D&D 5E What happened to the punk aesthetic in D&D?

[Azurewraith]

I think the issue is people just got turned off 3pp by 3rd eds OGL and mass of imbalanced splat books that turned level 1chars into greater deity killers.

4e all but proved even Wotc splat spam isn't balanced either. So I don't know why people need official stuff so bad I guess they assume official= balanced.

Personally at my table you can come to me with whatever stuff you want be it off the net or some scrawl you did on a napkin, ill vet the living daylights out of it and we shall find a middle ground.

 

[Mad_Jack]

Official material is official...

Not everyone has a home game. Many people only play at their local game store, in organized play at some other location, or with strangers online. The only way organized play or online pick-up games work is if everyone is following the same set of rules - that way, anyone can just show up and jump in without having to wonder if their character is going to work the way they think it should, or if the DM is going to allow this home-brewed class they found on somebody's blog.
On a wider note, it takes time and effort to playtest and tweak things so they work well (or at all) and WotC has a dedicated staff of professional people to do that, whereas most individuals - and even smaller companies - don't have access to that sort of resource to test their creations before unleashing them on the public. Or even just on their own home group, if they have one.
It's really easy to design something that works for one particular character, or one home play group or particular campaign world, but that one class, feat, houserule or monster that makes your game so cool could easily break someone else's...

Back in the day when the only game in existence was your home group, houserules and home-brewed content were the standard expectation. Because it didn't matter whether or not your own inventions worked for anyone else.
But the home game isn't necessarily the standard anymore, and the internet has been around for decades. Anyone with a keyboard can publish their home-brewed content online, and anyone can steal it for their own use. The corollary to this is that there is now a huge amount of useless trash or hideously broken things floating around as well as all the really good stuff. And you can't always be sure that the creators of things have actually taken the time to sufficiently playtest and quality-check their work before putting it out there. Thus, it takes time and work on the part of the DM running the game into which someone wants to bring that home-made material to vett it for quality and find a way to integrate it into their game. Time and effort they may not have - or, in organized play, authority they may not have.
In order to have a common community, we all need to be speaking the same language, and in order to have organized community-wide play or to find games run online we all need to follow the same rules.
The common expectation has to be that any game will follow the default rules and use the official content laid out in the published books.

Any perceived shift toward a majority preference for sticking solely to official content is simply a corollary to the factual shift in the target demographic of RPGs as a whole - D&D is no longer mostly played just by teenagers or older wargamers who have a consistent long-term group to play with and copious spare time to dedicate to creating their own home-brewed content and houserules. The official rules and official products have *always* been the necessary starting point for any branching out or replacement that a particular DM or group may do, and now that the game at large is played by a larger demographic that does not necessarily as a default conform to that "traditional" paradigm it becomes necessary for the D&D-playing community as a whole to default to the standard rules and official content being, well... Standard.

 

[steenan]

There are many game systems available now. If someone is not happy with D&D, they can just choose a different game that fits their tastes; they don't have to patch the system themselves. With many games available for $10-15 and some good games for free, there's no reason not to switch games for something better.

On the other hand, if somebody likes homebrewing, there are games that work much better as a base for own creations than D&D. Systems like Fate, Hero or Apocalypse World engine. The more transparent and clearly communicated the system design is, the easier to modify it. D&D does not rank high on the list (and the one edition that had well structured, transparent design actively discouraged homebrewing and third-party material through restrictive license and inflexible digital tools).

So, it's not that people are not creating their own material. They just do it using different games and typically write on different boards.

 

[MonkeyWrench]

For me it's time. I spent most of 2e and 3e making my own stuff - adventures, monsters, class abilities, etc. You name it and I made it myself. My group also had three "main" DMs (myself and two other players) who would routinely rotate campaigns and help keep things fresh. During 4e, I turned toward the OSR and did the whole megadungeon/hexcrawl campaign using LL which necessitated a lot of DIY material. Very fun but very time consuming.

Now between my job and being a first-time parent, I've got maybe a tenth of the free time I used to have and that free time has a lot of activities competing for it. Where I used to be able to easily devote a dozen hours or more a week to DnD, now I'm lucky to get 1-2 hours per week. On top of that, I'm my group's only consistent DM, so more of the work falls to me. I still modify, tweak, adjust, and experiment with 5e, but it's the first edition I've played where I'm using a published campaign setting with published modules. The me from 10 years ago is shaking his head in shame.

So for me I want to see published material that is as polished as possible, that works "out of the box", and doesn't require a lot of time to make fit my campaign. In theory WotC game material should fit this bill, but I find that their adventures are all over the place in terms of quality and the market will no longer bear the glut of 3PP products that I loved in 3e. Luckily, 5e is easy enough to modify at the table, but I wish I didn't have to.

 

[MonkeyWrench]

So, it's not that people are not creating their own material. They just do it using different games and typically write on different boards.

This is very true. The DIY attitude is alive and well in the OSR and the games that have spun off from it.

 

[MostlyDm]

With such a rancid post, I guess it's inevitable we'll clash.

I can't offer history, merely anecdote. When I learned to play, in the early 90s under 2e, player focused do it yourself material was simply not something you did. You used the PHB stuff, or the myriad of player focused material released in the early 90s, or (if you were daring) maybe you and your DM tried building a class using the 2e DMG "class builder". Honestly, 2e threw so much stuff at us that coming up with our stuff would have seemed sort of pointless.

I do think there's some generational factors at work. Those of us who learned to play in the 90s are kind of a mini-generation that missed the boom of the 80s, and are more influenced by the myriad settings of 2e and the mindshare that White Wolf also took up in that time period. (If you weren't playing D&D, you were probably playing Vampire.) Maybe we're the boy-band generation or something.

On first reading I thought you were being really unexpectedly rude. But the rest of your post was so constructive.

I had to read it about three times before I got the joke.

 

[lowkey13]

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[lowkey13]

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[TwoSix]

Something can be diminished, yet still there.

I might say that while I can still find a Zoot Suit, they aren't as common as in they used to be.

I don't think I've seen a Zoot Suit since 1998. It would probably start a riot.

 

[lowkey13]

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