epithet
Explorer
I agree they'd have to write it from scratch, but if you're planning on writing a game from scratch anyway, it makes a lot of sense to use mechanics that have been tested extensively.
D&D 5E A new Golden Age for D&D
- Thread starter Mercurius
- Start date
I agree they'd have to write it from scratch, but if you're planning on writing a game from scratch anyway, it makes a lot of sense to use mechanics that have been tested extensively.
Hussar
Legend
Yeah, I gotta agree with this one. The reason we see 5e OGL products is that 5e's terminology and flavor is so close to 3e. There are very few terms (Inspiration and Advantage are two that come to mind, but very few others) that aren't covered by the 3e OGL which doesn't refer to definitions, simply terms. 4e has all those powers, the text of which is not covered by the OGL, and a number of terms which do not appear in 3e. The whole AEDU structure, for example, doesn't appear anywhere in the OGL, so, it would be very hard to clone using the OGL.
I'm not saying you can't do it. I'm sure it could be done. But, it's a much, much more difficult undertaking than in 5e.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Oh, I would love to lay into 5e and spell out exactly the ways that I think it's awful. I just don't see the point, now. Back when it was still a playtest, I had the simple justification of "it could actually change, so my criticism could have an effect." Now, though, there's little if any point--I would be Complaining About Games I Don't Play. The only exception I make for that is discussing fan-generated content that could, potentially, make it a game I'd actually be interested in playing (e.g. changes to the Fighter class, creating a Warlord, etc.) Beyond that, I have neither need nor interest in bitching about the (significant) issues I have with it, and although I risk projection by saying it, I suspect that a lot of 5e's critics feel the same way, e.g. "what's the point." It's a different kind of "edition aftermath" than the 3e-4e change. I think both "old guards" felt "betrayed" in a certain sense (I certainly did, what with the repeated statements of inclusivity and creating options for 4e-like content...that were all vaporware), to be sure. But, at least this time around, it seems like the people who felt that way just shrugged and went to the game(s) they liked.
Of course, I also think that people like you (who liked 4e and also have no major beef with 5e) are more common than those who liked/loved 4e and dislike/hate 5e, but anything even remotely more specific than "more common" is going to be a questionable assessment, no matter whether it's "only slightly more common" or "much more common." That said, though, I don't think I've seen a single person who really liked/loved 4e, and who felt that 5e even partially delivered on replicating the experience from it, except in the weakest and most trivial sense (that is, 'you're still playing D&D so there are classes, levels, ability scores starting 3-18')--analogous to "well I'm still eating ice cream, but this is mint chocolate chip when I wanted tropical sorbet..."
So it would seem. I can understand that to an extent--considering how hard it was (and apparently still is, given things we've seen in this thread) for 4e to be recognized as "D&D." It just seems to me (and this might have been part of your point) that people *got* all the validation they really need; nobody accuses 5e of being "not-D&D" or "some other game with 'D&D' written on it." All this giddiness and need for validation at the level of "golden ages" sounds like...gilding the lily. (Pun absolutely intended!
)
Tony Vargas
Legend
Sure. And, as much as I'm enjoying running 5e, I feel the same way. 5e does a good job capturing the feel of classic D&D, and some of the customizeability of 3e, and that's about it. It has a few token scraps of 4e, but nothing that delivers the improvements 4e made to the game. Some effort was made, it's just not the kind of thing that could be delivered piecemeal. You can't have a little optional clarity in this module and a little optional balance in that one, they're system-wide qualities.
Heh.All this giddiness and need for validation at the level of "golden ages" sounds like...gilding the lily. (Pun absolutely intended!
Really, at bottom, the goal of inclusiveness was the justification of Next/5e. It wasn't presented as a 'screw you' to all fans but those of one edition who had 'won' the edition war and were now going to get exactly what they wanted. If WotC were to openly abandon that goal (as opposed to just not perfectly meet it), it'd be an admission not just of failure, but of outright dishonesty - not merely seeking a lowest common denominator to bring everyone together, but sinking to the level of the worst offenders of the edition war, to willfully exclude loyal segments of their fan base. That would have been tragic.
So, yes, inclusiveness was & is a prime 5e goal. And, while they backed off from the wilder versions (you're going to be able to play 4e characters next to 1e characters!) in the implementation, they never actually repudiated the goal of inclusiveness, and clearly made the effort with all the modules in the DMG.
What's more, even rabid edition-specific fans have often played multiple editions, so the things that are common through more of the game's history are more likely at least some buttons for as many D&Ders as possible....
It's inevitable, really. 5e was trying to heal this 'rift' that had really been in the community a long time, it wasn't just editions or technical approaches to the game or GNS agendas or anything like that. There were just cohorts who felt very differently about the game. Some of us started with it early on and never moved on as it went through editions, others did make the switch each time, other even tried other games. Some of us started with a later edition that defined the game for us. In the 80s, D&D was a fad, but a nerd fad, lots of us played it, but there was a stigma, at the same time it was very much a game one you could even 'win.' In the 90s, CCGs and LARPs were attracting more new players than D&D, Storyteller dominated the TTRPG community's headspace & Roll v Role was the great debate of the day. Then WotC saved D&D (after arguably helping kill it with CCGs), gave it to the world via the OGL, and a very new and different time was ushered in. Weirdly, it turned into RAW and system-mastery and optimization obsession. Someone who had played D&D since the 70s or 80s, even if they were playing 3e, were playing it differently than someone indoctrinated into M:tG rewards-for-system-mastery or obsessed with RAW. AD&D hold-outs were even more alienated and insular. A whole cohort of lapsed players were entering their mid-life-crisis years. When WotC aimed at growing the fanbase with /new/ gamers, and didn't make any effort to appease the already marginalized old-schoolers or the supposedly-'entitled' system-masters, it all blew up into the edition war.ByronD said:
5e was nominated to pick up the pieces and get everyone under the same bigtop again.
Everyone, that is, who had ever been a fan of D&D. Now, there's a lot more people who have never played D&D, than who have ever played D&D, but that doesn't mean it takes a wider net to go for a few 10s of millions of the former than to gather up all the few million of the latter. The D&D community was fragmented, and the divisions had been deepened by years of active hostility, starting at least as far back as the 90s & the Roll v Role debate (if not as far back as AD&D vs Arduin Grimoire, or even the Realism issue that was still trailing off when I joined the hobby in 1980) but going nuclear in the years leading up to the announcement of the Next playtest. In the course of all that crazy, battle lines had been drawn, and even fairly innocuous things had become intolerable to this or that faction.
So, yes, the common ground was hard to find, and the common denominators that could be broadly tollerated pretty 'low.'
By comparison, trying to net a largish quantity of new-to-TT gamers, absent all those prejudices and old wounds and recriminations would have involved a lot less compromise. But trying that again wasn't an option, the D&D name depended on the support of it's fan base, and, no matter how tough it was going to be, they had to be mollified.
That's one of the great things about emphasizing DM Empowerment, it turns what would be a weakness in a system trying to be complete in itself, into a strength, as it accustoms players to turning to the DM for rulings as a matter of course. I have to admit I was, once again, skeptical of what a new ed was trying to do, only to be surprised when it succeeded. I was concerned that 2e was going to 'invalidate' all the work I'd put into 1e, and it didn't. I didn't believe that open-source was going to work for 3e (having seen it fail for Fuzion), but it turned out to be a phenomenon. I couldn't see how 4e could possibly balance the classes, but it did, neatly. The only time my cynical pessimism was born out was Essentials. You'd think I'd develop a little faith after all that. But, yes, 5e had a lot of ideas, and, while I didn't expect it to really be as 'big tent' as they said they were aiming for, and that was borne out, I was also deeply skeptical that it could really undo the RAW fetish that had developed, and give the game back to the DM to the degree that we had it in 1e. I'm very pleasantly surprised at that. And taking full advantage of it when I run.
I also think that if there's was a specific key to WotC pulling off the impossible task of re-uniting the fanbase to the degree that they did (Pathfinder hasn't exactly vanished, y'know), it's that accomplishment: giving the game back to the DMs, so that each of us can make it our own, and make it the best game possible for our players.
Last edited:
delericho
Legend
Agreed. It should be possible to clone the underlying engine relatively easily, but the major value in 4e lies in all the specific powers, spells, feats, monsters, and the like. And those can't easily be cloned.
We know that some people have successfully produced support adventures for 4e under the OGL. And I'm pretty sure it should likewise be relatively easy to produce some supporting books for the game (giving new classes, new powers, and the like). But cloning the game itself is unlikely to be feasible, because of all those specifics.
Mercurius
Legend
Aside from the fact that by "minimalist" I mainly meant the complexity of the core rules themselves, but also could extend to rules bloat, let's do some research.
5E Products One Year In (July 2014 - June 2015): Starter set, core rules in three books ("Holy Trinity"), two story arcs in three books. That's seven print products (not including PDFs or the DM Screen).
4E Products One Year In (May 2008 - April 2009): Keep on the Shadowfell, Holy Trinity, Forgotten Realms Campaign Book and player's Guide, Adventurer's Vault, Martial Power, Manual of the Planes, Demon Queen's Enclave, Open Grave, Player's Handbook 2, Dungeon Delve, Arcane Power, Death's Reach.
So let's see, for 5E that's three core rule books, one starter set, and two story arcs in three books. For 4E that's the three core rule books, one story arc in three products, one campaign setting in two books, and seven splat books.
Clearly they are world's apart in terms of rules, complexity, and product bloat.
At is heart 5E is still d20 + modifier vs. target number, with various secondary and tertiary rules. But what is different is that the core of it is cleaner and less is intrinsically tied to it. For instance, feats, which was one of the "bloatiest" part of 4E. Or powers for non-magic characters.
I just don't see how 5E is not a simpler game than 4E, or 3E for that matter.
"relative inclusivitiy" would be yet another way of saying LCD, I guess.But, yes, with a modular/variant-friendly approach, you can include quite a lot of what people want, without worrying about what people don't want, because the don't-want crowd can ban or not opt-in to whatever they don't want. That's really the key to 'inclusive,' not so much including everything even one person wants (impractical, but not at odds with inclusivity), but not excluding things just because some, or even a plurality or self-proclaimed majority, want them /excluded/.
One of the reasons that 5E is more inclusive than prior editions, in my opinion, is that the base level of play is far simpler - and thus it includes those who prefer a simpler rules set. But you can still add in complexities, whether through options from the DMG or house rules or, presumably, future products.
But it does seem that WotC dropped he ball on the "complexity dial" they were talking about a couple years ago, namely the idea of being able to play different degrees of complexity at the same table - e.g. someone wanting a more bare-bones 5E-style character vs. someone wanting an optimized 3.5E style or a 4E-style AEDU character. It was a tall order, though.
epithet
Explorer
Red Box: "I hit it with my axe."
AD&D: "I hit it with my axe."
2e: "I hit it with my axe."
3e/PF: "Ok, um... I'm gonna try to use acrobatics to get around it to get flanking without getting hit with an attack of opportunity, so I can hit it with my axe. He does what? But my AC is... oh, it's a touch attack? I have a feat that should let me move anyway... No, I'm pretty sure - let me look that up, I have the book right here."
4e: "I use my 'Tide of Iron' power... oh, wait, it's 2 bigger, right? So I guess I just use the 'Cleave' power."
5e: "I hit it with my axe."
Tony Vargas
Legend
Plus, in 1e it should be 'long sword,' because you're not going to find many magical axes & magic swords can be a lot better. Oh, 2e it should be plural, because only a chump wouldn't be double-specialized in hand-axes and duel-wielding instead of making one lousy attack with a battle ax. 3e a fighter's unlikely to have cross-classed acrobatics /and/ use an ax - spiked chain, maybe. 4e you completely forgot about the enormous complexity of marking (you have to be able to remember who you attacked last round). And I guess we should note that this comparison was at 1st level, before the 5e fighter gets Action Surge, or maneuvers, or spell casting.
But, that is a very narrow - contrived-seeming, really - comparison of only one class. Yes, the poor fighter was a stultifyingly simplistic beatstick prior to 3e, and is, again, in 5e (especially if you go Champion). Other classes have different arcs, as does the game as a whole... A comparison of magic-users over the editions would be funny, but I think there's a limit to how long a post can be, and I have other things to do with my weekend than illustrate how whacked casting was in early D&D...
I thought so, but figured I'd mention bloat, as well.
As were 3.x & 4e - they're all 'd20 games' even if only one of them has an OGL. There's nothing too 'clean' about the 5e core system, it relies heavily on the DM interpretation, which is not a sign of simplicity, and isn't applied all that consistently, with different sub-systems for attacks, saves, skills & other checks, much like 3e (though it at least avoids multiple ACs). Once you get into classes core 5e is, if anything more complex even than 3e, with more classes, each with more features and many more sub-classes. It benefits from being familiar, of course, which makes it more approachable and may give it a feel of being simpler than it actually is, if you have the right background (and, really, the vast majority of us do), you're not learning the whole system, only the differences between it and past systems.
If we compare PH1 to PH1, no. 4e feats, though more numerous, do not represent a lot more complexity, since they're more consistently doled out, and 'smaller,' each feat being much simpler, in itself - more little choices is still a bit more complex than fewer bigger, less consistent ones, but not nearly so muchas if the feats, themselves, were comparable. 'Powers,' OTOH, are one thing where 4e was much less complex than 5e, by virtue of a common format and progression for all classes. Add to that fewer classes and fewer builds per class, in the PH1, and 4e was much less complicated than 5e. (But, also, less familiar to long-time players, which has the opposite effect of making it seem more difficult to grasp than it is, if you're not accustomed to taking in new systems - you're not only learning a whole new system, you're un-learning assumptions about it.) Similarly, if you compare 3e to 5e, the classes, though as varied in structure in both, are not so numerous, with no sub-classes vs 38, and not quite so complex - 3e feat-trees represent a little more complexity, as do skill ranks and more detailed combat options, but not enough to pull it ahead overmuch. Now, relative to classic D&D, 5e does simplify a lot of things, myriad resolution systems paired down to variations on the d20, cyclical initiative, matrices replaced with simple formulas, but then it also adds two new spell-casting systems, and arguably complicates the Vancian system, to boot.
I think I've at least scratched the surface enough to make it pretty clear that 5e, at release, is at least as complex as other modern (and classic) editions of the game, also judged at release.
But, I happily concede that there's no question it's less complex, as it stands now, than each prior full edition in their 'bloated' glory, and faces little immediate danger of becoming so, thanks to the more stately pace of releases.
And, really, that's the more practical comparison - you're unlikely to find a 'PH1 only' 4e or 3.0 game out there.
It's really not. The base level of play, the Basic Game, includes two profoundly complex classes, the Cleric and Wizard. They're each more complex than the corresponding version of those classes in 3e (so, for that matter, is the 5e fighter relative to the austere elegance, but surprising depth of the 3e fighter), and either of them is more complex than any 4e class.
But, 5e does Empower the DM to throw a veil over it's complexities, and a player can go no further than the 'how to play the game' blurb, discover that he just describes his actions to the DM who resolves them, and get started with a pregen without being exposed to even a fraction of the actual system. (You could do the same with other editions, but 5e sets it up for you so neatly, y'gotta love it.)
I think it's funny that people act like there's a "preference for complexity" out there. Simplicity is certainly a virtue for any rule set, but RPGs demand a high level of complexity by their very natures. If someone prefers a game that seems more complex to you, it may just be because you're unfamiliar with it, so it's complexities stand out, and, even if not, they prefer it not for the complexity itself, but for how much more that complexity allows the game to accomplish.
IIRC, it was more editions than degrees of complexity, and it was rather fanciful: the idea that 3.x-style system-mastery optimized characters and 4e balanced characters and classic-D&D random characters could all coexist under one system at one table. The 'modularity' actually delivered more lets the DM lean towards modern (mostly 3e) or classic (mostly 2e-ish AD&D) style, depending on the rules you opt into or out of. Which is still a nice range, and bridges a large part of the gap between old-school and modern. Quite a laudable accomplishment, really.
Last edited:
mflayermonk
First Post
I was thinking a little more about the "golden age" (type 1 Golden Age per Mercurius' original posts) and was thinking how many games/systems had their golden age in an edition after first:
for example, Shadowrun 2e was probably the Golden Age of Shadowrun.
Can anyone think of other examples.
I was also thinking about "golden ages" among music and books. The golden age of bands such as the Rolling Stones. Many bands have a brief golden age that defines their careers-such as Fleetwood Mac and Rumours.
Among writers there is often a short period where they make their reputation. Even Shakespeare has a considerable amount of bad content.
If we extend this to Gygax, he had around 7 years of good content and then kept producing with things like Gord the Rogue and the Canting Crew; while these had some merit, he was never able to produce hits of the scale of his "golden age" of Against the Giants or Barrier Peaks.
for example, Shadowrun 2e was probably the Golden Age of Shadowrun.
Can anyone think of other examples.
I was also thinking about "golden ages" among music and books. The golden age of bands such as the Rolling Stones. Many bands have a brief golden age that defines their careers-such as Fleetwood Mac and Rumours.
Among writers there is often a short period where they make their reputation. Even Shakespeare has a considerable amount of bad content.
If we extend this to Gygax, he had around 7 years of good content and then kept producing with things like Gord the Rogue and the Canting Crew; while these had some merit, he was never able to produce hits of the scale of his "golden age" of Against the Giants or Barrier Peaks.
Hussar
Legend
I'd say this was pretty accurate.
Similar Threads
