D&D 5E Are DMs the Swing Vote?

[Dwimmerlied]

I'd go even further than that. Nerds as a whole (GM and player alike) are every bit as impetuous and strident in their opinions and in their willingness to weaponize them. Nerds exhibit every bit of the cargo cult and tribal sociopathy that rabid sports fans do. The idea that any collective is able to simultaneously inhabit both temperance and passion, especially with respect to their intellectual and leisure cornerstone pursuits, strikes me as either willfully ignorant or vapid, cumbaya' boiler plate material. When I read that I rolled my eyes so hard that they probably heard it down the street.

Are you possibly overstating this? I don't know every gamer, and I do bet that there are some folk out there like that, but at the end of the day, 4th edition isn't the current edition because, I guess, too many people didn't feel that the system wasn't suitable. If fanaticism was a factor, it seems it wasn't a large enough one

 

[Dwimmerlied]

Also, despite guessing and second guessing Mike's intended audience with his "most people aren't edition warriors", I think its quite possible that it was not a calculated statement, but a reflection of what they have found/are finding. I personally find this easier to believe based on what I've experienced of people. Some are hard nosed with a footy-head mentality (born into an edition and will stand by it proudly no matter what), but for the vast majority of people I've seen, their decisions and opinions are based on what works best for their game experience. Even the folk on the boards are largely debating with genuine consideration the strengths and flaws of the system in representing this or that.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Okay, you've taken the statement out of its original context (talking about edition warriors, specifically) and now moved the goalposts to include fence-sitters. You end up with a strawman, Danny.

Not a true strawmen: Mearls's comment is addressed to "playtesters". But it glosses over or minimizes the existence of those- such as we've seen on these very boards- who have expressed deep and real concerns or have even left the playtest after actively participating in it.

And if you think the remaining playtesters don't count some fence-sitters and edition warriors among their numbers, you're not the guy I think you are.

Each communication has its intended audience. No communication is good for all audiences simultaneously. The warriors are *NOT COMING TO THIS GATEWAY*. Period. Full stop. There is no chance of getting the hardnoses with those articles. They are in exactly the wrong place (the WotC site), coming from the wrong people (WotC insiders), to be convincing to an edition warrior.

Any playtest group has as many different opinions on 5Ed as there are players in the group. Odds are good that there are edition warriors among them. Maybe not DMing, but participating, out of friendship with their buddies if nothing else. Others may even be participating to get an early look at their "enemy", all the better to blog about its failings as soon as they are permitted to. Especially if the playtest included rules they thought were superior to the released form of 5Ed.

Horsehockey. Does the phrase "energize the base" mean nothing to you? Keeping your strongest advocates in the zone is terribly important for success. You *also* have to reach out to new people, sure. But that probably calls for different communication, in a different place, and a different style.

Energizing the base is important- not doing that is part of why the 4Ed rollout helped make the subsequent schism as bad as it was. But in a competitive market, it's only part of the equation...and often, not the most important part. ESPECIALLY when you're selling 5th as a unifying release. If that is part of your marketing plan, every press release needs to echo that.

Maybe - that's a demographic question, and I don't have data to say. Be that as it may, edition warriors are not fence sitters. They are staunchly on one side of the fence, and put up barbed wire land mines to defend their side.

But by assuming they cannot be reached concedes the battle and defeats the narrative of your marketing plan. It merely reinforces the perception that "they" no longer care about "us" and "our interests."

Here's the question, though. Knowing your players - was the problem that the communications were wrong, or that the game just wasn't suited for them? Even with the best communications, would they have ended up liking 4e?

A little of Column A, a little of Column B. Ultimately, I think that its possible that some of them really would have enjoyed the Essentials classes and some of the cleaned-up math. And because we had a good DM, that mighthave added enough additional players to the 4Ed game to reach a critical mass of players. We'd probably still be playing 4Ed- right now its poker and boardgames.

Right. So, not reading L&L. My point is made, I think.

No, I mean the forum stuff- US guys and gals. I think some are still following official press releases, but they're not on the boards, AFAIK.

Yes, but they are probably about 20x less likely to come to your site to read about your product. Folks who are coming to your site for news - the audience for L&L articles, need nudges to keep them focused. They don't need heavy mind-changing. They don't need outreach.

Maybe I'm just more cynical. Maybe I just have more exposure to people seeking out what they dislike in media and entertainment in order to verbally smite it.

But I also believe that those same people can experience a Pauline conversion.

There is a whole separate question as to whether WotC is doing proper outreach (or will do it - I can see an argument that it is still too early for outreach). There's a whole separate question as to whether WotC *can* do proper outreach - is there a budget for the kind of advertising that makes outreach work?

Sometimes, "after we do _____" is too late for the outreach to begin. IMHO, the 4Ed rollout (along with other events) poisoned the proverbial well of goodwill- after a certain point, no outreach beyond actually playing the game would convince people of the good portions of 4Ed.

 

[Manbearcat]

Are you possibly overstating this? I don't know every gamer, and I do bet that there are some folk out there like that, but at the end of the day, 4th edition isn't the current edition because, I guess, too many people didn't feel that the system wasn't suitable. If fanaticism was a factor, it seems it wasn't a large enough one

I'm not really sure how to respond here. My response wasn't a statement about a 3.x/PF vs 4e edition war and the current design-space that 5e is aiming at. It was pretty much exactly what I wrote above. I found the assertion of "you are not edition warriors" (addressing the D&D audience) as pretty far off mark so as to be almost Monty Python satire. I witnessed the 1e > 2e venom. The intra-2e Complete Elven Handbook and Kender outrage, the cries and castigations against munchkins and metagaming leading toward onetruewayism, and finally the Skills and Powers battle lines. The AD&D > 3e rage. Finally, the extraordinary jilted lover type stuff from 3e > 4e. We don't have a full-on 4e > 5e edition war as of yet and there may be hope that we won't due to the marketplace being rife with alternatives. However, I suspect that once 5e is released and the DDI tools are formally taken offline, you will see a full court press of 4e player ire with 5e right in the crosshairs.

D&D tribalism is the same as sports fanatics is the same as diametrically opposed politicos/activists/competing hypothesis factions. The idea that the greater D&D culture isn't composed of a generous proportion of edition warriors, and that Mearls et al don't have to deal with/win over those competing interests is wishful thinking on his part...or abhorrent reading of the tea leaves.

 

[Dwimmerlied]

I'm not really sure how to respond here. My response wasn't a statement about a 3.x/PF vs 4e edition war and the current design-space that 5e is aiming at. It was pretty much exactly what I wrote above. I found the assertion of "you are not edition warriors" (addressing the D&D audience) as pretty far off mark so as to be almost Monty Python satire. I witnessed the 1e > 2e venom. The intra-2e Complete Elven Handbook and Kender outrage, the cries and castigations against munchkins and metagaming leading toward onetruewayism, and finally the Skills and Powers battle lines. The AD&D > 3e rage. Finally, the extraordinary jilted lover type stuff from 3e > 4e. We don't have a full-on 4e > 5e edition war as of yet and there may be hope that we won't due to the marketplace being rife with alternatives. However, I suspect that once 5e is released and the DDI tools are formally taken offline, you will see a full court press of 4e player ire with 5e right in the crosshairs.

D&D tribalism is the same as sports fanatics is the same as diametrically opposed politicos/activists/competing hypothesis factions. The idea that the greater D&D culture isn't composed of a generous proportion of edition warriors, and that Mearls et al don't have to deal with/win over those competing interests is wishful thinking on his part...or abhorrent reading of the tea leaves.

We are all reading tea leaves at the end of the day; imagining bigger pictures from little bits of information from the comfort of our arm chairs I acknowledge its possible that the people I've known and my interpretations of what ive read aren't representative of the real picture, but I'm not arguing that edition wars haven't happened, just guessing at the motivations behind them, and in doing so, giving a different interpretation of Mike's quote. My reading of what Mike was saying was that people aren't "edition warriors", they aren't mindlessly sticking to a given edition, for the most part, as some kind of code or whatever; and this is because most people engage in these debates because the game works for them. Further, I reckon that Mike is saying; given that people make decisions based on what they want from a game, and not some mindless "born into, football-like code", we actually can unite the fanbase.

 

[Morrus]

Evangelists matter, yes, but those driven away from a given product are statistically 10x more likely to discuss their opinion than those who are happy.

Is telling folks they aren't edition warriors likely to drive them away?

 

[Stormonu]

As a DM/GM, I'm not a swing vote - I'm a tyrant... but I try to be a benevolent one. Before a game, I'll usually throw out one of several game systems and campaign ideas and see which one hooks the players. Other times, I might have something in mind I want to try and it's just herding cats to get the players to try it. However, adventure content is 99.99% of my side of the screen; I'll decide what monsters to throw, what adventure modules to raid for ideas/use and what adventure hooks to lay out for the players. Yeah, the players get to make their characters, but again, as GM/DM I have authority over what books and whatnot are allowed. In essence, its all my rules - they just happen to happily coincide with printed material available. (I'm a lot nicer about this in-game, but this is what it essentially boils down to - being a tyrant over certain aspects to keep the game in line and fun for everyone).

Generally, the game is, in reality limited to what books I do have and what I feel like running. I'm very much unhappy with 4E, and you wouldn't find me willing to run a game. Pathfinder/3E somewhat irks me with its complexity, but I'm really in love with the options available for the game. 2E is light enough for me to consider running and overlooking some of its design limitations. Savage Worlds makes me happy all around, but there's (compared to D&D) relatively little support - luckily its fairly easy to convert on the fly. I also enjoy World of Darkness, but I'd probably never consider it for anything other than modern-day games. I have other systems available to me as well - too many to list here, but each has its ups and downs (for'ex: Up = Alternity, Down=Palladium).

Finally, 5E can support any number of game styles it feels like incorporating but the only thing that matters to ME is that it covers my game style. If it doesn't there's no need for me to purchase it. WotC's got the hard part - designing it to fit my gaming style, heck even acknowledging they are aware of what my play style is. Yeah, that's selfish, but its the truth - in the end I'm not wasting my money on any more systems I don't intend to use. I'm not saying I'm against 5E, just that I don't have time for it if the final product doesn't cater to how I run/play my games. If 5E doesn't, that's about 6 people (me and my game group) that are unlikely to purchase 5E material, based off one DM's vote. That's not a swing vote - that's a tyrant's dictate.

 

[GSHamster]

Well, in a gaming group, you really only need one person to veto something. I think most groups would be something like 1 person strongly for, 3 people in the middle, 1 strongly against. Odds are that group will drop that game, and move on to something that's more acceptable to everyone.

So you have two statements:

1. Most people are not edition warriors.
2. Most groups contain at least one person who is an edition warrior.

Both these statements can be true at the same time. In my experience, there's usually one person in a group who has "stronger" feelings about the game than the others. This is often the DM, but not always. That person often has an disproportionate influence on what game the group plays.

 

[Gundark]

In a Legend & Lore column a few weeks back Mike Mearls made the claim of players:
You aren't edition warriors. You want the game to support a variety play styles in equal measure. You're not attached to any specific ways of doing things as long as the game works.

Now, this doesn't match the forums, but it does suggest we're a curious minority here. But I still believe the statement is accurate. I'm a pretty strong 3e fan and was a bit of a anti-4e troll at the start of the edition. But i still ran a 4e game for two years, and played in two games (plus some Encounters). Because that's what people were playing.

But how do we reconcile the idea that players - as a collective whole - are not edition warriors and will play what works with the reality that many groups never upgraded from earlier editons or left 4e for Pathfinder?
I believe there must be a swing vote. In a group full of indiferent people who don't care what they play so long as they play, there must be one or two players with a firm opinion that drive the choice.
This would most likely be the one also providing the books, the participant most invested in the hobby. More often than not, this is the DM.

It's an interesting idea. DMs drive the hobby despite being outnumbered 4:1. But they're the ones that have to actually run the games, so if they're not having fun or don't enjoy the edition then it is going to be very hard for everyone else to enjoy themselves.
This actually explains some of the blowback from 4th Edition.

The lore changes hurt DMs the most, by altering worlds. Any DM who had an established campaign world - either homebrew or published - suddenly had to revise everything to account for the new races, classes, planes, monsters, and the like.

The bulk of the mechanics and content were also aimed at PCs, with no use for DMs. Unlike 3e, where DMs could at least use feats and classes with monsters, there was no reason to buy any of the ____ Power books.
4th Edition, like 3e, was a player's game with the power in the hands of the characters. The game was so designed to avoid bad DMs that good DMs lost a little authority. Everything was codified.

Curiously, 4e was touted as being easier to DM. So how does this theory mesh with that claim?
I often found 4e's claimed easier DMing not to be the case. Building encounters was trickier as I couldn't just pull a single monster from a book but had to pull 4-8 and see if their powers synergized and also think of the terrain in the encounter area and provide a map for the encounter and each fight had to be a big setpiece fight. You couldn't just have a quick filler encounter to act as a break between long stretches of roleplaying, or small mood building encounter.
Monster building was somewhat easier. Kinda. While there was far, far less math involved making a 4e monster also involved writing two to five unique powers. The math was annoying and slow, but brainstorming unique snowflake power could be even slower. Having designed quite a few monsters, eventually your brain just starts to shut down.
Often DMing was easier, often it was not. So at best I'd call this a tie.

I wonder if this is the potential appeal of D&D Next. More power and focus on the DM. A DM's game, because they're the swing vote that will drive up sales.

This ended up much longer than planned. I might expand it into a blog...

Thoughts? Comments? Am I dead on, full of poop, or somewhere in the middle?

I play Living Pathfinder (or whatever it's called) I HATE Pathfinder, but will play it because it's what the locals play. It's what spawned a thread I started a while back about mechanics not mattering as much as we thought they did.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Is telling folks they aren't edition warriors likely to drive them away?

No, it's just inaccurate. All I started off with was the premise that Mearles' statement was wrong.

Then I provided a counterpoint to the assertion that DMs were the ultimate decides, the swing votes. I don't have a game company's marketing branch behind me to provide statistically valid data, but my personal experience is that it isn't really the case. A DM may limit he number of systems he'd be willing to run, but the players will determine what system ultimately gets run.

And, often as not, that decision may be made on "edition warrior" type sticking points.