Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7027695" data-attributes="member: 996">It is a more plausible scenario that the botched introduction poisoned the well, than that he system differences freaked people out.  Though both were probably contributing factors that synergized - if WotC hadn't been so infuriating, there might have been some willingness to give the new systems a fair chance. It was a common criticism of 3.x that it was 'grid dependent' and it was impossible to ignore the intrusive use of AoOs and templates and spaces and diagonals (&c) to run it any other way.  Since you habitually played 3.5 TotM, you'd obviously find that criticism entirely unfounded.  You make a similar criticism of 4e, which is similarly, unfounded.  WotC started selling blind/random minis with 3.0, and only amped it up with 3.5, so yeah, that's an understandable assumption.  The 'grid' oriented mechanics, though, started with 2e C&T, under TSR, and before platic minis were being pushed like that. So the correlation is there, but the causation was probably the reverse:  they started selling minis because the rules had already evolved towards making them more useful.  (And, of course, sold them blind/random, because they're the folks that brought you M:tG). The VTT never materialized in a way that made money for WotC, though. Homebrewing was less prevalent - and less respected, really, under 3.x and 4e than under 5e or in the era of the classic game.   A consequence, I think it's pretty clear, of the player-orientation of the other two modern editions, than of their mechanics, though both figured into it.  (ie, in 3.x, the mechanics rewarded system mastery, so players resisted home-brewing which might undermine said mastery; in 4e, the mechanics were so carefully balanced that DMs resisted homebrewing, not wanting to disrupt that balance)However, it also depends on the area being homebrewed.  In 3e you could customize monsters to the same degree as PCs or use the same item creation rules as players to make novel magic items.  That's homebrewing using system tools, but it's still homebrewing in a sense.  Similarly, in 4e, making/changing up monsters (and their powers), designing skill challenges, finding alternate uses for the disease track, reducing daily surges, varying the availability of short & long rests, increasing monster damage, decreasing hps across the board, and changing the rules on rituals were all not uncommon variants - they were just applied in ways that didn't reduce player 'agency' or threaten class balance (though the point was sometimes to tweak encounter balance.In the same way that 3e primed the community to commit to RAW (in spite of Rule 0), 5e primes the pump for DM Empowerment in several ways, including fostering broad acceptance of homebrewing with ambiguous natural language over precise/clear jargon (and consequently less reliable rewards for system mastery), and subordinating balance as a design consideration.  But it was ultimately the community that would become accepting or not.  It went very well, that way.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> A hard thing to leave aside, for 3pps, but not, I think, a major consideration for most homebrewers.</blockquote>

Verification