Guts wrote:But then, isn't this DIY / "Rulings, not rules!" / "Each table it's own game" ethos the point of the OSR movement?
Sort of. OSR is a lot of things. Most of it is re-creating a particular feel, but they also focused pretty heavily on cleaning up old rule sets and mostly shifting everything to modern mechanics. It took off in the late 3e era and they were 3e players doing it.
A lot of OSR games have consistent rules for far more than D&D has had in decades. There's ones like Adventure, Conqueror, King; which is both minimalist and fully complete, it has rules for everything it ties to do and they all work, right up to kingdom stuff. Castles & Crusades was an early one and is basically a streamlined 3e laid out to look like AD&D.
Some examples. Swords & Wizardry is a good look at what the OSR movement intended by those statements, the author is one of the main proponents.
S&W wrote:Disintegrate
Spell Level: M6
Range: 60 ft
Duration: Permanent
The caster defines one specific target such as a door,
a peasant, or a statue, and it disintegrates into dust.
Magical materials are not disintegrated, and living
creatures (such as the aforementioned peasant) are
permitted a saving throw. The Disintegrate spell
cannot be dispelled.
5e wrote:Disintegrate
6th-level transmutation
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 60 feet
Components: V, S, M (a lodestone and a pinch of dust)
Duration: Instantaneous
A thin green ray springs from your pointing finger to a
target that you can see within range. The target can be a
creature, an object, or a creation of magical force, such
as the wall created by wall of force.
A creature targeted by this spell must make a
Dexterity saving throw. On a failed save, the target takes
10d6 + 40 force damage. If this damage reduces the
target to 0 hit points, it is disintegrated.
A disintegrated creature and everything it is wearing
and carrying, except magic items, are reduced to a pile
of fine gray dust. The creature can be restored to life
only by means of a true resurrection or a wish spell.
This spell automatically disintegrates a Large or
smaller nonmagical object or a creation of magical
force. If the target is a Huge or larger object or creation
of force, this spell disintegrates a 10-foot-cube portion of
it. A magic item is unaffected by this spell.
At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a
spell slot of 7th level or higher, the damage increases by
3d6 for each slot level above 6th.
When they said "rulings, not rules", they meant for the fiddly stuff, the edge cases, the bits of the game that are overly fussy to sufficiently pre-define or narrate across the table in play. The OSR does not have a table of +2 or -1 modifiers for the twenty things you might run across while climbing a wall in case no one bought a grappling hook, because the default (+/- 2 for whatever) is almost exactly the same in play, if they even go that far.
Things like stealth in 5e is a giant clusterfuck of cross-references across five chapters and errata that mostly invalidate each other, where in S&W it's a line that says you get +1 on 1d6 for surprise checks. Both make you ask nicely to have stealth please, but OSR games give you a result that does a definite thing and 5e you have to make that up too.
If so, that's a clear call out to OD&D grognards.
I saw one change to 5e (who was paid to) and a dozen that didn't. Most of the major OSR crowd are still putting out more new books from their basement than WotC does for D&D. Nothing in the OSR would make you imagine people buying a 316 page PHB that barely covers dungeon bashes, it's
not what they're about.
Mix that with some exception-based granularity taken from 3e/4e, and we have exactly what Mord is saying - a game that was made to acommodate all range of D&D fans across editions. Oh, and with Inspiration + Backgrounds you also attract the narrative crowd. In other words: a Market aware product, more so than any edition before it.
Mate, 5e backgrounds are terribly restrictive character design, seriously. Their marketing said appropriate things for the market, but they did not deliver. Those things are not in their game in the ways you imagine.
Also, this wouldn't be the first time a game without a clear mode of play was successful or popular. See Vampire the Masquerade in early 90s. No two tables played it the same way.
It's not so much the genre conventions that vary in 5e, it doesn't really support a lot of different types of play, it's the outcome of trying to do the same thing in the same place that varies a great deal which is a problem.
That's what bearworld games do. Those are bad games, deliberately empowering of abusive DMs and not helping anyone else in the slightest. The thing is, bearworld is open about it, it's a design goal, in 5e it's just the rules are such a mess you never know what you're gunna get.
...
That's the point. D&D5 is a huge success, no matter how you see it.
Man, do not get into Mearls' quotes. The least generous interpretation possible is usually over-generous. The man is king of marketing himself and playing up "growth" by fiddling numbers.
Let's see, Amazon rankings are a mystery, they keep changing how it works, it's conceivable a product which just sells about the same for a long time will keep rising in their ranks, rankings usually over-respond to recent acceleration, and that price is very much on sale just in time to get that place in the rankings. Roughly, sales are steady, maybe growing, and they're gaming it higher with price shifts before report dates.
Those VTT games available stats are basically bogus, with 3 million members and 620k games a year? That's most people not even signing in. I'd expect well under ten thousand regular players, and a whole lot more who play one session and then vanish.
Anyone that concludes 5e has outsold 3e and 4e but not 2nd edition, is high as a kite. They released numbers for AD&D, 2nd ed, and 3e back long ago, and the key is in numbers terms 1st edition AD&D plus Moldvay Basic was the 2nd highest seller, and 3.0 was the highest seller ever, and nothing else came anywhere near it. 2nd edition never really sold well, if you're not beating it, there's no way you're beating 3.0, or 3.5, though probably you're beating 4e because 4e.
Like, you need tens of millions of books shifted to beat 3.0, and if they did that they'd have more than a handful of staff putting out a couple books a year. It just doesn't work.
--
Hey, it's very likely that 5th edition has sold more than 4th edition. 4e was quoted in a court of law of every single book in the edition, in total selling under a million copies, early on but it just got worse for them. I would think 5e could break a million, easy.
Similarly, they likely outsold Pathfinder at some point, because Pathfinder didn't beat 4th edition every quarter, it just lived a bit longer.
And that too, to be beating Pathfinder a bit, when Pathfinder is between editions and unsupported and never sold all that much in the first place, to be 60% against "other" RPGs, like 3.0 was 99% of games, brick and mortar shops opened to sell 3rd party compatible books. Sales crashed in 2003, but 01-02 was gigantic. This is not that.
