D&D General Styles of D&D Play

[Hussar]

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.

Again, I doubt playstyles had anything to do with the decisions. They were far more worried that some larger company would make a 5e clone, similar to what Paizo did with 3e, then leverage their much larger marketing budgets to take over the market. Whether this was a reasonable worry or not, I have no idea.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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.

I have flipped back and forth on this. My problem is that, in most cases where such problems arise, it isn't going to be anywhere near this clean--and even when they do, the effects are kind of...I guess "disappointing" more than deleterious per se?

That is, nixing the entirety of Divination in order to have a fun intrigue game kinda sucks. There's a lot of cool spells in there that have little to nothing to do with busting up intrigue play. And there are other spells that are useful without being totally broken, like zone of truth, where you have to be very clever about how you use it in order to get useful effects. Further, both of these things are "active" by the standard set out for active vs passive support. It's just that what you call "passively opposing" is easy to get rid of, while what you call "actively" opposing is difficult or complex to get rid of.

Hence why I'm kind of skeptical about calling it "passive" opposition. I guess, if we want to give a label to this, we could call it something like "entrenched opposition" vs "trivial opposition" or the like. Entrenched opposition requires uprooting significant portions of the system just to make something possible, let alone gameplay-worthy. Trivial opposition is, as you say, closer to a line-item veto.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Again, I doubt playstyles had anything to do with the decisions. They were far more worried that some larger company would make a 5e clone, similar to what Paizo did with 3e, then leverage their much larger marketing budgets to take over the market. Whether this was a reasonable worry or not, I have no idea.

I don't see how that isn't exactly what Minigiant said.

Making a 5e clone that does the stuff 5e doesn't do would, precisely, be the potential 5e-killer you say they'd be fearing. And they would be right to fear it. "All the stuff you already know and love, and extra stuff on top" is a pretty good sales pitch.

 

[Minigiant]

I don't see how that isn't exactly what Minigiant said.

Making a 5e clone that does the stuff 5e doesn't do would, precisely, be the potential 5e-killer you say they'd be fearing. And they would be right to fear it. "All the stuff you already know and love, and extra stuff on top" is a pretty good sales pitch.

There's like 5-6 RPGs saying that right now in the works.

They just aren't backed by billion dollar companies/corporations.

 

[Maxperson]

I agree. Now, go argue with the people who are telling you that it doesn't exist and that these things are all free form. After all, @Oofta just said that the system is largely free form with the DM determining things.

When you folks figure out which it is, let me know.

No. We do not all have to agree for you to be wrong about how many tools(support) there are in 5e. I posted upthread a response to @Minigiant that showed just how many in-game tools there were for the Problem-Solving style, and I could have done the same for all of the playstyles.

As I've said more than once in this thread, D&D's greatest strength is that it can, with minimal effort, do virtually every playstyle decently to well. It just won't be great at any of them. If you want great, you will need to go to a smaller and more focused RPG system that has very pointed tools for the style you want to play.

I've also responded to at least one of those who said freeform was how to do things and refuted that. Anyone telling you that these things are all free form is wrong. You can force these things to be free form, but you need to ignore the multitude of tools the game has for that style in order to play it that way.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't see how that isn't exactly what Minigiant said.

Making a 5e clone that does the stuff 5e doesn't do would, precisely, be the potential 5e-killer you say they'd be fearing. And they would be right to fear it. "All the stuff you already know and love, and extra stuff on top" is a pretty good sales pitch.

No major company like Disney would bother with a D&D clone. 5e has been estimated at 100 to 150 million in annual revenue, so 1 to 1.5 billion in its entirety. The Last Jedi alone did 1.33 billion in revenue. It simply isn't worth Disney's time and money to pay for and develop a department to split the D&D base. They wouldn't even get the entire 1 to 1.5 billion. They'd get half if they were lucky. The same goes for every other major company like Disney.

 

[Hussar]

As I've said more than once in this thread, D&D's greatest strength is that it can, with minimal effort, do virtually every playstyle decently to well. It just won't be great at any of them

I guess we simply disagree on the definition of "decently to well".

 

[Hussar]

No major company like Disney would bother with a D&D clone. 5e has been estimated at 100 to 150 million in annual revenue, so 1 to 1.5 billion in its entirety. The Last Jedi alone did 1.33 billion in revenue. It simply isn't worth Disney's time and money to pay for and develop a department to split the D&D base. They wouldn't even get the entire 1 to 1.5 billion. They'd get half if they were lucky. The same goes for every other major company like Disney.

Nobody said that the fear was right. Just that that's what the fear was. The idea that some 3pp was going to come along and make the "killer app" wasn't even a blip on the radar.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yet it still worked well and added millions of players.

What does that have to do with anything being discussed here? How does popularity matter (yet again) in this instance?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

So why all the pushback about me saying that DnD isn’t particularly good at a number of these things?

You said you disagreed with the OP. The OP was only describing ways people played D&D. If you disagree with that, you are saying "no, people do not play D&D this way". And that is what is getting the pushback. No one is suggesting that D&D is a brilliant system for doing all those things, only that people do them regardless.