D&D (2024) DMG 5.5 - the return of bespoke magical items?

I think we can do a lot better at making an actually big-tent D&D than the one currently on offer.

Certainly, some of the better 3PP has shown that there's a lot of room for improvement.
Every time there is a new D&D, there is another space and faction that needs satisfying. I can't imagine too many genuine over the top 4e lovers are going to want to play the same game with the same enthusiasm as genuine over the top 3e lovers.

For me they've redesigned subsystems in various ways and they have no concern to avoid forcing people out of actor stance. The game as written now is a pawn stance game.

They would need to modularize on a far more fundamental level and if two different groups chose different modules would they even be playing the same game at some point.
 

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Every time there is a new D&D, there is another space and faction that needs satisfying. I can't imagine too many genuine over the top 4e lovers are going to want to play the same game with the same enthusiasm as genuine over the top 3e lovers.

For me they've redesigned subsystems in various ways and they have no concern to avoid forcing people out of actor stance. The game as written now is a pawn stance game.

They would need to modularize on a far more fundamental level and if two different groups chose different modules would they even be playing the same game at some point.
The literal and explicit selling point of 5e originally was something along those lines. I think it's far more achievable than you do. And I think that the alleged massive "it's a whole different game" differences argument is bunk. Nobody's even really tried. Even the "D&D Next" designers didn't really try. The instant any idea (that wasn't a designer's beloved baby) hit the slightest resistance it was immediately trashed without a finger lifted to see how it could be fixed or improved. (The designers' pet ideas, on the other hand, got wasted attempt after wasted attempt before, as often as not, being completely abandoned. E.g. Mearls and his almost undying love of fistfuls of dice everywhere.)

A rigorously balanced core with simple, clear expression for how to run away from that in many different directions successfully. 1st level as the point players generally start (because 5e's "most players should start at 3rd level" principle has objectively failed), but a full-throated support of novice levels and wholesale "borrowing" the 13A incremental advancement rules. Well-structured wandering monster tables and random loot tables, with solid, tested advice for how to build your own as well. A robust skill system with explicitly broad skills and clear instructions on the need for low, achievable DCs, alongside optional more specific rules for those who feel the skill system has no meaning unless there's premade objective DCs for everything, and "Page 42" rules that give clear and reliable cost-benefit matching so people who care about actually rewarding players for using skills can rely on it.

None of what I just said has any impact on the common mechanics (like class features), even though there may be some of that, too. I'd put things like that, actually retooling the player-facing rules, in a second, later book. Just as adding additional classes beyond the 12 PHB ones would be a great subject for a later book. By my reckoning you could probably do 7 in one book (reprinting with minor tweaks the 5.0 Artificer as one of those 7) and then a more way-out-there 6 a couple of years later.

It really isn't nearly as impossible a goal as people claim it is. We just can't spend two-plus years completely dithering the way WotC did with the D&D Next playtest.
 

It really isn't nearly as impossible a goal as people claim it is. We just can't spend two-plus years completely dithering the way WotC did with the D&D Next playtest.
Even though I do not think they cared even a bit for my playstyle, especially my objection to plot coupons, they still sold more D&D books than any edition ever.

If you take all the things we debate here, I think you'd find there are often three or four angles to every issue. Trying to cater to every one of those would be a mess. That doesn't mean though that they didn't missed some big opportunities to make some players happy. Second wind as a core fighter ability basically made the champion olive leaf a smack in the face. And that I think would have been easy.
 

Even though I do not think they cared even a bit for my playstyle, especially my objection to plot coupons, they still sold more D&D books than any edition ever.
And? Sales are at best a loose proxy of quality. Lots of things that are poor quality sell very well. Lots of things that are excellent quality barely sell at all. Pretending that sales are an effective substitute for quality is an example of "surrogation": allowing a metric to replace the thing that it's actually attempting to measure. Various "laws" of economic policy, such as Campbell's law and Goodhart's law, as well as the "McNamara fallacy," are examples of this in action.

A really good practical example happened with World of Warcraft a few years back. Starting around ten-ish years ago or maybe a bit more, instead of trying to find out what things actually made players happy and eager to play the game, they looked solely at what things players chose to spend time on, measured by number of interactions per month or how many players interacted with particular content or the like. This sounds, in principle, like a decent idea: if players interact with something, they must value it in some way.

The problem comes in when you conflate this measured interaction with the customer truly being happy about something. And in this case, that led to some very, very unhappy customers a couple expansions down the line. See, sometimes the players were holding their noses and doing something they didn't really like, but which would give them lots of power they could then apply to things they did like. Or sometimes, the players were happy with a thing being one part of this balanced breakfast, but quickly soured on it when it was inflated out of proportion with the rest of the game. Or one small slice of the community was rabidly engaged with a thing, and the rest were pretty tepid about it. Or the thing in question was really good at exploiting the sunk-cost fallacy, so even if a player wasn't having as much fun as they used to, they'd feel they had to stick with it to get to the end. Etc., etc.

This led to a number of unwise management and development decisions....which nonetheless still resulted in wildly impressive sales numbers. The expansion that finally broke the camel's back, Shadowlands, was by far the fastest-selling expansion ever sold, having moved something like four and a half million units in just a few days, and did in fact sell better than the previous expansion had. And yet the customer base was pissed only a few short months later, after they'd already sunk the money in etc. This led to a mass exodus to other games, notably the then-riding-high Final Fantasy XIV, and a major reckoning at Blizzard HQ. They have since radically retooled their approach, completely reversed course on a number of things, and worked very, very hard to focus on actual customer satisfaction, rather than the proxies they had been using and which had become foolish surrogates for actual customer satisfaction.

Now, I'm not saying 5e is anywhere remotely this bad. It took years of serious, severe mismanagement for WoW to get into that state--and video games necessarily work on a much faster audience response timetable than tabletop games ever will, so the D&D equivalent would be multiple decades and WotC has only barely entered their third decade at this point. Instead, my point is to show, with a specific and real-world concrete example, that proxy measurements, even concrete ones like sales, are not guaranteed to give you the whole picture.

Or, as I've said many times on this forum, a product can be really not very well-made at all, but still insanely popular, and another product can be unbelievably well-made and yet barely sell. Windows vs Linux, for example; in many ways, Linux has been the superior operating system for many years, even for business or education purposes, and yet Windows is absolutely dominant over those spaces.

We need more data than just sales. Especially for something that has significant social forces separate from the product's design...like being the "oldest" of a particular product, or the "most widely played" etc. Network effects matter a LOT.

If you take all the things we debate here, I think you'd find there are often three or four angles to every issue. Trying to cater to every one of those would be a mess.
No. Trying to cater to all of them without rigorous playtesting and refinement would be a mess.

Game design is difficult. That it is difficult is not a reason to say it is impossible.

That doesn't mean though that they didn't missed some big opportunities to make some players happy. Second wind as a core fighter ability basically made the champion olive leaf a smack in the face. And that I think would have been easy.
I mean, it didn't help that the Champion objectively sucked relative to all but one other Fighter subclass (the Banneret/Purple Dragon Knight, which was absolute trash). The Champion was, provably, built needing a certain minimum number of combat rounds per short rest just to keep up with other Fighters, let alone something like a Paladin. Most groups simply did not fight that many rounds of combats between short rests, and did not have enough short rests per long rest. The Champion was, objectively, designed for a gameplay style that most people simply did not want to play, and which WotC should have been able to see that people didn't want to play, because this was discovered almost immediately upon release by actual players.
 

Game design is difficult. That it is difficult is not a reason to say it is impossible.
But a game design to satisfy absolutely everyone is often a muddled and unfocused design. It makes everyone unhappy.

And making money is the object of WOTC whether anyone likes it or not. And yes of course they want to design a game that their players will buy and play. I would argue 5e is getting played commensurate with it's purchases. I get that literary classics are better than beach books, at least to me, but those beach books sell a lot and businesses like money and despite being not as good they don't appear to be diminishing in sales.

I mean, it didn't help that the Champion objectively sucked relative to all but one other Fighter subclass (the Banneret/Purple Dragon Knight, which was absolute trash). The Champion was, provably, built needing a certain minimum number of combat rounds per short rest just to keep up with other Fighters, let alone something like a Paladin. Most groups simply did not fight that many rounds of combats between short rests, and did not have enough short rests per long rest. The Champion was, objectively, designed for a gameplay style that most people simply did not want to play, and which WotC should have been able to see that people didn't want to play, because this was discovered almost immediately upon release by actual players.
But if they'd accommodated other playstyles those long rests would have been scarcer and there would have been more short rests in between.
 

But a game design to satisfy absolutely everyone is often a muddled and unfocused design. It makes everyone unhappy.

And making money is the object of WOTC whether anyone likes it or not. And yes of course they want to design a game that their players will buy and play. I would argue 5e is getting played commensurate with it's purchases. I get that literary classics are better than beach books, at least to me, but those beach books sell a lot and businesses like money and despite being not as good they don't appear to be diminishing in sales.


But if they'd accommodated other playstyles those long rests would have been scarcer and there would have been more short rests in between.
Remember that many literary classics were once the beach books of their time - for example Shakespeare and Dickens. It's actually rare for something that was actually unpopular in its time to be considered a "classic" today.

In response to the poster that you're responding to, the opposite can be true as well - while you can't state that popular = good, you can't also state popular = bad.
 

In response to the poster that you're responding to, the opposite can be true as well - while you can't state that popular = good, you can't also state popular = bad.
I definitely don't confuse popular with good or bad. Popular though is what publishers really want which was my point.

A lot of academy awards movies are popular but all of them aren't.

Also, don't confuse a lack of categories with there being no difference in the old days. I would argue all writing is done to draw a readership. I don't think most writers today are trying to write literature. They are just telling stories for profit. Some are trying to do that though.
 

But a game design to satisfy absolutely everyone is often a muddled and unfocused design. It makes everyone unhappy.
You have erred by the presence of the seventh word: "absolutely."

I didn't argue for "absolutely everyone" getting what they want. I said that we could do a lot better than we have, and that even some of the things you have given as examples as supposedly difficult really aren't that bad.

And making money is the object of WOTC whether anyone likes it or not.
But "make money!" is, like "happiness", an illusive goal. Making that your goal is a very easy way to mess things up. In D&D's case, the abstractness of the rules and the difficulty of connecting

But if they'd accommodated other playstyles those long rests would have been scarcer and there would have been more short rests in between.
Personally, I think if they had accommodated other playstyles, they would instead have (a) built (sub)classes that were more resilient to wider variation in resting/combat rates, and (b) would have provided both examples and tools/advice that assist in building a table-appropriate setup, e.g. ways to compensate for missing a critical function (e.g. "the party has no healer") or for having characters who are extremely combat-shy.

Most of that is quite doable, and several games I quite like (including 13A and DW) do that with no problems, at varying levels of game complexity. That's part of why I mention things like "novice levels" and the like. Those are extraordinarily useful opt-in rules that can let us have our cake (1st level is the clear starting point) and eat it too (new players can start with simple, straightforward characters) and have a second cake on the side (fans of older-school-style play can have their grim, gritty, low-survival early levels.) So long as you actually do give each thing its appropriate playtest time, and don't deprecate or hide these things, but rather put them front and center and specifically advise their use for cultivating various playstyles, it's quite doable to have a flexible system that still shares a common core but supports many different tastes.

Remember that many literary classics were once the beach books of their time - for example Shakespeare and Dickens. It's actually rare for something that was actually unpopular in its time to be considered a "classic" today.
I mean, only in the sense that it's rare for anything to be considered a "classic" today. The vast majority of human creative output gets forgotten. The only reason we look back and see endless fields of "classics" is survivorship bias. If his poems weren't utterly hilariously bad, nobody would even remember William McGonagall. (Seriously, his poems are so bad they wrap around into being sheer genius, albeit for comedy rather than drama.)

In response to the poster that you're responding to, the opposite can be true as well - while you can't state that popular = good, you can't also state popular = bad.
It's a good thing I didn't, then? I specifically said that you need more data. I also said that the two aren't the same. I never, ever said that popularity is bad, since I had figured it was obvious (and implied by the original argument...) that popularity/sales/etc. can be a proxy for quality, it's just not a reliable proxy thereof.
 

Also, don't confuse a lack of categories with there being no difference in the old days. I would argue all writing is done to draw a readership. I don't think most writers today are trying to write literature. They are just telling stories for profit. Some are trying to do that though.
That would be very disappointing, then, because both of those things tend to result in weak results. As C.S. Lewis put it with regard to children's literature, the real best reason to write a novel is because you have something to say that is best expressed by being put into novel form. (He allowed for one fine-but-not-ideal reason for writing a children's book, namely "you told a story for one specific child, who enjoyed it, and thus want to share it with other children, who might also enjoy it", but the true best reason to write a children's book was that a children's book would be the best way to express your ideas.)

If you write a book simply for profit and no other reason, that will come out in the work. If you write a book with passion but without purpose, that will come out in the work, too. Yet if you write something because you really feel it needs to be written, I find that more often than not, the finished product will be something compelling enough that people will in fact pay for it. (Well, so long as you actually hire an editor worth what you paid them. Editing is fantastically important.)

Chasing profit first is, unfortunately, a very good way to not actually profit very much. Like happiness. Trying desperately to be happy is unlikely to actually produce much happiness (this is a documented phenomenon). But if instead you dedicate yourself to something compelling or interesting, you'll often find yourself having stumbled keister-backwards into happiness almost by accident.
 

That would be very disappointing, then, because both of those things tend to result in weak results. As C.S. Lewis put it with regard to children's literature, the real best reason to write a novel is because you have something to say that is best expressed by being put into novel form. (He allowed for one fine-but-not-ideal reason for writing a children's book, namely "you told a story for one specific child, who enjoyed it, and thus want to share it with other children, who might also enjoy it", but the true best reason to write a children's book was that a children's book would be the best way to express your ideas.)
I think this person you quoted is talking about writing the "great american novel" or something literary. Plenty of people are churning out harlequin romances and dime store westerns. To me, great literature means something more than just entertaining. Ken Follett for example has long claimed he is purely an entertainer and has no aspersions to more than that goal.
 

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