Ruin Explorer
Legend
Exactly. This whole "5E is successful because of the rules!!!" thing is hilarious because if that's true 5E should have astonishingly, mind-blowingly well-designed rules to be wildly outperforming every previous edition by insane margins. Whereas in fact 5E's rules are, by TT RPGs standards, pretty okay. They're like 7 out of 10. They're accessible but far less accessible than most RPGs designed since 2010. They're flexible but far less flexible than an awful lot of RPGs and rules-sets. They're not bad, but the idea that their remarkable quality is why they succeeded basically 5x-10x more than previous editions and culture isn't acting as a multiplier here is just funny. It's not even worth arguing with because it's so transparently nonsensical!Given that no other version of D&D has ever matched 5E's success, I don't thing this is much of a clarifier. AD&D didn't match the success of 5E, doesn't stop the OSR crowd. There's 4E clones and stuff like 13th Age that go off with some of its ideas on their own showing it does have that lasting appeal and audience, just, y'know. A small audience. Given we're comparing to OSR games which are, let's be generous here, basically complete unknowns outside of the TTRPG space? Yeah, that's expected (i'd also argue there's also more tactical stuff around with some 4E inspiration, so your 4E fans might be drawn off to stuff like, y'know. Lancer)
Just, if you're trying to compare things to 5E's success? Every other edition of D&D is a failure. Basic? Doesn't meet 5E's stuff. 2E? Doesn't meet 5E's stuff, also bankrupted a company on the way out. 3e? Certainly doesn't meet 5E's stuff. 3.5E? Nup. Pathfinder 1E didn't even break past 4E's numbers until the tail end of the line, its got nothing on 5E. That's basically the problem of trying to compare to 5E's meteoric numbers: No edition has ever had the numbers 5E did.
The way the rules did play into things is that they're wildly more accessible, so they didn't actively block people from coming into the hobby or returning to the hobby. But even there they're like, not that accessible. D&D is still one of the harder RPGs to teach to new players in the grand scheme of things. I think part of the difficulty in seeing this is that we're mostly grogs and whilst 5E is towards the crunch-heavy end of things (again, about 7/10), we grew up with wildly more crunchy stuff, which was much harder to learn.