D&D 5e has failed

rasmuswagner · Post by **rasmuswagner** » Sat Aug 20, 2016 5:35 am

I riffed an obvious joke on ISPs virgin insult; not condoning it, just having fun. I also implied that the world would be a better place if Mearls didn't actually pass on his genes.

I like how the Den's brand of Big Purple Fuckery (this tone discussion) is "your insults against this specific named individual were not sufficiently creative or viscious".

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Aug 20, 2016 5:41 am

So again, your best case scenario is that three people, Ramus, ISP, and maglag are dumb.

All the other people think ISP is dumb, no one said anything in support of anything Ramus said, and no one said anything in support maglag.

So I guess the point here is:

Hey Grek, which of these looks more like the Den to you?

1) ISP, Ramus, maglag.

2) The people who criticized them: Kaelik, DSM, Virgil, deadDM.

I guess the main point is that if you want to call Ramus, maglag and ISP stupid "The Den" is probably not the best criticism for that group.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sat Aug 20, 2016 6:00 am

Yeah, fair enough.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Sat Aug 20, 2016 7:31 am

rasmuswagner wrote:I riffed an obvious joke on ISPs virgin insult; not condoning it, just having fun. I also implied that the world would be a better place if Mearls didn't actually pass on his genes.

I mean, the world would be a better place if I didn't pass on my genes, but now I'm just being pedantic.
I still don't really understand what you're getting at, but I'm happy to accept that as a me problem and drop it.

Neon Sequitur · Post by **Neon Sequitur** » Sun Aug 21, 2016 1:21 am

Grek wrote:The whole virgin thing is childish. But this weird tribalistic "I want to believe every 'bad' thing about 5e and Mike Mearls, truth or not" bullshit is actually deeply troubling. When did the Den start being full of dishonest shills and willful liars?

A long fucking time ago. Check your intellectual integrity at the door.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Aug 21, 2016 2:09 am

Neon Sequitur wrote:
Grek wrote:The whole virgin thing is childish. But this weird tribalistic "I want to believe every 'bad' thing about 5e and Mike Mearls, truth or not" bullshit is actually deeply troubling. When did the Den start being full of dishonest shills and willful liars?
A long fucking time ago. Check your intellectual integrity at the door.

Oh goody, you showed up just in time to quote the person after they recanted the thing you quoted. EHAN TIMING!

But I think you will find that the answer you were looking for was "When the addition I like was announced, and they didn't praise it as the greatest thing to ever exist before it came out."

Rawbeard · Post by **Rawbeard** » Sun Aug 21, 2016 3:34 am

I should not have looked into this thread.

...You Lost Me · Post by **...You Lost Me** » Sun Aug 21, 2016 3:59 am

EHAN TIMING!

That is an impressive typo.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Aug 21, 2016 4:45 am

...You Lost Me wrote:
EHAN TIMING!
That is an impressive typo.

? Do you... Like, do you know what it even is? Because I'll be honest, I've only ever heard it and I didn't bother to look it up, but it's like, one letter off.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sun Aug 21, 2016 4:51 am

Kaelik wrote:But I think you will find that the answer you were looking for was "When the addition I like was announced, and they didn't praise it as the greatest thing to ever exist before it came out."

I don't actually like 5e. I just happen to play it because that's what my group wants to play sometimes. And it annoys me when people make fun of things for flaws that aren't real when there are so many real flaws to care about.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Aug 21, 2016 5:00 am

Grek wrote:
Kaelik wrote:But I think you will find that the answer you were looking for was "When the addition I like was announced, and they didn't praise it as the greatest thing to ever exist before it came out."
I don't actually like 5e. I just happen to play it because that's what my group wants to play sometimes. And it annoys me when people make fun of things for flaws that aren't real when there are so many real flaws to care about.

I was specifically quoting and responding to the random 5e asshole who believes 5e has sold more PHBs than 3e, not you.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Sep 25, 2016 3:38 am

For the record, dearly beloved Mearls clarified later on https://twitter.com/mikemearls/status/7 ... 7520851968

That when he said "3+3.5+4e < 5e" what he really meant was "ignore all those plus signs, that's me lying my fucking ass off knowing that no one will ever see my correction."

So in conclusion, 5e PHB has still undersold "lifetime sales" of 3e+3.5, even including pdfs and shit.

JonSetanta · Post by **JonSetanta** » Sun Sep 25, 2016 4:09 am

I play 5e. It's not better or worse than 3e, but it is different.

It's easier for the new players to learn, that's for sure.

As for the price... eh.... someone's stuffing their pockets.

Good thing I know my way around the darker regions of the internet and grabbed some PDFs. Like, all of them.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Sun Sep 25, 2016 4:42 am

Kaelik wrote:For the record, dearly beloved Mearls clarified later on https://twitter.com/mikemearls/status/7 ... 7520851968

That when he said "3+3.5+4e < 5e" what he really meant was "ignore all those plus signs, that's me lying my fucking ass off knowing that no one will ever see my correction."

So in conclusion, 5e PHB has still undersold "lifetime sales" of 3e+3.5, even including pdfs and shit.

I'm honestly surprised it beat 3.5 even alone. Is that because of PDFs or what?

JonSetanta · Post by **JonSetanta** » Sun Sep 25, 2016 5:02 am

momothefiddler wrote: I'm honestly surprised it beat 3.5 even alone. Is that because of PDFs or what?

http://www.d20srd.org/

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Sep 25, 2016 5:07 am

momothefiddler wrote:I'm honestly surprised it beat 3.5 even alone. Is that because of PDFs or what?

I don't know specifics, but I would guess that the 3.0 PHB outsold the 3.5.

What I'm guessing is that "lifetime sales"is weaselwords that means 3.0 PHBs sold after 3.5 was written don't count, and that they are including all the 5e pdf sales as separate sales, including the free ones you get with your physical copy of the book bought on Amazon.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Sun Sep 25, 2016 5:25 am

Kaelik wrote:
momothefiddler wrote:I'm honestly surprised it beat 3.5 even alone. Is that because of PDFs or what?
I don't know specifics, but I would guess that the 3.0 PHB outsold the 3.5.

What I'm guessing is that "lifetime sales"is weaselwords that means 3.0 PHBs sold after 3.5 was written don't count, and that they are including all the 5e pdf sales as separate sales, including the free ones you get with your physical copy of the book bought on Amazon.

Ah. Okay. Seems likely those are counted double, yeah.

And yeah, I didn't even start until after 4 was out, so I guess I don't have a real clear separation of 3.0 and 3.5 in my head. Fair enough.

JonSetanta · Post by **JonSetanta** » Sun Sep 25, 2016 5:31 am

There's little difference between the two 3es.

I literally wrote the changes in pencil in my 3.0 book (the PHB at least)

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun Sep 25, 2016 9:28 am

JonSetanta wrote:There's little difference between the two 3es.

I literally wrote the changes in pencil in my 3.0 book (the PHB at least)

Bull. Shit.

Almost everything changed, but mostly just enough to render everything slightly different. I can't imagine what it would have to look like to accurately write the changes in margins. There isn't room on the Bard page margins for damn sure. At best you literally wrote shorthand or summaries for some of the changes, and I'm damned certain you missed some.

I was still being surprised by changes years after 3.5 came out.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sun Sep 25, 2016 2:32 pm

I'm quite serious that Mearls means the 3.0 and 3.5 PHBs they sold from 2010 to 2014, when 4e and Pathfinder were battling it out. He's not even counting the 4e books.

5e lifetime greater than 3.0 and 3.5 during 4e lifetime. They found a number. It's not a big number, but it's a number, and they found another number than is smaller than it. See, he can talk about "editions" because there's 3.0 and 3.5, the rest is him not technically lying.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Sep 25, 2016 2:42 pm

tussock wrote:I'm quite serious that Mearls means the 3.0 and 3.5 PHBs they sold from 2010 to 2014, when 4e and Pathfinder were battling it out. He's not even counting the 4e books.

5e lifetime greater than 3.0 and 3.5 during 4e lifetime. They found a number. It's not a big number, but it's a number, and they found another number than is smaller than it. See, he can talk about "editions" because there's 3.0 and 3.5, the rest is him not technically lying.

I originally suggested that. But based on his clarifications, it is clear that he means at the very least "individual editions separately" not adding any sales together.

So when you factor in that 3.0 and 3.5 are different, and that you get a free pdf with each book purchase that can count as two sales, I fully believe that 5e has sold more than half the PHBs of 3.0 that were sold in the first three years.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Sun Sep 25, 2016 5:18 pm

JonSetanta wrote:I play 5e. It's not better or worse than 3e, but it is different.

It's easier for the new players to learn, that's for sure.

And suddenly your stupid poll/idea threads make a lot more sense. They're still stupid, but it makes a lot more sense to fuck with numbers in a terrible way when the system itself fails at numbers (which yes, does in fact make the system worse than 3e). And also fails at dealing with any number of concepts and tropes of D&D itself.

As for easier to learn... yeah. Lacking any meat to it, it certainly is. That doesn't mean complexity is inherently better (see recent PF classes for complexity that adds nothing but stupidity to the system), but 5e has an inexcusable inability to handle the basics of D&D.

CapnTthePirateG · Post by **CapnTthePirateG** » Sun Sep 25, 2016 6:22 pm

Ok, the only reason 5e is easier to learn is because so much of it is "whatever the hell we made up".

I've had 5e players defend the system with "well we don't care about that stuff, we leave it up to the DM". Which is a way to play I guess. I personally hate it and despise that Mearls and co are charging $150 for a system where 66% is "make it up yourself, thanks for the money" but what do I know?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkRGlNNqmqk

5e in a nutshell.

Ghremdal · Post by **Ghremdal** » Mon Sep 26, 2016 7:17 am

I hate 5e as much as the next guy, if not more but is it possible that Mearls is right? That 5e actually sold more books then 3.0?

Now the Amazon data Virgil posted doesn't support that, but the interesting thing that is that it shows 5e PHB sales are actually growing.

The data that does support 5e's growth is the ICv2 data:
http://icv2.com/articles/markets/view/3 ... pring-2016
and
http://icv2.com/articles/news/view/3515 ... -2-billion

Where the RPG market grew from 15 mil to 35 mil in two years. According to that data DnD wasn't on the top 5 chart at all in 2013, but since 5e came out it was on top. Added to that is a quote from someone in paizo that 5e didn't hurt their sales (but also they didn't see a substantial increase), it seems that the 20 mil growth over two years is mostly due to 5e.

Lets say they make up for 15 mil of that, and at 30 $ a book that means they sold 500,000 books over two years. Ok I guess that supports Virgils data that suggest 300k PHB's have been sold; if 2/3 of all books sold are PHB's.

TL;DR I'm a stupid fuck who does math while posting.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Mon Sep 26, 2016 8:17 am

Yeah Spoiler alert, if 2/3rds of all the books they sold are PHBs (reasonable, since they don't actually make any non core books at all), then they sold 500,000 PHBs, which is still less than 3e.

But hey, if you totally count all the PDFs they "sold" as free copies to all the people that bought the book, and just double that up to 1 mil books, that might beat 3.0 PHBs. (But definitely loses to 3e+3.5).

Basically, everything that has been said everywhere is consistent with the fact that 5e still hasn't sold as well as the best selling edition of D&D 3e, by any non weasel metric.

Which is exactly why Mike Mearls will post blatant lies like "3e+3.5+4e<5e" and then turn around and clarify a week later that when he used plus signs, they were secret metaphorical plus signs that didn't actually mean plus at all.

If you lie big enough, then when people question your lie, they don't come to the actual conclusion which is "Oh look, still not even beating 3.0 sales alone."