Quote from: Lurtch;1052422He's telling people to learn to run a game by watching critical role and other shows like that. He's giving really bad advice.

I've had a woman interested in playing come to me and ask me how to play 5E because her DM just told her to download an app and then watch Critical Role. That poor woman was so fucking lost thanks to her lazy DM.

According to WotC, half of the people who have played 5E were introduced to the game through live play streams like Critical Role.

Quote from: S'mon;1051678I really love the smaller format RPGs such as White Star and 4e Essentials, but only Essentials' Monster Vault is really a good book IMO. The others look nicer than the 4e PHB but I don't much like most of their classes in play.

They really missed a trick with Essentials.  They went from overly complex non-casters to overly simple.  I don't think it really would have been too difficult - given the basic engine of 4E - to design for emergent complexity so the player of fighter type classes could up the tactical complexity to a level they were comfortable with.

Quote from: Haffrung;1052689According to WotC, half of the people who have played 5E were introduced to the game through live play streams like Critical Role.

I would be interested in how many of those had never played any D&D before versus how many had played earlier editions and Critical Role etc. just got them interested in taking it up again.

That - and being inspired to play by such things is a VERY different thing from learning to play from them.

Quote from: Haffrung;1052689According to WotC, half of the people who have played 5E were introduced to the game through live play streams like Critical Role.

I was inspired to play baseball by watching the Oakland A's.

Also I don't believe them when they say that because the numbers don't add up. I want the full market research or I think they are lying. Corporations lie all the fucking time, especially stupid Seattle game developers. I want the core data or they are lying.

Quote from: Charon's Little Helper;1052700I would be interested in how many of those had never played any D&D before versus how many had played earlier editions and Critical Role etc. just got them interested in taking it up again.

That - and being inspired to play by such things is a VERY different thing from learning to play from them.

I started a group of new people for Savage Worlds that were easier to convince because of the buzz around RPGs because of things like critical role.

In the square of public opinion, Critical Role did more to sell 5E (and RPGs in general) than 5E did on its own merits.

QuoteOn that, I have to agree. The adventure modules for 4E weren't designed for the system they were published in at all.

Bingo.

Trash fights in OSR games are fine because they'll be over in a few minutes and they serve a useful purpose (attritioning away party resources). Trash fights in 4ed are freaking stupid because they drain off a lot of time wtihout adding much fun and it's a lot harder for them to attrition off resources (since parties can blast through them with encounter powers and find ways to do bits of healing without spending much/any healing surges). So they're just boring filler. This kind of stupid shit was already cropping up in 3.5ed play with the 15 minute adventuring day and handfuls in CLW wands allowing players with dumb GMs to negate attrition which made any fight that wasn't a tactical challenge in and of itself a boring waste of time.

With 4ed rules you have to just have one or two big climactic fights per session and it works so much better. The thing is you have to teach players to play like that or 4ed is horrifically boring, you can't just play D&D the way it's traditionally been played. We can see this was a huge problem because people were willing to check out 4ed (huge initial sales) then they played 4ed in a normal D&D way as laid out in the intro adventure and got bored to tears.

4ed is basically an OK ruleset if you play it right.

It's just that they made a game that needs to be played very differently from how D&D is normally played and they didn't tell anyone that. That was a bit dumb.

Quote from: Daztur;1052817It's just that they made a game that needs to be played very differently from how D&D is normally played and they didn't tell anyone that. That was a bit dumb.

I agree. The problem I think is that while it is not an insult to say 4e is not D&D (as D&D is commonly understood), WoTC certainly didn't want to market it as 'not D&D'.

Quote from: Daztur;1052817Bingo.

Trash fights in OSR games are fine because they'll be over in a few minutes and they serve a useful purpose (attritioning away party resources). Trash fights in 4ed are freaking stupid because they drain off a lot of time wtihout adding much fun and it's a lot harder for them to attrition off resources (since parties can blast through them with encounter powers and find ways to do bits of healing without spending much/any healing surges). So they're just boring filler. This kind of stupid shit was already cropping up in 3.5ed play with the 15 minute adventuring day and handfuls in CLW wands allowing players with dumb GMs to negate attrition which made any fight that wasn't a tactical challenge in and of itself a boring waste of time.

With 4ed rules you have to just have one or two big climactic fights per session and it works so much better. The thing is you have to teach players to play like that or 4ed is horrifically boring, you can't just play D&D the way it's traditionally been played. We can see this was a huge problem because people were willing to check out 4ed (huge initial sales) then they played 4ed in a normal D&D way as laid out in the intro adventure and got bored to tears.

4ed is basically an OK ruleset if you play it right.

It's just that they made a game that needs to be played very differently from how D&D is normally played and they didn't tell anyone that. That was a bit dumb.

Yep.  

And 4E fights should never take place in an empty room.  You need to put in a big pit of lava you can push people into and some archers on a ledge, possibly a big cauldron of something hot, like in the conan movie that you can push over and wipe out some mooks, mark where the tables are so you can ram people against them, have reinforcements arrive halfway through the fight, have a third faction arrive 2 rounds in and just take on everyone, have the PCs trying to rescue a prisoner while the enemy are trying to move them away etc.

4E works well for a big Indiana Jones style set piece.

Quote from: Daztur;1052817Bingo.

Trash fights in OSR games are fine because they'll be over in a few minutes and they serve a useful purpose (attritioning away party resources). Trash fights in 4ed are freaking stupid because they drain off a lot of time wtihout adding much fun and it's a lot harder for them to attrition off resources (since parties can blast through them with encounter powers and find ways to do bits of healing without spending much/any healing surges). So they're just boring filler. This kind of stupid shit was already cropping up in 3.5ed play with the 15 minute adventuring day and handfuls in CLW wands allowing players with dumb GMs to negate attrition which made any fight that wasn't a tactical challenge in and of itself a boring waste of time.

With 4ed rules you have to just have one or two big climactic fights per session and it works so much better. The thing is you have to teach players to play like that or 4ed is horrifically boring, you can't just play D&D the way it's traditionally been played. We can see this was a huge problem because people were willing to check out 4ed (huge initial sales) then they played 4ed in a normal D&D way as laid out in the intro adventure and got bored to tears.

4ed is basically an OK ruleset if you play it right.

It's just that they made a game that needs to be played very differently from how D&D is normally played and they didn't tell anyone that. That was a bit dumb.

Man, I feel like trash fights take too long in 5e while at the same time the system can't really handle two combats per long rest.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;1052813In the square of public opinion, Critical Role did more to sell 5E (and RPGs in general) than 5E did on its own merits.

Somebody is lying. I checked the viewership for Critical Role on Twitch ant it's ~100,000 viewers there and on YouTube its roughly ~400,000 viewers. Because the show is a drama I'm assuming the bulk of the audience watches week to week. We are being told that D&D 5E is the "best selling D&D ever!" And if that's true and that's due to critical role....not that many people watch it. 500,000 is nothing! More people watched the D&D cartoon than watch critical role.

Where critical role has power is on social media and in the Seattle clique. Too much focus is put into social media, like Twitter, when very few people actually use Twitter. This is a bubble talking to each other.

If D&D is the best selling D&D it has almost nothing to do with critical role. If critical role is the main driver of D&D sales then it isn't the best selling D&D EVER!!!!

Quote from: Lurtch;1052830Somebody is lying. I checked the viewership for Critical Role on Twitch ant it's ~100,000 viewers there and on YouTube its roughly ~400,000 viewers. Because the show is a drama I'm assuming the bulk of the audience watches week to week. We are being told that D&D 5E is the "best selling D&D ever!" And if that's true and that's due to critical role....not that many people watch it. 500,000 is nothing! More people watched the D&D cartoon than watch critical role.

Where critical role has power is on social media and in the Seattle clique. Too much focus is put into social media, like Twitter, when very few people actually use Twitter. This is a bubble talking to each other.

If D&D is the best selling D&D it has almost nothing to do with critical role. If critical role is the main driver of D&D sales then it isn't the best selling D&D EVER!!!!

  If it's a strictly 1:1 relationship, you're right. But if Critical Role creates new DMs who recruit new players, some of whom go on to DM in their turn and recruit more, it may have an outsized effect. It may be like that saying about Velvet Underground: "Only [X] number of people bought the record, but every one of them started their own band."

I think we should go for the most likely outcome: fans of the show are very active on social media and the employes for WoTC are very active on social media so they are putting two and two together.

It's like that old Pauline Kael quite "how did Nixon win? I don't know anybody that voted for him!" We have a lot of folks that watch and everybody they know watches or is a fan.

WotC won't release the actual market research and Fat Mearls and the SJW brigade don't actually get to read the research from Hasbro.

I could see the streamrrs having an outsized impagt on the adventure and splat books. The reason 5E is as successful as it is: the genral board game and table top boom/fad, 4E sucked so bad that 5E had cannibalized the Pathfinder sales and brought in a lot of folks that left the hobby, the general 'nerd culture' fad happening where products don't matter as much as the brands and we all love to buy our pre faded 'nerd' t shirts at target

Quote from: Daztur;1052817With 4ed rules you have to just have one or two big climactic fights per session and it works so much better. The thing is you have to teach players to play like that or 4ed is horrifically boring, you can't just play D&D the way it's traditionally been played. We can see this was a huge problem because people were willing to check out 4ed (huge initial sales) then they played 4ed in a normal D&D way as laid out in the intro adventure and got bored to tears.

I had one of my better D&D campaigns playing 4E in just that way. Lots of roleplaying and investigation involving factions, and a couple big important combats per session. Frankly, there's more combat in the 5E campaigns I've played and run, and it's less fun combat.

There's nothing at all about 4E that says you can't spend most of the session in non-combat play. It's no different from 1E or 2E in that respect; just because most of the rules are about combat doesn't mean you have to spend most of the game in combat.

Quote from: Daztur;1052817It's just that they made a game that needs to be played very differently from how D&D is normally played and they didn't tell anyone that. That was a bit dumb.

WotC has a long-standing problem supporting its systems with the right types of adventures for that system. It supported 3/3.5 with adventures that relied on mix-maxing and gamy strategies like wands of cure light wounds. It supported 4E with a bunch of dungeon-crawls, which are lame in 4E. And it's supporting 5E with a bunch of epic mega-campaigns, which become a grind because they have to be stuffed with trash-fights. 4E would have been better with epic storylines, and 5E would be better with dungeon-crawls.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1052829Man, I feel like trash fights take too long in 5e while at the same time the system can't really handle two combats per long rest.

Yeah, I'm starting to see 5E shudder from the problems with its engine. To challenge the PCs with the threat of death, you have to pump encounter after encounter after encounter at them. Solos get roasted, so you needs lots of monsters in those attritional combats. Makes a game session either a cakewalk or a tedious grind.