D&D (2024) We’ll be merging the One D&D and D&D forums shortly

[FitzTheRuke]

I personally strongly dislike such nomenclature for books, and would have preferred something else get traction and history. But it is widely-used and familiar. It recalls software updates, where for example 6.X is all "the same version," but 6.5 is expected to be a fair amount of update to the original 6.0 release. It's used in all sorts of things, video games, utilities, even some operating systems (remember "Windows 3.1"?)

Sure. It makes sense for programs, if a bit dated by this point. Still dumb IMO for RPGs.

You certainly cannot really dispute that it's precedented. It undeniably, factually is. A previous publication of D&D used the "X.5" nomenclature. That is precedent. You might consider it weak precedent, or outdated precedent, or any number of other mitigating circumstances. But to say that there is simply no precedent at all would be objectively false.

Yes. Objecting to the term "precedented" does not require a full refute. It's simply "not very precedented". It was used ONCE, 21 years ago. And poorly at the time. They'd been working on a (totally different) 4e with plans to roll it out in some number of years and rushed a "3.5" instead. They used the term mostly because their vision for a 4e wasn't completed - so 3.5 it was.

Yes; and they were flatly wrong to do so. Essentials isn't even a revision.

I mean, I agree with you, but the upcoming 2024 books are almost EXACTLY the same kind of thing as Essentials (aside from the fact that that line's main purpose was to give Barnes & Nobles (or whoever "mainstream" store it was) instructions on how to sell D&D for employees who knew nothing about it. (This is why they called it "Essentials" - they were the products that WotC wanted the stores to understand were the important ones to get into the hands of new players).

Otherwise, Monsters designed with the benefits of hindsight, ditto for the organization of the DMG, and improved versions of the classes... 2024 Core is the same, design-wise (if not marketing) as Essentials.

Right. It's frankly weird, because for all the things I believe WotC has been boneheaded about with regard to this edition, presentation has not generally been one of them. There was a brief flare-up of "Disneyfication" pearl-clutching (just the latest in a string of "This aesthetic isn't absolutely perfectly for me, and therefore there's something WRONG with D&D!!!", which now has been emboldened by the fact that those arguments actually worked at least once), and some sporadic hate for TCoE as having abandoned the heart and soul of the game, but otherwise presentation has been reasonably cohesive and effective.

To ignore such a powerful symbol is just...weird.

Agreed.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I mean, I agree with you, but the upcoming 2024 books are almost EXACTLY the same kind of thing as Essentials (aside from the fact that that line's main purpose was to give Barnes & Nobles (or whoever "mainstream" store it was) instructions on how to sell D&D for employees who knew nothing about it. (This is why they called it "Essentials" - they were the products that WotC wanted the stores to understand were the important ones to get into the hands of new players).

Essentials was additive. Those were new classes with new names that fulfilled similar niches in the fantasy genre. The 5.5 classes are replacements, straight-up, for 5.0 classes.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Essentials was additive. Those were new classes with new names that fulfilled similar niches in the fantasy genre. The 5.5 classes are replacements, straight-up, for 5.0 classes.

Sure, the nature of 4e had a lot more class names, so adding a bunch more variations wasn't a big deal to them then. They were STILL reworks of the same classes done with slightly different mechanics (in that case it was an attempt to stop the perceived problem of all the classes feeling "samey", so they made alternate versions of the classes that were asymmetrical, but essentially balanced.

It's not ALL that different. You don't HAVE to "replace" the 2014 classes if you don't want to - you can just play them at the table with the 2024 ones. Same with the Essentials versions of the classes. What, you don't think that the Essentials versions were "better"? Because in many ways, many of them were - very similar to what 2024 will be like. Some of them (in particular, the "broken" ones) will wind up "worse".

They're BOTH just an attempt to make mechanical improvements to the game based on actual play experience. Whether they succeed at being improvements is, of course, subjective. But it's what the designers are shooting for, in both cases.

 

[Chaosmancer]

A majority is a safe bet. How large a majority depends on how you filter the respondents. Because a lot of the posters I see expressing a vocal disinterest, both here and on other forums, are ones that I recognize as... not exactly what I'd call active 5e players. Many are ones who have previously expressed a preference for 4e, or OSR, or some variety of Pathfinder. Others have said they've got the 5e PHB, and maybe an early supplement or two, but they haven't kept up with books like Tasha's Cauldron or Monsters of the Multiverse and they haven't actually played 5e any time recently.

Altogether, these are the sorts I consider to be lapsed players. They still retain an emotional attachment to D&D, but they're not active players or purchasers of D&D 5e. So asking them if they plan to upgrade is a misplaced question. They haven't bought a new book in years, and the Revised PHB is not likely to be the book that's going to change that.

If there were a way to filter the responses to people who have bought a new D&D 5e book in, say, the last two years, that would be a very different picture. Because the Revised Core is the culmination of a direction change that was already apparent in Tasha's Cauldron and Monsters of the Multiverse. And seeing what people who have those books think about that direction, and if they want to keep paying for it or if they want to get off the ride, would be interesting.

Agree, no way to tell how large the majority will be, but it will be a majority it seems.

 

[Chaosmancer]

If you want to refer to both WotC 5e book sets collectively as 5.x, I'm down.

I mean, I could. I likely won't. I don't usually need to refer to the collected books of fifth edition. If I need specific books, I tend to just refer to them by title.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It's not the first time I've observed that long time fans are far more invested in the topic's history than the actual creators are. I saw the same sort of thing when a new World of Warcraft expansion was due and the Internet was flooded with fake leaks. A lot of the fakes were easy to spot because they bundled up seven different loose ends from across the decades and tried to tie them all together into one big payoff. Meanwhile when the actual new expansion was announced, it was usually doing brand new stuff because the creators wanted to create and not win fandom trivia contests.

So with the revised 5e, I see a lot of people assuming it's a copy of some event in D&D's past. Especially here on ENworld, where the long time players hang out. It's 3.5e again! It's 4e Essentials again! If we had an even older demographic, maybe they'd be saying it's 2e Skills & Powers again, or 1e Unearthed Arcana again.

Really, this isn't any of those things. It's a new thing that takes lessons from the past, and therefore tries to do something different. They're trying to do a mid-edition rules update without forcing a hard reset. A mega-errata that updates the core books without fully invalidating the old supplements. That's a first, and it may or may not work. But it's worth judging on its own merits, and not on the memories of things that happened far in the past.

This.

Exactly.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure, the nature of 4e had a lot more class names, so adding a bunch more variations wasn't a big deal to them then. They were STILL reworks of the same classes done with slightly different mechanics (in that case it was an attempt to stop the perceived problem of all the classes feeling "samey", so they made alternate versions of the classes that were asymmetrical, but essentially balanced.

It's not ALL that different. You don't HAVE to "replace" the 2014 classes if you don't want to - you can just play them at the table with the 2024 ones. Same with the Essentials versions of the classes. What, you don't think that the Essentials versions were "better"? Because in many ways, many of them were - very similar to what 2024 will be like. Some of them (in particular, the "broken" ones) will wind up "worse".

They're BOTH just an attempt to make mechanical improvements to the game based on actual play experience. Whether they succeed at being improvements is, of course, subjective. But it's what the designers are shooting for, in both cases.

Presentation and intent (not historically assumed intent) matters. Ask the creators of 4e when they didn't make as much money as corporate wanted.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Presentation and intent (not historically assumed intent) matters. Ask the creators of 4e when they didn't make as much money as corporate wanted.

Yeah, exactly. I'm afraid that we are very likely to find that THIS time, while not doing every detail correctly, they will be more successful. So... what will that say for their presentation?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I mean, I agree with you, but the upcoming 2024 books are almost EXACTLY the same kind of thing as Essentials (aside from the fact that that line's main purpose was to give Barnes & Nobles (or whoever "mainstream" store it was) instructions on how to sell D&D for employees who knew nothing about it. (This is why they called it "Essentials" - they were the products that WotC wanted the stores to understand were the important ones to get into the hands of new players).

Except that amongst its express purposes, per statements from the designers like Crawford, is that it will address known and persistent balance problems (like short-rest classes being shortchanged relative to long-rest ones, Warlock and Fighter in particular), to respond to customer feedback fixing both high-level stuff like how the DMG is written and low-level stuff like unpopular classes (e.g. Ranger) and unpopular subclasses (e.g. Berserker).

It's very specifically fixing problems, not just providing an alternative entry point. It is replacing classes with new versions meant to fix outstanding issues, they just don't want to upset anyone by saying that they're replacing what came before with something meant to be actually better. Not to mention stuff like the brand-new weapon mastery stuff that the current rules completely lack.

Otherwise, Monsters designed with the benefits of hindsight, ditto for the organization of the DMG, and improved versions of the classes... 2024 Core is the same, design-wise (if not marketing) as Essentials.

Nooooope. Because Essentials subclasses did not replace, and were merely different from and not improvements upon* their original counterparts. There were, in fact, specific rules in place for how to integrate the two together, so that "O-Fighters" for example could pick up Knight or Slayer powers, and the converse a little bit; Utilities were explicitly common to all members of a class, regardless of what subclass they were written for, so long as the power had a level (this is why they—IMO wrongly—stealth-errata'd the Call Celestial Steed power, because originally it was "Paladin 4" and thus non-Cavalier Paladins could pick it up at level 6, 10, etc.)

You cannot use 5.5e Warlock pacts with 5.0 Warlocks and vice-versa. 5.0 characters do not get any special ability to use the new weapon properties.

*In fact, the community at large often found Essentials classes to be inferior to their "original" counterparts, often specifically because of their efforts to break away from existing patterns. Knight was fine, for instance, and a few were even good (Skald Bard was a solid alternative AIUI, on par with but different from "O-Bard"), but Binder was crap-awful, Bladesinger was an idiotic design from day 1 (seriously, Wizard Encounter powers as Dailies?!), Blackguard was weak (mediocre striker feature and poor power design), Vampire was finicky, etc. The closest it got to "we are fixing known problems" was Star pact Hexblade, and even then, regular Star Pact wasn't bad, it was just finicky like Vampire (that is, it had the same optimization ceiling as other Warlocks, but a much higher floor—that is, a mediocre-constructed Star Warlock was weaker than a mediocre Infernal, for example.)

I get why there is a comparison, but the fact is, "2024 5e" is actively trying to replace the original rules with new rules that do a better job, or fix customer complaints, or improve performance. The claims of backwards compatibility are primarily about (a) emphasizing that old adventures and monsters will still work fine, (b) assuring players that the underlying math isn't changing, and (c) pretending that the classes being replaced aren't actually being replaced...even though the new ones are specifically designed to be better by their chosen metric of better design, "70%+ of players say they like it." Because honestly telling people, "We messed up on some of the classes and subclasses, consistent feedback has shown this, so they needed to be rewritten to work out some of the kinks. Please use the new versions, we promise we've worked to make them the best they can be!" would upset fans who like the current state of affairs. By pretending that the replacement is merely offering a purely additive equivalent alternative, they can quietly phase out the old books and content without driving anyone away.

Effectively, they're recognizing "we can't take their books away," but countering with "we can quietly discourage the old rules until almost nobody uses them anymore."

So I guess that's where you and I split on this. I see it as extremely obviously and transparently replacements, because they come from explicitly admitting that players are playing in ways counter to how 5e was designed (e.g. taking too many long rests and far too few short rests), from explicitly recognizing that several existing classes and subclasses have gotten consistent negative feedback and thus are not up to par, from implicitly recognizing that players in general want certain core rules (backgrounds and races, mostly) to work differently, and from implicitly admitting that certain areas (the DMG generally, the equipment rules, non-combat/downtime activities) have been poorly handled or neglected, and thus replacement is required.

However, WotC believes (rightly or wrongly) that if they take the final step there and admit that this means the new rules really are meant to replace the old ones, not augment them, it will piss players off and hurt sales. Since explicitly recognized goals cannot be achieved without replacement—e.g. you cannot fix the explicitly-recognized problem of "Warlocks get shortchanged because folks don't Short Rest often enough" and "LR classes are overpowered because folks long rest at the drop of a hat"—this means they are saying one thing and doing another.

Essentials classes were new, different takes. They weren't replacements. They were designed to be able to integrate with previous content, even within a single char. "2024 5e" doesn't work like that. If you use a 5.0 background as a 5.5e character, you're just shortchanging yourself. If you play a 5.5e Warlock, you literally can't use the 5.0 Pacts, and the Hexblade Patron is essentially useless because of the changes to Blade Pact. Rangers in general are integrating various efforts to fix public criticism of the class. Berserker, notorious for being so self-sabotaging it wasn't worth playing, has been heavily rewritten, and is just generally better. These are not "totally new take" options that provide something refreshing and different. They are replacements. WotC just won't call them that, because being frank with their customers might (probably would) cost them sales.

Original 4e was forwards-compatible with Essentials. 5.0 is not forwards-compatible with 5.5e, in several places. WotC just won't ever say that out loud.

The great lesson of 5.X is: "if you don't tell someone what something is for, they can't get upset about it." Obscurantism is a sales tactic.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Except that amongst its express purposes, per statements from the designers like Crawford, is that it will address known and persistent balance problems (like short-rest classes being shortchanged relative to long-rest ones, Warlock and Fighter in particular), to respond to customer feedback fixing both high-level stuff like how the DMG is written and low-level stuff like unpopular classes (e.g. Ranger) and unpopular subclasses (e.g. Berserker).

It's very specifically fixing problems, not just providing an alternative entry point. It is replacing classes with new versions meant to fix outstanding issues, they just don't want to upset anyone by saying that they're replacing what came before with something meant to be actually better. Not to mention stuff like the brand-new weapon mastery stuff that the current rules completely lack.


Nooooope. Because Essentials subclasses did not replace, and were merely different from and not improvements upon* their original counterparts. There were, in fact, specific rules in place for how to integrate the two together, so that "O-Fighters" for example could pick up Knight or Slayer powers, and the converse a little bit; Utilities were explicitly common to all members of a class, regardless of what subclass they were written for, so long as the power had a level (this is why they—IMO wrongly—stealth-errata'd the Call Celestial Steed power, because originally it was "Paladin 4" and thus non-Cavalier Paladins could pick it up at level 6, 10, etc.)

You cannot use 5.5e Warlock pacts with 5.0 Warlocks and vice-versa. 5.0 characters do not get any special ability to use the new weapon properties.

*In fact, the community at large often found Essentials classes to be inferior to their "original" counterparts, often specifically because of their efforts to break away from existing patterns. Knight was fine, for instance, and a few were even good (Skald Bard was a solid alternative AIUI, on par with but different from "O-Bard"), but Binder was crap-awful, Bladesinger was an idiotic design from day 1 (seriously, Wizard Encounter powers as Dailies?!), Blackguard was weak (mediocre striker feature and poor power design), Vampire was finicky, etc. The closest it got to "we are fixing known problems" was Star pact Hexblade, and even then, regular Star Pact wasn't bad, it was just finicky like Vampire (that is, it had the same optimization ceiling as other Warlocks, but a much higher floor—that is, a mediocre-constructed Star Warlock was weaker than a mediocre Infernal, for example.)

I get why there is a comparison, but the fact is, "2024 5e" is actively trying to replace the original rules with new rules that do a better job, or fix customer complaints, or improve performance. The claims of backwards compatibility are primarily about (a) emphasizing that old adventures and monsters will still work fine, (b) assuring players that the underlying math isn't changing, and (c) pretending that the classes being replaced aren't actually being replaced...even though the new ones are specifically designed to be better by their chosen metric of better design, "70%+ of players say they like it." Because honestly telling people, "We messed up on some of the classes and subclasses, consistent feedback has shown this, so they needed to be rewritten to work out some of the kinks. Please use the new versions, we promise we've worked to make them the best they can be!" would upset fans who like the current state of affairs. By pretending that the replacement is merely offering a purely additive equivalent alternative, they can quietly phase out the old books and content without driving anyone away.

Effectively, they're recognizing "we can't take their books away," but countering with "we can quietly discourage the old rules until almost nobody uses them anymore."

So I guess that's where you and I split on this. I see it as extremely obviously and transparently replacements, because they come from explicitly admitting that players are playing in ways counter to how 5e was designed (e.g. taking too many long rests and far too few short rests), from explicitly recognizing that several existing classes and subclasses have gotten consistent negative feedback and thus are not up to par, from implicitly recognizing that players in general want certain core rules (backgrounds and races, mostly) to work differently, and from implicitly admitting that certain areas (the DMG generally, the equipment rules, non-combat/downtime activities) have been poorly handled or neglected, and thus replacement is required.

However, WotC believes (rightly or wrongly) that if they take the final step there and admit that this means the new rules really are meant to replace the old ones, not augment them, it will piss players off and hurt sales. Since explicitly recognized goals cannot be achieved without replacement—e.g. you cannot fix the explicitly-recognized problem of "Warlocks get shortchanged because folks don't Short Rest often enough" and "LR classes are overpowered because folks long rest at the drop of a hat"—this means they are saying one thing and doing another.

Essentials classes were new, different takes. They weren't replacements. They were designed to be able to integrate with previous content, even within a single char. "2024 5e" doesn't work like that. If you use a 5.0 background as a 5.5e character, you're just shortchanging yourself. If you play a 5.5e Warlock, you literally can't use the 5.0 Pacts, and the Hexblade Patron is essentially useless because of the changes to Blade Pact. Rangers in general are integrating various efforts to fix public criticism of the class. Berserker, notorious for being so self-sabotaging it wasn't worth playing, has been heavily rewritten, and is just generally better. These are not "totally new take" options that provide something refreshing and different. They are replacements. WotC just won't call them that, because being frank with their customers might (probably would) cost them sales.

Original 4e was forwards-compatible with Essentials. 5.0 is not forwards-compatible with 5.5e, in several places. WotC just won't ever say that out loud.

The great lesson of 5.X is: "if you don't tell someone what something is for, they can't get upset about it." Obscurantism is a sales tactic.

Your post allows me to understand where you draw your lines. I get why you see 4e Essentials and D&D2024 as very different things. I don't entirely disagree with much of your reasoning, even if I wind up at a different conclusion.

The part where we divide is that the way I see it, BOTH were designed with multiple agendas - nearly all of which are the same. The primary ones that spring to mind are "Fix some things in the rules that we've learned to do better" and "Make new books for people to buy".

Sure, HOW they pulled that off winds up different, here-and-there.

At any rate, sadly, 4e Essentials was ultimately unsuccessful as a product, whereas D&D2024 probably WILL be successful. (I mean, we'll have to see, but signs point to yes, IMO).