Fascinating. I also remember the comparisons of 3e to Diablo, but I remember them being made positively. Of course, I was hearing them from my friends’ “cool” older siblings (they were in middle school and probably seen as extremely uncool nerds by their peers, but they sure came across as cool to me at the time!)
Oh, I'm sure some folks did make positive comparisons. Just as I'm sure some WoW fans probably made positive comparisons WRT 4e. But there were definitely negative ones as well, I've done a little fandom archaeology in the distant past to dig up some of them. Many of the places such things were posted ceased to exist in the past 20+ years, but there's a lingering trace.
Unfortunately, most of 4e’s best ideas were only followed up on superficially. Take 5e’s hit dice, for example, which look a lot like 4e’s healing surges, if you have only a surface-level understanding of 4e’s healing surges, but utterly fail to even address the actual role of healing surges in 4e’s design.
Yeah. One of my most well-received posts on this forum goes into a lot of this, and IMO HD vs surges is
the most obvious place where 5e took only the slimmest superficial veneer of 4e and ignored literally any of the actual game design.
There really is no proper successor to 4e, that iterates on 4e’s actual design ethos. Just some vaguely 4e-like aesthetic elements that get pointed at to and claimed as throwing a bone to the 4e fans.
When in reality those vaguely 4e-like elements stick in the craw of most any 4e fan who appreciated what they were actually for. But this is precisely why I want 4e to be OGL or (preferably) Creative Commons. If they actually added 4e to the Creative Commons--even if it was just the explicit contents of the three PHBs and two DMGs and
nothing else!--then you could ACTUALLY get a true, full-throated successor.
As it stands, I find 13A is an acceptable successor, mostly because it has so many terribly clever design elements. It's far more of a merger of 3e and 4e design than 5e ever thought of being. As I've said elsewhere, 5e is 3e on a diet with a new coat of paint and a handful of new ideas (like item attunement, only being able to Concentrate on a single spell, and Advantage/Disadvantage.)
So, with 5E I think they are taking that lesson and going evergreen.
Whereas I am quite convinced we're going to get a 6e, or something functionally equivalent to a 6e even if it isn't called that, by 2032, or 2034 at the
absolute latest. I don't think 5.5e has more than six years' worth of play in it. It has nothing to do with Mearls' claim that "D&D isn't cool anymore"; it has everything to do with "second verse, same as the first" will never last as long as the original thing did, not least because plenty of the things in 5.5e are not well-liked by all fans of 5.0, and that's encouraging at least some people to start looking elsewhere.
Remember, they've made gestures at "evergreen" twice now, and both times they've backtracked. One was with 4e. The second was 5.0. And people swore, up and down, that 5e would be evergreen! That there would never be a need for an overhaul, they'd just do piecemeal, iterative updates comparable to TCoE. We've already seen that come and go.
"Evergreen" is a myth. If--I say,
if--5.5e goes a full decade without any announcement of a new thing, if in 2035 folks are still playing "2024 D&D" and not even hearing a whisper about any kind of new playtest,
then I'll buy that they've made something evergreen. Not a day before.
Great post. Thanks for that perspective.
My pleasure.
