What went wrong?

Binding was bad, my phb fell apart

Aside from an apparent lack of content, I'd say nothing really. The only drawback is having to homebrew so much stuff or resort to splats/UA to get more options, as the PHB content is solid but gets old fast.

I'd say it's the best edition D&D.

That said, Bards are awfully strong in this edition - kinda weird to have a 5/5 in a game based around the idea of being a mix of 3s and 4s.

A bunch of autistic manbabies couldn't handle that someone else did it better.

There's nothing wrong with it. Overall it's a solid game with a good mix of ideas.

The only problem is that EVERYONE plays the fucking thing so if you're even somewhat into tabletop gaming it is just bland shit that is easy to get tired of as a result of there being such an overwhelming playerbase. I'd probably like the game a lot more if the group I played with was even slightly interested in occasionally playing something other than the first game they ever picked up and I'm sure that I'm not the only one in this situation who feels this way.

In a general sense that doesn't concern Veeky Forums? Nothing. D&D 5e is a resounding success among gamers as well as the general populace where it's slowly gaining attention in popular media.
Inside of Veeky Forums? It's popular enough to gather players from all over, but its focus as an RPG is so utterly narrow that it doesn't suit the campaigns most of us want to run. It's too locked into "Heroic Fantasy Dungeon Crawler." Thus we all have those flaws we can say about it. Mine is that it's approach to maintaining combat difficulty is to run three or four combats in order to wear down player resources, which is frustrating when I usually only have one, maybe two combats per session.
There's also the issue that it's hard to break the fans out of their 5e comfort zone. I could have two new 5e groups ready by next week if I posted an ad online, but I'm hard-pressed to find a fourth player for my LotFP group.

That's also the wrong question. The problem with 5e is that it's too utterly safe in every sense. It doesn't try anything new besides being easy, and it's not deadly enough for my tastes, though other opinions may vary.
I've already explained what the issue is in a playerbase context here: And the real problem with 5e is that it can't run the campaigns we want it to run.
So the real question is, in fact, two questions:
"What do I want from a fantasy RPG?" And "How can we get 5e players to try something new?"

>How can we get 5e players to try something new?
By asking what they like about it and suggesting alternatives then explaining them in 5e terms. 5e kerfuffle players aren't 3.pf meleefags fucks who refuse to move on from what they think is the perfect system for everything, they're beginners who are dipping their toes in. The real question is if they want to try new things or not.

Forgetten Realms at this point feels like a bland, heavily market tested setting. They basically turned it into even more of a not!Tolkien setting and rarely step out of that comfort zone. I wish they'd just release a new campaign setting book like Eberron, Dark Sun, or even Spelljammer.

>"How can we get 5e players to try something new?"
This is a problematic question because the other major fantasy roleplaying game is looking backwards even more than 5e so pathfinder is still carrying the poor design choices of 2000-03 and if people went it played it it couldn't count as something 'new' since it and its fanbase are stuck in a rut.

The are questions really are
>Who is making new fantasy roleplaying games with unique non-d20 systems
and
>are they well balanced?
>fun to play?
>easy to learn?

Because unless there is a currently supported system out there which isn't trying to be D&D most people aren't going to move away from what they know.

Forgotten Realms is so bland and generic it makes me nostalgic for Golarion.

SotDL and 13th Age are better than 5e and still are sufficiently similar to 5e, i.e. your players will find the transition quite smooth.

the advent of the e-celeb finally sunk its teeth in, opening the floodgates on making the hobby a spectator sport

>13th post best post

>I wish they'd just release a new campaign setting
They are technically doing it with the Planeshift PDFs where they adapt the MtG worlds into D&D settings

No one wants to play in a setting based off of a shitty card game though.

>What went wrong?
Lore Mastery Wizard ever even being submitted as an Unearthed Arcana. I don't know who on the team is so obsessed with stripping away sorcerer features and giving them to the wizard, but the newest wizard UA--the School of Invention--is very clearly them being assblasted that everyone was so negative about Lore Mastery.

Speak for yourself
>STEAMPUNK INDIA!

spbp

At least now that this daily shit thread has been done with, we should be good... until tomorrow.

I em more bothered by them nit making the Mystic and Artificer official yet

>"How can we get 5e players to try something new?"
"Hey guys, wanna try this other game I've got for a bit?"

Mine is too. Is this particularly common? Im pretty gentle with books.

Thing is inventor is actually terrible

>non-d20
>unique non-d20
Is a uselessly specific requirement. d20 is not in-and-of itself a dice system that needs an alternative, upgrade, or update. There are plenty of dice systems, for instance, in d6, d10, and d100 that are total garbage and not improved over d20 simply for using different dice.

"Uniqueness" is also an overly subjective qualification. A bent fork can be unique in a drawer of "ordinary" forks; which one gets food to your face better? Uniqueness is almost never a sign of high-quality; more often than not, it is the sign of someone experimenting.

You don't take relatively new players into someone's experiment. That's how you make them hate whatever game you're trying to introduce, or the hobby all together if you continue to insist on subjecting entry-level players to experimental dice systems.

The departure from practically everything the D&D Next packets were presenting into a hamfisted attempt to bring the 3.X craze back from under Pathfinder's banner. It wanted to be the next big thing in tabletop again, but lost its soul in attempting this.

Is it as bad as people make it out? No. But it could've been so much better and have done so much more with itself.

It insinuates the idea of running the published modules and using the forgotten realms as a baseline. The tools for GMs are non existant, and the attitude of the designers shows they don't really care about supporting GMs going outside their cruddy, hamfisted little sandbox of level 1-14ish campaign books.

$50+ per book. I fully understand books have always been expensive, but a fucking rulebook shouldn't be priced like a AAA video game, especially since they sell electronic copies that are easily just reposted elsewhere for free. It costs about the same to buy into a console right now as it does to buy into 5e.

Back in 2002, Ron Edwards coined the term "fantasy heartbreaker". He used it to refer to all of those games which are the result of their creators believing that they've taken the mousetrap (i.e. D&D) and made it a little bit better. In some cases they may be right and in some cases they may be wrong but, as Edwards pointed out, they were all doomed to failure. Why? Well, here Edwards goes off into an ideological rant that I think rather misses the point. But, in my opinion, the primary reason can be boiled down to this:

If I wanted to be play a game like this, I might as well be playing D&D.

There are many reasons for that sentiment to hold true, but I think there are two major ones:

(1) It's much easier to find a group playing D&D than it is to find a group playing any other RPG;
(2) Most roleplaying gamers are already familiar with D&D -- they've already learned the game.

So why would you go to the effort of learning a new game and then convincing other people to learn a new game in order to achieve an experience that you can already largely accomplish with a game you know and for which it's easy to find experienced players?

If you order them off of Amazon right now they're only about $30-$35 apiece, new and straight from Wizards, and has been since the start of the edition. I've gotten almost all of my 5e books off of Amazon for that reason.

Wizards doesn't care about you.
They've made more money on this edition than either of the past 2 so they're going to keep moving in this direction.

Boy, I can't believe how much I hate that thesis. The argument of "But everyone knows the system, so why invest time and energy in learning a new system that attempts the same thing" is an argument that could be applied against making a new system ever, so long as you already have a system for that genre. There's twenty-odd Mecha TTRPG systems out there now, and running a Mecha game in Mekton, GURPS, GGG, Mecha vs Kaiju, TBZ, or whatever else are all going to be very different experiences or takes on the same core genre. The same argument can be applied even for different EDITIONS of DnD; why make 2E if 1E exists? Why make 3.5 if 3.0 existed? Why does Pathfinder exist if 3.5 already did? Why even make 5E if 3.5 and 4E already do? The Heartbreaker thesis relies on the idea that expending 0 energy on learning new rules is a more efficient way of producing Maximum Fun vs Energy Expended than learning a system that gels better with what you want to do.

What a dumb fucking thesis.

3.5 went half retard, PF went full retard, and 5e scrubbed as much of the retard they could scrub off, but didn't replace it with anything else.

This game is the equivalent of an excised cancerous tumor. It's far better than having a tumor, mind you. But you'd probably prefer your right leg to be whole, and to be able to use it.

People play at that game, and they say: right, it's not shit. It's not. That is usually the only qualifier they can think about the game. It's not shit. Which is something, I guess, but it isn't really activating people's almond something fierce.

Yep, it is. If I remember correctly you can ask for a substitution or you can re-bind it yourself: there are tutorials on youtube easy to find

The issue is that so many people are so used to playing 3.PF and its various offshoots that they never developed any skill in thinking outside the box unless there's a boldly written label saying "hey, you can go out here."

Between the (dis)advantage system and the bounded accuracy in play, there's really nothing to stop you from, say, grappling a dude before hitting him with a breath weapon at close range or using a dodge action to draw in an enemy while your buddy sneaks up from behind to hit him with advantage due to flanking.

There's actually a lot of options that you, as a player can do, it's just that too many people are so used to being punished for doing nothing that they default to basic actions since they're the most familiar.

Literally the only one worth downloading is Kaladesh, becasue all the others are worse versions of D&D settings. Innastrad is just a worse Ravenloft, Ahomket is just a worse Athas, and Ixalan is just a worse Ebberon.

user, people gravitate to the familiar. It takes time and energy to learn a new thing. And if that new thing isn't better than what you have, then the effort is effectively wasted. Nobody wants to spend their time on MAYBE getting something better ... becuase the upside is not big enough to do the work.

To give you a real-world example: people still use Windows. And Windows is a pretty mediocre operating system. Many good O/S get developed by startups and universities which are amazing, but gain no market traction because the market (people) don't want to learn new things .. change is hard, and the thing they are already using works well enough.

It happens in my work all the time .. I made a proposal to my department to improve things by not using software from the 1980s... and it was handily rejected, because it meant that management would have to learn a new tool or skill set, and they push back. Off the books, my manager flat out told me that was the reason for why my proposal was no-go. It's just how it is.

He's talking about THE d20 system, not the die.

stop posting this goddamn thread everyday nothing is wrong with 5e

(there are things wrong with 5e but I'm talking big-picture wise)

OSR does what it does better and therefore there's no reason to play it

Nah man its not like that, its precisely that it IS like a previous edition thats bad. D&D grew and changed with each edition, but 5e whilst changing some things attempts to be a "modernization" of 3e.

>Sorcerers know spells on an instinctive level, as a poet knows words.
>Wizard know spells by study and repetition as a mathematician knows algorithms
So why do they have the same god damned spell list!

What games would people recommend for Fantasy besides 5e?
I've DMed nWoD, Dark Heresy, PF, and 5e, so I'm not really loyal to any one system, but 5e has been pretty good for running a fantasy game and I've never really heard of any other systems outside of the DnD label that fit the ticket.

Gurps Dungeon Fantasy is fun if you want a more technical combat and a better designed skill system. Fantasycraft is worth looking into if you liked PF but wished it wasn't written by idiots. I think fantasy will have a bigger "range" soon, with "Dungeon Fantasy" (gurps DF without the word gurps in front, has quite a few rules changes apparently) being released and with the new age of sigmar and warhammer roleplaying games coming up there's finally some reasonable competition.

The Dungeon Fantasy standalone (DFRPG) is basically the same. There are two big selling points:
1. No need for the Basic Set. Every DF-relevant ability and is listed in full.
2. Good formatting. GURPS 4e was launched in 2010, and the formatting was poor to start with and has aged like milk. DFRPG may be the first time they made character template easy to read.

Some (dis)advantages are tweaked to better fit dungeon crawling, the new slam/collision rules are more streamlined, and armor is more customizable than in Basic but less in-depth than Low Tech, but at the end of the day, those are minor changes and DFRPG is still wholly compatible with the rest of standard GURPS.

You do realize that AAA games are actually artificially cheap because of price agreements between publishers. That's why so many are trying to nickle and dime you on microtransactions; they're trying to actually turn a profit on what should be a $80-100 game

2e is far more similar to 1e. The reason it's 2e has far more to do with legal stuff surrounding Gygax and IP ownership than any rule change. They are basically compatible; bad example.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e. It's easily the best fantasy rpg out there. 4e is coming this year.

Know that feel bro. If I ever want to play a different system and thus a different type of setting (low fantasy, super power, sci-fi, cyberpunk) well I have the learn the whole thing myself and run it.

This isn't true. Costs of production have been dropping for years and research and development has reduced massively. They push "micro-transactions" and "in app purchases" because it makes them literally billions of dollars of profit on top, not because they need to break even. But that's for another thread.

That's some serious denial. Very rarely do AAA games innovate, look at the Frostbite engine, which was only recently discontinued. Easily 75% of all manpower that goes into it is the actual design team. There is no justification for how expensive they've gotten recently besides an unnecessary increase in employees.

It's that bad? That sounds atrocious.

WFRP 2e
B/X D&D
Burning Wheel if you want something different

You can thank (((Mearls))) for that shit.

Overly-complicated action economy.
Messy, disorganized spell lists.
Inspiration and many optional rules being useless.
Obsessive focus on combat.
Limited player options that almost exclusively revolve around combat.
Cemented D&D as forever regurgitating a streamlined 3.5 instead of trying to innovate.

I really wish that the spells were organized by level, then by alphabetical order, instead of pure alphabetical

The game itself is good, I just wish there was more fucking content for it.

It's called Forgettable Realms for a reason. Granted, for some people setting doesn't matter, and I'm dissing them, in fact I have friend who's a great player and he never cares for the setting. But there are also many who absolutely need something better than flimsy cardboard on the background to have fun.

>wanted to type 'not dissing', instead forgot the 'not'
Well, I guess I am dissing them after all.

I use to buy hard back books at Barnes and Noble for around $30. Game books are a bit strange to me but I imagine it’s because you bought them at brick and mortar stores where misc fees up the price.

Trying to run my first adventure as a novice GM this week and I find that the DMG is pretty light on useful tools for homebrew settings. Thankfully the online community is so big that I can find everything I need though. I also really like that low level play feels dangerous and dropping an ordinary tiger on the PCs can be scary, without the super flashy Daily Powers from 4E and abundant self healing. I'll probably keep them pretty treasure hungry and limit access to diamonds too to try and preserve that sense of danger as we go forward.
Ultimately it's what you and your players are of it.

some of the rules in xanathars should probably have been in the PHB

Fantasy AGE

Blue Rose amirite?

Fuck Blue Rose though. I love reading 'Romantic Fantasy', it's comfy, naïve and wholesome. Sharon Shinn, for example, is such a read for a sore soul.

Then I find this Blue Rose game, it seems to hit just the right buttons judging by reviews, it has 3 archetypical classes (just like Whitehack which I love to death), 3d6 and other sweet things.

Then I open a PDF and see all the propaganda bullshit. Fuck.

It's not even a heartbreaker, it's a bloody cockbreaker, because it's managed to give me a boner and then snapped it in half.

mike mearls

Fantasy AGE is setting independent thankfully. But yeah, Bluerose's setting is nothing but cringe. I would recommend brewing up your own setting instead of going with Blue Rose or Dragon Age's setting.

MtG's settings are fucking incredible

I'd disagree with it being nothing but cringe. It's better than people give it credit for. I mean, I've no real desire to play in it personally but people seem to really think that it's a lot more hateful and 'If you are not like X you are bad' than it actually is. The setting is pretty clear that the entire reason the main nation can afford to focus so much on it's social progressive stuff is that they are geographically in a basically perfect situation that makes life a lot easier for them than it is for the other nations around them.

It's basically like that DS9 quote:

>Well, it's easy to be a saint in paradise, but the Maquis do not live in paradise.

Depends on which. I never played MtG, but I used to collect cards with good art. It was around 2006 or so, I suppose, so I still think Ravnica and that Planar Chaos setting are the best. Rose-tinted memories probably, but stuff from after 2010 or so seemed bland.

I might be overly sensitive, but shit like picrelated feels like an obnoxious political ad slapped across a coke can you bought.

You say that like new editions of D&D are trying to make the game better, rather than selling a new round of books.

They don't

literally none of the shit you just said lines up with reality

I expect Spelljammer sometime in the next year

It's just saying that if you plan on designing a fantasy roleplaying game, make sure it has multiple clear, unique selling points over D&D. There were a lot of games at the time which were basically 'its D&D but we totally fixed the math' (pathfinder being the lucky exception that proves the rule, milking the hatred that 4E caused in people invested in 3E.)

As a result now we have

Dungeon World
Lamentations of the Flame Princess
13th age
Burning Wheel
Etc..

All of which do things differently enough to have gained popular appeal.

Most of those games spend more on marketing than they do on actual development. And when I say development, I mean the whole package including 3d modelling, salaries for management, and exorbitant contracts with Hollywood actors who have little to no experience with non-visual voice acting.

It actually delivered in a good way.

Never happen.

>Indecisive the setting, Conan but forgotten realms or even forgotten realms in space

Wow such original and unique settings, truly they are the poster child of creativity.

Why not. They can only release so many monster manuals before they branch out some how. I think Spelljammer is a likely as any next step.

"What went wrong?" threads and posts should be a bannable offense.

Because the IP of Spelljammers isn't held by WotC. That's why a lot of AD&D and 2nd edition monsters showed up in PF and not in the WotC versions.

You know I have never seen these points brought on in any way but pure indifference, western common sense and not being in the writers comfort zone.

Boy paying by the word was a mistake, these people read too much into things.

Abandoned too many of 4e’s good ideas.

I think that if you want to say something went "wrong", is that it sacrificed too much complexity.
It's a great introductory game. Setting up characters is fast but still nuanced, and some of the subsystems are really good. The writing is extremely comfy and gave me a huge nostalgia hit (I ggrew up un 2e). The first level is bretty good.
The problem is, it never goes too far from there. Level 8 plays exactly like level 1, and that's where we stopped. I don't see the situation changing much even if we continued for a few more level.
I see that it's sparked a lot of homebrewing, and I'm happy for that, and for bringing in new blood. But as an old gamer, it's too thin for me.

Trying to please everyone at once. That's not the same, but there's a good reason why 5e is usually called "everyone's second favorite edition". Personally, I dropped 5e when I discovered the OSR scene had the tone and simplicity I was looking for, instead of having to strip 2/3rds of 5e's rules to get what I want.

What about Zweihander?:)

My group only has time enough to play three hours a week, that’s what’s wrong!

Shit and the guy who wrote it is shit.

(You)

I've heard that a lot, but nobody seems to elaborate on it.

Pick your poison.

They caved to a very vocal subset of the community that was pushing for them to get it as far from 4E as possible.