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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8247522" data-attributes="member: 18">Oh I'm not saying there aren't some basic conceptual similarities, like the broad division of roles, just as 3E seemed to be partially inspired by stuff like EQ (basically because people were thinking along the same lines in terms of systematizing things in that era), but what I'm questioning is the claim that it actually "plays" like "slow-motion WoW" at the table, which is utterly inaccurate.I say this particularly because WoW and similar MMOs have a very distinctive and quite narrow way of operating, where all the monsters attack one person (ignoring the rest), and then the job of the party is to keep that person alive whilst killing the monsters. And this has a whole lot of associated behaviour that bears no resemblance to 4E. It does, again, as I said, bear some resemblance to Final Fantasy Tactics and similar games. I can go into this at great length but I shall spare us!You're really making my point with your edit there.WotC had plenty of people who were involved with the OSR movement who they could have chosen to involve with 5E. Most of those people are pretty cool people, and were even in say, 2014 or whenever they started work on this. Instead of taking the most talented or experienced people involved with the OSR, they made an essentially political (in the game-politics sense)/PR decision to pick the loudest voices in OSR stuff. We all know about the eccentric "punk" antics of one, and the other was already an extremely loud and frankly unpleasant and poorly-behaved character, whose entirely popularity stemmed from essentially being extremely unpleasant and rude, which apparently appeals to a certain sort of person.This was  not picking people for their talent, nor for their genuine contribution to OSR. You say they're Johnny-Come-Latelys? I completely agree! But WotC picked them, presumably because they wanted to send a message about D&D Next. It is genuinely incredible to see their names in the context - not many people were consulted, here I'll list them:Jeff Grubb, Kenneth Hite, Kevin Kulp, Robin Laws, S. John Ross, the RPGPundit, Vincent Venturella, and Zak S.Jeff Grubb needs no introduction, Hite, Kulp, Laws and Ross are all successful and innovative RPG designers, with decades of experience, and Laws was near-legendary and Hite not far behind in respect. They had some seriously risk-taking RPGs there. So that was sending a message too - to RPG fans that 5E wasn't going to be completely retrograde. Vincent Venturella seems to be an expert minis painter, not really sure what's going on there. And then we have the other two. Neither of them has remotely the experience and publishing history of the other people consulted. And whilst both had published OSR stuff (Zak S. far more than the other), both were kind of Johnny-Come-Latelys to OSR. Yet there they are, being consulted as if they had similar levels of expertise, or rather, not because of that, because WotC wanted to send a message, as I said.This also helps illustrate how 5E was an "apology edition", and not actually intended primarily to reach a larger audience, just to attempt to regain an existing one. They aren't people you'd want input from if you were trying to make D&D go big with under-40s, which is what has happened.</blockquote>

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