Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7171365" data-attributes="member: 996">I think that was in reply, ultimately, to something about trivial encounters being boring.  The more confident you are something is genuinely going to be trivial if you play through it, the more sense it makes to hand-wave it, instead of getting bored by it. Anything that keeps your group out of a rut may well be worth it, yes.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  People were doing it a few years ago, more than just a few.  The slow pace of release really helps, IMHO.  2e, 3e, & 4e all drowned in supplements.  Rapid release was a standard strategy for the hobby (how else do you flog revenue out of a small/fantatical customer base?) - I first recall seeing it with Battletech, which wasn't even an RPG, in the 80s.  WWGS/WoD used it to great effect for a while.   Like I said, I've thought that each WotC edition could plausibly be the last, or at least have a much longer run than it did.  I think 5e is going to have a 10+ year run, I thought it might very well be the last edition during the playtest... Depends on what you're introducing them too, of course.  TSR era D&D did not have a great track record, that way.  Lots of people bought it, but it turned out to be a fad and most didn't stick with it.4e (anecdotally, I can only speak from my own experience) surprised me in that it didn't result in a lot of genuinely-new players shrugging and walking away after one experience - some returning players throwing a fit and running straight to PF, sure, but not the new ones.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />5e's DM Empowerment focus lets an experienced and/or talented DM deliver a great experience customized to the preferences of his players.  With new players, you don't always know what that is (heck, they probably don't know yet, they'll just know if they had fun or not), but you can still give a generally positive first experience.  But it's still D&D, still hard to wrap your head around all at once.  A good DM, an experienced player to help, and a good attitude, and that's doable.  The climate of the community helps, now, instead of hurts.  But, I still don't see the kind of retention of new-to-RPG-players we had with Encounters.  I guess we don't /need/ it with the returning players, and no small number of PF players coming back to the fold, I see as well (the new AL coordinator, for instance, came from the 3.x/PF side, he even did sign-ups via Warhorn for a while).   Since other games don't have the problem, yeah, I kinda do.  We are a very small hobby, in spite of a lot of people having tried it - overwhelmingly in the form of D&D.  We could blame the game or eachother, but that's the way it is.  I do that whether I'm running the old edition or not. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  But, no, on balance, I've never found an edition to completely eclipse all that came before.  3e was a great improvement, but I still played 1e from nostalgia, 4e was clearly superior, technically, but I still had character concepts that would only work in 3e (in part because 4e closed their loopholes), 5e is a blast to run, but if I'm going to play on the other side of the screen, 3e, 4e & 1e are all more appealing.Besides, I can lift neat bits from a different game or edition, if I want.  I can crib the Escalation Die from 13A, Adv/Dis from 5e, Skill Challenges from 4e, Take 10/20 from 3.0, etc...... OK, not sure what I'd actually be running at that point, but I'd've imported some nice mechanics into it.... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification