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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8726616" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Well, again, this seems like a circular argument: you are justifying that it was special by pointing to this unique behavior, but that doesn't distinguish special circumstances from special nature.Did it stay afloat because it was special, something totally unheard-of or nigh-unique in the gaming space, or did it stay afloat because its circumstances were special?Part of the reason I just can't see it as being particularly special is that...it's not like there haven't been quick-run, "light" versions of games, nor of D&D specifically. 4e had GW7e, which even sold in stores as a boxed set thing. Shadowrun 5th Edition had Shadowrun: Anarchy. D&D had Basic. Etc., etc. There have been attempts in that direction, and none of them took off even remotely like this has.Conversely, 5e isn't that simple by tabletop standards. It's absolutely not the simplest version of D&D ever made (which, again, would either be some early-edition thing or GW7e.) It has a whole bunch of weird legacy holdovers, like the claimed but generally invisible difference between "divine" magic and "arcane" magic, or saving throws as opposed to static defenses, or ability scores that are never used except at character creation (or for half-feats, I guess?) It's guilty of quite a lot of semantic overloading, particularly the terms "level," "action," and "check." It's absolutely nothing like the simplicity of ultralight games, particularly with à la carte multiclassing and the tracking of how levels in various (sub)classes stack together for that purpose.So...it's not that having a particularly simple system option makes that big a difference. 3.0 was quite a bit simpler than 2.0, but it didn't have the staying power that 5e has, and other, even-simpler systems (like various extensions of Basic) did not capture that lightning in a bottle the way 5e has. What gives?My only conclusion is that the special circumstances--which I don't think anyone here denies that those circumstances were special--played an enormous role in permitting this to happen. The rules were not irrelevant. But whatever 5e was, it couldn't have succeeded as much as it has without those special circumstances--because previous efforts in that direction, which didn't have those circumstances, weren't any different from other examples.Hence why I said 60% (or a little higher) was circumstance, 40% (or a little lower) was innate character. The special circumstances made all the difference, and in their absence, it doesn't matter what kind of game 5e was, it wouldn't have succeeded the way it has. With their presence, even a game that differed moderately to significantly from 5e (such as 4e*) would still have done well, though I freely grant that it might not have done as well. But, as I said, I could be argued down to a 50/50--that it was equal parts being the game for the time, and being the time for a game, whatever that game happened to be. I absolutely would not go any further than 50/50 though.*Though honestly it's really funny. People--some of them the very people who are participating in this thread--have previously tried to convince me that no, there's actually plenty of 4e in 5e, that there's such strong similarities that it's difficult to understand how someone couldn't see them. Yet now, when it's important that 5e be different from 4e? The two couldn't be more dissimilar. Funny that similarity is only present when it's useful and absolutely denied when it isn't...Edit: Hey, magic post 1234! Just something funny I noticed <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /></blockquote>

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