billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
Clearly the target audience is a bunch of dead presidents.
Not if I can pay for the books with a few Hamiltons.
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D&D 5E Who really IS the target audience of D&D Next?
- Thread starter innerdude
- Start date
Not if I can pay for the books with a few Hamiltons.
Crazy Jerome
First Post
Increased mind share in a significant market where you did not have it before is what makes a product really take off. Of course they want that any time they can get it. However, increased interest--not enough to become wildly enthusiastic or make 5E your primary or even exclusive game--but enough to get you to play and enjoy it at times--ain't shabby either. The latter will lead to some sales--in places that maybe had little or no sales before.
It sounds counter-intuitive, but I suspect that WotC would be quite happy with their sales totals if they had a 5E market of primary players about the size of 4E, but a much bigger secondary market where people were buying product because 5E was one of their secondary games.
It sounds counter-intuitive, but I suspect that WotC would be quite happy with their sales totals if they had a 5E market of primary players about the size of 4E, but a much bigger secondary market where people were buying product because 5E was one of their secondary games.
What makes you say that?
My group fits into this category (among others).
"Better" is a tricky concept here. Different systems do different things well, and each has its own set of drawbacks.
3e gets hard to run at higher levels, 4e combat is slow pretty much at any level, AD&D lacks mechanical PC customization options. My group's enjoyed playing all three... but "better" is mostly a product of what we're in the mood for right now.
Currently, AD&D is "better", because it's a refreshing change from the slower-playing, more mechanics-heavy D&D we've been using for the past several years.
Also, I'd bet the "circling the wagons" phenomena happens primarily in online arguments. In practice, most real-life gaming groups are less interested in partisan nincompoopery and more interested in their campaigns running smoothly.
Sure, there's a subset of the player base that is completely satisfied with their particular version of choice. My belief is that subset is fairly small. My evidence for this is simple: a lot of players keep buying new editions of D&D, some of which --ie, the OSR-folks-- keep buying new editions of old D&D, which they already own. This suggests to me quite a bit of D&D market is, in fact, open to new variations on the D&D experience.
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Judging from our table, 5E really, really resembles the core game all my tables tended to unconsciously house-rule themselves into.
I've played Basic as a kid, and the clean, fast mechanics made it easy to get into. 5E does that. It's SO much simpler to get going than 3.5. It does add system mastery, but at a bite-sized, 'level per level' pace that lets characters ease into it, rather than all at once.
I've also played AD&D games with segment-by-segment tracking, weapon speeds, strict time tracking, strict encumbrance, etcetera. But, over time, we dropped most of that stuff, because we found the shenanigans of what we'd get ourselves into - and the role playing - more. 5E is a cleaned-up version of that.
I've played 3.5E games from low to high level, and for us the game had a sweet spot that was all too short. Low levels had too few options, high level became 'Caster Supremacy' to the point of boredom. 5E found a way to take that sweet spot and extend it to be a much longer part of the game.
All the Grognard stuff is there, as 'alternate' rules, and from what I can tell they all work well. So, the small - and shrinking - group of dedicated grogs can play with the new rules, so when new people come into 5E and want to have that more 'AD&D' feeling, they can have it - with a much cleaner and more modern chassis.
And, it's mechanics lend themselves to tweaking, but it's solid enough that wholesale rewriting isn't necessary. So, IMO it lets other people really flex their creativity and make the game their own without breaking the game in the process - because they're tweaking aesthetics rather than core mechanics.
I think the game is the best possible edition we could have had, given the history and baggage. They snuck a hell of a lot of modern mechanics in there and still kept the 'feel' of old-school D&D.
I've played Basic as a kid, and the clean, fast mechanics made it easy to get into. 5E does that. It's SO much simpler to get going than 3.5. It does add system mastery, but at a bite-sized, 'level per level' pace that lets characters ease into it, rather than all at once.
I've also played AD&D games with segment-by-segment tracking, weapon speeds, strict time tracking, strict encumbrance, etcetera. But, over time, we dropped most of that stuff, because we found the shenanigans of what we'd get ourselves into - and the role playing - more. 5E is a cleaned-up version of that.
I've played 3.5E games from low to high level, and for us the game had a sweet spot that was all too short. Low levels had too few options, high level became 'Caster Supremacy' to the point of boredom. 5E found a way to take that sweet spot and extend it to be a much longer part of the game.
All the Grognard stuff is there, as 'alternate' rules, and from what I can tell they all work well. So, the small - and shrinking - group of dedicated grogs can play with the new rules, so when new people come into 5E and want to have that more 'AD&D' feeling, they can have it - with a much cleaner and more modern chassis.
And, it's mechanics lend themselves to tweaking, but it's solid enough that wholesale rewriting isn't necessary. So, IMO it lets other people really flex their creativity and make the game their own without breaking the game in the process - because they're tweaking aesthetics rather than core mechanics.
I think the game is the best possible edition we could have had, given the history and baggage. They snuck a hell of a lot of modern mechanics in there and still kept the 'feel' of old-school D&D.
CapnZapp
Legend
Five year old necro alert, by a spam account no less!
(Reported)
Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app
(Reported)
Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app
Ancalagon
Dusty Dragon
The five year necro is kinda ridiculous, but 600 posts... how the heck did a spam account build up 600 post and fly under the radar so long? :O
Mercule
Adventurer
schnee's been around for a while. Aside from a join date of 2004, I can remember interacting with him(?) on a few occasions.
Come to think of it, there may be a history of thread necromancy.
TwoSix
Everyone's literal second-favorite poster
Maybe he/she just likes to click on the "Similar Threads" links at the bottom of the page.
I don't need a ton of thread necromancy, but every once in a while it's good for a little nostalgia, and to see how completely wrong most of our predictions were.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
Maybe he/she just likes to click on the "Similar Threads" links at the bottom of the page.
I don't need a ton of thread necromancy, but every once in a while it's good for a little nostalgia, and to see how completely wrong most of our predictions were.
You think that's entertaining? You should go find the ones discussing Paizo sticking with the OGL and going with Pathfinder instead of supporting 4e. Those are an interesting read.
For a spammer, that's a very extensive, on-topic, and grammatically correct post. Unless there was a spam post above Schnee's that has already been deleted?
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