D&D 5E Modern influences on 5e!

I'd say the biggest modern influence on 5e is gaming itself. Game design is less a discussion about emulating an outside medium (fantasy literature) and more about emulating the emergent elements of fantasy gaming...for better and for worse.

An outgrowth of that is a move to look at popular media rather than the fictional canon of yesteryear as the lingua franca upon which to base the gaming canon. Kudoes however to 5e for re-printing and adding to the Appenndix N in the PHB, even if I don't agree with their reasoning on the addition of many choices.

And lastly a smidgen of a desire to tell us what we ought to like, even if it's not what we actually like.

hawkeyefan said:

The shift in entertainment from episodic to more long form storytelling seems to have influenced the rise of the adventure path as opposed to a string of more self contained adventures. Seasons rather than episodes, trilogies rather than single movies. Adventure Paths instead of modules.

Now, it seems that PCs spend their entire career facing one threat over a longer period of time rather than many threats one after the other.

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Great observation.

Personally, I prefer the older way. At least partially because I liked investing in a character over a much longer time. Racing through levels, killing Strahd, and then starting over again doesn't scratch my itch in the right way.

Ideally I would want it be the blend of both: something that feels merely episodic, but with clues and hints that slowly weave together a bigger story.

There's an interesting Forbes article where they talk to the authors of the new edition:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davide...ction-inspired-dungeons-dragons/#25a580633c82

They mostly reference the same classics from the original Appendix N, but the two recent works mentioned are Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon (bonds and flaws) and Rothfuss' Name of the Wind (bards, naturally).

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The use of magic in 5E feels more like Harry Potter or the Wheel of Time (the latter particularly with the talk of the Weave in the core books), with some magic that can continue indefinitely in cantrips, but also big "showstopper" spells that are more limited.

Playing a 5E Sorcerer or Wizard feels way more like being an Aes Sedai to me than an old timey Magic-User.

Game of Thrones has influenced the way they approach villains, according to Mearls in the build up to the release of Volo's Guide: digging more into the motivations and goals of Beholders and Orcs than they may have otherwise.

jasper said:

Dragonborn and Tieflings I don't know where those come from.

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Mostly they come from 2e and 3e where these races were just one of countless ways (not including other races, prestige classes, templates, and feats) that would allow you to play as a person with draconic or fiendish traits, just to name a couple. They were popular, along with characters with celestial, elemental, giant, and other traits.

4e, as part of its effort to be more transparent and less convoluted, decided to get rid of all those redundant/overlapping options and just presented Dragonborn and Tieflings as core Draconic and Fiendish races. They also did the same thing for beastfolk and lycantrhopes when they made Shifters core, the same thing for construct characters when they made Warforged core, and giant characters with Goliaths. Also to a lesser extent, they got rid of the dozens of subtly different Elven subraces by just splitting them into the arcane aligned Eladrin/High Elves, nature alligned Wood Elves/Elves, and dark elf Drow.

Tieflings and Dragonborn proved to be the most popular of these races, so they made it into the 5e PHB.

Elfcrusher said:

Great observation.

Personally, I prefer the older way. At least partially because I liked investing in a character over a much longer time. Racing through levels, killing Strahd, and then starting over again doesn't scratch my itch in the right way.

Ideally I would want it be the blend of both: something that feels merely episodic, but with clues and hints that slowly weave together a bigger story.

Click to expand...

And this greater focus on a continuous story has made people less tolerant of high/random lethality.

People aren't as welcome to the idea of having their character die to some critical hit from a random Orc at level 1 or having their 10th level PC whose story/character they've developed over the course of several months being slain because they failed a single saving throw against instant death. Especially not when the result is that in the next session (if not the next scene) they just come back from the dead of a replacement character pops up to fill the gap- often filling a suspiciously similar role in the party and story. Character death is expected to happen more rarely and when it does happen, it's expected to be more dramatic and have a much greater impact on the story.

But at the same time, they want a challenge and feel like their characters struggle to overcome things. Motivations have moved a bit more beyond "can I keep the character alive" to being more about "Can I accomplish the character's goals".

Other games, most notably White Wolf and many indie games, have been the go to option for scratching this particular itch. They introduce a lot more narrative mechanics, meta options, and things like fate/luck/action points that allow players to not only control their characters but also impact how the world/story around their characters play out. D&D has been slowly adopting many of these features over the editions.

And as far as my own observations go...

D&D originally started as the creation of folks who were members of a pretty insular (at the time) community. Historical wargaming, fantasy/sci-fi, etc was pretty niche. Chances were good that if you were into Historical wargaming, you had far more than a layman's understanding of history and military sciences. If you were into fantasy/sci-fi, you were generally well read in mythology and literature.

That's less the case now that more and more people come into the game via the game itself or from other forms of media like videogames, films, comics, TV, internet and pop culture in general. Such nerdy pass times are also much more readily embraced by "casual" audiences that don't really define themselves or limit their social groups/activities by their interests in them. Their background in and conceptions of history and military sciences, mythology, fantasy, etc are in many ways different than those of the people who originally created D&D.

In order to appeal to these peoples' sensibilities, many parts of D&D have changed to reflect how they approach the material.

hawkeyefan said:

The shift in entertainment from episodic to more long form storytelling seems to have influenced the rise of the adventure path as opposed to a string of more self contained adventures. Seasons rather than episodes, trilogies rather than single movies. Adventure Paths instead of modules.

Now, it seems that PCs spend their entire career facing one threat over a longer period of time rather than many threats one after the other.

Click to expand...

Not that I disagree with this very interesting point, but I think the realities of the publishing industry and the economically unfeasablity of the traditional 'adventure module' may have had a lot to do with the rise of the adventure path. IIRC, having third parties produce and publish the financially risky adventures was one of the carrots Dancy used to push the original OGL through management at WOTC. Of course, I don't have first hand knowledge of this, it is just what I remember hearing at the time.

I think there are two major new influences on D&D 5e

Harry Potter
The Marvel Cinematic Universe

While the nostalgia is there to bring adults back into the fold, those two influences help to hook the kids of those adults.

By going back to the feel of the game in the 70s and 80s and providing a more casual rule set, WoTC is targeting a demographic likely to have children in the right age range to play, and is easier to play for those parents with busy schedules.

In this way, D&D more closely mirrors the way that most of Hasbro's game properties work, with one generation bringing it to the next because of the fond memories they had of it as a child themselves.