D&D 5E 5e isn't a Golden Age of D&D Lorewise, it's Silver at best.

[Scribe]

I mean, if the metric is lore?

5e is the dark ages of iconoclasts.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The 3e FRCS was perfectly croment for starting a person off getting their head wrapped around the Forgotten Realms.

If they could get past Chapter 4 without dying of boredom.

It's a useful reference for those who live in the pre-Google age, but good grief it's dull if you try to read it cover-to-cover. Why would a player ever care that Turmish exports glass and salt?! It's chock full of completely useless information.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I DO!

A&W tastes decent, has a slight vanilla taste to it.

Barqs tastes completely like medicine. Several of the other types do as well, but none as strongly as Barqs does.

Personally, I'm a fan of Barq's. I find most root beer to be cloyingly sweet (which is saying something, because I love sweet stuff.) Barqs, with the sharpness induced by the caffeine and other flavor tweaks, avoids that cloying sweetness and thus manages to be actually refreshing. (Plus I just like caffeinated soda.)

 

[JiffyPopTart]

I will say, in the spirit of the OP, I have seen a seeming shift in the conversation regarding 5e over the past...year, perhaps two years at most.

That is, up until a year or two ago, it was strange to go more than a few months without someone gushing over 5e, showering it with praise and adulation. I personally found such threads quite tedious, and thus stayed far away. But I noticed their presence. Obviously such threads were very common when 5e first came out so people were all jumping on the bandwagon as it were, but even after they died down, they remained pretty steady for quite a while. As stated, if more than a couple months went by without a thread like that, it was a surprise.

And then, they seemed to slow and stop. Obviously it's hard to notice an absence, but as I said, over the past year or two it seems like people have shifted their attitude about 5e. It's no longer all sunshine and rainbows and puppies for everyone and eternal sugar-frosted happiness for all. There's a certain....I wouldn't call it "disillusionment," that's much too strong, but perhaps "chagrin"? Maybe it would be better to say the honeymoon has well and truly worn off, and the day-to-day foibles and the chafe of certain restrictions has begun to show. I don't think it's at all a coincidence that things like Level Up and other, similar projects (as well as rumors about a "50th anniversary" update etc., which we know have since been soft-confirmed) started gaining traction around this time.

5e's golden dawn has faded. Plenty of people still obviously love it, not at all trying to imply otherwise. But I'm not seeing that outrightly effusive "ermahGERD I just HAVE to talk about how AWESOME this is" stance anymore. Some folks are criticizing changes in art direction (y'know, that tedious brouhaha we had recently.) Some are criticizing the mechanics. Some, as noted, chafe under the restrictions of the rules that exist, wanting more options or more customization or more depth, etc.

Whether 5e is the "silver age" of D&D or not, I don't know. I don't personally think the "gold/silver/bronze/dark/etc." age terminology is particularly effective, but who knows? But I think we have hit the silver age of 5e individually. The gold hour has faded to the silver light of day, and some folks have noticed a bit of tarnish here and there.

There was an exit in the road around a sign that said "Learning new things is hard, so your psion is a sorcerer" where my car left the highway.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

If they could get past Chapter 4 without dying of boredom.

It's a useful reference for those who live in the pre-Google age, but good grief it's dull if you try to read it cover-to-cover. Why would a player ever care that Turmish exports glass and salt?! It's chock full of completely useless information.

Who reads a setting book cover to cover? It's not a novel, it's a reference. If a party heads east from Baldurs Gate I look at the map and read about the next few items of interest in their path.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Who reads a setting book cover to cover?

Someone who is completely new to a setting.

If a party heads east from Baldurs Gate I look at the map and read about the next few items of interest in their path.

Easier to use Google.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Easier to use Google.

On that we disagee to an extreme.

 

[Weiley31]

The 5e FRCS is not.

Well in 5E's defense, we technically haven't gotten a FRCS for the current edition. And SCAG is barely a primo choice for that because of its reputation and what not.

 

[teitan]

This doesn’t really track, since 4e was absolutely chock full of lore.

It was kind of its strongest element! It was so strong on lore it defined the mechanics as if D&D were also a world and not a DIY system. Not inherently a bad thing considering the lore was strong but it involved a lot of shoe horning to make the everything fit in settings it didn’t exist in before because of the depth of lore and mechanics intermingling.

 

[teitan]

The 3e FRCS was perfectly cromulent for starting a person off getting their head wrapped around the Forgotten Realms. The 5e FRCS is not.

There is a 5e FRCS? The SCAG is fine as a regional supplement. It covers a huge swathe of land and yeah it’s not that comprehensive of the continent but it does well for what it is.