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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8721841" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Hoo boy, quote-a-rama. Gonna try to consolidate.Keyword: "Seems." You have "I, and people who share my tastes, like it." The "significance" to that is zero in data terms.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?Again: you can only use this argument one way, and even there it's HUGELY arguable. Either natural language is popular, and thus it caused increased sales, or increased sales are evidence that natural language is popular. You cannot have the arrow of causation point both directions. (The problem, of course, is that correlation does not imply causation, so all you're actually doing is arguing either post hoc or cum hoc ergo prompter hoc: either "after this, therefore because of this" or "with this, therefore because of this." Both of which are fallacious arguments, and thus no reason to accept the conclusion.)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: "You realize these aren't games? They're storytelling aids. They literally aren't games.Would you say this trend is recent, or one that started at launch (or perhaps earlier)? Because most responses I saw, across various forums and interactions outside the Internet, indicated that most people felt 5e was "AD&D3" when it launched. You basically never hear people say that anymore, though it took at least a couple years for that to taper off.The assertion is that 5e, and only 5e, could have succeeded anywhere near as well as it did. That no meaningful changes could have been made to it to make it succeed substantially more than it did.I reject both of these claims. Certainly, some editions (OD&D, 1e, and 2e IMO) would have been ripped to shreds by things like social media and modern internet discourse. The flaws in the rules would have been flayed open within weeks and the blatant racism and (in 1e) sexism would have ignited a firestorm. But WotC editions? I think they could have sold at least half as well as 5e has, probably more. Would they have sold identically? Probably not. But this is a rising tide, it would take a lot of flaws for a game to fail to be bouyed up by it--and that's exactly what I think the TSR editions suffered from.4e did, in fact, do several things quite right. It also did some dumb things, as I explicitly said earlier in the thread. Further, it had exactly the opposite situation of 5e: launching at the start of a recession instead of the middle of an economic recovery (a recession that bankrupted one of the largest booksellers in the US), stupidly creating its own greatest rival rather than cooperating with them (the GSL directly caused PF1e), having a literal murder-suicide kill two of its lead digital tools developers and thus scuttling nearly the entire digital tools project, and an active climate of vocal haters who would gladly spew outright lies about 4e's rules and structure despite having never opened a single book.Like, in every possible way, 4e had the deck stacked against it, while in numerous ways, 5e had exactly the opposite, a deck stacked in its favor.The playerbase is not that old...now. After the huge boom. There were a few million people--perhaps as many as 8 million, if we take the absolute highest estimates--who were or had been D&D players in the late 00s. Nowadays, there are (allegedly) over 50 million. If we take that number seriously, that means anywhere between 40 and 48 million new players entered the hobby in just the last 8 years, the vast majority of them being under 40 years old.So yes, the hobby has become quite a bit younger. It didn't start that way. 15 years ago, right when 4e launched, most people playing were in their late 20s or older. And guess what? Those people are now 40-and-up. All the people that were fans before 4e are now the tiny minority.As others have said: 4e did just as well as any other previous edition, despite both actively hostile haters and various events seemingly trying to destroy it. Put that myth to rest. 4e did well. It just didn't do well enough to be a Hasbro core brand.(A) Network effects, (B) sunk costs, and (C) the founder-takes-all/"snowball" effect all apply here. A: When few play a game, few will want to join, thus keeping numbers low--when many play it, many will flock to it. (In MMO terms, this is the "dying game" paradox--even if a game is currently healthy, if people think it's a dying game, existing players will leave and new players will avoid it, causing the game to die.) 5e is what everyone's talking about, so it's what everyone keeps talking about; 5e is what everyone is playing, so it's what every new person starts off playing. Which leads to...B: TTRPGs are expensive. Even if you ride the sales, you're still looking at dropping probably $100 on the core books, plus the time costs of learning to play, finding communities to join, etc. Switching to a new system means at least having to learn to play it, and probably spending some money on it. Those costs will push people to stick with what they know, whether or not they're happy. (I don't mean to imply that there's some ENORMOUS crowd of people unhappy with 5e but unwilling to switch--just saying that even if the early advantages had disappeared, which I don't believe most of them have, and even if those advantages were literally the ONLY reason a chunk of people chose to play D&D, there would still be other reasons why people would stick around.)C: If you win early, you're more likely to win more, causing you to be even more likely to win more, etc. This is one of the most complex and difficult problems in competitive (video)game design: how to make a game that simultaneously gives genuine, real rewards for early success, but does not therefore cause the late game to be a totally foregone conclusion. 5e won early, and that has absolutely compounded.Again: this is NOT to say that these are the only reasons people play 5e (far, far, FAR from it.) Just that even if the advantages had all completely disappeared and even if those advantages were the only thing that got people into it to begin with, there would still be reasons people stuck around. Again, I don't actually believe eitehr of these things is true, I think the advantages are still mostly there, albeit having shifted (e.g. D&D as a digital hobby was actually a huge beneficiary of the COVID-19 pandemic, which means that instead of being hurt by the economic downturn, it was actually boosted by it.)I will grant that movement in that way is more natural for players to use. I do not know if I grant that it was good for the game as a game, but it is at least one way in which 5e is genuinely different from all other editions."Information" is a rather strong word for statements from Mr. Mearls.Gonna split this into two posts here, because this is already enormous.</blockquote>

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