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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8641882" data-attributes="member: 6790260">When a poster responds to a good-faith attempt to analyze problems and point out difficulties with either, "I don't have that problem, so it's not a problem" or "It's clearly selling well, so it can't actually be a problem," it's pretty clearly that poster who is shutting down any potential conversation. They are trying to, as I said above, use the trivial effort of pointing to sales figures, rather than engaging in the difficult (and at least partially subjective) process of analysis.Above, I gave my breakdown of the places where I think 5e has weak design. (Again, I want to stress the difference between weak design and bad design; the former is merely flawed, to some degree, while the latter is unfixable without radical change. 5e has little to no outright bad design. 3e was chock-full of outright bad design.) I also clarified that, regardless of my personal feelings about some of its mechanics, it is inarguable that they have useful characteristics which have contributed to its success. Its qualities (note the plural!) and practical applications, coupled with a favorable market, favorable social trends, tons of free advertising (Critical Role and other podcast games), brand recognition/loyalty, and solid production values collectively led to success. Those qualities played a meaningful part. But they did not guarantee success. Likewise, the fact that that success did occur does not give us any meaningful information about which qualities contributed to its success. People have a tendency to treat games as though they were absolute, monolithic units that must either be thoroughly loved or thoroughly hated with nothing between. This is obviously foolish. Editions of D&D are large things, made of many parts, and it is the overall sum of characteristics that matters for sales in most cases. Even if the collective qualities of 5e had absolutely and exclusively determined 5e's success (that is, even if we could be 100% sure that 5e solely sold well because of quality), we could not reason from that to the claim that absolutely every part thereof necessarily contributed to that success. It could be that some characteristics weakened 5e's success, that it could have succeeded dramatically more than it actually did if its characteristics were partially different.This part often gets overlooked by folks. D&D is often, and sometimes literally, the only game in town. Whatever D&D is, is often the only thing people get to play. I would absolutely love to find a solid, reliable, long-running 4e game. I did what I could to make one happen. My efforts failed. (Well, I had succeeded quite some time ago, but the DM had to stop running because of a major family upheaval, and the group never recovered. No subsequent attempt has succeeded beyond a month or two, despite my best efforts.) Hence, if I want any realistic shot at actually playing in a game,* I pretty much have to accept either 5e or some variant/descendant of 3e. So I have to advocate for the kinds of experiences I want to see, because if I don't, I pretty much guaranteed won't get them.*Because no, telling me "well just RUN 4e then!" is not even slightly helpful.</blockquote>

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