D&D 5e has failed

[Aspirinsmurf]

I think I've literally played one session of D&D 5e (could be two sessions, don't remember). I gave up on pretty much the whole when the rules failed to answer the simple question of whether or not I could sleep wearing my armor. My DM was stumped for an answer as well, so I think we reverted to the 3rd edition rules (which meant that I seriously wanted to reconsider my choice of armor). For a game that's very much about camping in the wilderness and possibly being attacked by monsters, that's entirely inexcusable.

Later on, I needed to force march my horse back to town for some reason or another. Once again, the rules failed to elucidate me on whether that would result in an exhausted mount, an exhausted rider, neither or both. Riding day and night is something I would expect to come up in a game of D&D at least once or twice during a typical campaign, so once again the omission is inexcusable.

The rules just aren't there.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Those are actually edge cases compared to the 404 error 5e throws when you ask 'can I see orc?'

[Aspirinsmurf]

Well, stealth and detection haven't really worked in any edition since you rolled a d6 for random surprise. At least 3.X had rules for sleeping in your steel pyjamas, in case of orcs.

[Kaelik]

Yeah what Angel said, although to be fair, that was also a 404 error in 3e.

[Username17]

The first, second, and third thing to remember is that Mike Mearls is a mendacious douche. Everything he says is very carefully sculpted to deceive. If 5e had surpassed 3rd edition in lifetime sales overall, WotC would be singing it from the rooftops and walking into a gaming store you'd be confronted with James Wyatt's alarming genitalia repeatedly thrusting at your face. It would not be announced in a weirdly punctuated and unsourced twitter response to some dude named "@newbiedm." It just fucking wouldn't. Sales like that of the 5e PHB would necessarily mean expansion materials would be produced and sold for money, which they clearly aren't.

I'm not entirely sure what the angle here is, but there obviously is one because Mike Mearls is a mendacious douche. He could be talking about amazon sales or something even more retarded like the lifetime of the sales period (the 5e PHB has now been on sale for more than two years and it wouldn't surprise me if the other editions stopped making new printings in less than that). But if I had to take a guess as to what the trick is, it would be the commas.

5e lifetime PHB sales > 3, 3.5, 4 lifetime

"Lifetime" only necessarily applies to the 4th edition PHB, which of course was a dog with fleas. As written, he could claim in court that he was comparing the lifetime 5e sales with the current 3e sales and the lifetime 4e sales. Which would be an apples to rutabagas comparison, but I don't see how you claim that 5e outsold 3e without one.

-Username17

[Roog]

Maybe that's projected lifetime sales?[/b]

[Otakusensei]

Without hard data everyone is playing darts in the dark. So let's stick with anecdotal data. I went to two local game stores on different ends of MI this weekend and found that both had pretty healthy 5e crowds. At least, healthy as far as traditional table top games went.

Mostly younger folks (<30), and pretty much everyone had some exposure to Critical Role/Twitch games or a friend who had same. Plenty of stories of 5e bring people back to table top after kids or a job from the store staff.

Personally I've enjoyed what I've played. The rules aren't perfect but they aren't a dumpster fire. I've made it a point to hate every new edition of D&D since I started playing back in 2nd, then end up coming around to it later. That didn't happen with 4e, even after a lengthy campaign by a solid DM I still respect. That whole system was hot garbage designed to make you chase every +1 and make level 20 feel like level 1 with more hit points. I've run Tomb of Horrors in every edition it's been released for and that was the first time I've ever been bored by it.

5e seems to be making money without making content and that makes the old school table top gamer in me sad. But it does keep power spiral in check better than Pathfinder's fire-hose of pointless and under powered options. I'm baffled that anyone would get excited for the release of a campaign book with handful of crunch, or that that would be the method a publisher would want to pursue. I do recall a Tweet from Chris Perkins saying the entire D&D team was ~25 people or something, so maybe that explains the grinding slow pace of releases.

I'm sure that tweet came from Sage Advice, which has been a hilarious parade of Mearls answering a rules question wrong or creating bizarro world sub rules only to be corrected by Crawford. Come to think of it, that might be the most entertaining bit of 5e so far.

[momothefiddler]

5e lifetime PHB sales > 3, 3.5, 4 lifetime

Clearly what this means is that the (5e) PHB has sold more copies during 5e's lifetime than it did during 3, 3.5, and 4's lifetimes combined.

[Prak]

I maintain that 5e is basically D&D with training wheels- perfect for newbies and drunks.


...that comes off way more condescending than I intended...

[virgil]

I like to think that my source data is at least semi-solid, as it's an aggregate research site of Amazon. Combined with hard quotes from more reputable interviews of sales ratios, I like to think my estimate is of non-zero value to any Bayesian prediction.

5e lifetime PHB sales > 3, 3.5, 4 lifetime

Clearly what this means is that the (5e) PHB has sold more copies during 5e's lifetime than it did during 3, 3.5, and 4's lifetimes combined.

Not sure if you're being facetious or not, but in that twitter thread, Mearls clarifies that it's just book sales and only individually.

[momothefiddler]

5e lifetime PHB sales > 3, 3.5, 4 lifetime

Clearly what this means is that the (5e) PHB has sold more copies during 5e's lifetime than it did during 3, 3.5, and 4's lifetimes combined.

Not sure if you're being facetious or not, but in that twitter thread, Mearls clarifies that it's just book sales and only individually.

Apologies. I haven't read the thread and was just snarking in the vein of Frank's commas comment. (EDIT: fwiw I'm actually reasonably ok with 5e, based on the two sessions I played of it before the game fizzled.)

[Username17]

You know, back in the early days of 4e, I was willing to concede that the edition had sold well. They produced all kinds of "technically true" statements that really seemed to point in that direction. They kept crowing about how they were doing super well, they announced that they were making new printings of the core books, they pointed to their largest number of pre-orders of any edition, and so on. I didn't doubt that they were financially successful with their edition for a year or more. I didn't outright say that 4th edition was dead until February of 2010.

At this point though, I simply do not give any credence at all to WotC's claims that they are doing well financially with shitty editions. After the big "hundreds of thousands" reveal, I simply assume that any statement from those assholes that their game isn't a dumpster fire that is also tumbling off a cliff is - at best - truth stretched to the breaking point. That any seemingly obvious "plain meaning" of a public statement is a carefully crafted deception that you are meant to be suckered into believing.

This doesn't even seem unfair of me, because the company has been doing absolutely nothing but this for the last eight fucking years. Remember when they made a whole printing of the 4ePHB1 that was such a small print run that no one I have ever spoken to or communicated with online has ever seen a physical copy just so that could "truthfully" claim that they had gone into another printing (and thereby imply that the books were continuing to fly off the shelves)? That is a thing that actually happened. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if they started doing Scientology style circular book purchasing just to drive up "technically true" sales values. If they thought they had a product people would buy, they would produce more of it and sell it for money. The fact that they continue to not do that says more than any oddly specific yet unexplained boast they have ever or will ever make.

-Username17

[Blicero]

Anecdotes from everyone!

I have contact with four or so groups of D&D players. Two mostly play pathfinder and one mostly plays 5e. The last started with 5e but got bored and switched to ACKS on my recommendation, because all I do now is shill for ACKS. The only D&D-like I have played in the past few years is ACKS. I don't spend a lot of time at FLGSs though, so that reduces my view of the current state.

[Schleiermacher]

I'm in two gaming groups, both of which mostly play heavily-houseruled 3.5, both of which have played one short campaign each of 5e (From 1st to... I think 6th level and 10th to 14th level, respectively). The GM of one of these groups is also running 5e for another group, and one of his players is GMing a 5e group of her own. I've definitely had fun with 5E, but it's full of little persistent irritations -obvious bad design choices and rules that are just not there. Many newbies don't notice these things, or consider them to be less important than the low barrier to entry (5E is definitely more accessible than 3E).

It's not a tire fire like 4e was, it's "just" completely unfinished and the proficiency math is bad. A real game designer could use the 5e ruleset as a starting point for an edition of D&D that was an improvement on 3E. But instead we got Mike Mearls and a team of monkeys with dartboards who released their half-assed nostalgia-fuelled alpha document as-is.

[Kaelik]

5e lifetime PHB sales > 3, 3.5, 4 lifetime

Clearly what this means is that the (5e) PHB has sold more copies during 5e's lifetime than it did during 3, 3.5, and 4's lifetimes combined.

That's a good one, but I nominate his tweet for claiming:

"5e sold more PHBs during it's lifetime, than all the other editions PHBs combinded during 4es lifetime!"

So he's making the bold claim that 3e and 3.5 PHB didn't sell very many copies during 4e when they weren't being printed

[Hiram McDaniels]

It's not a tire fire like 4e was, it's "just" completely unfinished and the proficiency math is bad. A real game designer could use the 5e ruleset as a starting point for an edition of D&D that was an improvement on 3E. But instead we got Mike Mearls and a team of monkeys with dartboards who released their half-assed nostalgia-fuelled alpha document as-is.

Preamble: 5E is what I'm running currently, and it's my preferred edition. I hate 3E with the intensity of 1000 exploding suns.

That said, I'm not sure where a designer would start with 5E to make it an improvement on 3E. There have been many, many posts here about the problems with bounded accuracy, from squads skeleton archers curb-stomping great wyrms to a frost giant's inability to kick a door down without DM handwaving. And this is what forms the basis of 5E's math.

The other thing is that the main virtue of 3E is that it's as close to a complete ruleset as purestrain D&D is ever going to get, whereas 5E's rules are basically comprised of Mearls blowing a raspberry and shrugging his shoulders. So in order for a 5E based system to improve on 3E, it needs to be a complete game, and therefore needs to have all of the missing pieces jammed back into it.

At this point I have to ask what 5E has to offer fans of 3E? If you replace grounded accuracy with something that scales reasonably well and put all of the procedural minutiae back in, you wind up with something that resembles 3E more closely than 5E anyway, so aren;t you better off houseruling advantage/disadvantage into 3E and calling it a day?

[Mask_De_H]

Simplicity in character design via baked in, long form ACFs. A universal spellcasting chart. A one buff per person paradigm. Something resembling differentiation between the full casters that isn't sucks more/less. No skill ranks, scaling proficiencies, reworked iteratives, free Spring Attack. Reworked Vancian Casting (everyone is a Sorcerer, prepared casters have far fewer spells to keep track of). System designed around not having magic items (sorta).

[Chamomile]

It's much easier to convince people to play your game if you have fifty pages of hidden house rules they don't get to know about until they come up because there's no precedent in the rule book to be contradicted than to convince them to play your game with fifty pages of house rules you have to show them up front because they override rules that are actually in the book. Stated plainly that is insane, but it is also the reality.

[DSMatticus]

I've played one very long one shot of 5E with some friends who were in town for a wedding. I was a rogue/monk. Predictably, no one could tell me how stealth worked and I was basically allowed to roll whenever for any reason. I do have to admit that was only slightly more confusing than my wildly varied experiences with 3E GM's interpretation of hide/move silently/stealth/whatever. The DM's love of big boss monsters meant I singlehandedly stunlocked everything important to death. Note that despite being the god of stunlock, actually killing anything was slow as fuck even when I started fights with assassinate.

I was substantially stronger than a pure rogue or pure monk of equivalent level, and yet if we had played the campaign organically I would have spent most of it sucking pretty badly. Martial classes are all pretty god-damn front-loaded, but because ability score increases and extra attacks are class features instead of a level-based progression like proficiency the breakpoints are fucking weird and fiddly as shit. Putting your sneak attack progression on hold and getting extra attack four levels later kind of sucks balls, but in the end it's basically just objectively better.

There was a cleric in the party. They spent every day of downtime casting a bajillion divinations and being blueballed by the DM over them. They singlehandedly resolved a bajillion non-combat problems with basic spells like detect magic. In combat they kept up with the DPS of everyone else, while being comparably tanky. They were basically the MVP, because of course they were. Though as the god of stunlock, I may have been the MVP of combat.

We were asked to make two characters just incase, and my second was a warlock. Blaster casters fucking blow. My rogue/monk did noticeably more damage than my warlock could have done with one of their two spell slots. Eldritch blasting as a fallback is a god damn joke - and yet if we were one level higher it would have been surprisingly competitive because fuck you this game is full of so many obscure and arbitrary breakpoints it's crazy. But on the flipside my warlock was loaded up with a fuckton of illusions and concentration-based save or dies and that trick where they hide in their own magical darkness that they can see out of in order to avoid the enemy's wrath. A friend dropped by unexpectedly for a little bit mid-session, and we just handed him my warlock. He wasn't there long enough to do much, sadly, so I can't tell you how that worked out (except when the cleric used some of those very same save-or-dies, and the answer turned out to be "very well").

We had a couple laptops with totally-legit-I-swear digital copies of the books (and at least two physical copies to pass around), and yet looking up rules and spells took longer than it ever did for 3E because that's what happens when you banish the SRD to the nether realms. Okay, 5E technically has an SRD, they just removed a bunch of content from it arbitrarily because fuck you.

I give hanging out with my friends two thumbs up. I give 5E a resounding meh. In practice, 3.5 encourages multiclassing less and has simpler breakpoints for doing so - making a good martial character (psst go rogue) is much simpler and has far less "power now for power later" trade-offs, which are depressingly prevalent and painfully punishing in 5E's design. In practice, 3.5 ability text is much easier to reference because everyone has access to a laptop and d20srd is fucking easier than any physical book or PDF ever will be. Let's be real - you are not going to remember every detail of every spell you have on your list, and you are going to have to look some of that shit up every now and then. 3.5's SRD created a system in which that's easy, and 5E's "we don't even sell digital PDF's" means you can straight up break the law and it's still more difficult than it was two editions ago.

Honestly, I feel like 5E's simplicity and ease of use are memes by mouthbreathers for mouthbreathers. We spent just as much time digging text out of rulebooks, and doing so took longer. Most of the game's complexity is in the spell section, and spells have not been simplified while being simultaneously made more difficult to quickly reference. If the mission was accessibility, then the mission was failed.

[tussock]

So he's saying the lifetime sales of the 5e PHB are (just now) better than the sales of the 3.5 reprint PHB they sold during 4e's lifetime.

Cool, that's a little sad, but that's a number. That's obviously not as good of a number as even the 4e PHB sales, and certainly nothing like the 3e or 2e or 1e sales while they were the supported edition, but its something.

[rasmuswagner]

5e seems to be making money without making content and that makes the old school table top gamer in me sad. But it does keep power spiral in check better than Pathfinder's fire-hose of pointless and under powered options. I'm baffled that anyone would get excited for the release of a campaign book with handful of crunch, or that that would be the method a publisher would want to pursue. I do recall a Tweet from Chris Perkins saying the entire D&D team was ~25 people or something, so maybe that explains the grinding slow pace of releases.

Let's see, 5 people to make fake social media content about for-realz awesome game sessions, 5 more salesholes, 2 guys in charge of turning files into paper books, 1 legal guy, Mike Mearls, office gimp...that still leaves 10 people to make new books as their full-time job. I think 25 people is maybe the entire D&D publishing industry, not the wotc team.

[erik]

I thought the staff number was down to under 10 now.

[virgil]

As of January of last year, there are eight. This doesn't include people for artists, branding, and licensing.

[JonSetanta]

Pardons if this was mentioned earlier, I don't have the time to read 50 pages back, but WHY ARE THE BOOK BINDINGS COMING APART?

This problem has plagued fellow gamers since 5e debuted in print, and it's a sorrowful and pathetic waste of material.
I expect better of $50.

[erik]

$50? Isn't that the sucker pricing?