D&D 5e was a decently-designed game, even if some of the concepts it was based on were stupid. The problem is that 5e coincided with the mainstreaming dilution of the tabletop hobby, as well as the burgeoning popularity of freaksh!t races and LGBT characters. As well as the soulless cartoonish art stye of most characters now, and a complete lack of regard for fantasy aesthetic.
It was not a "coincidence". 5e was DESIGNED to mainstream the hobby. It was part of our goals. What was coincidental is that this mainstreaming, meant to get more normal people into the hobby, coincided with a group of psychotic communists taking over all aspects of popular culture.
@@RPGPundit What actually made D&D mainstream post-2010 was such fare as Big Bang Theory, Stranger Things, World of Warcraft, and loads of other such junk. It'd be ridiculous to either credit or blame the rules system itself for doing all that. The game itself was just a lubricant, and that might be a fitting analogy given what it feels like these people have done to the tabletop RPG culture.
The fall of every edition can summed up in three words: "too much crap." Too many new rules, new classes, new "options" that don't stay optional, new powers for the power gamers, and new races to appease the furries. The sheer amount of "stuff" reaches a critical mass, and rather than try and keep up, people simply tune out. Well that, and the desire of the parent company to screw all the authors out of future royalties.
@@sadwingsraging3044 I’ve legit done this repeatedly. I played in 1 long term PF1 campaign and I inherited a bunch of 3 and 3.5e books. Every time I open one I get pretty overwhelmed and just close it.
It's funny you mention that, I'm actually in the middle of hosting a 3.5 campaign and as crunchy and hectic as it can be, it's already a much better experience than my last two 5e campaigns.
@@thegreatkabukino6639 I think I would enjoy playing in a 3.5 game. But I need someone who knows it to DM for me. There’s so much crunch I’m intimidated at the thought of DMing it.
@mrspeigle1 It's far to invasive and cloying. If you are an OCD personality type I get it but I had rather _play_ than fill out character sheets with a novels worth of every pedantic detail and stat.🤷♂️
depends who they play with - first group I DMed to lvl 22. Another group is now level 19 (was supposed to be a one-shot but they liked it so much we're still playing 3 years later). I do wish I'd used the same world since the first one I made in 1980, but I've generally made a new milieu with each edition.
@@crankysmurf that’s an exaggeration. If they’re leveling less frequently than once every three sessions though, they do get twitchy. Fundamentally, the player books simply have too many options laid out in them. If you’re not leveling up, they feel like they keep returning to a restaraunt where they can order from a third of the menu.
I’ll also say that two of those campaigns were with new players. 5e was great for getting them in and up and running. But none of them to this day ever bought into creating their own characters and really knowing what they could or couldn’t do with a certain class. Only 2 players ever went in to DM their own games, and neither for too long.
5e was a pop market sales operation It didn't at all create very many quality invested players. It played to accessibility. I don't enjoy 5e. I played it 3 years. Afterwards, I found myself returning to the detailed impartial random generation of 1st and 2nd AD&D - depth there is unrivaled from the DMs perspective.
As a participant in the 5th Edition playtests, I was extremely disappointed in the final product in some ways. I absolutely loved the concept of the four-factor character design: Race, Class, Background, and Approach. Unfortunately, the Balance Babies shot that down.
@@sand5857 I hate to disappoint you, but they intensively studied that playtest data to make the best game possible. The problem is "good" meant "appeals to the most potential players possible", rather than some quality-of-play metric. 5e tries hard to be all things to all people, it's hardly shocking some players find it a hollow experience.
I'd say the long term impact 5th Edition has had upon the hobby is friends we made along the way... quite literally. Also worth pointing out, ghe modularity of D&D 5E has led to an interesting ecosystem of 3rd party source material... but they haven't really taken full advantage, and part of it is those most prone to taking advantage of the Modularity, are the ones who looked at other games, i.e. those who found their home in the OSR. I mean, you cited Shadowdark as the example... well that's modularity doing its work. Remember, most players are going to be casuals, only so many really have it in them to be the "brewmaster" of the home brew... And while that is a damper on your success, in terms of legacy, it's also rhe source of your job security, and the reason I think I could still potentially enter this industry despite it being super duper saturated.
Yeah, there are some interesting 3rd party 5e products, and yet I'm not aware of any that are as radical in their innovations as stuff we routinely see in the OSR. But you might be right, about how the people who grokked that modularity in 5e might be drawn to the OSR (or some kind of "O5R").
@RPGPundit When you say "O5R" Professor Dungeon Master from Dungeon Craft is the person who comes to mind. He outright states that his OSR inspired Deathbringer system was built from a simplified set of 5E mechanics.
A friend of mine started his 3.5 D&D campaign at 2012, they were paying 10 hour sessions at least 2 times a month. His campaign still alive, whenever some players was changed, some players were dead, and they svitched to 1e pathfinder. I've joined theyr campaign for a short time in 2023 as episodic caracter, and it was a great fun. I think, one of the sighn of success is that sistem rises such dedicated cind of GMs and players, who can create such long and deep stories and stay attuned to them for so long time.
I have to disagree somewhat - 5e mechanically is a mess. It very quickly falls apart and that's not the customers fault, the original design isn't very good. Their are multiple issues but a lot of it boils down to bounded accuracy. This makes AC pointless and it makes most skills and DCs pointless very quickly as well. THis leads to a monster design which boils down to "bag of hit points" since rolling to hit is pointless its just slugfests. Very boring but there is little design space for the DM to fix it apart from "fudge stuff behind the screen". The design is not well thought through IMO. And no, I would not believe anyone who said they had run a 5e campaign for longer than 2 years or so. The game is horrifically anti-DM. It expects a lot of work from the DM, especially beyond level 8 or so and is unplayable - without massive amounts of work from the DM - after level 10. 4e is way better designed game. 3e (3.5, pf1e etc.) has issues but takes longer to break down (though I don't like that edition for a different reason - the reward of obtuse rules mastery (as you mention) and the whole "buff before every battle" meta. For context I have been playing/running D&D since 79 and I have played and run every edition "faithfully" moving from one edition to the next as they came out - though I wont be doing that anymore as 5e burned me out. I also ran 5e for 8+ years before abandoning it which included 6 separate campaigns, all those campaigns ended above level 10 and 4 of them were 1 to 20. We played (and still play) weekly at 4 hours a session, not including additional one shots during this time or mini campaigns for another 7 "campaigns". So at least 1,600 hours of game time as a DM. In retrospect I would take 3.5e and 4e over 5e - and I don't like either of those game systems (though 4e had a lot of good ideas, including peak monster design, but the package wasn't very good). So a financial success? yes. Design seucess? Abosultuly not. Will it be forgotten like 4e? Yes.
I agree that 5e runs into serious problems somewhere beyond level 10 or so. But that's also true of every other edition of official D&D (though not always for the same reasons).
Every version of 3rd edition is broken immediately, so I don't know what you mean there. Bounded accuracy is a good thing; when people talk about too many hit points, the problem is just too many hit points, not bounded accuracy. And Pundit is right, every version of the game struggles after level 10 because there's just too much for everyone to keep track of.
Most of my "RPGing" is done through OSR and independent systems, My 5E campaign has been going on and off since early 2020 and I don't plan stop anytime soon....however, I should state that I play 5E somewhat modified and detached from all but the core rule books and a few supplements. Basically, I use it to play my version of the "World of Dungeons & Dragons" where I take my main inspiration from 1980s cartoon series, the LGN toyline, and the Forgotten Realms. I reimage all the past D&D campaign settings as countries or continents that all exist on the same world and are populated by all the races and monsters in D&D history. The tone is a cross between LOTR, 1920's and 30's pulp weird fiction, 1970s and 80s swords and sorcery movies, with some nods to Star Wars. Yeah I know that sounds like a hot mess. lol
I think we must have a different definition of "modular". To me, modular means that the GM can easily alter a rule without breaking other parts of the system. In 3.x, if a GM wants to get rid of a feat, half the time it creates a cascade of other feats that get compromised because of it. Ditto with spells, and skills. That's not modular.
@@RPGPundit I certainly appreciate that and would love to be on. We do have a difference in opinion on the definition of modular in this respect. When I say 3.x is modular, I mean that picking which variants, supplements, and rules to include in the game, e.g. Which "modules" to plug into the machine which is the game, is the basis for how a GM shapes the game mechanics to influence a certain style of play and feeling to their campaign. It's also how they prevent game breaking power gaming as most "builds" rely on access to multiple rule sets which should virtually never all be included at one time. 3.5e, even in just the core books, was filled to the brim with variant rules and alternatives to change how the game played and the DMG was tailor built to guide a DM into that philosophy. 3.5e's issue is that the DM is forced to invest the same effort as the least lazy person at the table or more. You really can't be the quintessential lazy DM, and that gets taxing and tiresome quick.
3rd is bloated even within the core rules with no add ons. There are way, way too many feats and many of them are must-haves or literal trap options that were put there on purpose. Multiclassing or just playing a normal caster could be busted very easily too.
@@TheMinskyTerrorist I disagree, especially if you use done variant core rules, use the alignment system, and/or simply adjust the challenges presented in game you can easily keep casters manageable. Plus, in my opinion and experience, 3.5e is the only D&D edition where every build and every play style is not only viable bust can be extremely effective without relying on DM fiat
@@RPGPundit With the way the power imbalance shifted away from DM to players since 5th, good luck to the DM trying to put the breaks on the people in his game.
5E is not an even playing field for new comers vs min/maxers. Understanding what feats are worth it and what are garbage (most of them), how certain spells are used, and what multi class options work makes a huge difference. All Wizards had to do was put out a core book and then different setting books with unique feats, spells, classes and races. 5E could have gone on forever. Instead, in addition to crap adventures, they cranked out splat books that bloated the rules. As far as lengthy campaigns, I do play in a 5E game that is 6 years old and is in no danger of ending anytime soon. No one in my circles are going to play 6th.
Any game (at least, that's not totally random) will have SOME opportunities to min/max or powergame, so you're not wrong. The difference is of scale and intention. 3e was INTENTIONALLY made to punish newbies and reward OCD rules lawyers. 5e was intended to minimize the benefit to min/maxers. 6 years! You might have the world record. You have the record here so far.
If the average 5e campaign lasts 6 sessions, that doesn't necessarily mean half of all 5e campaigns last 6 or fewer sessions, and half of them last 6 or more sessions. If the median length was 6 sessions, then that would be true, but if it's just the average, then we don't know. My guess is that the median is probably less than the average -- there are probably tons of very short campaigns and a few very long campaigns.
5e was a great success when measured against what it was and what it was supposed to do. it succeeded in weakening the dnd community, weaken DMs, and empowering players. at first blush, many would say that empowering players was a good thing, but in this case it means empowering players at the expenses of rule consistency and game balance. it was a big step in the direction wotc wanted the players to go. it didn't bring in more players than expected. if anything, it polarized the community into "old school" players and "meta" players. it did not, however, make the game any more accessible or playable to new or new types of players. the goal was to bring players to online, subscription play moderated by AI DMs and away from the community and uncontrollable, one-time-sale, books. when measured this way, 5e and its latest iterations were resounding successes...
I can tell you, as someone who worked at the highest level on the guiding concepts for 5e, that it was very much the goal to bring in new players, and casual players, and that in spite of this 5e was successful beyond our wildest dreams (not all of this was due to the system, but because of a zeitgeist of the moment; however, if 5e hadn't been such an easily adoptable system, it likely would not have benefited; it was the perfect system to be around right at the moment that D&D became nostalgically cool again). However, where we really failed was that our original goal was to empower GMs to be really creative with the D&D rules, and that didn't happen.
@@RPGPundit where 5e failed DMs (and, by way of this, the community) was in its feeding of meta play without any real regard to game balance. this is because it was intentionally player-centric instead of centering on the game itself. the latest version is even worse in this regard (and so many others). good DMs are flexible. they'll take what rules work for them and their groups and ignore others, but the not-so-good DMs are stuck and generally accede to the whims of their players without knowing what is balanced. unbalanced gameplay leads to group erosion which weakens the community one small bit at a time...
@@CruentusV can you elavorate on this? I do not see it more than, lets say 3E and its player 'builds'. Furthermore, I found its non definition of the skills and DCs, a total 'mother may I...?' Or tea party style of play that feels very anti-player agency.
@@CruentusV on 5e being more player centric than ... 3e for example? 3e appoach to be Rolemaster forces DMs to be more rulemastery and fair from players perspective, while 5e half 'non defined' rules drops you totally at DM whims every time... ever. That is why I'm wondering. I mean on the rules side, I do not know if is the tone of the books selling that player empowering.
Ok so I checked out Bill the Elf's channel. That was a very entraining 10 minutes lol. I want to know about that system, setting, and group, and how you managed to play for so many years! Is there a video on it?
I should probably make a video about that! I can answer the system question: we pretty much run DCC (Dungeon Crawl Classics) rules-as-written. As for the setting, its a world of my own creation, that grew gradually, and you can purchase the setting book: World of the Last Sun, as well as a sourcebook: The Gonzo Fantasy Companion.
Mr Welch put out a YT video about his 'perfect' D&D edition built from bits and pieces of the various previous edition's rules (if any of them were good enough to meet the needs of the issue at hand) since he's played them all quite a bit (4th maybe not so much). Keep in mind that he's a grognard whose favorite setting is Mystara. His channel is largely dedicated to the setting of Mystara. He also made 'The List of Things Mr Welch Is No Longer Allowed To Do In A RPG'. It currently stands at 2,600+ entries.. The perfect 'frankensten' version of D&D th-cam.com/video/qK0CrzAagME/w-d-xo.html
Chiming in to say that I do have a 5e campaign that's still running which has gone past 2 years and I expect it to continue to go onwards. I completely understand why really short campaigns the norm are though. I started DMing with 5e and WotC didn't provide much support for showing people how to do things aside from lipservice in the PHB. The DMG does have info on how to do it and a lot of the info is quite good, but it is really scattered around sometimes and requires research outside the book, so I stuck with the pre-written stuff for a while until I played a lot, did a lot of research, and had multiple "false start" campaigns where I just didn't get it right and it fizzled out. I wonder if the large crowd that 5e attracted would have really gone for the longer campaigns if they would have put in proper support for it. They never wanted to do it though. I remember directly asking a WotC employee just after the 5e launch and their response was basically there's no player base for anything past short prewritten campaigns and lower-level characters, so don't expect too much from them. He's right that it narrows down as you get further, but I think when you see games like Baldur's Gate 3 succeed so wildly with lots of end game content, it makes you wonder if they're going to learn a lesson from that. Based on the 2024 PHB content they haven't so far.
Not only was there a lack of support, there were these campaign books that had 20 adventures in them and took you from level 1 to level 20. It was ridiculous. Spread the word, share the video!
I am beyond glad that I found you and got your materials to help run my campaign. I have been a DM for two years now and my campaign is at its second year anniversary. The characters are about to face a final big bad and then if they survive, get their happily ever after. Then I get to use Dark Albion, Valikan Clans, and some other sources and begin anew. Same world, about five years in the future, consequences of the players choices say hello.
The best lesson taught by 5e is the DM should be flexible, adaptable, and make half of it up. Also, RP is king. I find this only works after having a deep understanding of the rules. I play the game in a completely modular way. I think it's all up to the DM. love so many things from 4e that I use in my games. Players don't know crap about the rules these days I've found, if the DM tells them when to roll then they are fine. Besides that I think WOTC is insufferable and the DnD community has become probably the worst bunch of people that you could ever imagine. Emphasize on "has become"
"and make half of it up." That's fine for some players, and will drive others totally insane. Player: "But I did Y because the book says that would produce Z!" DM: "Sorry, in my game X produces D! Melody and Tarquinn don't mind when I make stuff up, why do you?"
@@ComicGladiator Yea so that’s why for the most part you flex off of a deep understanding of the rules, but when we are bound by them, it’s just becomes like any other video game. I only see pure power gamers (who don’t even want RP) having an issue. Also making half of it up is mandatory. There isn’t a rule for everything.
Almost 30 years for Birthright! Every week still, down to about 3.5 hrs now, but we used to go 5-6. To be fair, I do take breaks for a few months every year and a half or so to let Rogan run another game so we get a nice variety.
"Options" as a game design goal is bad design. It is the designer's responsibility to put together the best combination of rules. It is lazy design to leave that up to the players. 2nd edition proved this. Smart, creative, design oriented players will come up with optional rules if they want to anyway, it shouldn't be baked into the game. It is confusing.
Only 6 sessions? Looking at my last 4 campaigns, the current one is 43 sessions and ongoing, the previous ones ran 93, 94, and 85 sessions - so not quite 4 years on the average (we run every other week with the occasional miss).
As GM I use D&D 5E mechanics quite often, because I can focus on story not on fancy damage table or something like in Neuroshima 1,5 edition. By the way, our campaign lasts probably 15 sessions already.
I found your channel only some weeks ago and I didn't realize you were on the WotC team to make 5e. I wanted to ask though, how did you get into writing and game design professionally and how do you generally go about the task of writing rules for games?
I've talked about this on previous videos, around 2005 I started a blog about the hobby, and it came to be very well known. A few years later I tried my hand at making a couple of games, and got involved in the osr. I hadn't expected that I would become a full-time game designer but here we are!
@@RPGPundit Thanks for your reply man, looking forward to more videos. I have a side project game I've been designing for some months now and your insight with some of these videos has been almost immediately helpful. Cheers and have a good one
My 5e Saltmarsh / Greyhawk campaign is still going and coming up on our 3rd anniversary. We have no plans to switch to 5.5/One D&D/Whatever they're calling it. After almost 3 years of (mostly) weekly play, the party is at 7th level and very engaged. We have enjoyed some side games of ICONS and Lion & Dragon, and we hope to do more in the future, but 5.5 isn't on the menu.
Mine lasted 2 sessions before the other dm in his third session coopted my setting because he couldnt be bothered to run his game properly. Had he asked before jumping settings this might not be a problem, but he genuinely didnt give a damn. It was the last straw for me as it made me realise no friend would do that at least not one outside of kindergarten!
@@RPGPundit possibly. Most people I played with or knew of stuck to the rules pretty closely. We homebrewed monsters and lore of course. I think by the time 2e came out was when we all bid adios to level restrictions. I didn't play from 1996 to 2008 (apart from one night), so totally missed 3/3.5e.
From experience, I can tell that 2e, with all those different campaign supplements and players guides turned to a very modular and house ruly game, at least on the tables I played or DM'd. I presume 3e just turn that to 11.
One could argue that table top rpgs were conceived by a generation of people whose psychological profile no longer exists. People aren't built for table top role-playing games any longer.
I don't really think that's true. Clearly the aspects of 5e that were highly successful show that it's not. What is clear however is that people have shorter attention spans.
Nah, my millennial and xer players have plenty of fun, and we keep the campaigns going. What I would say is that rather young gamers now will struggle to read someone like Gygax. I've had some pushback, participated in threads on this. They think he is almost insane, and his style of writing too arcane. They don't put in the work to understand what he was setting up and saying. It's a comprehension issue as well as a psych profile, but comprehension of the written word has been in decline for at least thirty years.
Well, I get the feeling that's more of an aesthetic position, as in, none of them felt enough like D&D to you. Of course, there's other people who feel that way about 2e too.
@@RPGPundit Thanks Kai, for a response rather than just saying thanks and "share the video." I've commented a few times now, and I've been meaning to say that none of my AD&D apologetics is meant as an insult to or other gamers who are engaging the market now. I've said D&D was never "broken" and creative people should provide adventures and milieu for the greatest game ever - that we don't need new games. I respect that you've published and don't mean to sound obtuse or diminish your own accomplishments. Having said that, I wouldn't be happy if my name was attached to 5e. I don't know the circumstances around which you were invited (hired?), but I'm surprised given your commentary about the socio-political woke mind virus infecting our hobby. Even in your videos I can't help but think you're grasping at the proverbial straws to say something nice, or at least neutral about 3rd, 4th, and 5e, when you yourself can't possibly believe it. AD&D was developed after ALL the play testing to that date, by the people who created the original RPG. Expert war-gamers at that. When I see all these new "games" I have to laugh. People criticize AD&D and almost EVERYTIME it takes me a minute or two find evidence right in the texts that they forgot or never read said passages. No one has improved D&D. I haven't seen it yet. I enjoy so many OSR "pundits" who are gaslighting themselves about "flaws" in AD&D and yet there is a conspicuous absence of comments and anecdotes about actual game play where/when they allegedly proved the system was flawed. Racists of the Coast purchased an IP. The law now allows them to publish any dreck and call it D&D. They changed the mechanic so much it's a different game. And we cannot get past the influence of the video game world. It alters the RPG for the worse and is not compatible. Imagine playing a D&D like video game and your character's torch expires? Try playing a video game in the dark...! Oh, viola! Everyone can see in 5e. Case rested! It's a video game and the designers know those. NOT RPGS....Activists have infiltrated a game company and perverted its business model. Something other than game design has been going on. Enough for now. Thanks, I'll be ready soon to give this a go myself.
It should be have accounted that 3rd edition had the most broad and free style d20/ocr licenses.... that allowed for the proliferation on great supplements of small companies and even created the beast that 'was' Pathfinder.
You try sending me a invite. All i need to know is when on Sunday. Sunday is usually the day i make my videos. Any time after 5pm United States central time is good.
Well, I'll put you on the list. I'm only doing one episode every 4 weeks, so I can't say when your time will come, but you have the kind of channel that I would like to highlight to people.
My understanding of shadowdark is that it isn’t designed for long and/or ongoing campaigns. Won’t that suffer the same fate in terms of people not playing very long?
I'd have to take a closer look at Shadowdark to be sure of that. I think that Shadowdark thematically seems to be oriented to dungeon crawling, and this tends to be less focused on long-term campaigning. But that doesn't mean that it couldn't be used for that. The question would be how suitable is it really for high-level play. To provide a context, look at DCC. I think most people think of DCC as a game you largely play to just do the "character funnel" in a dungeon with 0 or 1st level characters. However, the mechanics of DCC are so well designed that they stand up extremely well for play all the way through to level 10; my campaign is proof of that. It's the same with all the games I design. There's basically two things that are really important for long-term play: one is niche protection so that no class becomes useless at higher level, the other is that mortality continues to be an issue at higher level play. Spread the word, share the video!
I think Shadowdark's very open license could help with its longevity as well. A lot of people are making stuff for it, and probably will for years to come. Given the license, people could also make new rules and stuff that opens it up to more types of play beyond just dungeon delving. I think it also comes down to how the GM decides to pace things, and (as Pundit says) lethality at higher levels. Tension is the name of the game in TTRPGs, and once that is gone so is the fun.
@@RPGPundit I believe we’ve done that with our rpg, Mystic Days though we ditched levels in favor of skill based mechanics It’s a lethal game. From your first spell to your last and you could end up killing your entire party if your spell goes wrong. You’ve been warned.
Its likely to. Pathfinder has been on a ten year decline (with a slight boost when they put out 2nd edition, but that quickly dropped down again after that). The various games that were created as a result of the OGL fiasco are likely to fall off the face of the earth with one or two possible exceptions. On the other hand, the OSR has been steadily growing for the last 5 years and is likely to benefit from a weaker WotC D&D, just like it did in the 4e era.
I think that each edition of the game offers something unique. Except 5e, which I don't think will stand the test of time, because in trying to cater to multiple styles of gameplay, it doesn't excel at any one thing in particular. There are better dungeon crawling experiences to be had elsewhere, better narrative games, better simulationist games, better heroic fantasy settings, games that provide better character building options, better tactical combat games, better miniatures games. etc etc.
4e was a disastrous failure BECAUSE it tried to be "one thing". Forge Theory is garbage, which is why it failed. The OSR is the most successful design school of all time because it does the exact opposite.
I agree with the general analysis. I think people hold onto previous editions in part because they like it, but also it's akin to holding onto the group. Most of the instances I've seen are peopel who were playing then and just went on playing. I don't know of a lot of groups who met in 5e and started playing 3e together. If that's true anyway. I don't see 5e staying around. Sure there were more fans, but it feels less like people are playing a game together during the 5e era than any other edition. Everyone kind of comes in with the anime character in their head and the game is incidental. Part of that is culture, part of that is design too though. One of the worse design elements of 5e is that EVERYTHING comes from the character class. There really is no link to any thing outside of the class, particularly not the world. Really not to your actions either. You fumble arouind and level no matter what. So why be invested in anyithing? I think this was part the design that made 4e go extinct as well. Just my thoughts.
As excited as I was when 3rd Edition came out, I’ve since come to appreciate simplicity and elegance in game design. Too many options and too many rules hamstring the gameplay. I see the attempt in 5E to ameliorate the rules bloat in 3E, but the heavy emphasis on character building can still bog things down. Shadowdark’s revolutionary and totally original random character development when levelling does a lot to speed things up (while not unduly rewarding rules familiarity). I still love the idea of character options, but they have to be reined in to some degree.
3e, when it first came out, felt like a breath of fresh air. It still felt like D&D but it also streamlined a lot of the rules. It also replaced the totally burnt-out setting-wank with going back to the "kick in the door dungeoncrawling" basics. Those were excellent strategies on the part of Tweet & Cook. It was bloat over time, and the problem of rewarding the most obsessive rules lawyers, that combined to eventually crash that edition. Random character development is awesome. I'm so thankful that shadowdark came up with it, so that I could then steal it, go back in time in my TARDIS, and put it into my OSR games in 2015.
It seems to me that in 'fixing the problem' of 3.0/3.5, IE people enjoying researching mechanical details and plotting out their character from 1-20+; you guys created a game where people enjoy researching options for characters that they think are cute and quirky, writing 10 pages of backstory, then playing 3 sessions before they get itchy feet about trying their new persona that they created in the meantime.
That's certainly possible. In my analysis in this video it's kind of what I'm trying to get at. I think that commercially it is more viable, to make a game that is more appealing to casuals, but in terms of legacy 5e might have been TOO casual.
Don't take this the wrong way, as I do want to see you, and everyone else in the TTRPG stream space, succeed and continually improve, but I think you should hear what some of your detractors are saying. A group of people were making fun of you and your channel the other day due to the number of videos that just show a camera view of your products leaning up or laying on a table somewhere for the entirety of the show and I think I agree that this isn't the best option for continued engagement. Even if they're completely relevant to the discussion, it's just not visually stimulating after more than a few seconds and detracts from what you're trying to say, which is oft' wise. That's not to say you shouldn't shill your amazing products, just that they should either be shown as a smaller overlay in the corner, held up or displayed when directly relevant to the conversation, or beside you as you personally/visually speak to the camera. If we're not constantly visually stimulated, we're going to focus on something else like chores while just listening and much less-likely to glance down and move to purchase the supplements you're rightly trying to show off. The only other, hopefully constructive, criticism I have to vastly improve the show, especially if you stick to your current face-off-stream/podcast style formula, is the spacial sound of the room itself. Maybe you're a little too far back from the mic, need a filter/different style mic, or something like egg-crate/foam to diffuse the echo. It sounds a little like you're talking to us from just down a wide empty hallway. Love your stuff either way brother, but I'd love to love it more ;-)
One of the business failures of D&D, for Hasbro, was that it allowed a lot of other companies to make interesting products that raked in millions that Hasbro failed to make. While I don't like what the new audience has done to D&D, it did succeed in acquiring a new audience.
That wasn't so much a failure, as a feature. Having compatible 3rd party products (ones that WotC itself would never have made) helps keep the fan base engaged on this game, rather than moving to other games. It's part of the same reason for the huge success of the OSR.
Some of the drivers of shorter 5E campaigns are not related to the design itself. Remember that Gen Z friend groups interact in person much less than us Gen X-ers. Also, with social media, attention spans are much shorter. A long RP campaign requires a significant investment of time.
The main age demographic of 5e players are neither Gen X nor Gen Z, they're Millennials. The kind that love to get together for kombucha drinking parties with charcouterie in hipster clothing and coincidentally play D&D.
I managed to run a 5 year campaign with a 3 hour session each week in 5e. I personally believe the biggest issue with 5e campaign lifespan is the have a go mentality of casuals. Someone will try to start a campaign and lose half their players after the first session and kill off the campaign.
To give you my personal opinion regarding the intent of Mearls, you and the other consultants for D&D 5e and how that went: you didn't fail in building that modular base. Anyone with a functioning brain that bothered to read at least half of the Dungeon Master 5e book could figure out that D&D 5e is a modular system that GMs should tweak to their own liking and that Setting + Modular Rules combo books are on the way. Unfortunately it didn't happen as it was initially intended. There's a reason why D&D 5e's 3rd party market was and still is pretty popular - they are doing what WOTC was too lazy to do. If anyone failed that vision, that someone is Crawford once he became the head developer after Mearls was exiled. Where you (as in the entire development team, including consultants AND Mearls) screwed up was The Exploration Pillar and how spells made a joke out of it. When you have crap like the 5e "Goodberry" and "Create or Destroy Water" spells (note that those are level 1 spells) you cut short any requirement for resource management or risks for the party to starve or die from dehydration. Don't get me started on the Ranger that is simultaneously crap and at the same time makes traveling the wilderness trivial. The HP bloat and little to no risk combat can be fixed by giving monsters their minimum recommended HP and by not caring about Crawford's precious "balanced encounters", but exploration was killed in its infancy. You guys didn't signal to GMs what spells are trivializing aspects of the game, exploration included. Combined with the stupid opinions of some people (ex: "if you ban or nerf races and spells you are a bad GM") you helped in the creation of a situation where it's unnecessarily hard for a GM to run the game in a more old-school style. Besides having to fight the spell system with no guidance, new GMs had to fight the players. Just to be clear, I think it's a shared guilt; for the later I don't blame the developers, but the internet "celebrities" that encouraged this stupid mentality. Fortunately others in the 3rd party market have done what should have been done from the beginning (or at least during its first few years of existence). And finally, almost no one regardless of political leanings, gives a F about the opinions of Crawford. People figured out long ago that he rarely knows what he's talking about. He's good at converting isolated ideas into rules, but he's crap at tying-up mechanics together and he's too afraid to not upset the "holy balance" of the game. He had so many bad and contradictory takes that no one cares what he has to say. He's especially annoying when he tries to hype in interviews parts of upcoming books; every time the things he was the most passionate about proved to be the most underwhelming and disappointing (he's like the Peter Molyneux of P&P games, but with a 6 in Charisma). I think that the only people that keep asking him things about rules on Twitter at this point are trolls that enjoy seeing him get annoyed.
I got into D&D via Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, a shockingly good system. it plays like an OSR instead of a rules-heavy hell that is pathfinder ttrpg. Since you like random encounter tables, you might actually dig it. next was 5e, which lead me to youtube, which lead me to you, which lead to buying Baptism Of Fire. I'd say 5e was a success.
I think a lot of interesting 5e variants and interesting content for 5e is coming out now and over the last few years, but seems to be a lot later than you thought. Then the double whammy of covid which has moved a lot of people online. So this alternate content has to make their rules, produce books, pdfs and now vtt content...these smaller independent creators are behind on the vtt front...so digital playera havent been able to as easily move away from vanilla 5e. ex..DCC, is just now coming out with support for roll20 (my preferred vtt). Same with Traveller. So the shift away from DnD, unfortunatly in 2024....isnt progress to far unless the content providers support the digital tools....which of course cost $$$. Make Albion for a VTT and I will buy it.
If I had to bet, I’d put all my money on No. WotC has done their own studies that show that most campaigns last for only a few to several month and most characters only reach 6th to 10th level.
Yup. But there still could be someone who has been playing the same campaign, one little group, for the last 10 years. In the comments, there's someone who has been running the same campaign for 6 years, which is pretty damn good, and I will assume is the world record for 5e, until someone else gives a better number.
What fundamentally pains me of this edition is it anti classical hero epicness... From its slow bonuses, its continuos low level theat, short minded high level powers/spells, and expectation of murder hobo nobodies at high level play that own nothing.... Asian rpg & media are the successors of high level play imaginery... and that irks me. If you want to play low level campaign broad the level advancements... but do not design a game where ending levels are afraid of low level threats.
People complain a lot about 5th and forget what it was trying to do in 2014, make an easily accessible version of the game that worked similar to a fixed 3rd edition, with some of the more popular parts of 4th edition. It was extremely successful. The only reason there are so many people that complain and nitpick it is that so many people played it in the first place, people that either never played 3rd or conveniently forgot how bad it was. Most complaints are coming from either end: the old school people who don't like the modern style of play anyway (perfectly fair), and people who want a fine tuned, balanced character building game with a bajillion options like 4th edition or Pathfinder 2. If you're anywhere in the middle and you don't mind tinkering with the game then it's still solid. There's a reason almost every new OSR game copies advantage and disadvantage.
@@RPGPundit I guess that was hyperbole on my part and I don't have time to look through all the games coming out lately. But Knave has nothing to do with 5e at all and Shadowdark doesn't take very much from it. It's more like B/X with advantage/disadvantage and a bunch of stuff stolen from DCC.
4e gets way more hate than is deserved. It was such a fun system but people seem to be unable to judge it fairly on its merits because it's "not D&D" or whatever silliness. Atleast no one had to worry about there character becoming useless because they chose the wrong class to play. Also the whole spell plague stuff was pretty cool and really pushed the points of light type of campaign. Just 2 copper from a long time D&D player.
I've always wanted to try 4e but can never get a group together to try. Everyone in my play group actually played 4e before I joined the group and they all really, really hated it. When I ask why, I never get a real reason 😅. The only reason I got was when I asked about a year or so ago and was told "4e made martials too strong" which I took with a grian of salt considering the person that told me always plays casters and just loves 5e 😂
@@thegreatkabukino6639 Im by no means an expert on 4e but i tried playing a few games. imo it didnt feel like dnd, a complaint about 3-3.5 was balance and wotc over did it. all the classes/subclasses felt very similar, the subclasses were essentially filling the same roles for each class, i remember getting rock paper scissor vibes but if you think that means combat would be simple youd be wrong. everyone has so much stuff they can do and a lot of things require xy before you can z so everyone has to be on top of their game or you end up screwing yourselves or the dm is retconning rounds, even if your rolling with the mishaps combat still takes forever. 4e was designed with the idea an app would be available, I dont think it was good or ran well might not have even been completed at the peak of 4e, I never used it but ive heard MCDM talk about it on several occasions.
I gave a lot too say about 5E and perhaps I will add it to this comment as I collect my thoughts. However there is one thing that I think needs to be said, 5E was Skyrim. What do I mean by this? Well I didn't mind Skyrim but one of my major complaints about it is there is no classes, everyone is playing everything and its annoying and bland. In 5E everyone is a melee, spell caster with skills. Nobody is unique and special so everyone steps on eachothers toes.
That is a somewhat legitimate complaint. At the time of the design I kept trying to advocate for there to be tighter niche protection. Spread the word, share the video!
All of your points about 5e's limitations and tremendous appeal to casual players are accurate, but I think you draw the wrong conclusions. I can't honestly think of a situation where a high conversion rate--turning first time players into returning players--is ever a bad thing for a game, or the hobby in general. It's much easier to convert a casual player into an invested player than it is to convert a non-player to a serious player! First off, the more casual players there are, the more likely one of them is going have to be the DM, which is probably the most likely way to convert a casual D&D player to an actual RPG enthusiast. If just one in five casual D&D players eventually start DMing, (thus noticing 5e's numerous pain points and design compromises), that's a ton of serious players. Second, the massive popularity of 5e means there's a ton of money sloshing around in the 3rd party space for anyone who wants to make modified versions. It's not a large slice of the community, but it's big enough it seems anyone with a decent platform can probably raise a quarter of a million for a project with relative ease. It's a strong enough phenomenon people actually complain that designers keep releasing 5e variants for properties rather than making new systems for financial reasons (the recent Adventure Time game being 5e, for example). If you think that 5e could ever be a net negative to the hobby, you're basically conceding that none of these players can be converted to other games, now that 5e got them into the hobby, which seems unlikely to me. They're definitely easier to entice into OSR games than Vampire LARPers.
Well, but Vampire is a pretty good example. It was unique in the context of RPGs (aside from D&D) in that there were a ton of gamers who started with Vampire and ONLY played Vampire (or occasionally other World of Darkness games, but nothing else). This also tied into a fad, the Vampire/Goth fad, much as 5e benefitted from the D&D Nostalgia fad. But when that fad passed, only a very limited number of those Vampire players went on to try any other games. Most just quit.
@@RPGPundit I would argue that 5e appears to have vastly better conversion rates than VtM. Shadowdark, for example, persuaded a ton of 5e players to try an OSR style game. I literally have two casuals in my Shadowdark game who just show up to roll d20s and smash monsters. Even if WotC’s decision to force an unneeded edition change causes a 5e collapse, I suspect it will be closer in effect to a supernova that spawns tons of smaller (and hopefully more varied) stars in the wake of its destruction. You’ve studied history-nothing as big as 5e collapses without creating multiple successor states.
I would say no. It initially did what it set out to do, which was to rectify the mistake that was 4e, which it did handily. It only started to go downhill once the woke garbage seeped in, and that didn't happen until later on, and thankfully that was limited to certain books outside of the core three. In terms of mechanics, it's a solid edition, IMO.
Well, if you've watched the whole video my answer is mixed. It was in some respects a big success, but it was failure in others, and what I'm seriously in doubt about is what its legacy will be.
Latakia is king. Quiet Nights (Gaslight is overrated, but still decent), Pirate Kake, Mac Baren Latakia flake, and Northwoods for an all the time smoke. (Plum Pudding sucks, and so does everything by SPC. Its the WOTC of pipe tobacco. All hype, no substance..)
I really like Latakia, but over the last few years I've come to enjoy Virginia/Perique mixes, and pure but very high quality burley even more than English blends.
For Perique, War Horse has always been a favorite. Just the right amount of that peppery, spicy, mild-bite one comes to love with Perique blends. For Burley, lol I'm basic. Half & Half OTC for me. Classic gas station pouch. XD Have a jar of Haunted Bookshop I offer to guests. Just can't stand that hot-burning Burley. lol
My new favorite Vir/Per is Chacom #4. And high-end burley doesn't have the tonguebite. Solani's Aged Burley Flake is probably the greatest tobacco I ever smoked.
I am talking with someone who is willing to help me out with the strange magic of how streamyard can somehow get on my youtube and let me have a guest.
Excellent analysis! 5e is a failure all the way to the bank for WOTC. Most Gamers lack imagination- needing to be entertained rather than create and entertain others- an experienced and talented writer/ game designer cannot imagine what it’s like to be a beginner player- to a beginner- 5e is awesome! To an advanced player or game designer- 5e is crap.
But are they "idiots who refuse to play anything not 5e"? Or are they "idiots who refuse to play anything that isn't the CURRENT THING WotC told them to play"?
I get the instinct to think that, but I don't think that the two things are actually one and the same. They are two things that happened at the same time. You COULD say that a game that is focused to casual customers is more easily taken over by woke fanatics, except that given how every other geek hobby was taken over (often worse) by woke fanatics even if they weren't focused at casuals, I'm not sure that's true at all.
5th edition just did not work with the way my brain functioned. I found it impossible to run and impossible to house rule. I went back to 3.5 and it worked so much easier for me and my group. The other added benefit - Woke WOTC got none of my money.
It was a decent game (the original version of the early core rules, at least compared to other WOTC rulesets) ruined by a truly horrid culture that grew around it.
@@RPGPundit At least 5e at release made the Fighter useable again compared to 3rd ed. Then they decided to repeat the same mistakes as that edition and caster bloat consumed the game.
Myprevious group, younger gamers (under 30 at the time) cared little for 5E and no one would run it . We played like 3 times over several years , no campaigns of any kind. I had fun and would have run but no one was interested . Still anecdotes are not evidence
When WOTC said on D&D the brand and not the game should’ve been a huge red flag. Late 3.5 had far more modularity than 5e ever did. Psionics, invokers, incarnum, martial adepts, and skill tricks.
Modularity means "how easy you can remove and replace the supposed CORE RULES. In 3.x, if you just decided that a single Feat was kind of dumb and you didn't want to use it in your campaign, there was a 50% chance your removal would collapse the entire Feat-Tree system. NOT MODULAR. Modular would be a game that has feats where the GM can just say "fuck it, we're not using this feat" and there is ZERO chance that removing it will affect anything else.
They don't want players playing older systems/versions. They want you to consume to current, and keep being casual because it will yield more money and it won't matter if it's slop They release cause the player base will just be flippant about it. Look at the state of video games, it's a good analog to it.
I honestly gave 5e a good try. Played and GM'd. I found it quite fun to play, but I had been away from class/level games so long I forgot about the constant arms race it is. I really did not like the everyone levels at the same time pretty much aspect of it either. It also seemed to be an arms race between PCs and Monsters - and that seemed to be the main point of the game. Maybe that was just me. I am playing a PF2 game now - and if anyone ever tells me that GURPS or Hero System are complicated ever again I will shove the PF2 Core Rulebook down t heir throats.
Haven't finished the video yet but I wanted to go ahead and say that 5r wasn't a failure of an TTRPG, especially not initially. Where it failed at was attempting to become a story game. Book after book coming out letting you customize your origin, making martials damn near completely useless and have 100 different backgrounds for characters to pick from. CR and other "actual play" channels, game designers and other fools coming along and trying to take what was basically 3.5e but simplified and turn it into Candela Obscura. Makes about as much sense as trading your house for a tent. Also side note: Sorry to hear about the streaming troubles. Maybe try streamlabs? TH-cam is notorious for being really wonky with trying to bring on other people over livestreams for some reason, even back when Google Hangouts were a thing lmao.
The "wanting to become a storygame" thing had nothing to do with the rules, and everything to do with a group of people who got into the game (largely because of Critical Role, plus the woke incursion). As for "martials becoming useless", that has always been a problem with D&D. Its why I've tried so hard in my own games to make sure that doesn't happen; in Lion & Dragon or Baptism of Fire, warriors keep being incredibly bad-ass at every level.
D&D 5e was a decently-designed game, even if some of the concepts it was based on were stupid. The problem is that 5e coincided with the mainstreaming dilution of the tabletop hobby, as well as the burgeoning popularity of freaksh!t races and LGBT characters. As well as the soulless cartoonish art stye of most characters now, and a complete lack of regard for fantasy aesthetic.
Facts in evidence. Pretty sure Meatball agrees.
Have to agree
Truth indeed.
It was not a "coincidence". 5e was DESIGNED to mainstream the hobby. It was part of our goals. What was coincidental is that this mainstreaming, meant to get more normal people into the hobby, coincided with a group of psychotic communists taking over all aspects of popular culture.
@@RPGPundit What actually made D&D mainstream post-2010 was such fare as Big Bang Theory, Stranger Things, World of Warcraft, and loads of other such junk. It'd be ridiculous to either credit or blame the rules system itself for doing all that. The game itself was just a lubricant, and that might be a fitting analogy given what it feels like these people have done to the tabletop RPG culture.
The fall of every edition can summed up in three words: "too much crap." Too many new rules, new classes, new "options" that don't stay optional, new powers for the power gamers, and new races to appease the furries. The sheer amount of "stuff" reaches a critical mass, and rather than try and keep up, people simply tune out.
Well that, and the desire of the parent company to screw all the authors out of future royalties.
True, but curiously in 5e's case the crap turned out to be more social than mechanical. Spread the word, share the video!
Ehhhh... A huge chunk was definitely mechanical.
Well, i see it more on their need to really sell new shiny stuff for all.... and nothing sells more than the three basic rulebooks, ever.
_Me as an old AD&D DM_
**Opens 3.5 players handbook**
😶
**Slides back onto shelf**
There'll be none of _that_ plaguing my table...🤨
@@sadwingsraging3044 I’ve legit done this repeatedly. I played in 1 long term PF1 campaign and I inherited a bunch of 3 and 3.5e books. Every time I open one I get pretty overwhelmed and just close it.
It's funny you mention that, I'm actually in the middle of hosting a 3.5 campaign and as crunchy and hectic as it can be, it's already a much better experience than my last two 5e campaigns.
@@thegreatkabukino6639 I think I would enjoy playing in a 3.5 game. But I need someone who knows it to DM for me. There’s so much crunch I’m intimidated at the thought of DMing it.
I love 3.5/pf 1 it's what dnd is ment to be.
@mrspeigle1 It's far to invasive and cloying.
If you are an OCD personality type I get it but I had rather _play_ than fill out character sheets with a novels worth of every pedantic detail and stat.🤷♂️
New 5E players don't have attention span to do a multi-year campaign. They want to level up every X session regardless of XP or story milestones.
That seems to be true of at least 50% of them. Spread the word, share the video!
Interesting point
Its the era of the one shot sessions...
depends who they play with - first group I DMed to lvl 22. Another group is now level 19 (was supposed to be a one-shot but they liked it so much we're still playing 3 years later). I do wish I'd used the same world since the first one I made in 1980, but I've generally made a new milieu with each edition.
@@crankysmurf that’s an exaggeration. If they’re leveling less frequently than once every three sessions though, they do get twitchy.
Fundamentally, the player books simply have too many options laid out in them. If you’re not leveling up, they feel like they keep returning to a restaraunt where they can order from a third of the menu.
I’ve managed to run 3 campaigns of any length in 5e. A year long, a 2 year, and another 1 year. I’ve run an additional half dozen 1-2 shots.
I’ll also say that two of those campaigns were with new players. 5e was great for getting them in and up and running. But none of them to this day ever bought into creating their own characters and really knowing what they could or couldn’t do with a certain class. Only 2 players ever went in to DM their own games, and neither for too long.
In that case you are WAY above the average in terms of 5e players. Well done.
5e was a pop market sales operation
It didn't at all create very many quality invested players. It played to accessibility.
I don't enjoy 5e. I played it 3 years. Afterwards, I found myself returning to the detailed impartial random generation of 1st and 2nd AD&D - depth there is unrivaled from the DMs perspective.
As a participant in the 5th Edition playtests, I was extremely disappointed in the final product in some ways. I absolutely loved the concept of the four-factor character design: Race, Class, Background, and Approach. Unfortunately, the Balance Babies shot that down.
I would like to know how much of those playtests were just for create hype and window dressing
... pathfinder had that problem also.
@@sand5857 I hate to disappoint you, but they intensively studied that playtest data to make the best game possible. The problem is "good" meant "appeals to the most potential players possible", rather than some quality-of-play metric. 5e tries hard to be all things to all people, it's hardly shocking some players find it a hollow experience.
I'd say the long term impact 5th Edition has had upon the hobby is friends we made along the way... quite literally.
Also worth pointing out, ghe modularity of D&D 5E has led to an interesting ecosystem of 3rd party source material... but they haven't really taken full advantage, and part of it is those most prone to taking advantage of the Modularity, are the ones who looked at other games, i.e. those who found their home in the OSR. I mean, you cited Shadowdark as the example... well that's modularity doing its work. Remember, most players are going to be casuals, only so many really have it in them to be the "brewmaster" of the home brew... And while that is a damper on your success, in terms of legacy, it's also rhe source of your job security, and the reason I think I could still potentially enter this industry despite it being super duper saturated.
Yeah, there are some interesting 3rd party 5e products, and yet I'm not aware of any that are as radical in their innovations as stuff we routinely see in the OSR. But you might be right, about how the people who grokked that modularity in 5e might be drawn to the OSR (or some kind of "O5R").
@RPGPundit When you say "O5R" Professor Dungeon Master from Dungeon Craft is the person who comes to mind. He outright states that his OSR inspired Deathbringer system was built from a simplified set of 5E mechanics.
A friend of mine started his 3.5 D&D campaign at 2012, they were paying 10 hour sessions at least 2 times a month. His campaign still alive, whenever some players was changed, some players were dead, and they svitched to 1e pathfinder. I've joined theyr campaign for a short time in 2023 as episodic caracter, and it was a great fun. I think, one of the sighn of success is that sistem rises such dedicated cind of GMs and players, who can create such long and deep stories and stay attuned to them for so long time.
I have to disagree somewhat - 5e mechanically is a mess. It very quickly falls apart and that's not the customers fault, the original design isn't very good. Their are multiple issues but a lot of it boils down to bounded accuracy. This makes AC pointless and it makes most skills and DCs pointless very quickly as well. THis leads to a monster design which boils down to "bag of hit points" since rolling to hit is pointless its just slugfests. Very boring but there is little design space for the DM to fix it apart from "fudge stuff behind the screen". The design is not well thought through IMO.
And no, I would not believe anyone who said they had run a 5e campaign for longer than 2 years or so. The game is horrifically anti-DM. It expects a lot of work from the DM, especially beyond level 8 or so and is unplayable - without massive amounts of work from the DM - after level 10. 4e is way better designed game. 3e (3.5, pf1e etc.) has issues but takes longer to break down (though I don't like that edition for a different reason - the reward of obtuse rules mastery (as you mention) and the whole "buff before every battle" meta.
For context I have been playing/running D&D since 79 and I have played and run every edition "faithfully" moving from one edition to the next as they came out - though I wont be doing that anymore as 5e burned me out. I also ran 5e for 8+ years before abandoning it which included 6 separate campaigns, all those campaigns ended above level 10 and 4 of them were 1 to 20. We played (and still play) weekly at 4 hours a session, not including additional one shots during this time or mini campaigns for another 7 "campaigns". So at least 1,600 hours of game time as a DM.
In retrospect I would take 3.5e and 4e over 5e - and I don't like either of those game systems (though 4e had a lot of good ideas, including peak monster design, but the package wasn't very good).
So a financial success? yes.
Design seucess? Abosultuly not.
Will it be forgotten like 4e? Yes.
I agree that 5e runs into serious problems somewhere beyond level 10 or so. But that's also true of every other edition of official D&D (though not always for the same reasons).
Every version of 3rd edition is broken immediately, so I don't know what you mean there. Bounded accuracy is a good thing; when people talk about too many hit points, the problem is just too many hit points, not bounded accuracy. And Pundit is right, every version of the game struggles after level 10 because there's just too much for everyone to keep track of.
Gimme 4th edition broad level bonuses for scale and 2e damage/hit points for speed and man, I am in.
@@RPGPundit true true.
Most of my "RPGing" is done through OSR and independent systems, My 5E campaign has been going on and off since early 2020 and I don't plan stop anytime soon....however, I should state that I play 5E somewhat modified and detached from all but the core rule books and a few supplements. Basically, I use it to play my version of the "World of Dungeons & Dragons" where I take my main inspiration from 1980s cartoon series, the LGN toyline, and the Forgotten Realms. I reimage all the past D&D campaign settings as countries or continents that all exist on the same world and are populated by all the races and monsters in D&D history. The tone is a cross between LOTR, 1920's and 30's pulp weird fiction, 1970s and 80s swords and sorcery movies, with some nods to Star Wars. Yeah I know that sounds like a hot mess. lol
Spread the word, share the video!
I completely disagree about 3.5e and unmanageable bloat. 3.5e was modular and it's incumbent on the GM to regulate which modules he adds or excludes.
I think we must have a different definition of "modular". To me, modular means that the GM can easily alter a rule without breaking other parts of the system. In 3.x, if a GM wants to get rid of a feat, half the time it creates a cascade of other feats that get compromised because of it. Ditto with spells, and skills. That's not modular.
BTW, I have watched some of your videos. At some point (if I can get it to work) I would like to have you as a guest on The RPGPundit Encounter.
@@RPGPundit I certainly appreciate that and would love to be on.
We do have a difference in opinion on the definition of modular in this respect. When I say 3.x is modular, I mean that picking which variants, supplements, and rules to include in the game, e.g. Which "modules" to plug into the machine which is the game, is the basis for how a GM shapes the game mechanics to influence a certain style of play and feeling to their campaign. It's also how they prevent game breaking power gaming as most "builds" rely on access to multiple rule sets which should virtually never all be included at one time.
3.5e, even in just the core books, was filled to the brim with variant rules and alternatives to change how the game played and the DMG was tailor built to guide a DM into that philosophy.
3.5e's issue is that the DM is forced to invest the same effort as the least lazy person at the table or more. You really can't be the quintessential lazy DM, and that gets taxing and tiresome quick.
3rd is bloated even within the core rules with no add ons. There are way, way too many feats and many of them are must-haves or literal trap options that were put there on purpose. Multiclassing or just playing a normal caster could be busted very easily too.
@@TheMinskyTerrorist I disagree, especially if you use done variant core rules, use the alignment system, and/or simply adjust the challenges presented in game you can easily keep casters manageable.
Plus, in my opinion and experience, 3.5e is the only D&D edition where every build and every play style is not only viable bust can be extremely effective without relying on DM fiat
6 sessions of a 5e game will level characters up to 18
Only if that's what the GM wants.
@@RPGPundit With the way the power imbalance shifted away from DM to players since 5th, good luck to the DM trying to put the breaks on the people in his game.
True, that's a culture problem though.
The longest D&D 5e campaign i was in was just around 2 & half years.
We started at level 5 and went to level 17.
5E is not an even playing field for new comers vs min/maxers. Understanding what feats are worth it and what are garbage (most of them), how certain spells are used, and what multi class options work makes a huge difference.
All Wizards had to do was put out a core book and then different setting books with unique feats, spells, classes and races. 5E could have gone on forever. Instead, in addition to crap adventures, they cranked out splat books that bloated the rules.
As far as lengthy campaigns, I do play in a 5E game that is 6 years old and is in no danger of ending anytime soon. No one in my circles are going to play 6th.
Any game (at least, that's not totally random) will have SOME opportunities to min/max or powergame, so you're not wrong. The difference is of scale and intention. 3e was INTENTIONALLY made to punish newbies and reward OCD rules lawyers. 5e was intended to minimize the benefit to min/maxers.
6 years! You might have the world record. You have the record here so far.
If the average 5e campaign lasts 6 sessions, that doesn't necessarily mean half of all 5e campaigns last 6 or fewer sessions, and half of them last 6 or more sessions. If the median length was 6 sessions, then that would be true, but if it's just the average, then we don't know. My guess is that the median is probably less than the average -- there are probably tons of very short campaigns and a few very long campaigns.
Well yes, good point. I should say that AT BEST half of all campaigns were less than 6 sessions. It is very likely much more.
5e was a great success when measured against what it was and what it was supposed to do. it succeeded in weakening the dnd community, weaken DMs, and empowering players. at first blush, many would say that empowering players was a good thing, but in this case it means empowering players at the expenses of rule consistency and game balance. it was a big step in the direction wotc wanted the players to go. it didn't bring in more players than expected. if anything, it polarized the community into "old school" players and "meta" players. it did not, however, make the game any more accessible or playable to new or new types of players. the goal was to bring players to online, subscription play moderated by AI DMs and away from the community and uncontrollable, one-time-sale, books. when measured this way, 5e and its latest iterations were resounding successes...
I can tell you, as someone who worked at the highest level on the guiding concepts for 5e, that it was very much the goal to bring in new players, and casual players, and that in spite of this 5e was successful beyond our wildest dreams (not all of this was due to the system, but because of a zeitgeist of the moment; however, if 5e hadn't been such an easily adoptable system, it likely would not have benefited; it was the perfect system to be around right at the moment that D&D became nostalgically cool again). However, where we really failed was that our original goal was to empower GMs to be really creative with the D&D rules, and that didn't happen.
@@RPGPundit where 5e failed DMs (and, by way of this, the community) was in its feeding of meta play without any real regard to game balance. this is because it was intentionally player-centric instead of centering on the game itself. the latest version is even worse in this regard (and so many others).
good DMs are flexible. they'll take what rules work for them and their groups and ignore others, but the not-so-good DMs are stuck and generally accede to the whims of their players without knowing what is balanced. unbalanced gameplay leads to group erosion which weakens the community one small bit at a time...
@@CruentusV can you elavorate on this?
I do not see it more than, lets say 3E and its player 'builds'.
Furthermore, I found its non definition of the skills and DCs, a total 'mother may I...?' Or tea party style of play that feels very anti-player agency.
@@sand5857 3.5e, 5e, or 5.5e (aka 2024e)?
@@CruentusV on 5e being more player centric than ... 3e for example?
3e appoach to be Rolemaster forces DMs to be more rulemastery and fair from players perspective, while 5e half 'non defined' rules drops you totally at DM whims every time... ever.
That is why I'm wondering.
I mean on the rules side, I do not know if is the tone of the books selling that player empowering.
I've did have 3 interlocking campaigns involving the same kingdom for about 4 years, before taking a DMing break.
That puts you well above the average.
Ok so I checked out Bill the Elf's channel. That was a very entraining 10 minutes lol.
I want to know about that system, setting, and group, and how you managed to play for so many years!
Is there a video on it?
I should probably make a video about that! I can answer the system question: we pretty much run DCC (Dungeon Crawl Classics) rules-as-written. As for the setting, its a world of my own creation, that grew gradually, and you can purchase the setting book: World of the Last Sun, as well as a sourcebook: The Gonzo Fantasy Companion.
@@RPGPundit That’s sick. I’ll check out the books.
But yes I would love to hear more about all that!
Mr Welch put out a YT video about his 'perfect' D&D edition built from bits and pieces of the various previous edition's rules (if any of them were good enough to meet the needs of the issue at hand) since he's played them all quite a bit (4th maybe not so much). Keep in mind that he's a grognard whose favorite setting is Mystara. His channel is largely dedicated to the setting of Mystara.
He also made 'The List of Things Mr Welch Is No Longer Allowed To Do In A RPG'. It currently stands at 2,600+ entries..
The perfect 'frankensten' version of D&D
th-cam.com/video/qK0CrzAagME/w-d-xo.html
I like Mr.Welch, he'll probably be a guest star on The RPGPundit Encounter, if I can ever get the videos to work!
@@RPGPundit Sounds Awesome! :) :) :)
Chiming in to say that I do have a 5e campaign that's still running which has gone past 2 years and I expect it to continue to go onwards. I completely understand why really short campaigns the norm are though. I started DMing with 5e and WotC didn't provide much support for showing people how to do things aside from lipservice in the PHB. The DMG does have info on how to do it and a lot of the info is quite good, but it is really scattered around sometimes and requires research outside the book, so I stuck with the pre-written stuff for a while until I played a lot, did a lot of research, and had multiple "false start" campaigns where I just didn't get it right and it fizzled out.
I wonder if the large crowd that 5e attracted would have really gone for the longer campaigns if they would have put in proper support for it. They never wanted to do it though. I remember directly asking a WotC employee just after the 5e launch and their response was basically there's no player base for anything past short prewritten campaigns and lower-level characters, so don't expect too much from them. He's right that it narrows down as you get further, but I think when you see games like Baldur's Gate 3 succeed so wildly with lots of end game content, it makes you wonder if they're going to learn a lesson from that. Based on the 2024 PHB content they haven't so far.
Not only was there a lack of support, there were these campaign books that had 20 adventures in them and took you from level 1 to level 20. It was ridiculous. Spread the word, share the video!
I am beyond glad that I found you and got your materials to help run my campaign. I have been a DM for two years now and my campaign is at its second year anniversary. The characters are about to face a final big bad and then if they survive, get their happily ever after. Then I get to use Dark Albion, Valikan Clans, and some other sources and begin anew. Same world, about five years in the future, consequences of the players choices say hello.
Awesome! Thank you.
Initially, no
Eventually, yes
I'm thinking that might be the case. Spread the word, share the video!
The best lesson taught by 5e is the DM should be flexible, adaptable, and make half of it up. Also, RP is king.
I find this only works after having a deep understanding of the rules.
I play the game in a completely modular way. I think it's all up to the DM. love so many things from 4e that I use in my games.
Players don't know crap about the rules these days I've found, if the DM tells them when to roll then they are fine.
Besides that I think WOTC is insufferable and the DnD community has become probably the worst bunch of people that you could ever imagine. Emphasize on "has become"
Well, its hard to entirely disagree. Except the part about 4e. Spread the word, share the video!
@@RPGPundit Haha I mainly steal random 4e combat things to add mechanics to combat RP from my players. I’ve never actually played 4e lol
"and make half of it up."
That's fine for some players, and will drive others totally insane.
Player: "But I did Y because the book says that would produce Z!"
DM: "Sorry, in my game X produces D! Melody and Tarquinn don't mind when I make stuff up, why do you?"
@@ComicGladiator Yea so that’s why for the most part you flex off of a deep understanding of the rules, but when we are bound by them, it’s just becomes like any other video game. I only see pure power gamers (who don’t even want RP) having an issue.
Also making half of it up is mandatory. There isn’t a rule for everything.
Almost 30 years for Birthright! Every week still, down to about 3.5 hrs now, but we used to go 5-6.
To be fair, I do take breaks for a few months every year and a half or so to let Rogan run another game so we get a nice variety.
Yes that's a huge accomplishment!
@RPGPundit So is over 10yrs for your DCC game!
"Options" as a game design goal is bad design. It is the designer's responsibility to put together the best combination of rules. It is lazy design to leave that up to the players. 2nd edition proved this. Smart, creative, design oriented players will come up with optional rules if they want to anyway, it shouldn't be baked into the game. It is confusing.
It's unsurprising that being grounded in the OSR, I would disagree.
Only 6 sessions? Looking at my last 4 campaigns, the current one is 43 sessions and ongoing, the previous ones ran 93, 94, and 85 sessions - so not quite 4 years on the average (we run every other week with the occasional miss).
That's quite good. Was it with 5e?
As GM I use D&D 5E mechanics quite often, because I can focus on story not on fancy damage table or something like in Neuroshima 1,5 edition. By the way, our campaign lasts probably 15 sessions already.
Spread the word, share the video!
There are grognards for every system
Some have way more grognards than others.
My first 5E campaign lasted 8 years. Every 2 weeks, 6 hours a session.
Been playing since the 80s though and I tend to run long campaigns.
Well as of now you have the record. 8 years is extremely good.
I found your channel only some weeks ago and I didn't realize you were on the WotC team to make 5e. I wanted to ask though, how did you get into writing and game design professionally and how do you generally go about the task of writing rules for games?
I've talked about this on previous videos, around 2005 I started a blog about the hobby, and it came to be very well known. A few years later I tried my hand at making a couple of games, and got involved in the osr. I hadn't expected that I would become a full-time game designer but here we are!
As far as going about writing the rules, that would take a lot longer than I think I would be able to put into a TH-cam comment
@@RPGPundit Thanks for your reply man, looking forward to more videos. I have a side project game I've been designing for some months now and your insight with some of these videos has been almost immediately helpful. Cheers and have a good one
Thanks!
My 5e Saltmarsh / Greyhawk campaign is still going and coming up on our 3rd anniversary. We have no plans to switch to 5.5/One D&D/Whatever they're calling it. After almost 3 years of (mostly) weekly play, the party is at 7th level and very engaged. We have enjoyed some side games of ICONS and Lion & Dragon, and we hope to do more in the future, but 5.5 isn't on the menu.
3 years puts you way above average!
Mine lasted 2 sessions before the other dm in his third session coopted my setting because he couldnt be bothered to run his game properly.
Had he asked before jumping settings this might not be a problem, but he genuinely didnt give a damn.
It was the last straw for me as it made me realise no friend would do that at least not one outside of kindergarten!
As kids, we were conformists in the 1980s - we waited on Gary Gygax's words and dared not (for instance) had drow PCs until UA came out
Your experience was very different from mine then!
@@RPGPundit possibly. Most people I played with or knew of stuck to the rules pretty closely. We homebrewed monsters and lore of course. I think by the time 2e came out was when we all bid adios to level restrictions. I didn't play from 1996 to 2008 (apart from one night), so totally missed 3/3.5e.
From experience, I can tell that 2e, with all those different campaign supplements and players guides turned to a very modular and house ruly game, at least on the tables I played or DM'd.
I presume 3e just turn that to 11.
One could argue that table top rpgs were conceived by a generation of people whose psychological profile no longer exists. People aren't built for table top role-playing games any longer.
I don't really think that's true. Clearly the aspects of 5e that were highly successful show that it's not. What is clear however is that people have shorter attention spans.
Nah, my millennial and xer players have plenty of fun, and we keep the campaigns going.
What I would say is that rather young gamers now will struggle to read someone like Gygax. I've had some pushback, participated in threads on this. They think he is almost insane, and his style of writing too arcane. They don't put in the work to understand what he was setting up and saying. It's a comprehension issue as well as a psych profile, but comprehension of the written word has been in decline for at least thirty years.
I could say 5e is for a generation of players... there are more DMs forgrd in older editions.
My 3.5 campaign ran for over 5 years. Then i got married and was too busy for games. My gaming group wants me to resurrect it
5E is slop just add advantage or disadvantage, so cringe
No. It was a failure from the beginning, i.e., since 2000 when 3rd edition came out. It was never D&D.
Well, I get the feeling that's more of an aesthetic position, as in, none of them felt enough like D&D to you. Of course, there's other people who feel that way about 2e too.
@@RPGPundit Thanks Kai, for a response rather than just saying thanks and "share the video." I've commented a few times now, and I've been meaning to say that none of my AD&D apologetics is meant as an insult to or other gamers who are engaging the market now. I've said D&D was never "broken" and creative people should provide adventures and milieu for the greatest game ever - that we don't need new games. I respect that you've published and don't mean to sound obtuse or diminish your own accomplishments. Having said that, I wouldn't be happy if my name was attached to 5e. I don't know the circumstances around which you were invited (hired?), but I'm surprised given your commentary about the socio-political woke mind virus infecting our hobby. Even in your videos I can't help but think you're grasping at the proverbial straws to say something nice, or at least neutral about 3rd, 4th, and 5e, when you yourself can't possibly believe it. AD&D was developed after ALL the play testing to that date, by the people who created the original RPG. Expert war-gamers at that. When I see all these new "games" I have to laugh. People criticize AD&D and almost EVERYTIME it takes me a minute or two find evidence right in the texts that they forgot or never read said passages. No one has improved D&D. I haven't seen it yet. I enjoy so many OSR "pundits" who are gaslighting themselves about "flaws" in AD&D and yet there is a conspicuous absence of comments and anecdotes about actual game play where/when they allegedly proved the system was flawed. Racists of the Coast purchased an IP. The law now allows them to publish any dreck and call it D&D. They changed the mechanic so much it's a different game. And we cannot get past the influence of the video game world. It alters the RPG for the worse and is not compatible. Imagine playing a D&D like video game and your character's torch expires? Try playing a video game in the dark...! Oh, viola! Everyone can see in 5e. Case rested! It's a video game and the designers know those. NOT RPGS....Activists have infiltrated a game company and perverted its business model. Something other than game design has been going on. Enough for now. Thanks, I'll be ready soon to give this a go myself.
*Kas....sorry.
It should be have accounted that 3rd edition had the most broad and free style d20/ocr licenses.... that allowed for the proliferation on great supplements of small companies and even created the beast that 'was' Pathfinder.
That's true, but hardly any of those "D20 games" persevered past the 3e era.
You try sending me a invite.
All i need to know is when on Sunday.
Sunday is usually the day i make my videos.
Any time after 5pm United States central time is good.
Well, I'll put you on the list. I'm only doing one episode every 4 weeks, so I can't say when your time will come, but you have the kind of channel that I would like to highlight to people.
@@RPGPundit
😊
My understanding of shadowdark is that it isn’t designed for long and/or ongoing campaigns. Won’t that suffer the same fate in terms of people not playing very long?
I'd have to take a closer look at Shadowdark to be sure of that. I think that Shadowdark thematically seems to be oriented to dungeon crawling, and this tends to be less focused on long-term campaigning. But that doesn't mean that it couldn't be used for that. The question would be how suitable is it really for high-level play.
To provide a context, look at DCC. I think most people think of DCC as a game you largely play to just do the "character funnel" in a dungeon with 0 or 1st level characters. However, the mechanics of DCC are so well designed that they stand up extremely well for play all the way through to level 10; my campaign is proof of that.
It's the same with all the games I design. There's basically two things that are really important for long-term play: one is niche protection so that no class becomes useless at higher level, the other is that mortality continues to be an issue at higher level play. Spread the word, share the video!
I think Shadowdark's very open license could help with its longevity as well. A lot of people are making stuff for it, and probably will for years to come. Given the license, people could also make new rules and stuff that opens it up to more types of play beyond just dungeon delving. I think it also comes down to how the GM decides to pace things, and (as Pundit says) lethality at higher levels. Tension is the name of the game in TTRPGs, and once that is gone so is the fun.
@@RPGPundit I believe we’ve done that with our rpg, Mystic Days though we ditched levels in favor of skill based mechanics It’s a lethal game. From your first spell to your last and you could end up killing your entire party if your spell goes wrong. You’ve been warned.
Won’t these shortcomings of 5E also impact it’s clone like counterparts (Pathfinder and others) in the same ways?
Its likely to. Pathfinder has been on a ten year decline (with a slight boost when they put out 2nd edition, but that quickly dropped down again after that). The various games that were created as a result of the OGL fiasco are likely to fall off the face of the earth with one or two possible exceptions.
On the other hand, the OSR has been steadily growing for the last 5 years and is likely to benefit from a weaker WotC D&D, just like it did in the 4e era.
@@RPGPundit we’re hoping Mystic Days will benefit from that. It’s OSR. (Renaissance)
I think that each edition of the game offers something unique. Except 5e, which I don't think will stand the test of time, because in trying to cater to multiple styles of gameplay, it doesn't excel at any one thing in particular.
There are better dungeon crawling experiences to be had elsewhere, better narrative games, better simulationist games, better heroic fantasy settings, games that provide better character building options, better tactical combat games, better miniatures games. etc etc.
4e was a disastrous failure BECAUSE it tried to be "one thing". Forge Theory is garbage, which is why it failed. The OSR is the most successful design school of all time because it does the exact opposite.
Dnd 3.5 is peak dnd for me, i can respect 5th as a separate game but its not dnd as far as im concerned.
Spread the word, share the video!
I agree with the general analysis. I think people hold onto previous editions in part because they like it, but also it's akin to holding onto the group. Most of the instances I've seen are peopel who were playing then and just went on playing. I don't know of a lot of groups who met in 5e and started playing 3e together.
If that's true anyway. I don't see 5e staying around. Sure there were more fans, but it feels less like people are playing a game together during the 5e era than any other edition. Everyone kind of comes in with the anime character in their head and the game is incidental. Part of that is culture, part of that is design too though. One of the worse design elements of 5e is that EVERYTHING comes from the character class. There really is no link to any thing outside of the class, particularly not the world. Really not to your actions either. You fumble arouind and level no matter what. So why be invested in anyithing? I think this was part the design that made 4e go extinct as well. Just my thoughts.
Spread the word, share the video!
As excited as I was when 3rd Edition came out, I’ve since come to appreciate simplicity and elegance in game design. Too many options and too many rules hamstring the gameplay. I see the attempt in 5E to ameliorate the rules bloat in 3E, but the heavy emphasis on character building can still bog things down.
Shadowdark’s revolutionary and totally original random character development when levelling does a lot to speed things up (while not unduly rewarding rules familiarity). I still love the idea of character options, but they have to be reined in to some degree.
3e, when it first came out, felt like a breath of fresh air. It still felt like D&D but it also streamlined a lot of the rules. It also replaced the totally burnt-out setting-wank with going back to the "kick in the door dungeoncrawling" basics. Those were excellent strategies on the part of Tweet & Cook. It was bloat over time, and the problem of rewarding the most obsessive rules lawyers, that combined to eventually crash that edition.
Random character development is awesome. I'm so thankful that shadowdark came up with it, so that I could then steal it, go back in time in my TARDIS, and put it into my OSR games in 2015.
@@RPGPundit 😄
It seems to me that in 'fixing the problem' of 3.0/3.5, IE people enjoying researching mechanical details and plotting out their character from 1-20+; you guys created a game where people enjoy researching options for characters that they think are cute and quirky, writing 10 pages of backstory, then playing 3 sessions before they get itchy feet about trying their new persona that they created in the meantime.
That's certainly possible. In my analysis in this video it's kind of what I'm trying to get at. I think that commercially it is more viable, to make a game that is more appealing to casuals, but in terms of legacy 5e might have been TOO casual.
Don't take this the wrong way, as I do want to see you, and everyone else in the TTRPG stream space, succeed and continually improve, but I think you should hear what some of your detractors are saying. A group of people were making fun of you and your channel the other day due to the number of videos that just show a camera view of your products leaning up or laying on a table somewhere for the entirety of the show and I think I agree that this isn't the best option for continued engagement. Even if they're completely relevant to the discussion, it's just not visually stimulating after more than a few seconds and detracts from what you're trying to say, which is oft' wise. That's not to say you shouldn't shill your amazing products, just that they should either be shown as a smaller overlay in the corner, held up or displayed when directly relevant to the conversation, or beside you as you personally/visually speak to the camera. If we're not constantly visually stimulated, we're going to focus on something else like chores while just listening and much less-likely to glance down and move to purchase the supplements you're rightly trying to show off. The only other, hopefully constructive, criticism I have to vastly improve the show, especially if you stick to your current face-off-stream/podcast style formula, is the spacial sound of the room itself. Maybe you're a little too far back from the mic, need a filter/different style mic, or something like egg-crate/foam to diffuse the echo. It sounds a little like you're talking to us from just down a wide empty hallway. Love your stuff either way brother, but I'd love to love it more ;-)
One of the business failures of D&D, for Hasbro, was that it allowed a lot of other companies to make interesting products that raked in millions that Hasbro failed to make. While I don't like what the new audience has done to D&D, it did succeed in acquiring a new audience.
That wasn't so much a failure, as a feature. Having compatible 3rd party products (ones that WotC itself would never have made) helps keep the fan base engaged on this game, rather than moving to other games. It's part of the same reason for the huge success of the OSR.
Some of the drivers of shorter 5E campaigns are not related to the design itself. Remember that Gen Z friend groups interact in person much less than us Gen X-ers. Also, with social media, attention spans are much shorter. A long RP campaign requires a significant investment of time.
The main age demographic of 5e players are neither Gen X nor Gen Z, they're Millennials. The kind that love to get together for kombucha drinking parties with charcouterie in hipster clothing and coincidentally play D&D.
@@RPGPundit Brrr.... Sounds positively ghastly!
I managed to run a 5 year campaign with a 3 hour session each week in 5e. I personally believe the biggest issue with 5e campaign lifespan is the have a go mentality of casuals. Someone will try to start a campaign and lose half their players after the first session and kill off the campaign.
That's a very good point! Spread the word, share the video.
To give you my personal opinion regarding the intent of Mearls, you and the other consultants for D&D 5e and how that went: you didn't fail in building that modular base. Anyone with a functioning brain that bothered to read at least half of the Dungeon Master 5e book could figure out that D&D 5e is a modular system that GMs should tweak to their own liking and that Setting + Modular Rules combo books are on the way. Unfortunately it didn't happen as it was initially intended. There's a reason why D&D 5e's 3rd party market was and still is pretty popular - they are doing what WOTC was too lazy to do. If anyone failed that vision, that someone is Crawford once he became the head developer after Mearls was exiled.
Where you (as in the entire development team, including consultants AND Mearls) screwed up was The Exploration Pillar and how spells made a joke out of it. When you have crap like the 5e "Goodberry" and "Create or Destroy Water" spells (note that those are level 1 spells) you cut short any requirement for resource management or risks for the party to starve or die from dehydration. Don't get me started on the Ranger that is simultaneously crap and at the same time makes traveling the wilderness trivial. The HP bloat and little to no risk combat can be fixed by giving monsters their minimum recommended HP and by not caring about Crawford's precious "balanced encounters", but exploration was killed in its infancy.
You guys didn't signal to GMs what spells are trivializing aspects of the game, exploration included. Combined with the stupid opinions of some people (ex: "if you ban or nerf races and spells you are a bad GM") you helped in the creation of a situation where it's unnecessarily hard for a GM to run the game in a more old-school style. Besides having to fight the spell system with no guidance, new GMs had to fight the players. Just to be clear, I think it's a shared guilt; for the later I don't blame the developers, but the internet "celebrities" that encouraged this stupid mentality. Fortunately others in the 3rd party market have done what should have been done from the beginning (or at least during its first few years of existence).
And finally, almost no one regardless of political leanings, gives a F about the opinions of Crawford. People figured out long ago that he rarely knows what he's talking about. He's good at converting isolated ideas into rules, but he's crap at tying-up mechanics together and he's too afraid to not upset the "holy balance" of the game. He had so many bad and contradictory takes that no one cares what he has to say. He's especially annoying when he tries to hype in interviews parts of upcoming books; every time the things he was the most passionate about proved to be the most underwhelming and disappointing (he's like the Peter Molyneux of P&P games, but with a 6 in Charisma). I think that the only people that keep asking him things about rules on Twitter at this point are trolls that enjoy seeing him get annoyed.
Some good points there. Spread the word, share the video!
I got into D&D via Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, a shockingly good system. it plays like an OSR instead of a rules-heavy hell that is pathfinder ttrpg. Since you like random encounter tables, you might actually dig it. next was 5e, which lead me to youtube, which lead me to you, which lead to buying Baptism Of Fire. I'd say 5e was a success.
In that sense I guess it was a roaring success!
I think a lot of interesting 5e variants and interesting content for 5e is coming out now and over the last few years, but seems to be a lot later than you thought.
Then the double whammy of covid which has moved a lot of people online. So this alternate content has to make their rules, produce books, pdfs and now vtt content...these smaller independent creators are behind on the vtt front...so digital playera havent been able to as easily move away from vanilla 5e.
ex..DCC, is just now coming out with support for roll20 (my preferred vtt). Same with Traveller. So the shift away from DnD, unfortunatly in 2024....isnt progress to far unless the content providers support the digital tools....which of course cost $$$.
Make Albion for a VTT and I will buy it.
I've seen some interesting variations from 3rd party publishers, but they're still a lot fewer than what we had originally expected, 10 years ago.
If I had to bet, I’d put all my money on No. WotC has done their own studies that show that most campaigns last for only a few to several month and most characters only reach 6th to 10th level.
Yup. But there still could be someone who has been playing the same campaign, one little group, for the last 10 years. In the comments, there's someone who has been running the same campaign for 6 years, which is pretty damn good, and I will assume is the world record for 5e, until someone else gives a better number.
What fundamentally pains me of this edition is it anti classical hero epicness...
From its slow bonuses, its continuos low level theat, short minded high level powers/spells, and expectation of murder hobo nobodies at high level play that own nothing....
Asian rpg & media are the successors of high level play imaginery... and that irks me.
If you want to play low level campaign broad the level advancements... but do not design a game where ending levels are afraid of low level threats.
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People complain a lot about 5th and forget what it was trying to do in 2014, make an easily accessible version of the game that worked similar to a fixed 3rd edition, with some of the more popular parts of 4th edition. It was extremely successful. The only reason there are so many people that complain and nitpick it is that so many people played it in the first place, people that either never played 3rd or conveniently forgot how bad it was. Most complaints are coming from either end: the old school people who don't like the modern style of play anyway (perfectly fair), and people who want a fine tuned, balanced character building game with a bajillion options like 4th edition or Pathfinder 2. If you're anywhere in the middle and you don't mind tinkering with the game then it's still solid. There's a reason almost every new OSR game copies advantage and disadvantage.
I wouldn't say that most osr games do that. At least not in a central mechanic in the same sense as 5e. My games don't for example.
@@RPGPundit Most of the newer ones that you get coming through the pipeline on drivethrurpg. Or something like Knave or Shadowdark.
Do you have other examples besides Knave or Shadowdark, both of which are directly derived from 5e?
@@RPGPundit I guess that was hyperbole on my part and I don't have time to look through all the games coming out lately. But Knave has nothing to do with 5e at all and Shadowdark doesn't take very much from it. It's more like B/X with advantage/disadvantage and a bunch of stuff stolen from DCC.
4e gets way more hate than is deserved. It was such a fun system but people seem to be unable to judge it fairly on its merits because it's "not D&D" or whatever silliness. Atleast no one had to worry about there character becoming useless because they chose the wrong class to play. Also the whole spell plague stuff was pretty cool and really pushed the points of light type of campaign. Just 2 copper from a long time D&D player.
Agree. I think pf2e is the inheritor of 4e. It’s better version without the issues.
I've always wanted to try 4e but can never get a group together to try. Everyone in my play group actually played 4e before I joined the group and they all really, really hated it. When I ask why, I never get a real reason 😅. The only reason I got was when I asked about a year or so ago and was told "4e made martials too strong" which I took with a grian of salt considering the person that told me always plays casters and just loves 5e 😂
@@thegreatkabukino6639 Im by no means an expert on 4e but i tried playing a few games. imo it didnt feel like dnd, a complaint about 3-3.5 was balance and wotc over did it. all the classes/subclasses felt very similar, the subclasses were essentially filling the same roles for each class, i remember getting rock paper scissor vibes but if you think that means combat would be simple youd be wrong. everyone has so much stuff they can do and a lot of things require xy before you can z so everyone has to be on top of their game or you end up screwing yourselves or the dm is retconning rounds, even if your rolling with the mishaps combat still takes forever. 4e was designed with the idea an app would be available, I dont think it was good or ran well might not have even been completed at the peak of 4e, I never used it but ive heard MCDM talk about it on several occasions.
People purchasing any of the new products are agreeing to the new OGL.
Bingo. That is why it exists.
I gave a lot too say about 5E and perhaps I will add it to this comment as I collect my thoughts.
However there is one thing that I think needs to be said, 5E was Skyrim. What do I mean by this? Well I didn't mind Skyrim but one of my major complaints about it is there is no classes, everyone is playing everything and its annoying and bland. In 5E everyone is a melee, spell caster with skills. Nobody is unique and special so everyone steps on eachothers toes.
That is a somewhat legitimate complaint. At the time of the design I kept trying to advocate for there to be tighter niche protection. Spread the word, share the video!
5th edition will be forgotten the same way fake geek culture died when the mainstream public stopped caring for superhero trash and Disney Star Wars.
All of your points about 5e's limitations and tremendous appeal to casual players are accurate, but I think you draw the wrong conclusions. I can't honestly think of a situation where a high conversion rate--turning first time players into returning players--is ever a bad thing for a game, or the hobby in general. It's much easier to convert a casual player into an invested player than it is to convert a non-player to a serious player!
First off, the more casual players there are, the more likely one of them is going have to be the DM, which is probably the most likely way to convert a casual D&D player to an actual RPG enthusiast. If just one in five casual D&D players eventually start DMing, (thus noticing 5e's numerous pain points and design compromises), that's a ton of serious players.
Second, the massive popularity of 5e means there's a ton of money sloshing around in the 3rd party space for anyone who wants to make modified versions. It's not a large slice of the community, but it's big enough it seems anyone with a decent platform can probably raise a quarter of a million for a project with relative ease. It's a strong enough phenomenon people actually complain that designers keep releasing 5e variants for properties rather than making new systems for financial reasons (the recent Adventure Time game being 5e, for example).
If you think that 5e could ever be a net negative to the hobby, you're basically conceding that none of these players can be converted to other games, now that 5e got them into the hobby, which seems unlikely to me. They're definitely easier to entice into OSR games than Vampire LARPers.
Well, but Vampire is a pretty good example. It was unique in the context of RPGs (aside from D&D) in that there were a ton of gamers who started with Vampire and ONLY played Vampire (or occasionally other World of Darkness games, but nothing else). This also tied into a fad, the Vampire/Goth fad, much as 5e benefitted from the D&D Nostalgia fad. But when that fad passed, only a very limited number of those Vampire players went on to try any other games. Most just quit.
@@RPGPundit I would argue that 5e appears to have vastly better conversion rates than VtM. Shadowdark, for example, persuaded a ton of 5e players to try an OSR style game. I literally have two casuals in my Shadowdark game who just show up to roll d20s and smash monsters.
Even if WotC’s decision to force an unneeded edition change causes a 5e collapse, I suspect it will be closer in effect to a supernova that spawns tons of smaller (and hopefully more varied) stars in the wake of its destruction. You’ve studied history-nothing as big as 5e collapses without creating multiple successor states.
I would say no. It initially did what it set out to do, which was to rectify the mistake that was 4e, which it did handily. It only started to go downhill once the woke garbage seeped in, and that didn't happen until later on, and thankfully that was limited to certain books outside of the core three.
In terms of mechanics, it's a solid edition, IMO.
Yes I myself didn't stop playing 5e until the woke crap
Brother I think it was successful it got alot of people behind the DM screen .
Well, if you've watched the whole video my answer is mixed. It was in some respects a big success, but it was failure in others, and what I'm seriously in doubt about is what its legacy will be.
That's a good point. DMs are not really "casual". The question is whether they will carry on to be part of the hobby in the post-5e era?
Latakia is king. Quiet Nights (Gaslight is overrated, but still decent), Pirate Kake, Mac Baren Latakia flake, and Northwoods for an all the time smoke. (Plum Pudding sucks, and so does everything by SPC. Its the WOTC of pipe tobacco. All hype, no substance..)
I really like Latakia, but over the last few years I've come to enjoy Virginia/Perique mixes, and pure but very high quality burley even more than English blends.
For Perique, War Horse has always been a favorite. Just the right amount of that peppery, spicy, mild-bite one comes to love with Perique blends. For Burley, lol I'm basic. Half & Half OTC for me. Classic gas station pouch. XD Have a jar of Haunted Bookshop I offer to guests. Just can't stand that hot-burning Burley. lol
My new favorite Vir/Per is Chacom #4. And high-end burley doesn't have the tonguebite. Solani's Aged Burley Flake is probably the greatest tobacco I ever smoked.
Streamyard.
I am talking with someone who is willing to help me out with the strange magic of how streamyard can somehow get on my youtube and let me have a guest.
@@RPGPundit Good move. It's pretty easy to use. Good luck. If I can do it, I'm sure you can.
Excellent analysis! 5e is a failure all the way to the bank for WOTC. Most Gamers lack imagination- needing to be entertained rather than create and entertain others- an experienced and talented writer/ game designer cannot imagine what it’s like to be a beginner player- to a beginner- 5e is awesome! To an advanced player or game designer- 5e is crap.
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I don't know. There's certainly a legion of idiots that refuse to play anything that isn't 5e.
But are they "idiots who refuse to play anything not 5e"? Or are they "idiots who refuse to play anything that isn't the CURRENT THING WotC told them to play"?
@@RPGPundit Yeah, I started to realize that the longer I listened.
I think turning the focus to casuals is what led to dnd becoming woke
I get the instinct to think that, but I don't think that the two things are actually one and the same. They are two things that happened at the same time. You COULD say that a game that is focused to casual customers is more easily taken over by woke fanatics, except that given how every other geek hobby was taken over (often worse) by woke fanatics even if they weren't focused at casuals, I'm not sure that's true at all.
5th edition just did not work with the way my brain functioned. I found it impossible to run and impossible to house rule. I went back to 3.5 and it worked so much easier for me and my group. The other added benefit - Woke WOTC got none of my money.
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It was a decent game (the original version of the early core rules, at least compared to other WOTC rulesets) ruined by a truly horrid culture that grew around it.
That's a fairly good summary of my video!
@@RPGPundit At least 5e at release made the Fighter useable again compared to 3rd ed. Then they decided to repeat the same mistakes as that edition and caster bloat consumed the game.
I feel like your description of 3rd Ed was a bit of a straw man
Well, it was my own perception of the game as someone who ran it.
Fair enough, I've played 3.5 since 2003. It's a sentiment I've heard, but I just don't think it's as bad as all that.@@RPGPundit
Myprevious group, younger gamers (under 30 at the time) cared little for 5E and no one would run it . We played like 3 times over several years , no campaigns of any kind. I had fun and would have run but no one was interested . Still anecdotes are not evidence
That's interesting. So what were your group playing instead of 5e?
@@RPGPundit B/X one time , Monster of the Week, Fantasy Age , GURPS, all sorts of things. I was surprised by how much GURPS got played,.
When WOTC said on D&D the brand and not the game should’ve been a huge red flag.
Late 3.5 had far more modularity than 5e ever did. Psionics, invokers, incarnum, martial adepts, and skill tricks.
Modularity means "how easy you can remove and replace the supposed CORE RULES. In 3.x, if you just decided that a single Feat was kind of dumb and you didn't want to use it in your campaign, there was a 50% chance your removal would collapse the entire Feat-Tree system. NOT MODULAR.
Modular would be a game that has feats where the GM can just say "fuck it, we're not using this feat" and there is ZERO chance that removing it will affect anything else.
They don't want players playing older systems/versions. They want you to consume to current, and keep being casual because it will yield more money and it won't matter if it's slop They release cause the player base will just be flippant about it. Look at the state of video games, it's a good analog to it.
The main difference with video games is that the technology continues to improve over time. In that sense the RPG hobby is very different.
I honestly gave 5e a good try. Played and GM'd. I found it quite fun to play, but I had been away from class/level games so long I forgot about the constant arms race it is. I really did not like the everyone levels at the same time pretty much aspect of it either. It also seemed to be an arms race between PCs and Monsters - and that seemed to be the main point of the game. Maybe that was just me. I am playing a PF2 game now - and if anyone ever tells me that GURPS or Hero System are complicated ever again I will shove the PF2 Core Rulebook down t heir throats.
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Haven't finished the video yet but I wanted to go ahead and say that 5r wasn't a failure of an TTRPG, especially not initially. Where it failed at was attempting to become a story game. Book after book coming out letting you customize your origin, making martials damn near completely useless and have 100 different backgrounds for characters to pick from.
CR and other "actual play" channels, game designers and other fools coming along and trying to take what was basically 3.5e but simplified and turn it into Candela Obscura. Makes about as much sense as trading your house for a tent.
Also side note: Sorry to hear about the streaming troubles. Maybe try streamlabs? TH-cam is notorious for being really wonky with trying to bring on other people over livestreams for some reason, even back when Google Hangouts were a thing lmao.
The "wanting to become a storygame" thing had nothing to do with the rules, and everything to do with a group of people who got into the game (largely because of Critical Role, plus the woke incursion). As for "martials becoming useless", that has always been a problem with D&D. Its why I've tried so hard in my own games to make sure that doesn't happen; in Lion & Dragon or Baptism of Fire, warriors keep being incredibly bad-ass at every level.