D&D 5e has failed

[Lago PARANOIA]

A first level wizard should be preparing the spells 'please DM let me play something else the first three levels and let me retroactively change my character' and/or 'please only do one encounter per long rest'.

Wizards, Sorcerers, and Warlocks are boring and a chore to play until level 5 under the 6-8 encounters per day paradigm.

[Cervantes]

A first level wizard should be preparing the spells 'please DM let me play something else the first three levels and let me retroactively change my character' and/or 'please only do one encounter per long rest'.

Wizards, Sorcerers, and Warlocks are boring and a chore to play until level 5 under the 6-8 encounters per day paradigm.

oh yeah it's absolutely not gonna be the 6-8 encounters thing and we're starting at level 3 in Chult

[mlangsdorf]

So what we have here is about 28,000 people collectively shelling out about $673k for a book about hiring warbands and building castles. That seems pretty heartening to me, honestly.

More like $1M, because the people buying the kickstarter exclusive hardcover are buying the book, too.

If your brackets are correct, they've got about $36 to produce each copy of the hardcover and $55 to produce each copy of the leatherette covered hardcover. Amazon Print on Demand is running less than $25 for a 150 page book from an established gaming company, so unless these guys are completely incompetent, they should be able to make enough profit off the book and PDF sales to not lose their shirts on the other swag.

If they're moderately competent, they should be getting $1M or more for their gaming studio. Pretty sweet deal.

The quality of the rules looks typical for 5e, which is awful, but there's clearly money to be made in fulfilling this particular niche. I should convert my current mass combat game to D&D5e and publish it.

[WiserOdin032402]

Hey, checking for posterity's sake, do we have a current rough estimate of how many people are working for WOTC's D&D division? Minus, of course, 5e fans desperately trying to fix the game with rather good-looking homebrew documents.

[Username17]

Hey, checking for posterity's sake, do we have a current rough estimate of how many people are working for WOTC's D&D division? Minus, of course, 5e fans desperately trying to fix the game with rather good-looking homebrew documents.

Good question. With books coming out like six months apart, it's probably safe to say anyone who wasn't on the last book basically doesn't work there. Other than artists, Xanathar's Guide to Everything has a total of 13 people who worked on it, with an extra 6 people on "Project Management" or "Production Services," and lists 8 other people as "Other D&D Team Members." But it also includes material from various books that were made in 2015, so any of those people could be former employees. I think it's instructive that XGtE lists:

"Designer: Robert J. Schwalb"

And Wikipedia says:

In 2014, after completing his work on the fifth edition, Schwalb launched Schwalb Entertainment and began writing a new RPG entitled Shadow of the Demon Lord.

So there's a pool of 27 people who have done some sort of work where they may have been employed directly by Wizards of the Coast at some point during the production of Xanathar's Guide to Everything, a production period which goes back two years or more because it uses recycled materials. At least one of the major people in that list actually puts "Former WotC Employee" on his CV. A majority of those people do not appear to have done any writing on this project, and indeed only the "Lead Designers," "Designer," "Additional Design," "Development," "Managing Editor," "Editor," "Additional Editing," or "Graphic Designer" interacted with the text in any direct way. And that's 11 people after you realize that Jeremy Crawford is listed as both one of the Lead Designers and the Managing Editor.

I just checked in with the people credited as "Additional Editing" and both of them are listing themselves as Freelance Editors. Michele Carter's LinkedIn page says she is currently Self Employed and Wizards of the Coast is her previous employer.

So it's rather hard to see how many of those people still work there. It's apparent that many of them did not work there when the book was being made, and instead are simply still on the Wizards approved-freelancer list from back when they used to work there regular and did some credited piecework on the project.

-Username17

[WiserOdin032402]

They're really trying to obfuscate their numbers, aren't they? Man, it's almost like low employee count looks bad or something.

Something else I'm interested in is this rise of 'Roll d20 and the GM says whether you win or lose' gaming. When did this suddenly come into play? I know some 3.5 rules don't work as written (Correction: a lot of them don't work as written) and it can lead to fights at the tabletop, but I personally loved the 'breaking and entering' rules D&D 3.5 had, and skills...sometimes worked. I don't get the 'roll d20, add your bonus, and suck the GM's dick super hard' way of doing it rather than just re-writing the DCs.

[saithorthepyro]

Laziness, for the most part, is my bet. Depending on how open-ended the skills are, there's a large number of possible aims you can have for a skill roll, each of which needs it's own DC. This probably isn't a major problem, but some of the designers probably put it in so as not to have to think of a DC for any likely use for the skill.

That or they just can't do the math and decided to not even bother. Which is still laziness pretty much.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I don't get the 'roll d20, add your bonus, and suck the GM's dick super hard' way of doing it rather than just re-writing the DCs.

Re-writing the DCs would involve making decisions that could be critiqued.

Mearls' go-to for years has been to write bad rules and then defend himself from criticism by saying those critiques don't apply to nebulous fixes to those rules he hasn't released yet and why are you so mean? I think he has a morbid fear of criticism because he has some neurotic need to have everyone like him and his work. Not just the finished product, but even the first draft, because even constructive feedback gives him the sads.

5e is the culmination of that. Huge chunks of the game text are design goals instead of actual design. The nebulousness is built-in from the start. People can project whatever they want into their interpretation of the text and it can therefore be whatever each reader wants to see.

[Koumei]

More like $1M, because the people buying the kickstarter exclusive hardcover are buying the book, too.

Only a million? I thought they were going to at least get hundreds of thousands.

I am not ready for this joke to die.

[CapnTthePirateG]

A first level wizard should be preparing the spells 'please DM let me play something else the first three levels and let me retroactively change my character' and/or 'please only do one encounter per long rest'.

Wizards, Sorcerers, and Warlocks are boring and a chore to play until level 5 under the 6-8 encounters per day paradigm.

How is that any different than anyone else in 5e? Up till level 5 your options are "autoattack".

[Whipstitch]

The other classes at least don't have incentive to stay the hell out of the way. You live and die by the whims of the dice gods at level 2 but in a lot of ways life never actually gets any better than that for a vanilla Fighter. You only have a couple of feats but the bullshit monsters you're fighting don't require magical gear to be beaten so Joe Fighter can actually afford to keep a golf bag of weapons around without bonus divergence automatically making them a god damned idiot for doing so. In a very real way their reasonable actions actually dwindle as time goes on because many critters have a hojillion hit dice and no sell anything less than a heavily enchanted 2 hander right to the face.

[Stubbazubba]

Obviously all of this is founded in people wanting to give Critical Role their dollars,

As Cham pointed out, no, this is a different guy.

Now, he is friends with Matt Mercer and also Liam, so he guest DM'ed for CR at one point I think, and he was the writer for the CR comic books, so there is almost certainly some CR goodwill reflected here (Mercer and Liam plugged the project on Twitter). But he also has a modestly successful YouTube channel, subreddit, and discord, all of which do not intersect with CR in anything but incidental ways.

So it's not wanting to give CR their dollars, but it is people wanting to give Matt Colville their dollars.

[Mord]

Matt Colville and Matt Mercer are different people.

As Cham pointed out, no, this is a different guy. Now, he is friends with Matt Mercer and also Liam, so he guest DM'ed for CR at one point I think, and he was the writer for the CR comic books, so there is almost certainly some CR goodwill reflected here (Mercer and Liam plugged the project on Twitter). But he also has a modestly successful YouTube channel, subreddit, and discord, all of which do not intersect with CR in anything but incidental ways.

So it's not wanting to give CR their dollars, but it is people wanting to give Matt Colville their dollars.

... shit, you guys are correct. My confusion was that when I looked up Matt Colville, I didn't find anything but his personal YouTube and a bunch of stuff related to Critical Role - particularly the comic books. I figured that this was a CR project in some way.

So this guy, who is substantially more of a rando than I had previously believed, has 183k YouTube subscribers and was able to attract 29k KS backers. That makes it more impressive that he was able to get $333k by offering people stickers and T-shirts and garbage like that with his "MCDM" logo on it, even though "MCDM" doesn't appear to actually be a thing right now.

More like $1M, because the people buying the kickstarter exclusive hardcover are buying the book, too.

I should have been more clear: for deluxe book pledges, I counted $25 of the price as "book" and everything left over to "Kickstarter idiocy" on the grounds that the extra price on the deluxe edition doesn't have anything to do with its contents; the extra money is going towards the price of leatherette and a few more bucks for Matt Colville (if he calculated his costs properly). I guess you could make the same argument that the extra $5 of the hardcover over the PDF is just going to the price of paper, but I have the strong feeling that the majority of the $25 for the hardcover is going towards printing costs...

Eh; it's all back-of-the-envelope math anyway. My point remains that the fact that some rando was able to pull in between $673k and $1M specifically for the contents of a book about lord-level adventuring makes me feel pretty confident that there is an eager market for those ideas and that kind of content.

[Prak]

Like... 5e is basically a shambling half-made promethian construct made by a shitty Dr. Frankenstein. But whereas people hated and reviled the creature, there is a sizable community loving 5e, and where as Frankenstein abandoned his monster, Mearls is actually slowly... well, slumping down to the cemetery and finding new Igors to do his job for him, but those Igors seem to be... content? to do so.

And there's a very real audience for actual play D&D podcasts and shit, I'm part of it, I just have a hard time finding games I actually like. So I could believe that this is a thing.

[WiserOdin032402]

So, I use my third level spell slot to cast Animate Thread and vent a little.

Let's talk about feats. The creators of D&D 5e keep releasing them, but never actually expanding how players get feats. This was a problem in 3.5 and it's a problem in 5e, and I'd argue it's a worse problem in 5e. Of course, taking feats in 5e can lead to a character being pushed off of the planned progression, which everyone I've talked to outside of here has scoffed at because 'Look at this big monster in Volo's guide to monsters that has 30 AC' with some amount of 'Bounded Accuracy doesn't exist' jerking.

So, what's an edition written by talentless hacks for talentless hacks or groups of friends you really really trust to do?

[infected slut princess]

So what's the deal with 5e these days?

Does anyone care about it? Do lots of people play it?

It doesn't seem to provoke the extreme hate of 4e, but rather cold indifference (which is possibly worse).

[Username17]

So what's the deal with 5e these days?

Does anyone care about it? Do lots of people play it?

It doesn't seem to provoke the extreme hate of 4e, but rather cold indifference (which is possibly worse).

Even WotC doesn't care about 5e anymore. Of the 19 releases of the D&D Brand last year, 13 (more than two thirds) were produced by other companies and just licensed to put the Dungeons & Dragons brand on them. Of the actual Dungeons & Dragons releases from Wizards of the Coast, only one of them was a book with original content, and even that was a collection of blog posts.

There hasn't been any real 5th edition material that could be unambiguously be called new, complete, and on-topic for several years. When WotC talks about how D&D is doing, they don't even talk about the 5e material, they talk about sales of the branded merchandise.

-Username17

[WiserOdin032402]

Everyone I've encountered online sings the praises of 5e, but at the same time they're also the kind of people I would never trust to run 5e. The system requires too much trust for quick pick-me-up games but at the same time is so easy to set up (outside of, say, breaking out all the copious amount of homebrew rules to make the game passable). Of course, if they were trying to make it good for new players and DMs, they would have...you know, done something towards that end.

[infected slut princess]

Even WotC doesn't care about 5e anymore. Of the 19 releases of the D&D Brand last year, 13 (more than two thirds) were produced by other companies and just licensed to put the Dungeons & Dragons brand on them. Of the actual Dungeons & Dragons releases from Wizards of the Coast, only one of them was a book with original content, and even that was a collection of blog posts.

There hasn't been any real 5th edition material that could be unambiguously be called new, complete, and on-topic for several years. When WotC talks about how D&D is doing, they don't even talk about the 5e material, they talk about sales of the branded merchandise.

-Username17

Sounds really sad.

I can appreciate why they would want to outsource stuff because I think it was pretty well-established that the "core" books were most profitable to produce (with Forgotten Realms sourcebooks also being valuable at one time because they could charge a premium, but OOPS! so much for that LOL).

Anyhow, what does it look like out there in the "scene"?

When young people want to get into RPGs, are they trying out D&D 5e? Or do they gravitate towards Pathfucker? Or classic 3e with its infinity of content? Or do they just play video games and leave the RPG stuff to old fat smelly losers?

I am interested in any anecdotes and frivolous speculation.

[jt]

I don't know about young people, but I've got anecdotes aplenty for people who are roughly 30:
- More people want to get into RPGs than ever, they all assume that D&D is the standard choice, and then proceed to assume that 5E is the right one. One friend actually wanted to do something in a modern setting, assumed D&D was the most standard and beginner-friendly RPG, and forced their modern world to include elves and magic and stuff.
- Among people who played D&D a little back in high school or college then stopped, the defaults are instead, in rapidly decreasing order, Fiasco, Dread, and Everyone Is John.
- The people who've been playing D&D continuously since high school play Pathfinder.

[Username17]

Sounds really sad.

If you want to read D&D stuff on a regular basis, yeah it is. In the last four years there has been less expansion material for Player Characters than was included in one 3.5 player's option expansion such as the Complete Warrior. There has been less expansion monster material than in one of the 3.25 transition era monster books like the Fiend Folio - about as much in total as one of the really decadent late period 3.5 edition monster books like Monster Manual 4 that's filled with random asides and shit we don't care about.

Anyhow, what does it look like out there in the "scene"?

When young people want to get into RPGs, are they trying out D&D 5e?

I definitely see people get into RPGs and get into 5th edition. I mean, that's what there is. I don't see people getting deeper into 5th edition, because you can't. There simply is nothing you can do that gets you particularly deeper into 5th edition than having the 5th edition Player's Handbook. People who want to go farther with RPGs have to expand into other stuff. And since I live in the UK these days, that's really weird.

Games Workshop is physically within bicycle distance of my house, and I've even gone to the great pilgrimage to Nottingham. Until quite recently, Games Workshop straight up owned gaming in this country. They had a vertical monopoly, where the stores were also Games Workshop stores. The local games store is actually only a few years old because the one before that had been eaten by the Games Workshop empire before they started losing their grip on this island.

Game stores here do have RPG sections, but they are incredibly random. I'm talking "used bookstore RPG section from 1995" random. We're talking "roll a d10000 twelve times to decide what books are on the shelf" random. Once people in the UK realize that there's nowhere left to go in 5th edition D&D I have no idea where they would go next. I assume they have to order things off Amazon. When I search Amazon UK for Role Playing Game Books, I get a 5e adventure for hit #1, a fucking Blue Rose expansion for hit #2, a 10-year old edition of Traveler for hit #3, a Norwegian RPG called Insight for hit #4, and some D&D map tiles for hit #5. That's where RPGs are in this country. Lost in the fucking wilderness where there's an obvious market but no products to serve that market.

-Username17

[Whiysper]

We generally use the internet like everyone else, pray to bump into friends at Uni/college, or look out for groups meeting in pubs - they often advertise .

There's no guidance on system, though, other that 'whatever the club plays'. University GameSocs are basically the big gateway.

Sounds like FLGS in other countries are much better than over here - as you say, most of ours died in the recession, and only creep back slowly. What with us being fucked economically by Austerity, Brexshit and all.

Oh, and seeing other people browsing the teeny tiny gaming sections of our crumbling bookstores/libraries and pouncing on prospective players.

[ScottS]

Part anecdote, part speculation. I live in a college town so these data are somewhat relevant, but I'm not a student so there could be stuff happening underneath my particular radar (e.g. people could be organizing via apps I don't know about or use, rather than sites like Meetup or FB).

First important point is that 5e didn't fix the fundamental problem with RPGs, which is that DMing is a shitty service job and no one wants to do it. Games still have a short half-life because D&D still requires "content creation" to function, and people either can't handle it or get burned out doing it. There's only been one 5e game over the past few years that I'm aware of that's survived longer than 1-3 sessions. "Making the game simpler" hasn't achieved anything in that regard (because people don't usually volunteer to be the tail end of the Human Centipede).

Second important point (somewhat speculative) is that people are either coming to the game via "brand recognition" or because of streams and podcasts. Players still want to engage with dumb D&D memes from the 1970s to 2000s (there's still the twisted desire to have a character sheet with "LG paladin" written in pencil in front of you, roll plastic d20s rather than use dice apps, yell "I Magic Missile the darkness" etc. etc.). People are also expecting to be amused in a specific Acquisitions Inc/Geek and Sundry type of way. Awkward nerds telling awkward jokes is no longer adequate; the "casual" atmosphere also has to include non-ironic interest in the story and "semi-attractive professional entertainer" levels of personality and humor. I don't know if the latter matters that much (beggars can't be choosers it is said), but it may make it easier for people to disengage or bail out when they discover that Emma Fyffe isn't going to be sitting across the table most of the time.

Third important point, already mentioned several times, is that "no system" is actually a positive to certain deviants. With the games I've seen, it isn't so much that DMs want to "fix" 5e but rather ignore/replace it. If the base game has little to no structure, it undercuts people's objections to the shitty ideas/rules you want to import, if adding your silly garbage make the game "more complete". If the combat system is mostly empty and reminiscent of 1e-2e-BECMI, then it's easier to drop it entirely if you'd rather run non-rigorous "narrative" encounters ("I beat the boss by coming up with a story solution that the DM liked, rather than interacting with a game engine"). So the decrepit state the game is in is like an indirect license to call whatever you want "D&D" and still attract players.

TL;DR I guess if you start playing again now you should expect less "Stats-based Fantasy-flavored Problem Solving Simulator" and more "Fantasy Storytime", for better or worse (spoilers: it's worse).

[K]

Part anecdote, part speculation. I live in a college town so these data are somewhat relevant, but I'm not a student so there could be stuff happening underneath my particular radar (e.g. people could be organizing via apps I don't know about or use, rather than sites like Meetup or FB).

First important point is that 5e didn't fix the fundamental problem with RPGs, which is that DMing is a shitty service job and no one wants to do it. Games still have a short half-life because D&D still requires "content creation" to function, and people either can't handle it or get burned out doing it. There's only been one 5e game over the past few years that I'm aware of that's survived longer than 1-3 sessions. "Making the game simpler" hasn't achieved anything in that regard (because people don't usually volunteer to be the tail end of the Human Centipede).

Second important point (somewhat speculative) is that people are either coming to the game via "brand recognition" or because of streams and podcasts. Players still want to engage with dumb D&D memes from the 1970s to 2000s (there's still the twisted desire to have a character sheet with "LG paladin" written in pencil in front of you, roll plastic d20s rather than use dice apps, yell "I Magic Missile the darkness" etc. etc.). People are also expecting to be amused in a specific Acquisitions Inc/Geek and Sundry type of way. Awkward nerds telling awkward jokes is no longer adequate; the "casual" atmosphere also has to include non-ironic interest in the story and "semi-attractive professional entertainer" levels of personality and humor. I don't know if the latter matters that much (beggars can't be choosers it is said), but it may make it easier for people to disengage or bail out when they discover that Emma Fyffe isn't going to be sitting across the table most of the time.

Third important point, already mentioned several times, is that "no system" is actually a positive to certain deviants. With the games I've seen, it isn't so much that DMs want to "fix" 5e but rather ignore/replace it. If the base game has little to no structure, it undercuts people's objections to the shitty ideas/rules you want to import, if adding your silly garbage make the game "more complete". If the combat system is mostly empty and reminiscent of 1e-2e-BECMI, then it's easier to drop it entirely if you'd rather run non-rigorous "narrative" encounters ("I beat the boss by coming up with a story solution that the DM liked, rather than interacting with a game engine"). So the decrepit state the game is in is like an indirect license to call whatever you want "D&D" and still attract players.

TL;DR I guess if you start playing again now you should expect less "Stats-based Fantasy-flavored Problem Solving Simulator" and more "Fantasy Storytime", for better or worse (spoilers: it's worse).

I'd agree that content creation is the only game in town. Often, the difference between a "good" DM and a "bad" DM is whether they had the creativity and time to make an adventure and some setting material.

For a while I was trying to mix old Dungeon adventures with adventures I wrote myself and I found that my stuff received a much better reception. It helps a lot when you can thread adventures together into a narative and your idea of a good adventure is not "X semi-related combat encounters and then bossfight."

Frankly, any new DnD-killer needs to be written by an anti-capitalist. Content creation needs to be given back to the people through an open and clear set of rules that they can use to build adventures, settings, and game components like abilities and classes and monsters.

Focus on brand economics killed DnD, and thats a lesson we should learn.

[Krusk]

A group i am loosely associated with just threw a “rpg day open game session” with probably 30 people between 20-30 with maybe a few old timers at under 35.

I ran a oneshot of paranoia. We had 2 dms who prepped one shots for pathfinder and 5e, willing to run either or. We also had a dm run his home game for his home group which was a 5e game where they apparently also use pathfinder for some sessions, or something.

Each game had between 4 and 6 players and there was a lot of board games too.

My observation was that everyone who dmed ran pathfinder as a preference, but all the players were mostly new and only knew or were familiar with 5e.

As for the actual games played, there was my paranoia game, the weird amalgam game, and a oneshot of 5e i got to play in when pranoia ended. 5e was crazy swingy where my warlock ruled because it was one fight and i just fireballed everything to death twice. The barbarian also carried the team, and most other players seemed bored, or didnt realize they were ineffective.