D&D 5E I think we can safely say that 5E is a success, but will it lead to a new Golden Era?

[Haffrung]

The tack you want to take is not that rolling back solutions is progress, but that progress is bad, and that things like class imbalance are what the fanbase /wants/.

Or maybe class imbalance is something most players don't notice or care about. Subjects of interest to system wonks on RPG forums don't necessarily correlate to the subjects of interest to the much wider group of fans (especially large for D&D) who don't participate in forums.

5e is directed primarily at longtime fans, and quite effectively so, calling back the ancient feel of early AD&D. Why, I was just reviewing HotDQ as I'm going to run it at Encounters, and I was struck by the charming, nostalgic archaisms, like random encounters of random numbers of monsters, that it lead with. The way Mearls & co talk about appealing to new players (and the way Encounters, aimed somewhat at new players, is being set up) also speaks more to appealing to what longtime players remember of being new, than what actual new players might need out of the game.

Is there something inherently unappealing to new gamers about random monster encounters? Just because something is appealing to long-time players doesn't mean it's unappealing to new players. Some of the stuff people enjoyed in D&D 25 years wasn't because they had no choice or didn't know any better - they actually enjoyed it because it was fun. And it can also be fun for new gamers today.

If 4E really was as appealing to new players as you suggest, I doubt it would have been shelved by WotC. They don't care who is buying their books - old fans or new. In my experience, character generation in 4E (pre-Essentials) was simply too involved to make it very accessible to casual gamers. As WotC themselves have admited, for more than 10 years now WotC has catered too much to hardcore gamers. They lost sight of what most people say they want out of a tabletop RPG, which is to generate fun stories with their friends. Too much crunch is a barrier to adoption. Essentials was an effort to make the game easier to get into, but it was too little too late.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Or maybe class imbalance is something most players don't notice or care about.

Unlikely, outside of systematically-railroaded or superbly-finessed campaigns (that keep the game on the narrow range of pacing that retains balance, or masterfully juggle a balance-of-imbalances). Some may not identify the issue that's ruining the experience for them in those specific terms, others may enjoy leveraging imbalances to their advantage.

Is there something inherently unappealing to new gamers about random monster encounters? Just because something is appealing to long-time players doesn't mean it's unappealing to new players.

It can be an issue, yes, since they break up the flow of the game, sometimes in ways that seem arbitrary. Worse, though, are random-sized encounters. String a few planned encounters together and they can be tailored to present the level of challenge you think will work best for your players. String random encounters together (as HotDQ does) and you could end up with a series of trivial or deadly ones - and either bored players or dead PCs (and, either way, give a poor impression of what the game can deliver). Obviously, one can over-ride the dice and insert more appropriate encounters, but, why, then, present random ones in the first place?

Some of the stuff people enjoyed in D&D 25 years wasn't because they had no choice or didn't know any better - they actually enjoyed it because it was fun. And it can also be fun for new gamers today.

/Some/ of it, yes. The very concept of RP for instance.

If 4E really was as appealing to new players as you suggest, I doubt it would have been shelved by WotC.

4e did, IMX, retain new players better than any other version of D&D I'd seen (everything except 0e). But, it couldn't /attract/ any more than usual, and that's really not that many. To 'succeed' well enough to avoid being downsized to Essentials, it would have had to have DDI take off and deliver MMO-level revenue - that's the goal that an insider later revealed D&D was working to at the time. Really, no matter how good a /game/ it may have been, or how much it appealed to new players who gave it a try, those goals were unreachable without the wild success of DDI & the never-released VTT.

They don't care who is buying their books - old fans or new.

No, but new fans are unlikely to wage an edition war.

 

[Tony Vargas]

But you claimed 4e fixed the problem... so did it revert with PHB 3? Were psionics a reversion because they came out before essentials?

Not so much, no. Psioniic classes had a different encounter-resource mechanism, but it was ultimately comparable to regular encounter powers - you could even hybrid psionic and non-psionic classes and trade off between the two encounter-resource models.

Are you saying 4e fixed the problem the recreated it?

Essentials back-slid before 5e, albeit to a much lesser extent, if that's what you're getting at.

How did rituals factor into this as well, did they cause an imbalance?

Rituals figured into it rather well, actually. Spells that, in the past, had provided utility, but had to be managed from the same resource pool as combat spells were broken out into long-casting-time, wealth-as-resource non-combat 'rituals,' that anyone could access with a single feat. They had minimal impact on class balance (some classes got the Ritual Caster feat as a class feature).

Personally I didn't see this great imbalance differing resource usage should have caused when rituals, psionic, essentials and regular 4e characters were used in the same party... and them being unbalanced didn't seem to be the prevailing sentiment among 4e fans either at the time.

Psionics and rituals were non-issues. The daily-less essentials classes were an issue, but, again, the degree of imbalance was a great deal less, because the other classes topped out at 4 dailies or so, vs /dozens/ in other eds. Compared to the imbalances of other editions, that's pretty minor, but, yes an imbalance.

 

[WayneW]

I haven't played D&D since 1e and I'm having a blast playing in two online campaigns of 5e.

I don't get why there is such a need for exact balance between the PCs and why you would only want perfect balance for each encounter. The power of each character will shift as the campaign goes on and each will be more or less useful depending on the challenge faced. The dynamic of a group coming together to combine their strengths and weaknesses in an encounter is what makes the game so much fun for me. And if the encounter difficulty swings from easy to impossible you have to be careful what you take on instead of just saying there are some monsters lets battle each time. Am I missing something?

 

[Tony Vargas]

I haven't played D&D since 1e and I'm having a blast playing in two online campaigns of 5e.

On-line? PbP, VTT or something else?

I don't get why there is such a need for exact balance between the PCs The power of each character will shift as the campaign goes on and each will be more or less useful depending on the challenge faced. The dynamic of a group coming together to combine their strengths and weaknesses in an encounter is what makes the game so much fun for me.

The dynamic you're talking about still very much existed among 'Roles' when classes were better-balanced, so no issue there.

The idea of class balance swinging around like a pendulum, but balancing out over a longer window - over a 'day' of challenges or even a whole campaign /is/ a valid way of achieving balance, often called a 'balance of imbalances,' it's just a pretty poor one. It fails to deliver balance when the game doesn't continue long enough to give everyone their moment in the sun, or when the campaign themes call for more of one sort of challenge than another, and so forth. It works only for a very specific, carefully-DM-managed playstyle. More robust ways of achieving balance work for a wider range of styles and campaigns.

and why you would only want perfect balance for each encounter. And if the encounter difficulty swings from easy to impossible you have to be careful what you take on instead of just saying there are some monsters lets battle each time.

Here you are missing something. Modern versions of D&D give encounter-creation guidelines. If they're 'balanced,' they given consistent results, meaning that encounters designed to be easy will be easy if played straight, and others designed to be overwhelming will be overwhelming unless the PCs pull out something /really/ clever or lucky. It doesn't mean that encounters will all present the same challenge - far from it, the DM has a lot more freedom to explore the edges of what the PCs can handle.

 

[Mercurius]

Here, we're in complete agreement. Mechanical improvements and innovations have been rolled back, and any new ones have been /very/ cautious and measured in implementation, and care has been taken not to ruffle the feathers of those who reacted so badly.

I think this remains to be seen. Further, I'm not sure I agree with what seems like a clear value judgement on your part, as if 5E is entirely void of innovations and lacking in the improvements that the prior edition(s) made. If anything, I like the fact that it is a simpler game at its core than the previous couple editions, and that it doesn't require the complex web of sub-systems and optimizations of the last couple editions. We won't really know until the DMG comes out, but the big innovation of 5E seems to be its flexibility and ability to customize different campaigns with modular options (I for one would like to see if they have something akin to the AEDU paradigm as an option, although that might be too difficult and complex to paste onto the 5E core).

Seems unlikely that specific problem will show up.

Let me clarify. I don't think 5E will have grindiness, but that it may have its own quality that leads to tedium for many. I can tell you that while I grew to dislike AEDU aesthetically, as too "video gamey," it certainly made for fun factical play and I'm going to miss Splitting the Tree, and so forth. I am wondering if some of the martial classes will seem boring at some point, which will require splats to flesh them out.

In other words, damned if you do, damned if you don't!

Give $100 million to at least a moderately well known director to make an Icewind Dale trilogy with Drizzt, and you'd have a blockbuster avalanche of new D&D fans starting at age 10+.

Relying on "books" to support the gaming model, as Mearls pointed out, does not work very well in the long run.

Agreed on both accounts. I think the key to a new boom of players is a successful movie franchise. Now the question is...

I do wonder which would be more likely to succeed as a big budget film... The Heroes of the Lance or Drizzt and company...

I think it completely depends upon who makes the films, and how they are made. I think either could work, IF done well and without geekspeak and over-the-top acting. On one hand I would lean towards Dragonlance as it is more epic and people love a big story. But I don't see why they couldn't do a Realms movie or three, featuring Drizzt etc. And it does make a certain degree of sense over Dragonlance in that young kids will think, "I want to play in that world!" and while the Realms will be there, ready and wiling, Krynn seems to be shelved for the time being.

But the problem is, people tend to prefer world-shaking fantasy films and WotC seems set on not shaking the Realms anymore. Or maybe they could just back-track and draw from the last 150 years of Realms shaking events, even hybridize them and take the best of them.

 

[Herschel]

I find that this sort of statement is very post-facto. It describes an outcome, but I don't think it explains very much. After all, sales of 4e PHBs were stronger than those of 3E PHBs (or 3.5?) in their respective launch periods, according to WotC (from memory, it was Mearls who said this).

At the time, therefore, there seemed to be quite a good reception and wide appeal.

If, in fact, WotC's market position is so vulnerable to the 'word on the cyber street' among a certain sort of D&D diehard, I think that in itself can tell us something about the nature of the market and the prospects for success.

For instance, I've found many LotR/Tolkien fans to be quite critical of Peter Jackson's movies, but I don't think they are good barometer for how the movie franchise overall will succeed.

Very much so, and it illustrates the power of belief used to ignore facts, which is Marketing 101: It doesn't have to actually be better, you just need to make people believe it is.

 

[kenmarable]

Unlikely, outside of systematically-railroaded or superbly-finessed campaigns (that keep the game on the narrow range of pacing that retains balance, or masterfully juggle a balance-of-imbalances). Some may not identify the issue that's ruining the experience for them in those specific terms, others may enjoy leveraging imbalances to their advantage.

If we are going with "IMX", then in my experience of playing since the Red Box with (rough guessing off the top of my head) 30+ people over all those decades, class imbalance has come up TWICE.

#1 - We let one player continue the 1e monk's chart well beyond 17 or whatever it was limited to, and so he could do stuff like run back to the city miles away and get equipment we needed in a single round. (So our fault on that one, but honestly we were just teenagers goofing around and eventually even mixed in the Immortals set with that campaign. Plenty of fun with zero interest in "balance.")

#2 - One of the Savage Species races (I forget which but it had like full spellcasting AND a bunch of class abilities) was clearly able to do far more than the rest of the party to the point of being noticeable.

Other than those 2 unusual cases, the problem of class balance has never, ever come up with any of us in any of those groups. Now, that's just anecdotal, but somehow I don't see not noticing the class imbalance problems as being "unlikely outside of systematically-railroaded or superbly-finessed campaigns." Never an issue for us in a wide variety of campaigns and play styles. And in talking with all of those people about their experiences in other games, they have never had a problem with it or even with some sort of unease that they couldn't identify that traced back to class imbalance.

In my experience, I have only seen the problem mentioned on internet forums. I'm sure your experiences are different. As to whether either of our experiences matches up to the experiences of millions of other gamers, the majority of whom have never even heard of EN World and don't have a voice here? I wouldn't even hazard a guess.

Edited to add: Also, thinking back, the group I was in at the time looked at 4e and didn't like it specifically for the identical resource mechanics. Some players like rolling the same attacks every round beating on the monsters with their sword, while others like to plan and come up with the right list of spells and combos. Many people loved 4e and the standardized resource mechanics, and that's cool. But some of us like classes playing differently and resource mechanics is a major way to give classes a different feel. Making all classes have AEDU (or some such) is LESS fun for us rather than more.

 

[Herschel]

I think this remains to be seen. Further, I'm not sure I agree with what seems like a clear value judgement on your part, as if 5E is entirely void of innovations and lacking in the improvements that the prior edition(s) made. If anything, I like the fact that it is a simpler game at its core than the previous couple editions, and that it doesn't require the complex web of sub-systems and optimizations of the last couple editions. We won't really know until the DMG comes out, but the big innovation of 5E seems to be its flexibility and ability to customize different campaigns with modular options (I for one would like to see if they have something akin to the AEDU paradigm as an option, although that might be too difficult and complex to paste onto the 5E core).

It was easily an option, but to this point, they botched it completely. They could have simply used the Theme system to add the AEDU powers (or whatever) vs. add-ons like they had set up.

Let me clarify. I don't think 5E will have grindiness, but that it may have its own quality that leads to tedium for many. I can tell you that while I grew to dislike AEDU aesthetically, as too "video gamey," it certainly made for fun factical play and I'm going to miss Splitting the Tree, and so forth. I am wondering if some of the martial classes will seem boring at some point, which will require splats to flesh them out.

In other words, damned if you do, damned if you don't!

We're already seeing that. I find martial characters boring thus far. I lik ethe achtype, but hate the implementation thus far.

Agreed on both accounts. I think the key to a new boom of players is a successful movie franchise. Now the question is...

I think it completely depends upon who makes the films, and how they are made. I think either could work, IF done well and without geekspeak and over-the-top acting. On one hand I would lean towards Dragonlance as it is more epic and people love a big story. But I don't see why they couldn't do a Realms movie or three, featuring Drizzt etc. And it does make a certain degree of sense over Dragonlance in that young kids will think, "I want to play in that world!" and while the Realms will be there, ready and wiling, Krynn seems to be shelved for the time being.

The problem with Drizzt is he's a super-dextrous Dark Elf. Giving a wig to Oded Fehr isn't quite going to cut it. That doesn't work so well on-screen as a focal point. Even the successful movies who use oddball races have humans as a focal point. Notice where the short humans are really the focal point are the scenes where it's basically just them and other shorties?

But the problem is, people tend to prefer world-shaking fantasy films and WotC seems set on not shaking the Realms anymore.

That's comedy gold, right there.

 

[Mercurius]

A lot of people didn't like 3E. But the pattern did not appear in that case.

I think historical context is important when comparing the community response to 3E and 4E. 3E re-invigorated the game and community, drawing in many lapsed players with a cleaned up rules set that didn't change the fundamental qualities of D&D that people had loved for decades. 4E, on the other hand, took an entirely different route both in terms of design and aesthetics which turned a lot of people off.

Casting a wider net would have gone a long way toward popularity. But accepting that there were legitimate reasons for disliking things and simply having a difference in taste doesn't make you a h4ter would go a long way toward shutting down the edition wars.

I hear what you are saying but I think your argument is weakened by focusing only on one side of what stimulated edition warring. It takes two to tango!

5E truly seems to be built on the idea that there is a wider net to be cast and further, that two group can play with completely different expectations.

Agreed! Although it still remains to be seen what kind of modules will appeal to 4E fans. I have a hard time imagining 5E being able to "out 4E" 4E. At best there might be modules that pacify more moderate 4E fans who still want certain bells and whistles not offered in the core rules. But it does seem that, overall, 5E is designed more towards a simplified version of 3E, with "modular options" being ways to customize and complexify a game towards something closer to 3.5 or Pathfinder. We'll know when the DMG comes out, but I'm not expecting "AEDU for 5E" in it, although you never know.

There will still be people who don't like 5E. But if the 5E fanbase accepts that, then the edition wars will be like 3E - a trivial part of the background.

True, true. I think the other part, though, is that for those that don't like 5E, well, move on a play something else. What seems to happen with each edition is that there's a segment of fans from the prior edition who feel like the publishers of D&D killed it and took their stuff. Maybe this is unavoidable. While no one is actually making 4E fans stop playing 4E, I can understand how it would be frustrating when the company and community moves on from your preferred version of the game.