D&D 5E I'm just not that "Psyched" about Next.

Hobo said:

Which is why I just don't see the point of 5e, at least in terms of it being a product that I would want to buy. I hardly need more D&Ds when I have one that already does what I want, and when--frankly--I'm not really a fan of most of the D&Disms that have suffused so many versions of the game over the years. I really only value a D&D that is sufficiently flexible that I can use it to play something that little resembles that classic playstyle associated with D&D. And making D&D more closely resemble other games--many of which I already own as well--also does little for me personally .. (snip) .. I don't value the idea of playing D&D for its own sake. I value the idea of playing the game I like, and I don't particularly care what it calls itself.

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Near the end of the 3.x era, hints of dissatisfaction with the system creeped in to my mind. The D&D-isms were mild irritants, but it was what our group played, so I just rolled with it.

When the 4e era kicked off, our group quickly knew that it was a non-starter. We simply weren't going to move ahead with 4e, period, which then begged the question--what were we actually going to play? Stick with 3e? Wait for Pathfinder? Try something totally different?

I think an unintended, unforeseen consequence of 4e was that when adoption of 4e didn't "catch" for much of the RPG crowd, many of us as players and GMs had a unique situation on our hands--we had to DECIDE what we were going to play going forward. This wasn't really new; we could have ditched D&D for numerous alternatives over the years, but it had been easy to just "graduate" with each successive D&D edition. Now the sudden decision brought to the forefront just how much choice we had.

When you're "looking around" for other dance partners, so to speak, you tend to do a total evaluation of EVERYTHING that's brought you to that point. For me, that led to a much deeper analysis of what I REALLY wanted from the RPGs that I was playing, and I more fully realized just how much the "D&D-isms" weren't taking my (increasingly limited) RPG time in a direction I really wanted to go.

So far, 5e's main selling point seems to be little more than, "Hey look, it's a new D&D!" when frankly, I haven't particularly liked the "D&D" in D&D for a while now.

A couple of years after DMing 4th Ed (high level 3rd Ed became numbing) I became disillusioned, soon after started perusing all my Basic, 1st (aha), 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and now 5th Ed play-test stuff to see what I/we can come up with.

That's an interesting point. I guess for me it happened in about 1985, though. It's a little surprising to me that given that decades of diversity in gaming that we've had all this time, that it wouldn't occur to gamers to look beyond D&D... yet at the same time, it shouldn't be. After all, even we mostly just play D&D too. And for at least a couple guys in the group, that's exactly the way that they like it.

Most of the rest of us have experimented with Shadowrun, or Mutants & Masterminds, or Call of Cthulhu, or World of Darkness, or something else. Or at least when we were newer we played Top Secret and Star Frontiers and Traveller and whatever else.

But still, at the end of the day we mostly played D&D. But at least in my mind, D&D had long since ceased to be anything special other than "the game that we mostly play, because more people can at least agree on it relative to anything else."

[MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION]
I agree with the notion that the 4e situation has produced a group of open-minded and conscientious consumers who are no longer bound to the status quo. Sort of reminds me of the new commercials dissing the iphone in favor of the samsung equivalent.

I also rather agree with your conclusion that this doesn't bode well for 5e.

Hobo said:

That's an interesting point. I guess for me it happened in about 1985, though. It's a little surprising to me that given that decades of diversity in gaming that we've had all this time, that it wouldn't occur to gamers to look beyond D&D... yet at the same time, it shouldn't be. After all, even we mostly just play D&D too. And for at least a couple guys in the group, that's exactly the way that they like it.

Most of the rest of us have experimented with Shadowrun, or Mutants & Masterminds, or Call of Cthulhu, or World of Darkness, or something else. Or at least when we were newer we played Top Secret and Star Frontiers and Traveller and whatever else.

But still, at the end of the day we mostly played D&D. But at least in my mind, D&D had long since ceased to be anything special other than "the game that we mostly play, because more people can at least agree on it relative to anything else."

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This time in 1985, I wasn't even born yet. Seems to me that when I started, there wasn't even talk that rpgs other than D&D existed for several years. I'm not even sure how I learned the hobby went beyond D&D. And even when we started experimenting around, it was with other d20 games at first and for a while. I'd say those of us who come from the time of the relatively effective effort to unify the marketplace using the OGL have a rather different perspective (not better or worse, merely different).

I've yet to meet any rpg-er who primarily plays something other than 3e or earlier D&D; I almost always see the other games as a change of pace or an experiment. Then again, maybe that is changing.

If you hang around rpg.net more, you'll meet tons who actively avoid it. I used to run with a "White Wolf" crowd in the late 90s; right before 3e came out, actually. We mostly stayed as far away from D&D as we could back on those days. I've known a bunch of folks who's main game was Cthulhu too.

Hobo said:

If you hang around rpg.net more, you'll meet tons who actively avoid it. I used to run with a "White Wolf" crowd in the late 90s; right before 3e came out, actually. We mostly stayed as far away from D&D as we could back on those days. I've known a bunch of folks who's main game was Cthulhu too.

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Online, sure. In person, I know plenty of comic book people, crpg fans, wargamers, MMO addicts, and practitioners of a variety of other nerdy persuasions, but not a lot of people who play any sort of tabletop rpg (which has me rather concerned for the health of the hobby). Even the people I know who are great at telling stories rarely have any idea what D&D is.

Part of this is probably that it isn't a big thing in my field, for whatever reason. Go to any D&D message boards and one sees a bevy of computer people, lawyers, librarians, mathematicians/physicists, engineers, schoolteachers, and businesspeople, but virtually no one from any kind of biomedical or healthcare background. Not sure why that is.

Hobo said:

That's an interesting point. I guess for me it happened in about 1985, though. It's a little surprising to me that given that decades of diversity in gaming that we've had all this time, that it wouldn't occur to gamers to look beyond D&D... yet at the same time, it shouldn't be. After all, even we mostly just play D&D too. And for at least a couple guys in the group, that's exactly the way that they like it.

Most of the rest of us have experimented with Shadowrun, or Mutants & Masterminds, or Call of Cthulhu, or World of Darkness, or something else. Or at least when we were newer we played Top Secret and Star Frontiers and Traveller and whatever else.

But still, at the end of the day we mostly played D&D. But at least in my mind, D&D had long since ceased to be anything special other than "the game that we mostly play, because more people can at least agree on it relative to anything else."

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D&D is kinda like vanilla ice cream. It may not be anyone's favourite, but, by and large, no one has any deep seated objections to it either. So, it gets the pass in a lot of groups simply because no one gets too fussed when someone says, "Hey, let's play D&D".

Ahnehnois said:

Online, sure. In person, I know plenty of comic book people, crpg fans, wargamers, MMO addicts, and practitioners of a variety of other nerdy persuasions, but not a lot of people who play any sort of tabletop rpg (which has me rather concerned for the health of the hobby). Even the people I know who are great at telling stories rarely have any idea what D&D is.

Part of this is probably that it isn't a big thing in my field, for whatever reason. Go to any D&D message boards and one sees a bevy of computer people, lawyers, librarians, mathematicians/physicists, engineers, schoolteachers, and businesspeople, but virtually no one from any kind of biomedical or healthcare background. Not sure why that is.

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In both of my "careers", one a brief stint in the military and now as a teacher in a non-English speaking country, I can say that gaming is very alive and well. I've never had any problem getting a group together until fairly recently (I'm the only English speaker in the neighbourhood - gaming would require too much time to do face to face and online is just too darned convenient). Get ten or fifteen foreigners together and I can pretty much guarantee finding enough people for a group.

So, I guess it really does boil down to confirmation bias. I don't see the "slow death" of rpg's because everywhere I go in the world I can find a group and I've always been able to find a group.

Obryn said:

The problem is ... every major, substantive innovation runs afoul of their "feels like D&D" stuff. If D&D has to have 80's-era rules, innovation will be hard.

-O

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After participating in the playtests, I feel like the rules are nothing like the lightweight 80's-era rules. It seems to me more like the heavy 3e rules minus the grid.

WheresMyD20 said:

After participating in the playtests, I feel like the rules are nothing like the lightweight 80's-era rules. It seems to me more like the heavy 3e rules minus the grid.

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I agree, and with each playtest packet the characters get more convoluted. There was a thread some where that had players refusing to playtest because the characters, the sorcerer in particular, were too complicated to figure out.

Now there's talk of adding yet another layer of complexity to the wizard and a whole flock of people wanting a return of the absurdly long skills lists.

You'd wonder what it's going to look like in two years.