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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9458757" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Which, I mean, that's pretty much the failure state for the design path 5e's designers chose to take for it.As folks said all too often during the "D&D Next" playtest, 5e was designed to be "everyone's second-favorite system." That is, almost any long-time D&D player who plays 5e probably has at least one other version of D&D they like better, or at least that they really liked certain parts of that aren't there/aren't well-articulated in 5e. The design choice, not really a "gamble" per se but a non-trivial risk nonetheless, was to make an edition that was good enough for the vast majority of players.The converse side of that particular risk is making something that can't justify its existence to anyone, because it doesn't have anything it actually does particularly well in and of itself--and beating it into shape is just too much work.Over time, I find that as 5e's honeymoon has waned--that is, official 5e, as I'm sure our perennial Level Up booster will be on my butt about that--a number of folks have slowly drifted from "it's good enough and widely played" to "it...isn't quite good enough, is it?" Certainly not enough to ruin 5e financially or anything like that. But as someone who is critical of 5e, I've very clearly noticed a culture-of-play change. The first four-ish years of 5e, it was nearly impossible to criticize it in any way at all without having folks jump down your throat (other than to complain about something being OP...but nobody cares about balance...but I digress), and we had a near-constant firehose of pure gush threads mooning over how A-MA-ZING 5e was. And then that mostly went away, and there was a period of positive neutrality for a couple years. Then, the criticisms started coming in, slow at first, then more frequently. Some of them were not at all worth the time required to read them (the endless pearl-clutching about "Disneyfication"), but some were much better--e.g. people finally started recognizing that the DMG is actually pretty bad, rather than being one of the best ever made (and yes, that is something someone told me on this very forum, several years ago).Now? I don't think the "constant gushing" phase will come back with 5.5e. The honeymoon is over, and it isn't coming back. Folks like you can see that 5e is not only not very good for the things that excite them, it's actually pretty overtly bad, and hard to change to fix that. Others, like the ultra-ultra "simulationist" players, or folks like me who find 5e's design painfully sloppy and self-sabotaging, have been aware of this for quite some time now. The question, of course, is whether 6e, when it eventually arrives, will try to woo us (all three) back, or write us off as lost for good. I can't say I'm optimistic .</blockquote>

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