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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7026551" data-attributes="member: 996">I'd hardly call the playtest period 'official support' for 4e.  ;PBut, no, there wasn't.  The Encounters program, which I was participating in from the 2nd season on, and which grew (or something) into AL, was attracting new players, and 4e was stunningly good at retaining them, because it was so much easier to pick up than other editions.  Encounters also attracted returning players, but 4e was not so easy for them - the problem with a new version of an old game that's easier than it used to be, is that it's /harder/ to un-learn the old tricks and expectations you /needed/ to play it before than it is to just pick it up from square 1.  I saw that play out again and again.  New players, even players who had only be casually involved in RPGs in the past, would pick up 4e and not only keep playing it, but be running decent games, themselves quite quickly.  But experienced and returning players - especially those with little experience of other systems than D&D - would run aground on their own expectations constantly.  Little things, like expecting to have to assemble the numbers you need to resolve an attack starting with the stats of your weapon, they'd search the character sheet for a weapon and not find it, they'd go right past the 'basic attack' that had everything they needed already there.  Or the thing that caught my entire group the first time we played:  adding CON MOD instead of CON score to 1st level hps!  There's probably a psychological effect to that, too, you go into the game expecting to have an advantage from years of experience and, instead, you're overcoming a handicap.  Do you set aside the preconceived notions and approach the game on a more or less equal footing with the new players - or do you blame the game?The encoutners draw continues with AL, but there's also a lot of returning players at my FLGS - I am no longer on the extrem elderly tail of the age curve!  OK, I'm still a good standard deviation from the mean.  But where I'd be the lone over-40 guy (and my wife the lone over-40 gal) in store crammed with tables of 20-somethings, now there's someone around my age (50 now) at every table.  The returning folks skew heavily towards last-gamed with 2e, if not started with 2e, though there's some with 3e/PF experience, too, they're usually returning after leaving the hobby having last played that edition, rather than converting directly from PF, which seems to hold onto it's fans pretty tenaciously.  Another convergent trend helping 5e, though, is the rise in boardgame popularity.  Our current FLGS is a decicated game store spun off from the old comic book store, and it's shelves are full of board games.  Card games have a substantial shelf right near the cash-register, and D&D has part of one island it shares with PF and whatever the other recent d20 RPG they have in stock, ten times that shelf space is devoted to boardgames.  And that's were the genuinely-new players come from, they're exposed to D&D because we're playing it in the store while they shop for boardgames.  5e seems like it might have been less unacceptable to the 3.5 crowd.  The tipping point there might hypothetically have been the handling of 3pps.  If they got a 5e SRD fairly promptly, they might have gotten on board, and, with no PF to rally around, as that very hypothetical 5e got more material out, it'd've gotten more converts.  OTOH, if WotC in this alternate history, kept the same attitude towards 3e and the same GSL, we'd probably have seen a similar dynamic develop with Paizo & PF - though there'd've been less to differentiate them.But, it could certainly have had more OSR appeal.5e seems to have been designed almost as if it were still 2008 or 2010 and the OSR crowd was the prime audience.  Almost.  I think they had the presence of mind to roll their sites forward to early 2e. <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=";)" />  The genius of 5e's grognard appeal is that an experienced DM can run a great game of D&D, in spite of the game's traditional faults (any he hasn't long since gotten used to fixing or working around he's actually leveraged in some way).  So if you draw in the grognards and get them enthused, you have mentors to teach new players the old 'tribal knowledge' it took to play classic D&D, in the classic way.Conversely, you tick of the grognards at your own risk.</blockquote>

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