D&D 5E Volo's 5e vs Tasha's 5e where do you see 5e heading?

[Minigiant]

"WotC and D&D have their strongest year ever."
also
"5E is on its last legs!"

You know a person or team can be the champion one year and be at bottom 2 years later.

D&D 5e won't be at the bottom but I predict a noticeable slippage of sales if WOTC continues their conservative norevisionist trends.

 

[tetrasodium]

So, there's a version of D&D out that does all that and while it seems like it is doing okay, Pathfinder 2E is not killing 5E and taking its stuff...

I had a player who was actively working to convince the group to switch over to pf2 last year & seemed to be making progress. There was even talk of me running a few games of it when I got covid in feb & the group split. Having little to no interest n going back to running 5e I agreed to join a game one of them started during covid a couple months back & the players are largel just showing up following the motions. Covid worked both ways for existing & new social distance friendly stuff tht workks best in person

 

[Minigiant]

Citation please.

They had plenty of ideas for month-a-book ideas. We've finally gotten one of the long time requests in psionic subclasses. There's a heck of a lot more ideas that can be mined from early editions to mix in and extend new ideas.

There are lots of ideas left. How many do fans actually want that can be implemented with WOTCs light touch, refusal to make major overhauls, and the rigid system. There is only so much left they can squeeze into the current system to make a book worth buying without making big changes or going on the crazy end.

 

[Sithlord]

So, there's a version of D&D out that does all that and while it seems like it is doing okay, Pathfinder 2E is not killing 5E and taking its stuff...

Pathfinder 2E sucks

 

[tetrasodium]

There are lots of ideas left. How many do fans actually want that can be implemented with WOTCs light touch, refusal to make major overhauls, and the rigid system. There is only so much left they can squeeze into the current system to make a book worth buying without making big changes or going on the crazy end.

Your missing the point though. 5e was designed with stripped down choices intended to make it easy for GM's to add modular components. The variant rules in the DMG however do a nice job of showing how being too stripped down & tuned too strictly for one specific style that actually taking them up on that modularity claim becomes an extremely involved heartbreaker level changes very fast. 5e came out in 2014 yet here we are six or seven years later with wotc still refusing to eat their own dogfood & support that modular goal. Not only that, we are doing it in a thread holding up yet another instance of a book where they talked up but avoided doing just that.

 

[Parmandur]

Pathfinder 2E sucks

I'm sure it's okay for people who like that sort of thing...I was initially excited about the character creation system, but it made my eyes glaze over in boredom when I checked it out.

 

[Parmandur]

Your missing the point though. 5e was designed with stripped down choices intended to make it easy for GM's to add modular components. The variant rules in the DMG however do a nice job of showing how being too stripped down & tuned too strictly for one specific style that actually taking them up on that modularity claim becomes an extremely involved heartbreaker level changes very fast. 5e came out in 2014 yet here we are six or seven years later with wotc still refusing to eat their own dogfood & support that modular goal. Not only that, we are doing it in a thread holding up yet another instance of a book where they talked up but avoided doing just that.

We just had a big old book of modular material come out this past Tuesday.

Y'all be trippin'

 

[Minigiant]

We just had a big old book of modular material come out this past Tuesday.

Y'all be trippin'

The mods are rather minor. If it weren't Ravenloft, it wouldn't sell.

That's the point. There is only so many Ravenlofts left.

 

[ph0rk]

We just had a big old book of modular material come out this past Tuesday.

Which suggests 5.5 is more likely than 6e; I'd be fine with that. The PHB and DMG are getting long in the tooth.

 

[Disgruntled Hobbit]

The slow speed is hiding the fact that they are out of ideas that can fit in the current race, monster, and class systems.

Then why did they launch the edition at a slow speed?
By that logic they started with no ideas

There is no path forward with their strategy. They have at most 2 years before major slippage. And 2 years is kind. Path of the Wild Soul? They are nearing the wall. It's Go wild, Revise, or Restart time.

2020 was the game's best year
Why would they revise and restart and risk losing that?
3.5 Ed had poorer sales than 3.0 Ed and 4th Ed lost the market lead. If they revise now they risk losing everything they've built

The bottom of the barrel is where patience & tolerance for stagnation ends. There is only so much patience that can be expected of people who notice crack in the 5e rules foundation over time or just find themselves bored with the level of mastery they've acquired over a very very simple ruleset that minimized tactical & resource management elements.

If they revise now, do you really think they'll make the game MORE complex?
They will likely go the opposite direction and make DnD even more streamlined and simple

What's more is that they are entering the d20 era of not d&d 5e versions of 5e spinning off away from wotc's stagnant d&d 5e. I can think of 3coming out in the next year (stargatehoenix, levelup, anime5e) with two in the next month or so & all of them taking it in remarkably different directions with their own rules modifications that will continue to diverge from the core it started with just as paizo & pathfinder did.

PathFinder only had a chance to pass DnD because they launched a new edition people didn't like
Level Up is unlikely to be the new PathFinder unless DnD lets it

TCoE probably did more harm than good wrt continuing a slow pace aiming for geologic timescales. People who were already scraping bottom or at a point where they could see bottom on the horizon heard it get talked up like the next unearthed arcana/phb2 with empty talk about new rules new variant mechanics etc. When it finally came out there was a reprint of some gm facing stuff, a handful of player facing options, and... and.... it's still basically the exact same game leaving everyone with expectations feeling like charlie brown watching lucy yank the football away even more dramatically than the last few times.

Sad for you and I and anyone who has been gaming since launch. But we don't matter anymore
There's more people who just started playing and haven't been playing DnD since 5th Ed was released. Who aren't burnt out from the limited options
That's the audience now. D&D can lose every single player who started with 3rd Edition and earlier and still chart high sales on Amazon and be a huge hit