D&D 5E Am I no longer WoTC's target audience?

[Mistwell]

5E lost me, Curse of Strahd (the only 5E product I've bought) alienated me to the point I'm planning to sell it ... yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm not the target audience anymore.

What is it that you do not like about it?

 

[Anoth]

5E has been a veritable love letter to the history of D&D and long-time fans.

I6 and Ravenloft
The Temple of Elemental Evil
Acererak and the Tomb of Horrors
White Plume Mountain, Against the Giants
The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, The Isle of Dread
Mordenkainen, Volo, Xanathar
Waterdeep, Underdark, Demon Lords
Undermountain, Halaster Blackcloak, Baldur's Gate
The list goes on and on.

Honestly, if you can't tell you're being catered to, then I don't know what to say. WotC has been chasing after you as desperately as a
teenage boy chases after the girl in an 80's romantic comedy.

i like 5E, but I would in no way call it a love letter to the history of D&D. I would call it quite the opposite. It’s almost like they are trying to look somewhat like earlier D&D and yet be quite antithetical to it. That is my opinion. 5E is a good game, but it is a very different animal with very different goals.

 

[Mistwell]

The primary audiences for a luxury hobby are the ones with little to no disposable income? Interesting business model; not sure you could get a loan for that, though.

I don't agree with his premise but yours is silly as well. Obviously parents buy stuff for their kids. I'd venture to guess most starter sets are not bought by the people who end up receiving them, for example.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I am no longer part of their target audience. I was in year one, but no longer. And I’m perfectly ok with that. My background is similar to the OP’s. And 5e managed to bring me back in after over 15 years of skipping new D&D products.

Most of the releases don’t appeal to me at all. goSM is the only one, and I suspect a lot of that has to do with it being reskinned retro adventures. I do like half of the UA as well. But that’s it.

Doesn’t matter though. They have me playing 5e . Old school folks like me are used to creating our own campaign worlds anyway, so it’s no big deal. I don’t expect them to put out products that I have to like. They need to bring in fresh blood, and I fully support all these other products even if they have no appeal to me because more people playing is a good thing. For everyone.

 

[cmad1977]

You haven’t been the target audience since the 90’s.

 

[hawkeyefan]

They’re trying to reach as wide an audience as possible. I think the variety of their line and the broad utility of moat of their products shows that. They want each release to reach as many people as possible.

This means that some products will be your cup of tea and others won’t. I don’t really see how that’s any different from prior editions.

I mean, the basic rules are free. They have multiple starter set kind of products. They certainly want to reach new audiences. I don’t think that means that they don’t want to sell products to their existing audience.

I don’t think it needs to be one or the other.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I have a memory of them saying something like that. I also remember them saying they were going to make Next very modular, so you could make 5e play exactly like an older edition of D&D. As you can see, that didn't exactly happen. That was one of the biggest selling points of 5e for me, being able to use my 2e stuff with no problem with 5e.

Curious. For pretty much the first two years, I almost exclusively used 1e adventures and setting material in 5e. And I found it exceptionally easy to convert. I could even do it on the fly. So I’m curious to know what your hurdles were.

 

[Azurewraith]

Certainly not alone I find myself feeling this way with a couple of my hobbies mainly TTRPGs and video games, unfortunately I think it's just the way of the world companies move on to what the masses want.

 

[Parmandur]

The primary audiences for a luxury hobby are the ones with little to no disposable income? Interesting business model; not sure you could get a loan for that, though.

The give the game away for free: the real money is in merchandising, which is a long game of building up customer loyalty. See also, the heavy emphasis the past few years on D&D children's books.

Sure, you won't get a loan for it, that's why it is part of the investment portfolio of a multi-billion dollar corporation that hopes to monetize the IP in the end.

 

[Eltab]

I am clearly not WotC's target audience:
Except for Rise of Tiamat (which I bought myself - I was DM'ing it) and the PHB (received as a Christmas present), everything I have 5e came from borrowing the book at the Public Library and copying off the rules / chapters containing something I liked.
On top of that, I have left the coveted 17 - 35 demographic (or whatever the exact ages are), with no hope of returning to it.

Why would WotC ever care that I want a Dark Sun Sourcebook? (Besides being one way to actually get money out of my wallet.) Because the most fun to me as DM is bringing new players in to try out this game and see how it works - and they pick up on their own as enthusiastic participants, creating characters, thinking up adventures or campaigns, looking for minis, and presently buying the merchandise they need to 'put it all together'.