D&D 5E Am I no longer WoTC's target audience?

[Arilyn]

THE connection, because there's only one, and it is well-understood and agreed upon? Sure...

I quite accept that art has changed. I'm not going to get into an argument over whether art has "advanced" - for that I will instead quote Shakespeare - there is no accounting for taste.

For what I'm talking about, whether art has advanced or not is not material. I can stick to discussing system-as-technology, and I'm fine, thanks.

Humans have been doing some form of art probably since we just became human, maybe even earlier. On this time scale, Shakespeare is pretty much contemporary with us, anyway, along with the Celts, Greeks, etc.

 

[Tony Vargas]

It would be really odd to assume that rpg designers have made no progress over the decades, other than creating new games. There have been refinements and experiments, some of which have been tossed, some kept.

The original D&D rules are rough, and even AD&D has rules mostly ignored, not because of preference, but because they are cludgy or unworkable.

To be fair, relative to D&D, game designers made tremendous progress even in the first 5-10 years, most of which D&D has stubbornly refused to adopt or adapt, and 5e, in particular, has backed off from in favor of re-capturing it's classic feel (to tremendous success - so don't hold out too much hope for many late-adoption of decades-past TTRPG innovations).

None of the WotC editions of D&D would have seemed too out of place or too wildly innovative had they been published as fantasy heartbreakers in the 90s.

 

[Doug McCrae]

None of the WotC editions of D&D would have seemed too out of place or too wildly innovative had they been published as fantasy heartbreakers in the 90s.

3e brought some of the innovations of late 70s rpg design to D&D for the first time. I'm thinking of universal systems such as RuneQuest where everything has the same kind of stat block.

 

[Tony Vargas]

3e brought some of the innovations of late 70s rpg design to D&D for the first time. I'm thinking of universal systems such as RuneQuest where everything has the same kind of stat block.

d20, c2000, is arguably on par with BRP, c1980. Both started as fantasy RPGs in the 70s, were stripped-down to core systems that can be built back up up into various full-fledged, similar but distinct, RPGs.

 

[Lanefan]

I quite accept that art has changed. I'm not going to get into an argument over whether art has "advanced" - for that I will instead quote Shakespeare - there is no accounting for taste.

The same is largely true of game design - whether or not it has "advanced" is very much in the eye of the beholder: what's an advance to one person might very well be a step backwards to another.

An analogy might be modern safety features in cars - auto-braking, lane departure alerts, etc. - that by some are seen as great advancements but by others are seen as impediments to the joy of driving.

So yes, we can argue - not so much about whether game design technology has advanced, but about whether those "advances" individually and-or collectively are of any use.

 

[Tony Vargas]

An analogy might be modern safety features in cars - auto-braking, lane departure alerts, etc. - that by some are seen as great advancements but by others are seen as impediments to the joy of driving.

Good analogy*...
...if your "joy of driving" requires hitting pedestrians or drifting into oncoming traffic.







* IDK why I like RPG:Automobile analogies so much, but they really seem to drive(pi) the point home, for me.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

You should remember today game designers can use softare simulation to test when new rules may be OP. You can't deny influence by videogames.

 

[Fenris-77]

A software simulation is not a video game. It might be, but the two terms aren't synonymous. I'm not suggesting that video games aren't a huge influence mind, they obviously are. Beyond that, a software sim can run numbers for you, but it won't necessarily tell you anything about OP, which is what happens when clever monkeys start putting things together in actual play, where synergy is the issue, rather than a strictly mathematical analysis of a single rule, or set of rules.

 

[Dire Bare]

You should remember today game designers can use softare simulation to test when new rules may be OP. You can't deny influence by videogames.

I would be very surprised if there are ANY tabletop RPG designers using software to test game rules. That just . . . . isn't a thing.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

You should remember today game designers can use softare simulation to test when new rules may be OP. You can't deny influence by videogames.

WotC still relies far more on actual live-play testing that software (they literally get dozens of people playing an adventure before it's released).

Software is not used ever as far as I know, and it really shouldn't be; you're not supposed to be measuring what a computer thinks is good, but instead what real people think is good.