The Gaming Den

Last I checked 5E was a pile of crap and no one seemed to care much about it.

I'm really out of the loop. My gaming group hasn't gotten together in a couple of years.

What's going on with D&D these days?

It turns out that having your rules boil down to "the numbers don't actually *mean* anything, just do what feels right" works really well for improv roleplay podcasts and livestreams (given sufficiently talented participants). That gave 5E a huge audience, many of whom picked up the game. It's now very popular.

Lots of D&D products coming out in the past 2 years. Not much D&D content, though. If I'm being very generous, they've put out about 2 dozen books since March 2018, and this is including things like Rick & Morty, the Penny Arcade shit, and the extra books that are nothing but maps.
So without actually going through those books to detail the decline? It's a pile of crap and the people making it certainly don't care about it. Hopefully someone who's a glutton for punishment can review them in more depth.

infected slut princess wrote:Last I checked 5E was a pile of crap and no one seemed to care much about it.

I'm really out of the loop. My gaming group hasn't gotten together in a couple of years.

What's going on with D&D these days?

I'm not sure if you'd include Pathfinder with this or not, but they have released a second edition. https://paizo.com/pathfinder Some people like it, some people hate it, as usual. I myself have no interest in a new edition at this time.

5E has also seen a resurgence due to D&D being a major plot point in the popular Netflix Show "Stranger Things".

A more general "What's going on with TTRPGs these days?" Whitewolf made some kind of comeback, Shadowrun has had 2 absolute shit editions after their best 2 editions, D&D has had 2 shit editions in a row after a promising edition, and everyone (especially the 3 I already listed) is run by a group of far-right people trying to stuff as much propaganda into the edition as is possible while putting as little effort as possible into the product as possible.

At least that isn't true of...all other industries.

I know about WW and Shadowrun's propaganda, but what did Wizards do?

Iduno wrote:A more general "What's going on with TTRPGs these days?" Whitewolf made some kind of comeback, Shadowrun has had 2 absolute shit editions after their best 2 editions, D&D has had 2 shit editions in a row after a promising edition, and everyone (especially the 3 I already listed) is run by a group of far-right people trying to stuff as much propaganda into the edition as is possible while putting as little effort as possible into the product as possible.

At least that isn't true of...all other industries.

I'm not even up on Shadowrun, how are they far right? Let alone WotC?

Unless I'm missing something newer, the 5e team tries to make overtures to seeming diversity and left-wing tropes, but earlier in 2019 some long-boiling drama spilled over in regards to WotC having RPGPundit and Zak S as playtesters back in 2014. Both of them are well-known among right-wing chud circles in tabletop. With the latter having his ex-wife and several other women accusing him of sexual assault. WotC responded by striking their names from the playtest, and Pundit in anger threatened to publish a bunch of 'incriminating emails' shared between him and Mearls.

Pundit also got angry on an unrelated occasion at WotC when Jeremy Perkins (or one of the designers) said that if the ICE concentration camps existed in a fantasy world then good-aligned adventurers would be breaking in to free the children. Pundit tried to start a #dndgate hashtag to shame Perkins for this, but the twitter community turned it into flowery descriptions of dungeon entrances to mock him.

Mearls for his part did his best to try and cover up the whole thing and gave a rather mealy-mouthed apology when the drama hit, but chances are the higher-ups in Hasbro put a social media muzzle on him. This is due to the fact that when Mearls asked people to come forward privately with concerns about their associations back in 2014, said people's email address and other contact info they shared with Mearls were then given to Zak S. One former WotC employee, Matthew Lee, says that Mearls was trying to avoid accountability this way rather than reporting the controversy to corporate higher-ups.

https://www.facebook.com/amandapatricia ... 5527064252

https://www.polygon.com/2019/2/20/18232 ... s-handbook

https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/a ... he_mearls/

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/c ... n_twitter/

https://twitter.com/XPMatthewLee/status ... 5427470338

It would be more accurate to say that Mearls and WotC tried to play both sides by thinking they could make money off of both sides of the culture war, but in so doing attached the 5e name to some very toxic people.

In non-drama related news, Paizo tried to make a science fantasy spinoff RPG, Starfinder, in 2017. But it has hardly any support in comparison to its main line.

Pathfinder 2e is decidedly non-popular, and practically every 3rd party publisher is sticking with PF 1e.

The OSR as a result of the Zak-drama, the Macris-drama, and other things split further into various clades. There was a movement called SWORD DREAM which was the OSR but with more explicitly leftist and inclusive themes. The death of Google Plus resulted in an exodus to Discord servers, and generally speaking the more lefty OSR types want nothing to do with the reactionaries and their enablers.

But like what Heaven's Thunder Hammer said, 5th Edition is very popular, in terms of both official and 3rd party support. WotC has been working a skeleton crew for their supplements, and the Eberron sourcebook came out to little fanfare. Even if you were following their social media feeds you wouldn't know that Rising from the Last War was a thing in comparison to that Critical Role Wildemount book.

More than a few 3rd party publishers managed to get some spotlight on their works, notably Kobold Press.

I think that D&D got a sudden popularity boost thanks to the Netflix show Stranger Things.

Heaven's Thunder Hammer wrote:I'm not even up on Shadowrun, how are they far right?

There's probably a thread about it, but aside from the way current-day racial stereotypes are handled (not always great, and worse more recently), there were some comments about politics from a lot of people on the team. Most obvious was the defense of the Nazi Camp run (go into this concentration camp, kill the ghosts of holocaust victims, return with Mendel's scalpel) included in one of their books.

Iduno wrote:the Nazi Camp run (go into this concentration camp, kill the ghosts of holocaust victims, return with Mendel's scalpel)

...the fuck?

in the "Shadowrun Situation" thread some people (IIRC it was Frank) reviewed WAR!, which had that as one of the example runs.
yes, seriously

Found it:
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=180641#180641

Libertad wrote:hilarious gossip

Thank you, this was delightful to read about.