D&D 5e has failed

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Voss
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Post by Voss »

He didn't actually claim to like the game.
deaddmwalking wrote:The game doesn't have a lot to it, but since anything they had would be crap, it's not the point against it that it ought to be. Basically ANYTHING you come up with will be better than what they came up with, so by making you come up with so much stuff, it's not as bad as it would be
The game is terrible, what they make is terrible, so by forcing you to make shit up yourself, they're making the game better? That's your claim?

The fuck. Would you thank someone for shanking you?
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Cervantes
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Post by Cervantes »

i think his argument is "they're terrible at design in general so by going rules-lite there's less shit rules"

i wouldn't take that as a super serious argument
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Post by deaddmwalking »

Clearly they shouldn't be asking for REAL MONEY for this game, but it's still slightly better than a stranger inviting you to play their homebrew without any other details.
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Post by Stubbazubba »

Mike Mearls did an AMA on Reddit. Apparently WotC was looking to hire a game designer and this was literally his reply when someone asked about what they're looking for in that position:
Mike Mearls wrote:The hiring process has been interesting, because it forced us to really look at what we value and require. Here are the big picture ones.

1. You really need to know how to write, and must have an excellent grasp of grammar. For tabletop gaming, the written word is your programming language. You have to be an expert with it and capable of handling complex language and concepts with precise language.

2. Game design is a little overrated. We do a lot of iteration, so having the ability to come up with lots of interesting ideas and polish the best ones to perfect is better than having a few, big ideas.

3. Mind set is important. Working on D&D is about supporting the community and growing the game. Some designers want to make a mark or make a name for themselves, and that doesn't really work well with what D&D needs.
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Post by K »

Stubbazubba wrote:Mike Mearls did an AMA on Reddit. Apparently WotC was looking to hire a game designer and this was literally his reply when someone asked about what they're looking for in that position:
Mike Mearls wrote:The hiring process has been interesting, because it forced us to really look at what we value and require. Here are the big picture ones.

1. You really need to know how to write, and must have an excellent grasp of grammar. For tabletop gaming, the written word is your programming language. You have to be an expert with it and capable of handling complex language and concepts with precise language.

2. Game design is a little overrated. We do a lot of iteration, so having the ability to come up with lots of interesting ideas and polish the best ones to perfect is better than having a few, big ideas.

3. Mind set is important. Working on D&D is about supporting the community and growing the game. Some designers want to make a mark or make a name for themselves, and that doesn't really work well with what D&D needs.
Wow. That’s the recipe for failure.

That’s how you get talentless hacks who recycle bad ideas that were debunked an actual generation ago. That’s how you get professional turd-polishers who spend their days trying to sell the community on grognard-isms instead of actual advancing the field. That’s how you kill an entire industry.
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Post by virgil »

His #1 point seems like an odd way to describe being a technical writer, which while I feel that is important for writing a rulebook - it's arguably a different skillset from being a game designer.
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Post by erik »

I’m on board with #3. People who want recognition or to do an AMA on Reddit... can go. Well. One person really.
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Post by Dean »

#3 sounds like boss-ese for "Let me, Mike Mearls take credit for your work"
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Post by Stubbazubba »

Yeah, the combined effect of these sounds like: "Your ideas don't matter, only your ability to polish my ideas and make them presentable. And if you disagree, I will say you're just trying to gratify your ego at the expense of the community."
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Post by K »

Stubbazubba wrote:Yeah, the combined effect of these sounds like: "Your ideas don't matter, only your ability to polish my ideas and make them presentable. And if you disagree, I will say you're just trying to gratify your ego at the expense of the community."
It's closer to "your job is to keep me and my friends employed. You'll do all the work, then we get credit for fucking around in the office in the guise of workshopping your ideas. Also, for god's sake, don't do anything original or interesting that might make us look less valuable than you."
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Post by Username17 »

Yeah it does seem like Mike is straight up admitting that he doesn't want to hire anyone who is going to make him look bad by making anything good. He just wants someone who is going to follow orders and polish his turds. Ugh.

I don't think there's anyone left at Wizards who could give us something like 3rd edition again. That's really sad.

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Post by rasmuswagner »

FrankTrollman wrote:Yeah it does seem like Mike is straight up admitting that he doesn't want to hire anyone who is going to make him look bad by making anything good. He just wants someone who is going to follow orders and polish his turds. Ugh.

I don't think there's anyone left at Wizards who could give us something like 3rd edition again. That's really sad.

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Shit, the current staff couldn't give you Fourth Edition.
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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

Someone else needs to buy the IP for 6e.
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Post by Dogbert »

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Someone else needs to buy the IP for 6e.
Disney?
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Post by Voss »

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Someone else needs to buy the IP for 6e.
Weird debate time: what IP? The 'Dungeons & Dragons' specifically-with-ampersand title? The tiny corner of the Forgotten Realms that they shove adventures into? They've abandoned every other setting, the mechanics can't be under copyright and the 4e/5e mechanics are the problem anyway.

It can't be the list of monsters from public domain and/or what the Tolkien estate didn't sue over. The TSR/WotC specific monsters (Beholders, Illithids (ish), and Rust Monsters (which actually doesn't have IP protection, or at least WotC didn't make Paizo take it out), etc) are largely terrible pieces of shit.

What, exactly, would someone need to buy other than the name?
Last edited by Voss on Sat Dec 23, 2017 7:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Cervantes »

Literally just the name yeah
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Post by Krusk »

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Someone else needs to buy the IP for 6e.
Hasbro just announced a movie for 2021. I think its pretty clear they told mearls to do whatever and not piss anyone off too much. Ip wont be sold until the movie bombs hard. If it does even just ok you’ll probably get a 6e but mearls most likely will still be around.

No one is buying for a long time.
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Post by Username17 »

As far as RPGs go, the names are incredibly valuable. Look how much virtual ink was spilled because some Swedish folks bought the Vampire IP and floated the idea that they might make an RPG out of it at some point. It's all vaporware at this point, and there's no evidence that they have anyone on staff who knows how to design an RPG. But it's considered serious news that appears on nerd news sites whenever they drop a new announcement about how this time for sure they are totally serious guys going to eventually release an RPG of some sort.

Dungeons and Dragons is the trope namer. Any edition of D&D will automatically sell a shit tonne of copies and be played by a host of people all over the world. A failed edition of D&D still sells hundreds of thousands of books.

5th edition D&D isn't better than some rando's 3rd edition house rules. In most ways it's significantly worse. But it has a real name, and it is therefore "official" in a way that other game systems would have a very tough time emulating.

It's possible for a startup with a new game and a new name to beat D&D. It happened in the 90s with White Wolf. It's easier now than it's been at any point in my lifetime because the internets and also 5th edition D&D sucks and has no products. But D&D starts on 3rd base and your heartbreaker starts in the fucking parking lot.

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Post by Mord »

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Chasing Innovation Inside the Company Behind D&D, Magic and Avalon Hill, Rolling Stone 2017-12-27.
“After three and a half years, we had our best sales in November. It sold out and we’ve been struggling to restock. It’s a great engine of play.”
Xanathar's Guide To Fucking Your Uncle was released November 21, 2017. The last time they released a rules supplement aimed at players was the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide on November 3, 2015, two entire fucking years earlier. It would be a mind-boggling failure even by Mearls standards if November wasn't the biggest sales month they had for 5e. President Chris Cocks may not currently be wearing pants that are on fire but he has a pair in his closet.
I want to to make new games. I want to make variants of existing games. What about Axis and Allies and Zombies?”
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Wizards approach to Avalon Hill is, in many ways, the most evident sign of how it likes to sort through both a long-lived history and create new properties. In figuring out what to do next from Avalon Hill’s library, Cocks says they look for the Zeitgeist. “What are players asking for,” he says. “We watch social media. We survey our players.” That also ties in nicely with the company’s approach to hiring. “The most important, if not fundamental, thing we do to have a holistic approach is to hire fans of the games,” he says. “We want people who are passionate and feel ownership. What that tends to do is create authentic experiences.”

Along with that comes a bit of tough love when it comes to the company’s and brands biggest fans, he adds. “We call it 'kicking in the door of the clubhouse,'” he says. “One thing about gamers and the gaming community is that a lot of people want to go in and play and be a part of the community. But they also want to be the last one in, because they want to feel special. We think the community feels more special the bigger it gets. You see that in how we address D&D stories and rulesets, making them as open-ended as possible.”
So let me get this straight... you have a "holistic approach" where you want to "hire fans of the games" who "are passionate and feel ownership" in an effort to "create authentic experiences," but simultaneously you want to "kick in the door of the clubhouse" and make your "D&D stories and rulesets [...] as open-ended as possible." How do you reconcile the ideas of fostering a sense of ownership in existing fans while also kicking the door of their clubhouse to let everybody in? You can't, because it's mutually fucking exclusive you hack fraud.
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Post by Dogbert »

So in the end Cocks turned out a barrel of cocks. Oh well, "here comes the new boss, same as the old boss."
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Post by virgil »

I figured that was corporate double-speak for "we want more people to play without losing existing fans:
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Post by Voss »

Seven more Magic computer games? Are any of them not going to suck?

I'm actually surprised at new D&D computer games. I thought that particular boat was burned after their licensing fuck ups with Atari- even once the agreements expired, they'd avoid that path again. Hmm. Unless they're counting the Beamdog 're-releases.'
“At its core, D&D has a couple things going for it: A rich lore and rich history and six or seven different worlds. That’s a rich vein to be able to tap into. Also, the history associated with it means that when you play D&D it feels very authentic because it’s a mature property and has had so many iterations of it. The secret to D&D is that really the rules are just guidelines.”
Mature + iterations = any bullshit is 'authentic.' Lovely.
Shame about that rich vein of 6 or 7 worlds (why... or? Shouldn't he know?). Not much point if you never use anything but a tiny corner of the post future* FR, which most people know jack-shit about.

*5e FR is set after the 'merged worlds' 4e apocalypse just... goes away.
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Post by phlapjackage »

The secret to D&D is that really the rules are just guidelines.
When did this become a "thing"? I guess they needed new marketing speak after "the math just works" failed, but that quote above has to be one of the dumbest things...you know what, never mind
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Post by Username17 »

phlapjackage wrote:
The secret to D&D is that really the rules are just guidelines.
When did this become a "thing"? I guess they needed new marketing speak after "the math just works" failed, but that quote above has to be one of the dumbest things...you know what, never mind
4e was very structured, to the point where many people said it didn't even count as an RPG and was basically a board game. 5e is a reaction to that and is essentially the opposite in every way it could be. While the 5e player's handbook is still over three hundred pages, it's not very structured at all. It's so unstructured that the procedure for sneaking or scouting or diplomacizing is left undeclared. There are related skills, but how and when you roll them is a mystery.

The 5e PHB is basically all filler. There are sample alphabets, charts to roll a d6 for character motivation, and musings about how you could use alternate pantheons from Earth's history. But the entire descriptions of the feats would fit in 4 pages without art, and that's with a sprawling format with a lot of white space. The entire 5e PHB looks like someone took a disorganized deck worth of D&D notes and just stuffed it all into a book-shape until a 175k wordcount was filled and then got a typesetter to fill it full of art until it wasn't shorter in pagecount than the 4e PHB.

5e's release schedule is also reversed from 4e. 4e had a very structured presentation, where new content could be made by simply filling in the blanks in templates with whatever came off the top of your head. I demonstrated that if you were fairly disciplined about it, you could write finished 4e content at the rate of about 12k words a day. Meaning that a book like Divine Power 2 could honestly be written by one person in 2 weeks if that's what you wanted to do. And the release schedule was insanely ambitious, with like a dozen core books in the first year, and they didn't even launch until fucking June, meaning that first year was actually just 7 months. 5e on the flip side, doesn't release anything ever.
After three and a half years, we had our best sales in November. It sold out and we’ve been struggling to restock.
This is weird on a bunch of levels.
  • Why three and a half years? The preface for the 5e PHB is dated May 2014, and Xanawhatzit came out at the end of November 2017. Three and a Half Years probably takes us back to just after the 5e PHB was made. But in any case, definitely excludes anything from the 4e time period, let alone the 3e time period.
  • Why or how would they be struggling to restock? They can print as many copies as they want and have them ordered for shipping the next day. It's not even a phone call to make that happen, they just write a two sentence e-mail and it's done.
  • With the amount of bullshit word games they play, I can't help notice that they said their best sales were in November. Normally you'd expect that to mean that they had their highest sales month, but they don't actually say that. Given that the book they are talking about wasn't available for most of November, they are probably talking about their best sales week or even their best sales day. And of course, that's further caveated by the fact that they give a time frame that pointedly excludes anything from before May 21st, 2014.
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Post by phlapjackage »

FrankTrollman wrote:4e was very structured, to the point where many people said it didn't even count as an RPG and was basically a board game. 5e is a reaction to that and is essentially the opposite in every way it could be.
Ah that explanation makes sense, thanks.
FrankTrollman wrote: [*] With the amount of bullshit word games they play, I can't help notice that they said their best sales were in November.
Maybe it's
[*] their best sales were in November.
meaning the best discounts on books happened in November :rofl:
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