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

[Reynard]

Someone who just said



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.

You are missing the entire point of what I said.

 

[Reynard]

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.

My point was that those new players would not care if it was different. 5E is not a magic formula.

 

[Parmandur]

My point was that those new players would not care if it was different. 5E is not a magic formula.

Or would they...? Controversy like that has a way of being a turn off, when word of mouth is so important. A well-tested and refined standard with fun packaging and prodi t design is going to be more attractive to new players.

 

[AlViking]

You are missing the entire point of what I said.

Then I don't know what your point is. I don't want your version of D&D. Short version is that I think it adds unnecessary complexity and could easily lead to way too many broken builds and turn off a lot of casual players. I didn't participate in your "what should 6e look like" because it would have just been thread crapping ... it's fine that you want something different I am not convinced that it would be at all successful.

 

[darjr]

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

Being one of them, I do!

 

[darjr]

@Reynard i think you just want a different game. Cool. I don’t under stand why it needs the D&D label for you?

 

[SlyFlourish]

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 that it'll change anytime soon. That really was one of the biggest issues with 4e. Many said if it had been a wargameish fork of D&D it would have been treated very differently.

 

[Zardnaar]

I did not mean to ignore this, it just got away from me.

Not too long ago we had a "what should 6E look like" thread and I went into more detail there, but broadly speaking I would like to see a focus on talent trees for characters instead of subclasses, a full mechanical embracing of non-binary action resolution, and the inclusion of subsystems that are designed specifically for what they do, rather than trying to shoehorn them into the skill system or whatever. To be clear, I don't think only my preferences for 6E would be viable -- lots of folks suggested some pretty cool stuff in that thread -- but what I don't want is a slight iteration on 5E.

And as another example, if Daggerheart had been D&D 6E (with allowances for some classic D&D tropes) I would have been totally happy -- except for the paucity of monsters.

Think ive mentioned talent trees as well.

My current test bed uses them. Not sure it gets tge complexity/simple thing right but theyre interesting art least.
.6E coukd yse them or even go more Shadowdark approach.

I woujd probably make 6E resemble 5E though even if you do in a different direction on say class design. Probably retain 5E round structure and skills tbh.

 

[Zardnaar]

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).

New grogs. All those new 5E players probably like 5E.

So any radical departure wont be D&D to them. I'm already seeing it with some lol.

 

[Dire Bare]

That's the point. Where is the Delve format now? Is it in use? Are we seeing it in any of the 5e adventures? Oh, right. No we aren't. Why not? Because it was immediately dumped on by the fandom that hated it. So, out the window it went.

Just like any other time WotC tries to do anything different. I mean, @mamba didn't even know what it was. That's how much of an impact it managed to have.

Tome of Magic was mentioned before. Hey, I adored that book. I still pine for the days when I could play a Binder. There is an excellent 5e version from Head of Vecna that I keep pitching to DM's to let me try out. But... again, what happened to those three classes - the Binder, the Shadowcaster and the Truenamer? Oh, right, the binder got stripped down to the bare bones and became the 5e warlock without pretty much any of the actual innovations that we saw with the Binder. The Shadowcaster and the True Namer have disappeared like the dawn in the morning.

So much for innovation.

Innovation does not always equate to improvement. Innovations, good or bad, don't always "stick". You may or may not like the innovations made.

But still, it's innovation. And there is plenty of it within each edition of D&D over the past 50 years. Less so than in some other games, but it's there nonetheless.