Quote from: Glazer;683955First off, I agree with pretty much everything Haffrung said in the mail I lifted this quote from. However, I have seen this number of downloads quoted a few times now. Does anyone know where it comes from? And if it refers to total downlaods of all of the different playtest packs they've put out, or just the latest one?

I've downloaded it twice and have never played it including the latest one, so take that number with an entire salt shaker of salt (not just the grain). I'm guessing there are lots of folks like me out there and that helped them decide to quit squandering resources on the play tests. I'm sure there are folks playing it but, just as many browsers.

I'm interested in 5e and follow Mearls post every Monday but no matter how interested I am it is going to be tough for me to get my group to buy in. Cynicism rules with us and the quote I hear most often is, "I'm not buying another book just because WOTC decides to revamp the game to sell more books". I liked the 4.5 edition (Essentials) and could tell they were trying to put some flexibility back into the system then. I think it needed to be re-done but I'm afraid it isn't going to make any of the folks I know buy more books unless it is nothing short of amazing. They will play the older versions just because they own them already.

And I've downloaded all packets, but I'm the only one in my group of 7 that has.  I just share it.  so that one download is the equivilant of 7 players.

Quote from: robiswrong;684146And even then it sucks.

The important decision-making should be when you're playing the game, not before you play the game.

For decades, the munchkin player was considered to be a horrible aspect of the genre.  Luckily there was only a small % of them.

WotC took over, and decided that munchinism should be the default play style.  Theory wankers and math obsessed people lost sight of actually playing the game.  The whole "role-playing" part was thrown to the side.  You were encouraged not to role-play an archetype, but instead encouraged to play a set of formulas.  The most important parts of the character sheet went from "race, class, name" to "HP, AC, DPS."  I think that's where they went critically wrong, and hopefully Mearls recent statement about losing direction means that they've realized this flaw.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;684195For decades, the munchkin player was considered to be a horrible aspect of the genre.  Luckily there was only a small % of them.

My personal belief is that "munchkin" referred to *age* primarily, and the playstyle typically played by that age, more than anything else.  To make sure I insult everyone equally, I'll call the adult players of that time period (ending in the early 80s) the "grognards"

Chances are that the vast majority of people on this board are munchkins.  We're the second generation, with some few exceptions.

I only came to this realization after playing in a 10+ year old campaign in the 90s run by a friend's father.  They played "D&D" (actually, a mix of The Fantasy Trip and AD&D 1e) in a very different way than I or my friends ever did - a way that I really grew to appreciate.

I think that most people around my age or even slightly older (I'm 41) don't realize this, as they never got the chance to play with the "grognards", who'd all be about 60 by this point.

Again, this is just my opinion.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;684195WotC took over, and decided that munchinism should be the default play style.

To a certain extent, "munchkinism" (as I define munchkins above) *was* the default play style, as most people playing the game were my age or younger when it came out.  Few of the grognards were left, and few of the "paleo" campaigns survived.  That's just reality.

I don't know that WotC really made a conscious decision to focus on charop and the like.  I don't think they realized how abusable their multiclassing rules were (which really became a very coarse-grained skill system), and the multiplicative effect of adding more classes (which is more problematic than in a traditional class-based system).  I think that in good faith, they tried to make a more "modern" version of D&D, and give players increased flexibility.

I think they *also* made a conscious decision to focus more on player supplements than GM supplements, under the very correct business idea that there are more players than GMs, so why not hit the larger audience?

I think that these two things combined together in a way that created, unintentionally, the charop explosion that was 3.x.  At some point they decided to run with it, I think, but I don't think that was the original intent, or they wouldn't have added things like the multiclassing exp penalties.

I think that when they were playtesting the game, they mostly used people that were D&D players that had expectations about what D&D and multiclassing were, and playtested generally within those expectations.

Quote from: J Arcane;683973See, thing is, 3e brought a shitload of people back into the fold when it came out. Including a lot of old schoolers. It was close enough in spirit to previous rules, while bringing a lot of modern rules innovations, and so it brought back a lot of old players, plus a lot of new players of other games and even from outside the hobby because of the very successful marketing push they gave it.

It only later turned into the CharOp dominated powergame that defined 3.5 and the splat treadmill for it,

Yes, absolutely!  I think its crazy most people forgot that.  Back when 3.0 was first release it was all about "back to the dungeon" and "the kick-in-the-door style of play".  I mean shit, the DMG literally disses Storytelling and outright states its where RPGs went wrong (in very subtle diplomatic words, of course, much more subtle than the nWoD manual's "all D&D players are 'unwashed masses' and its your duty to show them the better way" speech a few years later).

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