
Interest in 5e is declining, what about all that unprecedented market growth for 5e in the past couple of years? 5e is an entry level TTRPG, its been a boon to WotC/Hasbro but also the broader TTRPG market. I'm kind of curious what WotC marketing and product development think of players as a market. Yes, there are players who will stick and have stuck with the game and brand and have for years to decades. But I wonder if there's something to the effect of "your typical D&D player plays for 2-3 years" so they intentionally design a shallower system than what some folks want.
As been mentioned a lot in these discussions, WotC is owned by Hasbro, who is fairly adept (though there are critics) at turning out products designed to keep a consumer (usually a child) engaged for 2-3 years, as the consumer grows out of the toy new consumers take their place. So when folks develop an expertise in the game to the point that their theory craft asserts needs for new character classes within some sort of class periodic table of elements etc., that critic is sort of on the periphery of the market. Those critics are essential because community is clearly important to the brand and a sense of history helps sustains that community, but when I read say a new hardback and find myself giving it a "B" overall and sort of headscratching at its innovations that strike me more as common sense, I'm reading that with an awareness/amusement that I'm not completely in this publisher marketing bracket.
What I'm saying is yours and others on this board may feel jaded or of describe your interest flagging toward D&D, but that does not seem to be dragging the interest in the products as expressed in what really matters at this scale, its sales figures. When there is a true drop in market interest in 5e, there will be a turn to 6e.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
And yet, comparing the top profitable TTRPG - D&D 5e - to the top profitable MMORPG - World of Warcraft - shows just a weeeee little bit of a profit disparity. Just a smidge. Just a trace. Just one or two banananillion dollars and a legacy that radically changed the face of modern video gaming. Now sure, D&D invented the tabletop role-playing gaming genre fifty-odd years ago and inspired many of the games that eventually led to the modern MMORPG. But unlike D&D, which has to remain the exact same game it was when it was first invented fifty years ago, the modern MMO has benefitted from experimenting, learning, changing, and adjusting to fit modern gamers, with a resulting boost in profit.
Like I said. There's shit D&D could learn from successful MMOs. If anybody was willing to let the game learn, anyways.
If the interest keeps declining (As it has with every edition- hell every commercial item- ever), there will be some reboot to the system.
Interest in 5e is declining, what about all that unprecedented market growth for 5e in the past couple of years? 5e is an entry level TTRPG, its been a boon to WotC/Hasbro but also the broader TTRPG market. I'm kind of curious what WotC marketing and product development think of players as a market. Yes, there are players who will stick and have stuck with the game and brand and have for years to decades. But I wonder if there's something to the effect of "your typical D&D player plays for 2-3 years" so they intentionally design a shallower system than what some folks want.
As been mentioned a lot in these discussions, WotC is owned by Hasbro, who is fairly adept (though there are critics) at turning out products designed to keep a consumer (usually a child) engaged for 2-3 years, as the consumer grows out of the toy new consumers take their place. So when folks develop an expertise in the game to the point that their theory craft asserts needs for new character classes within some sort of class periodic table of elements etc., that critic is sort of on the periphery of the market. Those critics are essential because community is clearly important to the brand and a sense of history helps sustains that community, but when I read say a new hardback and find myself giving it a "B" overall and sort of headscratching at its innovations that strike me more as common sense, I'm reading that with an awareness/amusement that I'm not completely in this publisher marketing bracket.
What I'm saying is yours and others on this board may feel jaded or of describe your interest flagging toward D&D, but that does not seem to be dragging the interest in the products as expressed in what really matters at this scale, its sales figures. When there is a true drop in market interest in 5e, there will be a turn to 6e.
I am not saying that DnD is dying, or that there can't be upsurges of interest. Every item has a shelf life, and I think 5e is nearing the end of the point where most players can keep consuming without some sort of change.
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“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
Midnight has a point - Hasbro has built their entire business empire on the backs of children ages 8 to 11. D&D Beyond is clearly a website intended for use by those more invested in the game, but DDB is not Wizards. The people who post frequently on this board are not the target demographic for Wizards. Now admittedly, D&D is also not really intended for entirely new players - the game assumes at least basic familiarity with the tropes and language used to tell its stories, which is why D&D has historically had so much trouble attracting new players. It can only really draw from the pool of people who are already gamers, but who are not D&D players. The expansion of that pool due to other games being much better at onboarding non-gamers is a big reason for D&D's own expansion in turn.
With Hasbro calling the shots, if we assume Hasbro forcibly imposes its own business practices on D&D? You can expect 6e to be even dumber and less engaging than 5e is, and for 7e to be even less so than that. Hasbro expects people to switch hobbies every two or three years; it doesn't care about the handful of folks who invest long-term. They'll dop so whether the game is any good or not, and the people who don't?
Well, they're just conforming to Hasbro's expected business model. Sad and pathetic as it is.
"Hasbro has been investing heavily in the Wizards brand, seeking to double the size of the division over the five-year period between 2018 and 2023. During an investor presentation in February, the company the plan is on track."
Overall I would guess they will pump 5e out for another 2 or so years (2023) and with the new investment in staff fully realized start working on a 6e in that year with a publish date of 2024.
This would be my official guess if I had to put a timeframe on it....like Q4 2024 is when the next edition PHB and DMG will be published.
IMO there will probably be a "Advanced" version of the core books before a 6th edition comes out, with more races, a couple more classes/class variants, and more rules, not basing this off what I would want but WOTC's past actions with things like Tasha's, people want New and Improved, not Old and Classic, WOTC wants to dazzle the people with holes in their pockets, not the people who bought the core books and Xanathar's and stopped there, this kinda happened with VRGTR and Falkovnia, "Hey Russia!, remember how we made this political commentary about you?, well we take it back, this is Wizards of The Coast reminding you to preorder Van Richten's Guide To Ravenloft today! don't delay!, 30 more bucks in our pocket is just a few clicks away!", so if enough people have money in their pockets are bored of 5th edition, then 6e will happen faster the you can say "Preorder now!".
Hopefully 6e will learn from their mistakes, IMO 5e's rules hit the sweet spot between TTRPG and video RPGs, not feeling too much like one or the other, combats in other TTRPGs could take 15 minutes just to finish one round, while in 5e it could take only a minute, the skills are good despite tools not coming with applicable stats, the classes were quite well-done for the most part (Except for a class that starts with R and ends with R and is spelled R-A-N-G-E-R. ), I'm for the most part indifferent to the caster-martial gap, I tend to play martials, while I know folks who play nothing but Wizards and Artificers,for example, a fighter or, to a lesser extent, a monk ( Just examples. ), could crank out decent damage all the live long day, while their wizard (Again, just an example.) who ran out of spell slots ( A brilliant system nonetheless, another reason I love 5e.) a long time ago is forced to use cantrips, on top of that, martials get substantially higher health and AC to further cement their role as frontliners.
This would be my official guess if I had to put a timeframe on it....like Q4 2024 is when the next edition PHB and DMG will be published.
I think the timing makes some sense, if not for the 50th. I don't think what we'll see in 2024 will be a 6e. Some may call it a 5.5, I still think it will be more a "consolidated edition" celebrating the game, maybe call it D&D Gold (actually, don't do that). But I could see "5e will be D&D at 50" as part of the hype for what they put out.
FWIW I'm not against a 6e. I like reading new rules. I just see in this particular timeframe, I see WotC more doubling down on what they got to capitalize on the anniversary than break out a new rules set, unless they start hyping D&D Gold (which would work for a sort of developmental title like D&D Next) early next year.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
And yet, comparing the top profitable TTRPG - D&D 5e - to the top profitable MMORPG - World of Warcraft - shows just a weeeee little bit of a profit disparity. Just a smidge. Just a trace. Just one or two banananillion dollars and a legacy that radically changed the face of modern video gaming. Now sure, D&D invented the tabletop role-playing gaming genre fifty-odd years ago and inspired many of the games that eventually led to the modern MMORPG. But unlike D&D, which has to remain the exact same game it was when it was first invented fifty years ago, the modern MMO has benefitted from experimenting, learning, changing, and adjusting to fit modern gamers, with a resulting boost in profit.
Like I said. There's shit D&D could learn from successful MMOs. If anybody was willing to let the game learn, anyways.
You are comparing different products. D&D has tried its hand as an MMO. More than once. DDO still exists. Interestingly, it is based on 3.5e and has not converted to 4e let alone 5e, since that would mean a complete re-write of most of the coding. Neverwinter also still exists, based on 4th edition but the class names have been changed to 5e equivalents.
Making a set of PNP rules to simulate computer based play does not work so well.
Designing an MMO with sufficient AI to be live DM equivalent has also been tried. More than once. And failed every time usually in the midst of overhyped wishes and dreams as to how well it would work.
TTRPG rely on improvisational cleverness at the table in a way MMO just can't accommodate.
To the allegation being addressed that the TTRPG biz exists in some sort of ignorant bubble to the broader world of games people play: in fact, there has been and still is a ton of cross-discussion between people in MMOs and video gaming industry in general and the TTRPG world. I mean Matt Colville. His background in both worlds actually ain't all that uncommon. If anything the MMO business draws in the TTRPG people as consultants on the regular.
Midnight has a point - Hasbro has built their entire business empire on the backs of children ages 8 to 11. D&D Beyond is clearly a website intended for use by those more invested in the game, but DDB is not Wizards. The people who post frequently on this board are not the target demographic for Wizards. Now admittedly, D&D is also not really intended for entirely new players - the game assumes at least basic familiarity with the tropes and language used to tell its stories, which is why D&D has historically had so much trouble attracting new players. It can only really draw from the pool of people who are already gamers, but who are not D&D players. The expansion of that pool due to other games being much better at onboarding non-gamers is a big reason for D&D's own expansion in turn.
With Hasbro calling the shots, if we assume Hasbro forcibly imposes its own business practices on D&D? You can expect 6e to be even dumber and less engaging than 5e is, and for 7e to be even less so than that. Hasbro expects people to switch hobbies every two or three years; it doesn't care about the handful of folks who invest long-term. They'll dop so whether the game is any good or not, and the people who don't?
Well, they're just conforming to Hasbro's expected business model. Sad and pathetic as it is.
That's so wrong, so incomplete, I'm not even sure where to begin. Still, I'll try.
Hasbro is a big company; arguably most famous for its board games. Those start at age 6, if not younger, and are intended to be played at all ages. Parents play with their kids. When I was younger, I played with my own parents and grandparents at the same time. I play with my daughter. Heck, I played in college with other students. It's not just for kids, and I'm sick of people wrongly labeling stuff that's okay for kids as just being for kids. It's myopic and ignorant.
Their media entertainment is another story. Some of their other IPs, like Transformers and My Little Pony, do target young. They can also go a lot older, as the Michael Bay-led films and Bumblebee are all PG-13. Power Rangers, a relatively recent acquisition, skews a little younger. I think pretty much every iteration has been rated some variation on TV-Y7; meaning it has been deemed acceptable for children ages 7 and up.
Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, definitely targets an older audience. Dungeons and Dragons is designed for players aged 12 and older. And the recent demographics for the playerbase are impressive. They don't even track ages 12-14, and a full 62% are younger than I am: ages 15-34. (I'm actually older than 35, but that's how they broke it down.) For a game with nearly 50 years of history behind it, that's impressive. It speaks well to the longevity of the hobby. And, yes, catering to this larger, younger audience is going to mean some changes to lore and how it's presented. That's not a bad thing. Fantasy doesn't have to remain static, and the only real constant in the world is that things change.
Perhaps surprisingly, Magic: The Gathering is for players 13 and up.
So, no, not ages 8-11. And there's no reason to think the next edition of the game will be "dumber and less engaging" than it is currently. I know you love to share your piping hot takes, but you really should let things cool and rest after taking them out of the oven.
Suppose that's a fair take. Not at all what I intended, though.
What I meant is that Hasbro has mastered monetization of the passing fad. Of the thing people do for a year or two, then move on from. Hasbro can create Passing Fads practically at will - see fidget spinners - and rake in a killing when they do. Their board game market is steady, stable profit, but it's not where their Big Payoff comes from. You only ever buy a copy of Monopoly once, maybe twice if yours gets damaged. You buy the latest Passing Fad more-or-less yearly, and if you don't, eleventy billion other people do. Shifting D&D to mass-market appeal so that everybody buys D&D even if few people play D&D for more than a year or two is more money for Hasbro. Since they can turn D&D into a Passing Fad again and again and again with new editions, new rules, themed rulesets ("D&D, now in Star Wars Edition!"), and everything else they've ever done to any of their other properties.
Losing a relatively miniscule handful of long-term supporters to the new Passing Fad formula for D&D wouldn't matter to Hasbro. They're after making sure there's a PHB in every home, regardless of how much use it gets.
Midnight has a point - Hasbro has built their entire business empire on the backs of children ages 8 to 11. D&D Beyond is clearly a website intended for use by those more invested in the game, but DDB is not Wizards. The people who post frequently on this board are not the target demographic for Wizards. Now admittedly, D&D is also not really intended for entirely new players - the game assumes at least basic familiarity with the tropes and language used to tell its stories, which is why D&D has historically had so much trouble attracting new players. It can only really draw from the pool of people who are already gamers, but who are not D&D players. The expansion of that pool due to other games being much better at onboarding non-gamers is a big reason for D&D's own expansion in turn.
With Hasbro calling the shots, if we assume Hasbro forcibly imposes its own business practices on D&D? You can expect 6e to be even dumber and less engaging than 5e is, and for 7e to be even less so than that. Hasbro expects people to switch hobbies every two or three years; it doesn't care about the handful of folks who invest long-term. They'll dop so whether the game is any good or not, and the people who don't?
Well, they're just conforming to Hasbro's expected business model. Sad and pathetic as it is.
That's so wrong, so incomplete, I'm not even sure where to begin. Still, I'll try.
Hasbro is a big company; arguably most famous for its board games. Those start at age 6, if not younger, and are intended to be played at all ages. Parents play with their kids. When I was younger, I played with my own parents and grandparents at the same time. I play with my daughter. Heck, I played in college with other students. It's not just for kids, and I'm sick of people wrongly labeling stuff that's okay for kids as just being for kids. It's myopic and ignorant.
Their media entertainment is another story. Some of their other IPs, like Transformers and My Little Pony, do target young. They can also go a lot older, as the Michael Bay-led films and Bumblebee are all PG-13. Power Rangers, a relatively recent acquisition, skews a little younger. I think pretty much every iteration has been rated some variation on TV-Y7; meaning it has been deemed acceptable for children ages 7 and up.
Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, definitely targets an older audience. Dungeons and Dragons is designed for players aged 12 and older. And the recent demographics for the playerbase are impressive. They don't even track ages 12-14, and a full 62% are younger than I am: ages 15-34. (I'm actually older than 35, but that's how they broke it down.) For a game with nearly 50 years of history behind it, that's impressive. It speaks well to the longevity of the hobby. And, yes, catering to this larger, younger audience is going to mean some changes to lore and how it's presented. That's not a bad thing. Fantasy doesn't have to remain static, and the only real constant in the world is that things change.
Perhaps surprisingly, Magic: The Gathering is for players 13 and up.
So, no, not ages 8-11. And there's no reason to think the next edition of the game will be "dumber and less engaging" than it is currently. I know you love to share your piping hot takes, but you really should let things cool and rest after taking them out of the oven.
I'm not saying D&D is completely "child's play". Rather the average players engagement is more to the tune of 2-3 years and those who play for decades are outliers. So the ruleset is designed for that average engagement. I returned to "actively" gaming about a year and a half ago, actually following one of my kids who had started playing about a year, year and a half prior. In my own little world I can think of in that 2-3 year period a dozen new players from ages 11 to early 50s who bought manuals, maybe even got on here, even actually played, etc (not the one shot and "this ain't for me" types, many more of those). After that 2-3 year range, 3 of them still play. But there's always new faces at the game shop and I'd argue WotC/Hasbro has in its market plan the perpetual replenishment of that 75% than the 25% that see themselves as the life's blood of the game (of course they are essential too and not completely neglected by D&D I think presumes a sort of Evergreen status in it being more often than not being "discovered' more than "mastered" by the bulk of people playing it at any given moment). So I wouldn't use "dumb and less engaging" to describe any present or future iteration of the game. I would call the present "sweet spot" the game has hit and will likely carry over to future iterations "streamlined and accessible."
Yeah, I kind of assumed that, however I was more talking about when the DEVs changed their focus. If 6e is bad, then 5e will last a while, but the Devs wont keep developing 5e.
“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
I like 5e and I’m really happy with it, but inevitably there’s gonna be a 6e. Probably not for like another six or seven years or so though.
In a world run by logic, your numbers would make sense.
But in this era of "safe spaces" , that timeline will be accelerated. Even if WOTC stops printing Mord's (one of the best books I have read from WOTC) , and does a major censor job to ongoing reprints of the PHB and DMG, in the eyes of the tiny minority the damage is done. There are too many people out there with existing copies that are now "Bad". The only way that WOTC can eradicate all the mean words and concepts this tiny minority no longer likes is to create a new edition, rendering all those books obsolete.
I agree with you, to an extent, but boy that sounded caustic.
I think that they can easily keep developing 5e, no-one is saying they shouldn't. They just wished that some things are touched on with a little more thought, despite the fact that nothing is intentionally harmful.
“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
6e is targeting VTTs just like 4e was targeting digital DMs. (Not fact. Just a guess.)
It is my personal opinion that it's the VTT's job to become compatible with D&D and not the other way around.
Don't put everything upon the rules to fix things that one thinks are broken. 5e DMG has a full chapter and a half on how to modify the rules to one's liking.
It would be unreasonable to think any officially-sanctioned service such as DDB could handle all the different ways to play D&D as allowed by chapters 8 and 9 of the DMG. They must stick with set rules. That doesn't mean they're the only way to play.
I saw a stream where the DM was looking up Mage Hand online and said, "Ooh! Look at me! I'm D&D Beyond, and Mage Hand can't be used to attack. Sod it. You use Mage Hand to punch the minotaur in the junk. Roll for an unarmed strike."
(4 of the 5 players were in the stands among the crowds watching the trials that the 5th player was forced to take, and they weren't supposed to interfere with the trials, but the 4 cheated as much as they could to help the 5th who was often confused as to what was happening in the trials as he refused all offers for them to help him cheat. "You watch in confusion as the minotaur stops charging at you and suddenly doubles over in pain.")
Fix your own game if you think it's borked or is keeping you from having fun. 5e allows you to do it. 6e might actually not allow it for all we know of 6e right now.
6e will happen. Enjoy 5e while you can. It's really up to you.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
To be fair, 4e was targeting MMO players because MMORPGs are hundreds of times more profitable and successful than D&D is. Not just was, is. There are definitely lessons to be learned from MMORPGs and their success. Simply not the ones 4e learned. Or rather, not just the ones 4e learned. And one of the big lessons MMO developers have learned through the suffering of much pain and the shedding of much financial blood is that you don't engage players long-term by assuming they're too stupid to understand your game. The onboarding process for MMOs is not "hand the player a dumbed-down character that cannot do much of anything useful except click 'Hit Enemy'," it's "introduce elements of the game in sequence, not all at once, and don't overload the player with information - but make sure they do learn everything they need to know to enjoy the game to its fullest."
5e went too far in the not-MMO direction after the player backlash against 4e. You can tell Wizards agrees - every single sourcebook since the core release has come with new expansion rules to try and restore some of the options Wizards cut from the core 5e ruleset. That's fine - frankly, it's in line with what Wizards promised to do with the release of expanded optional rulesets for tables that were ready to get out of the Tutorial Zone and enjoy the game more fully than the PHB allows. But the whole thing's been haphazard and ad-hoc, with no real plan. It's all reactionary - it took them over six years to acknowledge that Session Zero existed and was a thing you should do, as one example. One of the most basic and critical tools for running games that last more than four sessions, and it took almost a dozen sourcebooks before they so much as agreed that it existed. The 5e DMG is a pointless tire fire that's three quarters Creative Writing 101, one quarter random tables stuck in weird places that may or may not actually be of any use, and zero quarters instructions on running a good game of D&D.
I said it before, when this thread was actually fresh - 5e was primarily driven by player feedback, not DM feedback. Especially with DDB and the slick digital character creator, players really like this edition. DMs do not find it nearly so rewarding and simple, especially new DMs without any experience in the unique brand of circus troupe cat herder improv story wrangling that is DMing for real people. 6e needs to do better by the DM than 5e did, and it needs to learn the right things from MMOs.
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Without digging into any employee numbers, I am willing to bet my life savings that WOTC's 5e employee expenditures is a small fraction of that of Blizzard's. A top coder makes a lot more coin than someone who sits there and pumps out some UA material, and there are a lot more coders for a AAA comp game than writers for new 5e material. The abomination that shall not be named has 40 or 50 names listed in the Credits. Pretty sure Blizzard has a few more than that working on WoW.
Interest in 5e is declining, what about all that unprecedented market growth for 5e in the past couple of years? 5e is an entry level TTRPG, its been a boon to WotC/Hasbro but also the broader TTRPG market. I'm kind of curious what WotC marketing and product development think of players as a market. Yes, there are players who will stick and have stuck with the game and brand and have for years to decades. But I wonder if there's something to the effect of "your typical D&D player plays for 2-3 years" so they intentionally design a shallower system than what some folks want.
As been mentioned a lot in these discussions, WotC is owned by Hasbro, who is fairly adept (though there are critics) at turning out products designed to keep a consumer (usually a child) engaged for 2-3 years, as the consumer grows out of the toy new consumers take their place. So when folks develop an expertise in the game to the point that their theory craft asserts needs for new character classes within some sort of class periodic table of elements etc., that critic is sort of on the periphery of the market. Those critics are essential because community is clearly important to the brand and a sense of history helps sustains that community, but when I read say a new hardback and find myself giving it a "B" overall and sort of headscratching at its innovations that strike me more as common sense, I'm reading that with an awareness/amusement that I'm not completely in this publisher marketing bracket.
What I'm saying is yours and others on this board may feel jaded or of describe your interest flagging toward D&D, but that does not seem to be dragging the interest in the products as expressed in what really matters at this scale, its sales figures. When there is a true drop in market interest in 5e, there will be a turn to 6e.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
And yet, comparing the top profitable TTRPG - D&D 5e - to the top profitable MMORPG - World of Warcraft - shows just a weeeee little bit of a profit disparity. Just a smidge. Just a trace. Just one or two banananillion dollars and a legacy that radically changed the face of modern video gaming. Now sure, D&D invented the tabletop role-playing gaming genre fifty-odd years ago and inspired many of the games that eventually led to the modern MMORPG. But unlike D&D, which has to remain the exact same game it was when it was first invented fifty years ago, the modern MMO has benefitted from experimenting, learning, changing, and adjusting to fit modern gamers, with a resulting boost in profit.
Like I said. There's shit D&D could learn from successful MMOs. If anybody was willing to let the game learn, anyways.
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I am not saying that DnD is dying, or that there can't be upsurges of interest. Every item has a shelf life, and I think 5e is nearing the end of the point where most players can keep consuming without some sort of change.
“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
Midnight has a point - Hasbro has built their entire business empire on the backs of children ages 8 to 11. D&D Beyond is clearly a website intended for use by those more invested in the game, but DDB is not Wizards. The people who post frequently on this board are not the target demographic for Wizards. Now admittedly, D&D is also not really intended for entirely new players - the game assumes at least basic familiarity with the tropes and language used to tell its stories, which is why D&D has historically had so much trouble attracting new players. It can only really draw from the pool of people who are already gamers, but who are not D&D players. The expansion of that pool due to other games being much better at onboarding non-gamers is a big reason for D&D's own expansion in turn.
With Hasbro calling the shots, if we assume Hasbro forcibly imposes its own business practices on D&D? You can expect 6e to be even dumber and less engaging than 5e is, and for 7e to be even less so than that. Hasbro expects people to switch hobbies every two or three years; it doesn't care about the handful of folks who invest long-term. They'll dop so whether the game is any good or not, and the people who don't?
Well, they're just conforming to Hasbro's expected business model. Sad and pathetic as it is.
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I don’t mind if they do 6e. I just don’t expect it to happen right away.
5e and WotC was a hugely profitable section for Hasbro in general.
D&D sales jumped 33% last year — adding to a six-year growth streak.
"Hasbro has been investing heavily in the Wizards brand, seeking to double the size of the division over the five-year period between 2018 and 2023. During an investor presentation in February, the company the plan is on track."
So they are putting more money than ever into DnD and likely we will see an increased cadence for release...because that's exactly what they said they would do.
Overall I would guess they will pump 5e out for another 2 or so years (2023) and with the new investment in staff fully realized start working on a 6e in that year with a publish date of 2024.
This would be my official guess if I had to put a timeframe on it....like Q4 2024 is when the next edition PHB and DMG will be published.
IMO there will probably be a "Advanced" version of the core books before a 6th edition comes out, with more races, a couple more classes/class variants, and more rules, not basing this off what I would want but WOTC's past actions with things like Tasha's, people want New and Improved, not Old and Classic, WOTC wants to dazzle the people with holes in their pockets, not the people who bought the core books and Xanathar's and stopped there, this kinda happened with VRGTR and Falkovnia, "Hey Russia!, remember how we made this political commentary about you?, well we take it back, this is Wizards of The Coast reminding you to preorder Van Richten's Guide To Ravenloft today! don't delay!, 30 more bucks in our pocket is just a few clicks away!", so if enough people have money in their pockets are bored of 5th edition, then 6e will happen faster the you can say "Preorder now!".
Hopefully 6e will learn from their mistakes, IMO 5e's rules hit the sweet spot between TTRPG and video RPGs, not feeling too much like one or the other, combats in other TTRPGs could take 15 minutes just to finish one round, while in 5e it could take only a minute, the skills are good despite tools not coming with applicable stats, the classes were quite well-done for the most part (Except for a class that starts with R and ends with R and is spelled R-A-N-G-E-R. ), I'm for the most part indifferent to the caster-martial gap, I tend to play martials, while I know folks who play nothing but Wizards and Artificers,for example, a fighter or, to a lesser extent, a monk ( Just examples. ), could crank out decent damage all the live long day, while their wizard (Again, just an example.) who ran out of spell slots ( A brilliant system nonetheless, another reason I love 5e.) a long time ago is forced to use cantrips, on top of that, martials get substantially higher health and AC to further cement their role as frontliners.
Mystic v3 should be official, nuff said.
I think the timing makes some sense, if not for the 50th. I don't think what we'll see in 2024 will be a 6e. Some may call it a 5.5, I still think it will be more a "consolidated edition" celebrating the game, maybe call it D&D Gold (actually, don't do that). But I could see "5e will be D&D at 50" as part of the hype for what they put out.
FWIW I'm not against a 6e. I like reading new rules. I just see in this particular timeframe, I see WotC more doubling down on what they got to capitalize on the anniversary than break out a new rules set, unless they start hyping D&D Gold (which would work for a sort of developmental title like D&D Next) early next year.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
To add to Bio,
An AI researcher once said teaching a machine to DM is one way to articulate a, if not the, long game for AI development. It's nowhere near there. Some would call it an endpoint or the so called "singularity". https://www.wired.com/story/forget-chess-real-challenge-teaching-ai-play-dandd/
TTRPG rely on improvisational cleverness at the table in a way MMO just can't accommodate.
To the allegation being addressed that the TTRPG biz exists in some sort of ignorant bubble to the broader world of games people play: in fact, there has been and still is a ton of cross-discussion between people in MMOs and video gaming industry in general and the TTRPG world. I mean Matt Colville. His background in both worlds actually ain't all that uncommon. If anything the MMO business draws in the TTRPG people as consultants on the regular.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
That's so wrong, so incomplete, I'm not even sure where to begin. Still, I'll try.
Hasbro is a big company; arguably most famous for its board games. Those start at age 6, if not younger, and are intended to be played at all ages. Parents play with their kids. When I was younger, I played with my own parents and grandparents at the same time. I play with my daughter. Heck, I played in college with other students. It's not just for kids, and I'm sick of people wrongly labeling stuff that's okay for kids as just being for kids. It's myopic and ignorant.
Their media entertainment is another story. Some of their other IPs, like Transformers and My Little Pony, do target young. They can also go a lot older, as the Michael Bay-led films and Bumblebee are all PG-13. Power Rangers, a relatively recent acquisition, skews a little younger. I think pretty much every iteration has been rated some variation on TV-Y7; meaning it has been deemed acceptable for children ages 7 and up.
Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, definitely targets an older audience. Dungeons and Dragons is designed for players aged 12 and older. And the recent demographics for the playerbase are impressive. They don't even track ages 12-14, and a full 62% are younger than I am: ages 15-34. (I'm actually older than 35, but that's how they broke it down.) For a game with nearly 50 years of history behind it, that's impressive. It speaks well to the longevity of the hobby. And, yes, catering to this larger, younger audience is going to mean some changes to lore and how it's presented. That's not a bad thing. Fantasy doesn't have to remain static, and the only real constant in the world is that things change.
Perhaps surprisingly, Magic: The Gathering is for players 13 and up.
So, no, not ages 8-11. And there's no reason to think the next edition of the game will be "dumber and less engaging" than it is currently. I know you love to share your piping hot takes, but you really should let things cool and rest after taking them out of the oven.
Also a reminder...
Hasbro owns Death Row Records.
So who knows what they cater to lol
Suppose that's a fair take. Not at all what I intended, though.
What I meant is that Hasbro has mastered monetization of the passing fad. Of the thing people do for a year or two, then move on from. Hasbro can create Passing Fads practically at will - see fidget spinners - and rake in a killing when they do. Their board game market is steady, stable profit, but it's not where their Big Payoff comes from. You only ever buy a copy of Monopoly once, maybe twice if yours gets damaged. You buy the latest Passing Fad more-or-less yearly, and if you don't, eleventy billion other people do. Shifting D&D to mass-market appeal so that everybody buys D&D even if few people play D&D for more than a year or two is more money for Hasbro. Since they can turn D&D into a Passing Fad again and again and again with new editions, new rules, themed rulesets ("D&D, now in Star Wars Edition!"), and everything else they've ever done to any of their other properties.
Losing a relatively miniscule handful of long-term supporters to the new Passing Fad formula for D&D wouldn't matter to Hasbro. They're after making sure there's a PHB in every home, regardless of how much use it gets.
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I'm not saying D&D is completely "child's play". Rather the average players engagement is more to the tune of 2-3 years and those who play for decades are outliers. So the ruleset is designed for that average engagement. I returned to "actively" gaming about a year and a half ago, actually following one of my kids who had started playing about a year, year and a half prior. In my own little world I can think of in that 2-3 year period a dozen new players from ages 11 to early 50s who bought manuals, maybe even got on here, even actually played, etc (not the one shot and "this ain't for me" types, many more of those). After that 2-3 year range, 3 of them still play. But there's always new faces at the game shop and I'd argue WotC/Hasbro has in its market plan the perpetual replenishment of that 75% than the 25% that see themselves as the life's blood of the game (of course they are essential too and not completely neglected by D&D I think presumes a sort of Evergreen status in it being more often than not being "discovered' more than "mastered" by the bulk of people playing it at any given moment). So I wouldn't use "dumb and less engaging" to describe any present or future iteration of the game. I would call the present "sweet spot" the game has hit and will likely carry over to future iterations "streamlined and accessible."
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.