Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8721884" data-attributes="member: 6790260">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.</blockquote>

Verification