D&D 5E (2024) I think we are on the cusp of a sea change.

[Oofta]

My experience. If you don't want to play D&D the way most people expect it to be played you're better off playing a different game.

There's so many people out there looking for D&D that they'll "settle" for a game that isn't in the style they really want. To some extent this is even true of OSR games which are D&D enough they get the 5e spillover.

Whereas if you advertise for something like Conan 2d20 you might find it harder to find players initially, but you'll have a better chance of finding players who want to actually play the game and will stick around.

So because I think dungeon crawls are boring I've been doing it wrong for the past few decades? Games where the main goal of the game is to break into monster's homes and steal their stuff hasn't worked for me for a long time.

I've also never had any issue finding or retaining players. You just have to be clear on what type of game you run and accept that every once in a while I'm not the right DM for a person and vice versa. Heck, one of the reasons I got back into DMing (long, long ago) was because I couldn't find a game that was working for me so I started a new group.

 

[HammerMan]

How so?

I'd also point out "ignoring the whole post-apocalyptic genre" in TT RPGs is um, pretty funny, because there have been remarkably few successful post-apocalyptic RPGs, much less influential ones. We're basically talking Apocalypse World, where the system was influential not the content, Gamma World, Twilight 2000 (kinda) and After The Bomb. Maybe RIFTS? But that's really something else.

Rifts is weird, but at this point is as old as TSR D&D was... it is holding and last time I was at Gen COn had equal foot print too WoD and ONLY D&D was bigger.

 

[5atbu]

I've almost always played story driven games, I haven't done a dungeon crawl since high school. Even then a lot of our adventures were city based or heists (stealing from crime lord's, of course ).

So when I hear about this new style, it's still rock and roll to me. Umm, still D&D to me. Oh, and the streamed games I watch don't look all that different than my home game.

I have always enjoyed both since the 80s.
So I am with you, all these approaches have been there since the beginning at the table, if perhaps a little less published as D&D adventures than other systems, but that didn't mean people weren't emoting their hearts out in D&D games or storming lairs in WoD games.

I'd suggest the first fully formed RPG for all styles was Traveller, most Traveller publications either supported all sorts of gaming, or kind of just let you explore as you wanted.

 

[5atbu]

Agreed with all of this--especially the point about how people's priorities change as they progress through life. Supposedly we all go through a new life stage every seven years, so what the core audience values now, will likely shift over time.

WOTC has produced tons of splatbooks expanding player options, but not a lot of expansion support for DMs. This is probably because everybody buys the player options books, but more DMs than players will buy DMs Guides, resulting in less sales.

5th Edition is a pretty flexible game system. I can't see why WOTC can just put out a book of "Game Modes" for D&D, with tutorials on multiple approaches to play. Then, write up a chapter teaching how novice DMs could DIY their own setting, put together using templates provided in the book.

You could have a chapter on each genre or play style. This could serve to include your entire player base, encourage them to try out different kinds of play styles under the "D&D Umbrella", and capture all of the customers. This would also increase interaction between groups of players, and introduce cross pollination of play styles and bring disparate players together as groups tried out each others' games.

There could be chapters on short term campaigns, and running very long campaigns. You could also have an introductory rules set, intermediate and hard mode. The hard mode could increase player mortality, and up the challenge in general, for players who are less casual and enjoy beating challenges as a team.

Genre chapters could include: Gritty Swords & Sorcery play, Planetary Romance/Science Fantasy play, CW-style fantasy teen relationship play (which I think is what Strixhaven is), Epic Heroic Fantasy, Classic Dungeon crawls, Crit Role style comedy romp/set piece action sequence games, Mysteries (like Candlekeep), Historical Realism or Arthurian Romance.

Have you seen the Kobold GM guides?

 

[Thomas Shey]

"I don't want a no true Scotsman argument"
"How narrowly do you define "dungeon"".

Come on. You can't have it both ways.

Sorry, but I absolutely can when my point is you seem to have a narrow set of specific definitions you're working from that both unclear from the outside, and if allowed unquestioned turn the argument into a tautology.

For goodness sake. You know you're wrong and playing with semantics for the sake of it. And you still haven't explained why we have to "ignore" post-apocalyptic - Apocalypse World and MYZ support my point, and if you think Apocalypse World isn't "major" and MYZ is, well, that's just funny.

I'm not suggesting we ignore Apocalypse World; I'm saying that if we're going to treat it as more representative than MYZ, you need to make the argument why it is, and not just beg the question.

In the 1990s the number of competitors which had class/level was vanishingly small, and they were some of the less-successful competitors. The only major/successful one that lasted was RIFTS. There was Earthdawn in 1993 but I feel like it didn't really make much of an impact (though it was cool - and was basically the first attempt at what 3E was doing - genuinely "updating" D&D).

You obviously never saw the large number of fantasy heartbreakers out there. You can, indeed, argue they were not exactly knocking the doors down, but there were a lot of them, and they weren't less successful than in gestalt than a number of non-class and level systems out at the same time. I have boxes full of the latter out in the garage.

A very large minority and one that was still growing and indeed possibly an outright majority by the late '90s. 3E turned it around.

And? I don't think I argued it wasn't growing, but that's not the same thing as saying it was the dominant view of how things should go.

That was over 10 years later, and I think he'd changed his philosophy by then, or Heinsoo was the dominant influence, because very little of 13th Age jives with 3E approaches.

It actually appears as a pretty clear hybridization of 3e and 4e design to me.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's precisely my point. But the reach of MMOs in the early-mid 2000s was nothing compared to the fact that virtually every game under the sun now uses progression systems, many of them derived distantly from D&D, most of them involving levels of some kind, many of them classes.

Seriously, man, I'm beginning to think you didn't see a lot of material than came out in that period from small publishers, and/or don't see a lot of what does now. If you ignore the direct 5e knockoffs I don't have much sign class-and-level systems are any more common than they ever were, and if you count knockoffs, there were an enormous amound of D&D3e era ones in that period.

I mean, if you look at modern military shooters, games that are clearly FPSes, you see this - Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, for example, has XP and levels and classes (you change class but you have to level each separately IIRC). And it's not just them - I can't think of a single genre completely untouched by levels and classes now. Whereas, roll things back to 2010 (after 4E, before 5E) and the idea of having levels in a shooter seems really off to a lot of people and would have people classing it as an "RPG shooter" or something.

We're talking about a situation where the reach of MMOs is absolutely nothing in comparison.

I'd argue the success of MMOs have just taken a while to completely splay across other genres. If you don't think so, well, you don't.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I have always enjoyed both since the 80s.
So I am with you, all these approaches have been there since the beginning at the table, if perhaps a little less published as D&D adventures than other systems, but that didn't mean people weren't emoting their hearts out in D&D games or storming lairs in WoD games.

I'd suggest the first fully formed RPG for all styles was Traveller, most Traveller publications either supported all sorts of gaming, or kind of just let you explore as you wanted.

Eh. The early versions of Traveler only really supported two kinds of game worth a damn; space merchants and mercenaries. The character generation was too random for much else.

 

[el-remmen]

If D&D is on the cusp of a sea change, it is on the other side of the cusp, inside the crest of the wave, not just about to hit it. I also think that despite the popularity of streaming, the variety of ways people play D&D is beyond what any one or group of us can know, so it is really impossible to tell what the coming trends are, and if trends we do notice have reached their peak (thus our noticing them) they are likely already passing, not imminent.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Moorcock

Yup, it's amazing how his influencer hobby has been completely obscured and forgotten.

Oh well at least it means he can be rediscovered later.

I... I remember.

 

[DarkCrisis]

My point was that at one time people getting into RPGs had littler or no structural expectations, but computer games did change that, and MMOs upped the reach of those pretty vastly.

While I was introduced to D&D via novels, it wasnt until I played EverQuest that I finally went out and played actual AD&D.