D&D General Why Enworld should liberate D&D from Hasbro

[FitzTheRuke]

Face it, the only people who call it anything other than “D&D” are people who spend way too much time talking about it online.

When I said that my group calls it 5e24, that’s mostly my fault. They all love the game, but I’m the only one who spends any amount of time talking about it online. In fact, last fall, when I announced I was starting a new campaign so we could have fun trying out the update, none of them were even aware it was happening (let alone, that it had just been released).

Yeah, everyone I talk to in real life (and remember, I own a game store, so I'm talking about even there) just calls it D&D.

Sometimes, "the new books".

I've certainly heard it be called "Five Point Five" aloud by a walk-in or two, but the speaker is clearly the kind of person who hangs out here (who are actually pretty rare, even in game stores).

For example, I regularly play with about thirty unique players every month, and as far as I know, I'm the only one on here. Many of them have DDB accounts. I doubt many spend any time on those forums, though!

 

[Scribe]

Yeah, everyone I talk to in real life (and remember, I own a game store, so I'm talking about even there) just calls it D&D.

Sometimes, "the new books".

I've certainly heard it be called "Five Point Five" aloud by a walk-in or two, but the speaker is clearly the kind of person who hangs out here (who are actually pretty rare, even in game stores).

For example, I regularly play with about thirty unique players every month, and as far as I know, I'm the only one on here. Many of them have DDB accounts. I doubt many spend any time on those forums, though!

We are a rare breed thats for sure. I always remind myself of what Maro said regarding MtG. "75% of players do not know what a Planeswalker is."

 

[Zardnaar]

Yeah, everyone I talk to in real life (and remember, I own a game store, so I'm talking about even there) just calls it D&D.

Sometimes, "the new books".

I've certainly heard it be called "Five Point Five" aloud by a walk-in or two, but the speaker is clearly the kind of person who hangs out here (who are actually pretty rare, even in game stores).

For example, I regularly play with about thirty unique players every month, and as far as I know, I'm the only one on here. Many of them have DDB accounts. I doubt many spend any time on those forums, though!

I noticed that back in 2002. I was the only one using forums.

You and reddit bit more popular but still. Most people weren't using forums or played 3E as forums thought. It was mostly theorycrafting. Imho of course.

Hence my theories about 4E tanking and 3.x surviving another decade.

 

[Lanefan]

The stack of papers is thrown up into the air where they fold themselves into a paper Cloud of Daggers. You should have filled out the paperwork.

That's fine. While we've charge forward to get our coup going we leave the Cloud of Paper Daggers behind us, and now the bureaucrats have to deal with it.

Benefits all round!

 

[Lanefan]

But, whatever. I will probably lose in the long run, and we can all adopt 5.5 until they revise 6e in 2052. They'll call it Ultimate D&D or some other silly thing, and everyone will insist on calling it 6.5.

Given that 6e will likely IMO come out in 2031, it lasting unrevised until 2052 seems like one hell of a stretch. Even 2042 seems too long. 2037-ish for the revised ".5" version, maybe 2039 if 6.0e proves highly successful.

 

[Lanefan]

My group, and my game store, calls it "D&D" and only if there is a danger of confusing anyone we call it the "new books" and only here do I call it 2024. I only rarely need to speak of it as 5e.

In a store it makes sense to have it be a single-edition environment as that's the version you're trying to sell.

Most of us - including this forum as a whole which covers all versions of D&D - aren't in that environment, and often do want and-or need to specify which edition or version we're talking about.

I mean, in our home environment here "D&D" said by itself usually means our own 1e-adjacent version

 

[Lanefan]

At the risk of starting this up again, when it was so beautifully concluded (honestly, sorry everyone). I feel like asking:

For those that prefer to call the 2024 books "5.5" - what is wrong with, say, 5e24 (is it really just that one more keystroke!?).

One more keystroke to type, two more syllables to say and-or think (or three if one sees 5.5 as just "five-five").

For ease of speech and thought, the fewer syllables the better.

 

[Reef]

This isn’t a battle that needs a victory. Call it 5.5, and I’m going to know what you are referring to. If I call it 5e24, I’m pretty sure you aren’t going to be confused either.

And offline, everyone can just say D&D and be relatively certain it’s good enough.

 

[Lanefan]

Because people like consistency. They don't want to necessarily learn a bunch of rules that are only applicable at certain tables. Especially if they play at multiple tables. "Oh, wait, I've been rolling critical damage all wrong. It's Bob's table that maxes one die, not Steve's table."

Because on places like reddit and other discussion boards, if you talk about house rules, you get a ton of people telling you the rule is bad, OP, unnecessary because of XYZ, and so on. Meaning that people may be loathe to trust those who use them.

Because if your table has a houserule you like, especially one that you think is needed to make the game fun, realistic, actually playable, to your particular standards, whatever, and you try to move to a table that doesn't like it, you may not actually want to move to that table. Or someone new who comes to your table hates the rule and it causes strife. Or if you lack social graces, you may end up assuming your houserules are universal, or try to force the other table to use them, which in turn may cause a lot of problems.

Personally, I don't see any of this as that much of a problem. One of the prime considerations already when jumping to another table these days is what system - never mind what houserules - they're using, so this feels like you're just taking that which has been the case since D&D was invented and painting it as a new issue.

Flip side: when I come up with a houserule my only consideration is what works for my game and my table right here, right now. I don't - and have no good reason to - give a flying eff what anyone external to our game thinks of it.

The only place where hard-coded rules consistency across tables makes sense - to a point - is "organized play" such as AL, where table-hopping is an intentionally baked-in element of how it works.

And obviously people are going to think their own houserules are better, because otherwise they wouldn't be using those houserules. Again, a non-issue.

 

[Stormonu]

Given that 6e will likely IMO come out in 2031, it lasting unrevised until 2052 seems like one hell of a stretch. Even 2042 seems too long. 2037-ish for the revised ".5" version, maybe 2039 if 6.0e proves highly successful.

I like to believe it will be the Pentium 2 edition. Or, as it may be called 5Ex2.