D&D (2024) GenCon 2023 - D&D Rules Revision panel

[mamba]

Good starter sets do.

WotC's don't and I am not sure how much one for e.g. PF2 will help me with 5e

 

[Reynard]

WotC's don't and I am not sure how much one for e.g. PF2 will help me with 5e

Right but if you are launching a new edition, maybe produce a starter set that does the job. A revision of the original starter set that incorporates sidebars to explain how to do stuff would work great and wouldn't be that onerous. Instead they are going to produce an expensive hardcover book in which some significant percentage of the contents is useless after a month of playing.

 

[mamba]

Right but if you are launching a new edition, maybe produce a starter set that does the job. A revision of the original starter set that incorporates sidebars to explain how to do stuff would work great and wouldn't be that onerous. Instead they are going to produce an expensive hardcover book in which some significant percentage of the contents is useless after a month of playing.

that still gives me one month more than the current DMG

I agree with a better starter set

 

[Emberashh]

And while they are getting the information they need, they are also successfully keeping the game that had its reputation so tarnished only 8 months ago in the conversation. That's good marketing.

That also comes down to a rather alarming swathe of people behaving as though they weren't angry not 5 seconds earlier. (Exaggeration, obviously).

 

[Reynard]

that still gives me one month more than the current DMG

Where's that eyeroll emoji...

 

[bedir than]

It's true.
4e was a success. It made a ton of money. It just didn't make the amount of money WOTC wanted, spawned competitors, and the designers were running out of ideas.

5e is a success. It just overrepresented specific tastes due to how its polling was analyzed

It is possible, maybe even likely, that D&D the game made more money in the first six months of 2023 than 4e did over its lifetime.
D&D, just the game, made nearly 150 million already this year (there's also licensed goods and the trickle that Hasbro made from the movie).

 

[FitzTheRuke]

They aren't testing as a comparison: the questions are a sliding scale of satisfaction with an option as presented, from 1-5. For WotC, they want the average to be closer to 4 than to 3 for it to be meeting design goals.

I saw you argue this with (again, I think it was mamba) but I'm not sure what you're getting at. It doesn't matter if WotC says "rate this on a scale of 1-5" as opposed to "rate how you like this compared to the 2014 version". People can't HELP but to do the latter.

Everyone playtesting the UA is already familiar with the 2014 version, and can ONLY rate the UA version with how much they like the UA relative to the 2014 version. They ARE testing a comparison. It's the only thing anyone can know for sure about the process.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

"When people give you notes on something... when they tell you it's wrong, they're usually right. When they tell you how to fix it, they're usually wrong."

Ugh. As much as I think that the surveys are poorly done (I don't think they're even all that good at telling WotC what's actually wrong) - I sure as heck wouldn't want them to ask the community how to fix it.

 

[Azzy]

Ugh. As much as I think that the surveys are poorly done (I don't think they're even all that good at telling WotC what's actually wrong) - I sure as heck wouldn't want them to ask the community how to fix it.

Yeah, I've seen some of the suggestions posited by some of the people here and I'm glad that most of them aren't on the design team.

 

[Charlaquin]

I don't know if that is something you took away from it, or something they said, but that is not at all what the 5E DMG is.

It's actually pretty good, in fact, but most DMs think they already know what they are doing so they did not bother to read it. Then they jump on line to complain agout things that are directly addressed in the DMG.

It contains a lot of really good stuff, but it is organized in a way that makes finding those really good contents very difficult. It’s also, in my opinion, very bad at teaching the reader how to DM, which should be its primary purpose. There are more significant reasons behind the DM shortage, but the 2014 DMG is definitely not helping in that regard.