D&D General "As a whole, 3rd Party Products Make D&D Better." (a poll)

[Enevhar Aldarion]

I don't know how anyone can answer this question as "no", unless they are reading it as "the personal use of third-party products in my game have made D&D more enjoyable for me." I find that hard to relate to, but at least I could see it being true for some people.

That is exactly how I read the thread title, but maybe the OP meant it as an industry, and not personally, and should clarify that.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Thanks to 3PP, the weapon list for my 5E games now encompasses the default 5E listing+Iron Kingdom: Requiem(and future book releases from Privateer Press)+Ruins of Symbaroum: Player's Guide+Adventures in Middle-Earth 5E: Players Guide+Whatever comes from Kobold Press.

Depending on how it looks or what not, Adventures in Rokugan's weapon list may be added to it.

Including Bohemian Ear Spoons?

 

[darjr]

It’s 200% true!

View attachment 256559

No difference

 

[Art Waring]

"Without deviation from the norm progress is not possible" -Frank Zappa

Wotc is in the business of maintaining the status quo in their sphere, they simply wont risk innovation because they have a business model that works. Corporate practices that favor profit over all else will always stifle imagination and innovation in a field.

The only content that I have seen for any edition that is truly thinking outside the box is 3pp and homebrew made by dedicated creators.

 

[DND_Reborn]

I am one of the few going against the grain, but no surprise there...

IME 3PP material is often:

A. silly
B. unbalanced/ OP
C. cumbersome/ complicated

But, since many people seem to like silly, OP, and/or complicated, I'm not surprised they find value in 3PP material.

 

[Weiley31]

Including Bohemian Ear Spoons?

ESPECIALLY the Bohemian Ear Spoons.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

On consideration I voted False because there are really two different questions being asked here.
Is your experience of D&D better because of third party stuff and while I have purchased third party stuff it it has not had a huge impact but the other question is D&D in itself better due to third party stuff and I am not convinced that it is. Or to put it another way that third party stuff is influencing the direction of D&D much. I think that D&D is mostly influencing itself at the moment.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

As a whole? Sure.

But there's two issues that often crop up. The first is, obviously, that a lot of 3PP is bad. Really really bad. You have to be very selective with it, Sturgeon's Law and all that.

The second is more subtle. People are often tempted to use 3PP as a fig leaf for covering the flaws of first-party work. Pathfinder with the Spheres of Power rules, for example.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

WotC itself shows that repeatedly they themselves have trouble following there own rules and making fun balanced content (in this case I don't even just mean balanced like a new class... but an adventure that is fun in all three listed types of play too) and as such I have had to think through each new book (it is easier with slower 5e releases) about if I will let them into my games or not... but mostly I do allow WotC stuff.

See the problem here is you're thinking just of sourcebooks.

It's absolutely true that when it comes to sourcebooks, i.e. player options (races, classes, subclasses), WotC do a better job of providing balanced and playable material (IN 5th EDITION!!! Not in 3rd, say...) than 3PPs. But that said, it's not at all hard to find races, classes and subclasses that actually mesh well with 5E and are balanced (you will encounter plenty where people don't understand how to write rules or what the action economy is, though). The average skill of people doing 3PP game design for 5E is a hell of a lot higher than it was for 3E (that also goes for the official designers of course).

With adventures it's a bit different. The better-quality 3PP adventures are, imho, much better-designed, and much more "runnable" than most of WotC's adventures (which seem to be designed to read and then spend huge effort filling in a ton of unnecessary blanks, which don't even really let you customize for your party, just do a lot of work). They also have a much greater diversity of adventure design than WotC offers.

Monster-wise I'd say some 3PPs put out better-designed and balanced monsters than WotC, at least up to MotM.

Also with setting design, many 3PPs do as well as WotC, and most assuredly provide setting types WotC is no longer willing to support (i.e. settings which aren't kitchen sinks and so on - yes there was Theros which vaguely suggested maybe if you wanted to, limiting things, but AFAIK, that's it)

 

[CleverNickName]

As a whole? Yes, I believe so. Sales from 3rd and 5th Edition (which had the more robust licensing to encourage third-party products) seem to back me up. I think that with enough third-party support, D&D can truly be all things to all people. I think D&D would look very different, and would be much smaller, without sufficient third-party support.

I remember how Paizo's Pathfinder product line--which used the OGL to become a direct competitor of Wizards of the Coast--ended up being a good thing overall for the hobby. I'm not an expert, but it felt like interest in tabletop RPGs had a pretty big drop in the late 2000s, when MMORPGs became incredibly popular and every game company tried to copy them. Seems to me that Pathfinder helped keep interest TTRPGs alive into the mid 2010s, until interest in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft cooled off. Compared to previous editions, 5E had a deliberate 'retro' feel to it, and I don't think that was an accident.

I think Wizards of the Coast realized this when they built 5th Edition, so they built a rules system that was flexible enough to support a wide (VAST!) amount of play styles. But I'm a game hobbyist, not a game developer...this is just my own speculation.