D&D General Mike Mearls' blog post about RPG generations

[Umbran]

For generations 1-3, I suppose what he says is fair enough.

At 4th generation, he gets very muddy, and unfortunately the change to his supposed 5th depends upon it.

I am not convinced he grasped the middle spans there very well.

 

[DEFCON 1]

For generations 1-3, I suppose what he says is fair enough.

At 4th generation, he gets very muddy, and unfortunately the cange to his supposed 5th depends upon it.

I am not convinced he grasped the middle spans there very well.

A lot of that I think is because we are still within the supposed 5th generation, and no one can really determine the tropes of an era while still within it. We're all too close to it and can't see the forest through the trees.

20 years from now when we are probably in D&D 6E territory and have true 3D VTTs that people are playing on... maybe then there will be a clearer demarcation of what happened starting around 2000 and the advent of 3E and the OGL to become a 4th generation(?), and where/when that morphed into the 5th gen era.

 

[tetrasodium]

Your just showing why you quit reading the table halfway through and discarded the rest in favor of hyper focusing on only half of it. Checking the table for a given check was not at all for those of us who actually played tend understood it, there were even sections in the phb like the one players about helping each other & working together in different ways on skill checks. The gm didn't need to refer to it very often because it went from negative ten to 30 with a bonus hypothetical outlier 43. Mostly it was just a general feel where the gm could feel supported when they say things like "it's a pretty high window for you to climb without any kinda gear or rattle off a few reasons why it was easier or more difficult (like the window being high up).
Edit: no idea how I get finger replied to @bedir than but the erroneous quoting was stripped

 

[Scribe]

Aww, but how can people crap on the Forge for being the worst thing ever, if they have to accept that it actually grew out of the existing tradition and discussion of TTRPGs?

Oh its very easy.

 

[Umbran]

A lot of that I think is because we are still within the supposed 5th generation, and no one can really determine the tropes of an era while still within it. We're all too close to it and can't see the forest through the trees.

I agree in part - I don't know that being simple for the GM is all that new, or will ultimately be seen as the focus of today's games.

But i think he gets muddy about 4th generation, and that i cannot lay on how 5th generation is still going on. It reads more like a pile of his personal gripes with the games of the times, not a coherent vision of how those times were different.

 

[bedir than]

Your just showing why you quit reading the table halfway through and discarded the rest in favor of hyper focusing on only half of it. Checking the table for a given check was not at all for those of us who actually played tend understood it, there were even sections in the phb like the one players about helping each other & working together in different ways on skill checks. The gm didn't need to refer to it very often because it went from negative ten to 30 with a bonus hypothetical outlier 43. Mostly it was just a general feel where the gm could feel supported when they say things like "it's a pretty high window for you to climb without any kinda gear or rattle off a few reasons why it was easier or more difficult (like the window being high up).

I think you aren't replying to me?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

heck, I am Gen X and that statement is true Albeit not as sparse as Shadowdark

I would bet that if D&D moves in a way that Mearls' post implies, it would split the difference between 5E and Shadowdark (more or less), rather than dumping all of the details that D&D customers are used to. Maybe it ends up looking more like 2E, but with better math.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Aww, but how can people crap on the Forge for being the worst thing ever, if they have to accept that it actually grew out of the existing tradition and discussion of TTRPGs?

Growing out of the existing environment doesn't make people love houseflies or cockroaches.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

For generations 1-3, I suppose what he says is fair enough.

At 4th generation, he gets very muddy, and unfortunately the cange to his supposed 5th depends upon it.

I am not convinced he grasped the middle spans there very well.

Yeah, I noticed the same. If his goal was to say, "hey, in the 21st century, we started designing around what was good for WotC, and now I see a lot of games that seem to prioritize what's good for the GM," he probably should have just made a blog post saying that and left the generational stuff out of it.

 

[Jolly Ruby]

I also think the user experience and general layout of games from publishers like Necrotic Gnome, Arcane Library and Questing Beast are a huge leap in usability when compared to the 5e era WotC books, but the definition of the 4th and 5th generations are too vague in comparison to the first three... I wouldn't call it "generations" in a linear sense, just different publishing approaches heavily influenced by market, scale and business goals.