Quote from: BadApple on March 01, 2025, 02:35:53 AMI can't help but laugh a little.  Ever since Tasha's, D&D has been taking a nose dive and there had been plenty of feedback as to why.  "The customer is wrong about what they want" is the dumbest thing stance a company can take.

There is a kernel of truth in there.

Decades of design experience have shown that actually yes, what players say they want is not always what they really want.

But "The customer is wrong about what they want" is marketing twisting that to suit their own ends.

Quote from: HappyDaze on February 28, 2025, 11:56:39 PM

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on February 28, 2025, 10:03:30 PM4E was the woke edition of D&D and it failed hard.

How was 4e woke?

I didn't care for 4e because of how it played with my group, but our complaint wasn't that it was "woke" in any way.

 I own the majority of what WotC produced for 4E, and I didn't pick up on much, if any, 'wokeness' or overt progressivism--not even on the level of the infamous 5E Basic set/PHB paragraph about PC sexual identities.

 Now, 4E did make a major step forward in D&D's progress towards infernalism by promoting Asmodeus to godhood, with the implications that the god he killed bore a suspicious resemblance to the real God ...

Quote from: HappyDaze on February 28, 2025, 11:56:39 PM

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on February 28, 2025, 10:03:30 PM4E was the woke edition of D&D and it failed hard.

How was 4e woke?

I didn't care for 4e because of how it played with my group, but our complaint wasn't that it was "woke" in any way.

It weasnt. But it developed a really nasty fanbase that had all the bad habits of the woke without actually being. Well into 5e the 4e fans were pretty wretched. I remember when during the 5e playtest they kept trying to sabotage it.

Whether you want to characterize 4E as "woke" (aka Leftism the reader dislikes) or merely "progressive" (aka Leftism the reader likes) it had all of the same underlying political motives, it's really just about how overt its been.

"Progressive" Design
- Removing / de-emphasizing alignment
- Removing ability score penalties
- Deliberate anti-White, anti-Male discrimination emphasized in artwork & NPC/adventure design
- Push towards "Costume Play" mentality where being an Orc, a Drow, a Tiefling doesn't represent a realized non-Human mind with completely different drives, motivations, ethos -- They're identical to humans except with a different +bonus and racial power.

Quote from: Zelen on March 02, 2025, 10:52:59 AMWhether you want to characterize 4E as "woke" (aka Leftism the reader dislikes) or merely "progressive" (aka Leftism the reader likes) it had all of the same underlying political motives, it's really just about how overt its been.

"Progressive" Design
- Removing / de-emphasizing alignment
- Removing ability score penalties
- Deliberate anti-White, anti-Male discrimination emphasized in artwork & NPC/adventure design
- Push towards "Costume Play" mentality where being an Orc, a Drow, a Tiefling doesn't represent a realized non-Human mind with completely different drives, motivations, ethos -- They're identical to humans except with a different +bonus and racial power.

  Distinguo: I dislike them both; I simply use 'progressive' as an alternative because otherwise, people start screaming about 'woke' not meaning anything. That said, I have no reason to quibble with the idea that many of the cultural ideas present in 5E were at least latent in 4E. I only asserted that they aren't as overt or obvious to me.

Quote from: Fheredin on February 28, 2025, 10:30:23 PMD&D has so many problems at the moment it looks to be impossible to fix, but the big one I see is that they've wound up courting an impossible to please userbase. I have no idea what a perfect version of D&D looks like, but no matter what they do, some grognard on the internet will be upset with it.

I'm not sure if this is an issue.  It's an issue if your goal is to appeal to absolutely every D&D fan of every D&D era, across increasingly divided political aisles.  But 5.0 made overtures to OSR people, legit old school people, 3.X people, and, to some degree, 4ed people (Mearls recently laments not being able to pitch to them harder).  That might be lightning in a bottle, but: 
a) You don't need to be nearly as successful as 5.0 was to be seriously influential, and even less so to be successful.
b) Simply focusing on one or two groups of D&D players could get others to join up- most players are reasonably fluid and have tried games outside their preferred design motif.
c) 5.0 expanded what a TTRPG player is to such a large degree that "being the lead TTRPG" is a larger advantage than it was before- there's plenty of people who would be glad to support and play a mediocre game as long as everyone else was playing it

If you made a game that was "AD&D reborn" and stuck with that, it could become the biggest thing ever, especially if you actually had the rights to D&D.  But the same could be said of 3.X, and soon, 5.0.  Mark my words, there will be a lot of interest in 5.0 reborn, because at this point the statement "most TTRPG players got their start with D&D 5.0" is either true, or very close to true.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on March 02, 2025, 12:09:14 PMDistinguo: I dislike them both; I simply use 'progressive' as an alternative because otherwise, people start screaming about 'woke' not meaning anything. That said, I have no reason to quibble with the idea that many of the cultural ideas present in 5E were at least latent in 4E. I only asserted that they aren't as overt or obvious to me.

I'd argue that there's been a progressive push in every version.  Just off the top of my head: 
AD&D 1e renames Fighting-man to "Fighter" and begins using "he or she" construction.  AD&D 1e removes the penalty for female human strength (I can't find the rules that had this, so it may have been houserules at the time, but Gary actually puts lessening the penalties female characters face in his forward or something- it's a selling point in the book)
AD&D 2e gets rid of minimum and maximum ranges for sex/race combinations- human females can now have a strength of 18/00, versus more realistic values in 1e.  It also makes an apology preface about using masculine pronouns throughout, even defending this as being proper English (which it is, but they felt bad about it)
D&D 3e alternates between "he" and "she" in any context of describing classes- each class is written with the pronouns that match the art that they commissioned (paladins have a black human female as their iconic character, so everything is written "she" and "her").  Human males become scarce, and white ones even scarcer, in the art.  Elves cease being portrayed as clearly European and become angular and alien, a design motif that continues to a degree into 4e.

So while 4e continues this trend, I really do think it's a trend of appeasement that has led us to the current situation.  And I will also say that stuff within the last decade or so really has broken new ground, as many pieces of the game with a lot of relevance- first racial stat penalties, then racial stat bonuses, then the entire concept of race- have been wiped away by the latest rules (this was incremental starting with 5.0 though).  These changes have had very negative effects on both the ability for the game to speak to you imaginatively and for how things have actually worked out in the game mechanically; the game is mechanically inferior with backgrounds providing stat bonuses than it was before.  If the game got marginally worse when human females could exceed 18/49 (or whatever), it's taken a huge dive in more recent years.  Renaming of phylacteries, removing all references to gypsies, and turning all the races into "cosplay humans" are all bad, but they are part of a big trend.

We'll see if anyone actually stands against this trend ever.  It's getting harder and harder to find a new game that even offers different races any more.

Quote from: Venka on March 02, 2025, 12:26:55 PMAD&D 1e removes the penalty for female human strength

It doesn't. Strength Table I on p. 9 of the PHB states that 18/50 is the "Maximum strength possible for a female human or male gnome character."

Quote from: Zelen on March 02, 2025, 10:52:59 AM- Deliberate anti-White, anti-Male discrimination emphasized in artwork & NPC/adventure design

The tale of Regdar says this happened in 3e times; it was not introduced in 4e.

Quote from: Zelen on March 02, 2025, 10:52:59 AM- Push towards "Costume Play" mentality where being an Orc, a Drow, a Tiefling doesn't represent a realized non-Human mind with completely different drives, motivations, ethos -- They're identical to humans except with a different +bonus and racial power.

This has existed since the beginning of RPGs. What about 4e makes you think it started there?

Quote from: Venka on March 02, 2025, 12:26:55 PMI'd argue that there's been a progressive push in every version.  Just off the top of my head: 
AD&D 1e renames Fighting-man to "Fighter" and begins using "he or she" construction.  AD&D 1e removes the penalty for female human strength (I can't find the rules that had this, so it may have been houserules at the time, but Gary actually puts lessening the penalties female characters face in his forward or something- it's a selling point in the book)

  Perhaps reacting to Len Lakofka's ill-conceived "Women in D&D" rules in The Dragon #3: "Only as fighters are women clearly behind men in all cases ... Strength 18 [sic] sided die and 1 six sided die." Since the article goes on to say "Any woman scoring 13 or 14 in strength may add one to her constitution score," I suspect it's supposed to say "1 8-sided die"--and maybe does; the DRAGON Archive I'm using has numerous scanning errors.

Quote from: Omega on March 01, 2025, 12:59:09 PM

Quote from: BadApple on March 01, 2025, 02:35:53 AMI can't help but laugh a little.  Ever since Tasha's, D&D has been taking a nose dive and there had been plenty of feedback as to why.  "The customer is wrong about what they want" is the dumbest thing stance a company can take.

There is a kernel of truth in there.

Decades of design experience have shown that actually yes, what players say they want is not always what they really want.

But "The customer is wrong about what they want" is marketing twisting that to suit their own ends.

There's a big difference between ordering a steak while really wanting prime rib and not knowing it and ordering a steak and getting served boiled chicken liver.

Quote from: Zelen on March 02, 2025, 10:52:59 AMWhether you want to characterize 4E as "woke" (aka Leftism the reader dislikes) or merely "progressive" (aka Leftism the reader likes) it had all of the same underlying political motives, it's really just about how overt its been.

"Progressive" Design

- Removing / de-emphasizing alignment
They still had Lawful Good, Good (NG/CG), Unaligned (N), Evil (LE/NE), and Chaotic Evil.

It's the Basic D&D Law vs. Chaos model only with moral weight assigned to Law (Good) and Chaos (Evil) and a couple of intermediate steps that map to the two axis system... making it a useful hybrid of AD&D and B/X.

Let's also keep pretending that virtually every other RPG outside of Palladium didn't throw alignment out as one of their first things.

- Removing ability score penalties
Like flipping to ascending AC, just having adding to a base number is an easier mechanical expression. Its not like it changed anything from the 3e days in terms of race/class preferences... a half-orc only being able to have a 18 Int (at great cost in point buy... to not gimp yourself a 16 was the defacto cap) while a High Elf could start with a 20 meant there were far more elf wizards than half-orc ones, just like the top end for a 3e half-orc was 16 while the elf was 18 and had the same outcome.

- Deliberate anti-White, anti-Male discrimination emphasized in artwork & NPC/adventure design
As was stated by others, that started with 3e... the devs then were already objecting to being forced to add white male Redgar as one of their iconic characters in the 3e PHB. This isn't a 4E issue, this is a WotC since forever issue.

- Push towards "Costume Play" mentality where being an Orc, a Drow, a Tiefling doesn't represent a realized non-Human mind with completely different drives, motivations, ethos -- They're identical to humans except with a different +bonus and racial power.
To be fair to the tiefling, they're humans warped by an infernal pact. Why wouldn't they think and act like humans?

Orcs never had a PC write-up outside of the Monster Manual appendix.

The Drow entries in the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide and Essentials Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdom (the only two places they got write-ups) did emphasize their differences from humans; the harshness and decadence of their native culture and how those taking up the role of a hero are still cold, arrogant, paranoid, distrusted and feared. Beyond that, they're fundamentally ELVES; demi-humans.

4E also went into detail on the dragonborn and how being hatched creates different family dynamics, a warrior culture focused on duty and rituals related to their egg shells.

Basically, I think you've got some confirmation bias going on.

Even if it was so successful that 5.5 became the world's number one economic force and the true faith of every nation it would still be crap.  Even so, it's nice when the financials reflect the reality.

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 02, 2025, 05:38:05 PM...

Basically, I think you've got some confirmation bias going on.

Not at all. I was making a quick comment, not writing an extensive essay.

I could've easily gone into more detail and sliced the salami, but it's not worth it because the core point is kind of blindingly obvious. The things people complain about today with 5E/5.5E/6E, whatever you want to call it are simply continuations of trends in 4E (& 3E). I'm not even saying that to be derogatory towards 3E or 4E -- A lot of change made in those editions are (IMO) better game design.

But I'm not just evaluating the game design changes, I'm evaluating the motivations -- Why you make a change does matter, it's a vector showing core game principles. The rot has taken awhile for a lot of people to recognize, but it's been there for awhile and will remain as as long as D&D's in the clutches of the WOTC / inbred Leftist crowd.

Quote from: Zelen on March 02, 2025, 10:01:42 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 02, 2025, 05:38:05 PM...

Basically, I think you've got some confirmation bias going on.

Not at all. I was making a quick comment, not writing an extensive essay.

I could've easily gone into more detail and sliced the salami, but it's not worth it because the core point is kind of blindingly obvious. The things people complain about today with 5E/5.5E/6E, whatever you want to call it are simply continuations of trends in 4E (& 3E). I'm not even saying that to be derogatory towards 3E or 4E -- A lot of change made in those editions are (IMO) better game design.

But I'm not just evaluating the game design changes, I'm evaluating the motivations -- Why you make a change does matter, it's a vector showing core game principles. The rot has taken awhile for a lot of people to recognize, but it's been there for awhile and will remain as as long as D&D's in the clutches of the WOTC / inbred Leftist crowd.

Greetings!

I agree, Zelen.

I don't see some kind of contradiction with saying that 3E, 4E, and 5E all demonstrated some solid game design, improvements, and worthy aspects--while *also* increasingly embracing Woke BS. The evidence is all there, straight from the mouths of various artists, game designers, and writers, every step of the way. Something that I think many people forget, is that also all along the way, we are talking about several dozen or more people involved in the entire staff. Some of course, are talented and have genuine skills. Many others, again, increasingly, much less so. This isn't rocket science, and yet many insist on seeing the internal "Work Culture" of an enormous company over the span of 25 years in absolute, binary terms. I also think that some designers that used to be celebrated and applauded broadly with high talent--such as Monte Cook--have actually *declined* in skill. In tandem with such skill erosion, it can be seen that the Woke ideology spreads and becomes even more entrenched, resulting in a growing insanity and constant outbursts of Woke BS and stupidity. This degeneracy is also seen increasingly in whatever works that they do manage to produce. It can be seen through Twitter, interviews, and so on, that many of these people that may have started out as game designers, artists, etc, 15, 20 and more years ago--have also steadily moved away from any serious professional work embracing the identity of a professional designer, artist, writer--and increasingly take up the identity of being a Woke activist. The Woke activism seeps into every aspect of consciousness, their every relationship, and every corner of their daily lives.

That's what the "Woke Mind Virus" does to people. It changes ostensibly normal people into twisted, maniacal, zombies and POD people. Que vision of "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers", 1979, starring Donald Sutherland.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK