D&D 5E Is 5e's Success Actually Bad for Other Games?

[Steampunkette]

First, on the core topic of D&D's success being bad for other games, I remember back when it was. At the start of the 3.0 days with the 3.0 glut where thanks to the OGL everyone was trying to produce a D20 version of everything; we're talking d20 Call of Cthulhu and Monte Cook's World of Darkness here. 5e is not doing that sort of nuking the RPG arena - instead it seems to be growing it. And Critical Role is making people aware there are other games out there.

On a complete tangent I'd be interested in a source for the first sentence. I'm pretty sure that the pike square was very much obsolete tech by the start of the 18th Century, with the socket bayonet more or less rendering pikes redundant. In the revolution they put heads on pikes - but didn't use them so much as weapons.

I'm pretty sure many of them would say yes. And there has been change in the 40k rules over time with e.g. 8th Edition streamlined compared to 7th and a lot of people responding positively to that.

Half-remembered episode of a Documentary TV Series. Though it should be noted the "Pike Square" was still in use all the way up to the French Revolution, they'd just traded pikes for Muskets with Bayonets. That way when cavalry came charging you still had the big wall of pointy that stopped the horses in mid-charge so you could yank officers and soldiers off the horse and stab them on the ground with your gun like a civilized person!

The latter part, though, with the Guillotines and the Military Leaders was a big part of Napoleon's rise to making massive armies of peasants. Well, that and the Pike Square in the centuries before making sure that peasant-conscripts were quite useful in protecting trained soldiers and important locations from cavalry.

The entire post comes from the series "Connections" by James Burke, a Science Historian. The Episode title is "Eat, Drink, and Be Merry" if you'd like to watch it. It can be found online and probably at your local library.

Great show. I watched it when I was, like, 8. I was a tiny nerdling, back then! wistful sigh

 

[Neonchameleon]

Half-remembered episode of a Documentary TV Series. Though it should be noted the "Pike Square" was still in use all the way up to the French Revolution, they'd just traded pikes for Muskets with Bayonets. That way when cavalry came charging you still had the big wall of pointy that stopped the horses in mid-charge so you could yank officers and soldiers off the horse and stab them on the ground with your gun like a civilized person!

Two very different formations, both called squares, but used for very different purposes. The (Swiss-derived) "Pike Square" was a square block of troops generally ten people wide and ten deep, and that's about as tactically flexible as you can make such a large and unwieldy weapon as a pike because it rotates easily rather than wheeling, and could if absolutely necessary point pikes in all directions.

The later musket-using "infantry square" on the other hand was hollow, about three ranks deep, and as immobile as any formation there has ever been in warfare that didn't involve literal digging tools (although not totally immobile). Its job was to balance the maximum surface area allowing people able to shoot with a dense enough thicket of bayonets that the horses weren't stupid enough to run onto them and instead normally rode round - where you could shoot them. You didn't want to leave the safety of your hedge of bayonets when there were enemy cavalry and you had consu!

You may be confused with the (Napoleonic) Column which is in some ways an intermediate formation and used extensively by Napoleon. It was indeed easy to teach - but it wasn't for trying to fend off cavalry. Instead it moved fast and it was large enough to be terrifying, punching through the lines of poorly trained troops - and getting shot to pieces by disciplined lines.

The latter part, though, with the Guillotines and the Military Leaders was a big part of Napoleon's rise to making massive armies of peasants. Well, that and the Pike Square in the centuries before making sure that peasant-conscripts were quite useful in protecting trained soldiers and important locations from cavalry.

Oh, Napoleon definitely did a lot with conscription and a lot of French leaders died in the revolution. But pikes had fallen out of use about a century before Napoleon and a pike square is very different from an infantry square.

 

[Thomas Shey]

@Thomas Shey man what?!?

You said “given 5e came out when a lot of well-received video let's play's were landing (Critical Role being the obvious one”

You didn’t say “fairly early in the process”.

all I did was point out D&D was hella popular before CR even existed.

that’s it.

Six months in doesn't count as my first sentence? It does to me. It quickly revved up awareness in groups who previously had probably had little or no exposure to RPGs at all.

If you want to be hostile because I didn't mean by the sentence what you thought I did--after all, since CR used D&D, how could it have occurred prior to its publication? How do you imagine I thought that worked?--that's on you.

 

[Manbearcat]

First, on the core topic of D&D's success being bad for other games, I remember back when it was. At the start of the 3.0 days with the 3.0 glut where thanks to the OGL everyone was trying to produce a D20 version of everything; we're talking d20 Call of Cthulhu and Monte Cook's World of Darkness here. 5e is not doing that sort of nuking the RPG arena - instead it seems to be growing it. And Critical Role is making people aware there are other games out there.

I was going to do a post on this, but this is pretty much where I'm at on it.

There was a convergence of a lot of simultaneous factors. Some of them are entirely unrelated to 5e's nature or existence; social media influence explosion + long-form podcast explosion + voyeuristic cultural zeitgeist coming online + significant upgrade in capability of virtual tabletop gaming tools.

However, celebrity geek culture embracing gaming (and a lot of that "coming back to") is a significant component of this which then made "geek culture mainstream/cool." 5e's design and marketing has to get its share of credit for this.

Now, there is still a huge component of D&D (and certainly 5e culture) that still has a DEFEND THE BRAND AGAINST ALL COMERS (meaning a perceived conflict with indie design and influence - and this includes 4e), but I feel like that faction of D&D die-hards isn't holding the sway it once did over new players (meaning early 20 somethings or younger) trying indie games (and liking them) after playing 5e for a year or 3.

One of the biggest impediments to the success of other games is that game stores (at least here in the States) largely treat RPGs as zero sum. It's really the combined stranglehold of D&D and Pathfinder since the 4e era that is the issue. You're lucky if there's even anything on the rack that does not come from Wizards or Paizo. In the 5e era Adventurer's League has made this worse because it is a format game stores can promote in the same way they promote Friday Night Magic. Home games and especially running other games at the store are often discouraged. I have pretty much given up on game stores as a way to connect with other gamers or recruit for not 5e / not PF2 games.

By the way what Wizards has been able to accomplish with both Friday Night Magic and Adventurers' League is some damn brilliant marketing. They have basically turned gaming stores into a vestigial marketing wing that pushes their products, keeps players engaged, and builds community around their games. It also has a chilling effect on anyone trying to compete with them directly.

However, @Campbell 's point above about AL and hobby shops exclusively filling their shelves with WotC and Paizo offerings works to countervail my paragraph immediately above...and that is a not insignificant consideration here. There are all kinds of market and cultural forces (including hobby shops desperate to survive and incapable of taking risks on other models) at work here to ensure the 800 lb gorilla only shaves off a few lbs at most.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Other RPGs have had almost 50 years to knock D&D off its throne. Not one of them has ever managed it except for Pathfinder (and that only briefly, in the waning years of 4E). And Pathfinder is a D&D clone.

The excuses wear pretty thin in 50 years.

Vampire the Masquerade, briefly.

As to the rest--so what? Windows has been the dominant operating system in the world for years too; that doesn't mean its intrinsically better than the other options, and in fact they'd have to be overwhelmingly better in a way that's probably impossible. D&D had a similar advantage; it got in early, was good enough, ballooned and then pretty much nothing was liable to dislodge it unless there was an extremely long period of lack of support.

That's pretty much a truism of markets; in first and good enough will do more for you than anything else. The only thing that tends to break that is outside elements that have little to do with quality or appreciation of value; often its an entirely new technology or corporate problems that are out-of-context problems. And most of those have worked in the opposite direction (for example, the fact that early computer RPGs used D&D as a model because it was so well distributed means a lot of its structures--classes, levels, amorphous blob hit points--became familiar to people entirely outside the normal RPG community. That just fed back into the core game's success.

The long and the short of it is that all the owners of D&D normally need to do is keep a functional product going, and nothing likely can displace it, and overall quality (whatever that even means) has almost nothing to do with it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

And that may have been at a time when TSR couldn't pay its printers.

And thus an example of the sort of exterior factors I refer to above. It also benefited from riding a particular cultural strain D&D wasn't able to.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The group that became the Critical Role show started together almost 2 years before 5E was published, according to their Wiki, and was running their game using PRPG, but converted everything to 5E rules for the show, which started airing in March 2015, or about 4 months after all three core books had been released.

Now that makes you wonder what things would look like if they had stuck to PRPG for the show?

I have a suspicion Mercer would have ended up cutting enough corners that from the point of view of a watcher the two games would have been almost indistinguishable--and CR would have still been selling the D&D experience, in practice.

 

[Neonchameleon]

However, @Campbell 's point above about AL and hobby shops exclusively filling their shelves with WotC and Paizo offerings works to countervail my paragraph immediately above...and that is a not insignificant consideration here. There are all kinds of market and cultural forces (including hobby shops desperate to survive and incapable of taking risks on other models) at work here to ensure the 800 lb gorilla only shaves off a few lbs at most.

It's a lot less of a significant consideration than it used to be however. When I was young the hobby shop was basically the only place you could get RPG books and most of the people you knew who roleplayed were the people you knew face to face who used the same hobby shops. These days Amazon has a ridiculous number of games, as does drivethru and itch.io and we don't have to find our way to usenet sites like alt.games.rpg (or whatever it was).

As to the rest--so what? Windows has been the dominant operating system in the world for years too; that doesn't mean its intrinsically better than the other options, and in fact they'd have to be overwhelmingly better in a way that's probably impossible. D&D had a similar advantage; it got in early, was good enough, ballooned and then pretty much nothing was liable to dislodge it unless there was an extremely long period of support.

And one of the positive things I'll say for 5e is that it's very much a "least bad" choice with as little as possible in there that will put anyone off. It's good enough for most jobs while not, I would say, being particularly great at any. Which makes it very good as a game random people can all have a good time with even if many of those groups would have a better time with something more focused.

 

[Steampunkette]

Two very different formations, both called squares, but used for very different purposes. The (Swiss-derived) "Pike Square" was a square block of troops generally ten people wide and ten deep, and that's about as tactically flexible as you can make such a large and unwieldy weapon as a pike because it rotates easily rather than wheeling, and could if absolutely necessary point pikes in all directions.

The later musket-using "infantry square" on the other hand was hollow, about three ranks deep, and as immobile as any formation there has ever been in warfare that didn't involve literal digging tools (although not totally immobile). Its job was to balance the maximum surface area allowing people able to shoot with a dense enough thicket of bayonets that the horses weren't stupid enough to run onto them and instead normally rode round - where you could shoot them. You didn't want to leave the safety of your hedge of bayonets when there were enemy cavalry and you had consu!

You may be confused with the (Napoleonic) Column which is in some ways an intermediate formation and used extensively by Napoleon. It was indeed easy to teach - but it wasn't for trying to fend off cavalry. Instead it moved fast and it was large enough to be terrifying, punching through the lines of poorly trained troops - and getting shot to pieces by disciplined lines.

Oh, Napoleon definitely did a lot with conscription and a lot of French leaders died in the revolution. But pikes had fallen out of use about a century before Napoleon and a pike square is very different from an infantry square.

The Battle of Fontenoy was the first major engagement to use the 3-rank square you're referring to because the English had both Bayonets and Paper Cartridges to allow them to reload faster than their 5-rank, less trained, no-cartridge French adversaries. Which is cool for a 1745 military engagement that ended with the British running screaming at the French and using Bayonets to break their ranks and chase them from the field.

The French Revolution happened 44 years later and this may be a shock but NOT EVERYONE HAD MUSKETS. Particularly the unemployed economically depressed revolutionaries who fought against their "Social Betters" in the Revolution. Most of them had old swords and spears or occasionally pistols when they stormed the Bastille and battled soldiers in the streets.

Look at all those Civilians with Pikes and some with Axes. Okay, they're not "Traditional" pikes from pike-squares of Swiss from the 850s, but you can blame Gustavus Adolphus of what is now Germany for changing naughty word up for Shorter Spears and Lighter Muskets in 1631.

The Improvisational combat methods of the citizenry, using what they had and half-remembered descriptions of winning tactics in historical battles lead to victory. Their version of the Pike Square was particularly useful in the more crowded streets of Paris. That is to say a massive mob of people moving through the streets with pikes pointed ahead of them or turning down alleyways, again, with pikes pointed ahead, eventually running over and down any soldier dumb enough to stay and reload.


Yeah, it wasn't the drilled and regimented version, certainly wasn't the one used on the battlefield by the Swiss. But the formation allowed them to fight a better armed force and ultimately win.

'Cause remember. I'm not referring to the big battlefield affairs of the Revolutionary Wars reaching from 1792-1802. I'm talking about the fighting in the streets of Paris during the storming of the Bastille and the 6 weeks of Head-rolling in 1793.

That showed that a group of people pissed off enough can walk over the twitching and bloody bodies of their compatriots and neighbors to attack their greater enemy! Which, honestly, is what Napoleon needed more than anything.

So big armies to protect his canons which did the majority of the -actual- work of laying waste to his enemies, firing bullets and closing ranks with bayonets high against anyone dumb enough to try and get to his cannons.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I say all this because there seems to be a bizarre need for many in the broader D&D community and particularly on this site to put broad sections of our overall hobby in boxes so they don't have to deal with them cognitively. To render them utterly irrelevant and deny they possess any value not contained within the sacred texts of D&D. It's dismissive, rude, and elitist. It's also entirely unnecessary. You can like what you like without shame. There's no need to tear other parts of the hobby down in order to justify your love for D&D. You can just love D&D. I do. I'm just polyamorous when it comes to RPGs.

To be fair, part of that comes from the tendency for people who don't play and don't like D&D to look down their nose at it in a very public and visible way. I had some of these tendencies years ago myself, at the point where I walked away from it at the start of the AD&D many decades ago (because so many of the things I'd seen other games do I thought were better were in the forefront of my mind), but I'd mostly gotten over that well before coming back briefly in the 3e era. You see it in other places (notoriously it was a problem on RPG.net at one time before the moderators started coming down on it).

That said, the excessive defensiveness is always kind of eyerolling on fora dedicated to a game, and of all the games that don't need defending, D&D is at the top.