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

[Malmuria]

tbh this would be my favorite rpg, if I could ever play it:
The authors of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre were roleplaying long before Dungeons & Dragons

ps. this thread has me looking up adding anchovy paste to homemade burgers. I think I might do it.

 

[Manbearcat]

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.

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?

I'm not sure what you mean by the implication here? Do you mean things other people are saying or things I'm saying?

If you're soliciting my thoughts, I've posted them above quite a bit (on both the 5e "rising tide lifts all boats" hypothesis and others as it pertains to indie games and 4e's relationship design-wise), but I'll throw a pithy recap here.

4e's relationship to indie game design is pretty clear (and its something that was clear way back when and I spoke about it a lot 10+ years ago):

* Ethos-wise, "say yes or roll the dice" + "at every moment, drive play toward conflict" from Dogs is basically 4e 101 and "cut to the action" that you see all over indie games (and Blades) deeply informs the game + how friendly the game is to Story Now/Play to Find Out (and alternatively, how relatively difficult it is for the GMs to exert Force).

* Design-wise, subjective DCs + keyword tech + the sort of player-authored Kicker approach of Quests + the table-facing system architecture + the narrow/focused premise + Skill Challenges as closed scene resolution + Fail Forward + Change the Situation + Success With Complications...all this stuff is pervasive in indie design (from Dogs in the Vineyard, to Fate, to Cortex+, to Mouse Guard, to Apocalypse World, to Blades). Not to mention the tight, focused, integrated design of the system.


As far as 5e's influence goes, the zeitgeist of "making being a nerd cool" (celebrity culture embracing gaming and the streaming aspect of play) plays a huge hand in the proliferation of nerd culture broadly and the courageous creativity of sticking your neck out and designing games specifically.

 

[pemerton]

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?

Some RPG rulebooks I own have lots of expensive full colour art; post-TSR D&D ones; some Monte Cook ones; two games both using art licensed from comics: Prince Valiant and Marvel Heroic; and my PDFs for The One Ring.

I have many RPGs with no full colour art, and only modest amounts of art overall: the Rolemaster that I ran for 20 years; Classic Traveller and Burning Wheel, which I have active games in; all the Vincent Baker PDFs that I own.

The most recent RPG books that I bought are The Green Knight and Agon 2nd edition. Both use colour in their layout scheme, but The Green Knight has very little interior art (and its not full colour), while Agon's art is colour but mostly using a few tones.

I find that RPG art can set an expectation of what the game is about. It may inspire imagination - I once set up an encounter in 4e D&D that was inspired by the cover of Dungeonscape.

But if an illustration or diagram in a RPG is meant to be explaining a process of gameplay than I want it to be crisp and clear (Agon has some diagrams like this; conversely, I find the 4e PHB's labelled illustration of a PC sheet to be unhelpfully busy and not terribly clear). As I posted upthread, the way these aspects of a RPG book ignite my imagination is by prompting me to envisage play. They are not themselves a component of, or element in, my imagining; they are a means, not an end.

I think a lot of people engage with the game just by reading the books.

I often read through RPG rulebooks, But as I posted, I am not reading them as fiction to imagine. The imagination they spark is of the situations that might arise from them in play.

In a couple of other recent threads, I posted that this is part of my frustration with patient, caution-oriented, dungeoncrawling of the classic D&D sort: because the setups in that sort of game suggest vivid scenes (PCs fleeing through dark corridors; crises with devouring green demon-mouths; as per the recent "fair trap" thread, the comedic horror of the party being sprayed with gelatinous cube goop) but when the game is being played well (ie the players are exercising appropriate care and skill) then none of this comes to pass.

I find this dissonance between what a RPG text leads me to imagine, and what the gameplay can deliver, can come up in other ways: the Foreword to Moldvay Basic, which is mostly a story of liberating the land from a dragon tyrant using a sword gifted by a mysterious cleric, is one example; illustrations that show things happening that aren't consistent with the game rules or elements are another.

As I said, I imagine that there are others approaching RPGing with a very different mindset.

 

[pemerton]

tbh this would be my favorite rpg, if I could ever play it:
The authors of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre were roleplaying long before Dungeons & Dragons

ps. this thread has me looking up adding anchovy paste to homemade burgers. I think I might do it.

Not by the Brontes - in fact a translation from the French game designed by our contemporary Philippe Tromeur - but the RPG Wuthering Heights is worth a look. (It's free here or here - the two versions aren't identical, and there are also some additional rules in the French version.)

 

[Malmuria]

Not by the Brontes - in fact a translation from the French game designed by our contemporary Philippe Tromeur - but the RPG Wuthering Heights is worth a look. (It's free here or here - the two versions aren't identical, and there are also some additional rules in the French version.)

thanks!

 

[pemerton]

thanks!

No worries! Here's an actual play post from when I GMed a session.

 

[cmad1977]

My experience of 4E was that most people I played with began seeing their character as a game piece with specific preprogrammed capabilities, rather than as a complex individual character.

I’ve never played a game where people looked down at their sheets so much.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I’ve never played a game where people looked down at their sheets so much.

Its pretty common with any game where people have an extensive option list, and the fact the D&D sphere has been focused on exception-based design for its abilities pretty much ensures it with anything using it that does that.

Honestly, I saw it in high level spellcasters since the dim times; people just weren't used to seeing it with other classes.

 

[Don Durito]

I honestly don't really see a lot of difference between 4e and 5e in terms of the intrusions of mechanical aspects into characters. Even since 3rd edition if I have to make a D&D character I often feel like I'm perusing the available options and then trying to ram a square peg into a round hole to get a character with the mechanics that somewhat approximates what I want to do.

Like say I want to make a character that was raised by a school of necromancers but then decided it wasn't for him and left to become a warrior. What's the best way to represent this mechanically? Take a level of Wizard, take the Magic Initiate feat? The Ritual Caster Feat? Aim for the Eldritch Knight subclass? All have trade-offs and all bring a certain level of awkwardness (eg the Eldritch Knight gives some magic but it's the wrong type of magic - not necromancy). 5e isn't really worse at this than previous editions but it's not better either.

In regards to looking at character sheets during play, I still remember the long detour I took through 3 different sections of the Players Handbook and the useless index to try and work out what the fog cloud spell my character could cast actually did. Ie. what does 'Heavily obscured' actually mean? (It certainly is not natural language). I feel like if players are spending less time looking at their character sheets in 5e it's because they haven't got what they need written on their character sheets (there's too much to write) and are therefore looking through the books or using google instead.

Or they're playing a Champion.

 

[cmad1977]

Its pretty common with any game where people have an extensive option list, and the fact the D&D sphere has been focused on exception-based design for its abilities pretty much ensures it with anything using it that does that.

Honestly, I saw it in high level spellcasters since the dim times; people just weren't used to seeing it with other classes.

Yes. That’s a bad thing though…

I don’t see it as much anymore.