3 ms·

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 cheeto

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...
- smogcutter 6y ago
  That’s a good point about the 1st/3rd part split, I hadn’t really considered that. I know that it’s not that you can’t buy a castle in 5e, and a big part of the game is grokking that the rules aren’t a list of what you can do, but how. But finding that section of the book as a kid was a real imagination kickstarter. Having it in there was just fun, even if the actual rule was clumsy and would’ve been better as a fleshed out supplement. I really am a fan of 5e, and have been having a lot of fun running it. I wouldn’t go back to 3e (or AD&D for that matter, which was a little bit before my time), but the kitchen sink approach in 3e had a kind of charm that I could see people missing in the new, more coherent material.
  - spiralx 6y ago
    I still enjoy reading my 1E Wilderness and Dungeoneer's Survival Guide books once a decade or so :)

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...

smogcutter 6y ago
That’s a good point about the 1st/3rd part split, I hadn’t really considered that. I know that it’s not that you can’t buy a castle in 5e, and a big part of the game is grokking that the rules aren’t a list of what you can do, but how. But finding that section of the book as a kid was a real imagination kickstarter. Having it in there was just fun, even if the actual rule was clumsy and would’ve been better as a fleshed out supplement. I really am a fan of 5e, and have been having a lot of fun running it. I wouldn’t go back to 3e (or AD&D for that matter, which was a little bit before my time), but the kitchen sink approach in 3e had a kind of charm that I could see people missing in the new, more coherent material.
- spiralx 6y ago
  I still enjoy reading my 1E Wilderness and Dungeoneer's Survival Guide books once a decade or so :)