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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haffrung" data-source="post: 6366021" data-attributes="member: 6776259">On the contrary, I think D&D is more popular than you would think by reading forums. Far more people play D&D as a casual activity among friends, in their homes, than the community who talk about RPGs on forums or attend organized events. It's the hardcores who post on forums about class balance, tweets by Mearls, and edition wars who represent the small but vocal minority. It's true that attrition is relentless. Which is one the reasons those who think in terms of a zero-sum struggle between 4E and Pathfinder or 5E and Pathfinder can't see the forest for the trees. If the D&D market consisted only (or even mostly) of long-time players, it would have dwindled away to almost nothing by now as attrition took its relentless toll. Every year, thousands of newcomers play D&D. With every new edition, tens of thousands play for the first time. And the new players tend to be young, as attested by Mearls comments about gearing the campaign length to a college year.5E Basic is the first real attempt to make D&D truly accessible to casual players in more than 20 years. 3E (and Pathfinder) saw the peak of the complexity graph. 4E dialed back the complexity somewhat, but not nearly enough to capture the market WotC has it sights set on. In addition, the market associated 4E with the need for dungeon tiles and minis - a barrier of entry for many gamers. With Essentials WotC tried to make POGS available with every product to allay these concerns, but it was too little too late.We seem to disagree pretty fundamentally on who and what a grognard is. To me, grognards are the players who started with B/X and AD&D 20+ years ago and play a very stripped-down, simple version of D&D. Far, far simpler than 3E. Spend some time over on Dragonsfoot and some of the other grognard forums and the most common complaints against WotC D&D is that it's just too damn complicated and hard to run. These grognards prefer characters that can be created in 10 minutes and can be scribbled on an index card. They want much of the rules to be handle by DM adjudication rather than hard-coded rules in a book.The hardcore from the 3E era are very different. They welcomed the mechanical codification of all game elements. They tend to be the char oppers who eagerly devoured every splat book released for the system. They're the first cohort to welcome a degree of character optimization that requires a software application to administer.During the development of 5E, Mearls commented that the developers of D&D had been catering too much to the hardcore 'for at least 10 years'. Did he have market data to support that assertion? I assume he did. So it looks like he has the same notion of hardcores as I do - gamers who love to play with all sorts of dials and levers to engage with the mechanics of the game and optimize characters. Those gamers didn't reject 4E because it was too simple - they rejected it because it was unfamiliar. WotC are reaching out to a wider audience: that booming market of tabletop gamers who have fueled a golden age in boardgames. I know a lot about that market, as I'm probably more of a boardgamer than an RPGer (my membership number on boardgamegeek is in the 200s). I've seen how that hobby has exploded. I have some insight into its appeal. WotC clearly does to, because they've explicitly questioned why the tabletop RPG market is stagnating while the tabletop boardgaming market is booming. The answer is accessibility. If a game takes longer than 15 to explain, it's appeal drops sharply. If it takes longer than 2 hours to play, it's appeal drops sharply. If it can't be played by casual gamers who want to just show up and play, without and at-home reading or preparation, its appeal drops sharply.5E basic is a game you can just show up and play. I question if full PHB 5E is. You certainly can't make up PCs on the fly in 15 minutes using one book. But with an online character generator (preferably free), it might be. The nice thing about 5E is most of the complexity is front-loaded in PC creation. Combat is far, far simpler than either 3E or 4E. The ease with which you can run a game where people go hours on end only speaking in in-world terms, while the DM occasionally refers to the rules, makes it more suitable for a style of play that WotC largely turned its back on with 3E and 4E. Does that mean 5E will bring in a new golden age of D&D? I doubt it. But I think it will gain traction with the casual gamer market who brought in a golden age of boardgames. And it will also be more appealing to lapsed gamers from the last golden age, who don't have the time or energy to run rules-heavy or detailed combat sims, than either 3E  or 4E. Those two markets - the casual boardgamer and the lapsed D&D player - are not at all incompatible. And they're the two groups where the growth will come from, not from competing with Pathfinder over the hardcores.</blockquote>

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