D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Hussar]

I assume it was a desperate attempt to keep sales going as all books dropped off fast


we always had the core three, starting with 1e, now the others are entirely independent of everything but them however

No. We actually didn't. The notion of "Core 3" was a 3e invention. In 2e and especially 1e, ALL books were core. Unearthed Arcana was just as much of a core book as the Player's Handbook and you were expected to be using it if you were playing "True" AD&D.

 

[jayoungr]

TL;DR: If you weren’t conservative to some degrees, you wouldn’t be a fan. Fans have different levels of tolerance to change but if you change something you loved, you might not love it anymore.

This seems really obvious to me, so much that I don't get why people try to shame and scold others for it.

 

[mamba]

No. We actually didn't. The notion of "Core 3" was a 3e invention. In 2e and especially 1e, ALL books were core. Unearthed Arcana was just as much of a core book as the Player's Handbook and you were expected to be using it if you were playing "True" AD&D.

guess I never played true AD&D then…

 

[KYRON45]

How are you harmed by their existence? How does their presence, in any way at all, affect YOUR play?

Nobody forces you to run funnels. They're an option. Every group can choose to use them or not use them, and literally nothing is lost.

You keep making this out to be some kind of zero-sum game. It isn't. Your point hinges on the presumption that in order for something to be added, it must, 100% always, take away something from someone else. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.

You're hostility adds to (if not proves) my point.
You like a thing and consider it progress. The thing you like has no value to me and therefore to me it's just change as it doesn't progress my game play. This seems to bother you. Hence progress is determined by its value to the end user.
I made none of the assumptions you are implying.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

 

[Hussar]

Does it?

Most thermostats never broke down. The fact that some did doesn't prove anything. A lot of circuit boards fail as well, but not all of course. They are however more sensitive and when they break they cause more trouble than some ice build up.


Yeah. This was actually never a comparison with ttrpgs. This was just a rebutal when someone claimed that no one ever makes something new willfully worse. I could have use mobile phones as a example but refrigerators was closer in my mind as I have worked with them and I know for a fact this to be true. They use cheaper components with a higher chance of failure and shorter life spans to sell more products.

An interesting thought exercise would be to ponder how one could translate this process to ttrpgs. Many have stated again and again that WotC is a corporation and that it's going to corporate. So if they want to keep us buying more and more books at a faster rate, and they want to spend less and less money doing it, how will they do this? What is the ttrpg version of planned obsolescence?

Except that you are flat out wrong.

While you are correct that a new refrigerator may have a shorter half-life than an older refrigerator, it's still a fact that the newer one will be cheaper in the long run. You are ignoring far, far too many things in your quest to prove that "older is better". And cell phones? Seriously? While, again, yes, an older cell phone may last longer than a new one, there's just no comparison. Let's see you post to En World from a cell phone produced before 2005.

More and more books at a faster rate? Again, seriously? Good grief, for the past ten years all I've heard is the constant bitching about how WotC isn't producing fast enough for people. Endless DEMANDS for more material.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Game dev's for RPG's simply cannot possible foresee every single issue with a system. Particularly not with a system as incredibly complex as D&D. It just isn't possible. So, we get errata and periodic rules updates. Which, in my mind, is perfectly fair and understandable.

A D&D edition change is usually much more seismic than a "periodic rules update," or else we wouldn't have had the 3e/4e edition wars, and we wouldn't still have some very vocal 4e fans complaining about what they see as a kind of design backsliding in 5e. We wouldn't have the OSR trying to recapture a simpler, deadlier era of play. We wouldn't have had 3e's "back to the dungeon" philosophy. We'd be able to use the OGL to publish 4e material because 4e is just a "rules update" to the same fundamental game.

This ultimately goes back to the diversity of audiences that D&D serves, and how different design works for different groups. Invested fans are protective of their version of the best D&D because the official vision of what D&D is can be described as incoherent at best. So fans have to plant their flags and get invested in the rules that work best for them, since there's no guarantee that the official releases will actually still care about their style of play in 5-10 years, and some very robust evidence that, in fact, they will not.

(and, as an aside, the tendency to just re-use catchy names on unrelated design does exacerbate this problem)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You're hostility adds to (if not proves) my point.
You like a thing and consider it progress. The thing you like has no value to me and therefore to me it's just change as it doesn't progress my game play. This seems to bother you. Hence progress is determined by its value to the end user.
I made none of the assumptions you are implying.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

There is no hostility. I'm confused why you would think there was.

And, again, I don't like this. That was the point. I don't want it, I wouldn't use it, it has nothing in common with my interests. And yet it is still a clear improvement over not having that arrow in the quiver.

 

[Hussar]

A D&D edition change is usually much more seismic than a "periodic rules update," or else we wouldn't have had the 3e/4e edition wars, and we wouldn't still have some very vocal 4e fans complaining about what they see as a kind of design backsliding in 5e. We wouldn't have the OSR trying to recapture a simpler, deadlier era of play. We wouldn't have had 3e's "back to the dungeon" philosophy. We'd be able to use the OGL to publish 4e material because 4e is just a "rules update" to the same fundamental game.

This ultimately goes back to the diversity of audiences that D&D serves, and how different design works for different groups. Invested fans are protective of their version of the best D&D because the official vision of what D&D is can be described as incoherent at best. So fans have to plant their flags and get invested in the rules that work best for them, since there's no guarantee that the official releases will actually still care about their style of play in 5-10 years, and some very robust evidence that, in fact, they will not.

(and, as an aside, the tendency to just re-use catchy names on unrelated design does exacerbate this problem)

Except, most of the time, it really isn't.

1e - 2e wasn't exactly a "seismic" shift. Nor was 3e to 3.5. Yup, 2e to 3e and then 3.5 to 4e, those were big shifts. But, then, back to 5e and then 2024. Over ten years now of pretty much no change. Does anyone think that 2024 is a "seismic" shift? Figure that 2024 lasts another ten years and we've had about a two thirds of the history of the game without any major rules changes.

 

[KYRON45]

There is no hostility. I'm confused why you would think there was.

And, again, I don't like this. That was the point. I don't want it, I wouldn't use it, it has nothing in common with my interests. And yet it is still a clear improvement over not having that arrow in the quiver.

I’ll have to take your word for it.

 

[Scribe]

The aesthetics can be distinguished from the rules. 3.5e is my personal edition preference and while I like the mechanics, I hate the aesthetics of the rulebooks. I've even ranted about those aesthetics back in the day.

Correct, but I'm afraid this thread has lost its way.