D&D General The DM Shortage

[Desdichado]

Do you have a reliable source for that?

In any case, they seem to have learned lessons from previous mistakes. It will be a decade before the first major revision to 5E and they haven't made the book-a-month mistake they made at the start of 4E.

Do you consider Ryan Dancy reliable? I can't remember where I read it—it's been the better part of ten years now, but yeah.

 

[Oofta]

Do you consider Ryan Dancy reliable? I can't remember where I read it—it's been the better part of ten years now, but yeah.

Maybe it was a corporate push to make money, it's certainly possible. But a half remembered quote isn't exactly proof and wasn't my point anyway.

My point is that they seem to have learned their lesson and do not appear to be repeating the mistakes of the past.

 

[J.Quondam]

The problem is when the players want god-like PCs and the DM doesn't.

Or said more broadly, whenever there's a conflict of play motivations at the table. Before any game considerations, the GM's zeroth responsibility, imo, is just doing the necessary vetting to ensure that every one at the table is compatible-- including basic personality conflicts.

 

[billd91]

Maybe it was a corporate push to make money, it's certainly possible. But a half remembered quote isn't exactly proof and wasn't my point anyway.

My point is that they seem to have learned their lesson and do not appear to be repeating the mistakes of the past.

The source is Monte Cook in his review of D&D 3.5.

The Beginning of the Story
A few weeks ago, in an interview at gamingreport.com, I said that 3.5 was motivated by financial need rather than by design need -- in short, to make money rather than because the game really needed an update. I said that I had this information from a reliable source.

That source was me. I was there.

See, I'm going to let you in on a little secret, which might make you mad: 3.5 was planned from the beginning.

Even before 3.0 went to the printer, the business team overseeing D&D was talking about 3.5. Not surprisingly, most of the designers -- particularly the actual 3.0 team (Jonathan Tweet, Skip Williams, and I) thought this was a poor idea. Also not surprisingly, our concerns were not enough to affect the plan. The idea, they assured us, was to make a revised edition that was nothing but a cleanup of any errata that might have been found after the book's release, a clarification of issues that seemed to confuse large numbers of players, and, most likely, all new art. It was slated to come out in 2004 or 2005, to give a boost to sales at a point where -- judging historically from the sales trends of previous editions -- they probably would be slumping a bit. It wasn't to replace everyone's books, and it wouldn't raise any compatibility or conversion issues.

Here I sit, in 2003, with my reviewer's copies of the 3.5 books next to my computer, and that's not what I see. It's not difficult to see how that could have happened, however. The business team for 3.0 (and I'm talking about Ryan Dancey and Keith Strohm here) are gone. Skip's gone. Jonathan's working on miniatures games. I'm gone. It's an interesting truism that in the corporate world, where long-term planning is a must but the length of time an employee stays in any one position is short, business teams and design teams rarely last long enough to see their plans come to fruition. Thus the people to propose something are almost never the people who implement it.

So, one has to surmise that the new business team determined that sales were slumping slightly earlier than predicted and needed 3.5 to come out earlier. One also has to surmise that someone -- at some level -- decided that it was to be a much, much more thorough revision than previously planned. Some of this is probably just human nature (two of the 3.0 designers were out of the way, and one would only work at Wizards of the Coast for about half the design time) and some of it is probably the belief that more revenue would be generated with more drastic changes. The philosophy of 3.5 has changed from being a financial "shot in the arm" into something with significant enough changes to make it a "must-buy." Perhaps they thought to strive for the sales levels of 2000. Perhaps there was corporate pressure to reach those sales levels again.

 

[Ancalagon]

I think that any time we write a complex set of rules there will always be bugs in the system and things we later wish we would have done differently. Authors of RPGs are human and are doing the best they can. They still make mistakes and change their mind on what's best.

that speaks to a lack of proper playtesting...

 

[Oofta]

that speaks to a lack of proper playtesting...

True, but 5E had one of the most extensive playtests ever and there are still issues. They may be minor, and many of the issues seem to be not with the rule as much as presentation or personal preference, but they are still there. When people write software it should undergo significant quality assurance testing, but even then things slip through the cracks.

To err is human and all that.

 

[Faolyn]

Worked in what sense, and what problem was he trying to solve? The problem of the OSR allegedly being full of DMs who can't find enough players for everyone who wants to run to be able to, or the problem of the 5e crowd allegedly being full of players who can't find enough DMs for everyone who wants a game?

Because I'm pretty sure that a not insignificant portion of the people who get that ultimatum will opt for no game at all and then still be counted as 5e players looking for a DM.

I don't get the idea of the OSR being full of DMs and no players. Surely some of those DMs want to play, right?

 

[MGibster]

As your representative, I am calling upon the government to tap into the strategic DM supply. For the sake of national security, we most close the DM gap to ensure peace in our time. Roll for initiative!

 

[Faolyn]

A while ago I wrote a blog about that - I think it's also because of advantage.

The problem with 5e? ... it's best feature.

So people have been grumbling about 5e. (tl,dr: advantage is great! but it has consequences - the players engage less. A proposal to fix ...

slugsandsilver.blogspot.com

Hmm. A fair number of games I've seen have mechanics of "roll a die, beat the difficulty, and some things let you roll one or more additional dice, and as long as one of them beats the difficulty, you succeed." A lot of them also say that some tasks require more than one die to succeed for the roll to succeed.

I see no problem with having multiple advantage dice (and multiple disadvantage dice). It would probably require majorly redoing the DC system, of course, but it could work.

 

[Faolyn]

that speaks to a lack of proper playtesting...

I dunno. You can have a ton of playtesters who simply never think to do this one game-breaking thing.