D&D 5E Do we need a Fifth Edition Revival (5ER)?

[mamba]

Also something to consider. If it were going to happen, it already would have. 5E is several orders of magnitude bigger than the entire OSR combined.

maybe it has happened recently (with the OGL drama), maybe regular 5e is so big that it drowns out something the size of the OSR. I would not rule out that it happens, I am not even ruling out that we are at the beginning of it (ToV, C7D20, …)

 

[mamba]

Of the things 5E does it isn’t the best for any of them. Monster fighting? 4E did it way better. Story-gaming? Actual story-games do it infinitely better.

maybe people are not looking for one or the other, I know I am not

 

[Malmuria]

Yes, this is very close to what I feel as well. There is something going on in the OSR I'd like to see happen in the world of 5E.

The OSR has the Primer for Old School Gaming and the Principia Apocrypha, texts that elucidate some (loose) principles for old school gaming as a style of play, not a set of products. What's the equivalent for 5e? Are you trying to capture a certain style of play, say from 2014-2017, that is fundamentally different now? It seems your concern are less about play style and play culture than about whom to give money to.

Now, certainly, the OSR is against any corporate control of official dnd, but that's only one feature of it. Speaking of though, it is a scene that is very comfortable with DIY products and zines. Products look different and feel different from each other. Many "products" are not even products, just things made and shared freely, and in places the OSR is explicitly anti-consumerist. Would 5e fans embrace this sort of weirdness? Some yes, but in other cases, people want their 5e gaming material to look and present a certain way.

 

[overgeeked]

maybe it has happened recently (with the OGL drama), maybe regular 5e is so big that it drowns out something the size of the OSR. I would not rule out that it happens, I am not even ruling out that we are at the beginning of it (ToV, C7D20, …)

Something's definitely happening because of the OGL. I'm not sure the result will be akin to the wild DIY creativity of the OSR. A whole lot of 5E 3PP are putting out their own minor spins on baseline 5E. That's fundamentally different than dozens or hundreds of individual hobbyist creators making their own things. I mean, it's the difference between organic, ground up, DIY hobbyist movement and companies fighting to stay in business and retain their fans.

There will absolutely be a lot of creative stuff coming out, don't get me wrong. I'm most looking forward to what Cubicle 7 does with 5E. I was initially skeptical then completely blown away by Doctors & Daleks.

 

[overgeeked]

The OSR has the Primer for Old School Gaming and the Principia Apocrypha, texts that elucidate some (loose) principles for old school gaming as a style of play, not a set of products. What's the equivalent for 5e? Are you trying to capture a certain style of play, say from 2014-2017, that is fundamentally different now? It seems your concern are less about play style and play culture than about whom to give money to.

Now, certainly, the OSR is against any corporate control of official dnd, but that's only one feature of it. Speaking of though, it is a scene that is very comfortable with DIY products and zines. Products look different and feel different from each other. Many "products" are not even products, just things made and shared freely, and in places the OSR is explicitly anti-consumerist. Would 5e fans embrace this sort of weirdness? Some yes, but in other cases, people want their 5e gaming material to look and present a certain way.

Yeah, exactly. This is another core difference.

Fierce independence and non-conformity vs conformity. OSR producers are almost allergic to sameness. 3PP for 5E are almost allergic to veering too far from core 5E. But then that's a reflection of the player base. 5E fans rather infamously refuse to look at anything that's not 5E, so it makes perfect sense that the 3PP are not taking those chances. But that same reflex by the fans is what prevents the kind of OSR-style DIY creative scene from flourishing.

In the OSR scene you can find very well received books with just text, sans art of any kind, but the baseline is a color cover with black and white interior art. In the 5E scene you have people regularly saying they'll flat refused to even look at a book that's not full color art throughout. And yet the OSR regularly produces books with better production values like ribbon bookmarks, printed end papers, stitch binding, etc.

 

[DarkCrisis]

The most popular TTRPG that out sales and out plays everything else needs a revival?

I think I will also give money to a rich person.

If any game needs massive help it's like Shadowrun. That game could shine again if it would have a real long and hard system reimagining. Time to slay some of those sacred cows.

 

[Quickleaf]

The OSR has the Primer for Old School Gaming and the Principia Apocrypha, texts that elucidate some (loose) principles for old school gaming as a style of play, not a set of products. What's the equivalent for 5e? Are you trying to capture a certain style of play, say from 2014-2017, that is fundamentally different now? It seems your concern are less about play style and play culture than about whom to give money to.

Now, certainly, the OSR is against any corporate control of official dnd, but that's only one feature of it. Speaking of though, it is a scene that is very comfortable with DIY products and zines. Products look different and feel different from each other. Many "products" are not even products, just things made and shared freely, and in places the OSR is explicitly anti-consumerist. Would 5e fans embrace this sort of weirdness? Some yes, but in other cases, people want their 5e gaming material to look and present a certain way.

I think the lack of a style of play is a terrific point. Though it's not as clear as the OSR's style, and there is no guiding philosophical document, I would argue there is an accepted practice that has emerged around "5e's play style" – if I can set aside the time and can formulate my thoughts I'll post what I think about that later. But interestingly I think it's a character/narrative-leaning style that bonks heads against 5e's rule system being designed for combat-frequent play.

While I found Ben Riggs' article to be...not that great...I appreciate M.T.'s steering of the conversation. On the one hand, yes it is about who fans give money to. On the other hand, things like open5e are about collaboration and not money-making, and fan efforts to hack 5e are certainly not money-focused enterprises. That there is a business component to this doesn't – in my opinion – detract from what might be a deeper change. In other words, they're not mutually exclusive.

But all those player base tendencies you describe in your second paragraph – I think that's the exact trend that should be questioned and challenged, rather than reinforced.

 

[mamba]

A whole lot of 5E 3PP are putting out their own minor spins on baseline 5E. That's fundamentally different than dozens or hundreds of individual hobbyist creators making their own things. I mean, it's the difference between organic, ground up, DIY hobbyist movement and companies fighting to stay in business and retain their fans.

Given that the OGL survived, and we even have a CC SRD now, Kobold Press, Cubicle 7 and others would not really need to create their own systems to stay in business, they could continue releasing 5e content.

They are also not the only ones, just the most well known ones

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[Shardstone]

I think you're right, @M.T. Black, that the big issue is how far designers (and players) are willing to stray from WotC 5E's baseline. Even the wild and craziest 5E material -- the leveless, non-combat spells in Metal Weave's Incantations, maybe -- are very clearly supplementary to the game in the way it's regularly played.

No one is ripping apart 5E and rebuilding it the way that, say, Whitehack or the Black Sword Hack have done in the OSR movement.

Part of that, I suspect, is that the audience is mostly interested in traditional gameplay models. I don't have firm numbers -- if firm numbers can exist without a marketing survey no one would pay for -- but I suspect more folks play pretty traditional D&D style games with OSR retroclones than play the wild and crazy OSR stuff assembled like Lego from its component parts. Dolmenwood may not use all traditional classes, races, spells and monsters, but no one in 1981 would be confused about how to play it if a copy fell back in time through a wormhole.

I think the 5E chassis is, by and large, the best "advanced" ruleset D&D has ever seen, so there's definitely a lot of good Lego to play with. And I do hope we will see people doing crazy stuff with it. I think it will require designers to blaze a trail by themselves and hope that someone wants to follow, rather than it being the safe commercial path of doing books in the WotC mold. (Tales of the Valiant's deviance from the WotC version of 5E is a matter of degrees, not any major break, by design.)

Many of us are ripping apart and remaking our own 5e. We just arent well know yet.

 

[Clint_L]

For me, 5e hits the sweet spot in a number of ways:

1. It's enough like AD&D that it satisfies my nostalgia cravings. I started playing in 1979, and if 5e didn't feel familiar to those treasured memories, I would have been dissatisfied. This was probably my main issue with 4e (personal opinion, YVMV, etc.).

2. However, it "fixed" (again, YVMV) a lot of the inconsistencies that always bugged me in AD&D. I'm a very rationally minded person, and things that feel arbitrary or counter-logical tend to bug me. Descending AC always irritated me, for example.

3. The rules are consistent enough to make it much easier to teach than most other editions (maybe excepting 4e). And the rules, while ridiculously complex compared to most games, are at their core the simplest version of D&D since Basic. Since I use the game at school with beginners a whole lot, this is great.

4. DnDBeyond. Game-changing in terms of time management and making the game accessible. In my current school campaign, only one student owned dice or a PHB at the start of the year, but we had no problem getting started, and the way it walks new players through character creation is mostly excellent (could do a better job explaining spell management).

5. Professionalism. I don't love everything WotC publishes, but it is always well done, and they continue to produce and revise work in a mindful way. They are more culturally responsive than in the past. And 3PP for 5e have similarly been very high quality.

6. Popularity. This is probably at least as much due to demographics and popular culture as anything that WotC did, but 5e facilitated it for the reasons cited above. And more people playing TTRPGs is object very good for the world, IMO.