phlapjackage wrote:The secret to D&D is that really the rules are just guidelines.
When did this become a "thing"? I guess they needed new marketing speak after "the math just works" failed, but that quote above has to be one of the dumbest things...you know what, never mind
4e was very structured, to the point where many people said it didn't even count as an RPG and was basically a board game. 5e is a reaction to that and is essentially the opposite in every way it could be. While the 5e player's handbook is still over three hundred pages, it's not very structured at all. It's so unstructured that the procedure for sneaking or scouting or diplomacizing is left undeclared. There are related skills, but how and when you roll them is a mystery.
The 5e PHB is basically all filler. There are sample alphabets, charts to roll a d6 for character motivation, and musings about how you could use alternate pantheons from Earth's history. But the entire descriptions of the feats would fit in 4 pages without art, and that's
with a sprawling format with a lot of white space. The entire 5e PHB looks like someone took a disorganized deck worth of D&D notes and just stuffed it all into a book-shape until a 175k wordcount was filled and then got a typesetter to fill it full of art until it wasn't shorter in pagecount than the 4e PHB.
5e's release schedule is also reversed from 4e. 4e had a very structured presentation, where new content could be made by simply filling in the blanks in templates with whatever came off the top of your head. I demonstrated that if you were fairly disciplined about it, you could write finished 4e content at the rate of about 12k words a day. Meaning that a book like Divine Power 2 could honestly be written by one person in 2 weeks if that's what you wanted to do. And the release schedule was insanely ambitious, with like a dozen core books in the first year, and they didn't even launch until fucking
June, meaning that first year was actually just 7 months. 5e on the flip side, doesn't release anything ever.
After three and a half years, we had our best sales in November. It sold out and we’ve been struggling to restock.
This is weird on a bunch of levels.
- Why three and a half years? The preface for the 5e PHB is dated May 2014, and Xanawhatzit came out at the end of November 2017. Three and a Half Years probably takes us back to just after the 5e PHB was made. But in any case, definitely excludes anything from the 4e time period, let alone the 3e time period.
- Why or how would they be struggling to restock? They can print as many copies as they want and have them ordered for shipping the next day. It's not even a phone call to make that happen, they just write a two sentence e-mail and it's done.
- With the amount of bullshit word games they play, I can't help notice that they said their best sales were in November. Normally you'd expect that to mean that they had their highest sales month, but they don't actually say that. Given that the book they are talking about wasn't available for most of November, they are probably talking about their best sales week or even their best sales day. And of course, that's further caveated by the fact that they give a time frame that pointedly excludes anything from before May 21st, 2014.
-Username17