D&D General Did 5e 2024 Not meet the economic goals set, and if not, why not?

[Micah Sweet]

Investors always want the strategy that nets them the most money and that goes back to the invention of merchants and money. The management get to choose that strategy.

But management in a publicly traded company doesn't get to choose a strategy that the investors don't think will make them the most money personally. That's the difference. No other consideration really matters.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

But management in a publicly traded company doesn't get to choose a strategy that the investors don't think will make them the most money personally. That's the difference. No other consideration really matters.

That is buying a dog and barking yourself. The investors do not micromanage the company, otherwise they would be the management. They want the management to tell them what revenue, sales, profits and share prices will be over the next quarter to a year and really only care if these targets are missed.

How they are met is up to management.

Now what business strategies get the best ROI, are like many things are the subject of fad and fashions. There probably still are business areas where dividend yield is more important than share price growth and so on. The latter has been more in vogue over the last 30 years but I would not be a bit surprised to learn in 20 years that, that is no longer in as much vogue.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

Thinking back on discussions about D&D 2024 when it was fresher in our minds. We had a discussion, if I recall correctly, about how people felt on the changes. And even here, amongst Enworlders, one of the most enfranchised corners of the TTRPG community, we were split as to whether the changes were good, much less worth a monetary investment.

In that thread, I remember a lot of comments saying that some changes were good. Some were bad. Some made no sense. I remember people commenting that it just changed some issues to different issues, while ignoring others.

So I wonder, if we were split. If Enworlders were split on whether mechanical changes to a system were a net positive. Why would we expect the broader, more casual player base to be any different? If many deeply enfranchised players on this very board, felt indifferent to the changes, wouldn't it make sense that the community at large would be at least as indifferent?

Obviously we’re all speculating, but I think ENWorld’s own reaction is a useful indicator. Some people like the changes, some don’t, many just don’t care; especially not enough to spend $150 to re-buy books for a game that still mostly works the same.

I'm not surprised, having read our discussions on the topic, that the community isn't jumping at the opportunity to buy these books. $150 is a lot of money for a lot of people, and all for changes that don't really change the game, at least to many.

 

[mamba]

Official sources from WotC say it’s doing well, so I don’t know why so many try to paint it as not.

WotC has an obvious interest to paint it in the best light possible however, so a bit of skepticism is warranted. The problem is that there is little data to go on

 

[Benjamin Olson]

Everything I've read (and I may be reading sources biased towards my viewpoints, so that is a problem on my part) is that the new rules improve things in every way.

That's because discussion of 5.5 is an Orwellian hellscape where up is down, bad is good, and more complicated is simplified.

I'll grant that there are improvements, but they all seem pretty much obvious improvements to make based on 10 years of experience. In many cases they are only improvements if you were playing without the Tasha's optional class rules and without common and obvious house rules. I guess if you're the type to get distracted by Malibu Stacy's new hat it all looks pretty impressive, but I would contend all the objective improvements are what a sufficiently experienced 5e player who was a moderately competent rules designer would come up with in a few days of work.

There are lots of changes to improve "balance" if you care a lot about that (I really don't it turns out), and as a result everything (be it a character option, a spell, a monster) is a lot more samey to its peers. Distinctiveness has been smoothed away in favor of endless near identical variations of class features to teleport 30 feet, and even more endless identical conjure spirit in shape of X spells. I prefer asymmetrical balance, meaning that for example at level 1 a Wizard is mostly useless in combat compared to the Fighter, but they can cast Sleep which used to be the auto-win cheat code for certain types of low-level encounters. New 5e doesn't like that sort of balance. New 5e wants to assimilate everything to working the same way so it doesn't have to playtest new things.

The system has been simplified on a theoretical level by using lots of terms-of-art keywords, plugging more features into the feat system, etc. This fundamentally makes things more complicated for people without a high level of rules mastery by requiring immediate comprehension of whole rules subsystems. A new player who has an idea for a background that isn't already covered has to digest the (no longer optional) feat system to roll up their level 1 character.

The "change things but pretend it's all the same and insist it's compatible" ethos of the edition is deeply obnoxious. When my new group I'm DMing for decided they wanted to use 2024 rules I read mostly straight through the new PHB overt the course of 2 days, and in the final stretch I came upon the (already mentioned above) spell Sleep at like 2am. And at that point I just had to pause and take a walk around the house to let off some steam. I mean, they completely mutilated one of my favorite spells with a ground-up rewrite. That I could actually forgive. What is unforgiveable is that in this and a few other instances they completely changed virtually every distinctive aspect of something, then gave it the same damned name as it had always had and buried it among a bunch of unchanged or virtually unchanged content to sow confusion. Like, just call it "Slumber" or something at that point. If you feel the need to kowtow to the people who hated Keen Mind because some player somewhere annoyed some DM, fine, remove it. But D&D does not have to have a feat called "Keen Mind", so don't write a completely different one and call it the same thing. If a Gloomstalker Ranger is going to have a new version of extra damage at level 3 no longer tied to the first round of combat during which they may have ambushed someone, don't put it under "Dread Ambusher", just make it its own damned thing. When the audience is heavily people who know 5e Classic and 90-some% of New 5e is basically the identical, hiding a few radically different things under the same old branding for no good reason is needlessly confusing and just offensive to principles of good rules design.

So no, it's not some broad improvement, except maybe if you were playing with just the 2014 core books and no house rules, and wanted a little more crunch. For people who already have decent rules mastery of orginal recipe 5e and have already supplimented it to their tastes it is pretty much a lateral move, and one that requires buying and digesting a new set of rules too similar to be interesting but too different to just ignore the changes. And it just doesn't have all the panoply of 5e content fully converted to it yet, so why switch to a system which is only half developed? I think for many existing 5e groups the 2024 rules will remain, at most, a suppliment from which they pull ideas they like for quite a while. It's only as there is increasingly content available that doesn't plug securely into 2014 5e that 2024 6e will slowly assimilate them.

 

[Remathilis]

D&D 2024 "failed" the same way the latest Marvel movies have "failed"; anything that isn't a resounding success and record-breaking return is a failure now. High end brands (be it Marvel, D&D or whatever) are held to almost unrealistic expectations based on prior performance. Costs to produce it rise, expectations rise, and eventually you reach a point where nothing could satisfy the fans or meet ROI. Middling success is the same as utter failure.

I feel in the coming years, especially with global trends being what they are, many of the great legacy brands will end up discarded because the amount of resources needed to satisfy fans will not longer be economically feasible. A triple A video game costs so much to make and the fans demand so much of brand (some very reasonably, some not so) that you will never be able to balance the needs of the fans and the bean counters.

 

[payn]

All I know is folks seem to want an edition war so badly, they are hell bent on making one out of almost nothing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Thinking back on discussions about D&D 2024 when it was fresher in our minds. We had a discussion, if I recall correctly, about how people felt on the changes. And even here, amongst Enworlders, one of the most enfranchised corners of the TTRPG community, we were split as to whether the changes were good, much less worth a monetary investment.

In that thread, I remember a lot of comments saying that some changes were good. Some were bad. Some made no sense. I remember people commenting that it just changed some issues to different issues, while ignoring others.

So I wonder, if we were split. If Enworlders were split on whether mechanical changes to a system were a net positive. Why would we expect the broader, more casual player base to be any different? If many deeply enfranchised players on this very board, felt indifferent to the changes, wouldn't it make sense that the community at large would be at least as indifferent?

Obviously we’re all speculating, but I think ENWorld’s own reaction is a useful indicator. Some people like the changes, some don’t, many just don’t care; especially not enough to spend $150 to re-buy books for a game that still mostly works the same.

I'm not surprised, having read our discussions on the topic, that the community isn't jumping at the opportunity to buy these books. $150 is a lot of money for a lot of people, and all for changes that don't really change the game, at least to many.

This is in fact what I've been saying this entire time.

 

[mamba]

The strategy they mandate is whatever makes them the most money, personally. The fact that they have this power without any required understanding of the product producing said money is, IMO, the actual problem here.

Investors do not tell WotC what the D&D rules should be, what adventures to create or what the release schedule should be, all of that is up to WotC management

 

[Remathilis]

The "change things but pretend it's all the same and insist it's compatible" ethos of the edition is deeply obnoxious. When my new group I'm DMing for decided they wanted to use 2024 rules I read mostly straight through the new PHB overt the course of 2 days, and in the final stretch I came upon the (already mentioned above) spell Sleep at like 2am. And at that point I just had to pause and take a walk around the house to let off some steam. I mean, they completely mutilated one of my favorite spells with a ground-up rewrite. That I could actually forgive. What is unforgiveable is that in this and a few other instances they completely changed virtually every distinctive aspect of something, then gave it the same damned name as it had always had and buried it among a bunch of unchanged or virtually unchanged content to sow confusion. Like, just call it "Slumber" or something at that point. If you feel the need to kowtow to the people who hated Keen Mind because some player somewhere annoyed some DM, fine, remove it. But D&D does not have to have a feat called "Keen Mind", so don't write a completely different one and call it the same thing. If a Gloomstalker Ranger is going to have a new version of extra damage at level 3 no longer tied to the first round of combat during which they may have ambushed someone, don't put it under "Dread Ambusher", just make it its own damned thing. When the audience is heavily people who know 5e Classic and 90-some% of New 5e is basically the identical, hiding a few radically different things under the same old branding for no good reason is needlessly confusing and just offensive to principles of good rules design.

The point was to provide a revised version of the options to replace the old options. For example, if I am using a 2014 monster in a 2024 game that casts sleep, I don't want to figure out it was changed to slumber or nappy time or whatever.