Imaro
Legend
If 4e had had one quarter of the management backing and marketing resources that 5e has, we'd all still be playing it.
Nah...we really wouldn't.
If 4e had had one quarter of the management backing and marketing resources that 5e has, we'd all still be playing it.
Familiarity doesn't explain 5e's success breaking into the mainstream? Or rather, it's a different familiarity - for at least the last 10 years, D&D has been, along with nerd culture more generally, exposed to the mainstream. Whether thats seeing a bizare facsimile of it being played on Big Band Theory, or watching streaming play - or playing derivative CRPGs or MMOs - it's a very different familiar than 5e has or 4e lacked with existing fans.
And, it's familiarity that can be gained without exposure to edition warring. Because 4e wasn't broadly unpopular with D&D fans, it was actively maligned and sabotaged by a particular segment of that fanbase.
You're not wrong. I consider 4e to be a step in the game's evolution until it did a backslide into 5e. 5e is closer to what I wanted in 3e, but 4e is what I really enjoyed and wished to see progress and evolve further in 5e. 5e does not innovate with any new ideas for me, so I moved on.
PF2 could get my interest, but I am fully invested now in other games that do things different and (dare I say) better in some aspects.
Also, evolution doesn't really happen at the individual level.
Games don't /really/ evolve from one ed to another, since they're literally an example of intelligent design (no matter what you think of the designers' talent or artistic merits, they're intelligent).
I got the impression that 5e was done on a shoestring, sort of a Hail Mary, pitched to an indifferent Hasbro as maybe rehabilitating the brand enough to use it in other media.
It just happened to be released into a TT renaisance - even then, I thought that'd stay limited to boardgames.
But, in a favorable market, without the negativity of an edition war, the D&D name finally generated the long-looked-for, and genuine come-back.
The impression I have is that MM was a good soldier when 4e was in development and did the best he could for the game (whether he believed in what Hasbro & Heinsoo were doing or not). Once he was in charge, he changed direction as much as he could towards what he thought would do better (or what he identified as 'really D&D,' himself, his own sense of familiarity, perhaps).As for sabotage, I do feel Mike didn't support it as well as it should have been supported
Just a very few incidents I actually saw. The most blatant was: a player sitting down at a convention game, declaring he was trying 4e for the first time, and grousing out a litany of complaints straight off the internet. Then doing it again - yes, including "I'm trying 4e for the first time!" - at another game, at the same convention, the next day.I don't know that it was "actively sabotaged." Maybe you know something I don't know.
OK, maybe not then."Intelligent design" isn't just "design by someone who is intelligent in a general sense". It is, "Design by someone who knows what they are doing."
The market place isn't /nearly/ that rational, no.I think history supports me in this - if games were intelligently designed, they'd all be very fit, and would succeed. But gaming history is filled with games that just didn't cut the mustard. That shouldn't be true if intelligent design was the rule.
I'd like to see a concise history of what has changed from edition to edition, over time.
Could it be argued that bigger changes to the system happened earlier in it's history, but now that the core concepts have been codified and popularized they have changed less?
This even held for 4e, where they were rather specifically designing to deal with some problems they thought were important, only to find out that while the results were pleasing to some, it was a solution to a problem that didn't drive most folks' buying and playing.
Nothing like 'sabotage.'
Just a very few incidents I actually saw. The most blatant was: a player sitting down at a convention game, declaring he was trying 4e for the first time, and grousing out a litany of complaints straight off the internet. Then doing it again - yes, including "I'm trying 4e for the first time!" - at another game, at the same convention, the next day.
I guess, by gamer standards, I really don't stand out, because I was sitting right there as he did it, both times.
still kinda a head-shaker