5e D&D is Vaporware

[Mistwell]

This remains the funniest thread in retrospect on the entire board.

[Kaelik]

Man this Edition with with 408 pages published since the core rulebooks in 3 years is just fucking bustling. And those core rulebooks sure have rules for things, and don't just tell you to make things up.

Totally on the same level as the first 6 months of 3.5 with more than 1k pages.

[hogarth]

In other news, 5E D&D can turn your microwave into a camera.

[Voss]

Man this Edition with with 408 pages published since the core rulebooks in 3 years is just fucking bustling. And those core rulebooks sure have rules for things, and don't just tell you to make things up.

Totally on the same level as the first 6 months of 3.5 with more than 1k pages.

The truly sad thing about 5e is it makes 4th look like a successful gold mine.

[Username17]

Something called D&D 5 was eventually released, but it was a vastly scaled down product that hit none of the promotional points. The entire D&D Next Modular Gaming Experience never materialized and 5th edition hasn't produced so much as a Fighter's book in 3 fucking years. What did go to print is laughably incomplete.

Yes, D&D Next was vaporware. The promised edition never happened. The minimalist thing they shat out after most of the high profile designers jumped ship to go make solo projects does not meet any of the design ambitions set for it and did not receive any meaningful support.

People can claim that "something eventually came out" and that games like Duke Nukem Forever and The Last Guardian aren't Vaporware, but that is semantic bullshit. If the company cuts and runs, dropping "whatever they happen to have" and the product meets none of the design criteria, that's still Vaporware.

-Username17

[Mistwell]

You...realize it's the most successful version of D&D since 1e now, right? That they've said it's outsold all other editions other than 1e (for which they don't have good records to know if it has). That three years from release the PHB still is in the top 100 of all Amazon books - not gaming books, but ALL books, right? That it still ranks top of IcV2 and has every quarter since release. That 5e has been so popular RPGs are now listed in the "mainstream" category.

And it remains the most discussed game on the internet, the most played RPG on digital platforms, and the one with the highest sales for all support books of any RPG?

You realize that, but to save face you have to pretend it never came out. But, it's a ridiculous opinion now. There is no saving face, at least not in the way you're trying to do it. At least acknowledging the basic fact you flubbed your prediction would have been a good start.

I mean you're free to not like it, or prefer more support material be published for it, or that it did not meet the goals you wanted it to meet, but those are all subjective opinions. Objectively, we can state with 100% certainty it was not late to release, it did not scale back release schedule (this was always the announced release schedule), it did come out, it is not vaporware, and is highly successful.

[Kaelik]

You...realize it's the most successful version of D&D since 1e now, right? That they've said it's outsold all other editions other than 1e (for which they don't have good records to know if it has).

That is not how sales work.

They definitely went well out of their way to avoid saying that and to say a bunch of things that might lead credulous idiots to believe that, but that definitely isn't true.

His most recent claim was that the 5e PHB sold more copies than the 3.0 PHB and more copies than the 3.5 PHB, but less than the two combined. Since there are like, 40-200 different books for each of those editions beyond the PHB, and there are 3 for 5e. Lifetimes sales of both 3.0 and 3.5 separately outnumber lifetimes 5e sales.

And that was literally 16 and 13 years ago! When you factor in population growth, failing to outsell them is basically just an admission of failure for 5e.

And even that is without us knowing whether or not they "sold" two copies of a PHB per purchase because the digital PHB you get with a paper one is also being sold.

[Voss]

I mean you're free to not like it, or prefer more support material be published for it, or that it did not meet the goals you wanted it to meet, but those are all subjective opinions. Objectively, we can state with 100% certainty it was not late to release, it did not scale back release schedule (this was always the announced release schedule), it did come out, it is not vaporware, and is highly successful.

You can't 'objectively' say it is highly successful without numbers.

It isn't a matter of meeting the goals we wanted, it didn't meet the goals THEY claimed. That is totally 100% objective failure.

Whether it was late or not doesn't matter much when they cut out most of the content they outlined. That they don't support it the way they said they were going to is pretty telling. No modular content inserts have EVER appeared and that was one of the cornerstones (or rather Pillars) of the entire concept of the edition!

[Username17]

As Kaelik pointed out, their statements are quite complex and very definitely do not include 5e being the best selling edition. The 5e phb beats some other specific books (not game lines) if you make vry specific choices about what to compare. It's basically meaningles. Remember when 4e was touted as being so successful that it had three printings? Remember when 4e was so successful it had more preorders than any previous edition? I do. Remember how actually those all turned out to be technically true statements about an edition that was actually in freefall?

Mike Mearls is skilld at turd polishing, and gets an erecton every time he deceives someone with misleading but technically true claims about sales.

The simple reality is that the people left at WotC have a history of using declarative statements to imply that DnD was doing well while it was in fact doing very poorly. Unless and until they unzip with some real numbers, you have to conclude that any and all statements are deliberately misleading. Even if they did produce numbers, you'd still have to look for the catch. Like when they compared pre-release sales of 4e to pre-release sales of previous editions that did not in fact have pre-release sales at all. Or when they proudly trumpted "hundreds of thousands" in isolation, without bothering to note that the previous edition had sales in the millions.

Any and every piece of information about Amazon's category assignment has nothing to do with the price of tea. If 5e boosters are pointing at weird ass shit like that instead of things that actually matter, it is a distraction intended to deceive. Because fucking obviously.

The bottom line is:

• The expansion line has failed to materialize.
• The 5e development team has had massive cutbacks and is now a smaller group of actual employees than it has been since the 1970s.
• The 3rd party support dried up, and the companies that had options to move forward with 5e adventures and expansion material they decided to release nothing instead.

-Username17

[Shrieking Banshee]

Oh yeah modular content. I forgot they even ever offered that.

[Username17]

Oh yeah modular content. I forgot they even ever offered that.

The weird ass mastery levels that were just like bonuses but more work thing they were promising when this thread started actually did come out eventually. It was Numenera. Whatever DnD engine they were promising at the time was completely scrapped.

-Username17

[Blicero]

The entire D&D Next Modular Gaming Experience never materialized...

Oh yeah modular content. I forgot they even ever offered that.

According to momothefiddler in this thread (http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=476483), the 5E DMG does contain a lot of optional rules that at least approximate the "modular experience" claim of pre-release.

[erik]

You...realize it's the most successful version of D&D since 1e now, right?

[GnomeWorks]

According to momothefiddler in this thread (http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=476483), the 5E DMG does contain a lot of optional rules that at least approximate the "modular experience" claim of pre-release.

The way I recall it, we were pretty much told that Bob could sit down and make a character 1e-style, while Tom could make his 4e-style, and they would both be able to function at Dan's table being run 3e-style, without running into any hiccups or problems or someone having to interact with mechanics they didn't like.

...in hindsight, that was probably a stupid thing to try to claim to be able to do, and I feel kind of bad for thinking that it would even be possible. Because writing that, it sounds... rather implausible as a possibility, maybe even going into the realm of "probable logical contradiction" territory.

[Shrieking Banshee]

Oh yeah modular content. I forgot they even ever offered that.

The weird ass mastery levels that were just like bonuses but more work thing they were promising when this thread started actually did come out eventually. It was Numenera. Whatever DnD engine they were promising at the time was completely scrapped.

-Username17

I don't see it. Numanera is mostly dull crap and mechanics wise it's like dry cardboard.

[Username17]

Oh yeah modular content. I forgot they even ever offered that.

The weird ass mastery levels that were just like bonuses but more work thing they were promising when this thread started actually did come out eventually. It was Numenera. Whatever DnD engine they were promising at the time was completely scrapped.

-Username17

I don't see it. Numanera is mostly dull crap and mechanics wise it's like dry cardboard.

If you go back to the first page of this thread, we're talking about the skill system they were going to do back in 2012. It had this thing about mastery levels which adjusted your DCs in a way that was exactly the same as just being static bonuses but requiring more information exchanges. That system is Numenera. Which is not surprising, because before 5th edition launched, Monte Cook quit the company and immediately started pimping his new Numenera game.

I think Numenera eventually went with power levels that modulate your DCs by 3 rather than the 5 he was talking about back in 2012, but whatever. It's the same thing. It ended up being dumb in exactly the way everyone said it was going to be dumb when they read the idea previewed in L&L articles.

-Username17

[Koumei]

...in hindsight, that was probably a stupid thing to try to claim to be able to do, and I feel kind of bad for thinking that it would even be possible. Because writing that, it sounds... rather implausible as a possibility, maybe even going into the realm of "probable logical contradiction" territory.

Yeah, you honestly should feel pretty bad for thinking that. I'm pretty sure everyone else was laughing at the moronic boldness of their claim, then possibly joking that "compatibility with all existing D&D stuff" will totally include the colouring-in book and the CYOA thing that one movie had on the DVD.

[TOZ]

You...realize it's the most successful version of D&D since 1e now, right? That they've said it's outsold all other editions other than 1e (for which they don't have good records to know if it has). That three years from release the PHB still is in the top 100 of all Amazon books - not gaming books, but ALL books, right? That it still ranks top of IcV2 and has every quarter since release. That 5e has been so popular RPGs are now listed in the "mainstream" category.

You're going to have to back that shit up, because I'm looking at the PHB page on Amazon right now and it says #11 in Books > Teens and that is not even close to being in the top 100 Amazon books.

[Username17]

I see the 5th edition PHB being #423 in Books. But the broader point is that Amazon Sales ranks don't mean anything when comparing editions. Leaving aside the fact that 1st and 2nd edition weren't sold on Amazon at all while they were current and that internet sales were a tiny piece of 3rd edition sales and 5th edition uses Amazon as its primary sales platform - previous editions don't even aggregate the same way as 5th edition does, because they never had an Amazon sales agreement.

If you look up the 3rd edition PHB on Amazon.co.uk, you get:

• Dungeons and Dragons: 3rd Edition Player's Handbook by Wizards of the Coast (Creator) (11-Oct-2000) Hardcover
• Dungeons and Dragons: 3rd Edition Player's Handbook [11 October 2000]
• Dungeons and Dragons: 3rd Edition Player's Handbook
• Dungeons and Dragons: 3rd Edition Player's Handbook by (2000-10-11)

Now, obviously those are all the same book. Because fucking obviously. But those are separate entries because the book has been tagged into Amazon multiple times. One of those is ranked 419,224 in books, and another is ranked 5,124,603. The fact that they do, or even can be ranked differently means that their sales are being tracked separately because Amazon is dumb about shit like that.

When you search for the fifth edition PHB, you get only one entry. Also it's on deep discount compared to the store price because WotC still has a sales agreement with Amazon specifically. If you compare all of the sales of one book to some of the sales of another book, you aren't making a meaningful comparison. Getting a poor rank would obviously be very bad, but considering how many tricks are being used to inflate that rank, getting a good rank doesn't mean very much.

Also remember that what tags the seller has put on things makes a huge difference to what categories it has been checked in. Right now, #7 in Role-Playing & War Games is the fucking Draconomicon from 2003 (mysteriously beating out the 4th edition PHB at #15).

The real reason we know 5th edition bombed is that it is so rare that people come to troll this board with rants about how great 5th edition is doing. Remember when we used to get invasions by 4rries every other month? Now it's one sadface dude four times a year. 5th edition just doesn't have the fanbase of... 4th edition.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

That three years from release the PHB still is in the top 100 of all Amazon books - not gaming books, but ALL books, right?

"Still" is an interesting choice of words.

The 5E PHB came out in 2014, and it did not make that year's top 100 bestsellers list. To be fair, it came out in August; that's less than half a year of selling to do. 2015 was the first full year the 5E PHB had been released, and it also did not make that year's top 100 bestsellers list. It did somehow manage to sneak onto the 2016 top 100 bestsellers list at position 92. The word you were looking for is "finally," not "still." A thing that is true now but was not true in the past is not "still" true. That is not how that word works.

Though, that does raise the question "why the fuck is the 5E PHB selling better now than when it was new?" And the answer is probably "it isn't, bestseller lists are highly volatile piles of ass that ultimately mean nothing in the absence of more concrete sales data." And that's something you can spin either way - "5E was robbed its spot on the 2014 and 2015 bestseller list by a year of unusually strong competition," or "5E barely lucked into a spot on the 2016 bestseller list due to an overall lack of big releases."

But that's neither here nor there. I really just wanted to take a moment to point out how little research you'd done before coming here to talk shit. Don't feel too bad; you are giving your defense of 5E exactly the amount of time and effort it deserves - none at all, apparently.

I see the 5th edition PHB being #423 in Books.

You would, you dirty European.

Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (and Amazon.co.jp, and Amazon.etcetera.etcetera) are all individual stores and have their own individual sales ranks. The 5E PHB is currently around #50 in the states, which means pretty much fuck all whatever. There isn't a lot of data tying Amazon Sales Rank to actual copies sold, but what data I have seen suggests the difference between a rank under 100 and a rank over 1000 is plausibly as small as hundreds of books a month. Maybe thousands. Maybe. It's not even a large enough quantity that I get to invoke the hundreds of thousands meme.

You could hold the Amazon #100 spot for a decade and not sell a million copies.

[Sacrificial Lamb]

You...realize it's the most successful version of D&D since 1e now, right? That they've said it's outsold all other editions other than 1e (for which they don't have good records to know if it has). That three years from release the PHB still is in the top 100 of all Amazon books - not gaming books, but ALL books, right? That it still ranks top of IcV2 and has every quarter since release. That 5e has been so popular RPGs are now listed in the "mainstream" category.

And it remains the most discussed game on the internet, the most played RPG on digital platforms, and the one with the highest sales for all support books of any RPG?

You realize that, but to save face you have to pretend it never came out. But, it's a ridiculous opinion now. There is no saving face, at least not in the way you're trying to do it. At least acknowledging the basic fact you flubbed your prediction would have been a good start.

I mean you're free to not like it, or prefer more support material be published for it, or that it did not meet the goals you wanted it to meet, but those are all subjective opinions. Objectively, we can state with 100% certainty it was not late to release, it did not scale back release schedule (this was always the announced release schedule), it did come out, it is not vaporware, and is highly successful.

No, I don't "realize" the success of 5e...considering that there are virtually no products released for this turd.....after 3 years.

How is 5e the most "successful" version of D&D? How many copies has it sold, compared to Basic D&D, or compared to either edition of AD&D, or compared to D&D 3.0 or D&D 3.5, or compared to 4e?

What are the profit margins of 5e compared to Basic D&D, AD&D, D&D 3.x?

How many people are consistently playing 5e, compared to how many people have played earlier editions of D&D?

Do you remember how the producers of this game made such a big deal about the modularity of 5e? That it would contain aspects of all other editions of D&D, and that we'd all be able to play our 1e/2e/3e/4e characters with little adjustment? So where is this fabled "modularity"? I don't see it.

5e is literally the least modular game that I've ever played. WoTC didn't fulfill their promises on game play, 5e did NOT unite the fan bases of 1e/2e/3e/4e, and there are virtually no products released for the game. Amazon rankings can be deceptive, and don't really mean anything in this particular case. WoTC also made bold claims about 4e, which ended up being bullshit, so I don't really trust anything that the makers of 5e tell me at this point.

[radthemad4]

I don't play 5e at the moment and don't have an immediate interest in learning to, but it does seem to be the most popular system on Roll20 at least.

Source: http://blog.roll20.net/post/15690701021 ... rt-q4-2016

[TOZ]

I stopped marking my Roll20 games as Pathfinder. I could go pump the number by about 100 if I went and actually marked all my organized play tables Pathfinder.

Mistwell has been wrong for months.

[Kaelik]

I think we previously talked about those stats, and decided that to the extent they mean anything, they probably just mean that more people are willing to DM 5e, but even that is questionable.

For example, I have a friend who has DMed 5 roll 20 5e one shots, that each have their own list of players, and regularly participates in one Pathfinder campaign weekly.

Those are 5 games for a bunch of players who may or may not have even filled out their stat, on the other hand, one game of pathfinder with 20 times as many sessions is counted as 1/5 the games.

The only thing I'm willing to say about roll 20 stats is that people on roll20 have attempted to start more 5e games than any other system. But that shouldn't be surprising, since roll20 only even started to exist after the "death" of 3e. And people trying out 5e for a bit should be the case generally.

It's certainly not nothing. 5e, despite releasing almost nothing that they promised, and releasing what amounts in a large part to dumbed down 3e with half the rules missing is certainly popular. But how popular is certainly open for question (Especially when people playing "old dead game from 10 years ago" and "random shitty changes to same old dead game from 10 years ago" combine to be more players than your new game.)

[GâtFromKI]

D&D 4 is remarkable in the fact it has less than two player per game - which means the average game of D&D 4 features the MC and less than one player.

Or each player plays 4 games of D&D 4 for some reason; my guess is, D&D 4 is so boring you have to do something else at the same time - like playing another D&D 4 game, during which you play another game of D&D 4, some kind of D&D 4-ception.