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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 8593394" data-attributes="member: 7635">I feel the missing ingredient isn't just how many new players, but what kind of new players. D&D spent large periods of its history fairly secluded. Sure, there was the 80's era with the cartoon and toys, but BADD put a big crimp its spread beyond the "nerd" crowd. Similarly, the 3e Renaissance/d20 market was huge, but the pond was still made up of the same general type of players. I wager that the 5e boom has brought in a lot of people who wouldn't have been in the "nerd" booms of the past; the kind of people who wouldn't set foot in a FLGS or browsed a gaming forum a decade earlier. People whose intro into the genre was CRPGS like Skyrim or WoW. Those games bring with them very different expectations. This is not to say those players are inherently worse, but it does change expectation. Personally, I came into D&D by way of JRPGs like Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger, where a tight focused narrative about a static group of heroes was the expectation. To me D&D was about making my own JRPG like stories and characters, and it was a fight to get AD&D to do that without extensive house rules. The current AP model of a long storyline mostly played by the same characters from inception to end is almost exactly what I wanted 20 years ago. I wager some, though not all, of the problems with "entitled" or "Mary Sue" PCs come from similar types of expectations: the Creepypasta kid who writes 20 page backstories for their OC, the Skyrim player who is used to the narrative calling them the chosen one, the WoW player who is here for the epic loots and endgame play. They are all playing D&D with the assumptions of the fantasy that brought them.And some are just jerks. Nothing has changed under the sun.</blockquote>

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