D&D General GenCon TV: Celebrating D&D

[UngeheuerLich]

The 5e one interview is not bad either. Also quite enlightening. Also started to watch the game afterwards. I like Mike Mearl's style Style of DMing.

 

[JEB]

Do the 0e or 1e videos also go into Basic D&D?

 

[overgeeked]

Do the 0e or 1e videos also go into Basic D&D?

Not that I saw. I only watched the round table discussion at the start. They might during the actual play portion. But I don't know why they would.

 

[JEB]

Not that I saw. I only watched the round table discussion at the start. They might during the actual play portion. But I don't know why they would.

Too bad, some insights into how that developed differently from the AD&D lineage would have been neat.

 

[DarkCrisis]

The 1E game is kind of hard to watch. The 0E was far more entertaining.

Like I just need them to be serious for 5 minutes and move the plot along.

 

[Mannahnin]

Do the 0e or 1e videos also go into Basic D&D?

Not that I saw. I only watched the round table discussion at the start. They might during the actual play portion. But I don't know why they would.

Too bad, some insights into how that developed differently from the AD&D lineage would have been neat.

It would have been neat if they did.

Peter does comment a couple of times how the 1974-style OD&D video is standing in for the whole Basic/BECMI/RC line, but you're right that it would have been neat to hear some discussion about the creation of the separate line distinct from AD&D during and in the wake of the Arneson lawsuits. I have read that they had a remit specifically to go wild and try to make it really distinct from AD&D in order to strengthen the case and make the two games more dissimilar. Although having also read in the last year or two about Tom Moldvay's 1970s home campaign and how wild it was, and his later game Lords of Creation, I'm almost surprised that B/X isn't weirder and more divergent. I'm trying to remember the chronology- it may be that the lawsuits were in a place by the time they were finishing B/X that making D&D really different from AD&D was just a lower priority than having accessible intro sets to sell in toy and book stores to middle schoolers.

Moldvay passed in 2007 but I'm sure Zeb Cook, Steven Marsh, and probably Lawrence Schick could give a ton of insight.

I think Peter's rationale of saying that OD&D is standing in the for Basic line is dubious, honestly. They're really just covering the published numbered editions and the folk tradition of retroactively numbering 0E and 1E. OD&D being 0E in the AD&D line. The Basic line which split off in 1981 (the 1977 Holmes Basic having been intended as an intro to OD&D and then tweaked at editing to point to AD&D) is really its own schism/offshoot which isn't covered at all in this series.

 

[TiQuinn]

Only part way through the 5e discussion but one question sticks in my mind: if making the game recognizable to the MMORPG crowd had been an edict of 4e, did that topic come up at all in the planning of 5e?

My guess is no, either because they eventually and painfully realized they didn’t have the right experience to segue into an MMO or VTT as an end goal, or they were so desperate to right the ship, that any previous considerations no longer held.

 

[Iosue]

Only part way through the 5e discussion but one question sticks in my mind: if making the game recognizable to the MMORPG crowd had been an edict of 4e, did that topic come up at all in the planning of 5e?

My guess is no, either because they eventually and painfully realized they didn’t have the right experience to segue into an MMO or VTT as an end goal, or they were so desperate to right the ship, that any previous considerations no longer held.

It was a different management regime by the time 5e development started. A new CEO in 2008, and Mearls replaced Bill Slaviscek in 2011.

 

[Iosue]

Mearls talked about 5e PHB sales a bit, which I found interesting. No numbers, but he said the game did well out of the gate in 2014. In 2015, there was a 10% drop off, which they were pleasantly surprised by, since the expected drop off was 50%. Then 2016 sold more than 2014, 2017 sold more than 2016, and 2018 sold more than 2017. This was unheard of; you had to go back to 1e, and its delayed explosion after the Egbert case brought them undreamed of publicity.

Then the pandemic in 2020 caused an industry-wide boom, as everyone’s sales skyrocketed.

On the design front, I was both happy and disappointed. Disappointed because I heavily followed development of 5e in 2012-2014, and there wasn’t anything particularly new said. But at the same time happy because there weren’t any scandalous revelations. Even though Mearls and Rodney Thompson are no longer part of WotC and don’t have to toe a company line, they gave the same goals and design philosophy as they did back during the playtest: not a direct reaction against 4e, but just striving to make complexity something you can opt-in or opt-out of, and let the playtest guide them for class design.

I was really glad they got Rodney Thompson for this, because he’s great at articulating design goals and decisions.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

One piece I found interesting that Rodney Thompson still thinks that making bonus = stat - 10 would have been better for game design (I agree), but in 2014 it was better for a game that wants to be D&D to keep the 3e scores.

After 4e they were very cautious about chnaging too much, even if it would make for a better game overall.