D&D 5E 5e and the Cheesecake Factory: Explaining Good Enough

[Oofta]

They do. That's not something I've seen. Usually it's "D&D could do X better," or "D&D doesn't do Y," gets hit with "Whatever, you just hate D&D." I haven't seen "I like D&D" get hit with "then you must HATE <insert thing here>."

I can't read every post ... so I can't say there aren't exceptions to the general. However, I've also seen "Why do you think D&D is perfect" or "You just hate new ideas" to know that it goes both ways.

Neither "side" is perfect.

 

[jayoungr]

Yes, year-after-year growth is a good indication of a reasonable good game. Popularity is not.

What's the difference between growth and popularity? How do you know something is popular if not through its growth?

I'm confused.

 

[TheSword]

Guess it depends on what you mean by "pissing contest". Because sometimes it seems like whenever someone posts an idea for an improvement and someone responds "that wouldn't work for me" they get a response of "why do you think the game is perfect?" or "stop hating on me!".

It's fine to criticize. It's fine to suggest that other games do stuff better. But people do seem to associate "I like D&D" with "I hate ___".

I see this come up a lot when an innocent poster, usually someone not familiar with the dynamics, innocuously says something like...

Step 1. “Hey I want to do a 5e game based on a [insert subject here]”

Step 2. They get some positive answers and suggestions.

Step 3. Someone comes along and says you can’t do X with 5e. You should play [Insert game here].

Step 4. To which the original poster replies. “No thanks I want to play 5e because [Insert reason here]”

Step 5. They are told it’s a fruitless exercise, they’re wasting their time and the thread degenerates into a debate about why 5e is no good for the poster’s subject.

Low magic is the topic that regularly comes up but you can add in political, exploration, horror (remember when Rime launched) and any number of themes.

It’s automatically assumed when people say “How do I do X with 5e”, that what the person really meant was “Please suggest alternative games to me even though I specifically asked you not to.”

We can go back through thread after thread on the subject.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I can't read every post ... so I can't say there aren't exceptions to the general. However, I've also seen "Why do you think D&D is perfect" or "You just hate new ideas" to know that it goes both ways.

Neither "side" is perfect.

Ah, your formulation had me confused. You're talking about when people propose new changes to D&D, and you say that those don't do anything for you, and then you're attacked for not supporting the proposed change, usually with asks about why you think D&D is fine as is. I get that, no issues.

 

[Aldarc]

I really, really want to do some Dark Sun with it. Some fairly heavy modifications to make it more like my own headcanon of Dark Sun, but I love the combination of the two.

I could definitely see that working well, especially since WWN does seem to lean into the Vancian dying world trope.

For the time being, I have something more along the lines of Chris Perkins's Iomandra with touches of the Second/Third Age of Middle Earth but painted on a canvas of scattered islands and archipelagos rather than a solid landmass.

 

[TheSword]

I do think there Brands are very powerful. Paizo did very well, slowly building their brand over a long time with quality work and there’s became the second most played TTRPG.

With a bajillion smaller companies and games out there, practically unheard of by those who don’t follow kickstarters, or get stuff from the FLGS, is it any wonder people struggle to have confidence when someone says a system is excellent at X when they only have that persons word to go on.

It’s a probably a similar response to why groups say no 3pp. Sometimes it’s because they were stung by something from the book of blaggy feats, but I think it’s usually being so overwhelmed by the range.

Before most people invest time, effort, money and cachet with their friends, they are going to want to know something is solid. It’s going to take more than suggestions from a stranger to do that. However sometimes I think this reluctance gets taken personally.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You folks (not just the ones quoted here, but others as well) talk about "good" and "best" as if they are some objectively definable things that everyone else should also respond to - as if you all actually agreed about what those things were.

You talk like "favorite" isn't something determined by more factors than just the system. And that, if you'd have your druthers, you'd only ever consume your one favorite food, watch your one favorite show exclusively - and that if it isn't your favorite, it can't be totally awesome anyway.

You talk like this is still the 80s, and finding out about other games is still hard, and that the small game companies aren't currently experiencing a renaissance of kickstarter products and players for those products like never before.

You folks look to be going to significant rhetorical effort to deny, reject, downplay, discredit, or deflect the idea that D&D... might actually be a good game.

I find that interesting.

It is interesting, isn't it? But so is the fact that you're putting words into people's mouths in precisely the way you yourself have correctly criticised and even had to moderate others doing. You're telling us how we think and what we think, and putting words directly into our mouths. Plus you're grouping together people with disparate opinions, which is, y'know, kinda rude.

And then the second-last line undermines the whole thing - if it's all relative, as your first line proposes, why does it matter? How could a game even be "good"? You can't have both, that's just shenanigans.

Personally, when I say whether a TT RPG is good, I'm largely talking about the mechanics, but also the presentation, and the way the mechanics influence other factors - often via the presentation to create stuff like how accessible it is. We've all seen relatively simple RPGs presented in ways that made them seem complex and difficult, or relatively complex RPGs presented in simple and accessible ways that made them more playable than they could otherwise have been.

If I take the words you've shoved in my mouth out, I would actually say D&D 5E is in my list of "good" RPGs, it's just not quite in my list of "great" ones, because it's a fundamentally a compromised game, a three-quarter measure. It was designed as an apology to fans, and it's success was not expected, nor designed for - some elements of 5E, as have been discussed in entire threads before, seem to owe a lot more to "OMG what will win grogs back from Pathfinder?!" rather than "What will make 5E an amazing game with massive accessibility?".

To me, as a compromised-but-modern design, 5E is quite impressive. More importantly, it has a ton of support. This is something that matters to what you actually play quite a lot I think, unless you're playing in a very self-contained way. But that doesn't make the RPG itself good in the way I mean it. It makes the support good. I mean, if we look at multi-player computer game, we can see a comparison - a lot of pretty mediocre multi-player games are pretty successful more through inertia and support and size of audience than quality of game. This isn't just a snobby thing, if anyone wants to claim that, I'm waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too old to fall for that nonsense. I've seen games rise and fall. I've seen games go from being hot, to not. And I've seen that that doesn't correlate extremely well with positive quality. Actually-bad or subpar games die fast, but 7/10 games? If they land at the right time, get enough players? They can go forever - and someone releasing an 8/10 or even a 9/10 game in a similar genre? Probably not going to have much impact. God help you trying to stop even an 8/10 game that has a big enough audience behind it, like WoW. Like train schoolbus gif man.

And I feel that's what 5E basically is. A 7/10 RPG with 11/10 support (no-one could match WotC's support - and the support the sheer popularity of the game creates with third parties). Does mean I should see it as like an 18/20 game? Maybe. I don't though.

I think your point about the '80s is interesting, I wasn't really around much then, but I don't think things have changed as much as you're trying to imply, because getting a group to try other games isn't merely a matter of getting hold of those games. I was lucky perhaps when I started playing RPGs, because I never really any difficulty getting hold of RPGs. I had enough money (between me and my brother and perhaps excessive pocket money as kids, initially, and then odd jobs and so on when older, until employment), and living in London, pretty much any RPG I could hear about, I could get, as the shelf behind me attests. The difficulty is transitioning players into playing it. Especially if the character creation is at all complex. As such, in the modern era, I've had a lot of success with PtbA/BitD-based games, Resistance-system games and the like (I suspect SWADE could also work, haven't tried it with my group yet), but am I ever going to run Cyberpunk Red or the Age of Sigmar RPG in their own systems? I very much doubt it (even though AoS is kind of simple enough). I think it's actually a lot harder, now, to convince a group to try a new system than it was in the 1990s. Is that because most gamers I know are 35-45? Maybe, but I don't think it's just that.

One thing that really helps D&D with my group is D&D Beyond. If it wasn't for D&D Beyond, there's no way we'd be playing 5E. Combine with the fact that a couple of the players just aren't very good at engaging with new systems, that 5E is at least a B+ game (7/10 being at least B+ in most grading systems I'm familiar with), and that 5E has staggering amounts of material for it, and you've got a pretty good reason to run D&D. Again maybe for you, a really decent solid game with amazing support is actually an amazing game. That seems to be what you're getting at. But that's not how I see it.

At it's heart, 5E is a compromised 3/4-arsed design, with a lot of weirdly clunky stuff and some sad attempts to shove 4E's prestige'd corpse under a bed (the feet are quite clearly sticking out), that's way more compromised and confused than is normal in actually-new RPGs. That's why I don't think it's great.

If you do a more generous comparison, maybe, don't compare it to it's contemporaries, but games from the '00s and earlier, and 5E looks absolutely great. Had 5E come out in 1994, it'd have been a 9/10 game, only losing that point for poor resolution system for out-of-combat stuff.

Let me just add - I think if they have the same attitude they seem to have NOW in 2021, rather than the "I've made a terrible mistake" of the 4E/Next era, 6E will be a genuine 10/10 RPG which I will not be able to look down my glasses at.* They have the money, they have or have access to the talent, they have the audience to test it with, they should be able to make a staggeringly good RPG.

* = I don't actually wear glasses, so this is entirely metaphorical.

 

[Ovinomancer]

My point was at least as much that some portion of the criticism (and I think it's the criticism that's most likely to be contentious) of 5E seems to come from people who don't like or play it. I don't doubt their honesty, or their ability to analyze the game and see how and why it doesn't suit them, but it's easier to accept a criticism of a thing you enjoy, from someone else who enjoys it, than from someone who doesn't--even in the absence of malice.

(Also, there seems to me to be more acceptance that someone might dislike 5E without having played it, than that someone might dislike BitD without having played it. That might be my perceptions not aligning to consensus reality, though.)

That doesn't seem to work for me, though. I like 5e. I'm running an AP right now (well, on Sundays). Yet, no matter how often I say this, it's ignored and I keep being told I'm irrational for saying 5e can't actually do everything, or that it's not well suited for a number of games.

As for not liking 5e without having played it, that's a interesting point. I think it hinges on exposure and awareness. Most people have been exposed to D&D, if not 5e specifically, and can recognize game structures that they don't like without playing 5e specifically. @pemerton is one such -- he doesn't like the GM/player authority structure inherent in most D&D editions (4e being an exception) and so, rightly, judges that the details of the system don't matter because one of it's core play agendas disagrees with him. Same with BitD, except that, given that most people haven't been exposed to it or similar games, there's a lot more ignorance of them. Sadly, this means that people like you, who have made an honest attempt at the rules, get caught in the assumption net that's most often true, so it makes absolute sense that you see this trend.

I mean, you've been involved in threads discussing how games like BitD and PbtA work -- how often do you see informed disagreement with those systems? Not really an excuse (you've raised a valid point, and one that I've tried to correct in myself), but rather a demonstration of how this occurs.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I see this come up a lot when an innocent poster, usually someone not familiar with the dynamics, innocuously says something like...

Step 1. “Hey I want to do a 5e game based on a [insert subject here]”

Step 2. They get some positive answers and suggestions.

Step 3. Someone comes along and says you can’t do X with 5e. You should play [Insert game here].

Step 4. To which the original poster replies. “No thanks I want to play 5e because [Insert reason here]”

Step 5. They are told it’s a fruitless exercise, they’re wasting their time and the thread degenerates into a debate about why 5e is no good for the poster’s subject.

Low magic is the topic that regularly comes up but you can add in political, exploration, horror (remember when Rime launched) and any number of themes.

It’s automatically assumed when people say “How do I do X with 5e”, that what the person really meant was “Please suggest alternative games to me even though I specifically asked you not to.”

We can go back through thread after thread on the subject.

Your step 3 on is an imaginative strawman, though. What usually happens is that someone points out that system Y does concept X well already, without additional work, and may be worth looking at. Or, also likely, that 5e lacks any real support for X, but system Y is made to do that.

That people stick to 5e anyway is true, though, and one should examine why that may be -- it's not because 5e does X well or that you can do a lot or work or ignore 5e's system to get there. It's usually some other thing or things. There's a cost to learning a new system. There's sunk cost fallacies for remaining with 5e. There's the quite likely situation that it's hard to find players for anything but 5e. There's inertia and avoidance of change (not bad things, just things). It's never because 5e is actually the right or best system to do concept X.

As for the last bits, it's fair to complain that if you really want to stick to 5e and cobble together an approach that does X, it's less helpful to get responses that suggest game Y. There are threads on this board, though, that start by explicitly saying exactly this and the pretty much avoid any such suggestions. If this is your desire, I suggest this approach.

That said, a number of those threads don't go anywhere successful even when looking at only 5e suggestions. This is because 5e (or any system) is actually limited in what it can do by it's core system. 5e cannot really do the kind of things a PbtA game does (and vice versa) because the core systems are very different and focus on completely different outcomes of play. I can (and sometimes do) smuggle in things from other games into 5e, but I'm very aware that when I do this, I'm ignoring 5e's system at that time, and I don't credit 5e for being flexible and enabling that play when I do so.

 

[Manbearcat]

Here is a quick anecdote from my last night's game that shows how "system matters" in a way where some might think "system doesn't matter there...the issue is the players!"

I've got 3 games going right now, but last night's game features two brand new TTRPGers (every now and again I try to introduce people to the hobby). One is slightly reserved (not full-blown introverted) while the other leans toward extraverted. This Dungeon World game is about 4 months old and we play every 3 weeks or so (this was session 5). Like all PBtA games, Dungeon World is very demanding of players. You cannot be passive. You have to actively advocate for your character. You have to actively be a participant in the conversation of play and answer provocative questions when asked and bring to bear interesting answers which are genre/theme/continuity-coherent which propel play forward. Its taken a few session, but these guys are finally getting there and enjoying themselves.

Last night we brought in a new player (a friend of two of us). She has also never played TTRPGs but she is an extraordinary reader (of all genres including fantasy) and has a lot of exposure via other mediums. She's also somewhat extraverted (though not hugely) and also attentive, empathic, and self-aware.

No disrespect to my two pals, but she is a natural. She blows them out of the water in every way; "knowing the room", "advocating for her character aggressively and coherently", "fitting into the chemistry of the conversation", "deploying immense creativity", "smoothly trying to keep everyone involved." She also makes fundamentally sound decisions (talking through her thinking) when navigating difficult decision-points. Right now (her first time ever playing a TTRPG game), she is one of the best gamers I've ever run games for and an absolute perfect fit for games like PBtA, FitD, DitV, et al.

These two guys went from "getting it" and having solid chemistry together (and within the framework of play) to suddenly deferring to her awkwardly and playing extremely passively. They were clearly intimidated and it wasn't because they weren't comfortable with her and/or they're hyper-introverts.

I was dissatisfied with the play experience due to the (I'm going to call it) "regression" of my other two friends. It wasn't a bad session, but nowhere as good as the last two because the "collective energy" wasn't well-distributed. This would not have been an issue in a system that isn't uniquely demanding of players where the significant majority of that aforementioned collective energy that propels play is concentrated in the GM and the metaplot (AP or the GM's own).

EDIT - POSTED IN WRONG THREAD - OOPS