Hoo boy, quote-a-rama. Gonna try to consolidate.
The Venn diagram of people who like natural language and who want to play D&D seems to be highly significant.
Keyword: "Seems." You have "I, and people who share my tastes, like it." The "significance" to that is zero in data terms.
The core assumption is that cranky old players and fresh new players stay want different things. WotC bet was that...they don't. Some things don't change much.
They
very clearly want different things, or we wouldn't be seeing so many old-school fans handwringing over brighter-colored art, "Disneyfied" design, or the move away from fixed Ancestry ability score bonuses. To assert that the oldest fans in the hobby and the enormous crowd of new fans want precisely the same thing is ludicrous in the extreme, to the point that I genuinely don't believe that's what you're actually saying here--so what
are you saying?
People enjoy natural language approaches, and combined with the evidence this seems to be a common opinion.
Again: you can only use this argument one way, and even there it's HUGELY arguable. Either natural language is popular, and thus it caused increased sales, or increased sales are evidence that natural language is popular. You cannot have the arrow of causation point
both directions. (The problem, of course, is that correlation does not imply causation, so all you're
actually doing is arguing either
post hoc or
cum hoc ergo prompter hoc: either "after this, therefore because of this" or "with this, therefore because of this." Both of which are fallacious arguments, and thus no reason to accept the conclusion.)
I don't think that 4E is bad or "wrong," but it was unfun and tedious for me and literally everyone I know who tried it. <snip>So for 5E, they went out of their way to find out what a broader number of people enjoyed, and well, frankly they succeeded.
Again: "Me, and people who share my tastes" is not a useful sample, so while your personal experience is valid and real, it doesn't
tell us anything, no more than me saying that me, and people who share
my tastes, found 5e tedious, confounding, and actively
hostile to our preferences. As for the other: "
You realize that they actually make these? The Young Adventurer Guides have been very successful, and the kids love them.
You realize these
aren't games? They're storytelling aids. They
literally aren't games.
I don’t actually know who the market was for 5e. A lot seems to be very at odds with my group’s zeitgeist in a lot of ways—-we are in our 40s.
Would you say this trend is recent, or one that started at launch (or perhaps earlier)? Because most responses I saw, across various forums and interactions outside the Internet, indicated that most people felt 5e was "AD&D3" when it launched. You basically never hear people say that anymore, though it took at least a couple years for that to taper off.
Is the assertion that if it was more non traditional like 4e or that it would have been better? “Special.”
The assertion is that 5e, and
only 5e, could have succeeded anywhere near as well as it did. That no meaningful changes could have been made to it to make it succeed substantially more than it did.
I reject both of these claims. Certainly, some editions (OD&D, 1e, and 2e IMO) would have been ripped to shreds by things like social media and modern internet discourse. The flaws in the rules would have been flayed open within weeks and the blatant racism and (in 1e) sexism would have ignited a firestorm. But WotC editions? I think they could have sold at least half as well as 5e has, probably more. Would they have sold
identically? Probably not. But this is a rising tide, it would take a
lot of flaws for a game to fail to be bouyed up by it--and that's exactly what I think the TSR editions suffered from.
We have a lot of people saying that 4e had a lot more “right” and that the stunning success of 5e was an artifact of the old players or inexperienced players not seeing the flaws or seeing it too late or just familiarity. Familiarity?
4e did, in fact, do several things quite right. It also did some dumb things, as I explicitly said earlier in the thread. Further, it had exactly the
opposite situation of 5e: launching at the start of a recession instead of the middle of an economic recovery (a recession that bankrupted one of the largest booksellers in the US), stupidly creating its own greatest rival rather than cooperating with them (the GSL directly caused PF1e), having a
literal murder-suicide kill two of its lead digital tools developers and thus scuttling nearly the entire digital tools project, and an active climate of vocal haters who would gladly spew
outright lies about 4e's rules and structure
despite having never opened a single book.
Like, in every possible way, 4e had the deck stacked against it, while in numerous ways, 5e had exactly the opposite, a deck stacked in its favor.
First, the player base is not old, generally—so not sure what catering to old players really meant for overall sales. There were a lot of new players learning the game for the first time. They were not familiar with squat in a lot of cases.
The playerbase is not that old...
now.
After the huge boom. There were a few million people--perhaps as many as 8 million, if we take the absolute highest estimates--who were or had been D&D players in the late 00s. Nowadays, there are (allegedly)
over 50 million. If we take that number seriously, that means anywhere between 40 and 48 million new players entered the hobby in just the last 8 years, the vast majority of them being under 40 years old.
So yes, the hobby has
become quite a bit younger. It didn't
start that way. 15 years ago, right when 4e launched, most people playing were in their late 20s or older. And guess what? Those people are now 40-and-up. All the people that
were fans before 4e are now the tiny minority.
Secondly, 4e did not do well. So why would we believe leaning into that would have done more? I assume “special” suggests wide appeal. Leaning more into a poorly received version would have done more?
As others have said: 4e did just as well as any other previous edition,
despite both actively hostile haters and various events seemingly
trying to destroy it. Put that myth to rest. 4e did well. It just didn't do well enough to be a Hasbro core brand.
It’s either that or the “special conditions” of the world—external factors. But when I really think about it…a lot of those conditions have been in flux over time but the game keeps on going.
(A) Network effects, (B) sunk costs, and (C) the founder-takes-all/"snowball" effect all apply here.
A: When few play a game, few will
want to join, thus keeping numbers low--when many play it, many will flock to it. (In MMO terms, this is the "dying game" paradox--even if a game
is currently healthy, if people
think it's a dying game, existing players will leave and new players will avoid it,
causing the game to die.) 5e is what everyone's talking about, so it's what everyone keeps talking about; 5e is what everyone is playing, so it's what every new person
starts off playing. Which leads to...
B: TTRPGs are expensive. Even if you ride the sales, you're still looking at dropping probably $100 on the core books, plus the time costs of learning to play, finding communities to join, etc. Switching to a new system means
at least having to learn to play it, and probably spending some money on it. Those costs will push people to stick with what they know, whether or not they're happy. (I don't mean to imply that there's some ENORMOUS crowd of people unhappy with 5e but unwilling to switch--just saying that
even if the early advantages had disappeared, which I don't believe most of them have, and
even if those advantages were literally the ONLY reason a chunk of people chose to play D&D, there would still be other reasons why people would stick around.)
C: If you win early, you're more likely to win more, causing you to be even more likely to win more, etc. This is one of the most complex and difficult problems in competitive (video)game design: how to make a game that simultaneously gives genuine, real rewards for early success, but
does not therefore cause the late game to be a totally foregone conclusion. 5e won early, and that has absolutely compounded.
Again: this is NOT to say that these are the only reasons people play 5e (far, far, FAR from it.) Just that
even if the advantages had all completely disappeared and
even if those advantages were the only thing that got people into it to begin with, there would still be reasons people stuck around. Again, I don't actually believe eitehr of these things is true, I think the advantages are still mostly there, albeit having shifted (e.g. D&D as a
digital hobby was actually a huge beneficiary of the COVID-19 pandemic, which means that instead of being hurt by the economic downturn, it was actually
boosted by it.)
Yes. But with all the "aparts" taken into consideration tgere is a big difference. You also forgot how much more natural moving works if you can move attack and move.
I will grant that movement in that way is more natural for players to use. I do not know if I grant that it was good for the game
as a game, but it is at least one way in which 5e is genuinely different from all other editions.
The information is out there, feel free to look into it or not.
"Information" is a rather
strong word for statements from Mr. Mearls.
Gonna split this into two posts here, because this is already enormous.
