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

[Fanaelialae]

@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.

I could see it maybe hurting the second hand market. I remember a few years ago I was looking around for a copy of Red Hand of Doom and I was absolutely stupified by the prices I was able to find (IIRC, well over $100).

Once it became available on DM's Guild, I was able to pick it up for a fairly reasonable price. I just checked and Amazon doesn't appear to have any listings for it whatsoever. That might just be a coincidence, or it might mean that DM's Guild put the price gougers out of business. I'd view that as a good thing.

 

[MerricB]

I could see it maybe hurting the second hand market. I remember a few years ago I was looking around for a copy of Red Hand of Doom and I was absolutely stupified by the prices I was able to find (IIRC, well over $100).

Once it became available on DM's Guild, I was able to pick it up for a fairly reasonable price. I just checked and Amazon doesn't appear to have any listings for it whatsoever. That might just be a coincidence, or it might mean that DM's Guild put the price gougers out of business. I'd view that as a good thing.

A few years ago, with the resurgence of D&D, the market for old materials became very tight. I'd been collecting older D&D materials, and I noticed how much more expensive they suddenly became.

(Have a look for the price for the out-of-print Tal Dorei book from Green Ronin!)

 

[Thomas Shey]

Not disagreeing here.

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

Just to be clear, before I answer that, I assume you're talking Pathfinder?

 

[darjr]

Just to be clear, before I answer that, I assume you're talking Pathfinder?

Yea

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yea

Okay, here's my view on what went down there (and note there's some evidence that Pathfinder was briefly number one):

Paizo was a well respected producer of adventures for D&D3 and 3.5. They also, if I'm not conflating them with someone else, produced both Dungeon and Dragon for a while.

Along comes D&D 4e. I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of whether that edition was a fundamental mistake, if there were presentation problems, if there was enemy action in the form of people on the Net actively trying to sabotage it, or any of that; I don't have enough of a dog in that fight (I respect 4e's design, but don't particularly like it), and it doesn't particularly matter. What matters is that there were a pretty impressive number of 3e players who, for whatever reason, did not want to make the jump to 4e. They wanted to stick with 3e.

So Paizo, essentially, gave them what they wanted: a somewhat cleaned up 3.5 that Paizo was going to continue supplying support for (all as a consequence of the OGL). Its success was a mix of having a more than competent company (not only familiar with the system and capable of doing what was, effectively, a thought through set of house rules for 3.5, but capable of making it look good and get into distribution, coming from a company a lot of 3e fans already respect), the option the OGL presented, and the particular zeitgeist of the moment in the D&D community.

(This comes up a lot when discussion of the sales of PF 2e are brought up. Even though the latter seems to be doing perfectly respectable sales, a lot of people seem to want to think its a failure because its not doing PF 1e numbers, even though those numbers were almost certainly only possible because of the perfect storm of the 3e-4e D&D transition and likely will not be duplicated ever.)

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Those are foul too. Umami is just an alternative spelling for vomit.

Not a fan of garlic or soy sauce, then?

 

[Malmuria]

And pretending that 4e has no relationship to this (again, not causality, but there is absolutely some connection) is only something that someone who (a) hates 4e would say and (b) is therefore intent on ensuring its gets no legacy rebound (even if it doesn't have a resurgence).

There is waaaaaay too much kindred tech and design ethos between 4e and so many of these indie games (not to mention so many of these designers liked/respected and/or played 4e).

Oh, I thought the implication was that, with dnd taking up less space overall, there was room for indie designers to gain more traction. That is, 4e's relative lack of popularity was what enabled other products to gain attention, pathfinder, indie games, osr, etc. Is that not the case? For example, take all the publishers developing 5e-compatible products. On one hand, you can say 5e's popularity creates a market for them. But conversely, those companies might be able to produce for other systems or focus on their own systems if not for 5e's dominance.

Myself and several others on here (and elsewhere) spent a huge amount of time during that era trying to convince/teach people to (a) view 4e through an indie design lens (thereby undoing some of the really bad marketing ploys/gaffes of 4e - eg "ze game remains ze same" - no it doesn't - and "skip the gate guards and get to the fun"...how about the less incendiary "cut to the action" or Dogs less flammable "at every moment, drive play toward conflict" instead?) and (b) embrace the GMing Techniques and Principles and Player Best Practices that undergird such play.

But the collective cacophony and resolve by a select group of edition warriors to wage a scorched earth campaign on the game (and WotC at that moment in time) was just_far_too much.

I would LOVE to behold an alternative universe where (i) the game was released in, say, 2018, (particularly after the Blades in the Dark, PBtA love-fest) and (ii) the game was released without the utterly unhelpful stuff I listed above (no...the game is not the same and cut to the action and Skill Challenges should be informed by Fail Forward, Success w/ Complications, and every moment of action resolution should dynamically Change the Situation). Edition Warriors would still besiege places with a frantic, pearl-clutching, obfuscating hatred...but now there is so much more widespread understanding of, and love for, indie games and the type of design and play that 4e represented.

Would be interesting.

This is interesting. I never played 4e, but I recently started a BitD game what I like about it is how different it is from dnd, or at least dnd as I know it. But part of that is that combat isn't resolved via tactical mini-game and therefore isn't a focus of playing. Whereas my impression was that 4e really focused on the tactical mini-game aspect of dnd?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Oh, I thought the implication was that, with dnd taking up less space overall, there was room for indie designers to gain more traction. That is, 4e's relative lack of popularity was what enabled other products to gain attention, pathfinder, indie games, osr, etc. Is that not the case? For example, take all the publishers developing 5e-compatible products. On one hand, you can say 5e's popularity creates a market for them. But conversely, those companies might be able to produce for other systems or focus on their own systems if not for 5e's dominance.

Look at all the games coming out for specific properties using their own systems.

It just seems to be that the only way to conclude that 5e's success isn't enabling the success of other ventures is by wanting to conclude that.

 

[Mallus]

This simple test shows where the player's priorities are — whether they prioritize keeping their character alive and making sure they succeed, or rising stakes and embracing the fact that the player is the main adversary of their character.

There's no correct answer to "what does a player want out of a scene?", except their answer. Whatever it is.

Now I'm curious about your own designs. Can a person who seems remarkably bad at discussing games actually make good games? My gut answer is "yes', they are two separate skill sets. Artists are often they last people you want to hear talk about their work.

I guess it's time to check out your shop...

 

[Malmuria]

The negative reaction to 4e formatting is a real thing, but it absolutely baffles me. As I've often posted, I love immersion in the fiction and inhabitation of the character - but the rules text is not part of this. It's a means for establishing the fiction, not the fiction per se, and the crisper the better.

I can only imagine that those who rely on the rules text to be part of their understanding of the fiction are approaching RPGing with a very different mindset from my own

Then why do rulebooks have lots of (expensive) full color art? I think a lot of people engage with the game just by reading the books. I know when I was little a lot of my interaction with the game came through this kind of "lonely fun." Not that that's ideal--I would have like to be playing, and rpgs are inherently social, but there is a sense in which people approach a game, including the rulebook, more through its overall aesthetic than through the rules (Vampire was also very much this way for me).

It also might be true that a lot of players don't engage with the rules at all. Certainly when I was 10 we were 'playing dnd' but probably getting most of the rules wrong. Or, more recently, an interaction that I had with a friend that I introduced to the game last year. We were playing 5e, and I wanted to move to The Black Hack, and I asked her if she would enjoy a game similar to dnd but with fewer rules. She said, "what do you mean by rules?"