Tony Vargas
Legend
Again, we were talking about /new/ players. New players hadn't decided D&D wasn't for them before they tried it. New players weren't bitter because the Red Box was 'too late.'As I've said before, Essentials set the game on the trajectory WotC is continuing with 5E - simpler and more familiar - but it was too little too late; many D&Ders had already decided 4E wasn't for them.
And, while I agree that 5e is following the same pendulum-swing backwards as Essentials, I don't agree that it's really a simpler game. Essentials delivered a less consistent game, that had some simplified classes and others made even more complex. And, yes, 5e took that /much/ further. Classes of varying complexity and effectiveness do not make the game simpler just because a few of those classes have fewer and less meaningful choices, they make the game more complex and complicated, and less approachable. And that's just /one/ dimension of complexity you can look at...
Sure and many went and added even more rules, detail and complexity to it, like mana/spell-point systems. The game is not the way /you/ played it, nor even the way some imagined majority might have played it, it's the game, in black and white. Maybe not 'RAW' in the 3.x-system-mastery zietgiest sense, but it's absurd to argue that a game was simple when it wasn't, just because some folks chose to ignore most of it.RAW isn't the game. Particularly when it comes to AD&D. The way it was played out in the wild by most people was very simple. In fact, a lot of people played B/X and AD&D interchangeably in a very stripped-down playstyle.
I'm certainly not pretending people didn't heavily mod D&D back in the day. Of course we did, it was the first RPG, it was the one we all started with and knew the best, so it was the obvious starting point. Nothing about it beyond 'first' and consequently, most-familiar and best-known, though, lent it to being a /good/ starting point.
I think that's a critical mistake WotC made with 5e, looking at what people did with D&D /in spite of/ the system, and deciding that the system must have facilitated those things.
I don't have to read about what D&D was like in the 80s, I was there.Many, many old-school players have testified to this. Again, go read Dragonsfoot sometime.
OK, I'll ask myself that:Also, if old-school players loved such baroque complexity, you have to ask yourself why virtually every OSR game is very, very rules-light compared to 3E or 4E.
Hey, Tony, why are OSR games so "rules-lite" compared to modern D&D?
Oh, probably because modern D&D was already catering nicely to people who liked more complete rulesets.
Wow, that was easy. And, no, the answer wasn't "Because rules-lite is the OneTrueWay of Real D&D."
He can say that all he wants, but 5e /does/ cater to the hard-core of longtime D&Ders, rolling back and resurrecting sacred cows like crazy. And, the segment of TT that's growing is /boardgames/, not TotM RPGs, so it's not exactly positioned for that, either.Sorry, but that isn't the approach WotC is taking with 5E. Mearls has said D&D catered for too long to the hardcore gamers. They want some of that growing tabletop gaming pie.
I accept that 5e isn't likely to grow the broader hobby, because it is simply repeating approaches that have consistently failed to grow the hobby ever since the initial D&D fad ended. That's just empiricism. No guarantee, but little reason to think otherwise. I don't doubt, at this point that'll consolidate existing longtime fans,, and the 4e fans I know are at least (mostly) giving it a chance (finally, now that books are on the shelves). That should be more than enough to meet any reasonable sales goals for the line (which, from what others have claimed about Hasbro's current policy, might not even matter, with WotC being counted as a single unit and CCGs doing well).You seem bitter they didn't grow the game with 4E, and convinced they can't do it now with 5E. I guess we'll see.
And, it'd be hard for me to be bitter about something that didn't happen to me. When I got back into D&D with 3.0, I managed to find a group with 6 other players, at someone's home, because there were no venues catering to D&D in my area (which is freak'n Silicon Valley), I'd've had to go to the east bay for that. Now, there are three active FLGSs in the area. Instead of playing with an insular group of half a dozen guys around my own age, I'm in two different home campaigns, and running an open campaign that's currently at 8 players, and running one of /five/ tables of Encounters. That growth happened in the late 3.5, 4e and Essentials period - and, remarkably, didn't drop off much during D&D's two-year hiatus.
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