Good thread [MENTION=6776548]Corpsetaker[/MENTION]
When I say this I don’t mean the rules, because I didn’t really like them, but the overall approach to D&D, minus a few things here and there. While it took a while to get everything off the ground, I really miss the fact that we had a great online magazine, a character builder, an in house VTT that worked, and we were getting lots of content. Now I would like to break these things down into a few bullet points and discuss in more detail.
Overall, I agree on the feeling that previous editions were more massive in terms of amount of books & magazine released. On one hand it might have made the hobby feel more alive (I disagree, but there are people who claim that 5e is "dead" because they judge it in terms of publications amount). But on the other hand, massive publication and support also worked as a big facade to mask the fact that probably the majority of us were 10% gaming and 90% talking about the game. The hobby had become the talk. With 3-4 books per month, everybody's attention was grabbed by new content to dissect and criticize. For a lot of people D&D was about collecting books, building hundreds of characters that never were, "fixing" the game with house rules that were never applied, and just imagining that one day they'll finally play the game. D&D was more similar to porn than the real thing IYKWIMAITYD. The stripped-down publication scheme of 5e brought this to light, at least a little bit: now less busy with stuff to buy and talk about, maybe we can look forward to actually play the game more. Or if it's still hard to do that (particularly for those who now have a family), taking half a step away from all the buying & talking is actually a good thing on itself IMHO.
• Online magazine: Well during this time we had a subscription paid online Dragon magazine. I must say that I really miss this because it allowed me to get great articles that I could read anywhere I had internet access. I felt like I was getting what I paid for even though I didn’t use the game options because I didn’t really like the rules at the time. I could see how someone who did like 4th edition at the time would have been delighted at all the extra content they were getting. When I look at Dragon+ compared to then, all I see is a hollow shadow of its former self. It’s almost sad in a way because I see where Dragon was to what it is now and it really contradicts Wizard’s whole strategy behind multimedia content. I don’t think just throwing stuff up on Facebook and Twitter really qualifies as that, as well as a free app that talk less about the actual game and more about D&D outside the table top game. I don’t really care which celeb was seen wearing a D&D t-shirt.
I do miss the old printed Dragon and Dungeon magazine. I was never into the digital once, since I hate reading digital. I don't think Dragon+ qualifies as a magazine. For me Dragon and Dungeon played a better role than actual books, because they were slimmer and cheaper, they worked more like "ideas books" to cherrypick or inspire you, while sourcebooks and supplements and adventure paths felt like more massive additions that you either married or avoid. I know that this is not true for many people, who do cherrypick on supplements, but that's not the
feeling that I usually got from them. The feeling from magazine was more like "let's see what's in this new issue, maybe I'll use something, maybe I won't use anything but I'll have a great time reading it", while the feeling from a sourcebook was "I have to understand this book as a whole system, and decide if I should allow it in my next campaign". Kind of like the difference between a buffet and a main course.
• Character builder: Now from a business stand point I can see where this all went wrong but from a customer view it was brilliant. I don’t really care about Wizard’s profit margins so I’m looking at this from a customer benefit. It was best when it was offline but it had its upsides to when it went online only. Either way you had a really useful tool that allowed you to create characters and store them for future use. I fully understand how it made someone more inclined to not even bother buying the books but it was still a great thing.
I am ambivalent on character builders. I liked the free one that came with the original 3e PHB. It helped to get used to the new 3e rules. But you really need a character builder only when you are playing a system that has complicated PC rules (which in general I don't endorse) and a large amount of character options. Not
needing a character builder is a good think IMHO.
• In house VTT: While this was by no means fancy, it was still very practical because of the price and the set up. What I liked was it enabled me to come home from work, come into the VTT and join a game that was either about to start or in the middle and looking for someone else to play. I didn’t have to go to a community and arrange a group and time to play. I could jump right in to a game when I wanted to. For me this VTT was very practical and not in the least expensive. The VTT’s now are too costly and doesn’t allow me to scroll games currently running. It did what I needed it to do and I sorely miss it.
I never used a VTT. I played RPGs only in person or in PbP. I can see that VTTs have their own merits, since they are closer to real tabletop playing, which for a lot of people nowadays are difficult to arrange. But for some reason I am not keen on the idea of gaming with strangers on a VTT, and it gives me the feeling that it's more subject to competitive attitudes than any other gaming setup.
I do think however, that VTT don't need to be too fancy and therefore expensive. Actually I think that there are free tools out there that can be used together for this purpose. I would personally not spend any money at all on a VTT, or at most a one-time small price, but certainly not a subscription.
• Content: I think if the content at the time would have been spread out and not thrown out all at once it would have been better accepted. Now I didn’t like the way the Realms was handled because I am a massive fan of the Realms, but that aside we did get loads of content. I will say that we got a bit too much player content and if Wizard’s hadn’t had the “everything is core” stance most DM’s would have just limited what they allowed in their games.
For a while, the abundance of player's content was exciting, but to me the thrill had already died out about the time when the 3.5 revision came out. With the 3.5 revision, it had become clear to me that player content was already being largely rehashed, recolored and repackaged, but people were buying the same stuff over and over again. It also created a bad player's attitude, in being constantly looking forward to change your PC before they even had time to enjoy the previous.
The content that has value for me is DM's content. Fantasy settings, adventures, monsters and sometimes why not some complete additional rules modules to really change the game. In general I always welcome this kind of content, but still I won't buy more than I can actually use. Sadly, DM's content has a much smaller customer base than players content, I am not critizing WotC for a business choice that's good for them, but I am just saying don't blame me if I don't buy what I don't think I need.
When I look back at all this I don’t see the 5th edition era of D&D as being any sort of “Golden Age”. The 5th edition rules of D&D are nice but I don’t have the feeling that I did with previous editions that the game is being supported in the way that it should. Again, I don’t care for profit margins so I don’t care from a business view. I am a customer so I am explaining how the era of the game felt whole to me, minus a few things here and there. If I could get the setting support of 2nd and 3rd edition with the overall structure of the 4th edition era with the rules of 5th edition then we would truly have a golden age of Dungeons and Dragons.
Well I won't go back to those 2-3 years of 3.0 when I bought a lot of supplements. That was my personal age of getting really into the game material, but it's long gone and won't come back. I don't consider that my "golden age". Instead, the closest to being a "golden age" for me was pretty much the following ~5 years, where (thanks to NOT liking the 3.5 revision and switching back to 3.0) I ignored >90% of the publications and got to play the game most often than ever. Not having to follow up with the mainstream of the hobby was a huge liberation... I had my small library of books already, and finally I was USING it!
