5e D&D is now over. I examine whether D&D was a success or failure, from a business perspective, a design goals perspective, and in terms of its long-term impact on the hobby.
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5E was a success, at WOTC recovering from the 4E / Pathfinder era.  5E was at least; a little bit more like AD&D, or 3E.  But 5E also managed to be a little like 4E, in subtle ways.  5E was Neapolitan ice cream D&D.  It had a little of it all, except for 1E AD&D's deadliness.

Your idea of success is more than a little biased. You presume that playing your way is the best way (e.g., decades long campaigns are better than multiple shorter campaigns) and dismiss other options (particularly the value of casual gamers, especially those that never "transition" over to your playstyle). This is all in-character for you, especially when pushing your products, but it just seems a little hollow here.

Quote from: Man at Arms on September 24, 2024, 11:33:18 PM5E was a success, at WOTC recovering from the 4E / Pathfinder era.  5E was at least; a little bit more like AD&D, or 3E.  But 5E also managed to be a little like 4E, in subtle ways.  5E was Neapolitan ice cream D&D.  It had a little of it all, except for 1E AD&D's deadliness.

It was meant to be set up in such a way that you could modulate the deadliness. Except no one did that. Which made it even more prescient that I kept trying to convince Mike to default the game to moderate-mode rather than easy-mode.

Quote from: HappyDaze on September 25, 2024, 02:03:25 AMYour idea of success is more than a little biased. You presume that playing your way is the best way (e.g., decades long campaigns are better than multiple shorter campaigns) and dismiss other options (particularly the value of casual gamers, especially those that never "transition" over to your playstyle). This is all in-character for you, especially when pushing your products, but it just seems a little hollow here.

I was literally the guy who championed Casual play in 5e's design. The motto when the game was being developed was "Dare to simplify" and that was my slogan.

However, yes, longer campaigns are better than shorter campaigns, in terms of the RPG experience. But I don't attribute the ease of play to the low level of sessions-per-campaign in 5e. That was much more to do with 5e's player demographics.

I feel like 5e was a failure in a couple of important ways.

First, the PHB is terrible and really badly laid out.  Rules that are all over the place and PC creation has you flipping back and forth.  This made it a rather daunting task to actually learn the system caused many people to just rely on their DM to teach them the game and use apps for PC management.  The game isn't that complicated and should be more approachable by players.

Mike Mearls sabotaged it's cultural development by handing down rulings on rules interpretations.  I don't know if he didn't understand the damage to the community he was doing or if he got off on the social power it gave him but he was handing out decisions to things that should have been DM calls.  This took final authority from the DM and created a situation where players would argue with decisions.

Finally, WOTC actively marketed to a particularly vile segment of the population, the far left.  As anyone with two brain cells could have predicted, they immediately assume authority on gaming and then demanded compliance from everyone else.  Gaming tables became contested places rather than places focused on the enjoyment of the game and public pickup games became unbearable to impossible.

I think it was a success but could have been greater success.
1. They should have avoided the rules bloat of character options that made it harder for DMs.
2. They should have had three types of modules. Low level (1-5) sandbox adventures. And high level adventure paths (6+}. That way the adventure paths don't have to dominate a campaign they are the final swan song of the campaign and they are less junk for a DM to worry about. The third type would be unconnected modules the DM can drop into either to spice things up.
3. Forgotten Realms can have been the vanilla campaign option but they should have had another option.

Note - I realize they almost did the module thing but really only did low level with the starter sets and the high level campaigns were all 1-20 which is to long a railroad.

- Lasted longer than any edition of D&D.
- Recovered market share lost by 4E.
- Vastly expanded the audience to the point of being mainstream now.
- Sold more copies than any other edition.
- Dozens of third-parties created supplements for it.
- The 2024 version is just a slight update and so whether 5e is actually over is actually debatable (it's got fewer changes than 4E Essentials or 2e Skills & Powers... neither of which are considered separate editions).

By any reasonable standard, 5e is one of the greatest successes in the history of roleplaying games.

It's mechanics are nothing to write home about and when in doubt it always picked the most banal option, but if the goal is mass market appeal, being the McDonalds of RPGs is exactly how you succeed.

Quote from: RPGPundit on September 25, 2024, 03:42:14 AMin terms of the RPG experience

The "RPG experience" is a very subjective thing, and its measure should be more qualitative than quantitative. Some players no doubt prefer multiple short stand alone campaigns rather than one extended campaign. For them, it very well could be a "better" RPG experience.

As for changing player demographics, I think it's important that the game be able to adjust to the people playing it than to expect the people playing it to adjust to old ideas of how to play it.

Well anecdotally, it ratified itself as the edition that made me put down D&D as my go-to system after a bazillion years of gaming.

It's a pile of meh to me.

Objectively it's not a failure on either side: it sold like crazy. I bought the core books - so it got my gold. But subjectively I think of it as a failure as it didn't keep me. I don't entirely think of it as 5e's fault. My years in the trenches of the 3e edition wars, the apocalypse of 4e had sufficiently wounded me on the mechanics that 5e and the "All things for all Edition tribes" pretty much doomed it for me.

I definitely think d20 could become a go-to system for me, but I believe that time has passed unless someone decides to get creative (that isn't me). If I ever go back, likely it'll be 1e/2e or maybe OSR. D&D isn't a brand aimed at me, and as a system, 5e and 6e is mechanically boring and uninspired *intentionally*. On principle I will not buy anything from WotC. I would rather have someone around here more invested in D&D come up with their own version of D&D and give my gold to them and see what they come up with over anything that is produced by WotC under their current leadership.

So failure? No. But it was the end of a long hike for me, that ended with a big wet fart.

5E has become a failure, I think, due to WotC's poor management. I'd guess that player numbers are down from the previous decade's high, even with the bump from the D&D movie and Baldur's Gate 3. And I don't think the 2024 revision will bring people back. It's like World of Warcraft now: still successful, but well past its prime. And like World of Warcraft players, I feel vaguely sad for the people who still play it.

Quote from: Ruprecht on September 25, 2024, 07:42:39 AMI think it was a success but could have been greater success.
1. They should have avoided the rules bloat of character options that made it harder for DMs.
2. They should have had three types of modules. Low level (1-5) sandbox adventures. And high level adventure paths (6+}. That way the adventure paths don't have to dominate a campaign they are the final swan song of the campaign and they are less junk for a DM to worry about. The third type would be unconnected modules the DM can drop into either to spice things up.
3. Forgotten Realms can have been the vanilla campaign option but they should have had another option.

Note - I realize they almost did the module thing but really only did low level with the starter sets and the high level campaigns were all 1-20 which is to long a railroad.

Early 5E was a clear success, albeit it could have been a bigger one with better modules and better defaults on the options.

Late 5E was a train wreck, the same way the recent McDonald's health food kick was a train wreck--still a huge business, still grabbing huge chunk of the market, but notably alienated a slice of that market to such a great extent that it likely won't recover it.  When you are a huge business with that kind of market penetration, driving away a small but significant slice of your market doesn't kill you.  It is a clear loss.

For me, it doesn't really matter, since late 5E was a huge "success" for me personally, in that it finally drove me to do my own system, which I've been happily playing and testing ever since.  Like tenbones, I finally gave up on WotC D&D entirely.

I think that D&D 5 is both, mechanically and commercialy, a success.
WotC/Hasbro had regain, in 2014, the favor of the general TTRPG population, through actual good works (the PHB, The DMG and the MM are useful, to me, as written).
I am, in the general belief, that in the period of the releasing of the essential trilogy and the starter kit, D&D 5 enjoyed praises and satisfaction from its users/cosumers base and the reworks of the Ravenloft was good.
After the consulting fiasco, where the Rpgpundit and Zak S were, unjustly, maligned, in the general apathy of most of the TTRPG communities, some cracks in the shining new reputation of WotC/Hasbro senior management and editorial staff began to show, regrefully I would add.
Then, the woke crow begins to petition for control of D&D and they won, somehow ...
I will not speak of the free licence debacle, where the arrogance and greed of Hasbro/WotC truly shone, the implementation of the D&D 5.5 still works, with some sacrificial lambs for the angry mob.
In a purely factual and businesslike analysis, D&D 5 was successful, in my opinion.

Quote from: yabaziou on September 25, 2024, 11:38:42 AMThen, the woke crow begins to petition for control of D&D and they won, somehow ...

  Any company as decidedly Chaos-aligned as WotC and headquartered where they are is going to go woke eventually; it was always just a question of when.

  I have my own opinions on 5E's success, ranging from the rational (good marketing, broad appeal, heavy nostalgia in a market primed for it) to the paranoid delusional (I'm still not 100% sure that certain parties didn't sell the game to Asmodeus for worldly success ). But I never bought the core books and sold off my copy of Curse of Strahd, the only 5E book I ever purchased, so I'm well outside the target market. The latest thing that brought home how far I am outside D&D's new audience  was finding out that there's a romanceable mind flayer in Baldur's Gate III.

Quote from: BadApple on September 25, 2024, 06:49:52 AMMike Mearls sabotaged it's cultural development by handing down rulings on rules interpretations.  I don't know if he didn't understand the damage to the community he was doing or if he got off on the social power it gave him but he was handing out decisions to things that should have been DM calls.  This took final authority from the DM and created a situation where players would argue with decisions.

That sounds like Jeremy Crawford. Mearls' only sin was to defer to Crawford as the "rules expert", which he really isn't. Mearls was at least as competent as Crawford, the early stuff where they posted joint opinions was vastly superior to Crawford's later brain farts. Mearls' big problem seems to be a lack of self confidence, where Crawford is pretty Narcissistic.