Now that 5e has the best-selling core rulebook of any edition and the most players of any edition...

Yeah, Mearls isn't the one >implying, it's OP being a faggot.

My first adventure. Ah, the heady days of figuring out what a +3 short sword and a +2 ST modifier needs to hit an AC of 4 when your thaco was 16.

The answer is 7. I do that shit in my sleep, son.

I run my homebrew 2nd ed game still and a 5th edition modules (halfway through Out of the Abyss), rotating between them. 5th is the beautiful child of 2nd edition that 3rd edition wishes it was. YOU'LL NEVER BE AS GOOD AS YOUR YOUNGER BROTHER, 3RD EDITION! 5TH EDITION IS GOING PLACES, STOP LOUNGING ABOUT AND SMOKING POT AND TALKING ABOUT HOW YOU'LL GO TO COLLEGE ONE DAY AND DO SOMETHING WITH YOUR LIFE, 5TH EDITION'S GRADUATING LAW SCHOOL NEXT MONTH AND YOU HAVEN'T EVEN PRINTED A RESUME TO BURGER KING!

As someone from /e/, it's not our shit. More /cm/.

Also, I'd like to see sales data for Mearls' quote.

>I'd like to see sales data for Mearls' quote.
Wouldn't we all?

But Wizards has been secretive about proper figures even before they were bought by Hasbro.

Also, what is the market share compared to previous editions? Does 5e have a bigger market share or has the general customer base grown?

4e outsold 3.5, but that didn't change anything either, did it?

5e has less direct competition than 4e did, that much is certain. Pathfinder did not do good things to 4e's sale by going 'We are the REAL D&D'. Harder to do that with 5e due to all the backflipping on 4e's changes.

Just ask what edition they are talking about.

/thread

There are no real hard numbers. Best that can be shown is the Roll20 quarterly polls, which aren't indicative of every demographic but might be useful to estimate general trends. I don't know, I'm not a statistician.

There's also the ICv2 stuff, which can be found compiled here for the last decade: enworld.org/forum/content.php?1984-Top-5-RPGs-Compiled-Charts-2008-Present#.V7Fx6ygrKUl

3.5 was the most realistic , simulationist system with the greatest depth. 4e was a pure tactical gamist edition and 5e is a strange love child of them both that doesn't satisfy either.

5e is easier than 4e or 3e for a newbie to get into.
It's still bad at it, because DnD hasn't been good at that ever since competition first popped up, but that's what it is.

Also, calling 3.5 'simulationist' is fine but please don't call it 'realistic' in any way.

>3.5
>simulationist

Simulationist in the sense that it literally tries to be rules-as-physics.
Hardness rules, aging rules, falling rules, drowning rules, weapon damage types, literally a rule for every situation that could happen.

compare to 'narrative' rules which are for "whatever makes for the best story" and 'gamist' rules which are for "whatever makes for the better designed/more fun game".
No game is only one of these, but they're often biased one way or the other.

GNS as a whole is outdated but the terms are still useful.

You're kind of stupid.

The number of people who played D&D doubled following the release of 3rd edition, and has continued to grow after that.

Your major mental issue is that you're counting small books (practically pamphlets) relative to larger and more expensive ones, rather than looking at things like convention numbers, worldwide statistics, and thanks to the internet, adventure downloads.

It's almost like you're comparing newspaper and magazine subscriptions before and after the internet, and then claiming less people read the news, when dramatically more people read the news than ever.

>tfw I have bought a thousand copies myself

>what a +3 short sword and a +2 ST modifier needs to hit an AC of 4 when your thaco was 16.
12 or better, with a +5 bonus to your roll, right?

>realistic
Lel.

>simulationist

Okay, but that doesn't make it good. Having rules entirely removed from reality, extremely complex, that you need several books to understand and several months to master is not good game design. Even worse when those rules don't make any sense, are unbalanced as fuck, and uninteresting.

5e is what happens when people start to think about making a playable game out of 3.5. I am extremely pleased with the new edition.

>dem self-applied shill parentheses

We finally got them to mark themselves.

>((()))

Is Mearls deliberately using himself as a meatshield for his Jew overlords, or is he actually a Jew?

3.5e is not the base because it sold the best, it's the best because the most people know it and it's the most iconic. When someone says DnD, the first thing that jumps to everyones mind, even if they did not play it, will be most likley either ADnD or 3.5

Virtue signalling. Gotta stick up for that poor oppressed minority group.

I'm completely ignorant. What are you guys talking about?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_parentheses
Forced meme that's fallen into near-meaninglessness.

Someone made an extension that put ((())) around Jewish names. Jews found out and cried anti-semitism, jewlovers started bracketing themselves to 'throw off the racists'. Backfired because none of them realised that doing so actually helps the people using the triple parentheses, because they want to identify people as part of a Jewish conspiracy and marking yourself out as either a shill or pawn only benefits them.

You ever hear of the children's book "The Yellow Star."

It's kinda like that.

>((()))
>rainbow picture

Why am I playing a tabletop game made by these kikes

I was supposed to familiarize myself with 5e in the coming weeks since my group is finally making the switch and this isn't very reassuring

...

>Ah, the heady days of figuring out what a +3 short sword and a +2 ST modifier needs to hit an AC of 4 when your thaco was 16.

American math scores have continued to drop since THAC0 was removed from the system.

Only played 5e, idgaf about the other shit.

>can we stop thinking of 3.5e every time people say "D&D"

Yes. Already happened.

>and consider 5e the de facto edition?

Yes. It is.

Probably half the current real-life players in this hobby already consider 5E to be "the D&D".

When I think defacto D&D, I think Game of Thrones.

>The number of people who played D&D doubled following the release of 3rd edition

And it also plummeted all through the late 80s and 90s, which meant that doubling after that long, massive decline was easy. 3E sold a ton of books, but it was nothing like the nationwide craze that ran from 80-83, which was downright ridiculous. (pic related) The stigma of being "one of those D&D nerds" appeared in the post-boom era. Prior to the boom d&d wasn't even a blip on the public's radar yet, and during the boom everyone was talking about it, with bits on the nightly news and TSR profits going through the roof.

And if you think the Red Box set was "practically a pamphlet" and therefore doesn't count when we're talking about copies of D&D sold, then you're the one who's "kind of stupid."

Why did you post a Hydra plant instead of the gay-loving, illegal-protecting, black, CANON Captain America? What kind of racist shitlord are you and when do you go back to /pol/?

I did awhile ago

I'd love to play 5e, but I haven't had a group in a couple years. Game looks good.

what

Consider yourself fortunate.

can we stop correlating sales data with superiority and just maintain personal favoritism?

there's two captain Americas because Marvel wants to be diversity and make money.

Falcon is now also Captain America and is super liberal and is fighting robot policemen designed to harass black people.

regular Cap has been mindcontrolled into thinking he's a hydra agent because Red Skull adopted a kawaii cosmic cube that identifies as a little girl

There are four Captain Americas running around. Steve, Sam, the Amazon musclegirl Captian America of 2099 who is a demure housewife in her secret identity and is hanging around the present with the third Spider-Man everyone also forgets, and Luke Cage's daughter from the slightly less future in the upcoming USAvengers.

>He dont know about the new cpt murica

No, because the people who play 3.5 and 5e DnD equate popularity with quality.

In all honesty, 4e was more of a complete reboot and 5e feels more like they're just continuing to develop forward from the old branch.

Except nobody buys the diversity comics and their only moneymakers are the movies.

I'd be interested in comparisons between each game's organized play programs.

5e's certainly the safe bet because of representation in new media, but it'd still be interesting.

There's probably a lot more WoD being run than that, for example. You don't really need a virtual tabletop for it at all, and most people have skype or discord.

>the nationwide craze that ran from 80-83, which was downright ridiculous. (pic related)

This "craze" underperformed and lead to a series of financial difficulties for TSR, ultimately leading to the company to have to restructure itself in '83.

Basically, Gygax and the Blumes overproduced cheap products hoping that the D&D name would be enough to sell them and that flooding the market would help spread the name, but this business strategy fell apart because of an insane overestimation of the power of the D&D brand. That, and TSR trying to branch out into arts and crafts shit like needlework for some ungodly reason.

Basically, it was less of a "boom" and more of a short fad, a fad that was milked for all its worth.

And no, doubling as in doubling the highest number of players previously accounted for. As in, the release of 3rd edition brought in more players than their had ever been previously, and this trend has continued with 5e.

There are considerably more people playing now there ever has been.

>And no, doubling as in doubling the highest number of players previously accounted for.

[citation needed]

I won't deny that it was a fad, but it was still huge. The reason they overextended was because their sales of the core product were phenomenal, and they thought it would keep snowballing.
We have fairly reliable sources from TSR that they were selling 100k red boxes every quarter for several years, leading to estimates of 1.2 million boxes sold in the US alone during the "short fad," and perhaps 3 million sold worldwide. That's colossal.

>leading to estimates of 1.2 million boxes sold in the US alone during the "short fad," and perhaps 3 million sold worldwide.

That 1.2 million figure isn't for a short fad, but for a very long print run.

That might have been impressive 30 years ago, but to put things in perspective, 3rd edition sold 1 million core rulebooks in little over a year, one of the last times WotC announced any sales figures. Of course, that's divided by the three books, but the crazy thing is that the rate of sales were reported to have increased after that point.

As far as 5e, the core rulebooks topped and hovered around the top of the Amazon book sales charts for the first few months after its release. Not RPG book sales, but ALL book sales, with estimates of 3,000+ books sold A DAY, or something to the tune of 300,000 in the first 100 days. And, the scariest thing is that number isn't divided by the three books.

And that's just Amazon sales.

>That 1.2 million figure isn't for a short fad, but for a very long print run.

This is approximately a 3 year period, not the whole print run.
Still, good to see some actual numbers to back up the claim of 3e/5e outselling it, though, I was afraid we were going to be going down a rabbithole of trying to extrapolate player numbers from convention attendance or something from the other guy's spiel about "accounting for" players. As hard as it is to figure out sales figures, figuring out how many people are playing is far worse.

I'm not saying you're bullshitting me, but I am saying that I hope that you're bullshitting me.

Possibly not because 5e's organized play organization is a goddamn dumpster fire. You could replace the entire admin team with bobbleheads that say "buy our shit" or "ask your DM what the rules mean" and not only wouldn't it change anything, but people would appreciate the increased transparency.

Nah. Remember when there were four Supermen? This is the kind of shit comics companies pull when sales start flagging, to get people talking about the book again.

>Of course it did. D&D is more mainstream now than it has been during the course of its entire existence.

Hence why D&D 5e has sold more. Not because it's better, because it's becoming more mainstream.

>No, because the people who play 3.5 and 5e DnD equate popularity with quality.

It's the only upside D&D has because it is already objectively worse than Dungeon World.

Perhaps it is more mainstream because it's better.

>objectively

Oh god, it's one of these faggots.

Shoo. Go away. Go away with your "I don't know how to argue so I posit my opinions as facts." Shoo.

wew lad

>4e is pure tactical gamist
Fuck, all Veeky Forums ever told me about 4e was "It's shit". If I'd know it was the gamist edition I would never have even looked at Pathfinder

No, and there's a very simple reason why.
On Veeky Forums, the main reason one would assume an edition of D&D would be because someone asks a question. Here, it is safe to assume 3.5 (being, as far as I can tell, the second-most popular D&D edition after 5e) because anyone retarded enough to not understand 5e surely cannot be smart enough to read English.

You are literally the fucking worst type of person then.

Listening to Veeky Forums

>anyone retarded enough to not understand 5e surely cannot be smart enough to read English.

Were you not here for the endless horse-casting debates?
Wait, those were retarded after all. Carry on.

Weirdest part is, DC has all kinds of diversity and has for a long-ass time and nobody cares because their comics are good but their movies are shit.

>Other Listed Games
> 10,000 games 50,000 players.

I really wish we could have the numbers on those.

Nobody cares about DC because they reboot all their shit every two years in order to make everything hip and fresh again, only to find out that people don't like the changes so they change everything again just when everyone's starting to get used to it.

Honestly, cape comics are just shit in general, there's just different flavours of shit to choose from.

>No one cares about DC.

No one cares about comics in general. Especially marvel.

>Now that 5e has the best-selling core rulebook of any edition and the most players of any edition,
The guy noting that TSR's books sold more was correct, if a little fast-and-loose with the figures. The boom in the early eighties didn't fade out until the 90s, and TSR was able to clear over a million boxed sets as late as '89, six years after its launch. By comparison, 3e was clearing a couple of hundred thousand PHBs a year. (Source: acaeum.com/library/printrun.html )

So there's simply no way that 5e is the best-selling core rulebook of any edition. It's just the best that WotC has ever done, and that's not saying very much. I doubt that the total sales of all core rulebooks since Wizards took over the IP exceed the sales for Mentzer's boxed set.

Reminds me of Square Soft saying that the adding women enemies into Deus Ex 4 for the first time. Ignore in the frist two games.

Or the 'new' option to play as a woman in fallout 4, ignoring every single game before including the previous ones by their studio

That's great devs, but could you please return the ability to kill children back?

>"What's popular is always best!"

No.

I still play OSR, and only OSR. You can have your broken newfangled unrestricted poly-classing. I'll stick with my tried and true systems.

How does one read that mess of a post?

You might be underestimating the internet.

>I still play OSR
It's been established that TSR's rules were the most popular (look up to ). You're just on the biggest bandwagon, rather than evaluating the editions by their actual quality.

5E on Roll20 is hilarious broken though, 80% of all games never start or don't survive more than a couple of sessions.

Isn't that true for all of the roll20 games?

Pretty sure 3.PF statistics are similarly bad.

No, look at the chart, If 5e really had 40% of the total games played on roll20 is should have a much much higher percentage of the playerbase.

This means people aren't sticking with 5e and the people running Pathfinder and 3.5 are much more experienced and run their tables for much longer.

Rebirth has acutally been surprisingly legit so far. However, like you said, because they reboot so regularly it's still hard for me to get too excited.

Of course, they've only actually reset a few times, all in recent history too. Ideally, now that the 52 debacle has been concluded, they'll slow their roll, or cut it out all together.

> You can have your new shit, I'll stick to the old shit.
I'm not a huge fan of D&D in general, but it's both frustrating and hilarious that there are people who think OSR/TSR systems are legitimately superior, and not equally riddled with a different set of flaws.

The solution your conundrum is that players participate in multiple games. Most of the players playing 3.5 also play PF and most likely 5e.

And yet wizards still can't into caster/martial balance.

I love me some dnd, bit this is a fundamentally flawed game.

This isn't even a question of ineptitude anymore. The basic premise mames it near impossible and the fans are against the changes necessary to balance it. You just can't balance a fighting man and the limitless DnD style reality bender.

Sure they could. Introduce feat taxes or skill taxes for spell use. Introduce skill monkey features for non casting classes.

Horse shit. Dnd was obscure except to the nerdiest nerds and 12 year old nerds in training. Now even the most clueless normie knows what dnd is and a lot of them even own a book or two. Dnd has never been even close to what it is now.

Yup. Subtract AC from THAC0 to get the number you actually need to hit, then roll with any modifiers.

But while I get peoples' nostalgia coloring their view, honestly, modern AC is a much better system. There's no reason to add complexity just to have complexity, and wanting a lower AC is just plain counterintuitive.

Maybe people shouldn't be relying on a nerdy fantasy game to teach their kids math?

We have similar phenomenon in our country - brass music has the most sales across all the genres of music. Does that mean it's the most popular? Hell no, it just means it's most popular with people too old or too technically impaired to download all their shit for free. But hey, good for WotC, keeps them in the business and stuff.

Those numbers don't really seem to add up. None of the books listed in your source sold more than 200,000 in the entirety of their run, and the million per year number figure in your source was never substantiated and was admittedly an estimation. I understand core rulebooks are expected to outsell all the rest by a large margin, but a million in one year is already more than 7 times the number of the entirety of the sales of the Faerunian Campaign setting, which is quite odd.

Compared to the confirmed selling of over a million core books of 3rd edition in its first year and the fact that TSR was posting losses during years it was supposed to be selling large volumes of books, there's something curious about the million boxed sets in '89, though ultimately we're still talking about largely speculated figures.

I think a firmer display of number of players might be seen in gaming convention attendance, with Gen Con in 1992 breaking all previous records with a whopping 18,000 attendees.

For a comparison, the 2016 Gen Con only saw a measly 200,000,

>brass music has the most sales across all the genres of music
That is an interesting observation. Do you have the source?

Sounds like you weren't there when Gygax was in People magazine and being interviewed on the nightly news programs. Everyone was talking about D&D for a while there. What do you think a fad is, anyway?

TSR was posting losses in the late 80s, but during the fad years was posting profits of 15-22 million dollars, which is pretty impressive for the era and industry.
Setting books and things didn't take off for a long time. Most of the "normal" folks who bought D&D bought the Basic Red Box set and figured they were done. I knew plenty of folks who had that box and nothing else, because why would you need other stuff when you have an imagination?
Also, TSR's monetary problems had a lot to do with mismanagement by the Blumes.

Were you around when the 5e books topped the books sales chart on Amazon?

It's around that point where it's no longer an oddity to air right before the weather.