EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Whereas for me it is a headache, full stop. Obscure text that buries the relevant information in a mountain of pointless fluff is frustrating and makes the book significantly less useful.
I fully agree that 4e needed better presentation. It was much too dry. But 5e has gone too far in the other direction. It absolutely engages in obscurantism, frequently in wholly unnecessary ways. Particularly when it comes to DMing.
That is certainly what I would like to believe, but I recognize that that may be my preference for 4e talking more than an objective analysis of what the designers are likely to do. Certainly they seem to be more positive about things 4e did than they were in the past (like monsters working by different rules compared to PCs.)
Really really. The grognards were always the main focus. That's why they immediately abandoned any nontraditional idea that got even the tiniest bit of pushback (like the playtest Sorcerer and Warlock, which were both incredibly cool and flavorful but the grognards hated them.) That's why they killed the Warlord, despite it being by far one of the most popular classes in 4e and an obvious opportunity for an olive branch (and, y'know, actually implementing the "leader of men" archetype.) That's why several spells work in the weird ways they do, why there isn't any caster anywhere near as simple as the Champion and no non-casters anywhere near as complicated as the simplest caster (whichever you think that may be), even though we have plenty of modern video games and media with complex non-casters characters (e.g. Warriors in most MMOs) and extremely simple casters (e.g. Wizards in Harry Potter, Gandalf, charter mages in the Old Kingdom series, Mages in WoW and Red Mages in FFXIV, etc.) That's why every survey wasn't about effectiveness or enjoyability or the like, but about whether things felt like D&D, felt like Fighters or Wizards or whatever else.
Achieving mass appeal was always a secondary concern. That doesn't mean they didn't care at all. They surely hoped it would do well. But their primary concern was always bringing back the "lapsed" fans, who bounced off of or waged edition wars against 4e. That was always the point. You don't bill your game as a big tent edition if the primary concern is drawing in new fans. You do that (and harp on it super hard) if your goal is to bring back folks who have left.
And I will never, ever deny that 5e was amazing at doing that. Mocking 4e, cutting out many things it added, and doing little to nothing to support its playstyle? Yeah, that's by definition going to catch the interest of people who bounced off 4e and outright delight the vocal haters. Such moves will be completely irrelevant to new fans. Same with the public playtesting. Essentially no brand-new folks participated in that. It was for current and past fans, it had nothing to do with outreach or spreading the good word. It was always about getting lapsed fans hyped to buy the new game.
Sure. I just think it's patently obvious that, during playtest and at launch, the latter was "well sure we should try for that if we can," not "we absolutely must bring in as many new people as possible, that is only the tiniest bit less important than bringing back lapsed fans." I frankly find it bizarre to assert anything else: growing the hobby was never the plan. "Damage control" was the plan. It happened to coincide with a huge explosion of interest. Had they known what was coming, I guarantee they would have done several things differently, both with the DMG and with the PHB. Monster design probably still would have been the same (which I do not consider a good thing, to be clear) but the other two books would definitely have significant differences.
Oh, there are a few posters here (occasionally including me, I have enough self-awareness to know that at least) who have both extremely idiosyncratic personal dictionaries and a dogged determination to assert that their definitions are the only ones and everyone else (including, y'know, actual dictionaries) is wrong. I have been trying to get better about refusing such semantic slap-fights. It is a struggle.
And here we see the circular argument yet again. Sales are good because of 5e's inherent qualities like natural language; every inherent quality of 5e must be good because it is selling well.
Both of these statements are already suspect on their own. But they get combined into an even worse whole so often you'd think it was religious doctrine at this point.
So what you're saying is, people literally stop themselves from playing purely due to a lack of familiarity, and then complain that the rules themselves must be bad and wrong and badong.
Gotta love self-made problems getting reified into inherent flaws of a work. That's just the best.
