D&D 5E The Mainstreaming of D&D

[Ixal]

(bold mine)

So, here we have it - the base anti-populist stance. That which is broadly popular is assumed to be of lower quality. This is a great way to render yourself obsolete.

You might not like it, you can get aggressive about it, but that simply happens when companies start to target more groups to increase the customer base. It turns the product from something bespoke for a specific group to something generic to capture as many people as possible with necessitates that the special interest of a specific group take a step back.
It happened to music, it happened to video games and it happened (and will continue to happen) with D&D.

 

[Oofta]

Failiure is an important part of the process of finding good ideas. If you're too scared of another WiiU you're never gonna make a Switch.

Sometimes failure is just failure. I know a lot of people liked 4E (I liked some aspects), it was very innovative. But it also practically killed D&D, 5E was kind of a Hail Mary that fortunately worked. I don't generally stick with old stuff out of nostalgia, I don't listen to oldies radio stations and my Spotify is full of music by artists that weren't even born when I graduated from high school. But if they come out with another edition that makes too many changes, I may for the first time ever not leap to the new edition. No edition is perfect, but 5E does what I need it to do.

But as Yogi Bera supposedly said, the future is hard to predict especially when it hasn't happened yet. So who knows what will happen. I just don't think change for the sake of change is a good thing.

 

[Undrave]

This was a case where 4E had it right. Treat encounters as memorable set pieces and handwaive the "there's 2 kobolds in a 10X10 room" cruft that takes as long to setup as play out.

In 4e I could easily see that kind of minor encounter being abstracted as a trap. Everybody rolls initiative, and then you take away 2 Healing Surges from people who rolled lower than the Kobold. Boom, resources drained, easily narrated in a few minutes, still can allow the PC to learn about the Kobolds.

BUT 5e doesn't have Healing Surge or any other easy and handy universal way you could realize that kind of abstraction.

That one I don’t think we can blame on the playtesters. If I recall correctly, monster stat blocks were written with spells from the PC spell list from the first playtest packet. Though from what I remember the idea was to make the stat blocks easily condensible into just a few lines of text in the modules, i.e. “the cave contains 1d6 kobolds (AC 12, HP 4, darkvision, sunlight sensitivity, pack tactics, dagger: +4, 5’/20’, 1d4 piercing damage).”

Sounds like a lot of flipping around for no reason... I guess having BOTH the lines and the stat block could be useful.

It was a much more significant change. But then not wanting a change any significant as 3.0 to 3.5 would also rule any as significant as 3.5 to 4.
That said, there were enough changes from 3.0 to 3.5 that a lot of OGL products became a lot less compatible. One of the big changes was weapon sizing. Now, it wasn't simply OK to have a halfling take the shortsword from the loot pile because it was one-handed and would work kind of like a longsword for him, he now had to hope that there were small versions of armor and weapons in the loot piles. And that was a PITA.

Sounds like it was just a lot of minutiae changing but with the same general philosophy. Like, they didn't change the way skills worked or feats or overhaul a class the same way the 5e Barbarian would look compared to the 3e one.

 

[ersatzphil]

But different enough to enrage the Ravenards(TM).

I dunno - as someone who has been hanging around the Fraternity of Shadows for far too long, the initial reaction was certainly tearing of shirts and gnashing of teeth, but people are mellowing. The general reaction to the changes to I'Cath were quite positive, actually.

 

[Oofta]

Getting back to this point, is this true in your experience at all levels?

When it comes to character deaths, I've run and been in campaigns that went to 20. The highest level death was IIRC when the PCs were 18th level, and I don't run a particularly deadly game.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

But I'm not really just talking about WotC publications. It's a more general feeling. But like I said, my own games are what I want them to be and so that's great. I just wish when I look at D&D in general I would get excited and inspired.

Slightly loaded question here, but when was the last time D&D got you excited and inspired? I'm something of an old-timer, but even for me D&D was always the boring old default, a stodgy old system and style of play that didn't speak to me or the stories I was interested in. I think the OSR has sort of opened my eyes to just how much D&D has, in fact, changed over the decades that I stopped paying attention to it--and based on your original post, it sounds like what you're pining for is exactly the sort of transgressive, dangerous stuff that OSR is all about.

But was there a specific time period or edition where you felt like D&D was cool, edgy, etc.? Because I'm over here reading the new edition of The One Ring and mostly loving the way it delves into fantasy tropes, but every time I play or read 5e it feels like another reminder of how stuck in amber the core D&D experience is. Tactical combat, rest, tactical combat, tactical combat, long rest, wake up and get right back on the treadmill. And a lot of the back and forth in this thread is just more evidence of that. Quantifying the average number of encounters between these weirdly artificial, narrative-breaking rests? Yeesh. This is all about as far from cool, innovative, or transgressive as you can get, and I don't know if that's really about D&D going mainstream, edition changes, or anything other than D&D being resolutely, reliably D&D.

 

[Undrave]

Sometimes failure is just failure. I know a lot of people liked 4E (I liked some aspects), it was very innovative. But it also practically killed D&D, 5E was kind of a Hail Mary that fortunately worked. I don't generally stick with old stuff out of nostalgia, I don't listen to oldies radio stations and my Spotify is full of music by artists that weren't even born when I graduated from high school. But if they come out with another edition that makes too many changes, I may for the first time ever not leap to the new edition. No edition is perfect, but 5E does what I need it to do.

But as Yogi Bera supposedly said, the future is hard to predict especially when it hasn't happened yet. So who knows what will happen. I just don't think change for the sake of change is a good thing.

After a while, market forces will push D&D to try something new because they'll have reached market saturation... Capitalism is a harsh mistress...

 

[Malmuria]

The layout and formatting in 5e could be better (for one thing, I can think of 3 major improvements I could make to the Spell Section alone...) but I think homogeneity in formatting is good for the identity of a brand and for ease of use. It's not as exciting if you just want to LOOK at your D&D books, but it makes them way better to use if you know how to navigate them.

Actually my issue with the layout is the usability: topics will start and end in the middle of a page, the headers are too similar in size to easily scan the page, nothing is cross referenced with page numbers, nothing is included on the inside covers, important information is buried within the text. It exacerbates the problem with verbosity. The organization of the dmg is terrible, also.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

All that said, if I am honest, I liked it better when D&D was a nerdy little hobby that felt a little weird and a little transgressive.

If I see one more happy bunny person in a Hogwarts uniform, or another cutesy tiefling making a "oopsie" face...

Kinda sounds like D&D is still a little transgressive. - Its just now your preferences it is transgressing against.

 

[Yora]

Actually my issue with the layout is the usability: topics will start and end in the middle of a page, the headers are too similar in size to easily scan the page, nothing is cross referenced with page numbers, nothing is included on the inside covers, important information is buried within the text. It exacerbates the problem with verbosity. The organization of the dmg is terrible, also.

Well, would you hate Worlds Without Number... (Which is a shame, since it has great mechanics.)

I always felt that every single DMG was terrible. They are all mostly optional or expanded rules, without really anything useful to learn doing GM tasks. (The Star Wars d6 Gamemaster Handbook is the only such book I know of that does that.)