D&D 5E Is 5E Special

[Parmandur]

Keyword: "Seems." You have "I, and people who share my tastes, like it." The "significance" to that is zero in data terms.

Simply, yes, absolutely, just our two different shared playstyles. Per WotC, my preferred playstyle is an overwhfavorite among the general populace. And the sales seem to back that up.

They very clearly want different things, or we wouldn't be seeing so many old-school fans handwringing over brighter-colored art, "Disneyfied" design, or the move away from fixed Ancestry ability score bonuses. To assert that the oldest fans in the hobby and the enormous crowd of new fans want precisely the same thing is ludicrous in the extreme, to the point that I genuinely don't believe that's what you're actually saying here--so what are you saying?

We don't see all that many older fans wringing their hands, in total. More are enthusiastic, from everI look.

Again: "Me, and people who share my tastes" is not a useful sample, so while your personal experience is valid and real, it doesn't tell us anything, no more than me saying that me, and people who share my tastes, found 5e tedious, confounding, and actively hostile to our preferences. As for the other: "

Sample, no, but WotC has the actual data. And have acted in it. They didn't know before they looked and got serious market research wheh Essentials fizzled.

"Information" is a rather strong word for statements from Mr. Mearls.

Take it or leave it, but what he put out in the Haopy Fun Hour is a tremendous Master Class.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Alright, continuing on:

The 5E action economy is explained quite clearly. It isn't all that different from 3E, no, but that's well and good.

Is it really? Then why was 3e so allegedly impenetrable for that? You seem to be rather vacillating about whether 5e is special and different or, as I've argued, familiar.

It should be something that you can explain to an 8 hear old, for sure.

Ehhh. I dunno about that. Certainly it should be something you can explain to children, but an 8-year-old is going to be typically in 3rd grade, which is about when children are first being exposed to concepts like multiplication, division, decimals, and the fundamentals of area and perimeter (that is, basic measurement geometry, as opposed to merely shape geometry.) While I have worked with such students in the past and recognize that they are much more intelligent than most adults give them credit for (frankly, I find most adults to be horrifically insulting to children), I am not sure if all of the concepts and structures used in D&D should be that easily explained to someone that young.

D&D is a game aimed at middle schoolers and high schoolers, so...yes. Absolutely.

You....do realize that middle school doesn't start until at the earliest 6th grade, which is roughly age 11-12, right? Three years is an eternity in childhood development.

You say that like it's an inherently bad thing.

If our standard is genuinely people who have just started 3rd grade, yes, I do think it is a bad thing. D&D players need to be able to handle probability, multi-digit multiplications, fractions, and (usually) areas and perimeters, which are concepts that a freshly-minted 3rd grader has not learned yet. It is not fair to ask a child to learn foundational mathematics they haven't even been taught just to be able to play; it isn't fair to them and it isn't fair to older players they need to play alongside. Especially since I would really prefer the child have at least some idea of variables and elementary algebra, which wouldn't be taught to them for another ~3 years at least.

Some 3rd graders will be precocious or fast enough on the uptake to handle it, and thus this (as it always should be) must be done on a case-by-case basis. But a majority of them simply won't have the background for it yet. If the given age had been 10 or 12 (which is much more appropriate for "middle school" students, as Parmandur originally described...), you would hear far less pushback from me. A 12-year-old should generally be equipped with the math background to actually play D&D without needing to be taught how to do the math involved. A 10-year-old is probably proficient, or close enough that only minor guidance will be required (as I said, kids are a lot smarter than most adults give them credit for), so it shouldn't be too difficult.

It sold.well st first, so it beat initial sales goals. But it fell hard, and fast.

"Hard and fast" relative to what? Because your other statements seem to indicate it performed just as well as, if not better than, prior editions. If you perform just as well as every other edition except 5e, can it really be called falling "hard and fast"?

I think there was a lot of pent up desire for a TTRPG that wasn't as crusty as 3.5, but 4e just didn't have the legs like 5e does for appealing to the broader public.

Which, again, could be due to a host of things that have nothing to do with 5e's contents. Nor, to be clear, with 4e's contents. I am not saying making 5e more like 4e would automatically make it more well-liked. I am instead suggesting that there are parts of 5e which are not helping (or potentially even hindering) its outreach, and which would have been changed by its designers before launch if they knew what the future held.

Before 5e most (all after 1e?) Had a boom and bust cycle.

Based on the graphs recently put out, even 1e had that, it just maybe lasted a year or two longer. So...is 4e some special failure that needs to be highlighted, as I know you have argued in the past, or is it the same as every prior edition and only 5e has played out differently?

My purely anecdotal experience is that 4e brought in lots of new players, but drove away lots of active ones. 5e managed to bridge that gap quite well. I know a lot of the 4vengers are still cold on 5e, and I really do get that, but from a sales standpoint 5e has been a big success on that count.

Amazon's sales figures back then showed Pathfinder neck-in-neck with 4e, and sometimes beating it. I don't know if PF ever really outsold 4e overall, but the fact that it's even a question shows that 4e was failing in some respect. Official D&D should not be in a tight sales contest with a bastardized version of itself, ever. And after 5e, it wasn't.

Though it's worth noting, PF only overtook 4e when 4e stopped putting out as many new books. It only really overtook things when 4e pretty much stopped printing anything at all; keep in mind, 4e basically stopped publishing well before the D&D Next playtest was announced. Almost all of 4e's library was published between 2008 and 2010: only four books were published in 2011, and only two in 2012. Now, obviously there are major differences between 4e and 5e in terms of publications, both number and intended impact (only people who wanted to play Divine characters wanted Divine Power, for example), but the point stands, PF overtook 4e because the latter stopped making books. It's pretty easy to beat the sales of something that isn't making new product, and PF1e launched in 2009...and took 2-3 years to overtake 4e. Imagine that.

Megumin - stoll feels like Evoker works.
Thor - seriously, rest the tempest Cleric again. It glaringly just MCU Thor.
Aquaman - so a Champion Fighter with a Magic weapon. Pretty sure there's a Trident in the DMG that is a direct Aquaman ripoff, too.
Deanrys - a pure pet class is a possible design space they haven't explored. Be interesting to see if they ever do.

Wait, wait, just to make sure I understand you here. You're saying Thor should be a spellcaster. One whose primary ability score is Wisdom. And that Aquaman, who can psionically control underwater life, should be a Champion Fighter. Like I'm not even going to touch how Megumin absolutely isn't an Evoker (which gets class features for being more careful about explosions...) The previous criticisms are damning in and of themselves.

I don't have the link handy, but there is sales history on this forum that shows the decline in sales and that 4e fell behind PF a year before plans for D&D next were announced.

Which would be 2011. Exactly when 4e reduced its publication schedule by more than half, and then only published two books thereafter.

I don't see why it's a bad thing to acknowledge reality. I liked 3.x, but I have no problem accepting that after an initial spike sales dropped off. Just like most other editions.

Well, it would help if people recognized, y'know, more of reality, like the above, and didn't repeatedly say that 4e was a massive failure in order to justify crapping on literally absolutely everything they can about it.

 

[Parmandur]

Is it really? Then why was 3e so allegedly impenetrable for that? You seem to be rather vacillating about whether 5e is special and different or, as I've argued, familiar.

3E' economy was fine, it was figuring out the modifiers and corner case rules after action declaration that I couldn't go back to. Grappling shouldn't be so complex.

You....do realize that middle school doesn't start until at the earliest 6th grade, which is roughly age 11-12, right? Three years is an eternity in childhood development.

They have marketing material aimed at 8 year olds, and I've played with kids as young as 4.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Simply, yes, absolutely, just our two different shared playstyles. Per WotC, my preferred playstyle is an overwhfavorite among the general populace. And the sales seem to back that up.

We don't see all that many older fans wringing their hands, in total. More are enthusiastic, from everI look.

Sample, no, but WotC has the actual data. And have acted in it. They didn't know before they looked and got serious market research wheh Essentials fizzled.

Take it or leave it, but what he put out in the Haopy Fun Hour is a tremendous Master Class.

You have repeatedly presented this as an either-or proposition: either 5e is exclusively driven by its innate characteristics and situation had absolutely nothing whatever to do with it, or 5e is exclusively driven by its situation and context and its innate characteristics had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Neither of these positions is reasonable. I have not seen a single person advocate for the latter, yet you keep specifically targeting that and saying that it is your reason for going for the former. That is, frankly, ridicluous; you have set up a patently false dichotomy and then said that, because it is ridiculously implausible to accept one branch, you feel compelled to accept the other instead.

Conversely, my argument, presented as simply and concisely as I can possibly phrase it, is:

5e is a mix of good qualities and bad qualities, boosted into enormous mass appeal more by circumstance than innate quality.

That doesn't mean there's NOTHING good about 5e. There totally is. Even I, who overall very much dislike 5e's design, can recognize places where it's done stuff well, or made choices that were fitting for the environment to which it was born. However, there are also faults--as literally everyone in this thread has recognized--and some of those faults surely must have held 5e back from what it could potentially have achieved.

Hence, it is like every edition before it: it has good qualities and bad qualities, well-made aspects and foolish errors, etc. But, unlike any of those previous ones (except maybe 1e), it has been boosted into the mainstream, been given literally millions and millions of dollars of free advertising, launching in the middle of a major economic recovery, and benefitting enormously from the full flowering of social media and internet media, particularly podcasts, Reddit (which normalized being a forum-goer), and YouTube channels (which normalized watching guides and reviews of nerd media.) The additional signal boost from artists commissioned to make character art and posting it to Reddit, Twitter, Imgur, etc. helped a huge amount too--you had creators actively putting their names out and spreading the word so they could get more clients.

Seriously, the sheer amount of new commissioned art for D&D ALONE is a massive, massive bonus that no other edition ever got, because the infrastructure and buyers/sellers simply didn't exist.

3E' economy was fine, it was figuring out the modifiers and corner case rules after action declaration that I couldn't go back to. Grappling shouldn't be so complex.

They have marketing material aimed at 8 year olds, and I've played with kids as young as 4.

So...is 5e special and different, or is it (as I argued) familiar and the same? You have dodged the question. And, as I already said, those materials aren't games, they're storytelling aids. So that's specious at best.

 

[Nightfly]

One of the benefits 5e has is that there isn't a "bastardized version of a previous edition" competing with it.

I don't understand. 5e has also had to compete with Pathfinder. Two of them, actually.

(And by the way, no offense to Pathfinder meant with "bastardized version". I like a lot of Paizo's stuff, actually, but y'all take my point.)

 

[Parmandur]

You have repeatedly presented this as an either-or proposition: either 5e is exclusively driven by its innate characteristics and situation had absolutely nothing whatever to do with it, or 5e is exclusively driven by its situation and context and its innate characteristics had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Neither of these positions is reasonable. I have not seen a single person advocate for the latter, yet you keep specifically targeting that and saying that it is your reason for going for the former. That is, frankly, ridicluous; you have set up a patently false dichotomy and then said that, because it is ridiculously implausible to accept one branch, you feel compelled to accept the other instead.

Conversely, my argument, presented as simply and concisely as I can possibly phrase it, is:

5e is a mix of good qualities and bad qualities, boosted into enormous mass appeal more by circumstance than innate quality.

That doesn't mean there's NOTHING good about 5e. There totally is. Even I, who overall very much dislike 5e's design, can recognize places where it's done stuff well, or made choices that were fitting for the environment to which it was born. However, there are also faults--as literally everyone in this thread has recognized--and some of those faults surely must have held 5e back from what it could potentially have achieved.

Hence, it is like every edition before it: it has good qualities and bad qualities, well-made aspects and foolish errors, etc. But, unlike any of those previous ones (except maybe 1e), it has been boosted into the mainstream, been given literally millions and millions of dollars of free advertising, launching in the middle of a major economic recovery, and benefitting enormously from the full flowering of social media and internet media, particularly podcasts, Reddit (which normalized being a forum-goer), and YouTube channels (which normalized watching guides and reviews of nerd media.) The additional signal boost from artists commissioned to make character art and posting it to Reddit, Twitter, Imgur, etc. helped a huge amount too--you had creators actively putting their names out and spreading the word so they could get more clients.

Seriously, the sheer amount of new commissioned art for D&D ALONE is a massive, massive bonus that no other edition ever got, because the infrastructure and buyers/sellers simply didn't exist.


So...is 5e special and different, or is it (as I argued) familiar and the same? You have dodged the question. And, as I already said, those materials aren't games, they're storytelling aids. So that's specious at best.

It's not a dichotomy at all: 5E has the innate characteristics that would lead to success no matter what, but also tremendously auspicious circumstances and timing.

4E in 2014 would not have done as well as 5E, not by a long shot. 5E in 2008 would have outperformed 4E, though perhaps not to the same defree.that it has.

With poaitive innate characteristics and a positive enviromcomvined, both/and, it has exploded.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't understand. 5e has also had to compete with Pathfinder. Two of them, actually.

(And by the way, no offense to Pathfinder meant with "bastardized version". I like a lot of Paizo's stuff, actually, but y'all take my point.)

Ph, PG2E also moved into that "prior edition revisited" space for 4E: a lot.of 4E designers worked on PF2E, and I have heard it said it has a number of 4E-isms, but thst might just be PF1E Grognard grumbling.

 

[payn]

Ph, PG2E also moved into that "prior edition revisited" space for 4E: a lot.of 4E designers worked on PF2E, and I have heard it said it has a number of 4E-isms, but thst might just be PF1E Grognard grumbling.

Its not an exact copy, but it is far closer to 4E style play than 5E is.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't understand. 5e has also had to compete with Pathfinder. Two of them, actually.

(And by the way, no offense to Pathfinder meant with "bastardized version". I like a lot of Paizo's stuff, actually, but y'all take my point.)

PF2e is its own beast, not a rewritten reprint of a previous one, so no, it wasn't two.

Beyond that, PF1e was already struggling when 5e released. Much like most movements that arise purely from opposing a disliked thing rather than offering a desirable thing, once there was nothing to oppose, the struggles started. Paizo's own public playtests were, shall we say, not well-handled (I'm specifically thinking of the Gunslinger playtest debacle), and people started really noticing the holes and issues in the rules. The original Summoner, for example, is often derided as a clear demonstration of PF1e's balance flaws, because it got powerful Wizard/Sorcerer spells at lower levels to compensate for being a Bard-style 3/4ths caster....but this is a HUGE power-up for the class, not a balance point. You started getting weird hyper-specific new options that weren't particularly popular, and while the APs continued to sell well, the core game books did not.

PF1e had essentially exhausted its design space in only four-ish years, so when 5e came along, you had people finally ready for a change away from 3e (which, at that point, had been around 14 years). Again, a circumstance completely unrelated to 5e's rules, which was very favorable to 5e.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It's not a dichotomy at all: 5E has the innate characteristics that would lead to success no matter what, but also tremendously auspicious circumstances and timing.

4E in 2014 would not have done as well as 5E, not by a long shot. 5E in 2008 would have outperformed 4E, though perhaps not to the same defree.that it has.

With poaitive innate characteristics and a positive enviromcomvined, both/and, it has exploded.

The poster has repeatedly presented it as such: that those criticizing the claim that 5e is special are saying "absolutely NOTHING about 5e was worth getting, so its success is a total statistical fluke and nothing more." And because that option is obviously untenable, the poster therefore concluded that its exact opposite, that 5e is successful exclusively because it's amazingly well-made, must be the only rational conclusion.

That is a classic false dichotomy.