D&D 5E What is Quality?

GMforPowergamers said:

i will respectively disagree here. Low quality work can out sell high quality work when the low quality has money/name backing it.

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I'd say that it often does. Lower quality tends to mean low priced and low price is a quality all of it's own.

Oofta said:

I don't even have a full page (I don't count my purchasing cost list), I can't imagine having a hundred. Maybe they're trying to compete with the guy that's running the 40 year long campaign?

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Some people homebrew a lot of stuff. I just today downloaded a 50 page sourcebook with a ton of class options someone had homebrewed. I'd imagine that people who go trough that sort of effort probably do like the game quite a bit and are inspired by it to create new options and content.

My ow houserules are not nearly as that extensive, but definitely several pages. But most of that is about customising and fine tuning the game for the style of campaign I want, as well as stuff specific for my world, and not so much 'fixing' things. (Though there of course is some of that too.)

Oofta said:

That's fine, I don't think there is a way to define quality in many cases. However, looking at previous editions, with most editions there was a boom and bust cycle. While nobody has good info on how well D&D sold in the TSR days (not even TSR) if we look at 3.0, it sold well at first. The sales dropped off quickly, and they had to release 3.5 in an attempt to resuscitate and fix it. Then, according to the people who worked on 4E, that version was rushed out more quickly than they would have liked because sales were not meeting company goals.

We don't see that pattern with 5. I largely credit the extensive playtest and development period and overall design decisions, although other serendipitous factors also of course come into play.

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So having been there during third edition, this isn't actually the case. There was a boom period, and sales did slack off a bit as expected, it was actually 3.5 that caused the bust. 3.5 was largely seen as a cash grab by the majority of people, causing A LOT of customers to drop. The D20 bust coincided exactly with the release of 3.5, and as someone who was a member of Bastion Press's stable, that was the beginning of the end for that company as well as a bunch of others.

Darrin Drader said:

So having been there during third edition, this isn't actually the case. There was a boom period, and sales did slack off a bit as expected, it was actually 3.5 that caused the bust. 3.5 was largely seen as a cash grab by the majority of people, causing A LOT of customers to drop. The D20 bust coincided exactly with the release of 3.5, and as someone who was a member of Bastion Press's stable, that was the beginning of the end for that company as well as a bunch of others.

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Wonder if 5.5e will have that same effect.

Ovinomancer said:

That people say that they think a rule is good but they changed it for whatever reason indicating that it wasn't good for them.

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Let's make this really specific:

IMO, Inspiration is a good rule.
IMO, tweaking it so the burden is off the DM and instead, the players award their own Inspiration (limited to once per trait per session), makes it a better rule.

Where is the issue in any of this?

I used to think D&D was a low quality game but Matt Mercer proved me wrong! Critical Role is proof that you can use 5E to create highly engaging TTRPG sessions.

The launch of 3.0 was fairly tepid as well. I kept going back to the hobby shop for months, waiting for a new book to come out, and usually there was nothing. I picked up a few of the early 3rd party books and the quality was...unique, I'll say.

Then once supplements did start coming out, well...Sword and Fist and it's cousins were pretty wonky, and I'm pretty sure WotC knew it.

The 3.5 versions were better produced, and the content was a little less...shaky, but anyone who has ever read Complete Warrior can tell you that it was a mixed bag. Many options were fairly conservative, but years later people were still finding ways to abuse Warshaper.

As an aside, that was always the problem with 3e- the sense of scale was always off. Every book had a combination of good, bad, and just plain weird, like WotC staffers were just throwing darts at a wall to see what stuck.

Even rebalanced options, like variant character classes never said they were such, and I imagine many a DM was confused about whether or not having a Dragon Shaman and an Archivist in the same party was a good idea (pro tip: no, it's not).

Personally, when the topic of 5e's quality comes to mind, I'm not really finding the quality lacking- the game gets new players into it and ready to play fairly quickly, which is very important. My problems more have to do with long-term play, how it performs over time as you reach higher levels, and consistency, because, just like every other D&D product WotC has ever made, even within a given book, you can have great things, decent things, terrible things, and questionable things, which really begs the question of what metrics they use when creating content.

FrogReaver said:

Wonder if 5.5e will have that same effect.

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I'm hoping not. WotC did learn a lesson about messing with the backwards compatibility with half-editions. 3.5 was also released just three years after the lunch of 3rd edition. They've been telling us 5.5 will be fully backward compatible, and it's already been eight years since 5E was released. I see this more in line with 2.5, where they re-released the core books with a new and improved layout but didn't make a bunch of sweeping changes to the rules. They did release the "Options" books that gave a bunch of optional systems you could add to the game or choose to ignore.

Backwards compatibility is an odd thing. At first, you think "well of course, why wouldn't you?". But from a business standpoint, you don't really want this, since then you won't be able to sell people all new books!

Like, 1e/2e, the rules were basically similar enough that you could keep using old content, though 2e found ways to make you want to buy and use newer content instead of old content, and the way many 1e books were written helped this along, as they could seem archaic and inscrutable to players newer to the hobby (not that 2e books didn't have their own level of arcane inscrutability, mind you!).

I think what we'll see is more like 3.5/Pathfinder 1. It's basically similar, but there'll be a lot of new concepts that will make you have to do some work to use older things at the "newer, sleeker, sexier, more advanced" 5e+ tables.

Toss in the usual sentiment of our disposable economy of "it's new so it must be better" and I'm sure newer players will scoff at 5e books anyways.

James Gasik said:

As an aside, that was always the problem with 3e- the sense of scale was always off. Every book had a combination of good, bad, and just plain weird, like WotC staffers were just throwing darts at a wall to see what stuck.

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I'd argue that this was a "too many cooks" issue.

At the time, WotC was having rolling layoffs and shortly thereafter all the designers who worked on 3rd edition were gone. Some of the folks who had primarily been setting writers, or adventure writers moved into positions where they were directly overseeing the development of rules, and most of those rules were coming in from freelancers.

I was in a meeting with Ed Stark and we were looking at a book (which shall remain nameless) where we looked at a specific rule from one of the later books and he became irritated that the rule literally broke their internal design guidelines but slipped through anyway.

Another one of the primary R&D people basically saw D&D characters as superheroes, so you could pretty much count on that person's stuff being overpowered.