D&D 5E When Did 5E Peak Quality Wise?

mamba

Legend
I hear what people are saying and I just don’t see it. Seems the better question is when did WoTC start making fewer books you were interested in or liked less.

Has the actual quality gone down? How quality is being measured outside of personal preference seems pretty nebulous here.
How do you measure quality? By how many typos per book there are? I prefer the 'did I like the book' metric over more technical ones.

I believe pretty much everyone here is only talking about personal preference, not any objective measure, and I at least do not care about measures like typos per page (unless that number gets ridiculously high)
 

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How do you measure quality? By how many typos per book there are? I prefer the 'did I like the book' metric over more technical ones.

I believe pretty much everyone here is only talking about personal preference, not any objective measure, and I at least do not care about measures like typos per page (unless that number gets ridiculously high)
My personal metric in this matter is dependent on the quantity and diversity of third-party material. A system's quality is shown in the willingness for others to invest into it.
 

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
My personal metric in this matter is dependent on the quantity and diversity of third-party material. A system's quality is shown in the willingness for others to invest into it.
5e is a great system by that metric. IMO, however, a lot of the more recent "official" material for it leaves a lot to be desired.
 

mamba

Legend
My personal metric in this matter is dependent on the quantity and diversity of third-party material. A system's quality is shown in the willingness for others to invest into it.
so basically anything WotC published in 2022 and 23 could suck as long as the game is big enough to keep attracting the same width and breadth of 3pps.

Bit of an odd choice for measuring the quality of WotC publications, and probably has quite a bit of lead time before bad decisions by WotC would catch up with them this way
 

so basically anything WotC published in 2022 and 23 could suck as long as the game is big enough to keep attracting the same width and breadth of 3pps.

Bit of an odd choice for measuring the quality of WotC publications, and probably has quite a bit of lead time before bad decisions by WotC would catch up with them this way
It seems odd because it is lol. It's hard to value the quality of any single product/publication so I use a "tell".
It will interesting to see how much the OGL thing ripples. I predict that the 3PP will continue to go strong in spite of WoTC sabotaging itself. It's a good system that's fun to write for.

You so have the wikipedia effect where bad material births better alternatives out of spite or frustration.
 

S'mon

Legend
On book quality, for me there's been a notable lack of first class material since 2014/15 - I'd rate the PHB & MM as first class, with XGTE adding most of the necessary stuff that was missing from the DMG. I don't see any stand-out adventures comparable to Red Hand of Doom say. Tomb of Annihilation and the Essentials Kit are pretty decent. Still, all the really good stuff comes from 3PPs. My general impression is one of indolence, laziness, drift - still that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's easy to ruin a great game with ill-considered supplements. What really gets my goat is the claim that D&D is 'under-monetised', when it's generating over $100 million/year on practically zero effort!
 


Interesting question. From this thread it appears the answer is: Everyone has a different opinion. I'll say that I find something useful in every WotC release, even the ones I don't like. I've gotten great mileage out of maligned adventures like Storm King's Thunder and Dragon Heist.
 

Zardnaar

Legend
Interesting question. From this thread it appears the answer is: Everyone has a different opinion. I'll say that I find something useful in every WotC release, even the ones I don't like. I've gotten great mileage out of maligned adventures like Storm King's Thunder and Dragon Heist.

Inherently subjective question.
 

Hussar

Legend
Inherently subjective question.
Sorry, but, no it shouldn't be. You asked about QUALITY. That means you can set a criteria, clearly and concisely, and then discuss whether something has met that criteria.

An example.

I use Fantasy Grounds. So, my needs and whatnot in a supplement are a bit different from a tabletop gamer. For example, the black and white Dyson Logos maps in many of the later WotC adventures aren't really useful to me since they're really not made for a VTT. For a tabletop gamer though, they're fantastic - easy to draw and reproduce for a table. So, are they good quality or not? Well, it depends on what your specific needs are. But, I can pretty clearly outline what I need and whether or not these needs are being achieved.

Or, take another example. I like monster books and WotC doesn't really publish many of them. So, I buy quite a few 3pp monster books for VTT. Now, again, that's the important point. This is for a VTT, not face to face. Kobold monster books in Fantasy Grounds are really top notch. The parsing is clear and accurate - they work in the VTT very, very well with few exceptions. OTOH, Necromancer Games' Fifth Edition Foes is a piece of garbage. The monsters frequently have parsing errors in them, meaning that they don't function in the VTT. Additionally, the images they used for the monsters are ENORMOUS. Huge PNG files. Which is fine when you show a picture of the monster to the players, but they use the same ginormous images for monster tokens.

Drop half a dozen tokens on the board and suddenly my poor old computer and not so fantastic Internet connection grinds to a halt as my game table crashes. Often. To the point where I offloaded the book and will never use it again.

Now, that's a point about quality. This is a product - a Fantasy Grounds Module - that doesn't work. It would work fine if I had a really good internet connection and a new computer, maybe. But, with my machine? Hot garbage. It crashes my game table.

THAT'S what a discussion about quality looks like. All this "oh, well, I just don't like the books now" crap is just people trying to pretend that their personal preferences are somehow important to anyone other than themselves. It's unbelievably selfish and arrogant to pretend that "I like this or I don't like that" means anything other than just what you or I happen to like.

But, I know that this nice little rant will fall on deaf ears. People have invested far too much of their ego into the idea that WotC is crap and that if WotC would only just listen to them, the game would be so much better. Thirty years of this same song and dance. WotC is killing the game because of the STL. WotC is killing the game because of the OGL. WotC is killing the game because it isn't supporting the OGL. WotC is killing the game because they publish too many/not enough books/books of the right type/on and on and on and on.

So, no, it's not an "Inherently subjective question." Not even remotely.
 

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