WotC Hasbro selling D&D IP?

[Dire Bare]

It has basically no mechanics in common with 4E except having more than one at-will attack. Even the "encounter" powers are instead in WoW-style cooldowns.

Okay.

 

[Zardnaar]

There is literally not a single word in @Mecheon's post that supports this interpretation of it. Not one. That's not very nice.

What Mecheon is saying is very simple. That 5E may or may not be "better" to some greater or lesser degree than other editions, but that's nowhere near enough to explain the vast disparity in success and that if we say 5E doing better than 4E means 4E was bad, it also means all other editions of D&D were bad.

It's the 1st D&D to launch to positive reception in a mature social media environment.

No other D&D had that factor.

4E launched to a negative reception in an emerging social media environment.

NA to anything earlier.

That's it that's the 5E secret sauce.

5E was more faithful to the lore and more approachable than 3E or 4E.

 

[mamba]

It's the 1st D&D to launch to positive reception in a mature social media environment.

[...]

That's it that's the 5E secret sauce.

5E was more faithful to the lore and more approachable than 3E or 4E.

maybe the last sentence is the secret sauce...

 

[Zardnaar]

maybe the last sentence is the secret sauce...

That got the D&D crowd on board.

3E was more faithful to the lore tbh but 5E more faithful than 4E and more approachable than 3E and 4E.

By 2014 3.X was getting played out vs 2008.

Positive reception magnified that via social media. 3.0 didn't gave that option, 4E launched to negative reception.

 

[Oofta]

That got the D&D crowd on board.

3E was more faithful to the lore tbh but 5E more faithful than 4E and more approachable than 3E and 4E.

By 2014 3.X was getting played out vs 2008.

Positive reception magnified that via social media. 3.0 didn't gave that option, 4E launched to negative reception.

I think you vastly overestimate the influence of the online community while also ignoring that the sustained growth of 5E has come from new players. The majority of people playing 5E had never played D&D before. Including, of all things my sister who joined a family game so she could spend more time with her kids.

A lot of old school players, including me, embraced 4E when it first came out. When it came to organized play the game days in my metro area had around 60+ people attending games twice a month for a while, an increase over what we had been seeing with 3.5. Then, over the course of a year or two it just slowly died. It simply couldn't retain the new players. Towards the end it was a single table and a handful of us that wanted to finish the epic campaign but were talking about switching over to PF when that campaign was over.

They tried a radically different design approach to 4E and everyone of the old school players that didn't switch over told me they simply didn't like the game. The AEDU structure and everything being powers just didn't work for them. It basically didn't feel like an improvement on the D&D game they had enjoyed, it felt like a different game with shared labels. I burned out on the system myself, if 5E hadn't come out I would have switched to a different game.

If people didn't play a game because a handful of vocal people trashed the game, it's pretty obvious from this very forum that nobody would be playing 5E either.

 

[Incenjucar]

It's also quite possible that a major factor was people stopped paying attention to forum naysayers.

 

[Oofta]

It's also quite possible that a major factor was people stopped paying attention to forum naysayers.

If it's any consolation I don't pay attention to what most people say on this forum.

 

[Zardnaar]

I think you vastly overestimate the influence of the online community while also ignoring that the sustained growth of 5E has come from new players. The majority of people playing 5E had never played D&D before. Including, of all things my sister who joined a family game so she could spend more time with her kids.

A lot of old school players, including me, embraced 4E when it first came out. When it came to organized play the game days in my metro area had around 60+ people attending games twice a month for a while, an increase over what we had been seeing with 3.5. Then, over the course of a year or two it just slowly died. It simply couldn't retain the new players. Towards the end it was a single table and a handful of us that wanted to finish the epic campaign but were talking about switching over to PF when that campaign was over.

They tried a radically different design approach to 4E and everyone of the old school players that didn't switch over told me they simply didn't like the game. The AEDU structure and everything being powers just didn't work for them. It basically didn't feel like an improvement on the D&D game they had enjoyed, it felt like a different game with shared labels. I burned out on the system myself, if 5E hadn't come out I would have switched to a different game.

If people didn't play a game because a handful of vocal people trashed the game, it's pretty obvious from this very forum that nobody would be playing 5E either.

The positive online reception probably drew in those new players along with established pools of existing DMs?

If it was negatively recieved a'la 4E by existing players do you think they would have jumped on board?

 

[Autumnal]

If it's any consolation I don't pay attention to what most people say on this forum.

Heck, I don’t even pay attention to what I say.

 

[Oofta]

The positive online reception probably drew in those new players along with established pools of existing DMs?

If it was negatively recieved a'la 4E by existing players do you think they would have jumped on board?

Everyone knows the internet is full of toxic negativity a tiny percentage of people pay much attention to what people have to say online. They pay far more attention to what people they know are saying.

All I know is that when 4E came out I was heavily involved with public games. We saw quick growth immediately after release, with a relative handful of old school players not making the switch. But over the course of a couple of years, it just died. The sales of the books reflected that as well (as did the previous couple of editions for that matter), there were decent sales immediately after launch and then it tanked. You don't get that if the internet bogeyman had scared people off.