D&D General Ben Riggs interviews Fred Hicks and Cam Banks, then shares WotC sales data.

[Reynard]

I hear you but this is where my brain breaks down. We have Daggerheart! It's right here! The only thing it's missing is the trademark.

Like I said before, I understand that is is an emotional attachment based on nostalgia and a bunch of other things.

And I DO play Daggerheart as Daggerheart and love it. I was just trying to illustrate that a pretty significantly different 6E would still be D&D for me.

Anyone outside of the hobby wouldn't bat an eye if you called it D&D to get them in the door and anyone who would know the difference shouldn't really care, right?

Which is one of the reasons I would like D&D to innovate and especially embrace other playstyles alongside 5E's attrition and combat focused loop. Since D&D is many folks' first game, having strong (for example) narrative tools built in would mean those new players had that in their toolkits when they went off to other games.

And imagine the outcry of D&D fans if Daggerheart was D&D 6e? No squares?? Different abilities?? People would lose their minds!

Yeah but we have established that longtime D&D fans are an ever shrinking portion of the player base. Who cares what they think?

 

[AlViking]

I hear you but this is where my brain breaks down. We have Daggerheart! It's right here! The only thing it's missing is the trademark.

Anyone outside of the hobby wouldn't bat an eye if you called it D&D to get them in the door and anyone who would know the difference shouldn't really care, right?

I agree that it's odd that people want a different game and then seemingly can't play a different game because it's not labeled D&D. If I want to play (WOTC's) D&D, it's right there. If I want to play a game with similar style and themes that's more to my liking ... I would just play those. I really don't see what the conflict is.

No game can be for everyone so if there's a better fit, use it! Want to play a variety of games with different approaches? Knock yourself out. For a variety of reasons I stick with WOTC's 5e but I don't expect it to be something it's not.

And imagine the outcry of D&D fans if Daggerheart wasD&D 6e? No squares?? Different abilities?? People would lose their minds!

Take away and replace enough things in the game and it's no longer the game I want to play, the label they slap on a game isn't the deciding factor for me.

 

[Lanefan]

I think the instrument vs music analogy breaks down way too easily to be useful for RPGs.

So the rules are the instruments and the group is the jazz band. Fine. What are adventures? Sheet music? What are APs and advice videos and other RPG ephemera that aren't strictly "rule books" yet still strongly contribute to the RPG industry and hobby?

Adventures are the lyrics. The rules are the instruments. APs are just longer lyrics. The people at the table are the band, with the DM as either the drummer (setting the tempo and letting the players call the tune) or the lead vocalist (in a more railroad-y type of game).

Advice videos are still just advice videos, to be ignored at every opportunity.

 

[Reynard]

I agree that it's odd that people want a different game and then seemingly can't play a different game because it's not labeled D&D.

Who's that?

 

[Scribe]

And imagine the outcry of D&D fans if Daggerheart was D&D 6e? No squares?? Different abilities?? People would lose their minds!

Makes one wonder, how stuck D&D is now being 'D&D'. I agree, folks would lose it, and I dont see that changing for a good while.

 

[Lanefan]

The point being, if you look at things like adventures and AP's and other stuff that isn't rule books, what innovations do we see?

Take any of the latest AP's and how are they any really different from a module written in the 1980's? WotC tried to do something different with the Delve format - an attempt to make modules easier to run at the table, and it was completely rejected.

I don't think the delve format was rejected as being non-innovative. Instead, it was rejected because it failed in achieving its goal of making modules easier to run.

Fifty years of module production and WotC STILL can't put actual usable information on a map.

Nor IME can 95+% of any other module cartographers out there. I feel your pain on this one.

You get a map and a number that you have to reference somewhere in the book. Even basic information like the height of ceilings is never written on a map. To me, THAT would be innovation.

I can live without ceiling heights on the map. As I have to reference the write-up to describe what's in the room anyway, the inclusion of the room's dimensions there - including height - is fine.

What's never shown on indoor maps, however, are elevation changes or contours. And rare indeed is the map that shows you which way the doors are supposed to open!

 

[Reynard]

Makes one wonder, how stuck D&D is now being 'D&D'. I agree, folks would lose it, and I dont see that changing for a good while.

I don't know. I don't think most of the new players are stuck in their ways, and they represent a huge portion of the player base. The grogs are dying out and WotC would do well to stop trying to make them happy (myself included).

 

[Scribe]

I don't know. I don't think most of the new players are stuck in their ways, and they represent a huge portion of the player base. The grogs are dying out and WotC would do well to stop trying to make them happy (myself included).

I dont know, people lose their minds when their game changes fundamentally, or even incrementally. I've seen it every 3 years over in 40K.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't know. I don't think most of the new players are stuck in their ways, and they represent a huge portion of the player base. The grogs are dying out and WotC would do well to stop trying to make them happy (myself included).

No, that's right, new players are not stuck in theory ways: by Justice Arman's account, they spent a lot of the development time for the new Starter Set carefully studying how nee players approach the game and gearing towards that.

Current D&D is kind of laser focused on new players acquisition.

 

[AlViking]

Who's that?

Someone who just said

... if Daggerheart had been D&D 6E (with allowances for some classic D&D tropes) I would have been totally happy ...

A game can't do everything so if you want something else, embrace that option. What you want from your hypothetical 6e wouldn't work for me and the current game works my players and seems to work quite well for a whole lot of others as well.