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

[Reynard]

I mean, say what you will about various shenanigans...WotC still puts out a prodict that I want.

Honest question: How? Why? Aside from its official status, what makes 2024 better than A5E or ToV (as far as we can tell)?

 

[Scribe]

Honest question: How? Why? Aside from its official status, what makes 2024 better than A5E or ToV (as far as we can tell)?

Better, or just different.

For most, name + 'official' is already more than enough for better or worse.

EDIT: I mean during the peak of the OGL fiasco, there were people calling for calm as it was harming something, "D&D", which they expressed having a borderline unhealthy attachment to.

There are people here that will never give up on D&D, no matter what options exist.

 

[Parmandur]

Honest question: How? Why? Aside from its official status, what makes 2024 better than A5E or ToV (as far as we can tell)?

Well, I stopped paying attention to ToV after the first fee playtest packets were riddled with basic spelling and grammar errors. I'm sure those will ne fixed by publication, but I didn't have great confidence in the mechanics as presented (liked Heritage-Lineage, though).

A5E is a throwback to the parts of 3E/PF1E that U find distasteful after having experienced more streamlined games. Juat not for me.

WotC paxks their books with fantastic art (even with Ilya's shenanigans, Bigby's other 39 artists have delivered), well tested mechanics (seriously), and ideas that work for me. Other companies can do those thigns (shout out to Free League) but nobody is doing so at WotC level, consistently, to my tastes.

Their playtest process raises a lot of grumbling among Forumite commjnities...bit for me, the results speak for themselves.

 

[tetrasodium]

I mean, a shiny new book with new art has its own appeal.

Personally, I'm most looking forward to the Larger Font & the 500-monster Monster Manual alone!

I dunno, it remains to be seen if there is anything of value there. We are in a thread where we just saw multiple posters imply I was being too optimistic by having a little hope that wotc might do better by GMs this time around... Heck wotc appear to have reversed course entirely & embraced short rest nova class design a single packet after a long separation process they started way back at tashas & finally fired off the packet prior.

I don't need another book of monsters incapable of providing a challenge to PCs they are woefully statted to face. Nor do I need another book of CR#/# toCRxx of monsters designed for bounded accuracy out of the misguided idea that anyone wants to run or fight dozens of useless monsters & cheeze their way through high CR monsters with tier1 PCs.

It's great that wotc is talking about giving us monsters across multiple CRs... but it's not exactly a blazing torch of certainty that those monsters will be up top snuff when they do it privately behind relatively

Spoiler: closed doors

and wotc doesn't seem to be laying any real mechanical groundwork to support those kinds of goals in the 6 packets we have seen, even stuff like the flight changes (packet6 pg72) are so uncertain of themselves that they seem to be intentionally failing at actually doing much of anything at the table during actual play*.


I'd like to be excited about a book of monsters, but right now that one is a bit too much pixie dust locked away in a black box behind the beware of leopard sign

-* Well at least until you toss in the new 3.x style tripper build base class in the same packet.

edit: One hope at a time. Wotc needs to show that the next hopeful flight of steps is going to materialize before it seems reasonable to get excited about the flight of steps behind it

 

[DEFCON 1]

Why is buying the 5E24 books going to be fine and worth my time?

Because they will correct and fix a bunch of niggling little things that have been a little annoying (that sure, they could have corrected using errata pages all along but chose not to after the complaints they got during 4E when they did that)... and I've been saving my $7 each month since the updates were first announced last year and thus I will be easily flush with the cash to buy a new set of books when the time comes. So why not?

Do I need to buy these new books? Nope. Any rules issues with 5E14 I more than fixed for myself many, many years ago... so if WotC never bothered to fix them it wouldn't have bothered or impacted me one single bit. But if they are going to release new versions with a lot of the fixes put in, and I have the money to do so (because I will have actually saved my cash for this specific purpose for the full 18 months before its release)... then I don't see any reason not to buy them. New books are new books. I've had no issue buying almost every new edition's books and revised books over the decades, so this set will be no different.

If some people don't want to buy them? Cool. No big deal. If you have moved on to LU or TotV, or just want to stay with 5E14... more power to you. But don't then also whine that WotC didn't give you a reason to buy 5E24, because quite frankly they are under no obligation to give you a book that you specifically want. Yes, WotC will release a trio of 5E24 books that some of you won't find value in. And that's fine. But it was never their job to do so for every single one of us players across the board, so just accept that you might have fallen outside the purview they were aiming at this time around. And be thankful there are probably any number of other 5E-adjacent products out there right now that ARE what you want and can happily use.

 

[Maxperson]

5e's skeleton is good.
REALLY GOOD!
That's why it succeeded. 5e's has the best skeleton of any Fantasy RPG.

People keep saying that, but correlation does not equal causation.

The folks putting 5e forward as the best version of D&D ever and then point at its success as proof are ignoring that Stranger Things, Big Bang Theory and many other main stream entertainment sources propelled D&D into the main stream, which equates to a lot of success. Critical Role also helped propel D&D(not necessarily 5e) into the main stream.

There's no way to know that 5e's massive success isn't despite the format and not because of it. Perhaps if 3e or even 4e had been released at the time 5e was, they would be even more wildly successful. Or maybe not.

What we can say is again that correlation does not equal causation and while 5e MIGHT be the best D&D ever, we can't just point at the sales and use that as the proof of that claim.

 

[Minigiant]

People keep saying that, but correlation does not equal causation.

The folks putting 5e forward as the best version of D&D ever and then point at its success as proof are ignoring that Stranger Things, Big Bang Theory and many other main stream entertainment sources propelled D&D into the main stream, which equates to a lot of success. Critical Role also helped propel D&D(not necessarily 5e) into the main stream.

There's no way to know that 5e's massive success isn't despite the format and not because of it. Perhaps if 3e or even 4e had been released at the time 5e was, they would be even more wildly successful. Or maybe not.

What we can say is again that correlation does not equal causation and while 5e MIGHT be the best D&D ever, we can't just point at the sales and use that as the proof of that claim.

I agree with you.
Read the rest of my comment.

 

[Maxperson]

Thank you!

I'm surprised that the post-Tasha's versions of those specific classes and subclasses were so low.

Especially when they are all at 70%(assuming WotC really sticks to those numbers) or higher or they never would have been released in the first place. So they are both higher and lower than 70%!

 

[FitzTheRuke]

People keep saying that, but correlation does not equal causation.

The folks putting 5e forward as the best version of D&D ever and then point at its success as proof are ignoring that Stranger Things, Big Bang Theory and many other main stream entertainment sources propelled D&D into the main stream, which equates to a lot of success. Critical Role also helped propel D&D(not necessarily 5e) into the main stream.

This is that "Chicken or the Egg" type argument. It's clearly BOTH. 5e was a very accessible version of D&D, conveniently at the same time that some D&D lovers got into positions of authority in the media and bravely put their love on display. They were successful doing so; so success breeds success - others did the same. A positive spiral occurred.

There's no way to know that 5e's massive success isn't despite the format and not because of it. Perhaps if 3e or even 4e had been released at the time 5e was, they would be even more wildly successful. Or maybe not.

Not a chance. The stars had to align for it to happen. Those editions would have been more successful than they were if they'd been in the same position, sure. But I highly doubt that they'd have done the same or better. They simply were not as accessible. You have to be in the right place at the right time AND do the right things.

What we can say is again that correlation does not equal causation and while 5e MIGHT be the best D&D ever, we can't just point at the sales and use that as the proof of that claim.

Not by itself, no. But you can claim that it was the right D&D at the right time (because clearly it WAS).

Hopefully it's NOT the best D&D ever. Hopefully that is yet to come.

 

[Maxperson]

This is that "Chicken or the Egg" type argument. It's clearly BOTH. 5e was a very accessible version of D&D, conveniently at the same time that some D&D lovers got into positions of authority in the media and bravely put their love on display. They were successful doing so; so success breeds success - others did the same. A positive spiral occurred.

Not a chance. The stars had to align for it to happen. Those editions would have been more successful than they were if they'd been in the same position, sure. But I highly doubt that they'd have done the same or better. They simply were not as accessible. You have to be in the right place at the right time AND do the right things.


Not by itself, no. But you can claim that it was the right D&D at the right time (because clearly it WAS).

Hopefully it's NOT the best D&D ever. Hopefully that is yet to come.

The stars had to align, but what I'm saying is that had the release of other editions been when 5e was released, the stars would have aligned for those editions. They would have been the "right D&D at the right time."

You say that those other editions would have been more successful than they were, and doubt that they'd have done as well or better, but I'm not so sure. You might be right, though. My main claim here is that the other factors are likely playing a far larger role in the success of 5e than the rules of 5e itself, yet it's the rules of 5e that get all the credit from most folks.