D&D 5E Crystal Ball: A year in, how do you think 5E will unfold going forward?

[Mistwell]

What do you do if you can't say "no" to your players, and they decide they want to play Pathfinder because it's got all that lovely crunch? Go tell Paizo to take all that crunch off the shelves?

You know, strawmanning me twice in a row on the same topic doesn't make it any more right.

Maybe you are having trouble resisting strawmanning me. If so, here is the actual quote for you to work with:

"It puts me in an uncomfortable position when one of my players buys a new book and wants an option from that book that I am not sure I want in my game. I don't know how it will work with our setting, with all the other things that player already has on their character, with the abilities of the other characters in the group, with my adventure, etc.. So now I need to make a decision between telling my player no and disappointing them, or telling them yes and having a problem later. I don't like being put in that position to begin with - and fewer books means it happens less."

Now lets see if you can disagree with my perspective without being snarky, rude, dismissive, insulting, or elitist.

 

[Staffan]

Mostly because it was riding around the idea that lower numbers were better for some things, but not other things. In order to make it easier to deal with, another calculation was needed, and that was thac0. The current methodology is much tidier, and much quicker to grasp. One less thing to think about.

THAC0 was an intermediate step in the evolution of the game.

1e had big honkin' attack tables for everything. These stated that if you were a 7th level fighter attacking an opponent with AC 3, you needed to roll 11 or higher on d20 to hit (modifiers, like Strength and magic weapons, applied to the roll). You looked this up by finding the Fighter attack table, finding the column appropriate for 7th level characters, and then cross-referencing it with the AC 3 row. I believe most character sheets in use at the time had space for the appropriate table column on the sheet.

2e condensed the attack tables into just the AC 0 row, and massaged the numbers a bit (e.g. instead of fighters getting 2 points better at fighting every two levels, they got 1 point better each level). You would then calculate what AC you hit per roll - this wasn't a problem for me and my friends, but I can see how people would find "lowest AC hit = THAC0 - (d20 + modifiers)" bothersome. It helped a little that we included fixed modifiers in the adjusted THAC0 we had on our sheets (So you'd have "THAC0 15, Str mod +1, Melee THAC0 14" - counterintuitive that an attack bonus would reduce your value, but it worked). In some of the material, you'd still find legacies of the old way of doing things - e.g. "Attacks as a 5th level thief" instead of saying "THAC0 18".

With 3e, the designers decided it was time for some sacred hamburger and flipped the whole thing to the current system of higher-is-better AC and attack bonuses based on class progression instead of tables.

IMO, THAC0 was a natural response to the clunkiness of attack tables while still wanting to maintain the backwards compatibility of lower AC being better. Is it as good as 3e's attack bonuses? No, but it's a lot simpler than looking the result up on tables.

 

[Umbran]

Morlock and Mistwell - before you continue any further, please consider whether either of you is going to get anything out of continuing. It seems pretty clear that neither of you is interested in accepting a point from the other - between the two of you, this is no longer an open-minded discussion, but is instead a head-butting argument.

If either of you is in the, "I must continue, to win the hearts and minds of other players," you can stop right now. While you are free to state your opinion, the site is not a platform to pursue such an agenda.

Which is a long way of telling you both to cool it.

 

[Morlock]

Umbran: if I was any cooler, I'd be in the freezer.

 

[S'mon]

People buy Pathfinder stuff because they like the system, not out of some sort of habit.

I have a bunch of Pathfinder stuff, and I hate* the system.

For one thing, PF stuff is really easy to convert over to 5e. Even the player-focused stuff has cool ideas for NPCs - I could make a 5e NPC Alchemist villain based on the PF APG class very easily, for instance.

*Above level 5 or 6, anyway.

 

[S'mon]

There is no theory about it. It's all down to the DM saying no and that's always been the intent of the game.

As a DM you pick and choose what tools you want to use to build your campaign, you then offer that campaign to your players and see if they want to play it.

The culture at many 3e/PF and 4e tables is that anything official is allowed, and only a bad GM would
veto it. Selective vetoing in 3e/PF can even create a more broken game than anything-goes, because of the caster/non-caster imbalance. And in 4e the only charbuilder is actively antagonistic to limited sources, my players are often accidentally taking powers from disallowed materials.

 

[S'mon]

TTRPG market is "Dying". Everquest killed it. All those kids that could have jumped on the TTRPG/minis market are now playing MMOs

Things have changed a lot in the past 5-10 years and especially with 5e, there is huge interest in
TTRPgs. Actually there was huge interest with 4e too, but it turned out not to be a suitable game for most new players. 5e was clevely designed to be fairly newbie friendly, especially relatively newbie-GM friendly (although it doesn't hold a candle to Mentzer or Moldvay).

 

[DaveDash]

Things have changed a lot in the past 5-10 years and especially with 5e, there is huge interest in
TTRPgs. Actually there was huge interest with 4e too, but it turned out not to be a suitable game for most new players. 5e was clevely designed to be fairly newbie friendly, especially relatively newbie-GM friendly (although it doesn't hold a candle to Mentzer or Moldvay).

It depends.

It may be doing better, but is it capturing the market, or just becoming more and more niche?

If D&D sells a million PHBs then it's doing well, if it sells 100,000 then it will fade into obscurity, unless it can tap into other markets. Even indie developers these days can sell more video games than that, and some really successful launches have sold 200,000+ the first day they launched.

That's what kids are engaged in, WoTC has recognised that, and are keeping TTRPG costs and risks down to invest more into those areas.

 

[delericho]

TTRPG market is "Dying". Everquest killed it. All those kids that could have jumped on the TTRPG/minis market are now playing MMOs, the rest of us still playing D&D are aging with the game, and apart from our kids there is a trickle of new players coming on board.

Actually, you'd be surprised. The same technology that allowed Everquest and WoW to "kill" D&D also enabled the likes of Meetup groups and ENWorld's "Find a Game!" section to bring people together. I can attest that I'm a gamer now only because of that - my group from uni gradually fizzled out, and it was only because of one such site that I was able to put together a new group. But that group now has 74 members and counting, in a fairly middling town in the centre of Scotland. The interest is there.

And, indeed, the recent financial crisis also seems to have given TTRPGs a shot in the arm, probably because you don't need high-speed internet and a relatively up-to-date (and thus expensive) computer to play effectively. As tastes push people towards lower-cost entertainment options, TTRPGs gain.

Things really seem to be going quite well right now. And, indeed, with D&D "on a tear", the trend is actually one of improving health rather than demise.

It probably cost them less to create the Enhanced versions of their oldschool CRPGs (Baldurs gate EE etc) than to create a splat book, and they sold quite well.

The beauty of licensing is that it cost WotC nothing to create the enhanced versions of those games. Of course, it also made them relatively little money, as they'd have received a licensing fee and then maybe some (pretty small) royalties.

And likewise with any movies or future video games they do. Indeed, the card and miniature games on the way appear also to be licensed products. So it's only the TTRPG and board games that they seem to be doing in house. With the benefit that the only costs they incur are for developing those games; but with the downside that they also don't reap the really big rewards either.

 

[DaveDash]

Actually, you'd be surprised. The same technology that allowed Everquest and WoW to "kill" D&D also enabled the likes of Meetup groups and ENWorld's "Find a Game!" section to bring people together. I can attest that I'm a gamer now only because of that - my group from uni gradually fizzled out, and it was only because of one such site that I was able to put together a new group. But that group now has 74 members and counting, in a fairly middling town in the centre of Scotland. The interest is there.

And, indeed, the recent financial crisis also seems to have given TTRPGs a shot in the arm, probably because you don't need high-speed internet and a relatively up-to-date (and thus expensive) computer to play effectively. As tastes push people towards lower-cost entertainment options, TTRPGs gain.

Things really seem to be going quite well right now. And, indeed, with D&D "on a tear", the trend is actually one of improving health rather than demise.



The beauty of licensing is that it cost WotC nothing to create the enhanced versions of those games. Of course, it also made them relatively little money, as they'd have received a licensing fee and then maybe some (pretty small) royalties.

And likewise with any movies or future video games they do. Indeed, the card and miniature games on the way appear also to be licensed products. So it's only the TTRPG and board games that they seem to be doing in house. With the benefit that the only costs they incur are for developing those games; but with the downside that they also don't reap the really big rewards either.

All valid points that I do not disagree with. I have no doubt that TTRPG's are growing, and that technology has helped in that regard. I am the same as you - a digital D&Der.

I still don't think D&D is a thriving product however (whether it's thriving for a TTRPG is beside the point), and WoTC are wisely diverging and investing their revenue in multiple streams.

I don't know how many PHB's Wizard's will sell this year, but Indie developers on steam are selling 100,000's of copies of their product in days after launch. There's no excuse for D&D to not be front and center in the RPG market in general, and in fact, it's been non-D&D CRPGS which have been stealing the spotlight lately. Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity ditched the D&D system because they said licensing was too hard, and they've sold very well. Bioware ditched D&D for Dragon Age, which has awesome lore, and even spawned its own TTRPG. Divinity Original Sin breathed life back into the CRPG genre, had a very successful kickstarter, but no D&D to be seen there.
Right now, D&D is missing out.

This very different from the 90's where D&D branded video games completely dominated the RPG market, until... Everquest and then WoW.

WoTC do have Neverwinter, which unfortunately sucks. Here's hoping Sword Coast Legends is a hit.

I want to be playing D&D with my mates once or twice a week, then fill in the rest of my spare time with something easy like a CRPG based on 5e. For me, that's utopia.