11 ms·

This was briefly not true during the 4th edition years. A LOT of people moved to Pathfinder as a kind of 3.75th edition, rather than picking up 4th edition. It

This was briefly not true during the 4th edition years. A LOT of people moved to Pathfinder as a kind of 3.75th edition, rather than picking up 4th edition. It was only when 5th edition came out and it became popularized in the mainstream that WotC regained its seeming ascendency. And I get it, 5th edition is much more streamlined and accessible than its predecessors (not that they were Fate-level challenging or anything). Tangentially, I think 4th edition and now 5th edition lost a lot of the creative soul of earlier editions - the lore is much more heavily integrated with the rule set and feels a lot more prescriptive. but that could just be nostalgic bias as I grew up with 2ed.

VonGuard 6y ago
I hear you, I grew up playing 2nd edition, and somehow the 5th stuff started off feeling empty for me, though I have to admit the rules are so much better and rolling is so much easier. Pathfinder is like doing math homework, every roll... 5th is finally starting to get some better flavor, however, now taht 3rd parties, and WotC seem to be filling in the gaps. Goodman Games has a line of reissued classic adventures, like Castle Amder and Barrier Peaks, and these books are fabulous. They're updated for 5e, so they offer that old school charm in 5e rules. Additionally, 5e has so little in the way of specializations and customizations for characters, but that's being cleared up in the newest official D&D book, Tasha's Caldron of Everything. It's got a bunch of specialized subclasses, like the Bladesinger, and a lot of more flavorful text and items to go with your campaigns. I feel like 5e started off kinda bland, but has been becoming significantly more fleshed out and living over time. And that makes sense: it takes time to add to these worlds. Oh, also, Kobold Press' Tome of Beasts 1 & 2 are also fantastic 5e books. Great monsters.
- FeloniousHam 6y ago
  I can't put my finger on why I dislike 5e, other just having a "corporate polish". Maybe the rules are too articulated, over-specified, or maybe it's just too clean and modern. In any case, Dungeon Crawl Classics[1] is like a mainlining RPG nostalgia. It's the one product that put me in the back of the bus with my 4th grade buddies working their way through the Caves of Chaos. The art, rules and just general vibe are so Old School metal, you can practically hear Zeppelin playing in the background. Magic is uncertain and rare, and death in DCC is the natural result of real danger. Encounters are not gradually scaled to fit the current Challenge Rating of the party. Can't say enough about how much fun this game is. Great community too. [1] https://goodman-games.com/dungeon-crawl-classics-rpg/ https://goodman-games.com/dungeon-crawl-classics-rpg/
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    My group gave up on 5e because it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on (especially the healing rules). It's a different style of play for people who came out of AD&D or who took to the OSR style games. DCC, which I've been playing and running for a while, is lethal in comparison. Which is a mark against it for many people, but my group loves it. We don't have a death a week, but we had several deaths over the past year. The threat changes the play style versus what we saw with 5e where it just felt like PCs couldn't die unless the DM went out of their way to create an excessive challenge that bordered on a forced TPK scenario.
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > My group gave up on 5e because it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on (especially the healing rules). I felt the same way about 4e: overpowered early on, but underpowered (compared to earlier editions) at higher levels. It basically felt like playing a party of 30th-level characters wasn't all that different from playing a party of 1st-level characters.
    - FeloniousHam 6y ago
      > it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on I think that's it: the stakes are too low. You don't have to ration your spells, there are few constraints, and your investment in your character is so great it's customer abuse to write them out of the story. Which is not say I don't get attached to my DCC guys.
      - Jtsummers 6y ago
        > your investment in your character is so great it's customer abuse to write them out of the story This is the biggest issue I've run into with some individuals/groups, and one thing DCC really helped with (for them). Character creation in DCC take about 5 minutes, if that. 6x3d6, assign to stats in order, roll on a few more tables, spend your starting coin, ok let's go. It got several people over their hatred/fear of PC death even in our non-DCC games. I'm starting up a Call of Cthulhu game (which is very rough on PC health, both physical and mental) and there's more effort needed to create characters and much more invested in each character, but now that their fear is gone the game should be more enjoyable. Even with the possibility of characters disappearing in the night or losing their minds and becoming useless.
- natural20s 6y ago
  mathfinder
smogcutter 6y ago
Personally I like 5e, but I know what you mean. I think part of it is just us getting older. DnD is one thing when you’re a bunch of 12 year olds eating cheetos in a basement, and it’s something else when you’re a bunch of 30-somethings with families and jobs carving 4 hours out of a Sunday afternoon. It helps to have a more well-defined and approachable game. That said, the 5e material does feel much more narrowly focused on creating “adventures” rather than creating a world. Like the 3e books had rules for buying a castle and hiring guards for it. Even if no one really did that, just its presence in the book indicated possibilities outside of “run this printed campaign set in the forgotten realms”.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > the 5e material does feel much more narrowly focused on creating “adventures” rather than creating a world. I have the same feeling; I had it with 4e as well. I can see why, given that the target audience is much wider and, as you point out, often has much tighter time constraints. I can't even begin to estimate how many hours I spent as a teenager doing world building for our D&D campaign (which started with 1st Edition Advanced D&D), hours I couldn't possibly spend today.
- sillyquiet 6y ago
  Yeah, I feel like the creators have already created the world for you and are just giving you a rule set to have adventures in that world. Which, like you mention, is fine.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Like the 3e books had rules for buying a castle and hiring guards for it. Even if no one really did that, just its presence in the book indicated possibilities outside of “run this printed campaign set in the forgotten realms”. 3e was the first open core version (and the first version designed from the ground up at WotC, rather than pre-WotC TSR), and WotC learned a lot about the first/third-part split and what worked well in core/supplement split between 3e and 5e. What they had for this in the core in 3e wasn’t really adequate for people who wanted rules for it (and there was a first-party supplement for it). By 5e, this kind of subsystem isn’t the kind of thing that they really do much in first-party supplements, but there is prominent third-party support leveraging the open-core nature of 5e (a feature it shares with 3e): https://shop.mcdmproductions.com/products/strongholds-followers-pdf https://shop.mcdmproductions.com/products/strongholds-follow...
lakkal 6y ago
WotC has been dead to me since 4.0. I stayed on 3.5 and switched to Pathfinder for some new games. I don't particularly want to learn 5.0, but I'm feeling I might be forced to if I want to join/start any current games...
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  One of the awesome things about published content is that you are never forced to do anything if you can form your own group. And even then, there are lots of people in many cities and online willing to play just about any system out there. My friends and I still play AD&D (run by a couple of the guys), or OSR systems if run by myself and the other guys. I've played 5e and 4e, but never felt like it was forced on me, because, you know, I own books for other systems and so do my friends. And since I didn't enjoy 4e, I just dropped that game. I haven't played 5e since the playtest days, but with OSR systems out there that already covered the same terrain, it held no appeal to me or my group.
  - lakkal 6y ago
    Yeah - and I get the impression that 5.0 isn't anything like 4.0, so maybe it wouldn't be as unpleasant as I've been fearing. I had been with two very long-lasting gaming groups (~35 years each) which both dissolved in the last couple of years, so maybe it's time to modernize.
    - cwyers 6y ago
      D&D 5e basically acts like 4th Edition never existed, and you will find it very familiar as someone who ahs played 3rd Edition.
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        Mechanically at its core, 5e is has a very close similarity to 4e with encounter powers becoming recharge on short or long rest and daily powers becoming recharge on long rest, and a few similar translations; it's much closer to 4e in that regard than to any earlier edition. And the catalog of classes, and other options, and their design doesn't throw out 4e heritage entirely, either. But it manages to avoid, IMO, the super-metagamey feel of 4e.
smrq 6y ago
Strange; I grew up with 3rd and I have the impression that 5th is much less prescriptive than its predecessor (I'm ignoring 4th entirely as an anomaly; I never played more than two sessions of it so I don't have any insight about it). 3rd had oodles of rules, prestige classes, feats, etc. whereas 5th to me has more of a "make stuff up for flavor" intent behind it. I think this is a direct result of 5th edition's focus on streamlining. This could be because I was involved with Living Greyhawk in 3rd edition, which was by its nature bound pretty strictly to RAW; or because I came into 5th edition when it was brand new and rules-barren. But I feel like they lifted a lot of restrictions in 5th edition. Example: alignment restrictions on classes. These days I don't even play with alignments at all, but the chaotic good paladin of freedom that I rolled in 5th edition would explicitly contradict the 3rd edition rules. And spells that used to interact with alignments have now been rewritten to target more objective things like creature type instead.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Tangentially, I think 4th edition and now 5th edition lost a lot of the creative soul of earlier editions - the lore is much more heavily integrated with the rule set and feels a lot more prescriptive. but that could just be nostalgic bias as I grew up with 2ed. I think that’s true in a superficial way that helps people new to it get into it, but I also think the core is more streamlined and easily adaptable than the earlier versions (particularly the pre-3e versions), and there’s quite a diversity of different-setting-and-flavor options in the core (primarily, in the DMG), and a good diversity of both generic tools and specific built settings and reusable setting elements, both first- and third-party, so even if the core doesn’t push as hard for “build it yourself”, the support for that is as good as earlier editions.

VonGuard 6y ago

I hear you, I grew up playing 2nd edition, and somehow the 5th stuff started off feeling empty for me, though I have to admit the rules are so much better and rolling is so much easier. Pathfinder is like doing math homework, every roll... 5th is finally starting to get some better flavor, however, now taht 3rd parties, and WotC seem to be filling in the gaps. Goodman Games has a line of reissued classic adventures, like Castle Amder and Barrier Peaks, and these books are fabulous. They're updated for 5e, so they offer that old school charm in 5e rules. Additionally, 5e has so little in the way of specializations and customizations for characters, but that's being cleared up in the newest official D&D book, Tasha's Caldron of Everything. It's got a bunch of specialized subclasses, like the Bladesinger, and a lot of more flavorful text and items to go with your campaigns. I feel like 5e started off kinda bland, but has been becoming significantly more fleshed out and living over time. And that makes sense: it takes time to add to these worlds. Oh, also, Kobold Press' Tome of Beasts 1 & 2 are also fantastic 5e books. Great monsters.

FeloniousHam 6y ago
I can't put my finger on why I dislike 5e, other just having a "corporate polish". Maybe the rules are too articulated, over-specified, or maybe it's just too clean and modern. In any case, Dungeon Crawl Classics[1] is like a mainlining RPG nostalgia. It's the one product that put me in the back of the bus with my 4th grade buddies working their way through the Caves of Chaos. The art, rules and just general vibe are so Old School metal, you can practically hear Zeppelin playing in the background. Magic is uncertain and rare, and death in DCC is the natural result of real danger. Encounters are not gradually scaled to fit the current Challenge Rating of the party. Can't say enough about how much fun this game is. Great community too. [1] https://goodman-games.com/dungeon-crawl-classics-rpg/ https://goodman-games.com/dungeon-crawl-classics-rpg/
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  My group gave up on 5e because it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on (especially the healing rules). It's a different style of play for people who came out of AD&D or who took to the OSR style games. DCC, which I've been playing and running for a while, is lethal in comparison. Which is a mark against it for many people, but my group loves it. We don't have a death a week, but we had several deaths over the past year. The threat changes the play style versus what we saw with 5e where it just felt like PCs couldn't die unless the DM went out of their way to create an excessive challenge that bordered on a forced TPK scenario.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > My group gave up on 5e because it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on (especially the healing rules). I felt the same way about 4e: overpowered early on, but underpowered (compared to earlier editions) at higher levels. It basically felt like playing a party of 30th-level characters wasn't all that different from playing a party of 1st-level characters.
  - FeloniousHam 6y ago
    > it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on I think that's it: the stakes are too low. You don't have to ration your spells, there are few constraints, and your investment in your character is so great it's customer abuse to write them out of the story. Which is not say I don't get attached to my DCC guys.
    - Jtsummers 6y ago
      > your investment in your character is so great it's customer abuse to write them out of the story This is the biggest issue I've run into with some individuals/groups, and one thing DCC really helped with (for them). Character creation in DCC take about 5 minutes, if that. 6x3d6, assign to stats in order, roll on a few more tables, spend your starting coin, ok let's go. It got several people over their hatred/fear of PC death even in our non-DCC games. I'm starting up a Call of Cthulhu game (which is very rough on PC health, both physical and mental) and there's more effort needed to create characters and much more invested in each character, but now that their fear is gone the game should be more enjoyable. Even with the possibility of characters disappearing in the night or losing their minds and becoming useless.
natural20s 6y ago
mathfinder

smogcutter 6y ago

Personally I like 5e, but I know what you mean. I think part of it is just us getting older. DnD is one thing when you’re a bunch of 12 year olds eating cheetos in a basement, and it’s something else when you’re a bunch of 30-somethings with families and jobs carving 4 hours out of a Sunday afternoon. It helps to have a more well-defined and approachable game. That said, the 5e material does feel much more narrowly focused on creating “adventures” rather than creating a world. Like the 3e books had rules for buying a castle and hiring guards for it. Even if no one really did that, just its presence in the book indicated possibilities outside of “run this printed campaign set in the forgotten realms”.

pdonis 6y ago
> the 5e material does feel much more narrowly focused on creating “adventures” rather than creating a world. I have the same feeling; I had it with 4e as well. I can see why, given that the target audience is much wider and, as you point out, often has much tighter time constraints. I can't even begin to estimate how many hours I spent as a teenager doing world building for our D&D campaign (which started with 1st Edition Advanced D&D), hours I couldn't possibly spend today.
sillyquiet 6y ago
Yeah, I feel like the creators have already created the world for you and are just giving you a rule set to have adventures in that world. Which, like you mention, is fine.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Like the 3e books had rules for buying a castle and hiring guards for it. Even if no one really did that, just its presence in the book indicated possibilities outside of “run this printed campaign set in the forgotten realms”. 3e was the first open core version (and the first version designed from the ground up at WotC, rather than pre-WotC TSR), and WotC learned a lot about the first/third-part split and what worked well in core/supplement split between 3e and 5e. What they had for this in the core in 3e wasn’t really adequate for people who wanted rules for it (and there was a first-party supplement for it). By 5e, this kind of subsystem isn’t the kind of thing that they really do much in first-party supplements, but there is prominent third-party support leveraging the open-core nature of 5e (a feature it shares with 3e): https://shop.mcdmproductions.com/products/strongholds-followers-pdf https://shop.mcdmproductions.com/products/strongholds-follow...

lakkal 6y ago

WotC has been dead to me since 4.0. I stayed on 3.5 and switched to Pathfinder for some new games. I don't particularly want to learn 5.0, but I'm feeling I might be forced to if I want to join/start any current games...

Jtsummers 6y ago
One of the awesome things about published content is that you are never forced to do anything if you can form your own group. And even then, there are lots of people in many cities and online willing to play just about any system out there. My friends and I still play AD&D (run by a couple of the guys), or OSR systems if run by myself and the other guys. I've played 5e and 4e, but never felt like it was forced on me, because, you know, I own books for other systems and so do my friends. And since I didn't enjoy 4e, I just dropped that game. I haven't played 5e since the playtest days, but with OSR systems out there that already covered the same terrain, it held no appeal to me or my group.
- lakkal 6y ago
  Yeah - and I get the impression that 5.0 isn't anything like 4.0, so maybe it wouldn't be as unpleasant as I've been fearing. I had been with two very long-lasting gaming groups (~35 years each) which both dissolved in the last couple of years, so maybe it's time to modernize.
  - cwyers 6y ago
    D&D 5e basically acts like 4th Edition never existed, and you will find it very familiar as someone who ahs played 3rd Edition.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      Mechanically at its core, 5e is has a very close similarity to 4e with encounter powers becoming recharge on short or long rest and daily powers becoming recharge on long rest, and a few similar translations; it's much closer to 4e in that regard than to any earlier edition. And the catalog of classes, and other options, and their design doesn't throw out 4e heritage entirely, either. But it manages to avoid, IMO, the super-metagamey feel of 4e.

smrq 6y ago

Strange; I grew up with 3rd and I have the impression that 5th is much less prescriptive than its predecessor (I'm ignoring 4th entirely as an anomaly; I never played more than two sessions of it so I don't have any insight about it). 3rd had oodles of rules, prestige classes, feats, etc. whereas 5th to me has more of a "make stuff up for flavor" intent behind it. I think this is a direct result of 5th edition's focus on streamlining. This could be because I was involved with Living Greyhawk in 3rd edition, which was by its nature bound pretty strictly to RAW; or because I came into 5th edition when it was brand new and rules-barren. But I feel like they lifted a lot of restrictions in 5th edition. Example: alignment restrictions on classes. These days I don't even play with alignments at all, but the chaotic good paladin of freedom that I rolled in 5th edition would explicitly contradict the 3rd edition rules. And spells that used to interact with alignments have now been rewritten to target more objective things like creature type instead.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Tangentially, I think 4th edition and now 5th edition lost a lot of the creative soul of earlier editions - the lore is much more heavily integrated with the rule set and feels a lot more prescriptive. but that could just be nostalgic bias as I grew up with 2ed. I think that’s true in a superficial way that helps people new to it get into it, but I also think the core is more streamlined and easily adaptable than the earlier versions (particularly the pre-3e versions), and there’s quite a diversity of different-setting-and-flavor options in the core (primarily, in the DMG), and a good diversity of both generic tools and specific built settings and reusable setting elements, both first- and third-party, so even if the core doesn’t push as hard for “build it yourself”, the support for that is as good as earlier editions.