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>>98292028
I think we both know but saying it out loud will cause a certain group of people to get angry and cause a tantrum in this thread for pointing out their agenda.

>>98292070
yeah everyone hates the fucking casterfags
casters ruined 5e

>>98292028
>The World's Greatest Roleplaying Game
That's not Castles and Crusades

>>98292028
Bait thread
But trying to serve too many masters, and too many sacred cows, in my personal opinion. Kinda doesn't matter, first mover advantage has pretty much guaranteed it's continued reign.

>>98292028
Corporate.

Hasbro
WotC
TSR
Gygax

in that order

>>98292028
Nothing, because it's perfect. Especially since it has the advantage over all other systems with rule 0, which can be used fir every other system.

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>>98292190
>rule zero
Then why bother using the books in the first place you ship of Theseus midwit.

>>98292197
Did you miss that that poster was being sarcastic?

>>98292028
Primarily the contradiction between refusing to accept niches and clinging to design decisions for brand-value reasons forcing some HORRIBLE choices in pursuit of an unironic wider audience, secondarily the steadfast refusal to let go of the one specific design decision that only casters get a big fat routinely-added-to options list, tertiarily that the crunched scale on raw numbers makes it goddamn impossible to have ANYTHING turn +numbers into spell-competitive utility even if they didn't ditch robust examples for skill DCs.

My own proposal is to work with third-party producers that continue to support older-edition communities to identify the elements that fractured their respective shares of the franchise's market share, then work on a common core ruleset for all of them to serve as the new Basic set, then their differences become separate product lines run by joint subsidiaries with said third-parties given the full IP rights for one respective setting to serve as their "official" one (e.g. Mystara for the OSR folks, Eberron for the 3.5 lot).

>>98292122
Exactly the same pressures applied to Myspace. Network effects are not inviolateable.

>>98292197
>why bother
Because give the company money for its product they didn't bother quality controlling.

>>98292249
It is the greatest after all, good advertising that.

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>>98292070

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>>98292070
>>98292641
how you two sound

>>98292028
Woooooooooo another culture war slop thread yaasssss queen well posted! NEVER post about ganes when you get more (you)'s with slop! /tg/ really is the lowest iq ceptic tank on this fucking website.

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>>98292070
I'll name them for you, you fucking coward. FOIDS

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>>98292028
- The d20
- Chasing mass markets over core demo
- Corporate strategy lacks employee development
- No vision for design; game is a toolbox where every tool is just another type of hammer
- They hired the pinktertons??? what does that suggest about the c-level leadership?

>>98292070
>limbussy cumpany
Quiet everyone, the child groomer has something to say!

>>98292678
> No vision for design; game is a toolbox where every tool is just another type of hammer
>Advantageslop
God, don't remind me

>>98292028
>Desperate to recapture the 3.5 audience
>Still thought they could make a "perfectly balanced" combat skirmish game with bounded accuracy
>intended to make Faerun/FR the default setting but never released a fucking campaign setting book for it
>Wanted to make 5e as an apology to 3.5 quasi-grogs, but ended up getting a massive wave of Theater Kid players because of The Adventure Zone promoting the game.
>Theater Kids are fucking retarded and don't read the books, but want to run games like their parasocial heroes, so WotC shifts focus entirely over to Adventure League play of pre-written Campaign Adventures, which ordered volunteer DMs to never punish, harm, or scare off customers (which is easier to do than they admit because bounded accuracy fucking sucks)
>Bought D&D Beyond to use as a microtransactions platform and subscription service for extra revenue, but ended up creating a massive number of retarded players who refused to actually learn the rules or how to make a character because DnDB and Roll 20 just automates nearly everything for them

>>98292028
Pic unrelated, I guess? Nothing is wrong with Pathfinder

>>98292748
>pic claims D&D is the world's greatest roleplaying game
>"Heh... pic unrelated, I guess?? Nothin' wrong with *Pathfinder!*" /snark
holy shit dude

>>98292028
As >>98292070 said. If you say what went wrong. the people who did it will bitch and throw a tantrum and sadly they got a few mods ins that attack anyone from pointing it out.

However, I will say this. Once Hollywood made them "cool" and "hip" to like them. You had the groups that didn't care for it suddenly become "lifelong fans" but ask them a question or two and they wouldn't know anything unless they could access the Wiki or was basic bitch questions. However they would complain about everything and want the main character not to be Straight White Men but more like them. Then when the corpos rather then keep going with what works let them change everything were shocked NO ONE like it.

Especially with the world's greatest roleplaying game. It was a buggy mess but rather then fix their problems with newer books. They care about thing some random person said was "racist," "sexist," etc and changed that breaking the game and making the fans more mad. Also the whole OGL. One of the biggest reason they were the biggest was the huge 3rd party books and materials they were getting. I think it will take time but in 5 more years. I think unless they fix and remove the problem. I think D&D will be gone or beaten by someone else. Hell, wouldn't doubt Hasbro sells them off at one point.

>>98292070
>grr i'm so silenced i can't speak my mind about (((them))) everyone is censoring me
>constantly talks about killing jews and trannies and niggers every single day with literally zero push back
Poor little baby.

>>98292075
I despise casterfags so fucking much. The goyim like to talk about how (((they))) ruined dnd but when it comes to the topic of overpowered wizards and puny martials everyone is silent.

>>98292757
Isn't Paizo at risk of going under?

Every problem, both cultural and mechanical, is downstream from the game abandoning Simulationism. The audience which can comprehend detailed gameplay in a weird fantasy setting that takes itself seriously is very small (and almost entirely autistic white men), while the audience that can comprehend a mixture of a number-maximizing MMO, a casual board game, and a highly reskinnable canvas to enact their parasocial adventures (in the same way that Minecraft youtubers tell staged stories) is very large. The first audience was already mostly aware of tabletop RPGs, while the second audience was mostly untapped, and had also just discovered that nerdy things are "cool", meaning that WOTC could get a much higher number of potential customers by abandoning the parts of the game where you had to think about long-term consequences, engineering, or about what would realistically happen in a situation.

Of course, the GREED meme is cope for the fact that games are now designed by people who hate the original nerd demographic, and explaining everything wrong with games purely through money is as retarded as claiming that universities became race-marxist purely because the rich wanted to distract white working class voters. WOTC could easily bring back cold Anglo-minded simulationism and heroic colonial adventure and still have a dedicated core audience (tech billionaires are probably disproportionately inclined to this now vanishing genre), they just don't want to because the unspoken law of gaming (which also destroyed Minecraft) is that *individual-scale simulationist games are absolutely forbidden*, with the closest allowed genres being detached mapgames and RPGs where 99% of the "detail" is just character options.

Peter Thiel or Elon Musk could save TTRPGs by paying me minimum wage to write FATAL 3 (the planned title was "For All Those Against Light") and giving me captive testers (the hard part).

>>98292885
The caster-martial disparity is easily solved by unpredictable simulationism, AD&D spells frequently randomly determined their effects even though it was oversimplified, and F.A.T.A.L. (or Arduin if you want the chance of instant death to be lower) made weapons actually scary by making them inflict injuries that weren't just decreasing a number (and also made having low HP make you worse at certain things, rather than having you be fine at 1 HP but instantly fall over if you get bitten by a rat). And if you make most spells the sort of spell that would actually exist either in an alchemy tome or in a weird fantasy setting, rather than the same effect reskinned with different elements, levels, and condition riders, casters actually have to be careful about which spells they prepare, since the only "generic damage spell" without side effects that could go either way would be magic missile (if players use burning hands in a wooden building, they should expect it to catch fire, and if they attack armored enemies with acid, it will corrode the armor, but that armor will still be corroded once they loot it from the enemy's corpse)

In contrast, the only permitted use of dice in 5e, generally speaking, is to either determine a number of damage, or determine if an effect succeeds/fails ("the d20 test"). Even randomized durations (which ironically reduce the amount of dice you need to roll, since you only need to roll dice when the effect starts, rather than rolling a recharge d6 or saving throw each turn) are not allowed, and the reason for this is clearly due to enmity of uncertain outcomes that add detail.

>>98292028
I don't get it, the 2024 version is way better than the 2014 version which was already pretty good.
Why are people so dramatic about it?

>>98292916
Pretty much, though it's more of WOTC and others are basically leaving the current fans who built up everything and have history with said IPs for that "modern audience." The problem is that the "modern audience" are the same as their old audience that does spend money on the IP. You get maybe a good amount of people buying a cute sticker or if your lucky the books. However, they're not going to care much about any new shit. Especially when the fad fades and they leave for the next one.

Also when it comes to TTRPGs especially after making a new edition. You got to be better or at least equal to your last edition to make it worth dropping the old one. 5e was better than 4e but as everyone can tell you 4e wasn't close to ever being as good as 3.5 hints why Pathfinder became a thing. Being a mostly refined 3.5. Many people keep to the older systems over upgrading. Plus with 5e, with how much 3rd party support it had. It's even harder to leave for a just as bad if not worse 3.5 system.

>>98292944
/tg/ is filled with contrarians. They spend all day debating what is and isn't OSR as if the label somehow has any value whatsoever. Just elitists engaged in their nonsense purity spiral. Most people could not give less of a shit. 5e was a success and nothing they say will change that.

>>98292995
this, it's mostly nogames osrtards and contrarians who make playing a game different than 5e their entire personality (literally the only reason pathfinder 2 exists)

>>98292995
No one denies that 5e was a success. However the later part of 5e was seen a meh and they try to make 5.5 a mostly online VTTRPG but failed once again. Lucky this time no one was murdered like with 4e. It was just shit

>>98292916
Wait i usually play modded minecraft (from like a 1.4 version) what the heck happened to minecraft?

>>98292953
>5e was better than 4e
I don't understand people who say this because every time I see a fighter power in 5e its some boring shit like "+2 to dying saves" or "once per day you may move +10 feet". In 4e my fighter was bouncing around the map like a pinball ripping people's fucking eyes out with his bare hands and that was before Dailies came into play. What possible benefits does 5e bring that would make up for making playing a human male fighter boring?

>>98292916
Simulationism is for faggots. No mentally competent man should ever waste his time on consulting charts for how many bowel movements they make in a day and how that will affect their encumbrance, or rolling for how many bug bites you get while outside and how that impacts your chance for malaria. Gamism has won, and you are forever trapped in a hell of your own making: playing OSR fetish garbage or going through the dullest dungeons ever devised by Gary Gygax's stupid Mormon friends.

>>98293147
Sounds like someone who whines when people make fun of shitty lit-RP made for theater kid tourists. Yet think they should be allow to shit on everyone else's games thinking everyone will like theirs if they do.

>>98293162
Simulationism stems from theater kid mindset. Gamism demands mechanical knowledge and the ability to make good tactical judgments (something which terrifies the idiot who gets into TTRPGs through Critical Role or, even worse, seeing it in Stranger Things), while simulationists prefer play-acting.

>>98292028
They fired Gygax. Actually, let me roll that back. Don Kaye had a heart attack.

>>98293204
You're mixing theater kids and "simulationists." Those who enjoy "simulationism" are those who are more into puzzles, math problems, etc. There is a way to fix it. However it's multiple ways of doing it and you have a group to do it with. Tourists tend to treat TTRPGs as play-acting and basically just want to be like toddler playing pretend over following said rules and all. Though there are times where you do get some overlap in a sense. (Wanting a OP item, skill, etc to wanting a "do over" after some bad rolls over letting a character just die and rolling a new one)

5e is a perfectly serviceable ttrpg. It's far more functional than 95.3% of it's competition, granted that is because it's probably the only ttrpg out there that had any actual play-testing. It is also the most well marketed rpg out there. So what's the problem? Terrible splats that no one really cares about for starters, underwhelming adventures, the whole controversy with the DM's Guilt and the pinkertons and what have you and only one(1) /v/game that anyone cared about. There should be dozens. Plus the art in 5e24 is really terrible. I don't want to look at mutts playing ttrpgs in my ttrpgs book Linda. I want to see art that would titillate my imagination about fantasy worlds and brave heroes not pastel cartoon characters pretending to play a game like you see in CR.

>>98292028
what happened to FATAL?

>>98292859
>Proving my point

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>>98293287
>granted that is because it's probably the only ttrpg out there that had any actual play-testing.
Lol. Lmao, even.

The MBA exec philosophy of chasing growth by always presuming that people who do not consume your product are the most important target audience.

>>98293147
>(implied) You're an autistic freak nerd, just play a beer and pretzels casual game like a fucking normal person
You are nearly indistinguishable from a 5e player, except masculine in expression instead of feminine.

>>98293204
>Gamism demands mechanical knowledge
Nigger, I want a game that includes acceleration and velocity, uses turn angles, and has different subsystems for every type of damage, among other things.

>>98292944
>the 2024 version is way better than the 2014 version
Subtle bait, but effective.

>>98293218
With how Gygax tried to fuck everyone else on contracts, he absolutely deserved everything he got.

>>98292953
>4e wasn't close to ever being as good as 3.5 hints why Pathfinder became a thing.
>hints
It's "hence", you absolute maroon. And Pathfinder was in the works well before there was any kind of consensus on 4E--it came into being because Paizo wasn't able to secure the same kind of third-party publishing relationship with WotC as they'd had for 3.5 and the GSL was too restrictive for them to just do it themselves.

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>>98293053
The developers refused to add any early-game difficulty or complex survival mechanics, while also stating that they would never add creepers or any feature which breaks/places blocks without the permission of the player now. Many of the new changes have been either decorative, items with a single non-decorative use, real-world animals with no uses except for completionism, or worse implementations of things added by mods, and there is an overwhelming requirement that anything added is "cute" (spiritual narrativism and womanish nonsense invading the homeland of the autists). The game was originally meant to be first-person 3d dwarf fortress with real-time action, but then wolves were added and made into pets (yes, Flowerchild from Minecraftforum was a prophet about the future trajectory of Minecraft).

The 3 most controversial changes added to Minecraft have been attack speed, hunger, and netherite requiring templates, all of which are the few cases in which the game added difficulty which was mandatory in order to follow the expected progression, rather than optional.

>>98295301
Minecraft died when potions got added

>>98293204
Ironically, GURPS would be a good game for theater kids given that it never pretends to have an assumed setting, an assumed level of realism, or even any significantly complex mechanics unless you specifically buy the books for those, and it arguably has more explicitly narrativist mechanics than D&D, such as luck existing, and character backstories being able to create elements of the world. However, it's still not considered narrativist because narrativism in the forgefag sense means a specific foucault-esque setting where what the players wish for out-of-game determines what gets created, and object permanence does not exist. If theater kids had latched onto GURPS, there would both be less theater kid retardation in D&D (and D&D would still be simulationist), and GURPS would stop being recommended as a realistic detailed game when it arguably isn't (It's closer to a crossover vsbattles game than anything else). This couldn't have happened because the theater kid audience is afraid of the scary detailed phrases in GURPS, even if GURPS can be much more simple than even 5e rules-as-written.

>>98293230
>Those who enjoy "simulationism" are those who are more into puzzles, math problems, etc.
No they're not. They're into saying narcissist shit like "its what my character would do" whenever they want to do something annoying that makes things worse for the rest of the party, or twisting themselves into pretzels to preserve a sense of "verisimilitude" (which is to say their own personal and desired narrative).

>>98295217
I play 4e, the most anti-theater kid edition. Consider this: the biggest haters of it back in the day were perpetual attention seekers and fruits like Zak S, James Raggi, RPG Pundit, etc. This is because 4th edition demands an actual understanding of how your class works, while once you get past the chart autism of the older editions, they play themselves.

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>>98292916
>Peter Thiel or Elon Musk could save TTRPGs
I was going to give a serious reply to this fucking post but I reached the end and read this. How fucking delusional, retarded and moronic you have to be to seriously, without a doubt, think that subhuman trillionaires are as poor nerdy guys? Your hatred for whatever boogeyman is consuming your mind has turned you retarded.

>>98292075
honestly, prepared casters being turned into basically spontaneous casters but better was so fucking gay

>>98295406
That's assuming that the archetypical theater kid is actually creative rather than a vapid narcissist, though.

They're hated because they're stupid, self centered, and pretentious

>>98292028
Same thing that happens to all good and precious things. If you don't gatekeep bad things/people from entering your spaces then it becomes devalued and eventually destroyed.

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>>98292916
I don't know what site you crawled out of but you really, really need to go back. /tg/ is for traditional games, not simping for trillionaire oligarchs who hate democracy and jerking off muh pure white anglo heritage like you're Varg.
Ironically, you actually take the right position re: simulationism being the cornerstone of a good system, but you argue it so poorly you discredit all of us who enjoy simulationism. In fact I suspect from your post, especially the second and third paragraphs, you are a falseflagger pretending to be pro-simulationism to make us look like lunatics. If not, then you need to get a reality check and remember anyone can enjoy simulations (and liking gamist and/or narrativist systems doesn't preclude liking simulationist ones)

>>98295953
What traditional games did you play recently?

>>98292859
You people will never figure out that the best thing to do with posts like that is to ignore them, because anything else proves them right.

>>98292944
5e brought in a ton of people who'd never touched an RPG before, thanks to Stranger Things and Critical Role bringing D&D back into the public's awareness, and they have no experience with edition changes and they're not handling it well.

>>98292859
>with literally zero push back
You are pushing back right now retard?

>>98292028
Simple, communists infiltrated and destroyed from within.
Next question

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>>98295862
>>98296406
>Not only does anon recognize that its bait and a shitpost but he decides to bite anyway because it has his personal boogeyman being mentioned
how's that MK ULTRA mind rape treating ya

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>>98296644
>communists are running a multibillion-dollar company

>>98292684
The Grease Civilizations in all of our History groomed their young boys

>>98292028
Theatre faggot retards and shitcal role morons who never even HEARD of the rulebook, let alone read it, or ever learnt to fucking play.

>>98297120
>anon got cucked by a theatrefag of all people
Lol

>>98297124
>cucked
That implies he's ever had a girlfriend. It would be more accurate to say that a theaterfag fucked some girl he was stalking while he hid in the bushes and masturbated.

>>98297124
>>98297162
>ridiculing someone for not having a girlfriend on /tg/ of all places
You are truly the eternal foreign element.

>>98297112
>purposely obfuscating infiltrated with being leaders of a group
Are you people ever honest about anything in your lives?

>>98297162
>>98297124
>theatrefaggots pretend they aren't theatrefaggots

HA HA HA..OK LOSERS.

>>98297116
>The Grease Civilizations
Fucking lmao.
Ancient Grease.

>>98297387
Somebody struck a nerve.

>>98292028
Simplifying the rules makes newer players feel better, but upsets longtime players who want increasingly complex experiences. Washing out “problematic” topics like in-lore bigotry makes minorities and queers feel safer and more welcome, but it sands off all the rough burrs that actually make the worlds feel gritty and interesting; bonus points it pisses off people who want to pretend that the blacks and gays don’t exist.
Corporate needs to make more money, but that cuts into creative agency for designers and artists. D&D is too big, and receives too much attention: it doesn’t matter who’s discussing it, everyone will find something to complain about.

>>98297404
few centuries from now that's how the future historians gonna refer to 'murrica.

>>98297467
I was thinking leather jacketed guidos hanging around the agora hotting up their chariots.

>>98297470
Congrats, you’ve just created the most interesting game setting/concept since fucking Ravenloft. Go write a splatbook cause I wanna play that shit.

>>98297470
Yeah, that could totally work as a setting.
Or a musical.

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>>98292028
Number inflation, sacred cows, massive inconsistencies in how systems work, inconsistent scaling, and trying to pander to an audience that does not actually exist by pretending to be inclusive in the way that only a corporation can.

>>98292916
D&D was never "simulationist".

>>98292070
>>98292028
5.5e killed their momentum, and generally, the quality of their books have been declining for years. It's normal for ttrpgs to die unless you are some microsystem that never got a chance to live.

>>98292028
I'll drop the / thread

between 3.5, 4, and 5th and 3rd party PF2E they covered pretty much every possible actually fun permutation of a D20 fantasy rpg.

Supplement slop can only carry you so far when homebrew is free. 5th edition is a decent rules lite flavorless rpg that has mass appeal and 3.5/pathfinder perfected DND as a meaty crunchy but good game.

When you have nowhere left to go, you can only had back down to worse games. When rules can't sell, all you can sell is fluff or politics. I don't think DND one failed because of woke, it was simply it offered nothing over 5th edition, and was obviously always going to be worse than 3.5 which was made before corporate enshittification took over. The controversies over the license change and subscription model are just the nail in the coffin.

>>98296406
Based for trying but these people are retarded (its hard to reach a tard on any issue).

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The game got big enough for rich normies to think it could be squeezed for serious profit.

From what I can tell, it stayed pretty niche while bowdlerizing and diversifying itself in its search for a mainstream audience. You can get fake geeks to buy a set of pretty dice or listen to Critical Role but when it comes down to brass tacks that doesn't mean they'll actually give up precious weekend time pretending to be a dwarf or spend hundreds on game manuals

>>98297597

WTF does this even mean? Are there really people who are going to have their character stay in bed all day because of a fibromyalgia flareup or something?

>>98298691
You sometimes see the crippled hacker archetype show up in cyberpunk games but generally, no. "Disabled player who needs their character to have their same disability because they're pathologically incapable of not making a 1:1 self-insert" is a made up bullshit demographic even by the standards of the mythical target audiences that these companies think is going to buy their products.

>>98298691

It's a slam on the rise of "theater kid disabled" or "liberal disabled" in gaming.

It's a fanatic luxury belief that "disability acceptance" means screaming at the top of your lungs that the disabled are actually fully capable and are in no way dis-abled, as evidenced by the insipid slogan "the only disability is intolerance."

The result is a bunch of people who *insist* on having "disabled representation" in their games but throw a gasket whenever it's pointed out that the dis-abled are unable to do things that the able-bodied can and insist that the DM refusing to re-write the game on the fly so that the theoretical disability never actually matters in any meaningful way, thus actually erasing the lived experience of the actual disabled.

In fact, most actually disabled people *don't* want to play as characters with our own disabilities (for the most part) and *really* don't want to see someone play a character "representing us" that has a magically charmed life free of the actual difficulties we face constantly.

>>98292646
>gets the show canceled
Proving our point

>>98296406
>projecting

>>98298821
Pretty much, I played with people who missing limbs or in a wheelchair. They never want to play a cripple character. Same with the I don't see black characters, I knew black people who played as black or even white guys since it made no sense to play a black guy in fantasy Europe unless you had a good reason. (I mean not ever character we make has to be us with elf ears, or shorter with a beard.)

>>98292240
I think the bigger problem is with creative direction rather than the mechanics themselves. 5e on release was a tight and functional game. Bounded accuracy, action economy, et cetera, all resulted in a good experience, with low-level enemies able to threaten mid-level characters in sufficient numbers or with support. The main sin was over-use of Advantage.

Then everything that got added was fiddly over-complicated, and conceptually cringe.

Also, the "new" fanbase's initial role-model for the game was cringe le-epic-pupper reddit faffing performed by professional voice actors. It's like dealing with a bunch of people who's only concept of sex came from watching niche fetish porn before they ever touched a dick/boob.

There have always been people who primarily use the game as a vehicle for their deviantart fanfiction Original Character (who is queer and also two-soul), but WotC decided their money was more worth chasing than the poor fucking DMs who have to run games for this crowd.

Also, back to creative direction, there is none. Everything in 5e has been a (secondhand, since all the new players don't remember the old stuff) nostalgia-grab. The closest thing they did to making a new setting was low-effort MtG crossovers, which you'll note have zero published adventures, because they're not really meant to be played, they're meant to be bought by triangulated fans (Yes, the Ravnica book was less bad than all the rest. That's because it was one guy's existing ravnica homebrew that got polished up)

>>98292028
The sale to WotC.

>>98298850
Dude ended it on his own terms before the oy veyers could figure out a way to steal it like Reddit & Memey, and while it was still funny, unlike Reddit & Memey.

>>98292678
I remember /k/ was mad when they heard about that because a perfectly good chance to kill two pinkertons and get away with it was wasted on a fatbody nogunz.

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>>98298944
Now, to be fair, you can totally play a black guy in peudo-medieval europe and have it make sense. If anything, you get to be the cultured foreigner from a place where people fucking bathe more than once a year. There's no fucking racial grievance baggage, because it takes place "before" colonialism and the trans-atlantic slave trade. You can be downright-fucking Wakandan if you want.

What's dumb is to be a random peasant in fantasy-scottland who's black and also gets pissy about his Blackness and history of racial oppression that hasn't happened ("yet").

Really, medieval europe is a shit inspiration for what most games are trying to do, the mediterranean is much better.

>>98298801
You sure see a lot of people who lack the ability to separate themselves from their characters, or authors from those authors' characters. People will literally risk publishing deals because they e.g., have an antagonist in their book say that Musk is a good business man. That is, the guy whose role is to be wrong saying something that the author thinks is wrong gets threatened and has to make a public apology as a result of including someone in their story who can have this opinion. It's the same reason to see all these evil characters who would steal, rape, and murder, and all kind of other vile shit, but would never, ever do a heckin' racism. The people for whom this is important are not some irrelevant minority; they're the most influential demographic in contemporary media. They're the kingmakers who get to decide if you have a job or not. Maybe they're a minority, but organized minorities always beat disorganized majorities, so that doesn't matter.

Which is why all these books are full of combat wheelchair retards and ancient black european vampires and mexican orcs and whatever; things that simply don't make sense for their setting or aesthetic or popular opinion, but get included because this organized minority is the one in charge.
Although, I'm not sure how minor this minority is, because a lot of *women* are legit like this and they are all over these hobbies now. I think this is probably a double-digit minority at least. Shit, you go to reddit and it's probably a majority.

>>98299026
Dude was allowed to look like he ended it

>>98299182
Dudes plural.

They're both actual creative people who are accustomed to doing their own little independent passion projects that they're passionate about, I can believe that they decided the show was just too much effort/work to make it good, set too high of a standard for itself, and they'd rather not make it at all than compromise on quality.

I've heard zero snarling from Leftists IRL about the show, I don't think anyone had an axe to grind over it.

>>98299249
I'm sorry but you will not change my mind on this. The fact the moment they decide to do a joke about them, who controls hollywood, they 'decided to stop is ridiculous especially given the Tim and Eric kikes meddling in similar issues prior

>>98299258
The joke was about blacks.

>>98299949
Lol

>>98292944
As has been stated, it's mostly 4chan contrarians or fans of previous editions who are just engaging in typical edition wars.

While I do agree with you that 2024 is a big step up in most ways, it's still not perfect (no system is of course) and benefits from using some of the 2014 variant rules like Spell Points.

I think 5e/5.5e's strength is that it's easy to change without the entire system crumpling because you changed something with 30 moving parts (for example, homebrewing PF2e is a nightmare because of how interconnected all of the mechanics are). Being able to add new features to the classes or otherwise adjust the system's options without much effort is a high point of 5e.

For example, >>98293127 makes a good point about fighters, especially in 5.5 where they're exceptionally boring. One of my fixes was to make Maneuvers core, add a new feature called Strikes (a bunch of abilities adapted from 4e powers), and Talents (think warlock invocations but for martials) along with a few new abilities and options.

I still think 5e/5.5 has some good ideas. I much prefer subclasses as a concept to 3.5's method of "make a new class that's an existing class with one or two new features". Subclasses package abilities and allow for more interesting progression when done properly, and can drastically alter how a class is played in some cases which I think is a good way to do things.

>>98292028
Listen if KFC goes around saying they have the world's best fried chicken no one fucking cares or believes them, because they don't even have the best chicken to come out of Kentucky.
But it doesn't change that they've manged to become the most widespread and well known, the most popular, fried chicken place in the world. Hell they gave up competing in the US and moved on to dominate the global market instead, yet are still the most well known in the US. They're not great, they're not the best, they're just the most popular.

That's all D&D is. You should play something else. However we all know that even if you do there's a good chance you'll find yourself playing it now and then because it's what other people around you decide they want. So who fucking cares. Someone has to be the popular one. If it wasn't them you'd be bitching about whoever filled the game.

>>98297597
>Number inflation
Fucking what? 5e has lower numbers than 3.X did. Stats are hard capped at 20 (23 in 2024), modifiers are lower across the board, damage dice stop at 2d6.
>Sacred Cows
On this I agree. Alignment, for example, needs to die a quick and violent death. The D20 also needs to be replaced with the superior 2d10 if they want to keep the idea of a natural 20 for crits or better yet something nice and consistent like 3d6. The idea that casters should be able to warp reality while martials just hit things more better was solved in 4e, and I have no clue why they regressed with 5e/2024.
>massive inconsistencies in how systems work
I'm going to need you to clarify what you mean by this.
>inconsistent scaling
If you're referring to CR and NPCs, 2024 fixed this issue. If you mean how classes progress, I agree. A standardized progression system would be far better.
>trying to pander to an audience that does not actually exist by pretending to be inclusive in the way that only a corporation can.
I mean that's just a problem with society in general, but I don't really see anything in the 2014 or 2024 books that would suggest this is a priority.

>>98301822
Popeyes is way better known, but sadly it's gone down the gutter since covid. Their chicken tenders are anemic now, they were way better back pre-2020. Still has good flavor though, their spicy chicken is god tier.

Anyway you're only right about the fact "the world's greatest roleplaying game" is all marketing language. Anyone with two brain cells could figure that out.

As for "you should play something else", that's hilariously pretentious. People should play whatever they want and enjoy, and if that's D&D then so be it. Play what you want at your table, and if you aren't willing to run what you want then sorry, you don't get to complain.

>The World's Greatest Roleplaying Game
That's not G.U.R.P.S.

>>98301872
GURPS is a toolkit to make a game system, not a functional game system on its own.

>>98292075
5e ruined casters. Fucking everything requires concentration. You can't just spam buffs like in 3.5 and PF1e. Fuck that shit.

>>98302378
More of the classes and sub classes weren't balanced and play tested enough. Not just the "casters"

>>98301829
I was going for the opposite of pretentious with that metaphor, in the sense that it's not about judgement, it's just as mundane and pointless as fast food preference. "You should go eat literally anywhere else, you should eat anything besides fast food, but yeah sometimes you'll be eating it anyway, and sometimes it will be KFC regardless of what you should be doing."

They are just the most popular roleplaying game. For that reason if you play a lot of games you'll often be right back there even if you try to avoid it. It's the neutral background option.

>>98299258
>>98299949
The joke is a recurring Jack Hadel joke where the first thing you think of is a slightly uncomfortable inkblot test for the viewer.

The Mr Frog "Working with all those filthy $$^$^$%%##*((%&$&%$*&%($(#*%&%&$" line was the same thing, but the context is more jew-suggestive than You Know Who I'm Talking About.

These guys are from an era of the internet where the racism really was ironic.

>>98303131
>These guys are from an era of the internet where the racism really was ironic
That doesn't mean they need to ignore reality forever and are incapable of being racist. I'm not even against racism, it's the logical conclusion if you are not hypersocialized to ignore all the data

>>98292028
Our society keeps teaching people not to give up on lost causes.

>>98292028
everything

>>98292028
Capitalism.
They create a rulebook and want the players to pay for it everytime the players use it. Products as a service is more profitable than selling a hardcopy product.

>>98292240
>in pursuit of an unironic wider audience
>>98292678
Chasing mass markets over core demo

Thats a problem for companies. Niche market will be saturated at one point. Means you have to make a new product or new business model, thats expensive and not profitable for investments in your production pipeline.
Since your company has to grow, you need to target the mass market.

>>98298691
>3 years - Microsoft XBox commercial team
Please tell me that was on the early Xbone fiasco, that would make so much sense

>>98292916
10 out of 10 bait. This is incredible. It belongs in a fucking museum. I regret ever doubting this board.

>>98295301
There is a reason I play Vintage Tale now, it's everything Minecraft should have been. Minecraft is still fun in online servers where one can chill with the lads (and watch some sweatlord kill the dragon in under a week) but as a single player game its boring and completely devoid of challenges. Hostile mobs are simply not a threat unless I choose to let them be as my small wall and gates keep them out and none of them can operate doors, let alone gates. The biggest challenge is gathering resources for my build, which is really just a grind.
Meanwhile Vintage Tale has wild animals, survival mechanics, hunting, stone knapping, detailed mining and smithing mechanics, trees that actually fall when cut, etc. Its actually fun and challenging.

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>>98311523
>Product gets NGO and government kickbacks for promoting DEI and gay shit
>A small but fanatic and dangerous fanbase supports this creating the illusion of a bigger consumer base that doesn't exist
>Blames capitalism when the product turns to shit

>>98292678
>>98311535
WotC discovered, thanks to Pathfinder, that D&D doesn't HAVE a core audience. Not a single D&D player exists that isn't willing to jump ship if the product changes. So they had to find a new audience that didn't already ditch them.
Why do you think 5e is still going strong at 12 years old with no sign of 6e? Because they are fully aware that the moment they change the game, someone will make a clone and steal 90% of the playerbase.
It's fallacious to think about different editions of D&D as being the same game. People may get into the hobby because they want to play "D&D," but they're not loyal to the brand. They're loyal to the game they already know how to play.
The only way to appeal to the "core audience" is to change nothing.

>>98312308
For a lot of people, Minecraft is just digital LEGO. I don't feel a need to fight the cashier every time I buy new bricks.

>>98313133
I mean... they COULD be releasing material for previous editions, preferrably with no trace of the whole 5e mindset, but I guess actually appealing to different customers, rather than saying that's what they're doing, is a bit too logical.

>>98312939
>government isn't capitalism

>>98312939
>pandering to investors isn't capitalism

>>98314835
Well it is not, they had to regulate that into existence.
Dodge versus Ford was the case if I recall correctly.
Instead of making the company better, Ford had to pander to investors (Dodge)

>>98292086
Correct Castles and Crusades is not the world's greatest role-playing game.

>>98314901
It's a feature of capitalism that the government can be bought and sold.
Remember: No capitalist society has ever existed without a government to leech off of.

>>98292916
>Thimulationithm

>>98292939
>Even randomized durations (which ironically reduce the amount of dice you need to roll, since you only need to roll dice when the effect starts, rather than rolling a recharge d6 or saving throw each turn) are not allowed, and the reason for this is clearly due to enmity of uncertain outcomes that add detail.
No, they exist so you don't have to track durations, you can just roll a d6 recharge or a save or whatever each time a character's turn comes up.

>>98303176
Well, so is misandry, but I suspect you aren't one of those.

>>98292028
There are no actual rules for anything except combat, and also, the combat is bad. Sluggish yet tactically flat.

This is downstream of the core issue, which is 5e is a game designed to offend no one. Read the original DMG, and take note of how many times the authors avoid giving actionable advice to a new GM out of fear of pissing off an old grognard. Shit like this:
>You decide when a random encounter happens, or you roll. Consider checking for a random encounter once every hour, once every 4 to 8 hours, or once during the day and once during a long rest-whatever makes the most sense based on how active the area is.

Wow, thanks. I could have my random encounters happen every 1h, every 4h, every 5h, every 6h, every 7h, every 8h, every day, every long rest, or really just whenever the fuck I feel like. Okay, but if I'm a new GM, and D&D is my first TTRPG, what do I *actually* do?

Nowadays, the concern isn't pissing off old grognards, but instead the swath of players who use D&D in like twenty different mutually contradictory ways, many of which actively work against the game's core design (for example: people who only do ~1 combat encounter per day). Everything gets boiled down to a combat system which isn't so complicated it turns off the theater kids, but isn't so simple as to actually be smooth.

>>98292028
According to my last GM it was allowing you to identify an item during a short rest instead of it requiring a spell. That was a change they made in 2008 and he had simply missed it for 15 years. Then again, that is kind of the state of a lot of GMs. They barely know the game and start running campaigns. Better than the alternative, I guess. There's already a huge shortage of GMs anyway.

>>98292885
We used to have multiple threads his post cap about this very problem. The real issue is that while some people acknowledge it's a problem, few if any want to actually kill the sacred cows. 4e tried by taking away all the gamebreaking shit that let casters break the system's back, fuck it up the ass, and make it humble, while giving martials different options than just a basic attack or one maneuver they had to fully devote their build to in order to actually be able to reliably pull it off (granted some of them were just attacks with more damage than a basic attack, but so're a bunch of spells). But the majority hated it. They hated it so much they sent Poppa Paizo's fat kid to space camp six times with the profits they raked in off of Pathfinder, which sold itself purely on the notion that it kept REAL D&D for REAL GAMERS alive while Hasbutt was putting out MMORPGan Weeaboo with 4e.

>>98315674
4e was wrongly slandered as the "video game" -ified mmo wannabe system when it dropped because of the changes they attempted to make to martials. I never had enough firsthand experience with that myself to have an educated opinion, but I genuinely wonder how much of that was just marketing that backfired through the introduction of the cards they issued with sets for people to keep track of their daily, once encounterly, and per round abilities that made it seem more akin to a traditional board game in a very visible sense

they seemed to push it pretty aggressively, and it really seemed to put people off at the time

>>98315780
I remember reading a few articles by pearl clutching faggots who used big red scare letters saying shit like "every class plays the same" to trash that aspect of the game.

>>98292028
I think one mark against the system was subclasses starting at level 3. I think the only time I've played a game of 5e that started at level 1 was the Lost Mine of Phandelver starter module. Some subclasses change the identity of a class so much that it doesn't make sense to not start out as that like Warlocks and Clerics.

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>>98312939
Companies dont have to surrender to niche groups. The CEOs decide for themslef that they need to cater to extremists.
Besides you just exclude shitification and raising the prices while lower the quality.
It seems you visited /pol/ too much and became a Gamergater.

>>98312939
>Company has financial incentives and follows them
>Company profits by selling a product to the public, so when their customers are loud and contact them directly re: the product, they listen, because bad public image kills sales.
>Somehow this isn’t capitalism
Literal retard.

>>98317871
NTA, but no thats not what happens.
Customer opinion is quite irrelevant. Corporations only respond to the commands of investors (in this case nonprofits, vanguard/blackrock/etc, and corrupt gov institutes who want to shape culture through media) there is no popular demand for this stuff, its not done for customers, therefor it is not because of capitalism. Its just a less obvious version of a censor office in an authoritarian nation.

You know what happens when you say "fuck off, the customers dont want this, you can sell stocks if you want"? They tank your stock and sue you for not fulfilling your financial duties.

Basically any corporation that is openly traded can be forced to do what these investors want regardless of what customers actually want.

>>98292028
Fags, corporate greed and incompetence.

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>>98317935
>Investors who lose money if the company loses money are going to force the company to stop earning money because they, a bunch of rich old whites and jews, want poor gays and minorities to have better self esteem
>No they don’t do it because they want to collect money from those people, it’s all a conspiracy and people who spent their entire lives amassing wealth aren’t actually motivated by money

>>98292028
Wizards of the Coast
There are good ideas spackled into the game, but it's predominantly corporate bullshit and it shows
There's a lot of material but not a lot of substance and everything looks like it was pulled off of a theme park catalogue
Also casters have access to a variety of resources that non-casters have no equivalent to
For fuck's sake, why is Bladesinger a Wizard subclass? Just make everyone run on the caster framework, you cowards
You already stripped monster statblocks down to raw function, just pull the trigger already

>>98317977
These are not investors as in people looking for ROI these are "investors" who get paid massive amounts to shape culture. A lot of non-profits and gov agencies (worldwide) participate in this, not just investment agencies. Its not JUST jews. Its like when media censors themselves when releasing in china because china has a censor office.

You know how the american military pays hundreds of millions to game companies to maintain military propaganda? That is also an investment. Is it for money? Obviously not.

>>98297776
5.5e's core problem is that it had a design philosophy of "we need to change it because we're about to do the GSL again", so they just randomly shuffled class features around to try to make it distinct ENOUGH you had to buy the new books. Then they abandoned the "OGL" 1.1 but the books already had random changes to everything for no reason other than to be changes.

>>98292028
Nothing I wasn't able to fix.

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>>98292028
DnD went mainstream and became popular among normies
As a result people wanted a boxed adventure over using their fucking brains to make one themselves. Because of this, the game was dumbed down, "streamlined" and made more "approchable" IE taking out all the things that original fans wanted and enjoyed in the name of appealing to the lowest common denominator.
It happened in DnD, it happened in commics, it happened in Sifi like star wars and star trek, it happened in war games, in computer games, in RPGs, in anything that goes mainstream. Pic realted, there are people who reee and say this is not true but its always been true and the rage against it is people upset they are being forced to look into a mirror.