WotC "D&D's Best Year Yet"

[wingsandsword]

My FLGS isn’t closed! In fact I preordered the Theros book from them to get the %50 DnDBeyond discount.

Also just picked up King of Tokyo Black Edition from them.

Sure it’s curbside only pickup but they are very busy.

Yeah, that depends entirely on local public health rules.

Some game shops have tried curbside take-out, only to be told it's not allowed.

 

[gyor]

We had AIDS, Thatcher/ Reaganomics and the Challenger disaster, and nothing else good. The Boomers at least got free love and the Apollo project to go along with the Vietnam war and the Cuban missile crisis.

We didnt even have the internet or mobile phones back then. At least VCR's came in at the back end of the 80's, and it was the golden age of action films. Die Hard, Commando, Predator, Terminator etc. So that's something. The cynicism and disenfranchisement of the time also led to musical expressions of that anger and disillusionment. Rap, Grunge and Metal largely kicked off in the 80's.

Ah the 80's. What a time to be alive. No wonder we're a bunch of largely cynical loners.

Some really great music in the 80's, I still listen to the 80's music channel on Amazon Prime all the time. Some good movies too.

Now the 1990's, that was the Golden Age of Sci Fi tv, you had all the best Star Treks in the 1990's (not that I haven't enjoyed Picard and Discovery and Short Treks, because I have).

 

[Krachek]

Im not 100% sure what you mean. Could you elaborate a little more please?

popularity of a game is a thing. It imply support, access to other gamers, new material.
satisfaction about a game is another thing. It is related to rules set and personal game experience.
can we have both? Sure.
do we have to choose one over the other? Usually.

 

[Imaro]

popularity of a game is a thing. It imply support, access to other gamers, new material.
satisfaction about a game is another thing. It is related to rules set and personal game experience.
can we have both? Sure.
do we have to choose one over the other? Usually.

Yeah I think there's a big difference between satisfaction and perfection. I think 5e is both popular and satisfying in what it achieves for the vast majority of people playing it... just not perfect, but is any game going to be out the box.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

Utter hopelessness and dangerous bitterness.

Trust me, you don't want anything to do with the black pill.

It can also refer to a state of realization that there are solutions. But that they are just horrible. Albeit workable. So not ALL black pills are hopeless and bitter. Some are just a realization of profoundly awful things. Or how naughty word the world really is. Some wouldnt make a distinction between the two, but in this option its not necessarily the case that a person is bitter. Or hopeless. But if they have a black pilled hope, its something terrible.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

popularity of a game is a thing. It imply support, access to other gamers, new material.
satisfaction about a game is another thing. It is related to rules set and personal game experience.
can we have both? Sure.
do we have to choose one over the other? Usually.

Thankyou for for clearing that up. I agree.

 

[Umbran]

Okay, so, if this doesn't come back around to being about D&D again soon, I'll be shifting it to the forum for off-topic discussion.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

do we have to choose one over the other? Usually.

I've been a lot less convinced that there are any RPGs which, mechanically and thematically, in terms of the kind of gameplay they promote, actually are "perfect" for me, over time.

When I was a teen/twenties, I was quite convinced that it was only a matter of time before I found a perfect or near-perfect RPG, because the variance in quality across RPGs was absolutely massive - from the truly dire, the basic maths don't make sense and the setting/themes suck and it's unbalance, to ones which were the inverse, with good math, great setting/themes, and strong balance between PCs, and so on.

But none of them were quite perfect. Even the ones I liked best had some significant flaw that I couldn't entirely overlook. With D&D, 4E's increase "slowdown" as the game got higher level, and the lack of non-combat abilities gradually wore on me more and more. With Dungeon World, it just couldn't quite do the things that I wished it could, and the PtbA structure just didn't gel with a couple of my players. I could go on back through the years, but even games I really liked had issues.

Popularity is certainly valuable, not just in finding players, though that is part of it, but also in that popular games now get wildly more support than others (there was less of an extreme distance in the 1990s). So having realized perfection probably isn't out there (most popular recent systems have been good-but-not-killer for me), I'm willing to go with decent and popular, rather trying to seek out perfection.

I mean, within reason. I still think you need the right system for the themes/setting you're working with.

 

[darjr]

So it seems WotC has an idea why it’s so popular. Are they right? Did they nail it or kinda set things up for success and took advantage of good things when they saw them? Or a bit of both? Or are they just lucky?

 

[DEFCON 1]

Let's also not forget that a number of the things that some folks would classify as "bad" or "terrible" are only done so because they are comparing the 5E system to a system they thought had done it better. So for instance, the skill system would be considered "bad" only when compared to the 3E system, assuming the person making the comparison feels having more granular skills and decision-making for points was a better option.

However, a large number of people who have bumped 5E's numbers up are in fact new players... and thus for them they have no comparisons. If this is the only skill system they know and have played... they are much less likely to designate it as either "terrible" or "awesome" (either ends of the line). Instead, they'd acknowledge that it seems to work find for what it's meant to do, because it does. So the numbers wouldn't necessarily have gone higher had 5E not had the issues being claimed, because they are issues of system comparison and not a straight indication of worth.