D&D 5e has failed

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Post by Korwin »

Should'nt D&D 5 get the same or more hits than D&D 5e...?
The letters of "D&D 5" are part of "D&D 5e"...?
https://trends.google.com/trends/explor ... ,D%26D%205
Why does D&D 5 get less hits?
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Post by ...You Lost Me »

Korwin wrote:Should'nt D&D 5 get the same or more hits than D&D 5e...?
The letters of "D&D 5" are part of "D&D 5e"...?
https://trends.google.com/trends/explor ... ,D%26D%205
Why does D&D 5 get less hits?
The results for "D&D 5" don't include any results that happen to have "D&D 5" in them, they only count if someone explicitly searched for "D&D 5" without the e.
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Post by Voss »

So, D&D 5e has another book coming out, only seven months after the last one! They're really ripping into a new production schedule.

Aside from the bullshit nostalgia name, it's another monster book like Volo's guide sort of was. But higher CR and Greyhawk themed name dropping(for the first time in two and a half editions).

http://dnd.wizards.com/products/tableto ... -tome-foes

As usual these days, they're all about the interview videos. This is worth watching at about 2:15 for the mindboggling stupid that is Mike Mearls.
'We know most campaigns don't go past level 10, so all the high level monsters in this book are mostly for story background purposes, and not for actually using in game.' Basically use MTP to banish or defeat them, but don't have fights.


Bonus stupid for dragging up Mordenkainen and assigning to him the stupid fucking idea (about 5:00) that neutral demands balance because good winning is equally as bad as evil winning.


And as a bonus, dwarves vs duergar as well as elves vs drow for the eleventy-fifth time (which makes the drow thread seem oddly topical).
Last edited by Voss on Tue Feb 13, 2018 10:48 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

Wasn't that Mordenkainen's actual stupid philosophy, where he had a whole ethical calculus of neutrality?

Really 5e is the desperate nostalgia edition, of course they will cram as many references in as possible.
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Post by Voss »

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Wasn't that Mordenkainen's actual stupid philosophy, where he had a whole ethical calculus of neutrality?
Truthfully, I don't remember. My experience with Greyhawk was the boxed set and early tournament and set-piece modules (Elemental Evil and GDQ) and not much else. He was just a name attached to some spells, that in theory one of the TSR or pre-TSR people played (or he was one of the filler NPCs, since that doesn't sound like the kind of shit an actual player would care about).

Edit: turns out he was one of Gygax's original Big Dick NPC wizards (along with Bigby and Riggby), and turned up in a 1984 module (Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure, which sounds asstastic). I suspect any ethical calculus bullshit arrived with From the Ashes, Rary the Traitor and other shit in the early 90s revamp, like a lot of the shovelware stuff that happened post Fate of Istus (the 1e->2e transition adventure) I have no idea and give no fucks about.
Last edited by Voss on Wed Feb 14, 2018 2:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Cervantes »

Cargo Cult D&D
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Post by Emerald »

Voss wrote:Bonus stupid for dragging up Mordenkainen and assigning to him the stupid fucking idea (about 5:00) that neutral demands balance because good winning is equally as bad as evil winning.
CapnTthePirateG wrote:Wasn't that Mordenkainen's actual stupid philosophy, where he had a whole ethical calculus of neutrality?
He did, but it was lowercase-n pragmatic neutrality, not capital-N cosmic Neutrality. Less "Good and Evil are both equally valid life choices, so I'll choose Balance and counter every good act with an evil one" and more "There are a bunch of different empires and cults and crazy wizards and stuff around here and it would suck if any one of them took over Oerth, so I'll work to prevent the cold war between all the factions from turning hot."

From the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer:
Mordenkainen the archmage (N male human Wiz20+) formed the Circle of Eight as a tool to manipulate political factions of the Flanaess, preserving the delicate balance of power in hopes of maintaining stability and sanity in the region.
[...]
He has fought ardently for the forces of Good, most recently during the Greyhawk Wars, but just as often has worked on darker plots to achieve his ends. In all things, the Circle of Eight prefers to work behind the scenes, subtly manipulating events to ensure that no one faction gains the upper hand.
[...]
Mordenkainen remains the ninth member, a "shadow leader" dictating his agenda to others and influencing the Flanaess network of agents and servitors.
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Post by RobbyPants »

Cervantes wrote:Cargo Cult D&D
This is probably the most apt description of this edition I've read.

I'm picturing Merals wearing coconuts on his head, waving a pair of sticks around, and it all makes sense, now.
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Post by nockermensch »

RobbyPants wrote:
Cervantes wrote:Cargo Cult D&D
This is probably the most apt description of this edition I've read.

I'm picturing Merals wearing coconuts on his head, waving a pair of sticks around, and it all makes sense, now.
It is. Say what you want about 4E, but it's an indisputable fact that they were bold. WotC ate Mearl's bullshit game design theories and then put forward a radically different game, with novel mechanics backed by an aggressive marketing campaign and a full product release schedule.

That 4E proceeded to crash and burn spetacularly is a testament to how bad mechanics that produce a boring game will in the end overcome any amounts of aggressive marketing and groupthink by a segment of the fanbase. If the game objectively sucks, people will stop playing it, period.

But what happened next was puzzling and sad: Not only WotC failed to fire the one responsible for that horrible mess, but they learned all the wrong lessons about the 4E catastrofuck. They came out of their self-inflicted failure with the lesson "the playerbase hates change and new things". It takes a lot of hubris to not conclude that the playerbase just hates stupid new things, but that's Mearls we're talking about.

The result is D&D Previous Next: the edition that's as different from 4E as possible. Having decided that the player base don't like rules for challenges, tight advancement schedules or complexity, they went for MTP, skeleton armies ruling the world (also: Pit Fiends struggling to open stuck doors) and vapor instead.

This takes us to 2018 and a book with Mordenkainen in the cover.
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Post by mlangsdorf »

nockermensch wrote:Say what you want about 4E, but it's an indisputable fact that they were bold. WotC ate Mearl's bullshit game design theories and then put forward a radically different game, with novel mechanics backed by an aggressive marketing campaign and a full product release schedule.

That 4E proceeded to crash and burn spetacularly is a testament to how bad mechanics that produce a boring game will in the end overcome any amounts of aggressive marketing....

But what happened next was puzzling and sad: Not only WotC failed to fire the one responsible for that horrible mess, but they learned all the wrong lessons about the 4E catastrofuck. They came out of their self-inflicted failure with the lesson "the playerbase hates change and new things".
Which is sad and frustrating in a way.The playerbase was willing to try new things: I've never played D&D 3e except via a computer game, but my F2F group played a couple of campaigns of D&D4e and Gamma World 7e. We had to house rule them heavily, but by the end we'd almost gotten to a game that didn't suck despite all the burdens of poor 4e game design.

4e could have been decent. The design team consistently chose the worst option every time they had a choice, and seemed to hate player agency and choice, but it didn't have to be that way. It could have evolved to a better game. Though upon reflection, having to rewrite all the classes, all the monsters, and the non-combat challenge resolution engine means rewriting 95% of the game to save the combat engine.

Even so, the game was evolving: I understand the later Monster Manuals sucked less than the first one, and people had house rules for non-combat challenges that weren't broken within a few weeks of the game's release. A new edition should have built upon that kind of stuff, not thrown out everything learned in favor of MTP and vagueness.

One of the great things about GURPS 4e (in the context of GURPS, yes a lot of you hate it) was that SJ Games had been publishing optional rules for 3e for years, and a lot of those rules substantially changed how 3e worked. When 4e was getting written, the design team had a lot of feedback - in the form of commentary on those optional rules - on what changes people might want to see and how those changes could work in play. So 4e was an evolution of 3e, with a lot of similarities but with some of the bad design decisions changed to be more sensible or some confusing things reworded. GURPS 4e isn't a perfect game, but it's better than 3e.

In contrast, WotC's policy of throwing out the entire previous edition means there's been very little evolutionary change between editions. Simple house rules to improve 4e like "let everyone get a +2 heroic bonus to a stat which they don't have a racial bonus, which immensely widens the acceptable race-class combinations" can't be easily included in 5e, because the rules are so different that there's no easy way to evaluate it.
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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

nockermensch wrote:
RobbyPants wrote:
Cervantes wrote:Cargo Cult D&D
This is probably the most apt description of this edition I've read.

I'm picturing Merals wearing coconuts on his head, waving a pair of sticks around, and it all makes sense, now.
It is. Say what you want about 4E, but it's an indisputable fact that they were bold. WotC ate Mearl's bullshit game design theories and then put forward a radically different game, with novel mechanics backed by an aggressive marketing campaign and a full product release schedule.

That 4E proceeded to crash and burn spetacularly is a testament to how bad mechanics that produce a boring game will in the end overcome any amounts of aggressive marketing and groupthink by a segment of the fanbase. If the game objectively sucks, people will stop playing it, period.

But what happened next was puzzling and sad: Not only WotC failed to fire the one responsible for that horrible mess, but they learned all the wrong lessons about the 4E catastrofuck. They came out of their self-inflicted failure with the lesson "the playerbase hates change and new things". It takes a lot of hubris to not conclude that the playerbase just hates stupid new things, but that's Mearls we're talking about.

The result is D&D Previous Next: the edition that's as different from 4E as possible. Having decided that the player base don't like rules for challenges, tight advancement schedules or complexity, they went for MTP, skeleton armies ruling the world (also: Pit Fiends struggling to open stuck doors) and vapor instead.

This takes us to 2018 and a book with Mordenkainen in the cover.
As I recall Mearls is on record explaining how 4e failed because it was too balanced.

The other big takeaway is Pathfinder - this beat 4e despite having no new or good ideas at all. Pathfinder's changes are pretty much some spell spot nerfs, rolling some skills, and fiddly class feature additions you don't care about. There are no new design ideas in Pathfinder, just 3.5 with the fiddliness ramped up to 11. It's not hard to see why Mearls saw Pathfinder winning and drew the conclusion that people preferred nostalgia.

This of course completely breaks down as you're trying to introduce the game to a new generation of players, but it's not like 10 year olds are good at judging game mechanics anyway.
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Post by OgreBattle »

I've heard "4e was too balanced so balance is bad" parroted various times across the internet now because of that.
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Post by Bigode »

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Post by ETortoise »

Does anyone have any advice for DMing 5e? My wife is running Storm King’s Thunder and is confused by the CR system for making appropriate encounters. Looking back at this thread, it seems like the CR system is borked anyway, so I was hoping there was some practical advice available. It’s also potentially tricky because our party is fairly large. We have 6-7 PCs on a typical night, two wizards, a Druid, warlock, bard, barbarian, and a fighter.

My wife’s questions started when a book encounter produced an invisible stalker for our level 2 party. We survived due to everyone being confused about the rules for grappling and resistance to nonmagical weapons. There was also a handy artifact hammer. I also think there was a double handful of behind-the-screen fudging...

In addition to CR and encounter building advice, I’d appreciate some general DMing advice for this edition, since there’s a solid chance I’ll be running a game in it pretty soon.
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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

ETortoise wrote:Does anyone have any advice for DMing 5e? My wife is running Storm King’s Thunder and is confused by the CR system for making appropriate encounters. Looking back at this thread, it seems like the CR system is borked anyway, so I was hoping there was some practical advice available. It’s also potentially tricky because our party is fairly large. We have 6-7 PCs on a typical night, two wizards, a Druid, warlock, bard, barbarian, and a fighter.

My wife’s questions started when a book encounter produced an invisible stalker for our level 2 party. We survived due to everyone being confused about the rules for grappling and resistance to nonmagical weapons. There was also a handy artifact hammer. I also think there was a double handful of behind-the-screen fudging...

In addition to CR and encounter building advice, I’d appreciate some general DMing advice for this edition, since there’s a solid chance I’ll be running a game in it pretty soon.
Slice monster HP in half so you're not bored to tears.
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Post by Koumei »

Drink heavily both before and during the game.
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Post by Whiysper »

Grant ability score increases AS WELL as feats. Do that on character level rather than class level (if you read this as 'give out feats on the 3e schedule', you're probably not doing anything wrong...).

Give people Inspiration whenever they do something that improves the game. Don't let people nominate each other for it, that's your job.

Monster-wise - avoid save-or-die effects, unless you're prepared to lose a lot of time to people being slowly cured/rerolled (basilisk, intellect devourer..). The halving HP I didn't find necessary, tbth - Assassin rogue w/decent poison (check the DMG) and a crit-happy Paladin made short work of most things! Mobs of weaker enemies work better than single hardcore ones, although Legendary enemies can be fun occasionally (thinking Dragons and Liches, didn't try any others).

Treat the skill system as 3e.

Basically, wherever 5e doesn't tell you enough to work something out, use the 3.5 rule from the SRD, and 95% of the time THAT WILL WORK FINE.

And, eventually, graduate from 5e to a houseruled 3.5 game. That's optional, but it's definitely the path I followed :).

EDIT: Koumei is right, by the way - I ran the game for about a year, every friday, while drinking more cider than I should have. Made the whole thing much more entertaining.
Last edited by Whiysper on Mon Mar 12, 2018 10:08 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by tenngu »

Not only doesn't fail, but raised over 2 million USD. Sure, some of that is for the minis that they were throwing in. Maybe wotc can take a note from this? This whole book printing business is alright when you actually do the book printing thing.
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Post by Iduno »

ETortoise wrote:Does anyone have any advice for DMing 5e? My wife is running Storm King’s Thunder and is confused by the CR system for making appropriate encounters. Looking back at this thread, it seems like the CR system is borked anyway, so I was hoping there was some practical advice available. It’s also potentially tricky because our party is fairly large. We have 6-7 PCs on a typical night, two wizards, a Druid, warlock, bard, barbarian, and a fighter.

My wife’s questions started when a book encounter produced an invisible stalker for our level 2 party. We survived due to everyone being confused about the rules for grappling and resistance to nonmagical weapons. There was also a handy artifact hammer. I also think there was a double handful of behind-the-screen fudging...
Yeah, that sounds like how it's supposed to work. The main design appears to be based around 2 things: be out of their minds on at least 3 different kinds of drugs while writing, and keep player agency and meaningful decisions to a minimum so the dungeon MASTER can tell their story without the players interfering. You're supposed to fudge things constantly so no matter what the dice say, they turn out the way you planned.
Last edited by Iduno on Mon Mar 12, 2018 2:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Storm King's Thunder is less, at least until the final parts, a story about giants and more a story about the Sword Coast where giants are a curiously common enemy. You can sandbox for a very long time and not intersect with the main plot, even though it gets introduced early on. The game also doesn't really force you to solve the plot at its pace, you're just supposed to go 'WTF is with all these giants' and investigate.

One thing to keep in mind is that giants are a bruiser enemy and they are very common in this adventure. If you don't have spellcasters confident with their save-or-sucks (like Sleet Storm and Otiluke's Resilient Sphere) or people with great ranged attacks, you're going to have a bad time. Even my high-AC Bladesinger with Shield and the 26 AC Light Cleric was getting creamed. If you have a party consisting of, say, a lot of melee rangers and rogues and Hexblades and monks and Champion fighters, you're not going to have much fun.

Our party went through it pretty well. Our most recurring group had a Lore Bard with Swift Quiver and a Sorcerer multiclass for a Staff of Power, a Light Cleric, a Bladesinger Wizard, a Dragon Sorcerer, a Barbarian with a decent ranged attack and a STR-XOR item, and a ranged Eldritch Knight. Giants have some pretty fearsome ranged attacks, but we were able to put down a much bigger ass-whupping. By the time they got in range, they were usually ripped to pieces by Wall of Fire/Spirit Guardians/Vicious Mockery/etc.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Mon Mar 12, 2018 9:34 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Username17 »

tenngu wrote:
Not only doesn't fail, but raised over 2 million USD. Sure, some of that is for the minis that they were throwing in. Maybe wotc can take a note from this? This whole book printing business is alright when you actually do the book printing thing.
The average backer is pledging more than $73. For a $20 pdf. I have honestly no idea what rate they are getting for those minis or shirts, but it seems like they are definitely being asked to cough up over twenty thousand copies of them. This is the kind of success that makes kickstarters leave their makers in bankruptcy. Not all of the pledge levels are profitable to the same degree, so if tens of thousands of people are picking one pledge level that has costs associated, that could be real good or real bad.

But regardless, Going about thirty thousand copies is certainly a good sales figure for a no-brand 3rd party book, but it's not great for Dungeons & Dragons. Even 4th edition got made fun of for only selling "hundreds of thousands" of books.

The flip side of course is that it clearly indicates that it is still profitable to print Dungeons & Dragons books, and WotC treating 5th edition like Abandonware remains inexcusable.

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Post by deaddmwalking »

I went through that kickstarter and didn't realize it wasn't 'official' product at any point. I mean, they push so much to third parties it just didn't surprise me if WotC was trying to start a 'twitch' streaming room.
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Post by Mord »

I know we are contractually obligated to piss in every available bowl of Cheerios, but this KS did so well on a theme that we discuss so frequently that I think it's worth unpacking a little. Hell, every other thread on the Den either starts out being explicitly about Logistics & Dragons or ends up there despite its nominal starting point.

The KS is kind of a dog's breakfast - they were asking $50k to make a supplement book for 5e, build a TV studio(?), and make a bunch of little gem-colored dragon figures(??). They ended up with $2.1 million, somehow. Is this purely because they were trading on the Critical Role brand recognition? Is this because people really want Critical Role to have a TV studio? Do people really want little plastic dragons? Or is the lord-tier landowning part of adventuring something that there's a real market for that is presently under-served?

I broke down the pledges and rewards. I don't know where the $375k in add-ons was spent, but of the $1,747k that was spent directly on pledge tiers, we see:
  • $494k on minis (28%),
    $333k on shit like stickers, T-shirts, and Discord access purely to support Critical Role (19%),
    $673k on the book in PDF and/or hardcover (39%), and
    $300k on Kickstarter stupidity (the deluxe book) (14%). You might as well lump this in with "supporting Critical Role".
So a little under 30% of the money is for little plastic dragons, a little under 35% of the money is for people to say "we like Critical Role a lot and want to give them our dollars", and a little under 40% of the money is actually for the damn book.

So what we have here is about 28,000 people collectively shelling out about $673k for a book about hiring warbands and building castles. That seems pretty heartening to me, honestly.

Obviously all of this is founded in people wanting to give Critical Role their dollars, but I have to believe that the choice of subject matter for the book matters at least a little... They wouldn't have raised the same amount of money offering a book all about magic roofies or a cow patty pressed between two covers, would they..?
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Post by Chamomile »

Matt Colville and Matt Mercer are different people.
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Post by Cervantes »

yo what first level spells should an abjuration wizard be grabbing

I went with Mage Armor+Shield+Find Familiar as the obvious base, absorb elements, and then the rest is probably gonna be rituals
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