Unpopular opinions go here

[Jd Smith1]

For WotC, the answer appears to be just, "make as much money as possible". It's the only coherent answer I can see.

Well, that is a valid goal for a business.

D&D is the McDonalds of the RPG industry: its fast, simple, and reliable. If you want ambiance or fine dining, you go elsewhere.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, that is a valid goal for a business.

D&D is the McDonalds of the RPG industry: its fast, simple, and reliable. If you want ambiance or fine dining, you go elsewhere.

It appears to be their  only goal, however. And the fact that the Golden Arches of it all has just gotten stronger and stronger in recent years is quite disturbing to me.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The people that design for D&D, for example, both have the luxury of designing for a brand, but also have severe design constraints; they have to design for a much larger population, and they have to be very careful about legacy issues. This is in contrast to someone designing an RPG from scratch that is made for a one-shot, and is designed for a small segment of the playing population.

I think there's a little chicken/egg thing going on with that. D&D is the only TTRPG to gain meaningful mainstream name recognition, it's the one most gamers start with. So, if you find you really don't like D&D, there's an excellent chance you never enter the hobby, you're not a member of that playing population.
D&D is designed for the broader playing population, in the sense that being able to at least tolerate past editions of D&D (especially the 80s editions and 3.x) enough to see the potential of RPGs, is virtually a prerequisite for joining said population. There's an even broader population of potential players out there, but when D&D tried to design for that, it pissed off the established core of existing players with their legacy issues.

D&D, as a commercial product, is just in a peculiar sort of position, where design (or artistic?) freedom is constrained both by what the potential mainstream audience might like - and what the hardcore existing audience will accept. The overlap, there, does not appear to be expansive.

 

[Tony Vargas]

While that's true, even generic systems almost always have some assumptions baked into them. As an example, you really have to fight with and add on a lot of add-ons with GURPS to handle anything much superhuman; its not a coincidence it apparently took them three editions to get Supers to really work right outside of their more gritty forms.

(I'm aware you can bolt on all kinds of extra rules modules for GURPS--I ran two full campaigns of it--but you can seriously start asking if the system is the same system once you do enough of those.

True, GURPS is really multi-genre, rather than universal, and admitted that a few editions in. That's why I gave it as the example of a system that could run any genre/setting - as long as there was already a supplement out for exactly that genre/setting.

True universal systems, like, Hero, where you can use rules to create everything in a genre/setting, rather than add rules to do so, are rare. (And even Hero is only that way at the high-level view, it does have a few alternate rules that you pick & choose from depending on genre, and it's implementation of skills gets in the way, too, especially in later editions.)

 

[Gradine]

I think there's a little chicken/egg thing going on with that. D&D is the only TTRPG to gain meaningful mainstream name recognition, it's the one most gamers start with. So, if you find you really don't like D&D, there's an excellent chance you never enter the hobby, you're not a member of that playing population.
D&D is designed for the broader playing population, in the sense that being able to at least tolerate past editions of D&D (especially the 80s editions and 3.x) enough to see the potential of RPGs, is virtually a prerequisite for joining said population. There's an even broader population of potential players out there, but when D&D tried to design for that, it pissed off the established core of existing players with their legacy issues.

D&D, as a commercial product, is just in a peculiar sort of position, where design (or artistic?) freedom is constrained both by what the potential mainstream audience might like - and what the hardcore existing audience will accept. The overlap, there, does not appear to be expansive.

Given the popularity and success of 5e, I find it hard to accept your final statement here. If anything, the wave of success brought on by 5th edition after the commercial failure of 4e has only proven that the overlap is not only quite a bit larger than it might seem, but that it was also essential to that success in the first place.

I mean, if you want to look at some of the pop culture drivers of the newest wave of D&D fans (Critical Role and Stranger Things), their creators were part of that hardcore existing audience.

In fact, I will argue that most of the groups who are most vocally moving away from D&D and have been for years are being driven by anything but game design. It's mostly political grandstanding, though amusingly the politics are coming from all sides.

And they say that D&D can't be all things to all people

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

For WotC, the answer appears to be just, "make as much money as possible". It's the only coherent answer I can see.

Let's unpack this a little.

If someone says, for example, that they don't like the music of Taylor Swift because to them it's just "pop music" that is designed "to make as much money as possible," then that is certainly an opinion! But it also overlooks the obvious- to make the most money possible, you are making a deliberate design decision to appeal to a lot of people. Whether you like, or hate, the music of Taylor Swift, you have to acknowledge that she is certainly savvy when it comes to making her decisions.

Let's simplify this a little. "Making money," in a capitalist society, means designing a product that people buy. So all you are doing, in saying that, is acknowledging that WoTC is designing a popular product. But that completely ignores the actually interesting questions-

1. What makes it popular?

2. What design constraints are there in designing for the product?

3. What are they designing it toward, in order to make it popular?

The problem when it comes to discussing the deliberate design decisions in D&D is that people often forget that designing for D&D is both a blessing and curse (as it is with most products with a built-in fan base). Sure, you always have the advantage of name recognition, but you also suffer from the constraints of not being able to just design what you want.

And that's really the issue. There are a lot of interesting design decisions that go into D&D. But just because they are no longer designing for you, doesn't mean that they aren't making deliberate decisions in order to ensure that it continues to be popular.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Given the popularity and success of 5e, I find it hard to accept your final statement here.

The success of 5e relative to other versions of the game since the fad years of the 80s is impressive... but it still doesn't touch the popularity or commercial success of MMOs/CRPGs or CCGs.

And, frankly, the overlapp between what won't outrage the hardcore fanbase (like 4e did) and what won't drive away any more of the mainstream trying it for the first time than it did in the 80s, prettymuch is 5e, almost exactly, or 5e.2024 would be deviating more from 5e.2014 in search of greater popularity/commercial success.

(but, y'know, maybe the final version of 5e.2024 will be more different from 5e.2014 than what we've seen before - 5e did have some surprises compared to Next)

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

The success of 5e relative to other versions of the game since the fad years of the 80s is impressive... but it still doesn't touch the popularity or commercial success of MMOs/CRPGs or CCGs.

I think you mean ... the success of 5e compared to any other TTRPG published, ever.

That's the correct comparison.

Sure, it's not as successful as other incredibly successful forms of entertainment. You could add, for example, that D&D has yet to surpass the revenue of the NFL if you wanted. But that's not really the proper comparator, is it? Doing the best of any game in its field, in history, is probably sufficient to call it not just impressive, but an unparalleled success. Not to mention that 5e's peak has far surpassed the very limited boom years of the 80s fad, which only lasted from '80-'83.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Let's unpack this a little.

If someone says, for example, that they don't like the music of Taylor Swift because to them it's just "pop music" that is designed "to make as much money as possible," then that is certainly an opinion! But it also overlooks the obvious- to make the most money possible, you are making a deliberate design decision to appeal to a lot of people. Whether you like, or hate, the music of Taylor Swift, you have to acknowledge that she is certainly savvy when it comes to making her decisions.

Let's simplify this a little. "Making money," in a capitalist society, means designing a product that people buy. So all you are doing, in saying that, is acknowledging that WoTC is designing a popular product. But that completely ignores the actually interesting questions-

1. What makes it popular?

2. What design constraints are there in designing for the product?

3. What are they designing it toward, in order to make it popular?

The problem when it comes to discussing the deliberate design decisions in D&D is that people often forget that designing for D&D is both a blessing and curse (as it is with most products with a built-in fan base). Sure, you always have the advantage of name recognition, but you also suffer from the constraints of not being able to just design what you want.

And that's really the issue. There are a lot of interesting design decisions that go into D&D. But just because they are no longer designing for you, doesn't mean that they aren't making deliberate decisions in order to ensure that it continues to be popular.

That's my point. It's very hard to look at D&D from the perspective of "What are designing it to do?" when they keep twisting it slightly over and over as time goes on to appeal to a bigger and bigger audience, with the upshot being that every part of that audience is being less served than they would if it were designed with that part's favored experience in mind. Some are getting more of what they want, others are getting less. Hence my claim that all they really want to do is make more money.

As much as I came to dislike 4e personally, at least it had an honest creative goal.

 

[payn]

If you don't personally like something, that doesn't mean there is some agenda obsessed cabal working towards popularizing it at your expense.