D&D 5E The Next Generation

Mallus said:

Except it was just an eclectic bunch of shi stuff two dudes really liked. .

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Some of the stuff was not things they liked, but their players wanted. One of them is on record as having regretted some of the things he included for his players.

i agree and disagree.

D&D has been using the old for along time and i feel that we need to keep that in the game. The "old" people have been playing this game for a long time, some since it came out. They've played every edition and they know how people are responded to each one of them.

But With the young come new idea's. The ones of us who are new to gaming or just young in general want different things from D&D and all roll playing games than those who have been playing for a while. I too want to see themes from anime.

Wizards needs to find a way to keep both age groups happy in making DDN. We need the old and the new in order to have a truly great game.

am181d said:

Any given attempt to capture a new audience can fail if you don't get the approach right. Continuing to service the same dwindling customer base will NECESSARILY fail, because eventually you'll run out of customers.

That said, I understand why WotC's response after the 4e schism would be to design a "one system to rule them all" style game, and I can't really fault their logic. Clearly a second schism would kill the brand a lot faster than the "Long Dwindle" outlined above.

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There is no logical reason to believe a new D&D game specifically tailored to youngsters will attract the young any more successfully than the 50 RPGs on the shelves of my local game store. What the D&D name brings is the goodwill of a large already existing community. That same community is a potentially huge asset to new gamers.

We are in the middle of a Golden Age of gaming. There are excellent computer games. We have an influx of gaming ideas from German board games that are bringing new fans in. Desktop publishing software means that small semi-pro publishing houses can create top notch material, from the old-style grognard war games to light hearted card games, etc. etc.

The OP's bright idea is to compete directly with what everyone else is doing, and throw away every major advantage the D&D brand brings.

I think the OP is just exhibiting frustration with the opposite perspective. There are plenty who seem to want the next generation to have no place in D&D unless they conform to the ways of their elders.

This is like watching a family where the parents want the kid to go to law school so they can pass down the family practice but the kid wants to be an engineer instead and instead of having a healthy family discussion the parents threaten to take away their college tuition and the kid goes into full-on rebellion mode.

There is also no reason to 'compete' on the DnD influences.

Campaign settings come and go. The magazine Dungeon used to each month present a new way to take the DnD rules and conform it to a new paradigm.

I've got rules for Dinosaur worlds, Mecha rules, alternate magic systems, psionic worlds, alternate Martial Art system rules, etc. It is all DnD compatible.

The strength of DnD is getting together with some people to share time together. It is the quality that MMORPGs can not deliver. They try but the element of sitting in a group has a 'feel' that nothing else can compare with.

You can sit together to do boardgames but there is usually a competitive quality. The competitive quality interferes with the enjoyment of sharing a victory together and having fun creating a story from each other's input.

I really dislike the idea that there is an age battle that needs to occur.

I'm 44 and I've been enjoying anime since I discovered it in High School. Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Clampoo are great but I'm watching stuff like 'Gundam AGE', 'Eureka Seven AO' and 'Moretsu Pirates'. If you are a fan of 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' then you're going to love 'Avatar: The Legend of Korra'.

What am I doing Monday night?

I've got the cousin of a friend of mine that I've done some gaming with over the last year and half. He's put together a group of players and needs a GM to run things. He called me in to help out.

He's bringing three people with no experience or only one brief experience of roleplaying to the table.

Am I going to start with Caves of Chaos? Nope.

I'm custom building a story after getting feed back on the kinds of stories the players liked from fiction and video games with an opening scenario chosen by giving three options and letting a vote choose what would be the start point. (Thanks to Chris Perkin's Game Mastery column my first adventure will feature a castle built on the back of White Dragon. Why? Because it sounds cool).

I'll be breaking most 'rules' by having the players level up each week (why, because the person that requested the game said they wanted that to get a feel for the game). After a short 6-8 week campaign to teach rules and get their feet wet, I'll move on to something that might be more long lasting and a slower pace.

GM Dave said:

There is also no reason to 'compete' on the DnD influences.

Campaign settings come and go. The magazine Dungeon used to each month present a new way to take the DnD rules and conform it to a new paradigm.

I've got rules for Dinosaur worlds, Mecha rules, alternate magic systems, psionic worlds, alternate Martial Art system rules, etc. It is all DnD compatible.

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This is a huuuuuuge issue. As much as I love 4E, they focused almost entirely on the core concepts with it and completely missed the potential to expand the game outside of vanilla in the ways that previous editions had. The paper magazines would introduce things based directly on video games, even, like save point crystals! I kid you not, save point crystals as a mechanic for playing D&D. But with 4E they moved away from that and focused strictly on vanilla D&D, even while expanding what that vanilla D&D encompassed. I love designing rules so that they work with core and aren't broken, but failing to expand the game... ugh.

Incenjucar said:

This is a huuuuuuge issue. As much as I love 4E, they focused almost entirely on the core concepts with it and completely missed the potential to expand the game outside of vanilla in the ways that previous editions had. The paper magazines would introduce things based directly on video games, even, like save point crystals! I kid you not, save point crystals as a mechanic for playing D&D. But with 4E they moved away from that and focused strictly on vanilla D&D, even while expanding what that vanilla D&D encompassed. I love designing rules so that they work with core and aren't broken, but failing to expand the game... ugh.

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I wouldn't even call 4e's focus vanilla D&D. It's some kind of tabletop miniature action version of D&D. And that's no more than a subset of vanilla D&D. In some ways, I'd say it's even less ambitious than you're suggesting.

So now I'm going to tell you that you need to go step back, and - in essence - go away.

Your stories aren't relevant anymore. I'm sorry that this has happened, but it has. I have met no one in my age group that has heard of the Dying Earth series, and yet D&D's default casting system is based upon Vance's work. The only reason I'm aware of the guy is because I spend far too much of my time on gaming forums, studying the history of gaming and what-not. I've never read his works, and, honestly, I don't care to.

The same thing can be said for Conan, for Frodo, for the Gray Mouser, for... whatever else traditional sources you can name for D&D. I know there's all kinds of sources, all kinds of books and what-not that no doubt innumerable people that frequent these forums can toss at me.

It doesn't matter anymore.

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Here's the thing: they've got money. Wizards wants money. Therefore, they are relevant. The tacit admission that 4e was a less-than-stellar product upon launch and the backpeddling that WotC has done to try and cater to the "old guard" proves that you are wrong. Not only are you wrong, but you're arrogant to dismiss them as irrelevant.

Me? I'm not part of the old school crowd. I grew up on 3.5, so I didn't have a lot of background with older editions. But 4e? That wasn't D&D, at least not to me. Given Pathfinder's success, the fans agree. What do the people want? Well, they don't want 4e, that's for sure. And when WotC tried to cater to a "new generation" at the expense of the old, it backfired. They alienated their fans and created a divide so bitter that there are still edition wars going strong years after the fact. I don't know about ENWorld, but RPG.net is a hotbed of malicious discontent festering around Pathfinder and 4e.

So, yes, the old farts you casually dismiss matter. They matter a lot--more than you or me, I'm certain. It's why morale rules are coming into play in 5e and why WotC are backtracking from their zealous pro-4e campaign. It's why TheRPGPundit and Zak S are all on the WotC payroll now instead of the standard RPG crew.

The old guard needs to start giving way to the new, at some point. Perhaps now is that point. I don't want mechanics steeped in the old, anymore. I want a game that can give me things like what I've seen in the Redwall series, in Last Airbender, in anime like Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. We've got to be able to follow the style of things like Harry Potter, because that is today's fiction, today's stories, the things my generation is familiar with.

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No, thanks. If you want a system that's about anime and Harry Potter, then you can make your own system with your own brand. The rest of us want D&D.

Here's the deal: I hate Vancian casting. Always have, always will. I prefer a system like Dark Heresy's for dealing with magic, but I don't want to eviscerate Vancian spellcasting in favor of any other mechanic. Why? Because Vancian spellcasting is D&D. You don't have D&D without it. Same deal with saving throws and Armor Class and clerics turning undead. If you want a game without those, I would suggest writing up some house rules or playing a different game. They're part of the "soul" of D&D, and I am interested in preserving the game--not just the brand name, but the game itself.

I'm part of your generation. In fact, I'd wager we were within a few years of each other. Yet I'm not interested in turning D&D into something other than D&D. Also, I feel that you're acting incredibly entitled by telling everyone else that their opinions don't matter because yours are more important. You also expect the game designers to cater to your wants specifically, at the expense of the rest of the world's. That's pretty unrealistic.

If the next edition of D&D can't do Last Airbender or Harry Potter, then what incentive does the next generation of gamers have to pick it up?

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Why do you think that D&D has to be able to emulate those things to sell? Better yet, why do you think that D&D needs to emulate those things mechanically? The most important parts of those shows were the settings, which exist outside of the mechanics. The Fire Kingdom is filled with wizards who like fireball, whereas the Death Eaters are evil clerics who like slay living.

D&D should be its own, separate entity. It always has been. It's never been exclusively Tolkien or exclusively Howard or exclusively Lovecraft or exclusively Vance. It's been a weird almagamation of ideas and houserules for an old wargame. It does not need to be a Harry Potter clone to sell.

billd91 said:

I wouldn't even call 4e's focus vanilla D&D. It's some kind of tabletop miniature action version of D&D. And that's no more than a subset of vanilla D&D. In some ways, I'd say it's even less ambitious than you're suggesting.

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Calling 4e a miniatures game has been said too many times. It is just blatant & brazen edition waring. Which needs to stop now, IMHO.

billd91 said:

I wouldn't even call 4e's focus vanilla D&D. It's some kind of tabletop miniature action version of D&D. And that's no more than a subset of vanilla D&D. In some ways, I'd say it's even less ambitious than you're suggesting.

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I've played 4E and 2E way too much to be able to agree with you, but certainly they could work on their writing to make it harder for someone to come up with that conclusion.

4E spent too much time trying to be D&D and not nearly enough time trying to be what D&D ends up being if people don't focus on it being D&D.