D&D 5E (2024) What Improvements Would You Want with 6E?

[Son of the Serpent]

Not remotely.

Agreed

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I didn't say that WotC was satisfied with the results, but that players and customers are satisfied with the results, which play well when followed while pulling the near trick of working fine if people want to undershoot the expectation (as you point out, many do). Sure, won't be as challenging, but the guidelines point out how to make it a viable challenge.

I don't agree that players and customers are particularly satisfied with the results, and the circular logic remains in place. You assert that, because official adventure sales are allegedly good, people must be satisfied. This is does not follow at all. On the contrary, the inability of people to make their own adventures work as well as the frankly weirdly designed WotC ones may well drive sales, as people seek something that works better. With 3.XE and PF there can be not the slightest shred of doubt that the complexity and effort involved in constructing encounters for those systems helped drive adventure and AP sales. Thus I suggest sales of official adventures may well reflect a problem with the system, not satisfaction. I have never seen a WotC survey result saying "Oh yes we love 5-8 encounters per day!" even.

As for "they work fine with less", you're contradicting your own, recent statements! Where you called less than 6-8/day "wonky"! Correctly, I would say. They work poorly with less, but player instincts are to pull back earlier and it's hard to write anything but a dungeon where 5-8 encounters in a day doesn't seem contrived in the extreme (certainly if it keeps happening! One day can work, but two or three or more?).

The guidelines do not explain how to make a "viable challenge" because 5E is badly designed here and utterly reliant on spamming encounters in a ludicrous way for challenge, and ill-suited to typical D&D play. And players do notice. My own players have commented that 5E encounters are a lot easier than 4E, and even if I dial the difficulty up, as you say, that makes things "wonky" because the encounters simply become swingy and deadly and blow resources in a disorderly way.

TLDR - 5-8 encounters per day forces DMs to write around this bizarre requirement, and that's perverse because design should serve DMs, not vice-versa. But if it sells adventures and APs I am indeed sure WotC is richly satisfied.

 

[Don Durito]

That's the issue with these threads.

"What improvements would you want with 6E?" could mean anywhere from:

"What would be your own private ideal 6E made purely for your personal tastes?"
to
"What improvements would make the game qualitatively better better according to some ideal of game design that your prepared to defend"
to
"What improvements would you like to see that you might think would feasibly be introduced without massive backlash?".

 

[Son of the Serpent]

Also "how would one sell a game immediately" and "how would one sell a game long term" are also very different tasks.

4e did neither well

Im worried 5e does the former well and maybe does the latter barely better than 4e. That can damage the sale of later editions. The first 3 editions were pretty different from eachother but all 3 of them did better in both departments than the company will often admit and this trickles down into whatever the current crop of players is. They will try to convince you the first three didnt do well in both departments. They did. Seeping into a population during a time when a product is heavily stigmatized by the brand of "counter culture" or "outsider" takes time. When you consider that element the 1st three editions in a way even did better than 5e at immediate sales. The popularity comes slow when you build gradually and strongly. Sustainably. I dont think 5e is actually the best thing to look at for multigenerational maintenance of sales and popularity. And probably not even immediate sales. What happens when dnd is no longer in style? At that point when the cultural trend says regardless of what you do it will be at a disadvantage for sales do you recommend just not making any new edition of dnd? If your argument for how to sell dnd is soley what sells best then i dont think your mindset for what later editions should look like is a good one. It is a view of limited scope. You have to look at the long game. There will be times when immediate profit cannot be what justifies your decisions for long term structure of the product.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

I don't agree that players and customers are particularly satisfied with the results, and the circular logic remains in place. You assert that, because official adventure sales are allegedly good, people must be satisfied. This is does not follow at all. On the contrary, the inability of people to make their own adventures work as well as the frankly weirdly designed WotC ones may well drive sales, as people seek something that works better. With 3.XE and PF there can be not the slightest shred of doubt that the complexity and effort involved in constructing encounters for those systems helped drive adventure and AP sales. Thus I suggest sales of official adventures may well reflect a problem with the system, not satisfaction. I have never seen a WotC survey result saying "Oh yes we love 5-8 encounters per day!" even.

As for "they work fine with less", you're contradicting your own, recent statements! Where you called less than 6-8/day "wonky"! Correctly, I would say. They work poorly with less, but player instincts are to pull back earlier and it's hard to write anything but a dungeon where 5-8 encounters in a day doesn't seem contrived in the extreme (certainly if it keeps happening! One day can work, but two or three or more?).

The guidelines do not explain how to make a "viable challenge" because 5E is badly designed here and utterly reliant on spamming encounters in a ludicrous way for challenge, and ill-suited to typical D&D play. And players do notice. My own players have commented that 5E encounters are a lot easier than 4E, and even if I dial the difficulty up, as you say, that makes things "wonky" because the encounters simply become swingy and deadly and blow resources in a disorderly way.

TLDR - 5-8 encounters per day forces DMs to write around this bizarre requirement, and that's perverse because design should serve DMs, not vice-versa. But if it sells adventures and APs I am indeed sure WotC is richly satisfied.

I couldnt agree with this statement more

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Group C I won't say doesn't exist in actuality, but it is fringe. The game right is tuned properly for groups A & B. Group D is dissatisfied, but...how big is it compared to either A or B? Tuning the game for D would make people in A dissatisfied, though B would be unaffected. I would posit that since WotC has built a publishing schedule aimed primarily at A, and not changed course after five years, suggests that group A is, in fact, the primary market for the game.

B are not "satisfied". They see the problem. It's just not a dealbreaker. I don't believe A are the main group and I'd like to know why you think they are. Your publishing logic does not work given 3.XE had huge problems here which both 4E and 5E sought to solve, but that didn't make WotC during 3.XE "change course" either.

Tuning for D would not leave A dissatisfied. That's straight up irrational and illogical. A don't write adventures, they buy them. Thus if you balanced for 2 or 20 encounters a day, so long as the official adventures had that, A would be fine.

If you want to separate A out into the larger A1 who buy adventures and much smaller A2 who write adventures and love the 5-8 number and find it works well for them then I would say A2 is probably far smaller even than D, even ignoring B which is likely the vast majority of people playing 5E. And don't even try "well if B were really the biggest they'd be catered for!" that's never been true in either TT RPGs or MMORPGs. I mean look at 90s WoD - Katana and Trenchcoat was the main way the TT (and to a lesser extent the LARP) was played, but was it supported? No (or rather, not intentionally). Indeed Revised was basically a metaphorical attempt to throw acid in the collective faces of the majority of players. WotC aren't that dumb but they either intend 5-8 as quasi-DRM (unlikely) or made a mistake when setting that, but not a big enough mistake to be worth correcting, as it would require an entire new edition to do so, and it works wonkily but just about okay.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

Not really my point, so I'll put it this way. I see four logical groupings for how people relate to the adventure day:

A. People who play the published adventures and/or follow the DMG and/or XGtE guidelines close enough for government work, and are satisfied.

B. People like Critical Role who do not (often) push the full adventure day, but have fun anyways because strict combat equivalence and challenge are not important to the flow of their game, and are satisfied. (I would put myself and most of my experience outside of the official modules here)

C. People who would regularly want to push past the guidelines, but find them limiting.

D. People who want a game balanced around a smaller adventure day economy, and are dissatisfied.

Group C I won't say doesn't exist in actuality, but it is fringe. The game right is tuned properly for groups A & B. Group D is dissatisfied, but...how big is it compared to either A or B? Tuning the game for D would make people in A dissatisfied, though B would be unaffected. I would posit that since WotC has built a publishing schedule aimed primarily at A, and not changed course after five years, suggests that group A is, in fact, the primary market for the game.

This is a very limited scope compared to the wide variance ive seen in player populations both across editions and even in my as of yet fairly recent venture into 5e. What about those who arent interested in encounter structure being relevant at all? Lotta dissatisfied players in the "creative" camp and thats not the only group of creative types who play but 5e fails multiple different sections of players that would be described as the creative/imaginative type. Creative types find 5e (even more so 4e) suffocatingly prescriptive (I am reluctant to point this out but there is such a thing as more valuable players. The creative kind is one of the kinds that DRAWS other players in. Thats valuable.) A high value player is a major resource like a dm. You dont want to disatisfy either and it IS more important than average player satisfaction directly. Those two groups generate a lot of player satisfaction.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

from OP

"Give characters more options for customization even if it means their character could mechanically become similar to a character of another class/race or a lot of the customization options are rather situational. In the current edition it seems rare that any real choices are made when leveling up."

This is one thing i would point out as an example of an aspect of what i was talking about when i said that 5e's immediate sale is not necesaarily good for long term sale. Cooky cutter classes are not going to keep people in the game longer than a single edition. Or even for more than a year or two. At least not in large numbers. And it will also create a culture of laziness in the creative department. Not good.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

I would gladly take breakability of classes over stagnation by lack of options. Just putting that out there.

 

[S'mon]

Any claim that 5e with its simpler rules and limited options does not have broad based enduring appeal seems bizarre to me. 'Creatives' especially love the simpler framework.

There is a small market for high crunch charbuilding - hence PF2e.