D&D 5E Is 5e's Success Actually Bad for Other Games?

[happyhermit]

5e's tactical components do not rise far enough above not at all tactical ttrpgs in order for it to be between those two extremes you note, it's still firmly on par with games like fate.

If it rises above them, then it's between, by definition.

Your spectrum is flawed in that you are trying to claim appreciable differentiation

I claimed differentiation, as did you. Then you went on to insert another thing that I never did.

View attachment 138258'If that greyscale gradient represents max tactical to not at all tactical games with the two red arrows representing the extremes , only the blue one is between them. The green one is still firmly in one extreme. Alternately you could say that the violence in hockey is between rugby & golf , it might be right on some extree technical level but not to any measurable degree because the scale is absurd

There are games that fall on both sides of the spectrum. If you think Fate is the least "Tactical combat" game in existence, then maybe there are a lot of games you don't know about. Or, probably more likely, you are arbitrarily excluding them in order to "prove" me wrong.

Perhaps you just aren't able to see the differences with the same level of resolution. Does a game that resolves combat with a single die role or deterministic combat meet your threshold of being "measurably" different? What about games where combat doesn't exist or isn't resolved by the rules? Are you able to perceive a differentiation between these or do they look the same to you?

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Thomas Shey, man what?!?

You said “given 5e came out when a lot of well-received video let's play's were landing (Critical Role being the obvious one”

You didn’t say “fairly early in the process”.

all I did was point out D&D was hella popular before CR even existed.

that’s it.

The group that became the Critical Role show started together almost 2 years before 5E was published, according to their Wiki, and was running their game using PRPG, but converted everything to 5E rules for the show, which started airing in March 2015, or about 4 months after all three core books had been released.

Now that makes you wonder what things would look like if they had stuck to PRPG for the show?

 

[Campbell]

Other RPGs have had almost 50 years to knock D&D off its throne. Not one of them has ever managed it except for Pathfinder (and that only briefly, in the waning years of 4E). And Pathfinder is a D&D clone.

The excuses wear pretty thin in 50 years.

What point are you making here? Are we doing the pissing contest thing?

I don't understand this desire people seem to have to treat RPGs as a zero sum thing or try to make comparative claims of quality when it's obvious each game has its own strengths and weaknesses it brings to the table. Why the need to knock down other games and the hobbyists that enjoy them?

No one has to like or play any game they have no interest in. That does not mean that they should make broad claims about the relative quality of other games, how difficult they are to learn, how much commitment they require, how narrow they are, and a whole host of inflammatory rhetoric being launched at other games broadly. If people want to get into specific criticism I will be glad to hear them out, but this sort of elitism makes being part of this community difficult for people like me who are fans of the overall genre of games.

I like D&D. I have 3 official versions of it on my shelf. Several games like The Nightmares Underneath, Pathfinder Second Edition and Electric Bastionland that are direct descendants of it. I play in a biweekly 5e game that's been going for 3 years now. I prefer running other games, including other descendants of D&D, but I absolutely enjoy playing it.

I say all this because there seems to be a bizarre need for many in the broader D&D community and particularly on this site to put broad sections of our overall hobby in boxes so they don't have to deal with them cognitively. To render them utterly irrelevant and deny they possess any value not contained within the sacred texts of D&D. It's dismissive, rude, and elitist. It's also entirely unnecessary. You can like what you like without shame. There's no need to tear other parts of the hobby down in order to justify your love for D&D. You can just love D&D. I do. I'm just polyamorous when it comes to RPGs.

 

[Dausuul]

What point are you making here? Are we doing the pissing contest thing?

This whole thread has been a pissing contest for several pages now. But the point I'm making is to the people saying D&D is a bad game whose continued success is just some combination of luck, having been first, and benighted players who never try other games. Those are the excuses that wear thin over 50 years. You can't coast on past successes for half a century.

 

[Campbell]

This whole thread has been a pissing contest for several pages now. But the point I'm making is to the people saying D&D is a bad game whose continued success is just some combination of luck, having been first, and benighted players who never try other games. Those are the excuses that wear thin over 50 years. You can't coast on past successes for half a century.

So the proper response elitism is to then engage in your own form of elitism backed by bad faith arguments that don't meaningfully speak to the actual quality of any game? Why not make the argument that D&D is a good game and other games are too? When we engage in these sorts of pissing matches we all lose.

I mean I broadly agree with your point that you can't coast by on your success and that D&D would not have been successful if it were not a good game, but I don't see why you need to imply that other games are not also good or are less good because they do not have the same mainstream appeal.

 

[pemerton]

You can't coast on past successes for half a century.

Is that claim true? I mean, a lot turns on what we mean by coasting on past successes. But path dependency is a thing, and I think it probably has work to do in the analysis of the endurance of certain sorts of games - eg Monopoly - in just the same way that it tells us something about the endurance of the QWERTY keyboard.

So I think there are some major issues with market design when it comes to tabletop RPGs. Basically you have very few companies with the capability to perform any kind of market outreach. The games those companies are selling all pretty much fit in the same mold (cooperative action adventure with an emphasis on GM as storyteller). So when you have games that are meant to appeal to a different sort of audience they usually have to sell themselves to a market where initial participation requires an interest in the dominant mode of play.

That being said I think a lot more could be done outreach wise to attract less traditional customers who might be interested in something like Monsterhearts or Vampire, but would never have any interest in something like D&D. You're starting to see some signs of this on platforms like itch.io and Kickstarter, but really there needs to be a lot more done.

We know that given the right resources something like this can work because Vampire used to be a thing. You had all sorts of nontraditional hobbyists entering the hobby during the 90s because there was a compelling game with real resources and marketing muscle behind it.

You're sounding a bit like Ron Edwards from 20 years ago! (And that's praise, not criticism.)

 

[Aldarc]

You can't coast on past successes for half a century.

There are far too many counter-examples to supply here for such a strong assertion. Some of them supplied in earnest and others with tongue-in-cheek humor. I think that we can praise what D&D has done well and right over its past editions, particularly when it comes to their respective Zeitgeists, without these sort of generalized claims.

 

[Campbell]

One of the biggest impediments to the success of other games is that game stores (at least here in the States) largely treat RPGs as zero sum. It's really the combined stranglehold of D&D and Pathfinder since the 4e era that is the issue. You're lucky if there's even anything on the rack that does not come from Wizards or Paizo. In the 5e era Adventurer's League has made this worse because it is a format game stores can promote in the same way they promote Friday Night Magic. Home games and especially running other games at the store are often discouraged. I have pretty much given up on game stores as a way to connect with other gamers or recruit for not 5e / not PF2 games.

By the way what Wizards has been able to accomplish with both Friday Night Magic and Adventurers' League is some damn brilliant marketing. They have basically turned gaming stores into a vestigial marketing wing that pushes their products, keeps players engaged, and builds community around their games. It also has a chilling effect on anyone trying to compete with them directly.

 

[Neonchameleon]

First, on the core topic of D&D's success being bad for other games, I remember back when it was. At the start of the 3.0 days with the 3.0 glut where thanks to the OGL everyone was trying to produce a D20 version of everything; we're talking d20 Call of Cthulhu and Monte Cook's World of Darkness here. 5e is not doing that sort of nuking the RPG arena - instead it seems to be growing it. And Critical Role is making people aware there are other games out there.

Hundreds of years later, the Pike Square is used to great effect by French Revolutionaries in France, that and the loss of most of the military leaders to the guillotine (along with all the other leaders) leads Napoleon to decide to have MASSIVE armies that can protect his cannons with their feeble meatsack bodies! Allowing his bombards to destroy fortifications and troops while keeping his cannons safe from cavalry. But this caused Supply Chain problems.

On a complete tangent I'd be interested in a source for the first sentence. I'm pretty sure that the pike square was very much obsolete tech by the start of the 18th Century, with the socket bayonet more or less rendering pikes redundant. In the revolution they put heads on pikes - but didn't use them so much as weapons.

I mean, if you want a tactical miniatures combat-focused experience... your first step would be to look at Warhammer (Fantasy or 40K). And that game is definitely complex. But is it "needlessly" complex? I'm pretty sure the people who play it would say 'No'.

I'm pretty sure many of them would say yes. And there has been change in the 40k rules over time with e.g. 8th Edition streamlined compared to 7th and a lot of people responding positively to that.

 

[DEFCON 1]

If you think Fate is the least "Tactical combat" game in existence, then maybe there are a lot of games you don't know about. Or, probably more likely, you are arbitrarily excluding them in order to "prove" me wrong.

Heh heh, yeah... I mean if someone really believes FATE is the least "tactical combat" game in existence... that person has obviously never gone to the 'Games On Demand' indy RPG booth at places like GenCon or PAX. I mean for pete's sake... you can just start at Fiasco, move back through Ten Candles and then keep going backwards from there to find games with less and less tactical combat than FATE. Especially considering most of those games don't involve combat at all!

If you have all the indy press RPGs on one end and Avalon Hill games like Memoir '44 on the other... yes, D&D 5E is somewhere in the middle between those two ends. We can't quantify how close to the exact middle it falls (because it would necessitate listing out and plotting every single game out there)... but we CAN say definitively that it falls between them.