D&D 5E 50th Anniversary and beyond

[DND_Reborn]

I was wondering if anyone believes these changes will result in them stopping buying new product?

I doubt I will buy much more of WotC D&D products--5E seems played out to me already and everything that is pouring out at this point reminds me too much of the splat books of 2E.

When a 6E comes out, I'll browse through the books at the bookstore, but unless I see some truly inspired and dramatic changes to the direction the game is going, I'll be done with new products.

 

[Geoff Thirlwell]

It’s the same for the ones published by WotC on the Guild DDAL-DRW-EP-03 When the Lights Went Out in Candlekeep - D&D Adventurers League | Dungeon Masters Guild

 

[darjr]

That’s the DM’s Guild. Fan-made content.

Not every AL Adventure is Fan Content, the main story arc folks, I think, get paid by WotC. Also I think many of these domain of delight ones do to. Over and above what they make from the DMSGUILD.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Hi
We‘ve been told there will be some sort of revision of the rules and aspects of the game for the 50th anniversary in 2024

The things we know about are:
Starting stat bonuses no longer being tied to race
The removal of character age, height and weight as factors
Changing monster and NPC spells to Actions rather than being the same as PC spells
Not having alignment tied to race and which in turn leads to the reduction of racial conflict
Presumably incorporating the class abilities from Tasha’s into the core game
Adventures carrying trigger warnings

Please forgive me if I’ve missed or misquoted anything. I don’t want to dredge up old and repeated arguments about the merits or lack of them for these points but I was wondering if anyone believes these changes will result in them stopping buying new product?
I personally don’t agree with many of the changes and as I’ve got a bit of a backlog of adventures I’ll probably stop buying new stuff when the revised rules come out. Does anyone else feel less than excited?

Cheers
Geoff

None of these changes put me off 5.5/6E personally.

However, the only which kind of offends me, and this is so dumb, is losing age/weight/height, because like, I guess not including that sort of detail just flummoxes me. Like, can't you tell me the typical ranges for a species or whatever? And then we can decide whether to be inside or outside them. Literally never stopped people before. I've never had a DM say "HOLD UP! That Dwarf is two inches too tall!" or "Stop right there, that human is outside the rolled weight range!!!" or the like, and age ranges seem pretty immutable. So anyway I feel like an idiot that this irks me, but it does.

I guess it's easily addressed for any home game though.

I think anyone who doesn't think all this stuff will be part of 5.5/6E is pretty silly to be honest. There's absolutely no possibility that a company committed enough to this vision that they're taking out default weight/height and stuff is going to go "Oh, we'll make adjustable stats optional though", given they're a vastly larger issue.

EDIT - You know what will make or break 5.5/6E for me though?

Art quality. If they don't have lots of high-quality art, and not just stuff second-handed from MtG, that's going to make a very poor case for paying for new products for me. And the layout/design needs to be improved or at least updated too.

(I may be a twit, but I know what I like! And it's good art!)

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Doesn't follow. Removing alignment won't get rid of conflicts. You can still have epic wars between orcs and elves, if you want there to be, but there needs to be something there other than "orcs are evil and want to kill elves, while elves are good and are fine with killing orcs."

You know, reasons like wanting land or resources, or getting revenge for something.

The social dynamics depicted in D&D settings deliberately seem to eschew racism. Most fantasy demographics seem to happily mix races as if they were all humans (or actually better than if they were all humans). I can see them having a Luskan/Baldur's Gate grab for resources leading to a war much more likely than a elves vs humans grab for resources. Because they'd have to deal with the minorities among each side (and there are few 100% racially homogenous places in the common settings right now to avoid that) ; it's not waters I see them treading.

 

[Charlaquin]

Not every AL Adventure is Fan Content, the main story arc folks, I think, get paid by WotC. Also I think many of these domain of delight ones do to. Over and above what they make from the DMSGUILD.

Ah, good correction, thank you.

 

[darjr]

5e is still roaring along. I find new players asking for DMs and players at an increasing rate. And none of this seems like a show stopper.

In fact it’s a sign that WotC is paying attention. Which is awesome.

Having said that I do prefer spells in stat blocks the way LevelUp does it. I hope other 3rd party books adopt that style.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Actually no. First, 5e is less than 10 years old, so it was not portrayed that new way except recently, after about half its life so far. Moreover, it certainly does not represent any universe of D&D published so far, just the way the game is forced to evolve under external pressures which actually have little to do with the game itself, which has actually been more or less consistent with itself for... well, actually, we are nearing its 50th anniversary.

Furthermore, anything is totally wild speculation at this stage, for example the lineages who sent some people in a crazy frenzy with the UA release have now been completely suppressed from the last two official books, which means that they remain just an artefact of Van Richten, my guess is that they won't make it into the anniversary changes. But again, wild guesses - including mine just above - is all we have.

What do you mean by "completely suppressed"? I didn't get the latest two books yet (saving cash for personal reasons), are you saying that the new races in those books have fixed stat bonuses, suggested alignments, height/weight/age stuff, and so on? Or do you just mean they're not para-racial lineages like in Van Richten's?

EDIT - Looking online it looks like they don't have fixed stat bonuses, suggested alignments, height/weight etc. - So I guess you must mean they just aren't lineages in the sense of being para-racial?

 

[Charlaquin]

None of these changes put me off 5.5/6E personally.

However, the only which kind of offends me, and this is so dumb, is losing age/weight/height, because like, I guess not including that sort of detail just flummoxes me. Like, can't you tell me the typical ranges for a species or whatever? And then we can decide whether to be inside or outside them. Literally never stopped people before. I've never had a DM say "HOLD UP! That Dwarf is two inches too tall!" or "Stop right there, that human is outside the rolled weight range!!!" or the like, and age ranges seem pretty immutable. So anyway I feel like an idiot that this irks me, but it does.

I guess it's easily addressed for any home game though.

Yeah, I think that decision was pretty baffling to, like, everyone. The only way I can square it is to figure they wanted to make a broad rule that PC races only tell you what your individual character is like, not about the lineage broadly. Your individual elf character can have +2/+1 to any ability scores, and the race rules for elves won’t tell you any differently. If you want to know what most elves’ ability scores are like, it’s in the monster manual. Likewise, your individual elf character can be anywhere from 1’9” to 9’11” tall, and the rules for the elf race won’t tell you any differently. If you want to know how tall most elves are, it’s in the random heights and weights table.

That’s my speculation on it, anyway,

 

[Oofta]

Yeah, I think that decision was pretty baffling to, like, everyone. The only way I can square it is to figure they wanted to make a broad rule that PC races only tell you what your individual character is like, not about the lineage broadly. Your individual elf character can have +2/+1 to any ability scores, and the race rules for elves won’t tell you any differently. If you want to know what most elves’ ability scores are like, it’s in the monster manual. Likewise, your individual elf character can be anywhere from 1’9” to 9’11” tall, and the rules for the elf race won’t tell you any differently. If you want to know how tall most elves are, it’s in the random heights and weights table.

That’s my speculation on it, anyway,

My personal preference is to have default values and ranges, perhaps with limits. I like to know what range 80% of halflings fall in for height and weight but it's fine if some fall outside of that. On the other hand, I don't want 7 foot tall halflings any more than there are humans that are 12 foot tall.

With a lot of things, I think a general descriptor of the average helps establish a picture of that race. Dwarves, to me, are short and stocky but in muscular way. They're a hardy race that varies between 3'6" up to 5' or a little under. They generally seek order and tradition while running around in the heaviest armor they can afford. My dwarf? He's scrawny, weighs less than most dwarves and rejects the clans traditions while seeking out the mysteries of the arcane.

But that "oddball" dwarf loses something for me if there is no baseline, no default. Doesn't matter to my home game of course but I think the game loses something if we lose that common grounding and shared vision. Sometimes feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

But we'll see. Nobody really knows what the anniversary edition will look like. I doubt the people working on it even know.