D&D 5E Where to Now?

[Mistwell]

Druids haven't always been among the game's least popular classes but they are in 5th edition D&D. That provides pretty conclusive evidence that the 5e druid is hobbled more by poor design than an inherently unpopular concept, though I'm glad you personally find it to be better than most people do.

It was always in the lower portion of popularity, and I gave the reason for it's drop for 5e - the Hobbit movies.

You cut the part that addresses your point from my post. An odd cut.

There is nothing about the 5e design that is poor. It's designed slightly better than the 3e and 4e design in my opinion. 3e had terrible trouble with wildeshape, and 4e it was often considered lost among the many classes, competing for concept space with classes like the Warden. Power-wise it's definitely on the more powerful side for 5e, and has more niche protection.

However, people's desire for a nature caster has dropped as a concept over time. This is a low ebb for desire for that concept I believe. No amount of tinkering with mechanics can address that.

The bard is similarly suffering from concept dislike - despite it also being one of the best designed and powerful classes in this edition.

 

[jsaving]

I disagree completely on pretty much all counts and actually haven't previously heard the claim that 5e's bard and druid are among the edition's "best designed" classes. But I'm glad you find them useful.

 

[Shiroiken]

Yeah, I'd want to take out non-magical healing, completely re-do how resting works such that nothing recharges on a short rest except a very few h.p., re-do how spells are cast by going to a 1e-2e model using casting times, and go to a non-additive multiclassing system where each class advances independently.

As I said, 5E is flexible, but flexibility does have its limits. More often than not, I've found the question to become "is it worth trying to implement this?" Sadly, the answer is usually no. Hopefully you can find or make what you need!

Gads, no! It's just than when I buy something I want a physical copy handed to me to take home, and I'd prefer my money go to a local store keeping local people in jobs.

Understood. I buy from the FLGS rather than online, but they also try to keep their prices low enough to be competitive with Amazon and the like. They pretty much only stay in business by selling crack... I mean Magic and other CCG

 

[Stormdale]

Druids haven't always been among the game's least popular classes but they are in 5th edition D&D. That provides pretty conclusive evidence that the 5e druid is hobbled more by poor design than an inherently unpopular concept, though I'm glad you personally find it to be better than most people do.

If people don't want to play a class, that is totally fine, but then it doesn't belong among the 12 classes printed in the Player's Handbook for general use by everyone. That "real estate" is very limited and there are plenty of other classes that came close to making the PH cut and could have been of more use to more players.

The druid has been one of the most effective classes in our last 3-4 campaigns and at our table is far more popular than clerics. As both a DM and a player I find it one of the most versatile classes in the game. Now if you were talking about the badly designed abomination that is the 5E warlock we'd be in agreement, but druids? Nah, leave em alone I say

Stromdale

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Do you think WotC could agree a partnership with any 3PPs for a paper-printed version of the adamatine best-sellers of DM Guild? And does DM Guild allow freelance artists to sell the own arts based in D&D? For example Dark Sun, or a reboot of Jakandor with a new tribal-punk look, or Heroes of Dragonlance with a Disney style.

Could Paramount Pictures allow a smash-up of Star Treck franchise set in Spelljammer? At least a comic miniserie.

Has got Paramount the exclusive rights about D&D adaptations, or can other companies? For example a videogame by Capcom set in Mystara. Or DC publishing the TTRPG of "Pirates of the Dark Waters". Disney could get the rights to produce an adaptation of the adventures of Gord the Rogue.

 

[Lanefan]

I was thought the ranger was primarily a exploration class. It's signature thing since OD&D was tracking. The whole gimmick was that the ranger was the person who hunted the savage humaniods who would not conform to peaceful relations and to convince the animals/plants to not kill random townsfolk as sustenance.

And to do this the Ranger also had to be a hella good and tough warrior, hence it's original placing as a sub-class of Fighter.

The whole spindly two-weapon Dexterity-based Drizz't-style Ranger is to me an abomination; even more so if it's expected to have a pet following it around all the time.

 

[Lanefan]

It was always in the lower portion of popularity,

I disagree with the "always" there; it's popularity has risen and fallen over the years and - as you note below - is currently at a bit of a low point.

and I gave the reason for it's drop for 5e - the Hobbit movies.

Yeah, that didn't help - even though Radagast is in theory supposed to be a nature-Wizard rather than a nature-Cleric (which is how I see Druids), portraying him as a bumbling bit of comic relief didn't exactly help the cause of nature-casters of any kind.

However, people's desire for a nature caster has dropped as a concept over time. This is a low ebb for desire for that concept I believe. No amount of tinkering with mechanics can address that.

The bard is similarly suffering from concept dislike - despite it also being one of the best designed and powerful classes in this edition.

I've also found even within our own gaming crew that certain archetypal concepts kinda come and go over the years.

Time was, 20 years ago, nobody would even think about playing a Part-Orc of any class. Times change. Now, relatively speaking, we're buried in them.

About every ten years for some reason we see a big influx of Hobbits, then they slowly disappear as players get tired of them; and ten years later there's suddenly another wave of 'em because for some reason they're the 'in thing' again.

 

[wingsandsword]

Well, two obvious places the rules can go are psionics and epic-level rules.

Both of which are well-established parts of D&D, to the point of being pretty integral to official D&D settings (Dark Sun and Eberron are pretty intrinsically psionic, Forgotten Realms is crawling with Epic-level characters and the first dedicated epic-level book for D&D was setting-specific to Dark Sun), that 5e has avoided or only vaguely touched on.

I know they're controversial topics, judging by other threads on them, but you'd think that "hey, let's make a psionics supplement for the new D&D edition" wouldn't be THAT controversial since 2e, 3e, 3.5e and 4e all had them, and how there were two epic-level rulebooks for 2e, an epic-level sourcebook for 3e, and epic-level rules in the core rules of 3.5 and 4e. They're both established enough concepts in D&D that 5e will always be somewhat incomplete without some official treatment of the subjects that does the subject matter justice (the vague epic boons of the 5e DMG aren't really a substitute for actual epic-level rules)

 

[Blue]

As long as they stay away from the churn of earlier editions, like putting out book for each class. Keep player content slow and steady, introducing new thing only in the concrete service of a new setting. So Dark Sun and Psionics rule plus some other race/subclass options sort of thing.

 

[Blue]

I don't think the Druid is badly designed at all. It is, however, specifically designed. The class centers on Wildshape, so if your idea for a Druid-y character doesn't involve shape change it's going to be a poor fit.

All but one of the subclasses only have wildshape as a ribbon ability and focus on other things.