I think far more of it is applicable than not. It perfectly matches my experience with modern players.
Imperfect communication on my part - Applying the general ideas to RPG design vs adopting the specific CRPGs implementations...
The spell slots are too restrictive, the spell descriptions too restrictive, class, levels, etc are all too restrictive for that kind of play to be viable. But that's still where the game pushes play to go. Making most things trivial with skip buttons littered throughout the game and monsters drastically undertuned compared to PCs.
I agree that many of these players would be better served with a system like:
Age of Sigmar: Soulbound.
But D&D is the market leader, and for the majority if RPG groups;
close enough is good enough.
In my opinion:
Other than being the least complex WotC edition of D&D, which has worked in WotC's favor;
there is nothing inherent in the actual design of 5e that is responsible for the massive upswing in the popularity of D&D.
It is a pop culture phenomenon that WotC marketing has been savvy enough to ride the wave of to unbelievable sales numbers.
But different people find different things fun. I think it's fun to be challenged in a game. Apparently the vast majority of survey respondents do not. At all. Hence the cakewalk tuning of 5E.
I think they realized that there are at least 10 players for every 1 DM and so catered to their main audience...the players.
A classic failure to protect players from themselves.
The overwhelming majority of players are Normies to whom D&D is a past time; not a hobby.
Normies don't work for their entertainment. That's why Normies rarely have hobbies; hobbies require work from participants while pastimes do not.
Normies
generally don't buy RPG stuff. GM's are the hobbyists that buy the product.
Tabletop RPGs require work, which is foisted off by Normies to the Game Master; he is
generally the sole hobbyist in a group and thus it is he that puts in the work to make and keep the game going. While the Normies who make up the bulk of the players do nothing more than show up, play the game, and then leave to do something else until next time.
I am lucky in that most in my Sunday group are also hobbyists. We have three people that have GM'd different systems at various times.
Yet even when we ran a short campaign of 5e, how many actually bought the books out of 5 people? Just me.
IMHO - giving disproportionate weight to the desires of players that are not the majority demographic that actually buys the product, and not giving equal weight to GM concerns/desires who do make up the majority demo that actually buys the books is a
long term mistake that will come back to bite them.
I think that the blistering success of 5e is sending the designers a false market signal that a lot of these new players will become long term hobbyists.
Hence the gradual shift in 5e marketing from attracting back all the old guard that left D&D in the 4e era with a less complex edition, to now explicitly catering to the new player base gained in the past few years to the near exclusion of other concerns.
And that is not to say that anything really bad will happen to D&D, or that it will no longer be the market leader when the boom ends. Just that the downturn after the boom will be bigger than they estimate, and they may have to make more of a design course correction than they anticipate.
The current momentum will keep things going for a while though.
If our visions of fun are too different, we find other people to play with who match up better with our expectations. If our visions are similar enough to warrant ironing things out, then we do. There's no group that "has to" play with a given DM and no DM who "has to" run for a given group.
Exactly.
Voting with your feet is the path to happy gaming.
The president of WotC does play the game. Both of them.
As a past time, not a hobby. There is a big difference between the two.
