Serious question - are you going to invest in D&DNext?

[RevTurkey]

It strikes me that after such a long playtest and oppurtunity to inspire us with cool ideas and marketing trickery that by now we should all be shouting YES and rushing to beg to preorder the game. For a well financed design team with plenty of time to not have us all more excited and enthusiastic by now is a worry. To even be asking this question to a forum on a specialist D&D related fansite and getting a pretty wishy washy response is a sign that all is not so well. They still have time to get it right and have us all running to our local store upon release to grab the book or books but at the moment that doesn't look as likely as it should.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Looking through the responses, 5e seems to be the half-Japanese half-Caucasian of editions.

So true.

4e fans say "D&D is devolving into 3e!"; 3e fans say "Get those 4e mistakes out of my D&D!"; and OSR fans say "Ho hum, more new school WotC garbage."

Bottom line: 5e ain't gonna unite anyone but its own little chunk of the D&D fanbase, just like every other edition.

 

[Zardnaar]

Trying to unite everyone is a silly idea to begin with. They should have just picked a one true way and made it the best one true way they could. Still they might surprise us. I do not thnk it is great but everyone else may buy it so who knows?

 

[dd.stevenson]

Looking through the responses, 5e seems to be the half-Japanese half-Caucasian of editions.

A half-Japanese person in America is usually told they look "Asian" while in Japan a half-American is told they look "White". Obviously the common elements in both are predominant, as humans have a lot of common elements; humans are generally more similar than not. So you notice the differences.
Really, that' shaman nature. That' show we tell people apart. It's very pronounced when looking at near human CG or robots, when uncanny valley kicks in.

5e, by design, focuses on the common elements of D&D. It's an aggregate edition taking the most typically found D&Disms and building that into the spine of the edition. So you don't notice those elements, and instead notice the bits that are less D&D, the differences. Which, of course, is informed by perspective.
A dedicated 4e player is less likely to notice the 4e elements because those are just part of D&D. But the 1e or 3e elements that were not present in 4e will stand out. In contrast, a 1e player will see the 4e additions.

I got married to a Japanese woman last weekend, and since we reside in Japan--where overt racial discrimination is a serious problem for everybody who's half-Japanese/half-anything--I'm tempted to write a full-page article about this analogy. But really, I think the most important fact pertaining to this comparison is that in the west, only a select few half Japanese/Caucasian people are subject to this effect. Especially in America, which is pretty diverse, I know a lot of half-Japanese who usually get mistaken for full Caucasian, or hispanic, or something else other than Asian ancestry.

(Here in Japan it's a different story, since the Japanese ethnicity is fairly homogeneous compared to the all-encompassing Caucasian label, and so mixed-race Japanese stick out much more clearly.)

So, to navigate out of the minefield of ethnic stereotypes and back to the question of 5E's place in the multiverse, I would extend your analogy to point out that the uncanny valley effect applies much more strongly to fans of editions with a focused design ethos and not so much to fans of editions that were all over the map in terms of game design.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

Trying to unite everyone is a silly idea to begin with. They should have just picked a one true way and made it the best one true way they could. Still they might surprise us. I do not thnk it is great but everyone else may buy it so who knows?

Yeah, I agree.

The thing that astonishes me most about Next is that it has taken over two years of design work and it's still seemingly no closer to actually being published (and now they have a maths team). And the official line on Next always seems somewhat incoherent.

Bugger that. Clear leadership and do what needs to be done.

 

[innerdude]

Yeah, I agree.

The thing that astonishes me most about Next is that it has taken over two years of design work and it's still seemingly no closer to actually being published (and now they have a maths team). And the official line on Next always seems somewhat incoherent.

Bugger that. Clear leadership and do what needs to be done.

To me this was the biggest, most detrimental outcome of Monte Cook leaving the D&D Next design team in its early phases---lack of a strong, clear artistic vision for what the entire project was trying to accomplish.

Say what you want about Mearls, but I've never been particularly impressed with his leadership style. The keynote speech at 2013 GenCon was about as underwhelming a presentation as one could get from the tabletop RPG hobby leader. Maybe it's a function of him having to serve too many masters (the D&D fanbase + the Hasbro management team), but I don't know that I've ever heard him say something that really resonated with me as a fan.

With Monte Cook at the helm, there were always going to be detractors, but you KNEW that whatever Monte produced, it would have a clear vision behind what it was trying to accomplish.

 

[innerdude]

However, the question is would I actually choose to buy it, support it and play it as my main game in the future?

(snip)

. . . . my gut feeling is that I don't need another fantasy RPG. How do other people feel?

To answer the original question, I absolutely don't need another fantasy RPG. I was just going through my PDF collection the other day, and just up and deleted pretty much everything I had that was D&D 3.x. I simply know for a fact that I will never, EVER run another 3.x era game, and if I end up as a player in one, I'll just use an SRD.

But what exactly is 5e anyway? Most people seem to think it's some amalgamation of D&D 2.75e + a few 4e-isms + a nod to a few other "modern" mechanics.

Is that a fantasy RPG I'm willing to play? I honestly don't know. Having pretty much been off the entire d20 mechanical "base" for two years now, I find for the most part that the thought of having to deal with a "classic D&D" game approach frankly annoys me. I'm sick of gobs of hit points. I'm sick of AC. I'm sick of "Vancian" casting. Would D&D Next still let me tell some of the stories I want to tell? Well sure, of course it does; it's a fantasy RPG after all.

But even if I buy the "core 3" books--something that seems unlikely at the moment--I'm never going to be "invested" in D&D 5e. I could be wrong, of course, but as it stands I'm unlikely to ever be passionate about playing or running 5e. I think in some measure the appeal of D&D to much of the fanbase is like going to McDonalds---it's not that it's the best food on the planet, it's that you know exactly what to expect from it when you get there.

And no matter how much "filing off" the 3e / 4e edges 5e does, the whole point of the exercise is to make the D&D experience repeatable for your group, however you define it. And the farther I'm away from it, the more I realize that I seem to enjoy telling my stories more in ways that don't require adherence to D&D-isms.

Who knows, maybe a year from now I'll suddenly have urge to "return to my RPG roots" and try it out. But I've easily got five years or more of GM-ing material in front of me right now with systems I already own. Even now, sitting here at the keyboard thinking about what I would do if I wanted to run a D&D Next campaign, I just get a colossal sense of "meh." Yeah, I could do it, but why? Why would I put my group through the hassle of buying new books, learning unfamiliar rules (no one in my group with one exception has ANY long-term experience with prior D&D rules sets), simply because it's a "true D&D fantasy experience"?

 

[Argyle King]

I'm leaning toward no. It's not that I feel negative toward the game; I don't. It's that I feel a general sense of apathy toward the product. I don't think I'm part of the target audience. (...or, if I am, there is a significant gap between what I want and what the game appears to provide.)


I do believe at some point I'll end up playing the game since I have enough gamer friends that it's likely I'll encounter the game. Playing and investing aren't the same thing though.

 

[Kobold Stew]

The negativity in this thread is surprising to me.

5e -- through the public playtest documents -- has already helped me introduce more new players to rpgs than 3.5 or 4e did. Certainly, there's lots of factors at play, but the reports I've read of people playing the game have mostly meshed with my own: it's a fast, intuitive experience that creates opportunities for imaginative and dynamic play.

Will it be to everyone's taste? Of course not. But it's mostly trying to push the right buttons, I feel. Sure, there are and will be some missteps, but nothing so far that makes me want to close myself to trying it for real in play once the game is finished.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

(snip) Say what you want about Mearls, but I've never been particularly impressed with his leadership style. The keynote speech at 2013 GenCon was about as underwhelming a presentation as one could get from the tabletop RPG hobby leader. Maybe it's a function of him having to serve too many masters (the D&D fanbase + the Hasbro management team), but I don't know that I've ever heard him say something that really resonated with me as a fan. (snip)

I didn't see that but I am familiar with his d20 work which often pushed the envelope simply for the sake of pushing the envelope. As an example - and I will avoid Iron Heroes as a published incomplete game is too easy a comparison to make - there were more than ten prestige classes in the Underdark Adventure Guide, one of Goodman Games' worst products. Each prestige class had a unique saving throw progression for each saving throw category. Why? No reason. No explanation. No underlying logic. And that to me is Next.

That said, I do not consider Next to be a complete game or even near to a complete game. We've seen the alpha test. I suspect some sharper and more focussed people will be called in now - Chris Perkins, for example, or they could hire back Rich Baker - to get it completed before Hasbro completely loses patience with a team that has taken over two years to punch out something that a lot of people on internet messageboards doing their own fantasy heartbreakers on their own could have punched out in months.