D&D General Does D&D (and RPGs in general) Need Edition Resets?

[haakon1]

Sunk Cost and Sacred Cows keep the community from making the correct base.
…
never be able to keep up a viable business plan for an incremental RPG that keeps up with the current trends and population and isn't shoved off into a niche corner.

New isn’t alway better.
Fads are often crap.
Some old ideas - whether good or not - come back as retro cool.
I’d say most of what makes D&D great is classic stuff - some of it older than RPG’s, like the concepts of make believe, playing war, elves, spells, werewolves that it brought together beautifully in inventing the concept of RPG.

Subclasses, advantage, warlocks, and goliaths are not why D&D is a cultural phenomenon unlike any other RPG. They’re just stuff someone put in 5e; perhaps improvements to editions without them, perhaps not. (Wyll the Warlock isn’t very popular in BG3, and it has no Goliaths in character creation.)

To me, arguing those “innovations“ are why D&D is the #1 RPG are like arguing the shape of the Bishop piece is why chess is successful, and saying D&D needs new editions to add stuff from Indy games is like saying Jeopardy needs to copy “The Floor is Lava”’s fonts and sound effects. I think that’s ephemera irrelevant to the success of the game as a whole.

 

[Parmandur]

Agree on the past. I’m not sure I know precisely what may happen in 2024 though. You have 100% been paying more attention to that than me, but my Hasbro trust gauge is on “E”.

No trust is needed we have the UA playtests in hand.

 

[Lanefan]

3e
5e
5.5e

3e wasn't killed by the community I don't think, except maybe the optimizer minority that kinda broke it for everyone else.

I'm not at all sure 5e has yet been killed by anything, so I'm not sure what you mean there.

As for 5.5e, we still don't know its final form (the playtests, based on the 5e experience, aren't much of a guide as to what the end result will be).

 

[Parmandur]

As for 5.5e, we still don't know its final form (the playtests, based on the 5e experience, aren't much of a guide as to what the end result will be).

I mean, we know they will change stuff, but...we have a pretty good idea of the shape of things.

 

[Lanefan]

For me, 2nd edition is a refinement of AD&D. It smooths out and standardizes a lot of things (like making initiative a d10 in all instances), changes some things (like the bard and ranger), added good ideas from the 1e era (spheres of magic, nonweapon profs) and removed some bad ideas (hello 1e bard). Yet most of 1e's stuff remains useable with a little work, enough so that you can blend those rules together even though a character built using the 2e PHB looks different than a character built using the 1e PHB.

Indeed, though we could argue all day about which of those changes are for the better (hint: the Ranger changes were not).

And the things they took out to satisfy the howling hordes of morality (assassins etc.) could easily be put right back in.

3e made it so that was no longer possible. My AD&D books were built with wildly different assumptions on combat, skills, ability checks, even magic. You cannot take anything from AD&D and make it run in 3e without basically rebuilding it in 3e's rules. But potentially, there might have been a 3e that took a lot of the best ideas of 2e and built a compatible version of 3e that worked with your 2e material (and by extension, your 1e, though probably you'd need to do a lot more work to make that happen). Lather-rinse-repeat. Maybe we don't get 3e all at once, but I'm sure eventually we excise level limits, buff up weaker classes, clean up saves and skills, etc. etc.

3e's biggest change under the hood - and IMO it wasn't necessarily a good one - was to greatly steepen the overall power curve. The best evidence of this is that in 1e-2e you can quite easily have a viable party where the PCs' levels vary somewhat, while in 3e even a 1-level variance is immediately noticeable. The other effect of this is that any given monster is a viable challenge for a much narrower range of PC levels.

That's the sort of change you'd probably never see happen as an incremental...which is IMO a mark in favour of the incremental-change idea.

 

[Minigiant]

3e wasn't killed by the community I don't think, except maybe the optimizer minority that kinda broke it for everyone else.

I'm not at all sure 5e has yet been killed by anything, so I'm not sure what you mean there.

As for 5.5e, we still don't know its final form (the playtests, based on the 5e experience, aren't much of a guide as to what the end result will be).

I didn't say the edition was killed. I said good ideas were killed.

Here let me explain with an example.

Druid's Wildshape and Beast Monster statblock.

The 3e, 4e, 5e druid do not meet the standards of the community because in order to get what the playerbase ad DMbase wants, you need to reset the game several times. The Fans want to be about to wildshape into the animals in the books. And they don't want their old books to be outdated.

However you'd have to design the beasts in the books to

1. used as monsters
2. user as PC
3. balanced over several levels
4. not over shadow several classes

That requires a ton of playtesting and redoing the MM and PHB. Which is a new edition as you will have to rewrite the Monster Manual several times. It's adesire for systemic change.

However how can you write all the beast statblocks if the fanbase want to keep the old beast statblocks for backwards compatibility?
You can't.

Thus the fanbase will be in charge disappointed with the druid until WOTC can rewrite the MM in 6e.
The Druid and Beasts need another edition change.

 

[Remathilis]

I didn't say the edition was killed. I said good ideas were killed.

Here let me explain with an example.

Druid's Wildshape and Beast Monster statblock.

The 3e, 4e, 5e druid do not meet the standards of the community because in order to get what the playerbase ad DMbase wants, you need to reset the game several times. The Fans want to be about to wildshape into the animals in the books. And they don't want their old books to be outdated.

However you'd have to design the beasts in the books to

1. used as monsters
2. user as PC
3. balanced over several levels
4. not over shadow several classes

That requires a ton of playtesting and redoing the MM and PHB. Which is a new edition as you will have to rewrite the Monster Manual several times. It's adesire for systemic change.

However how can you write all the beast statblocks if the fanbase want to keep the old beast statblocks for backwards compatibility?
You can't.

Thus the fanbase will be in charge disappointed with the druid until WOTC can rewrite the MM in 6e.
The Druid and Beasts need another edition change.

There is another way though. Alternative rules and class features.

In PHB 2 (3.5) they introduced a version of wild shape called shapeshift that used a template system. It did not replace 3.5 WS, but it could be used instead. Template and stat block WS lived side by side. It wasn't perfect, but perhaps in Iterative design people who liked shapeshift could use it alongside WS, and when alternative 4e came out, even if SS isn't the default version in the PHB, people could use the 3e version with a little work. But with the 4e we got, nothing was portable and we were again stuck with the WS they gave us. Much like how people who do not like the proposed 24 Wild Shape could use 14's, but people who liked a system akin to shapeshift are forced to make their own or go without.

 

[payn]

There is another way though. Alternative rules and class features.

In PHB 2 (3.5) they introduced a version of wild shape called shapeshift that used a template system. It did not replace 3.5 WS, but it could be used instead. Template and stat block WS lived side by side. It wasn't perfect, but perhaps in Iterative design people who liked shapeshift could use it alongside WS, and when alternative 4e came out, even if SS isn't the default version in the PHB, people could use the 3e version with a little work. But with the 4e we got, nothing was portable and we were again stuck with the WS they gave us. Much like how people who do not like the proposed 24 Wild Shape could use 14's, but people who liked a system akin to shapeshift are forced to make their own or go without.

Sounds modular, and awesome! Totally incremental too.

 

[Minigiant]

There is another way though. Alternative rules and class features.

In PHB 2 (3.5) they introduced a version of wild shape called shapeshift that used a template system. It did not replace 3.5 WS, but it could be used instead. Template and stat block WS lived side by side. It wasn't perfect, but perhaps in Iterative design people who liked shapeshift could use it alongside WS, and when alternative 4e came out, even if SS isn't the default version in the PHB, people could use the 3e version with a little work. But with the 4e we got, nothing was portable and we were again stuck with the WS they gave us. Much like how people who do not like the proposed 24 Wild Shape could use 14's, but people who liked a system akin to shapeshift are forced to make their own or go without.

The community rejected templates in 5e.

Granted the templates offered were terrible.

But that kinda proves the point.

The designers have to know how to design an incremental adaptation of a subsystem that the community accepts. Incremental design is harder to design than resets as you are locked to the structure of previous design. And ocked to backwards compatibility.

And for certain aspects you must change so much to update , fix, or add; you have created a new edition as stuff stops being backwards compatible.

 

[haakon1]

The 3e, 4e, 5e druid do not meet the standards of the community …
Thus the fanbase will be in charge disappointed with the druid until WOTC can rewrite …

Your community and mine seem to disagree on whether the Druid is acceptable. And in general about how much to whinge that rules are “unacceptable“.

• In 3e/3.5e, I’ve DM’d druids, and the Druid player, me the DM, and the other players never had any problem with RAW for the class.
• 4e I don’t remember if anyone I played with had a Druid, but Druid was a subject of complaints I heard zero times, and I heard lots of complaints about 4e.
• In 5e, I’ve seen a Druid or two, and again they no objections were raised.

Ranger, on the other hand, I’ve controversial and house ruled in many editions.