D&D 5E Anyone else feeling "meh" about recent 5e releases?

I'm really, really glad in light of the past several posts that D&D is owned by Hasbro, so that quote-unquote "adult content" is not featured.

You know what? You're right. You can imply edge and graphic content as desired.

This approach is good for sales. But we have not abandoned demons and devils (the old panic is funny in light of Gygax going to church!) so it's a sweet spot.

I willlet my gradeschoolers play the game with me without a lot of concern if they want to buy their own players or whatever.

It's a good strategy...it's an action movie and you can make it hard R Arnold conan movie if you wish (without keeping the kids from getting in).

As someone who writes their own adventures, I am feeling very "meh" about recent 5E releases.

I mean, for me, we can discount any adventures. I'm not saying they're bad. They could be amazing, but I'm not running other people's adventures, my main group isn't into that and I haven't really enjoyed it since, well, the 1990s.

So looking at the other material, we have:

Eberron - I like Eberron, but I didn't particularly need specific 5E rules for it (especially as they don't really change anything up, for better or worse), and just personally and for my main group, I know we're not excited about Eberron-specific races nor Alchemist as a class. Also the best bits of Eberron will still primarily be covered in previous-edition books.

Acquisitions Incorporated - The very definition of "meh", for me. I like the PA guys, generally. I have no desire to play a campaign specifically like their one. It's basically aggrandized house rules/content here, in kind of a "meh" way, rather than exciting one.

Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica - I'm not saying "No-one asked for this!", but this is TSR-like levels of "Really? An entire setting book?". I can think of some pretty obscure 2E stuff that was more in-demand than this. I read up on it to see if it was actually exciting, but it seems like it's profoundly unexciting. Even the race mechanics are pretty dull. Not mechanically bad, necessarily, but far from exciting. Really feels like a deep-2E TSR product.

We have to go aaaaaaaaalllllll the way back to May last year (so 1 year 4 months ago!) to find a book that was actually useful or exciting for me:

Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes - Totally solid effort, enjoyed, would buy more like this. Didn't blow my mind but is a solid, good product.

Then we're back in 2017!

Xanathar's Guide to Everything - Great. Players enjoyed it, I enjoyed it. Added plenty to the game in a good way. I can see you don't want to do this too often, but it seems like, I dunno, every two years would be reasonable, and I'm pretty sure we're not actually going to see another thing like this for another year or more.

Then we're into 2016 with Volo's and I don't think there's any definition of "recent products" which goes back that far.

So yeah, I'm with the OP. For someone who runs their own adventures, WotC have had a deeply boring set of products for the last year and a bit, and I feel like it's unlikely that this is going to improve.

Which is actually fine! If WotC don't want to sell me stuff, I don't have to buy it. I can keep going just fine with the content I have now. But it does mean the amount of money I'm spending on WotC products is drastically lower than it could be. If they're happy with that, I guess I'm happy with that. I spent, far, far more in 2E, 3E, and 4E though - and I would in 5E is there was anything fun to buy!

CapnZapp said:

Let's remember that a lot of the "Paizo is better than WotC" (at writing stories) is a hold-over from before 5E.

Especially 4E was a god-awful period. Something about that ruleset really brought out the worst in its adventure writers, much like how (somehow) WFRP 3e managed to evoke true howlers of scenarios.

So if Paizo's quality has declined (quite natural for such a venerable edition), it's a significant difference if we compare early energized PF1 with late tired 3E products (or worse, most of the early 4E modules I looked at) or if we compare late era Paizo with the considerably improved 5E efforts.

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I loved 4E but yeah, like what was up with the adventures? Pre-4E, I always used a mixture of my adventures and pre-gen material. I didn't enjoy the pre-gen material as much but it served a purpose and I could jazz it up and so on. 4E's adventures though, esp. WotC ones? I started with those because I was so busy at work at the time and good god they were awful, like, next level bad. I tried to jazz them up but there's only so much one can do. So I made time to focus on writing my own, which, frankly, were far better and played to 4E's strengths (which the official ones definitely did not).

Later 4E modules may have improved, but it was too late by then.

My idea of 4E adventures was early DDI Dungeon ones.
We went from almost the best Dungeon had ever been to it's worst.

Best Dungeon ever was was probably late 1E or early 2E. Before the niche setting adventures started turning up. So 1988-1991 roughly.

Quality fell off a cliff and Paizo was on fire.

Option B would be 2004-2007 under Paizo.

Ruin Explorer said:

Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica - I'm not saying "No-one asked for this!", but this is TSR-like levels of "Really? An entire setting book?". I can think of some pretty obscure 2E stuff that was more in-demand than this. I read up on it to see if it was actually exciting, but it seems like it's profoundly unexciting. Even the race mechanics are pretty dull. Not mechanically bad, necessarily, but far from exciting. Really feels like a deep-2E TSR product.

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Or you could look at it as a way to invite M:tG players to try their hand at D&D. Not designed for long time players such as yourself, but for new players who want to mix their peanut butter with some jelly.

Having said that, and while I'm a fan of the M:tG planes in general, this setting actually doesn't interest me either .

I liked Ravnica, probably not gonna play Ravnica though.

And I played it in MtG.

For 4E Edition, I bought and ran quite a few of the Goodman Games adventures. I felt they were all solid, and some were very fun to run.

As For WOTC, I found books like Hammerfast, Vor Rukoth, and Open Grave very useful for "adventure starter" material. The initial HPE series had some great ideas and locations, but were ruined by too many combat encounters and linear design. Same for that Dark Sun module- Put on your conductor's cap ….."ALL ABOARD!!!!" Reavers and Winter King (Essentials) were very fun playable adventures.

I don't buy that it was a designer issue either. People like Rob Heinsoo, Bruce Cordell, Mearls, etc. have proved themselves very capable of putting out good material. Both before and after 4E. I have to believe that this was some kind of serious management ignorance/stupidity/cluelessness in the first few years of 4E.

I visit DMs Guild every month to find the stuff that caters to my niche of interests.

Tallifer said:

I visit DMs Guild every month to find the stuff that caters to my niche of interests.

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Just keep that away from Japanese schoolgirls. What the F is that?