D&D (2024) 6e? Why?

[Satyrn]

Huh. When I type @Tony Vargas, and do a preview it doesn't show...maybe when I submit?

Ah. I rarely ever prebiew my posts.

(And I'm sorely tempted to jokingly tag Tony in every single one our posts regarding this sidebar)

 

[ad_hoc]

I simply fundamentally disagree with most of what you're saying. Which is an awesome things about opinions, we can just agree to disagree. In my experience 5-10% of players preferred 4E. You sound like one of them which is fine.

I'll let the fact that they felt compelled to come out with a new edition speak for itself. I'm tired of edition wars. As far as I'm concerned, 5E won. .

I agree.

I don't think it will be long until 5e outsells all other editions combined. Well for core books anyway. Might need a few more supplements to catch up to that.

 

[Oofta]

Your experience is clearly with folks who came to 4e from other editions to prefer. And I'm not surprised by it. 4e was not easy for fans of 3e or earlier eds to wrap their heads around, let alone like. It killed too many sacred cows, it made the game better in two many ways that undercut existing ways of leveraging the system.

IMX, and I have no small amount of it, though, genuinely new players took to it better than any other edition. 5e is not the worst in that regard, but the best ways to bring new players into it are by immersing them in a table of mostly-experienced players, or by outright concealing the system from them as much as possible and bringing them into it by degrees, the very old-school Gygaxian philosophy of the DM always needing to have greater mastery of the rules to maintain an air of mystery. It works on a small minority of new players, but it works /really/ well. Almost like indocrinating them into a grognard religion.

Oh, I don't disagree that 4e lost the edition war in a big way (though 3e didn't exactly win the way it's adherents had hoped, either). 5e shows a clear adherence to the most traditionalist of the edition warriors' agendas - and it happend to work well enough in the current come-back market.

But, if you really are tired of it, why keep attacking the dead edition? 4e's no threat to you, anymore. There's no need to keep warring against it.

I played with people that were new to D&D, people that had been playing since the brown box set and everywhere in between.

I'm just responding to you because you state certain things as facts that I disagree with about 4E. In addition you make broad assumptions like "Your experience is clearly with folks who came to 4e from other editions to prefer." It's not only untrue, but how the heck would you know?

As far as new people finding it easier, your experience is simply different than mine. I DMed at least a couple of public sessions per month, many with newbies for the lifetime of 4E in addition to a home campaign.

I simply disagree with much of what you state about 4E.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I'm just responding to you because you state certain things as facts that I disagree with about 4E. In addition you make broad assumptions like "Your experience is clearly with folks who came to 4e from other editions to prefer." It's not only untrue, but how the heck would you know?

Certain things that you said were contrary to the actual facts, so yeah, I corrected your mistatements. They're not unusual misaprehensions, thanks to the edition war, but being sick of them and of correcting them doesn't make them any less untrue.

It's not hard to surmise from the experiences you were relating that you were not dealing with whole tables of new players being introduced to D&D for the first time with 4e, but with mixed tables. The pattern's familiar enough. Mixed tables are a great introduction to 5e (or the classic eds it resembles, for that matter), because the preconceptions of the experienced players match the system, and help guide the new players through it's intricicies and unintuitive elements. 4e was readily accessible to new players, more so than other eds, but a mixed table could outright sabotage that. Not always metaphorically.

As far as new people finding it easier, your experience is simply different than mine. I DMed at least a couple of public sessions per month, many with newbies for the lifetime of 4E in addition to a home campaign.

Encounters. Weekly, plus conventions. I'd have a whole-new-player table for a season, and see them all come back the next season, some of them run the season after that. The accessibility of 4e to new players surprised me, and was very real. Though, I'll admit, it also seemed to be in isolation from the edition war. The FLGS in question didn't much cater to PF (there was another across town that did, almost like different churches for different religions), and the clientel was overwhelmingly younger/newer players, and I rarely heard of any of them visiting forums or the like.

That your report of your experiences differs doesn't surprise me.

 

[Tony Vargas]

(And I'm sorely tempted to jokingly tag Tony in every single one our posts regarding this sidebar)

You won't hurt my feelings.

 

[Satyrn]

You won't hurt my feelings.

Sure, but at some point the mods are gonna call it harassment.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Sure, but at some point the mods are gonna call it harassment.

LoL. We're not supposed to discuss moderation!

 

[Salthorae]

The bigger driver of a new edition or effort to revitalize WotC sales will probably be how well Paizo does with their 2nd edition release and how that does or does not impact WotC sales.

I have talked to a few people who are going to jump ship when Pathfinder 2 is released. If it kills 5e sales they may move their timeline up on a new edition again, like they did with 5e. 4e wasn’t in the wild very long comparatively before we hear about D&D Next play tests. Partly because the edition itself drove many people to Paizo’s 3.75 outputs.

If their 2e pulls a ton of interest and sales it MAY push the timeline on a new D&D line up.

I don’t want that to happen, i enjoy 5e still. The simplicity is refreshing after a decade of morass of complexity 3.x across WotC & Paizo lines. But it could...

 

[BookBarbarian]

The bigger driver of a new edition or effort to revitalize WotC sales will probably be how well Paizo does with their 2nd edition release and how that does or does not impact WotC sales.

I have talked to a few people who are going to jump ship when Pathfinder 2 is released. If it kills 5e sales they may move their timeline up on a new edition again, like they did with 5e. 4e wasn’t in the wild very long comparatively before we hear about D&D Next play tests. Partly because the edition itself drove many people to Paizo’s 3.75 outputs.

If their 2e pulls a ton of interest and sales it MAY push the timeline on a new D&D line up.

I don’t want that to happen, i enjoy 5e still. The simplicity is refreshing after a decade of morass of complexity 3.x across WotC & Paizo lines. But it could...

These days I think that will depend on how widely adopted PF2 is among popular game streams. Those shows are leading a lot of new players into the hobby.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The bigger driver of a new edition or effort to revitalize WotC sales will probably be how well Paizo does with their 2nd edition release and how that does or does not impact WotC sales.

I suspect the impact will be negligible. 5e has already sold to the established fanbase, it's ongoing sales are more to new & returning players drawn to the D&D name. PF2 might pull away a few hard-core 3.x/PF fans who'd been amusing themselves with 5e while waiting for it, but it's not going to have any effect on the stream of incoming new/returning players. The come-back is D&D's to lose it's hold on, and WotC is showning no sign of loosening it's grip.

I have talked to a few people who are going to jump ship when Pathfinder 2 is released. If it kills 5e sales they may move their timeline up on a new edition again, like they did with 5e.

PF had the unprecedented advantage of being de-facto D&D at a time when D&D, itself, was very pointedly being not-D&D. That's no longer the case, 5e is all-in, true-blue, D&D the way D&D oughta be. PF2 - which, honestly, is showing every sign of being /better/ than 5e even tried to be, but, as such, "less D&D" than 5e is - has no chance of rivaling that.