The Great D&D Schism: The End of an age and the scattering of gamers

[GMforPowergamers]

I ran my first game Christmas holiday of 1995, before that I had LARPed and play RIFTs a few times.

by 1999 we had a group of almost 60 people in 10 or 11 games (we ran every Tuesday night, every Friday night and every saterday night alternating Friday and saterday games) No 2 DMs ran the exact same but we shared the lion share of house rules.

When Tuesday night upgraded to 3.0 we lost 3 players... they said it was garbage they weren't going to play. (we also lost 1 to having twins born but that would have happened either way) Friday night game completely fell apart to fighting edtion wars. Saterday night game some of the games up graded some kept running 2e.

By the time 3.5 came out we had only Tuesday and Saterday running and only 12 regular players... when Matt took over saterday DM duties full time and ruled that it was "Any 3e book published including 3rd party" that game fell apart quickly.

When 4e came out we had 5 players on Tuesday, and started a new saterday night game with 5 players (3 cross over) so starting 4e we only had 7 players...

our splitting group started the first time someone told me "I'm not buying or playing magic the gathering...and Wizards are only Magic the gathering"

 

[Derren]

You see a schism, I see a healthy diversity.

Looked at through another prism, in the past people who wanted to play a fantasy RPG had one real choice. Now they have many. They can pick a game that caters best to their tables' preferred play style. They can try out Pathfinder or Dungeon World or Fate or GURPS or Savage World or 13th Age. I'm sure I've left some important ones off that list. Seems like lately there's more cool, professional games out that there than ever before. This can only be good for the hobby.

I suspect that the only people the 'schism' is really bad for is Wizards of the Coast.

Going forward there may not be One Game To Rule Them All. And that's fine. As long as you are open to new gaming experiences I doubt you'll have trouble finding a table to play at.

That sounds a lot like wishful thinking.
There were fantasy games before 4E people could have played if they didn't like D&D. Fact is many did, either directly or one of the many D20 games which used D&D as basis. Games back then were already diverse, but D&D profited from all of them.
4E changed that by declaring a small subset of this healthy diversity to be the true way of D&D and driving away who liked something else. This is certainly not a healthy diversification but a unhealthy schism.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Melodramatic is right.

You know what the real breaking point is? The ubiquity of the internet.

Before that point... the only people most of us ever talked to about it were people we came into contact with personally. And those people tended to be folks with whom we shared common gaming ground with (because we wouldn't hang out with people whom we didn't get along). And thus... we rarely heard as many negative things about the games we were playing.

But now with the internet, messageboards, social media etc,... we're stuck listening to all these other people who have opinions and beliefs that are completely insane and we can't get away from them. And it has nothing to do with the games themselves. No matter where we go on the net to talk about something we like... there is an equal and opposite faction telling us that our opinion is crap and that we're idiots. Just like we feel towards them.

I would guess that had we had the internet in the early 90s... the caterwauling between D&D and Vampire: The Masquerade players would have been just as ridiculous and overblown as any 3E/4E/5E conversation. The talk about D&D is no more special or disparate as its ever been... there's just a lot more people all grouped together throwing stones.

 

[ccooke]

I don't think 5e will "fail," certainly not from a commercial standpoint. And certainly it will "win over" some fans as their preferred edition.

The original subtext of this thread is that 5e doesn't appear to be a vehicle for player base unification. If you're defining 5e's success or failure based on its ability to unite the fan base, then yes, in my opinion 5e will "fail."

But 5e can fail at that aim, and still find success in other ways.

Unification of a playerbase this divided isn't something you can judge at release, though. It's something that can only happen over a long period.
Success in unification will only come if WotC are prepared to keep pushing 5th edition for a long period:

At release, it needs to capture at least a portion of the market.

After release, WotC need to actually release the right things to make it a viable ecosystem: They need the basic box to pull in new players. They need adventures, both advanced and simple. They need to release new rules content that enhances the system without overcomplicating it (this is where the modular approach could reap dividends).

Long-term, 5e will succeed if it's a vibrant and viable option in the market for a number of years. If it's pulling in new players and the curious, then every time you finish a campaign it'll be an option, gathering more people and content until it can TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!11!!!

Ahem. Sorry.

But yeah, I think that's the only viable model for true success with 5e - a long-term investment spread over several years. I think the noises coming out of Wizards right now indicate they get that, too - all this talk about brand awareness and multiple platforms is a long-tail play. If they can make D&D a big enough thing in the public mindset, then they'll make profits from all of these multi-media ventures in the short term. In the long-term, *some* of those people are going to be curious and buy the game, which means they (could) be a customer for many years (and those people keep the idea of D&D in the public eye, too, because hey - it's not exactly a stigma any more).

Failure is easy - it could fail to get enough of the market on release to be viable (although I don't believe that will happen).

Wizards could fail to bring enough existing, lapsed and new players to it over the first year to 18 months - a failure of marketing and their ability to release good quality new content, really. In that time period, fifth edition needs to be *growing* in the market.

And finally, they could fail to stay the course and change plans a few years in. A failure of staying power or (quite possibly) lack of ability to keep producing high quality content.

Well. Those are some thoughts, anyway. I have no idea how close this is to their *actual* plan. Not too far, I hope. But either way, there's a lot of room for both success or failure in the market today.

 

[XunValdorl_of_Kilsek]

That sounds a lot like wishful thinking.
There were fantasy games before 4E people could have played if they didn't like D&D. Fact is many did, either directly or one of the many D20 games which used D&D as basis. Games back then were already diverse, but D&D profited from all of them.
4E changed that by declaring a small subset of this healthy diversity to be the true way of D&D and driving away who liked something else. This is certainly not a healthy diversification but a unhealthy schism.

I can promise you that "Old World of Darkness" got a lot of play in the 90's.

 

[billd91]

I don't think there's been a heck of a lot of unity in RPGers since maybe the 1970s. As soon as significant critics of any one game showed up to play something else, the bickering has been going on. Enthusiasts are nothing if not enthusiastic - both for and against the things they like and don't like and the way they like them (and it's not limited to RPGs, just ask ASL players if they prefer the IFT or IIFT, Plano boxes or some other method of chit storage, and so on).

That said, D&D really has been a sort of lingua franca among gamers due to the immense size of its player base (both current and former) and those network externalities that go along with it. No other non-computer RPG has ever come close to that level of recognizability. Has WotC allowed that to be significantly damaged? Maybe they have. But even if they have, it's hard to tell for certain that's a good or bad thing. Personally, I think it probably has occurred and it's probably a bad thing.

 

[Umbran]

I saw the Edition Wars break into real life like no other gaming debate ever did.

If you only started gaming in 1998, then there's a couple of decades of history you missed. For Example, White Wolf's classic Word Of Darkness was released in 1991, and oh, my goodness the flames between WoD players and D&D players! Messageboards were not quite the thing then they were at the release of 4e, but the vitriol was quite remarkable.

There's strong argument that this division led to the development of the "Threefold Model" in 1997-1998, and this to Ron Edwards and The Forge. And oh, goodness, how nasty people were to each other over that!

So, really, there was lots and lots of debate before 4e came out. Some of it quite unpleasant and factionalized.

I miss when we were all on the same page, more or less. I miss when I could talk D&D online or in meatspace and not have to ignore half the conversations because I genuinely dislike the edition they are talking about, or when I could walk into my FLGS and actually see books I wanted to buy. I haven't bought a D&D book in about 6 years, because they stopped making anything I'd want to buy.

See above - gamers really haven't had the "all on the same page" on gaming since the early 1990s, if not earlier.

The sad thing is, I've got no idea what could fix this gaming schism.

Note that, as you've described it, "this schism" is defined by how you don't like the games others are talking about, and you don't like what is on the shelves. The schism amounts to, "a lot of people like things I don't like".

Step back from how you could fix that. *Should* you want to fix the fact that there's diverse desires among gamers? Why on Earth should we have everyone liking the same things you do?

 

[NewJeffCT]

People seem to forget that this site was founded when 3E was in the pipeline and coming out soon. When 3E first came out, it suffered from all sorts of bashing on here, and the other internet forums out there. (Anybody remember WebRPG? I found a great gaming group in the 90s through there... RPG.net's been around for years, too)

People said 3E was dumbed down/written for 5th graders, it was too complex, it was too easy, it had no heart/soul, the art sucked, it was too overpowered/munchkiny, made too many changes, required too much magic, the CR system didn't work, trying too hard to appeal to women/minorities, etc, etc, etc. From my experience, love/unification of 3E and 3.5E was certainly NOT universal. And, a few years back, I was the EN-worlder in the thread about who had the most gamers within 100 miles of their zip code (I was within 100 miles of Boston & NYC), so it's not like I was living in Antarctica... Heck, that great 2E group I was in from the 90s basically broke up over 3E, with a bunch leaving to go back to 1E (with one of them saying - with a straight face - that 1E was the cleanest & tightest rules system ever.) About the only thing that got universal praise was demons & devils being called demons & devils again, instead of baatzu and tannari or whatever it was.

And, look at your Dragon magazine letters to the editor when 2E was coming out around 1989 or 1990 - similar bashing of 2E - dumbing the game down, no heart/soul, bad artwork, trying too hard to appeal to women/minorities, etc.

And, when 6E comes out in the 2020s, we'll have similar issues.

 

[Bedrockgames]

If you only started gaming in 1998, then there's a couple of decades of history you missed. For Example, White Wolf's classic Word Of Darkness was released in 1991, and oh, my goodness the flames between WoD players and D&D players! Messageboards were not quite the thing then they were at the release of 4e, but the vitriol was quite remarkable.

this was quite a big deal when i was playing the 90s (the D&D and vampire split). There was also the split between D&D and AD&D, as well as people who strictly played stuff like rolemaster and couldn't stand D&D. I also remember a lot of people who hated 2E and kept playing first edition.

When 3E was released, even though a lot of us held out a bit, i remember witnessing a re-unification. I saw lots of 1E players hop aboard 3E, saw tons of new people join in, and even saw some world of darkness folks climb aboard. I believe the 3E boom was pretty huge, probably hard to repeat, and it surprised a lot of people when the edition change caused so much division. But if you had been
playing since the 80s it wasn't all that surprising because 3E was always kind of a coalition government, made up of different groups. It feels like 5E is just trying to find the fault lines and build a new coalition.

 

[Yora]

Dungeons & Dragons is just a name, that doesn't stand for anything specific anymore. All the editions until D&D 2nd Edition where relatively consistent in what they are and how they are different from other RPGs. 3rd Edition was a major step to something different, but to a large number of people it still at least felt like a different take on the old and familar standards and aspects.
4th Edition just was something completely else that didn't continue the tradition of what the lable D&D stood for, and at that point it became just a name that could mean a lot of things. And now we have a couple of games, both OSR games and Pathfinder, that represent that tradition a lot better than the game currently running under the brand D&D.

5th Edition could potentially, or rather theoretically, fix this by once again representing those things people have associated with the lable D&D for decades. But as of now there doesn't seem any indication that the game is going to get played by a major fraction of the people who like "old D&D".

And I think in this age, we don't really need an RPG company with an almost-monopoly of the market. I like the current situation of a lot of creators trying out different things for several smaller niches a lot more. Everybody wins.
Except the people who once paid a lot of money for the brand name D&D...