Quote from: Trond on January 06, 2024, 12:57:41 AM

Quote from: Grognard GM on January 05, 2024, 10:45:40 PM
The Golden Shower age, maybe.

You brought it up so I can't be held responsible:
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/165/910/9da.png

That's how I feel whenever I played Symphony Of War: The Nephilim Saga, and Diana  gets her Titan form.




It's like "we knew you had a strong woman fetish, by the way you have slight effeminate men being betas to the female characters, and Diana being a 7ft tall killing machine Valkyrie. We were prepared to let it go, because the game is good, but then you brought your Deviant Art into the game."

The Dev gaslighting about it just being a sensible, thematic aesthetic choice is great.

Quote from: BadApple on January 05, 2024, 11:28:42 PM

I understand your perspective, but I disagree.  The 5e influx brought a lot of money and people into the hobby, not just to WOTC. 

A lot of people were inspired to create new stuff and a lot of people were inspired to try out games they hadn't before.  I admit that a lot of it is shit but there has been some good stuff come along.

Several games that were thought dead have been resurrected.  Traveller being one near and dear to my heart.  Sure the Mongoose books are of mediocre quality but we now have Cepheus Engine and T5.

While most new players are tourists, there have been some that have been willing to try out new games and really be a part of the hobby.

I'm certainly not saying it's all been cherries.  We have seen nearly all the online spaces get flooded with SJWs, something I'm sure is directly linked to the 5e up swell.  While the higher profile of the hobby has made it more acceptable (we nerds need not fear the locker because of funny shaped dice anymore) it's also had it's image tarnished in a different way simply due to low quality output from WOTC.

I don't know.  A lot of these people don't seem to be interested in playing anything but 5e just like a lot of the people who came in during WoD's heyday weren't interested in playing anything but WoD. 

Traveler strikes me as one of those games that never really went away.  Like the oD&D crowd, the Traveler crowd was always there.

I'm sure some of them have actually become part of the hobby.  I think a substantial majority have not.  I always wonder how many of these people even play and how many just watch Critical Role or read the books.  A fair amount of this stuff reads like the person writing it doesn't really have any idea how the game plays at the table-top.   

Quote from: yosemitemike on January 06, 2024, 02:34:53 AM

Quote from: BadApple on January 05, 2024, 11:28:42 PM

I understand your perspective, but I disagree.  The 5e influx brought a lot of money and people into the hobby, not just to WOTC. 

A lot of people were inspired to create new stuff and a lot of people were inspired to try out games they hadn't before.  I admit that a lot of it is shit but there has been some good stuff come along.

Several games that were thought dead have been resurrected.  Traveller being one near and dear to my heart.  Sure the Mongoose books are of mediocre quality but we now have Cepheus Engine and T5.

While most new players are tourists, there have been some that have been willing to try out new games and really be a part of the hobby.

I'm certainly not saying it's all been cherries.  We have seen nearly all the online spaces get flooded with SJWs, something I'm sure is directly linked to the 5e up swell.  While the higher profile of the hobby has made it more acceptable (we nerds need not fear the locker because of funny shaped dice anymore) it's also had it's image tarnished in a different way simply due to low quality output from WOTC.

I don't know.  A lot of these people don't seem to be interested in playing anything but 5e just like a lot of the people who came in during WoD's heyday weren't interested in playing anything but WoD. 

Traveler strikes me as one of those games that never really went away.  Like the oD&D crowd, the Traveler crowd was always there.

I'm sure some of them have actually become part of the hobby.  I think a substantial majority have not.  I always wonder how many of these people even play and how many just watch Critical Role or read the books.  A fair amount of this stuff reads like the person writing it doesn't really have any idea how the game plays at the table-top.   

I agree that a lot of the crowd is going to thin out quite a bit.  How much?  Only time will tell.  I do know that at least some of the 5e crowd has gone on to other games and I think there will be people playing 5e and it's derivatives for a while so I think some of the growth is permanent.  Of course, this is just speculation. 

I agree there's a lot of people that watch the shows and yt videos, read the memes, and make comments.  I can't wait for them to go away.

In the end, when the waters recede, we gamers will be left with more good stuff than we had because of the 5e surge.  Sure, there will be plenty of dreg worthy only of a burn pile but that's to be expected for any hobby that gets a surge of interests followed by a surge in production to met that interest.

Has it been a golden age?  I think it's been a mixed blessing.  There's been a lot of shit to come with it that I don't like but it has brought in some good stuff.

Quote from: BadApple on January 06, 2024, 04:21:16 AM
I agree that a lot of the crowd is going to thin out quite a bit.  How much?  Only time will tell.  I do know that at least some of the 5e crowd has gone on to other games and I think there will be people playing 5e and it's derivatives for a while so I think some of the growth is permanent.  Of course, this is just speculation. 

I agree there's a lot of people that watch the shows and yt videos, read the memes, and make comments.  I can't wait for them to go away.

In the end, when the waters recede, we gamers will be left with more good stuff than we had because of the 5e surge.  Sure, there will be plenty of dreg worthy only of a burn pile but that's to be expected for any hobby that gets a surge of interests followed by a surge in production to met that interest.

Has it been a golden age?  I think it's been a mixed blessing.  There's been a lot of shit to come with it that I don't like but it has brought in some good stuff.

I don't think people are going to just stop playing 5e entirely.  That didn't happen with any other edition.  5e may retain more players than any other edition if 6e is as close to it is WotC implies. 

I always suspected that a lot of the WoD people were like that too.  A lot of them seemed to talk about it a lot and read the books but not actually play.  I suspect that is why some of the later books are so busy looking artsy that they aren't very usable.  They didn't expect people to actually use the books for games.  A lot of the metaplot stuff was pretty much useless to almost everyone for actual gameplay.  It was stuff for people to read and talk about online. 

Of course good stuff came out.  I just don't think it was a golden age and certainly not because of the increased number of people alone. 

Quote from: Grognard GM on January 05, 2024, 11:18:56 PM
As manufactured, and often inauthentic as the current fad for the 80s is, I'm going to miss it. Because the 80's were awesome, so even its shadow is decent.

The 90s fad will be OK. Once we hit "hey, remember the 2000s?" I'm checking out of everything.

Fortunately that's never going to happen, cuz the 90s were the last true decade. The only real cultural achievement since then has been social media. What are people going to remember about the 2000s? 9/11? "Support the troops?" What was the distinct sound of the 2000s onward?

RE: Whether there was even a 5e Golden Age? 5e was by far the most sold and arguably most "popular" edition of D&D ever made, bringing more people into the hobby than ever before. Whether they all stick around once the fad dwindles down is largely irrelevant. It was a Gold Age. That it will not last forever is why it's called a "Golden Age". Otherwise it wouldn't need a distinct label.

Not all those people will leave regardless, and 5e brought more people into the hobby than any other edition of the game. That means there's potential for a lot of people to stick around even if many leave. But again, even if they do leave (they probably won't), it was still a Golden Age while it lasted.

Quote from: VisionStorm on January 06, 2024, 06:52:02 AM

Fortunately that's never going to happen, cuz the 90s were the last true decade. The only real cultural achievement since then has been social media. What are people going to remember about the 2000s? 9/11? "Support the troops?" What was the distinct sound of the 2000s onward?

The early 2000s were pretty raunchy. A lot of people were trying to shock in films, TV etc (think e.g. Tropic Thunder and Little Britain, Sarah Silverman in blackface, podcasters using the "n" word etc). Then, the woke era started, particularly early in gaming (2011 or so). Gamergate was the earliest reaction to that in 2014.

I suspect that the twitter players will dwindle down and fuck off over time, and the games that feed into it like the various PbtA clones will also take a hit when they can no longer get a quick buck off kickstarter.  Wizards stands to lose the most, but even if there's a sizable exodus D&D will likely remain the largest piece of the market pie.  Expect ever more layoffs and increasing outsourcing of work to freelancers, as Wizards really doesn't seem to give a shit about the quality of the product as long as there are sufficient suckers to buy it.  Real game companies that don't toss out flash in the pan kickstarter bait should be okay; smaller groups like Pinnacle and Mongoose I expect will stay steady with their current customer base.

I believe creators who have already established themselves as quality creators, will continue to make money for a while.  How long and how strong will that opportunity be?  I'm not sure.  There are so many digital distractions available today, which constantly compete for peoples' time and money.  OD&D, B/X, and AD&D didn't have to compete with these digital distractions.

Has 5E enjoyed a new golden age?  Yes, but it has been different from D&D's classic era golden age.  5E has enjoyed many advantages in this era, which have allowed it to spread to the masses more quickly.

Quote from: BadApple on January 05, 2024, 07:22:29 PM
Is the Golden Age for 5e over?  Yes, thank the deity of your choice.

Is it going to damage the RPG industry?  WOTC for sure.  Some of the other big publishers are going to fade out too.  I think that the hobby is going to take on a different shape and move in a positive direction.  I think there will be some pain involved but I think in 18-24 months (if WWIII isn't raging) RPG players are really going to be happier with gaming spaces and products that are available.

I mentioned before that I think there's a split coming in RPGs as a whole.  I don't know what you would want to call them but there's going to be PbtA type games with player control over the meta narrative of the game on one side and crunchier games where rule 0 reigns supreme.  There's already a natural gulf and it's easy to pick out the kind of game it is by just looking at who's sitting at the table.  I think the ending of 5e will be the point at which they are considered two different hobbies, even if it's just in hind sight. 

I also think we're getting near a tipping point where there's going to be an anti-woke crusade.  It will happen in the share gaming spaces but it's going to happen a lot in culture in general.

The Storygamer/Forge-refugees have been trying to claim that story-creating RPGs would become as popular as real RPGs for nearly 20 years now. It's not going to happen. It'll keep being the domain of aging pseudo-intellectual hipsters.

As for 5e, if it goes full VTT, then yes, it will be a different hobby. And that's going to be a huge change. Of course, there's also a good chance it will fail, and then WotC (or their inheritors) will eventually go back to producing a tabletop D&D game.

Quote from: yosemitemike on January 05, 2024, 10:17:21 PM
I'm not sure I buy the premise that there was a golden age to begin with.  I don't think that a large influx of tourists represents a golden age.  That's what a lot of these people are really.  Fads are, by nature, short-lived.  When the fad is over, they will be gone.

Well, this particular fad has been going on for close to a decade.

Quote from: Socratic-DM on January 05, 2024, 10:36:49 PM

Quote from: yosemitemike on January 05, 2024, 10:17:21 PM
I'm not sure I buy the premise that there was a golden age to begin with.  I don't think that a large influx of tourists represents a golden age.  That's what a lot of these people are really.  Fads are, by nature, short-lived.  When the fad is over, they will be gone.

This.

I tend to call these types of people Secondaries. They Have no love for the hobby and were merely a temporary surplus, in fact these types of trends tend to hurt hobbies overall because the industry of said hobby adjusts to the influx and then when it Secondaries leave, the industry has no way to cope with the mass exodus.

Logically it's never good in the long term to chase short term trends, and thus I'd agree this was never Golden Age, a Golden age implies a long period of stability.

As of this year, 5e matches 1e for the longest unrevised edition (and that's only if you don't count Unearthed Arcana as a revision).

Quote from: Omega on January 05, 2024, 11:25:58 PM
wotc is going to screw up 6e massively.

Just listen to Perkins go on about the new "totally legit would we lie to you its really still 5e!" DMG changes alone.

The changes to the system across the board is more dumbing down of the system and pushing storygamer dogma of "The DM is only there to serve the players. Every player is a DM!"

Yes, that's because no one left at D&D knows how to design, and I'm definitely including Perkins and Crawford on that list. The people now in charge of D&D are mediocrities at the very best. Vegan Cookbook Writers at the very worst.

A part of the "Golden Age" argument is the influx of causals/tourists into the hobby as a net benefit.

I read a blog post where the author broke down how such an influx into a hobby (I believe he used the terms "scene"), if not destroys it, fundamentally changes it.

Does that jog anyone's memory? So far my google-fu has been sufficient to find it.

Quote from: RPGPundit on January 07, 2024, 06:30:55 AM

Quote from: yosemitemike on January 05, 2024, 10:17:21 PM
I'm not sure I buy the premise that there was a golden age to begin with.  I don't think that a large influx of tourists represents a golden age.  That's what a lot of these people are really.  Fads are, by nature, short-lived.  When the fad is over, they will be gone.

Well, this particular fad has been going on for close to a decade.

Maybe fad isn't quite the right word here.  Trend is more accurate.

At the very least, 4E has become a distant memory.  5E has been so much more commercially successful, than 4E was.  But the irony, is that WOTC can't leave 5E alone.  They are hell bent on destroying any and all good will established with 5E.  It is perplexing....