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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6921343" data-attributes="member: 1465">Good thread [MENTION=6776548]Corpsetaker[/MENTION]Overall, I agree on the feeling that previous editions were more massive in terms of amount of books & magazine released. On one hand it might have made the hobby feel more alive (I disagree, but there are people who claim that 5e is "dead" because they judge it in terms of publications amount). But on the other hand, massive publication and support also worked as a big facade to mask the fact that probably the majority of us were 10% gaming and 90% talking about the game. The hobby had become the talk. With 3-4 books per month, everybody's attention was grabbed by new content to dissect and criticize. For a lot of people D&D was about collecting books, building hundreds of characters that never were, "fixing" the game with house rules that were never applied, and just imagining that one day they'll finally play the game. D&D was more similar to porn than the real thing IYKWIMAITYD. The stripped-down publication scheme of 5e brought this to light, at least a little bit: now less busy with stuff to buy and talk about, maybe we can look forward to actually play the game more. Or if it's still hard to do that (particularly for those who now have a family), taking half a step away from all the buying & talking is actually a good thing on itself IMHO.I do miss the old printed Dragon and Dungeon magazine. I was never into the digital once, since I hate reading digital. I don't think Dragon+ qualifies as a magazine. For me Dragon and Dungeon played a better role than actual books, because they were slimmer and cheaper, they worked more like "ideas books" to cherrypick or inspire you, while sourcebooks and supplements and adventure paths felt like more massive additions that you either married or avoid. I know that this is not true for many people, who do cherrypick on supplements, but that's not the feeling that I usually got from them. The feeling from magazine was more like "let's see what's in this new issue, maybe I'll use something, maybe I won't use anything but I'll have a great time reading it", while the feeling from a sourcebook was "I have to understand this book as a whole system, and decide if I should allow it in my next campaign". Kind of like the difference between a buffet and a main course.I am ambivalent on character builders. I liked the free one that came with the original 3e PHB. It helped to get used to the new 3e rules. But you really need a character builder only when you are playing a system that has complicated PC rules (which in general I don't endorse) and a large amount of character options. Not needing a character builder is a good think IMHO.I never used a VTT. I played RPGs only in person or in PbP. I can see that VTTs have their own merits, since they are closer to real tabletop playing, which for a lot of people nowadays are difficult to arrange. But for some reason I am not keen on the idea of gaming with strangers on a VTT, and it gives me the feeling that it's more subject to competitive attitudes than any other gaming setup.I do think however, that VTT don't need to be too fancy and therefore expensive. Actually I think that there are free tools out there that can be used together for this purpose. I would personally not spend any money at all on a VTT, or at most a one-time small price, but certainly not a subscription.For a while, the abundance of player's content was exciting, but to me the thrill had already died out about the time when the 3.5 revision came out. With the 3.5 revision, it had become clear to me that player content was already being largely rehashed, recolored and repackaged, but people were buying the same stuff over and over again. It also created a bad player's attitude, in being constantly looking forward to change your PC before they even had time to enjoy the previous. The content that has value for me is DM's content. Fantasy settings, adventures, monsters and sometimes why not some complete additional rules modules to really change the game. In general I always welcome this kind of content, but still I won't buy more than I can actually use. Sadly, DM's content has a much smaller customer base than players content, I am not critizing WotC for a business choice that's good for them, but I am just saying don't blame me if I don't buy what I don't think I need.Well I won't go back to those 2-3 years of 3.0 when I bought a lot of supplements. That was my personal age of getting really into the game material, but it's long gone and won't come back. I don't consider that my "golden age". Instead, the closest to being a "golden age" for me was pretty much the following ~5 years, where (thanks to NOT liking the 3.5 revision and switching back to 3.0) I ignored >90% of the publications and got to play the game most often than ever. Not having to follow up with the mainstream of the hobby was a huge liberation... I had my small library of books already, and finally I was USING it!</blockquote>

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