Will 6e D&D save the game?

While I'd agree that 5e was built with that design intention, to be bland, simple, easy to learn and very inoffensive, I do think they could have done a better job in some areas, and that showing a little more innovation or having new, original ideas might have given the game value other than just as an entry point or lowest common denominator aimed product.

I've been playing since AD&D. 5e is my favorite. Frankly, it's the first time I've actually liked a D&D system. We used to just play Deadlands, Shadowrun, Vampire, etc. It's nice being able to play D&D without having to houserule it to hell and back.

>I've been playing since AD&D.

Eh, unlike him, I wouldn't say 5e is my favourite, but it's certainly the edition I'd want to play the most at the moment, and I started with AD&D, as well.

I would like to see an eventual 6e have more focused design and some actual ideas. 5e works for its own purposes, but despite the controversy I really appreciated what 4e did as a system.

I'm not their primary audience, I rarely play D&D, having moved on to other games a long time back, but 4e actually caught my interest because it did something different, and the kind of storytelling its mechanics supported gave it a place in my RPG collection if I was ever in the mood for some high action fantasy storytelling.

5e, in contrast, seems more like what most D&D fans want, but lacks anything to really inspire me to play it.

I'd hope a 6e would manage to find a balance point, keeping that broad appeal while also introducing some design ideas or innovations that gave people a reason to play it beyond it being a functional iteration of the brand.

Tail end of it, but yeah. I started playing when I was 13. 3rd didn't come out until 2000, when I was 15.

Christ, I still remember my first session. Backstage at the community theater before rehearsal on Saturday, trying to figure out why the fuck armor classes went down into negative numbers. It seemed like such a dumb way to handle it.

5e is fine, stop with the meme hate

Yeah, some actual content would be nice, even if it's just rehashes from fan favourite material in previous editions, but some relatively new ideas would be great, too. Look at what 4e did with the Warden and the Avenger: while the idea of the forest guardian or the religious executioner were by no means original or unheard of, they were something that D&D itself had never really made its own before then.

“Saving a franchise” is by any definition it is ever used when speaking about economic success.

I concur that they could have tried to do some more new stuff to make the game have a unique feel. However, 5e also came after 4e which had a fair deal of blowback from their established playerbase. I think 5e is kinda like Star Wars VII where it didn't really do much new because they were trying to go back to their roots and recapture their audience. They opted to go with the safe bet, for better or worse.

Oh, I completely agree. 5e was designed to ruffle as few feathers as possible as a direct response to 4e, as a business decision it made sense, and given their success it's clearly what their fanbase wanted. I'm well aware I'm making my comments from the perspective of a minority audience, but that doesn't mean I can't hope that D&D will get some of its confidence back in future rather than very carefully toeing the line and providing exactly what its core fanbase expects.

>grognard tryhard

>Popularity and economic success are not necessarily based on quality though.

In a capitalist free market, yeah, popularity tends to be because a product is a quality product.

>They opted to go with the safe bet, for better or worse.

For better. I started playing RPGs for the first time ever last year with 5e, and the system is elegant enough that I'm easily DMing a game with an entire party of new players now.

It's not the ultimate system, but it's easily engaging. Armor class is easy and intuitive, proficiency is easy and intuitive, advantage/disadvantage as a concept makes houseruling easy and fast.

Character building sucks because of how inflexible it is, but the subclasses cover enough gameplay archetypes that you can play for years before getting bored with your options anyway. It's a great starting point for getting people into RPGs, and since actually having players is the most important part of running a game, people should be thankful for what they did with 5e.

>original ideas might have given the game value other than just as an entry point or lowest common denominator aimed product.

While true, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that 5e serves as an entry point for rpgs, especially for normies. All of my IRL friends want me to GM 5e just because of the name "Dungeons and Dragons," which I'm ultimately fine with since my ultimate goal is happy players. There's still a plethora of weird indie titles and other systems out there that I can push on them once they've developed taste for the hobby and really begin to think about how systems impact what kind of experiences they'll have. I think a lot of people want whatever current edition of DnD is to be this platonic ideal of roleplaying, which it will almost never be.

Laughing_minions.jpg

ancap Veeky Forums when

Look, not every movie can be Shrek, and work on multiple levels. The minions movies don't appeal to smart educated adults, because they are not designed to. They are children's movies, and they succeed because they know their audience.

There are tons of RPG systems and settings out there, the ones that do very well, are those that recognize how to accomodate a variety of audiences and satisfy them.

It's why FATAL sucks, GURPS is played by math geeks, and DnD is the everyman game.

I don't buy the it's for kids so it's okay that it sucks meme. That's conditioning kids to have bad taste in the hopes they'll buy more lazy cheap garbage as adults.

>In a capitalist free market, yeah, popularity tends to be because a product is a quality product

No, no it does not. It CAN be an indicator of a quality product, but it can even easier be an indicator of quality marketing.

>popularity tends to be because a product has quality marketing.
FTFY

How is "tends to be" and "can be" any fucking different?

I guess it just comes down to me expecting more from D&D. It's the grandfather of the entire hobby, the largest game in the industry by a huge margin, and in doing 4e, for better or worse, they tried something extremely strange and interesting and new.

And it's not that they didn't try. The 5e playtests had a bunch of interesting and novel ideas that, IMO, wouldn't have detracted from its function as a gateway game. But in the end they stripped out basically everything that could be controversial.

I don't think 5e is a bad game, and I don't blame them for the decisions they made, I just think with a little more ambition it could have been so much more.

It's been years since I read the playtests. What was some of the unique ideas they dropped?

>Statistically frequent
>Hypothetically able to happen
Oh yeah woops same thing.

>What was some of the unique ideas they dropped?

All the bad ones that made Casters retardedly OP. They were dropped for good reason.

While the big one that gets discussed was the expertise dice fighter, of which the Battlemaster is a lacklustre shadow, the thing I really miss was their idea for the Sorceror.

The example Dragon Sorcerer cast spells via a Spell Point system, spending a number of points from their pool equal to the spell level to cast a spell. The interesting thing? The more spell points they spent, the more bloodline manifestations they unlocked, traits based on their magical ancestry emerging as they expended their magical potential.

For the dragon sorceror, they manifested draconic traits that meant that, at zero spell points, they became a decently tough second line fighter, with draconic scales and strength and IIRC a breath weapon at one point, giving them an interesting and very different skill set they had access to, even when they were running low or out of magical resources. I loved the emphasis on the idea of magical bloodlines and how it gave them a very different, distinct playstyle instead of just being a slightly reflavoured wizard.

What the fuck are you even talking about? None of the good ideas people talk about from the playtest had anything to do with the power of casters.

5e is a great beginner system, and it's decent for people who don't really look at the system.

If you're into really understanding the rules and the world, 5e falls apart pretty quickly, and it's not really that elegant. I think the biggest reason for it's popularity is that for most things outside of combat, you're making the rules.

And dude you make awesome rules, because you do what seems awesome, and thus 5e by extension seems to have all these awesome things... but it really doesn't.

Yeah, that shit was fantastic. But no, instead we just got the poor man's wizard, yet again.

Man it's almost like that's the intent all along

I'm pretty new and I don't know much about previous editions. Can someone please explain what they had that 5e lacks? I don't understand the hate.

It's worked for 40k.

This keys into something I realised a little while ago, and shaped my thoughts as an amateur designer, hoping to publish a game or two some day. Some groups will read and use the rules as you might expect, but a significant portion of groups will instead take the rules as presented and improvise on the theme, ignoring details over broad intent. It made me realise why in depth breakdowns of the mathematical flaws in 3.PF, for example, are basically pointless. For the groups who are playing and enjoying those games, the math is irrelevant because they're just making it up as they go along anyway, just using the system as a general inspiration and common basis.

1e is super simple and people have a lot of nostalgia for it, 2e caters to a completely different playstyle and created the OSR, 3.PF has a shitload of content and a lot of people started roleplaying with it as their first system, meaning they're so invested in it they only play games that resemble it, 4e had better tactical combat, balance and a lot of really interesting and unusual mechanics that some people loved and a lot of people hated.

>4e had better tactical combat, balance and a lot of really interesting and unusual mechanics that some people loved and a lot of people hated.
>a lot of people hated

All the casters pissed that a fighter at their level could kick their ass.

4e killed LFQW and I loved it for that.

I loved it too, but it's hard to deny the evidence. Taken at its own merits, I think 4e was a great game that did what it wanted to extremely well, but the reaction it got can't be understated. It can be discussed and argued, whether it was legitimate outrage or just a vocal but passionate group doing everything they could to convince others the system was terrible, but either way the legacy of 4e was soured as a result, which IMO was a real shame.

4e was the best tabletop tactical game ever made.

It fell down because some players claimed they wanted more RPing and less monster killing (then went right back to being murder hobos in Pathfinder)

Thank Big Bang Theory, Stranger Things, and the inexorable tide of public awareness for that. Each new edition has been more popular than the previous. That doesn't mean each new edition is better.

>focused design
What the fuck does this mean, reddit-spacer? Name one thing in 5e that isn't "Focused".
I am not a huge fan of parts of the system but it's certainly more "Focused" than 4e was. Or 3.5. Or most of the RPGs out there.

Why are you advocating for everyone to buy new books from WotC?

>All the casters pissed that a fighter at their level could kick their ass.
This has literally nothing to do with why I hate 4e.
I have hated 4e since before caster supremacy was even known to me.
I hated 4e because of its stupid metagame AEDU "you can only disarm once a day cause the story sez so" bull crap
And the absolute ass gloat of hit points in the game.
And the raping of multiclassing.
And the boring, linear advancement.
And the fact that you start as a 1st level character with 20x as many hp as the average orc warrior.

Tabletop RPG as a hobby is bigger than it ever was and growing like crazy.

5e is selling the best only because of brand name. Most of those people move to other things after playing D&D as a tutorial.

>4e was the best tabletop tactical game ever made.
Hot damn you are delusional.
>It fell down because some players claimed they wanted more RPing and less monster killing
That has nothing to do with why it fell down.
No one has ever complained about D&D being combat-focused.
They complained because martials became casters and a lot of people didn't like that. Instead of making fighters viable in their own right, Mearls and Crawford just turned them into casters and nerfed casters to have the same abilities with status/terrain ride-alongs. Absolutely fucking gay. Barely anyone plays it now, it has been entirely abandoned for 5e and even Pathfinder is outselling it.

>Most of those people move to other things after playing D&D as a tutorial.
You are retarded.
Let me ask you:
What game(s) are they moving on to?

By focused design I mean choosing a specific goal for the system to support.

I would argue that 4e is far more focused than 5e is. 4e chose to put its focus on high action fantasy storytelling, with its PC's as great and mighty heroes and its rules and mechanics all built around that assumption.

5e, in contrast, and has been cited in this thread as a strength, is a much broader and more general system. The only real goal of 5e was 'Be D&D', which covers a broad range of expectations that 5e manages to mostly assimilate into itself. However, this leads to the system feeling, in my view, unfocused, as it is trying to embody the entire range of experiences D&D has served up to this point, rather than choosing to design around a more specific idea in the way 4e did.

By the way, please stop repeating the stupid 'reddit spacing' meme. I've been using readable formatting on this site since before that garbagefire existed.

>5e is the most popular and best selling Role Playing Game of all time

Not among people actually into the hobby:

drivethrurpg.com/top_100.php

D&D is just the entry point.

>4e was the best tabletop tactical game ever made
Really fishing for the (you)s arent you. 3.5 was a better game over all. 4e was much more ballanced but the combat was streamlined and just not fun. Every class was basiclly the same. If the game was good even not for d&d standers people whould have not abondon it in droves.

You say that, but a lot of people have complained about 4e being too combat focused. Heck, I like the game and I still think more non-combat support would have been a good thing.

Also, please play RPG's outside of D&D. Casters being the only people with a resource mechanic or activated abilities is very much a D&Dism, present in games emulating it or older games that didn't know better.

If you don't like narrative mechanics, which is what powers are, then I can understand not liking 4e, but 'They made martials into casters' is a meaningless statement.

Woe to those who would worship False Editions!
Woe to he who would turn away from the One True Way to enjoy fantasy role playing as The Founders intended!

Lord, have mercy on those wretched souls who have yet to bask in the light of True AD&D™!

It was a video game pretending to be P&P. Combat is not even the most important thing about RPG's and 4e was nothing but combat.

>I hated 4e because of its stupid metagame AEDU "you can only disarm once a day cause the story sez so" bull crap

Actually, you could try again, but you'd use the improvised action rules (DMG 42) rather than the Power rules.

>And the absolute ass gloat of hit points in the game.

A fair criticism, although one that was fixed with the MM3 math

>And the raping of multiclassing.

I can see this, for people who liked level by level multiclassing. Personally I actually think multiclass feats were better, they let you splash a class as an aspect of your character concept without having to worry about it fucking up your progression.

>And the boring, linear advancement.

Can you expand on this? Between feat and power choices, Theme/PP/ED and magic items, I always felt 4e had just as much breadth of advancement, if not more so, than other editions.

>And the fact that you start as a 1st level character with 20x as many hp as the average orc warrior.

HP is an abstraction, and 4e explicitly did not maintain mechanical symmetry between PC's and monsters.

Still, overall I can understand why you dislike 4e, but my point is that a lot of your complaints were either things they fixed, or aspects of the system that other people explicitly enjoyed. I don't think 4e was bad, I think it was a niche game published to an audience who expected something a lot broader, and was punished as a result.

>And the fact that you start as a 1st levep character with 20x as many hp as the average orc warrior
Maybe in another edition this would be true, but average HP levels in 4e for 1st level PCs is usually in the 20-30 range with higher instances caused by people pumping up their CON
You'd be right if the orc warriors were classed as minion monsters, but that's the point of minions, they're 1-hp mooks meant to tarpit players and get some damage in for the stronger monsters in an encounter.

>Every class was basically the same.

You can just say 'I never played it'. You'd look like slightly less of an idiot that way.

Are you being serious? There are dozens of alternatives. 5e is not even the biggest one outside USA.

Please don't repeat memes and lies.

>4e chose to put its focus on high action fantasy storytelling
So has every other edition of the game.
>However, this leads to the system feeling, in my view, unfocused, as it is trying to embody the entire range of experiences D&D has served up to this point,
You seem unable to point to a single example to support your point.
And, your formatting isn't any more readable, it's just narcissistic and obnoxious. Anyone who can't read single-spaced type where each sentence isn't a new line, is a literal retard.

>further Reddit spacing
I have played dozens of games outside of D&D. I've even played and enjoyed narrative games. D&D is not a narrative game. They could release 6e D&D as a clone of FATE, and it might be a "good" game, but it won't be D&D at all so people will have a right to be upset.

When I play D&D, I want to play D&D. I want to play a good version of D&D, but if you change the game too much, then it's not D&D anymore, and why the fuck would I want to play that for my D&D game?

You liked it, we get it. The vast majority did not. If even people used to eating D&D shit abandon the game so hard Pathfinder is born from it something is very, VERY wrong with it.

>but 'They made martials into casters' is a meaningless statement.
No it's not.
Martials in 4e are effectively casters.
They function the same way.
Their "spells" are powers.
There is no mechanical distinction between how they function.
No one has ever given a decent reason for why a fighter in 4e can only do his daily attack once a day.

>when you are so out of argument you start commenting writing style

Really? 2e's focus on lower fantasy adventurers with a lot more attention to avoiding encounters and conserving valuable resources, in your view, shows a focus on high action fantasy storytelling? The gimped nature of 3.PF martials, too?

And if you want to prove me wrong, then tell me how 5e is a focused system, and what its focus actually is. Because, as I noted, people in this thread have explicitly stated the opposite, as a positive trait of the system.

And that's your opinion. I respectfully disagree. I've been posting this way since I started on this site, and I have no intention of stopping any time soon.

>mm3 math
Fixed nothing, and even if you can't get your game right until the umpteenth splatbook, you've fucked up.
>pick from these 3 powers as you level up
No thanks.
>hp is an abstraction
Yep. And you start out in easy mode able to effortlessly slaughter dozens of enemies.
>magic items
Every edition has had those.
>Theme/PP/ED
Wow it's just like the pick three shit I mentioned before. Unlike 3.5 where there thousands of prestige classes. Most were shit, to be fair, but sure better than the paragon paths.

Heck, I acknowledged that earlier in the thread. I'm not in D&D's core audience, and I grew kinda bored with D&D a good many years ago. I liked 4e entirely because it was so different, which is the exact same thing so many people had a problem with.

Although even then, I often feel like the differences are overblown. 4e took how 3.5 worked, at endgame, and used those mechanical ideas to build a functional system. But, as was mentioned earlier in the thread, it turned out that the high end optimisation and mechanical focus was a single niche playstyle that was overrepresented on their forums, rather than a more general preference of their whole community.

>No one has ever given a decent reason for why a fighter in 4e can only do his daily attack once a day.

Because of the same reason a fighter in 5e can only do some of his special stuff once per long rest?

So explain to me.
How many hit points does the average commoner have in 4e?
How many hit points does the average village militiaman have in 4e?
A 4e fighter starts out with relative hit points equivalent to a 3.5 fighter.... of 15th level.
By the way if you cannot answer the questions above, your game has wholly failed at simulating a world. Which is the job of ALL roleplaying games, like it or not. Even FATE and other narrativist wankery, simulates a world.

>evading the question
I want to know where "most" of the people who play 5e are moving on to. Because then that game would be bigger than 5e.

But your whole argument entirely relies on a definition of 'Casters' as 'People with resource based abilities', which is only true in D&D, and even then not exclusively true.

Martial exploits and arcane spells use the same AEDU system, but 'they function the exact same way' is explicitly untrue if you look at the actual class mechanics and how they interact with their powers. Try reading the system next time.

And the reason is that it's a narrative abstraction. You might not like the reason, but that's what it is. Although, as was noted above, that you can only use the power once a day doesn't mean you can only attempt the maneuver once per day. Doing it a second time just uses the improvised action rules.

Literally how? If people move from one big entry point game to 20 other ones how the shit could any of them be bigger?

>drivethrurpg.com/top_100.php

>D&D isn't even on that list

Curious.

>Not among people actually into the hobby:

Laughable.

That they fucked up the math is a legit criticism, but I'm not sure how you can say they didn't fix it. They reduced combat times significantly, making fights a lot faster and more dangerous, which is what most people had been asking for.

Also... No? I can't think of any classes in the game who only have 3 powers to pick from. Even the least supported had at least four options for their feature choice, and most of the classes had significantly more than that.

How does the heroes being able to slaughter mooks make the game inherently easy? It's balanced around the fact you can slaughter them, making minions very cheap in terms of XP budget so you have a lot of them. The mechanics can still be incredibly challenging despite the starting power of the PC's.

Again, what? There were a huge number of viable choices for Themes, PP's and ED's for most character classes, and even less supported classes could also go for generic or racial options. Did you only play the game early in its publishing history? If so I can kind of understand it, but all those complaints became obsolete pretty quickly.

You really don't get it do you?

Most people wanting to play a fighter in fantasy want to play something like Tyrion, Aragorn or Drizzt. Not superman with a sword.

No? 4e isn't trying to simulate a world, and a lot of games don't care about simulating a world. Your entire argument is based on a false premise.

Fuck what people buy from a particular store that doesn't even sell current D&D rules.

Check out any survey of what games people are actually PLAYING if you want useful information.

D&D 5e is the number one, and by a fucking long-shot - because people aren't just using it as an "entry point". There are fucktons of folks like me that have been playing all kinds of different RPGs for decades now, and have added 5th edition D&D to our other short-list of favorites that we actually sit down and play on a regular basis.

Most people playing D&D by the book are not even playing a RPG game. They are playing a board game with RPG elements.

>Because of the same reason a fighter in 5e can only do some of his special stuff once per long rest?
That shit is stupid, too, and it's only in the game because of 4e. Action Surge and Second Wind are retarded shit. So is battlemaster. Just trying to make martials into casters because of 3.5 butthurt losers who whinged about "wahh why aren't martials as interesting as casters" and instead of taking the interesting-but-shitty options they had in 3.5, they just decided to make them into spellcasters, fucking up any semblance of mechanical diversity between the two to try to turn the game into even more of the bland superheroes powerwank game it's becoming.

This shit is why I started playing OSR games.

But how does having some cool moves you can pull off take away from that? The only reason it would, in my experience, is if you were invested in the idea of D&D fighters how they worked before that. For new players, in my experience, they've had a lot easier time understanding 4e fighters, and how they can do various awesome things emulating the heroes they describe, rather than the D&D default of 'You get to roll attacks'.

Then they should add up to be much, much larger than D&D's audience.
Except, D&D is larger than the rest of RPGs combined.
Why is that?

1/10.

Here's your (you), but that's all I can give you for such lazy trolling.

Assuming a commoner in 4e would have a similar attribute array to 5e (which last I saw was 10 across the board,) their HP would be 20. A militiaman would be the same or more assuming they have more points put into CON, so about 20-24 for them.

Because no one buys D&D on DriveThru you fucking idiot, it's probably not even for sale on there.

So, a question. Do you think it would be possible to make an interesting, mechanically complex Martial character? Or would adding absolutely any complex choice, decision making or resource management make them, in your view, just like a caster? Are maritals defined, in your mind, by being simple to play?

Have you considered that real life sword fighting and so on is actually pretty complex?

Because it's the grandfather of the hobby and always has the biggest marketing budget.

Surveys? Really? Something with D&D brand name will always win in fucking surveys. Vote from a guy who plays one game a year will matter as much as one from a guy playing every week.

I'm from mid EU and D&D 5e is not even in top5 here. People play Warhammer, Star Wars, Savage Worlds, Shadowrun, Neuroshima, WoD and tons of other things while D&D games are rare as hell.

Dude, stop arguing with willfully obtuse people.

>which is only true in D&D
Yes. congratulations on figuring out that we are talking about D&D.
Casters and per-day resource management have been synonymous since the creation of the game and Vancian casting.
>Martial exploits and arcane spells use the same AEDU system, but 'they function the exact same way' is explicitly untrue if you look at the actual class mechanics and how they interact with their powers. Try reading the system next time.
I have. I know that spells and martial exploits have (slightly) different effects.
>And the reason is that it's a narrative abstraction.
Okay. But D&D is not a narrative game.
>Doing it a second time just uses the improvised action rules.
Okay, there are rules for me to try to get the exact effects of my powers again, without asspulls by the DM? And, if that is possible, why not just make it possible for the fighter to do that anyway. Why have AEDU at all? It just adds more bookkeeping. So does ongoing damage and floating modifiers like mark and combat advantage. What do they add to justify the extra complication? This has never been explained by any 4e player on this board, to an adequate degree, except for non-answer circular logic like "it's a narrative abstraction."

No it isn't nigger.
Every RPG simulates a world, in some way or another.
Answer the question: how many hit points does the average foot soldier in the king's army have? 1? 25? There's really not a lot in between in 4e.

the answer is "muh immersion." The rules don't actually matter to most people here, it's about how they're presented. For example 4e's healing surges are completely irrevocably immersion-ruining to the point where it is literally impossible to roleplay while playing 4e. However 5e called them hit dice (and made them kind of shit) which is a term grognards are already familiar with, so they're OK now.

>Tyrion
>fighter

>But how does having some cool moves you can pull off take away from that?
Because you can only do them once a day.
In 3.5 I could Power Attack as much as I wanted. Same with using my tactical feats. Was I shit compared to the casters? Yep. Was the attack roll / AC math completely broken? Yep. And it was still better than 4e's pre-templated bullcrap.