WotC Unpopular Opinion: WotC is the Bethesda of RPG Companies

[Man in the Funny Hat]

This is NOT a dig. I love Fallout and The Elder Scrolls.

That said, more and more I see WotC putting out buggy, slightly underwhelming material and then encouraging the fan community to patch it, expand on it and tweak it. The awesome experiences we have with D&D are actually as much the result of that fan/indie effort as they are WotC output.

The DM's Guild is the most obvious element of this, but even message boards like this one, Facebook groups and Reddit are filled with "mods" for D&D 5E. Like I said, it is a good thing IMO, but also striking.

Don't know about you, but every game I've run or played in since 1976 when I started has not been successful or entertaining because of the copious and premium quality output from WotC, TSR, etc. It has been because of the expansion, tweaking, and customization of a DM. RPG campaigns of any sort live and die by the people who PLAY the game and who RUN it, not those who publish it. Historically speaking, the earliest editions of D&D were all "buggy", incomplete, confused and underwhelming, so from the inception of the hobby it has been the DM's and players who "fixed" it and made it what THEY want that have made the game popular. It was even expected that you would be doing a great deal of your own "fixing" rather than ever just playing things "as-written". You could even say it was in spite of the companies in control that it succeeded. I don't see that anything has actually changed all that much in that regard despite decades of "professional" RPG design, other than a DM now has a more solid foundation of rules to start their customization FROM.

 

[Beleriphon]

Like others, I'm not taking a jab at Bethesda, their buggy nature is kinda endearing until you hit the one that hard locks the game, and even then their games tend to be fun enough to justify starting over (and over, and over, and maybe just one more character, and oh hey I need a clean save for this mod, and maybe one more since I forget what I was doing last time anyway, and I still haven't gotten that one ending in NV).

I have what 7500 hours in Skyrim, that's just tooling around and doing stuff. I've actually finished the main questline... once.

 

[Phazonfish]

I have what 7500 hours in Skyrim, that's just tooling around and doing stuff. I've actually finished the main questline... once.

Same. I like collecting as many shouts as I can before the starter quest where you even get recognized as Dragonborn. It kills me how late in the main story you get Dragon Rend though.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

No-one said anything about anything being "for everyone". They're fixing the game so, with any luck, it works the way they want it to.

That said, sometimes a fix made by one person does turn out to be better than the original design.....

You don't think there's any difference between a 'fix' and a 'tweak'?

 

[Imaculata]

Bethesda has recently turned into something quite ugly that I would not want to compare WOTC to in any way. In the past their bugs were cute and an inside joke. Now it's clearly customer exploitation and lazyness.

 

[Burnside]

By and large I disagree with OP, but there are a few egregious cases - I’m looking at you, chapter 2 of Dragonheist - where the product feels incomplete or malformed enough that it does seem like “eh, DMSGuild will patch this” may have been part of the release strategy.

But on the whole, IMO 5E has better official adventures than ANY previous edition.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Seems strange to pick on 5th edition. The editing and adventure crafting is far more careful than the previous editions, which focused on the sheer amount of content rather than quality checking. Heck, a lot of 2nd edition material wasn't even playtested, because they weren't allowed to. Nostalgia allows people to pick the best of previous editions, and then compare it to the worst of the current edition.

 

[Mistwell]

@Reynard is the EA Games of the message board posters world.

What, I loved Star Wars: Old Republic, so that makes it not a dig, right?

 

[5ekyu]

You don't think there's any difference between a 'fix' and a 'tweak'?

There may be but in a very narrow subset of the context.

Most of the time what people call fixes are tweaks to make a section work differently - in a way they like better. The various homebrew rangers mentioned above are just that, tweaks, not fixes. The original rules "work" but some folks dont like the outcomes or performances in their style of game play.

An actual fix is where it simply fails to work without the change. I cannot think of a case of that in 5e that is not already eratta or reprinted out.

For my game, when I added rites, changed some of the interaction rules, removed common healing other than HD, etc - none of those were fixes - just preferences I adjusted for.

So, in the context of this 5e rpg, I tend to agree that most fixes are actual tweaks to suit the user's preferences, not fixes to patch the game.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Right. My houserule to give a level 1 bonus feat, +1 anytime you choose a feat rather than an ASI, and my variant crit (max die+bonus die), are just things that make the game run how I want. They aren’t fixing the game, because the game wasn’t broken.