OSR Is there room in modern gaming for the OSR to bring in new gamers?

[Clint_L]

Problem is, presenting it as optional rather than core guarantees it'll be ignored by 75% of the DM/player base.

It's a disaster to intentionally split your own player base. WotC did an autopsy on TSR after they purchased it and that was one of the main things that they flagged. There's no way they will publish competing rules systems for D&D.

 

[Clint_L]

I actually think the opposite is true: 5E is terrible for learning how to start your own campaigns.

I direct them towards the starter games like Lost Mines, but honestly students never have trouble starting their own campaigns - they just kind of wing it like we did.

The bigger issue is them finding others to play with, and starting them on 5e makes that exponentially easier. Starting them on 1e or Basic or 3e or PbtA or whatever would not be doing them any favours. There are already tons of other 5e campaigns going, and the usual transition is for the new kids to be absorbed into those. By Grades 11/12 the hardcore players are exploring other systems on their own; one student, who just graduated, even had an encyclopedic knowledge of 1e from her father's books.

 

[Lanefan]

Back during the D&D Next playtest, Mike Mearls openly and intentionally cracked anti-4e edition warrior jokes on a podcast. He very specifically used the phrase "shouting hands back on," which originated from edition warriors hating 4e because the Warlord could actually heal. He followed that with an extremely lame "now I'm being ridiculous," bit he was sincerely using those jokes as a reason for why the Warlord class should not exist. I don't remember which podcast it was, but it did happen.

OK, this seems legit.

Likewise, on one of the blog posts about D&D Next, which conveniently got deleted when WotC changed their website for the umpteenth time, another of 5e's designers openly poked fun at the very idea of liking dragonborn, as though only weirdos and crazy people could ever be into them. He ended that blog post with the oh-so-magnanimous stance of saying (more or less) that there was no accounting for taste.

This isn't, though. Dragonborn aren't specific to 4e (they're just re-named half-Dragons from 3e) and even if they are, they're something that IMO should never have been PC-playable. Even so, they came forward into 5e anyway, so that designer clearly lost the battle.

Yeah. The 5e designers were more than once actively signalling "4e fans are not welcome here." They made plenty of motions as though that weren't true, sure. But nobody else got actively crapped on the way 4e fans did.

They didn't exactly do much for 0-1-2e fans either, despite all their promises, so my sympathy is somewhat limited.

The "big tent" is a big, ahem, alternative fact.

Nah - it's a big tent. But even the biggest of tents doesn't contain the whole circus.

 

[Lanefan]

I remember a youtube video in lead up to 4E dumping on 3E.

I was live in the room when some 4e designers* opened their GenCon seminar by whaling on 3.xe.

Made me sit up and pay attention, that's for sure; and that may have been the intent: start with something provocative to get people listening.

Doesn't surprise me that 5e designers had a go at 4e, nor would it surprise me much if 5.5e designers don't diss original 5e.

* - This was 15-ish years ago so I don't remember exactly who they were, or whether any of them had also been involved in 3e or 3.5e design.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Shouting on hands thing you woukd probably have to be thin skinned to take that as an insult. It's a big thing people didn't like from 4E rapid martial healing.

Shouting hands back on was always a sign that the person repeating the talking point neither knew nor cared how the 4e rules worked and was an unrepentant edition warrior. Hit point damage in no edition ever involved cutting hands off or anything else short of death that couldn't be healed by the sort of rest an athlete might take after an event therefore recovering hit points could not shout them on.

And getting back to 5e and the OSR (and for that matter 4e) to me 5e's biggest strength is how easy it is for a new player to make a strongly drawn and evocative PC that's relatively simple to play and new players have been flocking in through the door. Its biggest weakness is that it gives almost nothing to the DM. oD&D/OSR-editions did and in a very different way so did 4e. 3.0/3.5 also did although it added a lot of work. But 5e gives the DMs nothing in terms of a vision and tools, which means it's comfortably the version of D&D that's the shortest of DMs that I've ever seen.

 

[Zardnaar]

I was live in the room when some 4e designers* opened their GenCon seminar by whaling on 3.xe.

Made me sit up and pay attention, that's for sure; and that may have been the intent: start with something provocative to get people listening.

Doesn't surprise me that 5e designers had a go at 4e, nor would it surprise me much if 5.5e designers don't diss original 5e.

* - This was 15-ish years ago so I don't remember exactly who they were, or whether any of them had also been involved in 3e or 3.5e design.

I remember the youtube video people blamed on 4E reception. At the time it had 40k views.

Meals did say the shout hands back on the context was a joke he wasn't being literal about it.

There's two comments vs what you saw and a video dumping on Gmomes.

 

[Lanefan]

It's a disaster to intentionally split your own player base. WotC did an autopsy on TSR after they purchased it and that was one of the main things that they flagged.

Which makes little to no sense given that BX/RC and 1e AD&D ran side-along just fine through the 1980s.

And part of the reason why was that they were very compatible with each other.

There's no way they will publish competing rules systems for D&D.

Competing rule systems? No.

I'm talking about complementary rule systems.

Different topic: I don't like hard level caps and much prefer the game be designed open-ended but with a soft cap in practice; that soft cap being that after a certain point levels just become too hard/take too long to achieve through play. That way, I can have a 27th-level NPC that follows the PC rules but be safe in knowing the PCs aren't likely to get much past the 10th-11th range.

 

[cbwjm]

Obviously people will get offended over different things, and my post was a bit tongue in cheek. However, I'm seeing some serious flaws in arguments here. Even if you ignore the "someone criticizing my favorite thing means they are insulting me personally" thing, which I disagree with, there seems to be an assumption or inference that if you criticize anything, then you're a hater of that thing. That simply isn't true. It's absolutely fair for someone to not like how warlords could heal wounds in 4e, but that doesn't mean they hate 4e. That's just a small part of 4e. There are a lot of other things people could like about the system, like it's organization, minions, balance, and tactical combat.

I've criticised certain things about 4e and yeah, you can't escape the people who seem to think it's attacking them personally. 4e had some great stuff but, like every edition, it wasn't perfect.

 

[Ondath]

Well...it's almost like they don't want you to play modern D&D as a "campaign"....just buy and use the next book published by WotC.

Ehhh, I'll disagree with you there. 5e is absolutely designed with love and care and can be used (and was designed to be used by its design team) to run fantastic campaigns. They just assumed the DMs would be folk who already know how to DM from earlier editions and that most of the important info on running D&D would get passed along as folk wisdom (which is done through many, many GMing blogs). There's no need to attribute maliciousness (assuming WotC designers did this out of greed) to what can be explained by incompetence (designers not foreseeing that 5e would get so big).

Now, whether the marketing/accounting folk at 5e wanted the game to be unsuitable for campaigns and only urge the next purchase, that's another question. But those people are there to maximise profits. That's their job, and it's ultimately the designers who write the books.

 

[Ondath]

The bigger issue is them finding others to play with, and starting them on 5e makes that exponentially easier. Starting them on 1e or Basic or 3e or PbtA or whatever would not be doing them any favours. There are already tons of other 5e campaigns going, and the usual transition is for the new kids to be absorbed into those. By Grades 11/12 the hardcore players are exploring other systems on their own; one student, who just graduated, even had an encyclopedic knowledge of 1e from her father's books.

That's a valid point, but it isn't by virtue of 5e being a good game to DM - it's by virtue of 5e being a very easy game to find a group for due to its popularity. So it really doesn't say anything about whether learning how to DM through 5e's sourcebooks give you the necessary tools to become a good GM.

And absolutely you can learn a lot of stuff and be a good GM by winging it and learning from experience. But why waste so much time learning by trial and error that the game's equipment system is a vestige from a time when every item in your backpack mattered, or that most rules on overland travel assume the background of a hexcrawl, or that the game's encounter balance works best as a war of attrition and not a series of cinematic setpieces, when you can read the earlier Edition books and see that these assumptions are much better spelled out?