D&D 5E 5E And The D&D Play style "Won"

[guachi]

Emphasis mine. I'm among the "golden-age" players who came back to the hobby with 5e. But the "great numbers we are not seeing" are mostly millennials introduced to the game by entertaining streamers on Twitch and YouTube who first get hooked by the story-telling and improv skills of the streamers, but also see how the rules work in play. I don't know that there are enough of us golden-age returning players to explain the numbers we are seeing with 5e.

Maybe not to explain the current numbers. But old-timers coming back was likely a big part of early sales and good word of mouth. As an old-timer, I've now been a first time DM to probably 20 players. And old-timers are probably a disproportionate amount of sales dollars.

 

[S'mon]

I think Old Timers coming back and enjoying the game is significant as seed corn for generating more new players. They will often be willing to GM, they know basic RPG tropes, they can help newbies get started.

 

[jasper]

For us old timers.I throw in Adventure League Modules being at the near same cost as old school modules use to. One of giant modules was $4.50. I know because I wrote the price on inside map.
And I can go to store play a few hours and DO NOT have to ever invite the players back to my house. So I can put some distance between the game and the gamers.

 

[Gradine]

As an "old timer" that never left, I will say that I been much more successful in recruiting new players to D&D with 5e than I have with any previous edition (I usually had to struggle to get a full party together for my 3.5 campaigns, and never managed to successfully recruit for any 4e campaign).

 

[Sacrosanct]

Prior to the internet, which was really hitting stride with 3E, games were very different when you moved from table to table. Most people misunderstood some of the rules, but the rules they misunderstood (r did no know about) differed from table to table. The best source to understand the rules as written were monthly magazines like Dragon. It was a dffernt experience fr every group.

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I know this is anecdotal, but I just don't see this. In the 80s, my group was pretty static. Same core group of players with only rarely bringing in new player or me going to a different group. But then, there were very few differences. In the 90s, I was in the military, and must have gamed with over a hundred different people. Players were coming and going every couple months as everyone got deployed to different areas and/or switched duty stations. And again, there was little change from table to table.

The only differences I've seen in those 20 years were minor house rules, like 4d6 vs. 3d6. Or start with max HP at level 1. That was pretty much it. This thought that prior to the internet everyone was completely different just doesn't match with my experiences at all.

 

[Pauper]

Put simply the online stereo types about the various D&D playstyles do not apply to how peopel play the game. Those stereotypes broadly speaking are.

1E. Fantasy Vietnam.
2E. Narrative settings.
3E. Powergaming.
4E tactical.

I think this is an interesting way to look at the differences between previous editions and 5e, though I have Thoughts.

For example Fantasy Vietnam in AD&D mostly exists in a handful of adventures with certain reputations the Tomb of Horrors being the prime one (Ruins of Undermountain and Labyrinthe of Madness). The thing here is that for the most part I suspect those play styles are actually in the minority.

I think, generally speaking, you're right. Classic 'meatgrinder' dungeons might do well in lists of all-time best modules, but they're also highly polarizing. It's hard to tell any kind of story in a meatgrinder other than Day of the Dead, and arguably that movie had more story in it than most meatgrinder dungeons allow.

That's not to say it's impossible to set up overwhelming combats, or that some players don't still get a kick out of telling stories about how their party kept pounding their heads against a dungeon wall until it finally collapsed, but that seems much less prevalent now. And the design has something to do with it -- I've been doing a reasonably faithful 5e adaptation of the 3E Age of Worms adventure path for a local group that tired of organized play, and a number of the encounters in the first two adventures are significantly less challenging in 5E than they were in 3E:

- Monsters that were immune to weapon damage in 3E are now only resistant, meaning that characters can still contribute to a fight if they don't have alternate damage sources.
- PC races with spell-like abilities aren't automatically mirrored in their monster expressions, which both makes monsters less complex and complicated to run and makes PCs strictly superior at the same 'tier'.
- Short rests are actually significantly more useful in 5E than they were in 4E, which helps define the 'tempo' of an adventuring day and also helps short-circuit adventures that are built as a series of combats leading to a final big fight when the party is drained of resources. And by resetting HP, long rests are more useful than in 3E, where whether or not a party was fully prepared for the next day's adventuring depended in large part on how many resources they'd expended the previous day (i.e.: if they could burn spare cleric spell slots on healing before rest, or if they'd need to basically spend two days resting to both heal up and get all the spells back to adventure with).

It's perhaps unfair to consider 5E "D&D on Easy Mode", but the game as a system puts way fewer obstacles in the way of party success than it used to.

Even now people still slag off FR for example for various reasons, part of it being its always "cool" to hate whats popular. And yet is the only thing that has survived from 1E-2E-3E-4E due to its popularity. This would indicate that most players don't care to much about Darksun or Greyhawk or Eberron etc and FR killed off Greyhawk and Dragonlance for the most part in the 80's and 90's.

I think this is an oversimplification. For starters, as evidenced on any D&D forum, there are still people who are huge fans of the various settings. I'd also argue that people who are die-hard FR fans to the same degree that people can be die-hard Greyhawk or Dragonlance fans are probably not entirely happy with FR these days -- the 'lets throw everything the system supports into this world' gumbo bucket that the designers seem so pleased with about FR is actually harmful to the perception of hard-core FR fans, who see the setting as different from Greyhawk because it is more explicitly high fantasy without going as far as the baroqueness and single-story obsessiveness of Dragonlance. FR is a sandbox, but it's a sandbox with a particular kind of sand, not just any old sand you happen to come across. (Case in point: just because you can justify warforged in a FR setting doesn't mean they should be as common as any other non-human racial option -- if you want a setting where there are lots of warforged, that's what Eberron is for.)

Looking back through my old D&D books there was a clear path towards more options for players. From large chunks of UA being added to the 2E PHB (mostly spells), through to streamlining the late 2E mechanics and turning them into feat for 3.0. 4E and Pathfinder were the ultimate evolution of those concepts, both of them have not done that well by D&D standards (great for Paizo at one point though they are a smaller company).

This seems to me to be post-hoc revisionism based on the seeming economic success of 5E. During the 4E era, there were those who argued that Pathfinder was the 'true D&D' (despite OSR still being a thing during that time). Paizo took over WotC's position in the Sagamore Ballroom at GenCon, then took over their sponsorship of the convention proper (and WotC still refuses to return in any significant sense, leaving their organized play in the hands of a competent vendor).

With that said, I think a big part of the success of 5E is in the recognition that having a system that assumes players will optimize limits the player base to those players who enjoy optimization. By presenting published adventures that don't presume optimization, and complimenting them with streams of games where optimization doesn't really happen to any significant degree, the designers explicitly give permission for players who don't find optimization interesting or enjoyable to find their own fun within the game system, and the streamers help point out where that fun is to be found. That taps into a much larger pool of potential players than just those who are tiring of the grind of Pathfinder or others looking to get back into a D&D game that feels like the games they played as teenagers.

And that is why I think rulings not rules as the basic concept has worked so well. Some players do like the extra crunch but if you scare off the GMs and fail to appeal to new players you might not have much of a game long term.

Agreed to a point. 'Growing the game' sounds all well-and-good, but it isn't strictly necessary to prove a game is good or worthy of play. Chess, as the ur-example, has been around for centuries, and the last significant rules change occurred in the 15th century (though rules on how to organize tournaments have changed frequently over the past couple of centuries).

What 'growing the game' does is make the game more economically viable for its owner -- yet plenty of games don't have an owner and are still both fun to play and classically viable as pastimes. One could even argue that the OSR movement helps demonstrate that, even if D&D didn't have an 'owner', it would still be played and enjoyed in some form now that it is part of the cultural consciousness, even if the OSR is dwarfed by the capitalist expression of D&D that is taken as the default by most gamers today.

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Pauper