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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 7500641" data-attributes="member: 17607">I think this is an interesting way to look at the differences between previous editions and 5e, though I have Thoughts. 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.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.)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 <a href="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/tabletop/columns/days-of-high-adventure/6412-Full-Circle-A-History-of-the-Old-School-Revival" target="_blank">OSR still being a thing</a> 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. 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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_passant" target="_blank"> last significant rules change </a>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.--Pauper</blockquote>

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