D&D (2024) DMs what do you think of the new PHB?

[Azzy]

Soom.... I will have the book soon.

 

[DEFCON 1]

The question, of course, is whether 6e, when it eventually arrives, will try to woo us (all three) back, or write us off as lost for good. I can't say I'm optimistic .

My personal guess is that if/when we get an eventual 6E, its design will be predicated on how successful their 3DVTT has been and whether the "next edition" will be designed to be even more integrated into whatever works best in that program. After a couple years of using the 3DVTT the designers might discover that there are pain-points in the game on the VTT for which a new tabletop game engine for D&D would smooth things out. Although to be honest... I think if those pain-points are at all actually manageable and the so-called "evergreen" foundation of the 5E game works out well for the VTT and it generates the kind of cash flow WotC is hoping for... then I don't think there's any reason to believe WotC won't continue to just keep that fifth edition foundation of the game in place and instead continue to publish revisions to it every bunch of years rather than do a full 6E "game edition update".

As far as "wooing" people back? If I had to guess... they probably no longer see the need, especially if the 3DVTT ends up being truly "system neutral" as they claim. Because at that point, anyone who left WotC's Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition to play some other game could in theory play that other game on the 3DVTT as well if they wanted (and some of them actually might). Which means those people would still potentially be customers and thus wouldn't have really necessarily "left" as it were. People prefer to play Level Up or 4E online? They might be able to use the 3DVTT to do it. So those folks could throw in their bucks and still be customers... and at that point there's nothing left to "woo".

And the people who don't come back at all? That's always been something I think TSR/WotC has always understood to be the case, and they've for the most part accepted it. And that's much easier for them to do so now that a lot of that "non-D&D 5E" material is available for those folks on DMs Guild to be bought anyway (and thus getting WotC their sheckles for that stuff too.)

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

VTT + 6e would be the right time to just reprint most of 4e.

 

[teitan]

Reading reviews and it's a lot of gushing over how many new options and powers the PCs have. Which is grand from a player perspective.

What do my fellow Forever DMs think?

I like it but it also frustrates me because I was under the impression that MoM, FIzban's & Bigby's were forward compatible and looking at the monster stats in the book I wonder how true that is and the species are giving me flashbacks to 4 iterations of the Orc in a row with "this book now has the official Orc stat for PCs"

 

[teitan]

I'm not a forever DM, I do get to play quite a bit. But I do DM the vast majority of the time, and do so for randoms off the internet quite often.

I think the new PHB adds a lot of unneeded stuff, and is kind of a wash. They cleaned up a lot of rules, such as exhaustion, but they also added a bunch of "crunch" to the system. Whether this is a net positive will be up to each group.

But in my opinion 5e didn't need more crunch or more rules. It needed it's janky edges cleaned up. So I don't know that any meaningful improvement happened. And so I think the choice between 2014 and 2024 will just be about which jankiness you prefer instead of a clear upgrade.

But that's just my opinion, obviously.

Kinda like 1e, late 1e and 2e. Sure it cleans up a lot over the three eras but also introduces some new quirks in the system. The only real improvement in 2e is the adoption of THAC0 into the core rulebooks and even then it screws with the way that the numbers work with AC. Sure the thief was a nice update but the priest and wizard sure were overly complicated compared to the cleric and 1e wizard and I prefer not to discuss NWPs at all.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My personal guess is that if/when we get an eventual 6E, its design will be predicated on how successful their 3DVTT has been and whether the "next edition" will be designed to be even more integrated into whatever works best in that program. After a couple years of using the 3DVTT the designers might discover that there are pain-points in the game on the VTT for which a new tabletop game engine for D&D would smooth things out. Although to be honest... I think if those pain-points are at all actually manageable and the so-called "evergreen" foundation of the 5E game works out well for the VTT and it generates the kind of cash flow WotC is hoping for... then I don't think there's any reason to believe WotC won't continue to just keep that fifth edition foundation of the game in place and instead continue to publish revisions to it every bunch of years rather than do a full 6E "game edition update".

As far as "wooing" people back? If I had to guess... they probably no longer see the need, especially if the 3DVTT ends up being truly "system neutral" as they claim. Because at that point, anyone who left WotC's Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition to play some other game could in theory play that other game on the 3DVTT as well if they wanted (and some of them actually might). Which means those people would still potentially be customers and thus wouldn't have really necessarily "left" as it were. People prefer to play Level Up or 4E online? They might be able to use the 3DVTT to do it. So those folks could throw in their bucks and still be customers... and at that point there's nothing left to "woo".

And the people who don't come back at all? That's always been something I think TSR/WotC has always understood to be the case, and they've for the most part accepted it. And that's much easier for them to do so now that a lot of that "non-D&D 5E" material is available for those folks on DMs Guild to be bought anyway (and thus getting WotC their sheckles for that stuff too.)

I would consider "publish the 4e rules for the VTT" as a form of wooing people back.

That said? This idea that any part of 5e is in any way actually "evergreen" is frankly silly. It never has been, and their claims otherwise were at absolute best pie-in-the-sky dreaming.

They had said things that were very, very much meant to be understood as "we will never replace these core books." They've already broken that "promise" (which, naturally, they never said outright and made sure to always keep soft-touch and equivocal, so people will eviscerate you for claiming that it was a promise...even though it was literally everything BUT explicitly stated.)

If general patterns hold, 5.5e will last all of 4-6 years before we start hearing rumbles about another round of public playtesting. I fully expect an actual public playtest by 2031 at the absolute latest.

 

[teitan]

Is it just assumed that, so long as it is a good jumping-off point for new players (which is what most seem to be saying), and it has fancy art and a good layout, no other metric by which one might judge the most-used (by everyone), most central book of a game matters nearly as much? Do we really only care about new players now?

I mean that's HOW you keep the game alive, introducing new players and a complicated, poorly thought out lay out where you can't find anything is a huge barrier to success. IF you don't cater to new players you die on the vine.

 

[teitan]

As others have pointed out, the PHB has the core rules of the game. You don't need other books for it, since people were playing with PHBs for some time before DMGs/MMs became a thing.

When was this? In 1e the first book WAS the Monster Manual and it was written with the OCE rules in mind, then the PHB a year later, the DMG a year after that. 2e they were released back to back, same with 3.x and 4e was all same day. There were a few delays with 5e but the schedule was supposed to be back to back then as well.

In other versions of the game the DM advice and monsters were part of the boxed sets and not separate.

 

[pemerton]

The question, of course, is whether 6e, when it eventually arrives, will try to woo us (all three) back, or write us off as lost for good. I can't say I'm optimistic .

What does optimism have to do with it? Or to put it a bit more another way, why do you want or need to be wooed by WotC? They will publish the game they want to publish, based on their commercial imperatives; you should play the game that you want to play, based on your RPGing preferences.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

What does optimism have to do with it? Or to put it a bit more another way, why do you want or need to be wooed by WotC? They will publish the game they want to publish, based on their commercial imperatives; you should play the game that you want to play, based on your RPGing preferences.

It'd be really damn nice to have the game 95% of people are playing as one I'm actually eager to play for the game itself, and not (almost exclusively) for the good people I share the table with.

Or, to phrase that differently: I tried to play the game that I want to play. Several such games, in fact. It was a huge bust and, by and large, a waste of nearly a year's effort, a few years back.