D&D 5E What Does the Game Need Now?

[Parmandur]

Much of the core demographic of the game is changing. I feel customers are getting older as a whole, with more income to spend on their hobby. And this is a currently missed opportunity for wotc.

Quite the opposite, actually: WotC has been saying their demographic is getting younger, and is largely high schoolers and twenty-somethings.

 

[Retreater]

They are licensing out to third-parties for this. Which is the appropriate way to go about it. It creates a lot more competition and variety. On the other hand it can create too much choice, confusion, buyers remorse, and everything that comes with too much choice, but I prefer choice, even if that means I occasionally pay for the same content more than once.

Yeah. I'm a little hesitant to purchase physical and digital on something like Fantasy Grounds. If I'm not playing online, I would never consider using FG at a face-to-face game. It's way too cumbersome and clunky. I have a player who uses it for his character sheet management and dice rolling, and I swear his turns take 5x longer than people using dice and paper. (Not to mention the large amount of table real estate dedicated to his laptop.)

I can visualize what I want in a DM's assistant app, and honestly, it might be possible to use Google Drive to do it. But there's nothing that I've found that does what I want.

 

[pukunui]

As a time-poor DM, I would really appreciate some more adventures like LMoP that don’t require loads of prep to run.

 

[TheSword]

Darksun would be nice please with an excellent Dark Sun campaign.

 

[Eubani]

A book full of alternate rule, class abilities and monster abilities.

 

[WisdomOfWombats]

Since I think I am rather good at improvising and running adventures, I would like to see more campaign settings done in Ravnica-style: give me the gist of the setting, provide lots of random tables to spark my imagination, some signature monsters & magic items, a strong hook for character creation, and I am good. I enjoy doing the rest of the work myself. I would really love to see Birthright, Dark Sun, Theros, and Spelljammer. I feel each of those worlds can offer something unique to the game: Birthright for gaming as rulers, Dark Sun for gaming in a post-apocalyptic sword & sorcery style, Theros adding a decidedly greek aesthetic to the game - thus moving a bit beyond the usual medieval style fantasy world (and of course another MtG setting), and Spelljammer would add space fantasy.

Of course, Planescape and Eberron could use a printed campaign setting book as well.

All in all, I am rooted in AD&D 2nd Edition which was the time when campaign settings defined the game - and I am a sucker for those.

 

[MNblockhead]

Yeah. I'm a little hesitant to purchase physical and digital on something like Fantasy Grounds. If I'm not playing online, I would never consider using FG at a face-to-face game. It's way too cumbersome and clunky. I have a player who uses it for his character sheet management and dice rolling, and I swear his turns take 5x longer than people using dice and paper. (Not to mention the large amount of table real estate dedicated to his laptop.)

I can visualize what I want in a DM's assistant app, and honestly, it might be possible to use Google Drive to do it. But there's nothing that I've found that does what I want.

Have you looked at RealmWorks by Lone Wolf Development for campaign management? For home brew it can be an amazing tool. Unfortunately, it has been taking a long time for them to get their content market out and even when it is release, it will unlikely have official WoTC material beyond the SRD. But if you are creating your own world from scratch, you might want to take a look at it.

As for character sheets, I find D&D Beyond to give the best experience for a digital character sheet. And it works very well with tablets and phones. One reason I like to use DnD Beyond when playing games at a game store is that tables can get pretty crowded and it is nice to beable to have my character sheet and all official WoTC books in the palm of my hand. But I also bring a print out just in case. For that I prefer Hero Lab. So, yes, I have two character sheet generators. But I just do not like the printed character sheet from DnD Beyond, which trys to stay true to the "official" design, which isn't a good format once you have lots of abilities.

I can't see using Fantasy Grounds or Roll20 as a player unless the DM is running the game from those tools. But I suppose you get comfortable with what you are used to.

As a DM, only physical dice rolls count. I don't allow digital dice rolling. Even though digital dice are going to be the most random, I don't care. Physical dice are just too important a part of the gaming experience for me.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

I donn't understand the desire for a 100% ruleset following videogame,

Mainly:
1. I want to apply my already existing knowledge of good D&D builds into a video game (tired of having to read guides on which build is good or learning new rules).
2. I want turn-based combat (tired of all P&P inspired games having action-with-pause combat while the ruleset is clearly written and balanced for a turn-based approach).

 

[Xetheral]

That's what prompted this thread. I was thinking about what came next and decided that just "more" was boring. We've have lots of content, and I doubt the majority of gamers have used what we have. "More" didn't interest me.,

I've used a fraction of the monsters I already own. More are almost wasteful. That's when you transition from necessary content to bloat. From requested and needed content, to content for the sake of producing books.

One of 5e's strengths is that (compared to previous editions) a higher proportion of the character options are viable, useful, and/or interesting. But it's still not 100%. Some options simply see more play, whether that's because they are mechanically stronger, more useful for expressing (or making viable) a wide range of concepts, or simply fun in their own right.

As an example, consider the Cleric class. It's a strong class. But a substantial portion of its mechanical strength comes from a small handful of popular spells like Spiritual Weapon and Spirit Guardians. There are a lot more Cleric spells to choose from, but for those Cleric players who value the mechanical strength of their choices, the range of viable choices is much more limited.

As another example, consider the popular Warlock dip. Thanks to Eldritch Blast, cantrip scaling, and the Agonizing Blast invocation, any character with at least two levels of Warlock and halfway-decent CHA can pull their weight in combat for the rest of their career. This frees up the entire rest of the build to pick character-concept-expressing abilities without regard to combat strength. This makes a Warlock dip extremely attractive to players who want to focus on non-combat abilities. (Of course, the Warlock dip can also be used purely for its mechanical strength, so it's also popular for the same reason as the top-flight cleric spells in the previous example.)

I suspect that the oft-expressed desire for "more" character options is more-precisely a desire for more options that offer compelling alternatives to the most-popular options available in the existing content. In other words, it's not that there aren't enough options already, it's that (under a variety of subjective standards used by some fraction of the player base) there are too few appealing options.

Unfortunately, the reality of dead-trees publishing makes it extremely costly in customer goodwill to modify already-published options to make them more appealing. Thus, addressing the desire of some fraction of the player base for a larger number of appealing options requires publishing more options, some fraction of which are appealing. Alas, this leads to bloat (and, arguably, power creep, especially if a higher proportion of the new content is appealing).

It may well be that the players asking for new player options don't see a need for a greater number of appealing options than you do. Instead, because everyone has their own subjective standards, they may simply consider fewer of the existing options to be appealing, and thus aren't satisfied by the current content.

 

[Jester David]

I donn't understand the desire for a 100% ruleset following videogame, but I do want them to be more hungry for good 5e based video games.

So far, all of the computer games done so far for 4e and 5e have been very, very loose with the rules of the game. Which is fine for an option. But it might be nice to have a D&D game that replicates the tabletop experience. Just like a lot of people love to play football games that are heavily focused on realism and have all the rules of that game. If every football game was like Super Mario Strikers, that wouldn't satisfy everyone.