D&D General Styles of D&D Play

[Hussar]

5E D&D is great at what it does: provide a simple, easy, clean fun game to casually play with a group of friends. It gives the Younger Gamers what they want: "Some fun time to imagine killing a dragon!"

D&D does have a huge influx of new gamers. All the time. Baldur's Gate three caused a big fall out. Many video gamers loved playing BG3 by clicking buttons and then wanted to make the jump to playing real D&D, for example.

D&D, and RPGs as a whole, are not big on retention: many people when young play D&D for a couple years...at most. Then they drop it hard. Years and years later someone might mention D&D and they will say "oh yea, I played that once" and they will never play again.

Players that do stick with 5E for a time often become...bored...restless...unstatsifyed or worse. The game play is always the same (as it was made that way). And this is doubly so as most games follow the same "houserules" and "Gentleman's Agreement" as every other game with no verity at all.

I find most such players jump at a chance to play an Old School or OSR games after all of the above.

I'm not sure that's true recently. After all, if what you are saying is true, then well, where are all these massive increases in players coming from? Because, let's be honest, there hasn't been massive increases in the audiences for other RPG's. Not like there has been for D&D. What evidence do you have that D&D is not retaining the players? I mean, you mention Baldur's Gate 3 "at the time"? What time would that be? Three months ago? BG3 has only been out for less than a year. I doubt we're seeing any "fall out" yet at all.

Let's not forget that the massive growth in D&D predates BG3 by about five or six years. It also predates things like Critical Role by a couple of years as well.

See, your experience has been players will jump at OSR. My experience is that I couldn't pry 5e out of my player's cold, dead hands. Getting them to try anything other than D&D is a massive uphill battle.

 

[Minigiant]

Yeah, I certainly wouldn't call it all luck either.

Millions of dollars in product placement over the past fifteen years. Shows like Big Bang Theory and Stranger Things and Rick and Morty. Massive outreach with things like regular Unearthed Arcana, not counting the playtests they have been doing, what, quarterly or more frequent UA's for over a decade. Expanding into all sorts of merchandise and whatnot.

While I'm sure the amount of growth has been a shock, I wouldn't call it entirely luck either. WotC has been climbing this mountain for a LOOOONG time.

I didn't say it as all luck.

I said it was Dumb Luck. Meaning WOTC didn't plan for 5e to work so well.

The plan was to sell the 3 core books to random sets of curious people and make the game simple enough it doesn't scare them away in the first 1 or 2 campaigns that they buy a setting book and an adventure before they drop D&D.

WOTC didn't plan to sit there and be primed from when D&D becomes mainstream and technology advanced to ease play and learning.

THAT is why WOTC freaked out and went all greedy. They realized they were halfway making an effort and letting 3rd parties make tons of money that they could make megatons on if they made those products.

Hasbro realized they made all this money only seriously supporting 2 of the 10 playstyles and let other companies make money off the other 8 they ignored. That's why they wanted a lockdown and a percentage.

 

[bloodtide]

I'm not sure that's true recently. After all, if what you are saying is true, then well, where are all these massive increases in players coming from?

All the non gamers. All the younger people.

Because, let's be honest, there hasn't been massive increases in the audiences for other RPG's. Not like there has been for D&D.

Few people, even gamers, even know any other RPGs even exist.

And D&D has huge legacy name recognition. And WotC has a huge advertising budget.

What evidence do you have that D&D is not retaining the players? I mean, you mention Baldur's Gate 3 "at the time"? What time would that be? Three months ago? BG3 has only been out for less than a year. I doubt we're seeing any "fall out" yet at all.

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That time would be.....right now. A simple enough search and you could be able to find a person posting something like "wow, I loved BG3, jow do I get into this D&D game for real?" And it happens a LOT in real life.

Let's not forget that the massive growth in D&D predates BG3 by about five or six years. It also predates things like Critical Role by a couple of years as well.

I did say BG3 was the latest Gateway Path.

See, your experience has been players will jump at OSR. My experience is that I couldn't pry 5e out of my player's cold, dead hands. Getting them to try anything other than D&D is a massive uphill battle.

I did not mean to say that there are no zombie 5E gamers that Must and Forever Only play 5E. Huge numbers of 5E players refuse to try anything else. Even when they describe that they want a specific type of game, and I say "well, this made was MADE for exactly that, lets play it" and they will be quick to snap "I must only play 5E D&D".

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So we don't use XP at all, does that mean we have no support for anything!?

XP is, I should think rather obviously, not the only way to reward behavior. Bennie points, abstracted level progression ("milestone" levelling or the like), 13A-style Incremental Advancements,

You are not going to resolve this discussion unless there is an agreement as to what constitutes "support". There are certainly frameworks for how persuasion checks work, how insight as a skill can be used to ascertain whether an individual is lying, et cetera. These are all extremely barebones approaches to turning the nuances of language into a mechanical aspect of the game tied to ability scores and die rolls. I feel like you will not accept the notion that there is support for talk-first adventures in DnD because you expect a certain level of crunch in order for there to be something substantive there, others do not.

I have been pretty clear, in multiple posts, about what I consider various levels of support or lack thereof.

Spoiler: Full explanation

Active support is where there are present, productive rules(/tools/guidelines/etc.) specifically for some function. It may be good or bad (e.g. 3e's CR system is active support for encounter design, it's just bad). Combat is obviously D&D's biggest active support area. Lesser active-support areas would be investigation/reconnaissance (that's...kind of what the whole school of Divination is for) and

Passive support is where there are rules/etc. that aren't specifically for that, but are adjacent and could be repurposed, or act as necessary "raw material" for building it yourself. Previous example was crafting rules and item-price rules, which help make an economics-/industry-focused game happen, but don't cover needed rules (e.g. price differences, wages, gathering resources, etc.) Another: 2e's NWPs as a kludgy "skills" system.

Permitting is the default: nothing said, silence. Doesn't help, doesn't hinder. As an example, relationship stuff; D&D just doesn't do rules for Teen Wolf-style relationship drama, where a system like Monsterhearts is built around such. It isn't that you can't have relationship drama, you totally can,

Opposing is where the rules that exist genuinely impede or interfere. My repeat example, Survival. 3e rules heavily opposed Survival gameplay. 5e followed suit (as it does in most things.) Spells nix most Survival concerns, mid-level chars are too durable, and existing rules that should help (e.g. Exhaustion) are so egregiously punitive as to be worthless. The rules themselves make Survival harder to run.

TL;DR:
Active support = rules specifically for the task in question
Passive support = rules that can be repurposed for the task, or used as foundation for homebrewed active support
Permitting = an absence of rules that fit into either of the above categories
Opposing = rules which actually hinder the task in question, often requiring removal/banning/etc. to merely enable the task

The existing rules of 5e mostly permit many of the "styles" folks have referenced here (even though, as I said above, I think calling all of these things "styles" is a major error, because it conflates 2-3 fundamentally different categories as though they're all the same.) Sometimes, as with Survival, the rules oppose a particular "style." Add-ons, often years after 5e originally published, have helped to add further areas of support, but their efficacy is often questionable.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't think I would put the success of 5E down purely to luck, it was a very intentionally designed product meant to reinvigorate the brand, which was losing out to Pathfinder at the time, following the failures of 4th edition. 5E was a bold step towards very simple, very broad design. Gone are the days of Tomes of Vile Darkness and obscure 3.x splatbooks, the era of 5E was meant to sell a small number of products to every single player, as opposed to the marketing philosophy of 3.x, which was to sell a huge variety of products to cover the needs and desires of every conceivable player.

I mean, a huge portion of what affected both of those editions was luck. 4e got hammered by a terrible economy right out the gate, which killed one of the biggest booksellers in the country; the podcast revolution was still about five years out, so it made many of the right moves simply a bit too early; and then the murder-suicide on the digital tools team essentially killed all of their hopes for comprehensive product on that front, which is where they'd placed most of their hopes for monetizing D&D. The three major actually bad decisions they made were publishing too early (it should have waited another year), trying to force the GSL down the 3PP industry's throat (which is the actual reason Paizo made PF), and failing to account for presentation. But even despite all that...keep in mind that 4e was in fact financially successful (in part due to the steady stream of income from DDI subscriptions.)

By comparison, 5e has had essentially every possible windfall it could get. Enormous amounts of free advertising from numerous extremely popular Actual Play podcasts, near-zero costs because they slashed staff and production (rather reminiscent of Gamigo type stuff) and outsourced much of the rest, catching the economic recovery pretty much as it happened, and then getting to ride the "everyone is staying at home bored out of their skulls" wave of the COVID pandemic just as things were starting to slump.

That does not, at all, mean that 5e did not make some smart decisions. It did. I do not contest this. But to say that luck was mostly not a factor for either 4e or 5e is simply false. Good luck helped cover for several mechanical missteps with 5e's design (some of which are getting addressed with 5.5e). Bad luck crippled some of the most important parts of what 4e wanted to do.

There's a very good reason why all the 5E splatbooks are extremely basic stuff that for the most part is just "more monster manual" or "more player's handbook". Those types of books appeal to every single 5E player.

Though, as noted, WotC/Hasbro has pretty clearly figured out "oh crap, we're leaving a ton of money on the table by letting everyone else publish the splats we normally would." That was the whole point behind trying to put the OGL genie back in the bottle.

I very, very much expect 5.5e to get a meaningful uptick in publication rate. It's not going to go back to the days of 3e--there's still too few people for that--but significantly more than "one split-three-ways book every year or two."

 

[Hussar]

I didn't say it as all luck.

I said it was Dumb Luck. Meaning WOTC didn't plan for 5e to work so well.

The plan was to sell the 3 core books to random sets of curious people and make the game simple enough it doesn't scare them away in the first 1 or 2 campaigns that they buy a setting book and an adventure before they drop D&D.

WOTC didn't plan to sit there and be primed from when D&D becomes mainstream and technology advanced to ease play and learning.

THAT is why WOTC freaked out and went all greedy. They realized they were halfway making an effort and letting 3rd parties make tons of money that they could make megatons on if they made those products.

Hasbro realized they made all this money only seriously supporting 2 of the 10 playstyles and let other companies make money off the other 8 they ignored. That's why they wanted a lockdown and a percentage.

I'm sorry, but, I don't buy this interpretation at all. Number one, when did WotC "freak out and go all greedy"? What has WotC done that is "all greedy"? They've largely maintained exactly what they said they were going to do since day 1. I highly doubt the OGL thing had anything to do with 3rd party publishers. Why would they care? None of the 3rd party 5e publishers makes more than a tiny, tiny fraction of what WotC makes. Any single WotC 5e books makes more money than nearly any 3rd party publisher has ever made.

The whole OGL thing had nothing to do with 3rd party publishers and everything to do with worries that actual larger companies like Disney or the like, would step in.

 

[Hussar]

I did not mean to say that there are no zombie 5E gamers that Must and Forever Only play 5E. Huge numbers of 5E players refuse to try anything else. Even when they describe that they want a specific type of game, and I say "well, this made was MADE for exactly that, lets play it" and they will be quick to snap "I must only play 5E D&D".

Nice. "Zombie" 5e gamers? Could you be just a little more condescending? I don't think the folks in the back quite heard that.

But, if there's a huge number of 5e gamers that refuse to play anything else, then 5e is hardly bleeding gamers is it? So which is it? 5e cannot retain players and is only getting the numbers its getting through a constant stream of new players or are 5e gamers actually staying with 5e?

 

[Hussar]

By comparison, 5e has had essentially every possible windfall it could get. Enormous amounts of free advertising from numerous extremely popular Actual Play podcasts, near-zero costs because they slashed staff and production (rather reminiscent of Gamigo type stuff) and outsourced much of the rest, catching the economic recovery pretty much as it happened, and then getting to ride the "everyone is staying at home bored out of their skulls" wave of the COVID pandemic just as things were starting to slump.

Your timing is a bit off. The massive growth of 5e predates those Actual Play podcasts. Critical Role didn't even start until March 2015 and didn't become a massive powerhouse until some time later. By then, 5e had already doubled in size twice. and had already been breaking records.

 

[Minigiant]

• Hack & Slash: Actively Supports
• Problem Solving: Passively Supports
• Character Driven: Passively Supports
• Historical Simulation: Currently Permits. Actively Supported in past editions..
• Slapstick: Permits
• Monty Haul: Actively Supports HARD!
• Tactical: Currently Passively Supports. Actively Supported in past editions..
• Political: Permits then becomes Passively Opposes Tier 2 and then Actively Oppose Tier 3 and up.
• Management: Permits. Will Actively Support in Future
• Mystery: Permits then Passively Opposes
• Survival: Actively Opposes
• Horror: Currently Passively Supports. Actively Supported in past editions.
• Relationship Sim: Passively Supports
• Faction War: Permits

Active support = rules specifically for the task in question
Passive support = rules that can be repurposed for the task, or used as foundation for homebrewed active support
Permitting = an absence of rules that fit into either of the above categories
Opposing = rules which actually hinder the task in question, often requiring removal/banning/etc. to merely enable the task

I'd say there is Actively Opposes and Passively Opposing


Passively opposition is when rules which actually hinder the task in question but banning them is essentially easy and has little rippling effects. Like how Enchantment, Divination, and Illusion spells mess up Intrigue so powerful people either all become mages, walk with mages all the time, or wear lead helmets.

 

[Minigiant]

I'm sorry, but, I don't buy this interpretation at all. Number one, when did WotC "freak out and go all greedy"? What has WotC done that is "all greedy"? They've largely maintained exactly what they said they were going to do since day 1. I highly doubt the OGL thing had anything to do with 3rd party publishers. Why would they care? None of the 3rd party 5e publishers makes more than a tiny, tiny fraction of what WotC makes. Any single WotC 5e books makes more money than nearly any 3rd party publisher has ever made.

The whole OGL thing had nothing to do with 3rd party publishers and everything to do with worries that actual larger companies like Disney or the like, would step in.

Exactly. They ceded the space for a larger company than a TTRPG game publisher or a YouTuber group to whoop in. They were afraid that someone big would realize the big open space of poorly supported playstyles they left raw.