D&D (2024) Dungeons and Dragons future? Ray Winninger gives a nod to Mike Shea's proposed changes.

[Charlaquin]

I'm not sure the analogy makes much sense. 4e and 5e may be different editions but "ze game remains ze same", or so someone once said.

Whoever said that was wrong. Every edition of D&D is its own complete game, and each is at its best when treated as such.

 

[Scribe]

There have been regular drizzt novels for decades...

Yeah, and after the reset button going into 5e, that's about it right?

 

[Parmandur]

Funny thing about cooking writing. What’s the number one complaint about cooking blogs? That you have to wade through paragraphs of crap just to get to the recipe at the bottom.

But this little back and forth about 4e is precisely why 5e was laid out the way it was. There was zero chance WotC could use any layout ideas from 4e. Just not going to happen.

So here we are eight years later and people complain about vague writing, poor organization and poor layout and wonder why it was done this way.

It’s not exactly a secret. Anything with 4e cooties was an absolute nope in 2014. In 2024, it’s only okay if you can sneak it in under the radar.

There is a balance to be found, and yeah, a lot of cooking blogs don't get it right. 5E, however, does get that balance right, pretty much across the board.

 

[Malmuria]

I continue to struggle to see how sheer verbosity = good writing. You can write evocative and interesting lore without tedious exposition that overstays its welcome. You can express setting details via random tables rather than paragraphs of text. You can publish dungeon adventures that foreground interactive elements and unusual features without forcing a dm to wade through walls of text for each room description (“this room is a kitchen. You see a stove, cabinets, pots, and assorted cutlery. Players can make a dc 15 investigation check to search the cupboards. They find nothing of value.” etc).

The point of brevity and clarity, e.g. in adventure writing, is not to make dry-but-useable texts but rather to foreground all the weird, unique bits that the dm wouldn’t make up by themselves.

 

[Parmandur]

Readability is subjective though. I found 4e more readable than 2e or 3e. That was one of the things that brought me back to D&D.

These things are somewhat subjective, but the experience from what I see is common.

That’s only a positive note if you didn’t like 4e’s writing.

Yes, that's why I'm ending on thst note.

Whoever said that was wrong. Every edition of D&D is its own complete game, and each is at its best when treated as such.

That's really not how the game has ever worked, though: as a DYI experience, mixing and matching versions has been natural since they first introduced a new version.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The formatting and readability come up just about everybtike the topic rears it's head.

Not IME.

Edit: particularly, “readability”. I can’t recall that ever coming up. People not liking the formatting, sure. Nowhere near as common as the claims of “sameyness” or that it “dumb down the game” or that it’s “basically a computer game”, etc, but I’ve seen it.

But readability? Not so much.

 

[Parmandur]

Not IME.

Really, I always see people bring up the awkwardness of the way Powers were presented, and the use of jargon instead of natural language. The natural language aspect is a major component of WotC own analysis of what went sideways.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

Whoever said that was wrong. Every edition of D&D is its own complete game, and each is at its best when treated as such.

 

[billd91]

Funny thing about cooking writing. What’s the number one complaint about cooking blogs? That you have to wade through paragraphs of crap just to get to the recipe at the bottom.

It’s true. That’s a common complaint. Read one of Alton Brown‘s explanations about how baking is different from deep frying in his cookbook, however, and it’s a lot more interesting than someone’s self-indulgent blogging about devising a recipe their picky kids will eat.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Whoever said that was wrong.

Absolutely.

Every edition of D&D is its own complete game, and each is at its best when treated as such.

But not because of this, because this is not unambiguously correct, by any stretch.

To many folks, D&D is at its best when you make it your own.

Really, I always see people bring up the awkwardness of the way Powers were presented, and the use of jargon instead of natural language. The natural language aspect is a major component of WotC own analysis of what went sideways.

“Awkward” is a new one, to me. I get that all the jargon annoyed people, but “poor readability” is just not something I’ve seen claimed, at least as I understand the terminology in question.

Like, it isn’t hard to read, poorly organized, overly wordy to the point of obfuscation, or any other thing that I would normally associate with poor readability.

Regardless, it’s a big stretch to claim based on no more than anecdote that the thing you disliked was the reason that 4e was controversial.