NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6681095" data-attributes="member: 996">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.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.  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.</blockquote>

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