D&D (2024) I think we are on the cusp of a sea change.

[Professor Murder]

My gut feeling is a push for more and more online tools, with the goal of production values making DnD stand out from the general competition. Hell, I buy 3rd party materials semi-regularly for DnD but have reluctance incorporating it due to it being an extra step or three to incorporate it into DnDBeyond. People may have reservations about the game as a system, but if you give the game the best means of delivery, especially for the increasing reality of teleplay groups, you are going to dominate. It's just shocking that they haven't done more. But what you have to remember is that the market is still small when compared to nearly every other major commercialized self entertainment. Compared to Video Games, people are fighting over pennies. I'm a lifer, so I'm just hopeful that this surge of young people entering the hobby will produce some future lifers to play with.

 

[Professor Murder]

Also, perhaps it is just me, but I am liking the shift in priorities, the widening of playstyles. This is coming from someone who started with 1st ed ADnD. Dungeons are boring.

 

[Mordhau]

All I can say about the 90s rpg scence in Australia is that AD&D was viewed as an outdated primitive kind of system for kids and that just about everyone graduated to play games that didn't use stuff like classes and levels.

A lot of 2nd edition settings were well regarded, but you converted them to Stormbringer, or Gurps or Runequest or something like that.

And in the early 2000s, with 3.XE, it took a very different approach to classes, one which made classes very simplistic in a way that 4E and 5E didn't. It really felt like if Tweet had been completely off the leash we'd have seen the classes collapsed down and several deleted outright.

What people like now seems to be different - they come to TT RPGs with existing expectations about classes, which wasn't really the case in earlier eras. It makes narrow and specific classes and subclasses perhaps more palatable than in any previous era.

I've long felt that a lot of recurring problems in D&D have basically come about from the fact that it was a class and level system designed by people who really didn't want to be writing a class and level system.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think it's been longer than that. Classes have been a part of the game for more than 40 years and even before MMORPGs were around plenty of video games were influenced by D&D.

My point was that at one time people getting into RPGs had littler or no structural expectations, but computer games did change that, and MMOs upped the reach of those pretty vastly.

 

[Thomas Shey]

All I can say about the 90s rpg scence in Australia is that AD&D was viewed as an outdated primitive kind of system for kids and that just about everyone graduated to play games that didn't use stuff like classes and levels.

I should have made it clear my statement was U.S.-centric. Some countries were very heavily influenced very early by RQ, for example.

 

[MGibster]

Also, perhaps it is just me, but I am liking the shift in priorities, the widening of playstyles. This is coming from someone who started with 1st ed ADnD. Dungeons are boring.

I like the widening of playstyles as well. I'm not sure D&D's current class system supports that very well. If I want to make a character that's good at talking to people, I'm not going with a Fighter or Barbarian. Sure, I could jump through some hoops to make them decent at talking but it's much easier to just go with Rogue, Bard, or Warlock.

 

[Mordhau]

I should have made it clear my statement was U.S.-centric. Some countries were very heavily influenced very early by RQ, for example.

I think the biggest influence at the time was Storyteller games. At one point Vampire was outselling AD&D I believe.

Virtually everyone I knew had either graduated from AD&D (at high school) to Storyteller or had started (usually at University age) with Storyteller. People tended to approach other systems for fantasy due to the perceived out-of-dateness of AD&D.

Virtually every new game being produced in the late 90s was some kind of Stat+Skill with Advantages/Disadvantages game. For a while there the hobby seemed to have settled on a consensus in rpg design approach.

 

[Professor Murder]

I like the widening of playstyles as well. I'm not sure D&D's current class system supports that very well. If I want to make a character that's good at talking to people, I'm not going with a Fighter or Barbarian. Sure, I could jump through some hoops to make them decent at talking but it's much easier to just go with Rogue, Bard, or Warlock.

I think a part of this will come down to how much you want there to be rules systems for roleplaying interactions. Me, I like having them, but I find in the heat of things they are often overlooked. I totally grok that DnD's largest and most developed system is combat and therefore that's what it points people towards.

 

[Professor Murder]

I think the biggest influence at the time was Storyteller games. At one point Vampire was outselling AD&D I believe.

Virtually everyone I knew had either graduated from AD&D (at high school) to Storyteller or had started (usually at University age) with Storyteller. People tended to approach other systems for fantasy due to the perceived out-of-dateness of AD&D.

Virtually every new game being produced in the late 90s was some kind of Stat+Skill with Advantages/Disadvantages game. For a while there the hobby seemed to have settled on a consensus in rpg design approach.

Yep. Played a shitload of WoD. Still love it for LARP. RPG game design was widened even further. A lot of the design energy feels towards more minimalist design right now.

 

[MGibster]

I think a part of this will come down to how much you want there to be rules systems for roleplaying interactions. Me, I like having them, but I find in the heat of things they are often overlooked. I totally grok that DnD's largest and most developed system is combat and therefore that's what it points people towards.

I'm one of those weirdos who think that the rules influence how a game is played. I have observed many times over the years D&D players avoiding engaging in conversation with NPCs because they weren't playing a "talky" character class. I don't do that, I'll have my characters talk to everyone whether they're good at it or not. I think anyone who wants D&D to expand into a more storyteller is going to have to address the problems with Charisma and communication oriented skills and the class system.