D&D General What version of D&D are you playing?

[Lanefan]

It's funny, we moved to 3.5 from 3e almost immediately, it was just seen as a flat-out improvement by our gaming groups. Not the same with 5e24! BUT it's also, what, 20 years later? So we're definitely different players/consumers/DMs as well- hard to tell.

It wasn't until 2007 that the game I was in jumped (on the fly in mid-campaign!) from 3e to 3.5e; which means we'd have been in the cohort still playing original 3e a year after 3.5e came out.

 

[Reynard]

Movies require less work.

That's a whole different thing. If less work is what you want, just play BG3 co-op. If you play for the same amount of time as D&D at the table (say 4 hours weekly) you will have at least a whole year's worth of gaming if you decide to 100% the thing.

 

[Reynard]

Heck if I know. But that was a bit different, 3e had only been out a couple of years and felt like a cash grab. On the other hand we had a decade before a major change to the core rules with 5e. Meanwhile a lot of people on this forum are older than the norm (I would assume most) and most companies don't really care as much about old geezers like us as a sales demographic. They care more about the kids who are picking up the product for the first time. The real question as far as WOTC is concerned is likely going to be what percentage of those newbies are using the 2024 rules. I would assume that it is much, much higher.

The problem with 2024 isn't that it is too late, it is that it is too little.

For me personally, certainly, but also regarding the marketing. So you tell people that it is perfectly compatible with 5E 2014. Okay. Why should they buy it then?

If they really believed that, it should have been a 1993 2.1 reprint with new art, not 3.5 redux.

 

[Stormonu]

For me 3.5e felt more like a massive errata dump, after seeing four years of people managing to break 3e in so many different and unexpected ways. Never really saw it as a cash grab as such.

Quite literally but an expensive one. I remember printing out the changes from 3E to 3.5E, thinking I could just incorporate the changes and not have to rebuy books. What I got convinced me it would be easier to keep track of the differences if I just bought the books.

 

[kermit4karate]

The problem with 2024 isn't that it is too late, it is that it is too little.

I'd agree with that. I love D&D in general and always will, but 2024 wasn't super inspiring. Granted, it isn't decisively inadequate either. It's just...OK. There isn't a whole lot more to build on with it because it didn't change very much from 2014, which is strange to me because they could have offered up some new mechanics as optional. I mean, they didn't even have to make them forced changes that might have caused some fan blowback. They could have simply said, "Optional Rules."

That lack of providing very much of substantial difference might prove to become a problem over the long run, too. Like, they didn't change enough to hang the entire game on for the next 7-10 years. Seriously, could you even imagine playing with the 2024 or even the 2014 rules for another 10 years?? I can't. That's a long time to rely on 3rd parties and homebrews to carry it.

I do think they'll need to offer something substantial, a supplement or something else, at some point in the next few years that mixes things up, something meaty that involves new mechanics or modes of play. Can't just be a new setting or new species or classes, IMO. It should be some new optional rules or an optional "beginner's mode." Something substantially different.

There's no way it's a critical emergency yet, but I don't see 2024 having the gravitas to carry D&D for a decade. I just don't see that based on what it is now.