D&D 5E Is 5E Special

[payn]

Honestly I agree with your hot take, if 4e had come out in the opposite order, starting with the essentials stuff, and then diversifying into the PHB style, it would have helped it a lot-- probably not scared off the 3.5 fans in the first place. Give it the quality of digital tools we see today (if it was taking the place of 5e), I think people would really prefer it for both its hands off approach to out of combat roleplaying, and its more engaging game play. Honestly, given a few more years, I think digital tool use is going to be so ubiquitous its going to start radically changing the narrative on accessibility vs. engaging game play in RPGs, because people will be more comfortable letting their tools take the burden of actually book keeping, and just enjoy the depth on offer, my players already do this and it works super well. I think its already been accelerated by the COVID shift to virtual tabletops.

My personal opinion is that pf2e actually fulfills that niche even better though, since its a lot more approachable than either 5e or 4e or pf1e in terms of how much character optimization it takes to succeed and how wide the party gap can get, it just doesn't benefit from the Coca-Cola like status of Dungeons and Dragons as a brand.

A lot of the reasons I disliked 4E were my own subjective taste. Though, how forward it was as a tactical game I have come to find a re lot of the reasons why. Now, if a lot of that was off loaded onto an automated system, maybe I could tolerate it better. Maybe. Though I do agree I think PF2 does it even better than 4E, but a lot of 4E fans wont go near it.

 

[LordEntrails]

That is probably the first time I have ever seen 2E described as "too crunchy."

Maybe crunchy isn't the right term. But Player Options and the simple glut of player facing books etc means that the version is not very accessible to new players. Sure, both 2& 3 are fine if you got in at the beginning, but to step into a game after their are dozens of players optional books and where to start... yea, not new user friendly (at least from a consumer perspective).

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

A lot of the reasons I disliked 4E were my own subjective taste. Though, how forward it was as a tactical game I have come to find a re lot of the reasons why. Now, if a lot of that was off loaded onto an automated system, maybe I could tolerate it better. Maybe. Though I do agree I think PF2 does it even better than 4E, but a lot of 4E fans wont go near it.

Understandable, one of the things they did better with essentials, was to 'conceal' some of the tactical elements under a more traditional DND structure and asymmetry they just built on top of their pre-existing symmetry-- in other words they shifted power budgets around so not everyone had to have dailies, and created a Basic Attack and BasicAttack+ to evoke the feeling of old style martials being more simple. It was very much designed to ease players into the structure, which then had lots of other stuff they could tap into if and when they wanted to. If it had come out first, I think it would have done a lot for how people thought about the game.

Automation does a lot for simplicity, because whatever edition we're talking about it becomes so much easier to just reference +7 on your sheet that's set up for you based off more intuitive decisions like "I'll have high strength because I'm a Barbarian" than to at some point, set the numbers up yourself and remember which ones to apply.

Our VTT even tracks the -whatever to ac from a creature being frightened so long as i click the button to mark that it happened, players can double click a creature to 'target' it and have the system tell them if it was a hit or crit, I can click a button to mystify the actual roll, and I can use as much or as little of it as I want, its super duper neat.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Maybe crunchy isn't the right term. But Player Options and the simple glut of player facing books etc means that the version is not very accessible to new players. Sure, both 2& 3 are fine if you got in at the beginning, but to step into a game after their are dozens of players optional books and where to start... yea, not new user friendly (at least from a consumer perspective).

Actually, about this, I'm a librarian and its super interesting to me that the problem of 'bloat' is generally about information management, players get hit with all the content all at once and feel the need to catch up, but in theory, they just don't need to use most of it-- they can always just play with the core book. I wonder how designers can weaken the culture of 'i need to use all my options all the time' to make it work better, I know good balancing helps a lot but we have some advancements in personalized data curation that could be useful, that and Wikis would help because they let you get straight to content rather than flipping through books.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yes. 5e is “special” in that it hits a sweet spot of having enough dials to make an OC (do not steal), but simple enough for people to learn it quite easily, and robust enough to handle fairly major modification without major imbalance.

A D&D built for heavy tactics, or brutal dungeon crawls, or simulationism, wouldn’t have exploded nearly as much in response to the outside factors that helped 5e explode, IMNSHO.

 

[Minigiant]

Maybe crunchy isn't the right term. But Player Options and the simple glut of player facing books etc means that the version is not very accessible to new players. Sure, both 2& 3 are fine if you got in at the beginning, but to step into a game after their are dozens of players optional books and where to start... yea, not new user friendly (at least from a consumer perspective).

Yeah, it's less 2e is more crunchy and more in order to play the way 5e players and DMs run things, 2e would have to pull out the crunchy options.

My personal opinion is that pf2e actually fulfills that niche even better though, since its a lot more approachable than either 5e or 4e or pf1e in terms of how much character optimization it takes to succeed and how wide the party gap can get, it just doesn't benefit from the Coca-Cola like status of Dungeons and Dragons as a brand.

When it comes the Pf2e vs 4EE really comes down to "familiar approachibality" vs 'fantasy archetype focus".

However 5e is special as an edition. However my opinion any edition could have sold like crazy and some versions of D&D editions or D&D clones could have done better than 5e.

 

[OB1]

Maybe crunchy isn't the right term. But Player Options and the simple glut of player facing books etc means that the version is not very accessible to new players. Sure, both 2& 3 are fine if you got in at the beginning, but to step into a game after their are dozens of players optional books and where to start... yea, not new user friendly (at least from a consumer perspective).

As a side note I think this is what 50AE is going to address. Right now to play the game in the style it's being played, you need a minimum of 3 books, and maybe 4 or 5. I think 50AE will reset the starting point so that new players only have to worry about buying the PHB to get started.

As for 5e being special, I'll first say that 5E would not exist if not for 4e, not because of what 4e got 'wrong' but because of how much it got right. The stroke of genius with 5e was to lighten the core enough for casual players busy with life to come in and enjoy the game for 2-4 hours a couple of times a month, while still having enough depth to keep it interesting if you're playing every week for years (which of course has also helped allow streams like CR to take advantage of the ruleset and make the game even more popular).

But the biggest roadblock 5e has to even greater popularity is DMs. By making the game easier for players, they had to make it tougher on the DM. Some of the digital tools has made it better, but it still needs work to get DMing to the same 'casual' level as players. My core group has been playing since the Next playtest, and three of them still won't try to DM.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I think Essentials was closer to what the devs wanted but weren't given the time to implement. Which is too bad. No clue how well it would have worked or what other mechanics would have been tweaked.

4e is, as much as I love, an overly long letter written because the writer didn’t have enough time to write a short one.

It’s still a very good letter, but man I wish they’d had more time.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Right now to play the game in the style it's being played, you need a minimum of 3 books, and maybe 4 or 5. I think 50AE will reset the starting point so that new players only have to worry about buying the PHB to get started.

Most groups I’ve seen start out with only the PHB, now. Maybe an adventure as well.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yes. 5e is “special” in that it hits a sweet spot of having enough dials to make an OC (do not steal), but simple enough for people to learn it quite easily, and robust enough to handle fairly major modification without major imbalance.

Ehh. I don't personally share any of these opinions. I find 5e stifling and incredibly slow to add new options/possibilities, it has tons of grandfathered-in complexity that existing fans don't notice because it's too familiar, and it "stays balanced" only because it wasn't really balanced to begin with (see: the Ghoul Surprise.)