The Gaming Den

GâtFromKI wrote:D&D 4 is remarkable in the fact it has less than two player per game - which means the average game of D&D 4 features the MC and less than one player.

Uh, 7857 players/1294 games = 6.07 players/game. ???

I may or may not have read the thread title incorrectly.

Also, if you had 5 players who played 4e, you could have eight billion games of 4e on Roll 20 that are all actually being played in, since the games metric is literally just "different game" and has no interaction with the people saying they want to play the game.

In fact, you can have 3/4ths of your games be bye people who don't fill out the "Looking for X" part of their player profile at all because they just play with each other and use the map function.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:

GâtFromKI wrote:D&D 4 is remarkable in the fact it has less than two player per game - which means the average game of D&D 4 features the MC and less than one player.

Uh, 7857 players/1294 games = 6.07 players/game. ???

If you look at the numbers, it should be very clear that he means DnD 5. Which has about 25.000 games and 35.000 players.

sandmann wrote:If you look at the numbers, it should be very clear that he means DnD 5. Which has about 25.000 games and 35.000 players.

Dude, he used the term 'D&D 4' seven times in two sentences. Once might be a typo, but seven times is something else.

The Roll20 stats measures "games" by the number of games tagged with that system that have been accessed in the relevant quarter. If you start up a game and nobody accesses it for the quarter, it won't count, but if even one player or GM accesses the game anywhere in those three months, it does count. Totally forgotten games aren't counted, but games that have concluded and are now being used as asset depositories, or which the GM made a brief attempt at reviving but it died before the first session, or which has concluded but the GM likes to show off this one really cool map he made for it, those are all counted. Additionally, separate games that are actually all the same game will be double-counted. For example, I run a Star Wars campaign that has two separate Roll20 games associated with it, one is the actual campaign with tactical maps and the other is the galactic map, which is kept separate so that players can reference it at-will instead of requiring me to move them over to it. I forget if I listed the galactic map as Star Wars, but even if I didn't, other people doing something similar might.

Also, as mentioned, someone who already has their group assembled and is using Roll20 as a medium for play only and uses Myth-Weavers or personal pdfs for character sheets has no incentive to tag their game with any system at all, since the only functionality for that is to do with the LFG system and character sheets. Older systems are more likely to be played by ongoing groups who started with that system and never bothered to change, so this means that Roll20 is biased against older systems by at least a little bit.

At the same time, D&D 5e is nearly half of all games on Roll20 and games which started up and burned out quickly are unlikely to be continuously re-accessed so they're probably not being double-counted. It's possible that 5e is getting a boost from their Adventurer's League, whose GMs might maintain a different game for each of the dozens of different adventures released and access 10-15 of them per quarter to run mostly the same group of 4-5 players through them. Paizo has their adventure paths, but those are much more likely to take a complete quarter to run through even if GMs do keep adventure paths in separate games and access them whenever a group wants to play them.

Considering the total dominance of D&D 5e over every other RPG, making up nearly half of all games accessed this quarter in all of Roll20, I seriously doubt that 3.5e or PF or both combined (which is fair, since they're very nearly the same system and tables nominally playing one frequently allow content from the other) are actually more popular than 5e on Roll20 right now. Beating PF is an actual accomplishment, especially considering that 5e is in fact pretty much vaporware in print. There's huge chunks of the game which are just missing. They don't have a skills chapter, they have two pages that give vague overviews of skills with no advice whatsoever on how to actually use them and they don't even have a standard DCs chart for skills in general, let alone skill-by-skill examples.

All that aside, there is no data on whether 5e is doing better than 3e or even 4e in terms of lifetime sales. Mike Mearls is dishonest and everything he says is null data. There's a dozen different ways his claims could be technically correct while extremely misleading, and he could also just be flat-out lying. Roll20's data is probably more trustworthy (in that we can probably trust that it has been gathered in the way they say it was, with all the flaws that brings with it) but it only goes back to 2014, when 4e had been out of print for years and 3e for over half a decade.

The players stat is completely useless trivia. Unlike tagging your game, which causes the in-engine character sheet to match your system and causes people searching for that system to see your game in LFG, tagging yourself as a player of X system does nothing. You can, and several people do, tag themselves for systems they have never played on Roll20 or at all. Having an incredibly high density of D&D 5e players as compared to 5e games could mean a lot of things. It could mean a shortage of GMs so that people who tag themselves as playing 5e aren't actually playing 5e, they'd just like to. It could mean that games start up and burn out quickly, so that the average 5e player is playing in 2-3 different 5e games within the same quarter, because their bounce rate is that high and that fast. It could mean that 5e players tend to be playing more games at a time, not in the sense of playing them simultaneously but in the sense of having a Tuesday game, a Friday game, and a Sunday game. It could mean that a lot of players are hearing a lot of buzz about 5e and list themselves as 5e players because they'd like to try it out, but never bother to actually seek it out and instead play other games (which they have also listed themselves as players of).

The games number is extremely imperfect data, but also the most reliable data we have and not completely useless, but the players number is completely useless null data because there's no reason to believe there's any correlation between what people put themselves down as a player of and what they end up actually playing.

As much as people - myself included - like to hate on how there are no rules for skills, that is literally one of the selling points of the edition for many people. I've talked to a lot of people who like 5e better because it's "simpler" and point out that all the skill stuff is stuff for the DM to handle.

I'm also convinced that literally no one runs 3.5 skills as written (ex: hiding)

CapnTthePirateG wrote:As much as people - myself included - like to hate on how there are no rules for skills, that is literally one of the selling points of the edition for many people. I've talked to a lot of people who like 5e better because it's "simpler" and point out that all the skill stuff is stuff for the DM to handle.

I'm also convinced that literally no one runs 3.5 skills as written (ex: hiding)

I think that's basically disingenuous shit. 3.5 skills are 36 different rules. Some of them are Nintendo Hard, or infinity harder than that, to do right.

Saying that people don't run 3.5 RAW hide/MS/spot/listen/Diplomacy does not mean it's better to have no rules and just chill, because there are still 31 other rule sets people might use RAW.

And it's not like having no rules is exactly better either, as demonstrated by the fact that, even with their shitty rules best not used RAW in 3.5, 5e players and DMs still just use the 3.5 rules they remember to fill in the gaps in their no rules more than they make up new rules themselves.

So we've gone from Make Shit Up to Make Shit Up.

Yeah, you have some usable 3.5 skills, but let's be honest, shit like "social skills" and diplomacy are probably never going to be salvageable no matter how much you try.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:So we've gone from Make Shit Up to Make Shit Up.

Yeah, you have some usable 3.5 skills, but let's be honest, shit like "social skills" and diplomacy are probably never going to be salvageable no matter how much you try.

No that's the point. "Make shit up based on the (shitty) framework presented by 3.5" is so much better than "make shit up based on nothing" that people ostensibly playing the game with the second system actually just the first system.

And again, 30/36 skills (not saying you actually should use all of them, but it seems perfectly possible to use the RAW of 36 skill rules.)

The real reason we know 5th edition bombed is that it is so rare that people come to troll this board with rants about how great 5th edition is doing. Remember when we used to get invasions by 4rries every other month? Now it's one sadface dude four times a year. 5th edition just doesn't have the fanbase of... 4th edition.

Also, they don't stick around to keep arguing. It's the equivilent of drive-by arguements.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:As much as people - myself included - like to hate on how there are no rules for skills, that is literally one of the selling points of the edition for many people. I've talked to a lot of people who like 5e better because it's "simpler" and point out that all the skill stuff is stuff for the DM to handle.

I'm also convinced that literally no one runs 3.5 skills as written (ex: hiding)

Why enlighten me, how does one do Hiding wrong?

Slade wrote:Why enlighten me, how does one do Hiding wrong?

Apparently it just doesn't work.

Slade wrote:

CapnTthePirateG wrote:As much as people - myself included - like to hate on how there are no rules for skills, that is literally one of the selling points of the edition for many people. I've talked to a lot of people who like 5e better because it's "simpler" and point out that all the skill stuff is stuff for the DM to handle.

I'm also convinced that literally no one runs 3.5 skills as written (ex: hiding)

Why enlighten me, how does one do Hiding wrong?

I"ve seen this happen a lot with Hiding being used in gaming groups outside of my regular circle of gaming friends. The rules for hiding and moving silently aren't "just" 'Opposed Check'; but 'Opposed Checks + Distance/Condition Modifiers'. People regularly forget to subtract from their Spot/Listen checks further than 10' from where they're positioned; and make the mistake of calculating their played creature's spot/listen capability as if it had infinite range.

Even when playing with people on TGD I've seen it happen (e.g. Players ignoring distance and distracting environment modifiers; and then assuming they can spot/listen to someone making a hide/move silently check).

angelfromanotherpin wrote:

GâtFromKI wrote:D&D 4 is remarkable in the fact it has less than two player per game - which means the average game of D&D 4 features the MC and less than one player.

Uh, 7857 players/1294 games = 6.07 players/game. ???

I meant "D&D 5" (27k games for 40k players).

I guess I already forgot their was something between D&D 3 and the current edition.

Slade wrote:

CapnTthePirateG wrote:As much as people - myself included - like to hate on how there are no rules for skills, that is literally one of the selling points of the edition for many people. I've talked to a lot of people who like 5e better because it's "simpler" and point out that all the skill stuff is stuff for the DM to handle.

I'm also convinced that literally no one runs 3.5 skills as written (ex: hiding)

Why enlighten me, how does one do Hiding wrong?

JE got it with the distance modifiers (which I've never used) but people usually just mutter something about hiding instead of explicitly checking for a place to hide as well.

Likewise, I guarantee you the vast majority of players don't do climb and jump checks by the table lookup, and knowledge checks are traditionally "the DM lets you learn something, maybe, someone figure out what that is".

CapnTthePirateG wrote:

Slade wrote:

CapnTthePirateG wrote:As much as people - myself included - like to hate on how there are no rules for skills, that is literally one of the selling points of the edition for many people. I've talked to a lot of people who like 5e better because it's "simpler" and point out that all the skill stuff is stuff for the DM to handle.

I'm also convinced that literally no one runs 3.5 skills as written (ex: hiding)

Why enlighten me, how does one do Hiding wrong?

JE got it with the distance modifiers (which I've never used) but people usually just mutter something about hiding instead of explicitly checking for a place to hide as well.

Likewise, I guarantee you the vast majority of players don't do climb and jump checks by the table lookup, and knowledge checks are traditionally "the DM lets you learn something, maybe, someone figure out what that is".

1) The actual rules for knowledge checks are "the DM lets you learn something, maybe, and someone figure out what that is"

2) I would be genuinely surprised if people didn't do jump and climb by the DC look ups. That's one of those things I've literally watch 5e players and DMs look up in 3.5 SRD and then use in their 5e game.

3) The hiding rules are just not very good all around, but again, even the garbage in there is better than 5e's not rules, which is why people still look to garbage 3.5 hide rules (and their memory of them) to fill in the gaps missing in 5e rules, and we even saw that happen in an argument about hide rules with a 5e defender on this forum.

Next up for 5e releases: Character Sheets. $10. June


After that, everyone can look forward to September (3rd anniversary of the edition!), where WotC is... licensing Goodman Games to reprint basic D&D modules. And throw in some bullshit essays and interviews AND convert them to 5e. So in September look forward to B1 In Search of the Unknown and B2 Keep on the Borderlands. In a deluxe hardcover format!

Keep in mind that the bulk of Keep (the murderhobo caves where you go in and kill various tribes of humanoids, one at a time), were also redone as a 4e 'Encounters' sessions, and redone as a playtest module for very early versions of D&D Next. So... hard to tell if Goodman really has to work to shit this out. Not that whiting out the original stat blocks and replacing them with 5e versions would involve much anyway (beyond bloating the page count).


The only other product for this year have already been discussed: the reprinted 5e conversion adventures already stuffed into 'Tales from the Yawning Portal,' despite most of them being Greyhawk and not FR modules.

Yes, the THREE (3) 5e products for 2017 are character sheets, a $50 book with 7 converted modules, and a third party book converting 2 modules.

Truly, 5e is the most innovative and daring edition, with reams of quality products. Well, OK, a bare handful of products of dubious quality.

Going weakly into its third year with actual blank pages and reprinting the work of others. Then copping out and simply licensing the monumental task of digital scanning and reprinting with minimal editing.

So, I asked a friend's opinion of this product schedule, since they like 5e. They pointed out that a lot of the 5e worldbuilding and new content is being done online, which... is a reasonable business model, conceptually. I can see doing all or at least a lot of your new mechanical stuff as regular web offerings, and saving your print production for adventures and maps and other stuff that would be inconvenient in a web-only format.

But, quality of their product and their web content aside, it seems like that's why 5e's production schedule seems to be a bare trickle. The things that would be filling up four or five additional books a year are being released a few pages at a time online.

Prak wrote:They pointed out that a lot of the 5e worldbuilding and new content is being done online

Does anyone know where online this worldbuilding and new content is being done?

phlapjackage wrote:

Prak wrote:They pointed out that a lot of the 5e worldbuilding and new content is being done online

Does anyone know where online this worldbuilding and new content is being done?

I got nothing on the worldbuilding stuff, but character options get trickled out in PDF form on their website about once a week, give or take.

Prak wrote: But, quality of their product and their web content aside, it seems like that's why 5e's production schedule seems to be a bare trickle. The things that would be filling up four or five additional books a year are being released a few pages at a time online.

Except that doesn't even begin to cover it. Not only did 3e have significant;y more online support, but the books that aren't coming out every month were hundreds of pages long. Back in 1993, the 2nd edition version of Shining South was 96 pages. The 3rd edition version in 2004 was 192 pages. 4th edition of course didn't have the same kind of world building books, but shit like the "Gazeteer: The Nentir Vale: A 4th Edition D&D Supplement" was also 192 pages.

If you came out with a couple extra pages of online gibbering every day, that would be the equivalent of one of those fucking place books every three and a half months or so. Popular editions like 3rd edition and 2nd edition produced multiple books every month. Fuck, even 4th edition managed that until right at the end of its death spiral.

The simple fact of the matter is that official D&D content hasn't been coming out so slowly since before I was born. The fact that there's an online presence now and there wasn't in the late seventies isn't an excuse. There was an online presence fifteen years ago and people managed to write books on time. The D&D writing team today is less people than it's been since TSR was a garage operation in Wisconsin. I was not even alive the last time so little material was produced by the D&D writing staff because I have not been alive at any previous point in history when there were so few actual people writing D&D content.

-Username17

I think my friend misused the term worldbuilding to mean character options and such.

Prak wrote:I think my friend misused the term worldbuilding to mean character options and such.

Three years on, there haven't been as many character options released in all online sources combined as were in The Complete Warrior. That should be an exaggeration, but it is not.

I remember 3rd ed having a bunch of online content and, if memory serves, some kind of magazine or two. I didn't read much of either though I do remember some of that content being shoved into a book (don't remember the title). What I've noticed is the lack of interesting 3rd party content. I really like(d) the Slayer's Guides and I just haven't heard of any interesting content similar to that. Though I don't follow 5th ed all that closely. I do have long distance friends that do play it but all they ever tell me about is their own games and nothing about the quality of the actual books.