D&D 5E Is 5e's Success Actually Bad for Other Games?

[Parmandur]

Yea. But if they mean board game mechanics influenced 4e design, they are right. Heinso, a board and card game designer as well, said so.

I mean, it is notable that Dungeons & Dragons Adventure System board games are still in print, and they've made new games recently: as a board game, 4E Lite worked out very well.

 

[Thomas Shey]

sorry, I wasn’t engaging with that debate.

MerricB stated something about the kinds of games that “took over” when D&D was in trouble.

Pathfinder was the main one this recent round. I just wanted to note that the last round there was no decent D&D clone. And to wonder if there had been would it have taken the place of Vampire.

Seems unlikely. It might have weakened the overall position of Vampire, but Vampire was serving a market that no heroic-fantasy game of any stripe was going to serve.

 

[Fanaelialae]

It's from Hagakure, I've just replaced Bushidō with roleplaying.


Are there, though? In order to even start playing, say, an OSR game (which I personally consider a separate hobby, as exactly zero of best practices can be shared with other RPGs, but anyway), you have to betray the very idea of mitigating and managing risks -- because delving into dangerous tombs filled with deadly traps and equally deadly monsters with zero guarantee that it won't even be already looted or just empty in the first place (y'know, negadungeons) is the opposite risk management, it's a thinly-veiled suicide attempt!

Mitigating and managing is not the same as utterly eliminating something. The point of OSR play is to get as many of the rewards as possible, while keeping your risk low.

Saying that OSR play is a separate hobby is IMO nonsensical. I guess in that case DW and Vampire are completely different hobbies too, since they play quite differently? I mean, come on. The hobby is small enough without subdividing every different playstyle into it's own individual "hobby".

I mix OSR play techniques with a generally modern playstyle. Somehow, in spite of that, for a while I was running for three weekly groups who showed up every week eager to play. I only stopped because running that many games was starting to burn me out. Believe or not, despite that what I was doing was "impossible", I did not tear a hole in the space-time continuum.

 

[Aldarc]

The period of the rise of boardgames has spanned 2000-2021. (I use 2000 as an arbitrary starting date as it's the founding of BoardGameGeek and the publication of Carcassone - but as you can see from Catan, it started a little bit before that).

It's not something that just happened. It's been growing and growing since about the same time as the release of 3E.

The Settlers of Catan (1995)
Carcassonne (2000)
Ticket to Ride (2004)

Cheers!

Hmmm… it may be better then to speak in terms of the pre-Tabletop and Tabletop era because Tabletop was what really boosted my friends’ awareness and desire to try playing board games, and the Wheaton effect was a real thing. Tabletop was definitely part of this era of raising board game consciousness. It was also when a lot more YouTube content creators were beginning to really make content about board games.

 

[darjr]

Seems unlikely. It might have weakened the overall position of Vampire, but Vampire was serving a market that no heroic-fantasy game of any stripe was going to serve.

Not disagreeing here.

why do you think a D&D clone did take the second spot the second time around?

 

[MerricB]

Hmmm… it may be better then to speak in terms of the pre-Tabletop and Tabletop era because Tabletop was what really boosted my friends’ awareness and desire to try playing board games, and the Wheaton effect was a real thing. Tabletop was definitely part of this era of raising board game consciousness. It was also when a lot more YouTube content creators were beginning to really make content about board games.

What's actually happened is that we've had the rise of youtube and similar mediums as a way of disseminating knowledge about tabletop hobbies.

One of the reasons I finally started painting minis was because there were very good tutorial videos posted on youtube.
Boardgames started getting reviews on youtube. Tabletop started on... that site.
And we finally started getting RPG videos.

 

[Umbran]

Well, "death" can mean "trouble" in this context, and pretty much nothing would change

Okay, that'll function.

I still have issues with the litmus test, but for your own use it is not for me to quibble with.

 

[Umbran]

People who have played only D&D are most of the time are just bad players...

Maybe people who have played only D&D will not mesh well at your table.

But how about you take the One True Wayism of gaming... elsewhere, please. It is kind of insulting.

 

[MerricB]

Not disagreeing here.

why do you think a D&D clone did take the second spot the second time around?

Because 4E felt, to a lot of people, not like D&D. And the reason D&D is popular is that people like playing D&D or something like it! (That core loop of kill monsters, gain loot, and level-up is VERY strong - strong enough to be adopted by computer games, and still going strong today). Plenty of people tried 4E, but they didn't like it enough. And so they stuck with 3E - even though the publisher had changed. That's enough people to take 2nd spot, even if the numbers were far less than those that were with 3E in the day.

Vampire itself was unusual. A very strong role-playing experience. I don't know if we've really had that since - yes, there are good role-playing RPGs since then, but rarely paired with a strong theme that draws people in.

One of the problems I have with the idea that "D&D must be weak to allow other RPGs in" is that I don't think it's supported by evidence. I think games do well when they are good and when they are lucky. You need both. (Mind you, releasing a new RPG in the year of a new major edition of D&D might not be great. That would be the years 2000 and 2014).

Although, thinking about it, how much D&D is saturating the market may have an effect. With 3E, the early years saw the d20 Glut, when any other RPG would likely struggle due to stores not having enough money to stock everything available. But post-2003, I don't think that would be the case any more.

But the thing with 5E is that there hasn't been a glut of products. Nowhere near the same scale. And there have been some rather big releases of non-D&D material. Albeit, some not all that well handled. 7th Sea, for instance?

 

[darjr]

@MerricB I think the glut is there. But this time around it isn’t hurting the retailers. Specifically DMsGuild. They do not suffer from to many items in the shelves, at least not catastrophically.

But I think individual sellers might. Though maybe enough of them don’t to make it a healthy industry? I dunno.
I’d love to hear more from folks in this topic.