D&D 5E Do we need a Fifth Edition Revival (5ER)?

[dave2008]

I a completely unrelated note, there are a number of great Chrome plugins that let you pull down web content in Markdown for archiving purposes.

I tried out Markdownload and it's pretty great.

MarkDownload - Markdown Web Clipper

This extension works like a web clipper, but it downloads articles in markdown format.

chromewebstore.google.com

Now back to your topic...

That sounds pretty great - thank you for sharing!

 

[Remathilis]

+By and large, an environment for 5E that mimics the OSR environment has long since been my dream as a game designer. However, what made the early OSR have staying power was that the many designers participating in it were coming together and working together, and that there was an open door policy on new creatives entering "the fold" so to speak.

I find that in the 5E ecosystem, there's a lot of different cliques, but none of these cliques are in communication with one another. There is no Blogspace unifying a 5ER. There are no strong personalities seeking to make a mega-community dedicated to exploring and experimenting with 5E. And there are no publishers paying people to break into the fold like there was for the OSR.

The significant difference is that the OSR movement was mostly focused on reviving older editions* of the game that were mostly forgotten come the 2000's. They were trying to revive interest in something that's time in the spotlight has passed. The modern 5e movement is mostly built around providing alternatives to supporting WotC. It's built around drawing the audience away from the current edition to their own fantasy heartbreaker. In some ways, I liken it to what's happening with Twitter. A lot of people are not happy with Twitter's current direction, so a lot of companies offered up their own alternative to Twitter (Threads, Bluesky, Mastadon, and others I won't dignify by naming). And none of them have managed to rival Twitter's dominance, despite how bad the company behaves. Put mildly, people don't want to be starting somewhere new again without a dang good reason and apparently odious ownership isn't sufficient.

I think it further proves how much Pathfinder was catching lightning in a bottle. It was the right product at the right time by a company people trusted implicitly, and those factors don't come along every day. I don't believe TotV or Level Up, or MCDM or any other 5e-adjacent system is going to find itself repeating Paizo's miracle.

* some older editions. I must admit I haven't kept up with the OSR movement after 5e's release, but I recall at the time mention AD&D 2nd edition in OSR circles was the equivalent of ripping a loud fart in public. The OSR movement was fixated on 1e and B/X clones and everything else was politely ignored.

 

[Clint_L]

I think it further proves how much Pathfinder was catching lightning in a bottle. It was the right product at the right time by a company people trusted implicitly, and those factors don't come along every day.

More specifically, it was catching D&D in a bottle after WotC basically handed 3.0 to Paizo and released a very distinct version of D&D that split WotC's own fan base. The 2024 update is very much informed by that critical error, and I am sure it is a significant reason why WotC is being so loud and aggressive about backwards compatibility.

Even so, remember that press release that Kobold Press released last year about being the true home of 5e now that WotC was moving on to OneD&D? 3PP are still looking for any opening they can (as they should).

 

[Malmuria]

I think the lack of a style of play is a terrific point. Though it's not as clear as the OSR's style, and there is no guiding philosophical document, I would argue there is an accepted practice that has emerged around "5e's play style" – if I can set aside the time and can formulate my thoughts I'll post what I think about that later. But interestingly I think it's a character/narrative-leaning style that bonks heads against 5e's rule system being designed for combat-frequent play.

I remember listening to actual plays run by Chris Perkins. Similar in a lot of way to early critical role, his games involved a lot of free form character-focused scenes, punctuated by big encounters that were run theater of the mind. If rules situations came up, Perkins seemed to make a ruling, usually one favorable to the players. I think 5e works best when run in that kind of breezy way. The game seems to be slowly moving to focus on fans who want more options, optimization, and tactics.

 

[mamba]

Both of which will directly prevent the kind of wild creativity we're seeing in the OSR. That's the problem.

by compatible I mostly mean with monsters and adventures, the classes can differ widely, in theory even classless.

I agree that this makes an extreme development less likely however

Quite controversial considering generative "AI" art programs violate copyright.

then why is AI art even allowed on DTRPG? Or are you talking from a ‘philosophical’ perspective rather than legal?

 

[Mirrorrorrim]

I think it helps 3PP creators to embrace and spread the narrative that the sky is falling with D&D, because it goes hand in hand with "But hey, buy my product! My products and I are objectively better than Wizards and Hasbro." That literally brings them business. That said, I do see their fans and advocates doing it more often for them.

Like many here, I've witnessed the rise and fall of many games, and D&D editions. I've been around for all the prior ups and downs and every time people said D&D is dying (the Death of TSR and resurrection with 3E; and the 3.5/4e/Pathfinder split, and the D&D Next complain-fest, and the OneDnD complain-fest.) D&D is still here, despite the (some say deserved) hate of the 800-lb. gorilla.

It will always be a business for someone. Look at the 3PP clones who call Wizards stuff terrible and push their stuff as objectively better. Maybe they think it can only help them to be hostile. And it may be a legit response for them because of what they observe to be hostility from Hasbro/Wizards. But when I saw the early advertisements for what became ToV in early 2023. It showcased an OGL-fueled, venom-laced opinion of 5E that misrepresented opinions as facts (like 5E wasn't going to be supported any longer, so buy theirs). That negativity is all it took to turn me off and I didn't look into it further. I don't see A5E doing that (but I see when their fans do). Morrus is class act, and is carefully diplomatic. I did buy A5E to enhance my D&D games (I like the monster/treasure layouts a lot).

We'll see how 2024 pans out, but I just don't see the smaller, vocal, online groups making a dent in the millions of players that play 5E for its ease, accessibility, live-play visibility and familiarity, especially if the public doesn't pay attention to the negative press because they see the clickbait too, and don't trust their facts.

But those people who do their darnedest to spread the negativity and shut Wizards down... I see when they are being honest, but I also see when they inflate it or mislead things compared to my own knowledge and experience. And that turns me off. How many people did I see that saying that the Hasbro/Wizards leadership took 20mil bonuses each alongside the layoff? Enough to know that they don't know what they are talking about and are coming from their feels to create clickbait. Now I am against US Corporatocracy and can't stand that Wizards is controlled by shareholders. And I will vote with my wallet. But I play the games I like. I support designers I like. And I do like the designers and artists of 5E, despite the challenges caused by their parent companies, and despite my perception that there is a divide between their art and the owners of their art.

 

[MichaelSomething]

A DM who has mastered empowerment should have nothing to fear from the 2024 version.

 

[mamba]

Also, it's probably the easiest game to produce: low-fi art, copy/paste the majority of rules with little modification, a built-in market of old-timers, all with the blessing of the OGL (until maybe last January).

so just as easy as 5e then Yes, you will need to have your own classes and subclasses, but if you copy those too, why even bother creating your ‘own’ version

 

[Mirrorrorrim]

I think that comes from having lots of experience with earlier editions and non-D&D games. 5E is popular, granted. But other games, even older editions of D&D, do all the same things only better. Of the things 5E does it isn’t the best for any of them. Monster fighting? 4E did it way better. Story-gaming? Actual story-games do it infinitely better. Dungeon crawling? Hexcrawls? Sandboxing? Exploration? 5E has almost zero or literally zero support for any of those, so any TSR edition and almost the whole of the OSR does all of those better.

That's a shifting baseline. You could do a lot more with less than half the word count.

That's awesome. Playing D&D together was a main bonding experience between me and my brothers. We've since all had kids and have introduced them all to the hobby and play as an extended family. That you used 5E isn't what caused that though. Any game you regularly pushed to play would have done the same.

About half of the next generation of our gaming group started with 4E and they picked it up just as fast as the other half picked up 5E. The core of the game is the same.

It sounds like you are saying that every prior edition and game does everything better than 5E. Yeah. OK. I played them too, friend, and with every prior edition I was glad when it was over, and I was looking for the next thing that might fix the parts I came to be annoyed by.

For example, I DM'd 4E for the life of the edition, up to 30th level. Twice. 4e does NOT do monster fighting better in my experience. The artificial treadmill of numbers and incredibly large HP pools for monsters, and the players only able to do the same maneuvers over and over... The player contributions to fights became predictable and we had to rely on the story and my messing around with the monsters for the fun. I had more than one boss battle that took 3 three-hour sessions to resolve because of the structure, and it took something like that for them to feel a challenge. Every round took forever. Also, I could not reward cool unique magic items because players didn't want them. They had ideal builds that relied on specific magic items and they only cared about increasing the tier/modifiers of their preferred magic items.

And I'm not saying that 4E was objectively better or worse. We had some great stories playing in that edition. But for me, 5E has done the majority of things I like about D&D the best for my tables. And because of what I've seen with the playtest, I'm looking forward to the revised ruleset this year.

 

[Retreater]

so just as easy as 5e then Yes, you will need to have your own classes and subclasses, but if you copy those too, why even bother creating your ‘own’ version

I don't think a lo-fi version of 5e would be as well accepted as another B/X clone - but maybe I'm wrong?