D&D 5E I think we can safely say that 5E is a success, but will it lead to a new Golden Era?

[prosfilaes]

You gave an example of the idea of rankings, which not only is insulting to everyone's intelligence as if we don't know what the word ranking means, but also didn't help the topic.

You don't seem to know what the word ranking means. It means that number 1 sells more books then number 2; not way more, not a little more, just more by some unknown amount.

You can choose to believe that, or you can choose to believe that this is some special outlier that was just edging out the rank below it by tiny numbers, in wide defiance of the broad reported averages, for unknown reasons, for 50 hours straight.

You mean just like I've seen other things do in other sales rankings where I do have hard numbers?

I think Hugh Howey sponsored a full study that included this aspect

If you bought the book that's currently the best selling on Amazon, it would point out that if you refer to a book, it should be listed as

Kidder, T. (1981). The soul of a new machine. Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company.

That's because it's completely unclear what Hugh Howey's full study might be referring. Cornell has a full list of APA citation format at https://www.library.cornell.edu/research/citation/apa , which is generally a sufficient cite in Internet terms, because it does tell you where exactly to find that page, at least while that URL is live.

 

[Steely Dan]

Shaping up to be the 3rd Ed I wanted back in August 2000.

Now, it is all about a heavily house-ruled 1st/2nd edition.

 

[DaveMage]

Shaping up to be the 3rd Ed I wanted back in August 2000.

Now, it is all about a heavily house-ruled 1st/2nd edition.

It really does feel like a more natural evolution from 2E than 3.x did. Especially with the limits to ability scores and lower damage by monsters (than 3.x).

 

[thecasualoblivion]

are there seriously people who want 5th Edition to fail?, i'm getting such good vibes locally for it

I hold a bit of a grudge against WotC for how they ran 4E into the ground. I hold more than a bit of a grudge against 3.x/PF and OSR edition warriors. Given that, 5E's failure is something I will take some level of satisfaction from.

As for the game itself, I think 5E is boring and meh, and stuck in the past. It is very far from what I want out of D&D and I don't expect things to change going forward. I'm hoping it doesn't do well so the next edition, where hopefully they do better next time, comes that much sooner.

 

[BryonD]

I hold a bit of a grudge against WotC for how they ran 4E into the ground. I hold more than a bit of a grudge against 3.x/PF and OSR edition warriors. Given that, 5E's failure is something I will take some level of satisfaction from.

No irony to be found here........

 

[Mistwell]

I hold a bit of a grudge against WotC for how they ran 4E into the ground. I hold more than a bit of a grudge against 3.x/PF and OSR edition warriors. Given that, 5E's failure is something I will take some level of satisfaction from.

As for the game itself, I think 5E is boring and meh, and stuck in the past. It is very far from what I want out of D&D and I don't expect things to change going forward. I'm hoping it doesn't do well so the next edition, where hopefully they do better next time, comes that much sooner.

Well at least we know where your preferences are at, and that you won't likely be posting in many 5e threads.

 

[billd91]

are there seriously people who want 5th Edition to fail?, i'm getting such good vibes locally for it

There are undoubtedly some. But there are also some of us who want it to do well but also want people to not jump to hasty conclusions about how well it is doing and will do. I'll be cautiously optimistic because I think that's about the best most of us can be after recent years.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Absolutely. One wonders what it might have been like if the interwebs were about back then. Having experienced it first-hand, I have little doubt it would have been as rough and tumble as the recent edition wars. It was pretty similar in a lot of ways.

Role vs Roll was all over usenet back then. And, yes, it was comparable to the edition war.

But it was little more than a slogan because 3.x beyond 5th level (CLW wands and Scribe Scrolls?) wasn't particularly fit for that playstyle.

Whacked and possibly unintentional as the WoCLW might have seemed, it in no way invalidated dungeon crawling. You just barricaded yourself in a room long enough to drain a wand when you were all badly hurt, rather than over'night' so the cleric could regain healing spells.

I think its been a series of step changes for mainstream RPG culture. During the intervening periods, there has been a tendency for the greater culture to go head down, full bore in a direction and be resistant to change backwards and a resistance to revolutionary ideas. Then, there is another step change, either forward or backward.

A sort of punctuated equilibrium? I suppose you could look at it that way.

Finally, we seem to have come to a point in the RPG marketplace where it is saturated with a fairly matured understanding of what each of us want to do while RPGing and matured systems that support that understanding.

I can't really agree. There has been a lot made of the idea that there are various imagined 'styles' that justify opinions at a level beyond just opinion or preference - like, you must choose a style, and if you choose style B, you must love game X and loath game Z. Maybe that's the 'step-change' or equilibrium position we're at now, but I doubt very much that it's some sort of final state for the hobby.

5e's "big tent" idea (at the outset at least) appeared to have been an acknowledgement of that.

I thought it was mostly 'spin' at the time, and not much has happened to change my mind. 5e still shows few signs of real modularity, and isn't a particularly 'big tent.' It's clearly got room for 3e fans who are willing to accept a little less customizeability and fewer rewards for system mastery at the outset, and for classic D&D fans who could already tolerate the d20 consolidation of quixotic sub-systems into one core resolution mechanic. Apart from that (and that's a lot, really), it hasn't broadened it's horizons any. It's clearly designed to evoke the feel of old-school D&D, and that means only working well for the "styles" that it directly encouraged. It's a valid marketing choice to consolidate and stabilize the brand identity.

What they can't do is simultaneously cater to the Story Now crowd nor the 4e crowd that liked 4e for its unique "4eishness" and not its "having D&D on the cover"; basically its amazing ability to functionally marry Gamist and Narrativist interests/ideas. My guess is that they probably have realized this for a fair stretch (or at least they probably have by now even if they were "true believers" when all the "big tent" tenets were being espoused).

That may well be the thinking. There's really no such thing as "4eishness" and functionally marrying Gamist & Narrativist is a fancy GNS way of saying that 4e was comparatively balanced. Balance does let a game work over a broader range if it's robust enough, and 4e's wasn't /too/ brittle. It's wrong-headed, though, to think that there was something about that balance or the mechanics of the game that made it incompatible with catering to a wide range. It's more the rancor of the edition wars, and the insistence that a game 'support' an imagined style or other that serves only to dictate that it return to one of it's past, mechanically less functional, states.

 

[BryonD]

It's wrong-headed, though, to think that there was something about that balance or the mechanics of the game that made it incompatible with catering to a wide range.

There are a lot of buzz words in your statement that leave wiggle room.

But it is wrong headed for any one person to claim that it did nearly *good enough* at catering to a wide range to be successful across that "wide range". Again, as described previously, it is not an all or nothing proposition. If you want to insist that the intent was there, so be it. I would counter that all the statements received (over and over) that losing some fans was ok because they were going to be replaced many time over would strongly fly in the face of that position. But whatever, it doesn't matter because you can insist about "intent" all you want. It won't change history or results.

But when you speak to large chunks of the "wide range" for whom 4E was deeply substandard compared to other available options, and tell them that you know how 4E fit their tastes better than they know how 4E fit their tastes it just sounds like head-in-the-sand bitterness.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I hold a bit of a grudge against WotC for how they ran 4E into the ground. I hold more than a bit of a grudge against 3.x/PF and OSR edition warriors. Given that, 5E's failure is something I will take some level of satisfaction from.

I think you're in a very small minority. Basically you and Ren1999. While there may be plenty of us who appreciated 4e's superior qualities as a game and are disappointed that WotC has chosen to make 5e cater exclusively to other side of the edition war, very few of us, having experienced the damage caused by that conflict, want to go and inflict a round of such damage, ourselves, in turn.

So the only negative reviews we're seeing of 5e are coming from the occasional Pathfinder partisan, and there's no 'Hater5' waging an intense campaign of lies & misinformation against it.

That's a good thing.

As for the game itself, I think 5E is boring and meh, and stuck in the past. It is very far from what I want out of D&D and I don't expect things to change going forward.

Well, sure. But an awful lot of us appreciate that past. WotC is selling to a 'graying' audience in their peak earning years, the strategy is a classic one and makes perfect sense.

Fads (like D&D was in the 80s) come back in about a generation - our society has been changing and the come-back was a little delayed, perhaps leading WotC, in 2006-7 to conclude that it wasn't coming, so they jumped the gun and launched a product positioned for a post-comeback era, just a year or so before the come-back got rolling. Now they're launching a come-back era product several years into it. Not ideal, but they're making the best of it.

I'm hoping it doesn't do well so the next edition, where hopefully they do better next time, comes that much sooner.

The bar for 'doing well' is probably a lot lower, now. 5e is a very safe, conservative design, can't have required a lot of FTEs to produce (it does mostly re-cycle d20 mechanics and classic D&D), and has announced only a vary slow, cautious pace of ongoing support. That's indicative of a low initial investment, probably calculated to be profitable even if sales are nothing special (and they do seem to be quite good, initially, in keeping with the game's usual sales patterns at the very least).

To use a tired sports analogy, they're just trying to get a man on base. The next edition will probably come later rather than sooner, perhaps at the 50th anniversary mark, but probably /will/ be more ambitious.

Of course, with 5e focusing mainly on core books, you have to expect a half-ed in a couple years...