Seriously? No dnd as a service I mean, 2024 analyses yet?

[Dogbert]

No one has been willing to bite the bullet yet? No one eager to tear 5.5 a new one? At all?

[Foxwarrior]

The 5e people in the denner discords mostly got bored of it before it even came out...

[Thaluikhain]

I don't like the weapons mastery thingy. Ok, the idea wasn't bad, and needing to do something to make fighters hitting people with swords more interesting is a known issue, but the implementation is bad. Each weapon has one from a small list of special abilities which you use if you have the mastery of that weapon (fighters and barbarians and stuff can choose 2-3 weapons to master, monks can't (which they should, thematically), rogues can (which not sure they should, thematically), they can change their choices every long rest).

But that's one special ability that triggers each and every time an attack hits with the weapon. Doesn't increase your options, just adds another step, sometimes to get an irrelevant result.

Also, some weapons can be used one or two-handedly. Using them two-handedly does more damage, but not as much as a dedicated two handed weapon, and using it one-handedly just seems to allow shield use. So if you're not going to use a shield there's not point not having a dedicated two-handed weapon, and if you are, it having two handed stats doesn't help. Unless you start the fight with a shield but want to drop it half way through to use the weapon twohandedly.

Now, one thing you could want to do is have the option to hit someone once with a weapon if both hands, or try to hit twice, once with each hand, less powerfully (maybe the other blow is a punch). But you can't do that in a fight. The closest I can see to doing that is to take a Paladin or Ranger, and take one of those bonus action spells that do more damage when you hit. So when you hit, you can maybe use that spell, or maybe make an attack with a weapon in your off-hand.

If have to squint my brain a bit to make that look right, though. I don't think 1 big attack vs 2 small attacks is too much to ask, and gives a tiny amount of choice during fights. But non-casters are the sort that need that the most.

[Kaelik]

I'm not saying it's the one true path to interesting fighters, but still haven't seen anyone beat Fiends and Fortresses "by being a fighter you get to use all the different fighter abilities of your level, each of which requires different kinds of weapon, and so you carry around a golf bag full of weapons that you pull a new one out of for each attack if you switch up what you want to do."

[deaddmwalking]

I've been playing D&D long enough that I remember first edition and basic and advanced (AD&D). There was no SRD, and half (at least) of the rules were in the DMG. If a player said something like 'I cast teleport', there was an equal chance that the GM said 'sure', and used the description in the PHB and an equal chance that they remembered GM dickery in the DMG and busted it out. Basically, while everyone was pretty sure we were playing 'by the rules', nobody was sure exactly what those rules were.

I feel like 5th edition has embraced that. With new rules in a variety of books, there's a lot of ambiguity regarding which options are available at any table. If the rules actually included meaningful variety, that'd probably be a bigger problem. But everything is so bland I just don't think anyone can get worked up over it. It's like incorporating articles from Dragon Magazine - you'll see something for a couple of adventures and maybe one player will make it a major thing, but eventually it all disappears from play because nobody is bothering to remember that there even is an option that they're forgetting to use.

[Dogbert]

Mearls' legacy was Calvinball. Ever since then, dnd is the game where everything is made up and the rules don't matter, but it's kinda depressing that it no longer warrants discussion here.

P.S: I didn't even know there was a Den discord.

[MGuy]

The only thing I feel about DnD 5e is that, where there are rules, they aren't that interesting. Between it and PF2E I was thoroughly convinced to start running Lancer.

[Kaelik]

Yeah I have prepared to run lancer, but alas did not have enough players. If I never played D&D again, that would be okay at this point. I would be content playing other TTRPGs.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

I'm not even sure what I would want a genuine good quality successor to the good editions of D&D anymore. I certainly don't want what's on offer, its a meat free yawn fest.

It's D&D for rules vegans.

I've seen more engaging rules that were written as a joke. In fact, rather surprisingly, I've seen that well more than once.

[virgil]

Yeah, there are definitely much better systems out there. I'm still quite satisfied with this campaign of Star Wars SAGA, truly a masterpiece for what me and my players all want.

[Thaluikhain]

Given the size of D&D, would a new edition have to include umpteen years of bloat and weird classes and races and everything, pretty soon out of the gate? Otherwise you've annoyed existing players, but there are some really big and obvious downsides to trying to mash everything in, especially quickly.

[deaddmwalking]

If you don't support concepts that people play, they aren't going to want to convert.

The original D&D and 2nd edition were popular with like 6-12 classes, and it took a long time for 3rd edition to get a lot of base classes (and in hindsight PrCs are probably a mistake). Having a small number of classes with lots of selectable options is probably fine - in fact when you look at classes today you could pretty much treat each HD as the same class - but stating that a Paladin or Cavalier is a kit for Fighter makes it a lot harder to publish book after book with more base classes. There's pressure to find ways to say less with more words. Essentially, the publishing pressures push toward always releasing more content which is caustic to the game.

The best case scenario is that they publish a complete game all at once and there's no need for mechanical expansions. Settings can explore variations or alternate takes, but you should never have to retcon the existence of classes into the game world.

[Foxwarrior]

Given the size of D&D, would a new edition have to include umpteen years of bloat and weird classes and races and everything, pretty soon out of the gate? Otherwise you've annoyed existing players, but there are some really big and obvious downsides to trying to mash everything in, especially quickly.

I think probably most people are fine with making a new character when they switch to a new edition. As long as you offer a decent variety of weird classes and races that behave in a refreshingly new way I don't think you have to offer nearly all of the ones that the fully expanded previous edition had.

... It is kinda fundamentally absurd to pretend that different ttrpg editions actually describe the same setting at all in a way, like even small rule changes affect how the world works in a meaningful way and unlike with other kinds of games the abstraction between a rule set and what it means to exist in the setting is much smaller in a ttrpg...