Hasbro wants to sell more hamburgers, and their model has been to have hamburgers that can be prepared quickly with little preparation. So they will double down on that. “Can we make these hamburgers even easier to buy and eat?” “How can we ensure all Hamburgers are as similar as possible so that regardless of where a customer (player) goes, they’ll get the same taste experience?” And finally, “The live streaming phenomenon of people eating our hamburgers has really helped sales, so what do we need to modify so we can get more free advertising about our hamburgers.” Meanwhile I’ll be in my backyard grilling steak and providing other treats for all palettes and food preferences using locally and/or organically bought ingredients. Because I want a good meal that I can share with friends, not a quick, ready in 3 minutes hamburger experience.
I'm not super sure what the burgers in your analogy represent to be honest? I feel like anyone who GMs anything pretty much needs to spend some serious time behind the grill, taking a mix of ingredients and preparing it to suit the tastes of their table? Even one of the glossy hardbound adventures like Waterdeep Dragon Heist takes slaving away for hours to get it ready to bring to table. We all put in the hours. I can't even imagine what the roleplaying equivalent of a burger would even be? Impulse buy it, take it home and play it straight out of the greasy wrapper. (More I talk about it--it does sound kind of fun though...) So here's the truth. Once upon a time D&D tried to make a ton of different campaign settings and splatbooks to be everything to everyone and it always hurt them. They'd end up putting a huge amount of money into a glossy hardcover book that only a splinter of their audience actually wanted to buy. Everyone wanted them to put out products that way--wanted support for Dark Sun or Eberron or whatever, but it was causing their business to tank. It nearly put them out of business back in the AD&D days. That's why 5e has had to do a hard, unpopular thing: keep the game to three core books set in their most colorful and popular setting. Put out a couple of big lavish adventures a year but stick to having them all take place in one hyperfocused part of the world. Put out a few other books but either have them be adaptions of previous modules in a "system neutral" format, or mini monster manuals with new PC races and stuffed with lots of Forgotten Realms centered lore, or junkdrawer splatbooks full of rules that all have to be entirely optional, or else one off setting books that they release and then never support with any followup books. And that's what's made them really good at making money--leveraging their juggernaut business presence to maximum benefit by drilling down on a single common product. But like none of this is cheap prepackaged garbage akin to a trashy fast food burger. It's all very high production value and cared about intensely by everyone who puts work into it. But also it needs to go out to a unified fan base, which means it can't drill down into any particular thing as much as we might want lest it spin out again the way it has the last few editions. But that exact thing is what's allowed the larger TTRPG market to flourish. As smaller companies they get to focus on one particular thing--a single setting with a single system and make a bunch of content for it. Lots of companies all doing that is why we have the lush ecosystem of neat games we have today. Which ends up being a cool thing for everyone.
@@robertblank5206 D&D and D&D-alikes are TTRPG fast food in various formats with comforting brand familiarity. That's cool, and if people like it, they are welcome to it, and godspeed to them and happy gaming! I don't like TTRPG fast food and the comfort branding doesn't mean anything to me. That's all opinion and taste. But to think that the McDonald's of TTRPG publishing that is owned by the General Foods of the Toys, Games and Sundry Industry isn't going to make decisions based solely on selling more units is patently naive.
Hey man, great video. You made some really good points. To your last point, I think the dice became a crutch very early on when being GM/DM wasn't something you could find role models for. As such, many people latched on to using dice and totally negated the story telling side. Instead of hearing what the player was trying to do in the context of the situation and using logic/creativity to resolve it, everything became a check/save dice roll. I think that DnD will likely take advantage of what many other games have done with the yes, yes and, yes but, etc. I think it's a great mechanic for those times when dice must be used or when playing alone. Solo play is another market that DnD has been slow to grab. Many of us can't find a group for a variety of reasons. Solo play is amazing.
A 4th force that's also pulling on the industry is technology. Web apps, databases and tools, and virtual table tops have become a common place. I would say there are now more people playing across VOIP than there are across the room and that's not likely to change, even with the covid 19 vaccine being distributed. The nature of these applications and their partnership with publishers and developers has a strong impact on what games become accessible and convenient. The analog experience of going over to a friend apartment with your dice, character sheet, and a 2 liter of Mt Dew is never going to go away, but for many new players, their first experience will be connecting to a server on discord, typing in !roll d20+modifier, and alt+tabbing between applications of their choice while the results of their roll come to light.
It is very early days in that respect. Roll20 was built out to run 4th edition and still carries with it an interface and priorities similar. Fantasy Grounds is a hot mess of pop-out windows and bizarre radial menu choices. (They each have some strengths). There’s some new thing called ROLE which seems to want the more progressive indie game crowd. There’s foundry. And astral. At the moment each of them is hard to use or ill-suited to some RPGs, and it leads to a lot of silo effects in the community. For years this was exemplified by the roll20 forums as the primary way to recruit people to play a game, with the culture of “applying” for a game which I felt was awkwardly formal and impossible to get a sense of people within. One thing I will say is that blockchain has a role to play here in allowing publishers to vend their content independent of the myriad of platforms. D&D beyond only works in some places, Disney probably won’t let FFG sell anything official for Star Wars RPG, etc. I’m not much of a fan of cryptocurrency but I’ve got to admit it would be the key to solving this issue which is holding back online play
@@The_CGA the best option I have found, and what I would hope would become an industry standard, is a game on steam called table top simulator. It doesn't require a subscription, but it does require all players to own the game. However, once you have it installed, you can create a virtual table top in 3d for various board games and pencil and paper games. It even has mod support through the steam workshop and allows you to import custom assets.
It's an experiment, there's so many fissures in my audience (older gen z, millenials, Gen X, Older Gen X) it's hard to tell what will work and what won't. 'Jokes that aren't funny' (laughtrack!) but are part of the idiom of sitcom storytelling is something that I feel really at ease with. without putting it in the video and testing it, It's hard to tell if anybody remembers those times or felt it was a worthy part of the idiom...
Could 6e drop the d20? Surely the most sacred cow - but a very very swingy one. Especially when wed to the small range of bonuses from bounded accuracy.
No sacred cows can be on the chopping block-lessons have been learned in that respect. The “swingy” critique has already largely been neutralized by advantage and inspiration as a ready source of inspiration. “Damage on a miss” was trialed for fighters in the playtest of 5E and panned. If one is looking to a change in the d20’s role, look to the design space around advantage, disadvantage, and inspiration.
@@The_CGA Very good point. I guess "passive" (can't be worse than a 10) and Expertise can also help if boosted from the current base in the design space. Also - more GM training: Don't call for a roll unless it is feasible and intereresting that the character could fail. A character of your Int/Wis/Training would automatically know ... / Can aoutomatically climb ... etc.
2:45 The irony of this statement shouldn't be lost on anybody. The latest generation of players indeed thinks the Vancian Magic subsystem is "a problem for balancing a (COOPERATIVE) game" and would like to do away with it. Those who have been around in 2008 can't help but experiencing a *Déjà Vu*. We have been there, 4th Edition was precisely aimed at "game balancing" and getting rid of "old tropes". 7:30 The only "barrier" to DM'ing and playing D&D is being able to read 4th Edition plays fine without any IT equipment, 5th edition has a much more pervasive IT integration. *The 4e Player's Handbook cost US $ 34.95, the 5e Player's Handbook costs US $ 49.95*
1) there is a considerably higher page count in the 5E PHB and considerably more art made to very specific specifications adding to cost. 2) they were made 8 years apart and the MSRPs reflect that. Inflation is a thing 4th edition was built from the bones up to support the D&D insider product and generally designed in direct reply to the massive divestment from the game toward world of Warcraft. Here’s an excerpt from DMDavid’s well researched history: ““Along the way, we also came up with the idea of Dungeons & Dragons Insider,” Bill Slavicsek wrote. “This exciting suite of digital tools for players and Dungeon Masters was just too powerful a concept to try to shoehorn the existing d20 Game System around it. Instead we knew we had to rebuild the game to take full advantage of this amazing new initiative.” The game didn’t just need to be easy to DM. It needed to be easy to run online. Ideally, it would help DMs enough to make running a bad game nearly impossible. Players could drop into the virtual tabletop at any hour, join any available DM, and feel confident that a stranger could deliver a fun experience. A thriving virtual table would let players join a game 24/7, just like Warcraft. And all those player would pay monthly, just like Warcraft.” dmdavid.com/tag/why-fourth-edition-seemed-like-the-savior-dungeons-dragons-needed/ The *perception* of barriers is the matter at hand. Not whether any actually exist-it’s the psychology of the casual would-be customer, who is in a low-information state, that all of your eagerness to correct me is not a tonic for. Neither 4E nor 5E require any “IT integration.” The claim 4E was built to work within a proprietary client, which was never finished due to 4E bombing with fans in conjunction with a tragic circumstances around the lead Developer of the app that I won’t repeat here. www.quora.com/How-did-Joseph-Batten-ruin-Dungeons-and-Dragons-4E Take care! Have a nice day!
Since the release of D&D5e, Hasbro have taken a slow, very measured approach to official D&D releases. Part of this is due to the prices of D&D materials. D&D materials are expensive and they don’t want to flood their market with products that will be competing against each other for a player’s hard earned money. TSR learned that the hard way with too many official campaign worlds, each with their own separate product lines. More importantly, they have taken care (until recently) to not violate the “sanctity” of the core rulebooks by not publishing splatbooks that introduce new official rule systems that alter, circumvent, or replace existing systems in the core books. There’s a reason for this: Not only do they want to keep the core books “clean” for future sales, D&D has a larger and, more or less, unified (and, thus, more profitable) audience again. Tampering with such a perfect equilibrium would be a fool’s errand. But knowing that never stopped anyone from trying. Fifth edition brought back a large portion of the D&D grognards who played in the 1970s & 80s - the same ones who dumped 4th edition and created the OSR movement and the Edition Wars. The reason they left was because 4th edition was a paper version of “World of Warcraft” that felt nothing like previous versions of D&D. Fifth edition won them back by restoring most of the mechanical elements that, at lower levels of play, made the game feel similar to older editions of D&D. In short, what Hasbro did with 4th edition was assume that the D&D brand name was enough to keep its audience despite having an entirely new game under the hood. They were wrong and then fixed their mistake with 5e. (Brand-management thinking is so f*¢#¡ng stupid.) What we saw back then -fundamental changes to the game that affect its identity as D&D- are what we are smelling in the wind now. In 4th edition, they changed the game rules so as to make the tabletop D&D game seamless with a potential MMO version of the game. Now, due to sociopolitical complaints of bioessentialism in D&D’s race system, complaints of moral (and thus cultural) absolutism in the alignment system, and complaints of cultural imperialism in a game that has most of its roots in European history and folklore, we are beginning to see changes that address those complaints - the most obvious being the recent soft introduction of the lineage system that will likely supplant the race system in 6e. I suspect that to address the “problem” of evil races, the alignment system will be scrapped also in 6e altogether. The problem with such changes, though, is that they are fundamental and foundational. They will, like 4e’s changes did, change the way the game plays and feels. And that’s a mistake. We already know the D&D brand name alone is not enough to keep the audience unified. Like last time, fundamental changes to the game will create a new schism -a new Edition Wars- and, unlike last time, there will be a fully formed OSR community waiting and a large group of departing grognards who’ll say “We won’t be fooled again” and won’t look to future editions of D&D for the play experiences they want. Tread as carefully as you have been, Hasbro. You’re on thin ice.
I discussed a few of these things in the video Truth told, alignment has no mechanical effect on gameplay in 5E. It’s there in name only, like the difference between one Polearm that does 1d8 damage and another polearm that does 1d8 damage. The spells and planar traits and other things in the game that consulted with alignment have been gone since 3.x.
That’s not entirely true. It’s more accurate to say that alignment doesn’t affect *combat.* It does, however, affect how some spells, magic items, traps, etc work. It’s certainly to a much lesser degree than AD&D 1e/2e. But it’s still there. But that’s neither here nor there. Alignment is fundamental to D&D’s Campbellian / Moorcockian worldview: Good and evil are real natural forces endemic in the fabric of everything. While some other older games have used a similar mechanic in the past, you don’t see the concept much in modern RPGs. But if you mention the concept of alignment in RPGs, you immediately bring to mind D&D. Alignment is a core piece of D&D’s identity.
This is mostly spot on and very well written. I feel like Dungeons & Dragons has the strategic challenge of trying to balance all of the different factions that they've gotten on board with 5e: OSR types who have been away from the game since 3e (which was plenty controversial at the time), folks who defected to Pathfinder because of the changeover to 4e (which I'll hold is still not as bad as it's maligned to be--mostly the idea of powers was awful and it made a mess of the classes), as well as the tons of people who have come to the hobby this edition because of its splashy and easy to jump into new core books, but who have much different ideas of what fantasy and roleplaying should even be. Keeping them all happy will indeed be touchy. As in all things the answer is probably a glacially slow incremental push toward change with a lot of performative handwaving. Progressive folks will be angry that it's too slow, but hopefully not so angry they don't stick around. Those who care about preserving the game's foundations meanwhile will hopefully have enough time immersed in these new perspectives and for the developers to organically and deftly weave them into the fiction of the world.
If you wouldn’t mind, which spells did you have in mind? Because, this isn’t one of them roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Protection%20from%20Evil%20and%20Good . The mechanical effects of Alignment peaked in 3.x. I’ve played a lot of AD&D retro clones and honestly the touch of alignment was as light as a feather most of the time, only becoming relevant in circumstances like where “Detect Evil” was a worthy use of a spell slot.
As to point 3, the facts just don’t support it. I have been wondering for more than a decade when the first Magic Block to take place on a D&D plane would see print. It still hasn’t, even to the opposite effect, of trying to cram lowly D&D characters onto planeswalker playgrounds like Ravnica or Theros. MtG is spinning off into something like Hearthstone as it goes into mobile territory, many people wonder if paper magic cards will ever become important again. Meanwhile D&D remains an interpersonal game and carries with it a non-intersecting audience. I’m sure their market research bears this out, (avid, cash-bringing) Magic players and (cash-paying) D&D players are never the same kind of people. Pushing the two brands together is just not an intent I see Pt 1 was relevant about 10 years ago, when 5E was being put together. Since then, the OSR has gone its separate way, the audiences have diverged to the point there’s no perception of “versus.” OSR games are about as big a deal as they were in 2015, which is to say “kinda” but now where near the millions of units that D&D moves. Note I feel this is to the benefit of both as its good and healthy for there to be more than one way to play D&D. “The web” is a pretty indistinct concept. Since 5e came along the Website for D&D has, if anything become smaller and less relevant. 4E was the edition they tried to make fit into a MMORPG box. Do you mean streamed games and Critical Role?
@@The_CGA UM the CEO of Hasbro announced last year he wanst magic and D&D to be the same thing! Just this week they announced the FORGOTTEN REALMS CORE SET for magic. This will be the new T Legal core set going foward and all future Magic sets will be somehow linked to this Forgotten realms set.
@@The_CGA The OSR movement means that going forward WOTC does not have to apses Old fart players like myself. They can truly make 6th the WOTC D20 Holywood Midevial Magic the gathering game and still make bank off the huge post CR fan base and not worry that they have lost the Nostoliga fans. Since goodman games is doing ll the old modules anyway.
@@The_CGA The web is the future or so they think, they want to keep milking that CR cash cow and the whole RU-vid RPG phenomenon for as longs they can. More and more of D&D will be shunted over as it is now Wizards and Digital. meanwhile, CR will make their own RPG at some point to totaly 100% capitalize off their fan base (They are working on one now). I would not be surprised if 6th edition is at least 30% based on D&D beyond and digital playground/product.
Oh, yes Seems to be a bid to consolidate the creation of art assets between the two games, which is frankly a good thing as Magic’s art direction is top notch wheee D&D has had huge ups and downs and a different art style preventing the use of the buckets of mtG art they pay for all the time I maintain that very basic market research would reveal the player bases of the games do not intersect (I tried for years to invite Magic players at tournaments to play D&D). What you’re seeing is very early days, attempting to show to Magic players some concepts from D&D. I very much doubt The D&D player base could be convinced to spend money in any meaningful amount on MtG
Big fan of the new look and content. Really interesting video. Overwhelmingly I agree with most of your points. Still digesting. I may drop by in a bit once I've had a chance to mull your video over.
I think, for better or for worse, the next edition with have some acknowledgement of streaming and streamed games built into its structure. I am *very* skeptical that whatever is done in that direction will have utility, even for people streaming games, but I think it will happen.
Do you mean something like “audience boost?” Or NPCs played by people in the chat? Honestly I’m not sure the people making the next edition will be young/in touch enough with why people watch streams to even attempt it but we shall see (I have no idea... 🤷♂️) Wizards has treated their Pro Magic players really poorly and now the streamers have gotten short shrift as well, so...Uhhhh they may try it but I expect something like Gleemax and D&DSubsciption, vaporware coming soon 🔜 ™️
@@The_CGA I was thinking more in terms of "optimizing" the rules for those who are streaming. This conversation seems to have died down, but for a while the conventional wisdom was "the future is super rules-light because that's better for streaming."
Ohh yeah the people in those conversations are people that don’t frequent the DnDMemes subreddit and are ignorant of how much the casual user base absolutely LIVES inside of “gameplay loops” and what Perkins calls “character stories.” Mechanics are a bed upon which people can talk about the game and “play without playing.” Thats a more powerful source of advertising than streaming (it happens anyway in streams because the gameplay loops 🔁 are good there too, compounding it) This is actually one of the reasons I think Traveller fails to capture and retain players, there’s so little to be said about the game away from the table from the player’s perspective. No jargon to form the conversations comparing notes between groups. I have Only observed FFG Star Wars succeeding in that same way that D&D does. Star Trek may get there but the weak attention to mechanics in the splat books hurt it on that path.
I would love a more in-depth video on illusionism in RPGs. I've been thinking about this a lot recently. At the heart of it is really a philosophical issue: Do you as a person think there is virtue in decieving someone for their supposed sake? Or do you confront them with the truth and let them deal with it. When talking about fudging dice, generally it's the GM that wants to do it. In his mind he is doing it for the players, yet If asked most players dislike it. The mentality is that they know best what's fun for everybody, so much so that the ends justify the means. I do wonder how a fudging GM would react if a player used that same rationale when cheating? "The combat was over, anyway, I just wanted to speed it up." "Well, I just had an important story beat and I wanted to emphasize my character's growth in ability because of that." Kind of tough to argue against that when you are doing the exact same thing.
I am hoping to begin work on a video about illusionism today There are a lot of other defenses of fudging that don’t involve illusionism directly, like unanticipated interactions of mechanics (learning about how rule A multiplies the deadliness of rule B), so the video may not focus too much on fudging (I have a video about that already which you may find interesting). At the moment my critique of illusionism is with its ascendancy, and it’s assumed universality. It’s getting to a point where neurodiverse GMs are facing a caustic atmosphere and having a glass ceiling laid over them. Because illusionism above all revolves around empathetic thinking an emotional intelligence. It’s about “reading the room” as the penultimate GM skill which not everyone is built to do. In shorted language, I think people on the autism spectrum, and people with ADHD who think too fast to always consider everyone’s feelings (me 👀) can also be “great GMs.” Illusionism might be ok for some people. It’s a useful tool for understanding why boring history lectures about the world’s mythic past or “you can’t open this door” railroading can cause feelbads and prevent games from succeeding. But the problems have arisen as now almost every new player in the RPG zeitgeist *assumes* their GM is an illusionist, and the joy they find in GMing *should* be from entertaining the players.
Definitely looking forward to this video. I feel like I'm like 90% of the way to agreeing with you here. I want to hear more for sure. Particularly it seems strange to sort 2d20 into the non-illusionist camp, when the whole mechanic of taking Doom tokens and turning them into extra monsters, traps and other misfortunes that, in exactly the same way the ogre's extra HP gets handwaved away by an illusionist DM, didn't exist in the secondary world until spawned in. I'd argue 2d20 has illusionism baked in.
Ehhhh, 2d20 is based on an idea that bothe the player and the GM are playing within the genre idiom. “Illusionism is in the eye of the beholder (player)” The difference witb 2d20 is that raison d’tere is to create a shared space of genre idiom that GM And players are both within. Everybody gets to be in the pool and get wet.
@@The_CGA I almost feel like that would make it MORE damaging the idea of a secondary world, since rather than suspecting the GM was moving things around behind the screen, you'd just know everything was fake because you'd be right there moving things around too? Granted that's moot since players don't get to spend Doom Tokens, so it really is just the GM.
What dnd would benefit from is not new rules, but a bunch of new settings. What about a sci-fi magic world? What about a dark sun type world? Hollow earth? Etc, etc.
Lots of pissed off 3.5 fans. That's easy money. There's a market for 5e's simplified access, and there's gaming for the hobbyists. They have limped along with etc, but someone WILL come and close that access for Hasbro (for at least the next 8 years.)
I keep thinking someone is going to make a 3.X game that’s in the vein of Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea as it is a remake of AD&D1. Just a down to earth reboot of D&D 3 without trying to push out into different directions (like 13th age and Cypher did...). Nobody’s doing it, though, and PF2 is honestly as alienating (to me) as 4th edition was ten years ago. I’ve considered doing it myself, but I don’t really have the time to playtest some of the more important elements (namely, refactoring the system to better allow playing without map and miniatures while retaining as much as possible of the tactical framework)
@@The_CGA I thought it was FantasyCraft: It was perfect. I guess it was commonly read as "As much work as doing your own in Gurps." I thought it was easy or hard as you could like. The quest...continues.
@@The_CGA Can I tell you how much I want to see an OGL based CGA version of D&D that favors a detailed persistant world and rich immersion over 3.5's map based 'back to the dungeon' ethos? You package that with a detailed original Harn-esque world to explore and I would jump on it.
@@The_CGA It's something I've tried a couple of times, but yeah it's easier said than done. There's a certain desire to modernize and streamline certain sub systems (like how PF did for grappling), and that's always what eventually fatigued me.
It saddens me greatly, but I'm convinced you're right about the future being diceless. They're going to bleed the game part right out to the point where it's just collaborative *let's pretend.*
As I’ve said elsewhere in the comments here, the massive amount of discussion of gameplay loops and character builds and the memes and shared culture between tables is a huge chunk of Free advertising for the game. (They know this. Perkins calls it “character stories” when discussing the power-ups the latest subclass of Paladin gets) I don’t think D&D will be “less Gamey,” except in that one key area of spells and effects that take a character “out of the game” (including death). Because the ascendancy of the sly flourish school has led people to assume a DM is casting disintegrate for aesthetic or emotional reasons rather than because it makes sense.
Excellent perspective. I have been predicting that there will be (especially with the rise of roll20 and other online venues) pressure to make D&D 'diceless', maybe some kind of system where a player describes the action they desire to perform and then the group votes as to whether it moves the story along. Mind you, this makes D&D less of a 'game' and more like some kind of interactive theater, so I am not sure if this is a direction older players will welcome.
As I have noted elsewhere, this is very unlikely, as “gameplay loops” and the endless internet discussions that erupt from them are a source of free advertising and a means for people to be engaged with the game when they can’t be playing themselves. There’s not much to watch or anticipate or be surprised by of other people are making 100% aesthetic decisions. Hasbro knows these things. Chris Perkins uses euphemisms like “character stories” to describe how people are aspirational about unlocking the next ability and trying it out at the table. They are loathe to throw this away. Dice will be rolled, the significance of a given die may be reduce or there may be ways to opt out of the die roll, but...without them, the mechanical complexity that gives rise to free advertising ceases.
6e will be even more ‘everything is awesome’. I think there is a big chance it will be a hot mess of blandness shouting as loud as it can that it is cool. The financial and cultural success of 5th Edition will probably lead to more corporate Death Knights shuffling in on the decision making process, which I doubt will be a healthy development. Maybe they’ll do different versions for different people...like an OSR Hardcore Mode edition for all the crusty grognards like myself....and a ‘My First D&D’ for children....perhaps they’ll use Alignments.....buy the Chaotic Evil Edition....bound in black leather with metal studs, with all the pages inserted in a random order? Who knows. I just hope they go for a more interesting art style and give the game a bit more pazazz and make it look more snazzy🤪👍
lol exactly. I think DnD is headed for disaster... With the woke community barging in full force, in the latest re-issue of Ravenloft, Vistani are no longer thieving, lying substitutes for traveling gypsies amped up to 11, they're just... there.
From what I've seen so far, the trend of "Everyone's A Wizard" will probably be doubled down on. Right now, there are plenty of feats that look like spells. Why can I only do this once a day? Because it was meant to balance you against the wizard. I don't mind the sacrifice mechanic in principal but getting it right is tough. I've been thinking about sacrifices in lieu of success and the hard part is properly defining what the scale of the sacrifice needs to be. For those that are uncomfortable with sacrifice, would it matter to you if the sacrifice was defined as "Take 3 HP damage this turn to get a +1 to your roll"? That way the dice are still honored but a player that's just rolling poorly can still get a little help. Would that work for you? As far as the moving towards Fate or pbta, I find it helpful to know what's being pushed against. Don't get me wrong, I'm not super comfortable with those games, but the question is, what am I uncomfortable with? I've been calling the distinction Realism vs Formalism after watching this ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-pxuK4NQ2NHk.html video about Realism in movies (and Speed Racer). It's not about the movie being "real" it's about how the movie is presented. Something very similar is happening in RPGs like Fate. Fate is the Speed Racer of RPGs, it's very formalistic. It has it's own language of presentation but if you don't pick up on it, it just looks like a lot of nonsense. I gotta stop here or I'll write another five paragraphs.
Regarding “everyone’s a wizard”: I am a big supporter of abstract declarations that a character ability “just works.” Insofar as vancian magic makes the wizard “just become invisible” I think that the Cavalier should also “just leave their mount with a trustworthy squire.” The problems of horses lost to monsters when they’re left at the dungeon entrance would be gone if there was an assured mechanical way to make the mounts safe. (Just an example) As for the per-day thing, I think the hobby is struggling with pacing and quotas tied to absolute durations. It’s already the case that many groups “break” the game by failing to stress or at least create uncertainty about the availability of spell slots in a day. (A subtext in this video is that I think Vancian Magic an “the adventuring day” is on the chopping block) As for the sacrifice mechanics, for my part I think that’s especially a matter of debilitating spells, death, and debuffs. It’s a way of washing the GM’s hands of responsibility for being turned to stone. I don’t think sacrifice 3 hp for +1 damage is something we will see, as this would escalate the space for player skill to exist. There would be situations where this was a good idea and others where it would be a very bad idea. Internet discussions would then to revolve around telling people what the best choice was and...Well, that led to a bad place for 3.X and character optimization where all the online conversations were about character builds... The conversations about game mechanics have been keenly crafted to actually be about discernible player experiences. This has cured “let me tell you about my character” and shortened conversations about “my amazing build” to have time to compare notes about what happened in my fight with a roper vs. your fight with a roper. I think they’re looking to relieve some burden from the GM, but they can’t upset the healthier equilibrium about gameplay loops among Players. And there will be more gameplay loops. Whoop boy-
@@The_CGA I'm very happy with GUMSHOE-based games having come from CoC and with a general enjoyment of investigation scenarios or often investigation leading to a big showdown. You get used to abilities just wrking very quickly. Part of the 6e conditioning needed - as you allude to -is showing the audience that there is more to D&D (as a synomyn for roleplaying) than combat encounters coupled with modern solipsistic angst.
The more I play 5e, the more I miss 3.5. Didn't realize how much till I joined a Pathfinder game recently. It was like having a meal with some meat again. In 5e, feats are afraid to be powerful and fun rules exceptions. Everyone's a caster. Healing is easy. Actually, easy is the operative word when dealing with 5th. 5e's advantage is it's accessibility and it's one strength is completely ignored by Wizards: It seems like it's built to have content slotted into it, the third party content really takes advantage of how modular it has the potential to be while official content just keeps it as basic and plain as it can get away with. Anyhow. I'm pretty pessimistic about 6e, honestly. Between corporate forces and faux progressives looking for "bioessentialist dogwhistles" in fiction that they principally don't seem to understand and are thus destined to ruin, I don't see myself sticking around to watch that destruction. I cherish the Forgotten Realms, I'd rather not watch it get destroyed by people who never cared about it. I don't think I'm a big enough person to not shake my fist at the march of time, especially when it seems to come not from a place of altruism as it proports to be, but from a place of vapid, attention seeking, arrogance. However, I suppose that's not entirely a bad thing. I am trying way more games these days again. There's so much more out there than Dungeons and Dragons.
I haven’t played D&D since 3.5 was current, and I haven’t really felt the pull to go back. Your ideas of how a 6E might look wouldn’t get me to come back, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you were right. Have you seen the blog post that was going around recently about the “six cultures”of TTRPGs? While I don’t think it’s a comprehensive list, I think it is good at describing the major directions the hobby is being pulled these days.
As much as there are fissures in the audiences, the self-awareness necessary to understand which “culture” one is in is beyond the casual level, sometimes beyond the authors of a given game (because they often don’t get out much, like Paizo that created their own cons and walled garden of forums) Therefore siloed audiences I don’t feel is relevant to the production and decisions made about what to include in a new game, as every game maker hopes to capture a casual audience of Kickstarter Backers that are “intrigued.” (Kickstarter is Also another reason so much is rules-light) I’ll have to look at the post, but I’ll stick with my own assessment, that genre-illiterate new audiences, prejudices about learning curves from video games (of in game tutorials and “learning levels”), • Hasbro stuff, • and the increasing assumptions that the GM role is about entertainment, that the world/adventure is improvised, objective reality is a thing of the past, etc (the increasingly universal assumptions of the Sly Flourish school)
The "Six Cultures..." article is just a variation on Robbin's Laws, just another attempt to develop a taxonomy to view the hobby through. I did get a laugh from the bit about the forge, considering that many of those ideas are about designing games to be played and not necessarily about the people who play them specifically.
It is *a school of thought* which is informed by *player’s understanding of what is best* which is gathered, in some respects, from the inculcation that comes from *the dominant school of thought.* Insofar as playing with casual people, with whom one doesn’t know how reliable they’ll be and how much they flake out, there is something to be said for not over-preparing. Personally I also like to focus preparation on the immediate sphere of the PCs. Making a detailed village or a large island and surrounding archipelago. So many novice GMs get caught up in writing Millenia of history and the soap operas of the Gods, while their hills, valleys, roadside inns and down alley dungeons are sparse and sterile. “Make the worldbuilding matter” isn’t transitive with “worldbuilding doesn’t matter”
Fudging is not a mechanic. It is the opposite: it’s throwing a mechanic out, disregarding its dictates based upon one person’s private aesthetic sense. Or their desire to create an “entertaining experience.” Rarely, it is imperative due to an unforeseen interaction of rules or an error/omission in the GM’s narration. It is the opposite of gameplay. That is a hill I will die on.
@@The_CGA nah don't get me wrong, I'm not gonna argue that it is, but from how often I see DMs doing it, you'd think that it was mentioned on every other page of the dm guide. I can't say I'm a fan of it.
I'd say the "G" in RPG is loosing the battle. Instead, the hobby is being pushed towards collaborative make-believe/storytelling/pretend-play. I honestly don't feel like it's an RPG without solid mechanics that determine the outcome of a proposed action. Did I hit? Where did I hit? Is there a shield or armor in the way? Did I pierce or circumvent it? How much pain are they in? Are they bleeding?
I don’t think that’s the case. There is an impression drawn from the popularity of streamed “games” (which I would typify as performances), but most folks engaged with the current edition of D&D or pathfinder 2 are as passionate as ever about the gameplay loops and the nature of the mechanical interactions. On visit to the r/DnDMemes subreddit will reassure you in this respect. It is another Matter entirely if the mechanics being discussed there are to your taste, but there’s plenty of emphasis on gameplay, and the people making D&D know this, it’s free advertising when people discuss these parts of gameplay. There is pressure for lighter rule sets is upon other publishers working through Kickstarter, but this is owing to their fighting for the scraps. It is the dominance of D&D and the reluctance of folks to learn another system on top of D&D...but D&D itself remains a complex and “gamey” system as ever
@@The_CGA That is an interesting take, but I have to respectfully disagree to the bulk of your statement. Though I admit it may simply be a matter of taste, or at least jaded by my tastes. D&D is like a beat up rusty bicycle with training wheels in comparison to even other D20 systems like Hackmaster 5e. That isn't even taking into consideration something like Greg Stolze's "Reign: A Game of Lords and Leaders" which I hold to be the best example of an accessible game perfect for new players and GMs alike; one that still feels like it has the depth and freedom of the warhorses of the hobby. D&D can't hold a candle to Harnmaster, Rolemaster, Pendragon, BRP (& Derivatives/Mythras), and Warhammer/Zweihander. At least not in my opinion, especially when it comes to freedom, depth of customization, and the very real threat of death or dismemberment. The latter of which, I feel is absolutely necessary to elicit real thought and consideration to character behavior and reaction to situations. It's one of the most basic drives in life, not to die. Heck, in Pendragon, you have to go into it knowing your character is going to eventually die, even if that is from old age. Idk brotha! To each their own, of course. My way, and my tastes aren't for everyone, and that is what makes our hobby so cool: so many options and ways to scratch the itch. I just think it's empirically the case that D&D seeks to placate a casual majority, and stress the social elements over the "game" elements. Which isn't surprising, given the direction of video games and their always online multi-player focus or even the way we interact through social media in real life.
There has always been an argument between which is superior role playing vs. roll playing. Plenty of systems cater to one type of player or the other (and a reason so many exist). All are games if you can interact and influence the result. I will say it is much easier to get people to try new systems if they have a low learning curve.
I think that they should make a dnd gurps. So have a DMG, and PH that works in different genres. There are so many different TTRPGs, and there will be people who want to try things like Traveller, Cyberpunk, CoC, shadowrun etc. And there are people who don't like new things. WotC could actually take over the market if they did a system that has the different classes, and suggestions for other types of settings. I like the others, but dnd holds you to what class you picked, and you have a theme. Cyberpunk 2020 doesn't do that quite the same. I think people like knowing their bracket. And other settings would be a big draw.
I think unless 6e is a radical departure from 5e I won't be playing it. I do think the hobby as a whole is going on a good direction. You have your illusionist school games like fate, and powered by the apocalypse. But you also have more objective or simulationist games as well, and everything between. One thing I don't want to see is d&d to have an even stronger market share. When d&d is strong the hobby suffers. Even now almost every company, even chaosium, is vomiting out 5e material. It's difficult to find a group at a local game store interested in games other than d&d. But I think interest in 5e is slowly starting to wane as the extremely slow drip of content is seeing people look elsewhere for games that have more official support.
And that is writing on the wall, I think, for hasbro too~that they’re about to lose market share. I don’t think their non-D&D RPGs I imagine they’re working on will be all that great. But I do think they’re working on them
D&D has so much of the market as it is, there's no reason to make a new edition. By the time D&D loses enough of the market to push Wizards into making a new edition, the forces impacting on and shaping the roleplaying hobby will be different from today so I see it as an impossible exercise to predict what forces will shape the 6th edition at this point.
I laugh in GURPS at the idea of another edition of D&D after what happened with and to 5th Edition. When the moral authoritarians swooped in and started applying their broken religion of feelings, critical theory, to the game, they attacked the potential of the general nature of D&D and proceeded to prescribe ways in which the game had to be played to be acceptable to them and avoid the dreaded toy hammer of, "Cancellation." By the way, it's weirdly contradictory the way they cry, "Racism" at older elements of D&D while themselves acting as race essentialists and racists by themselves equating orcs and drow with black people. All of the yikes points go to them. The appeasements from Wizards and the ways in which D&D was warped to fit new, unchallenged and poorly constructed ideas inspired me to look elsewhere, and between classic games and older, beloved editions of D&D, I'll never look at 5th Edition or offerings from Wizards of the Coast ever again. This movement has sent me backward into nostalgia and an analysis of classic ideas.
Ehhhh There have been manifold “caving to the mob” moments across D&D’s history. I hardly need to enumerate, but the washing of the monster manual of Christian mythology for AD&D2, the overly concerned “Gary Voice” of AD&D 1 worried day and night over the possibility players might ‘pull one over’ on their GM…the “game balancing” and “infinite splatbook power creep” aesthetic of 3rd edition as the Magic the Gathering design team often earned a veto in the development process based on their evaluation of how “broken” things might be heedless of how the game actually plays…. Even the “most important rule is to have fun and there are no rules” reformulation by Holmes and Moldvay…of the Braunstein wargame style…can be seen as a play to heed the complaints of external majorities. And then there’s 4th edition. Anyway. I am often in a situation where I’m in conversations with potential players, I’m being shouted down by folks ignorant of non-current-D&D perspectives of playing, so it pays to understand what’s driving their world and where it’s headed. For me, understanding without judgment is the only way I can hope to make myself understood and spread my own ideas. While I certainly have experienced and shared in some of the feelings of askance and irony you’re speaking to, I have let the chagrin and concern wash out of me. I never liked the system bedrock of 5E enough to weep for its “breaking.” I played heavily it early on, and tired of its breakneck pacing, the irrelevance of alliances, gear and magic items compared to the native power of the character sheet, and the empty feeling I was left with any time I tried to role-play the antagonists as the GM.
I know that I am late to the conversation. 6e will be unrecognizable as a ttrpg. It will be played online by androids. Hasbro has waaaay too much invested with 5e to take a risk on upsetting the apple cart now. The near future looks like an endless supply of new and shiny packaging on photocopies of previous stuff.
Shortly after I made this video, it was announced that something like a “5.5 edition” or an “updated/revised core Rulebook” was in the works. Probably something like the difference between 3.0 and 3.5 or smaller, and by many accounts the primary change would be dropping player species stat bonuses for a different approach to in-game effects of PC species
The perception of play around the TTTPG hobby is such that, no one game will ever appeal to all the diverse groups out there. That's OK. Being one of those who became saddle sore a LONG time ago with D&D and its close variants, I can't see Hasbro doing much to drastically change the direction that D&D is going in. Hell, in the last 15 years there has been little in the way of "new to D&D" that's been written. Hasbro will not want to venture into 4th ed territory least the torches and pitchforks come out. There is literally so much on the cutting room floor that the product line looks emaciated compare to the choices in the past. As far as D&D's future, I can only see them attempting to hold and strengthen their position in the hobby. You can't even really call 4th or 5th the out as having any innovation within them; Adv/DisAdv is more evolution than innovation. As far as the hobby goes, when D&D 6th rises from the rumor mill, and it will thanks to the publishing cycle, the world of TTRPGs will go on; even without a new edition of the "worlds most popular roleplaying game."
For me, the reasons why it matters are: 1) Kickstarter: capturing large enough funding to pay for art, layout and cartography requires capturing the imagination of casual hobbyists, this has in the recent past led to a great many Kickstarters being billed as rules-light, reluctant to use their own systems and instead using an SRD or savage world, etc. so where will D&D go? 2) generational shifts. The level of genre illiteracy, where nothing in the game has been experienced outside the game, means there’s more likelihood of things being cast off. 3) retention. As I noted, there’s a huge cohort of new folks ready to move on. I think there’s a growing likelihood of trying to undock genre (at least in perceptions) from hasbro-official product to prevent so many folks from playing something else. Why does this matter? Because it is hard to get people to play with me when I don’t want to play D&D. And I Do want to play. Likewise it’s hard to get people to buy into and play a Star Wars RPG when there’s a going theory that using this one Star Wars fan sourcebook for D&D can be “just ok” and obviate the risk of folks walking away. I don’t like any of this, I have a reply, I’m still standing exactly where I always have been, but the language and talking points necessary to get anyone to come on my lawn and join my barbecue will be different.
@@The_CGA Would you mind expanding on the topic of genre illiteracy? I’m not really sure what you are referring to when you talk about “nothing in the game has been experienced outside the game”.
I spoke to it in the video a bit, like how everybody thinks D&D “races” are “racist” because they’re unfamiliar with how the species included in the game come from a fantasy wheee gods created creatures rather than that creatures evolved from eukaryotic life. People are unfamiliar with attrition based gameplay because all they’ve seen is 5 room dungeons and theatrical streamed games, so the mechanics supporting attrition based gameplay feel irrelevant or “broken.” Nobody reads faffrd and the grey mouser, Jack Vance, or in the case of Traveller, nobody reads clarke, Niven, Asimov.
@@The_CGA Well, I can see the Kickstarter thing. Even with Free League being an established company that many are familiar with, they too are doing a KS project...for a D&D crossover. Insofar as not creating new systems, one can look at the development of Warhammer 4th edition to see what happens when a designer ventures into actual, unexplored territory. The backlash was so significant that it lasted about as long as 4th ed D&D did. It took a more streamlined design but with the same basic principle and a solid IP to bring the system back into the limelight. Partnerships like FL and Alien and Tales From the Loop helped them as well as the MYZ videogame. However, many of the EU nations' games KS projects had more to do with translating into English as they did with art and layout. No one outside of those who could read German would have ever played The Dark Eye if it were in its original language; the same goes for the MYZ ( a 2ed game in truth) predecessor Mutant. Granted, 5th ed is "lighter" than 3.X, but there is still the issue with the "Big Six," and that's not likely to go anywhere unless they decouple from hit points and pip modifiers. There is also no actual ability to go back and support social/interactive game mechanics as the ideology behind reaction/moral rolls is all but gone. Maybe as optional rules that no one uses but that would go against the trend of "more player authority." Using an SRD removes the most challenging part of the design and leverages the developer's ability to generate a compelling setting. Something that a far greater number of players are reluctant to develop to the point of semi-mass distribution. As for where will D&D go? D20 will go nowhere as it's not safe for them to go far afield. It'll get tweaked, with options and more Unearthed Arcana. It'll shift its cultural perceptions as it has done recently to appeal to the next generation. Beyond that, until it breaks its own mold, its fungibility is limited.
@@The_CGA With every new generation, there comes a new generation of genre authors; there's no lack of fantasy literature out there. When it comes to the magic system used to propel D&D, though, it's far from the Jack Vance view. Everyone from Abercrombie to Sanderson has moved far away from the "fire and forget" of the past. However, it's not just a generational shift that is creating the cast-offs. Financially it's a vast library catalog of products to support. Even in the heydays of Planescape | SpellJammer | Forgotten Realms | Ravenloft and into Eberron, the ability to support such product lines was weakening. Heck, even before that with Gammaworld/Star Frontiers/Boothill,/Gangbusters, TSR had its fair share of issues with creating, expanding, and maintaining material. The publishing cycle itself has thinned out the selection. There's also the lack of initiative to go beyond the "framed border" of the Forgotten Realms map.
I think the next stage in D&D is for Hasbro to monetize the IP. The books have been selling better than ever but I’ve been saying for years that they are leaving a lot of money on the table by not taking advantage of their very valuable IP with movies, tv shows, video games, novels, action figures, etc. With Baldur’s Gate 3, talk of a Chris Pine helmed movie, and a tv show, I think they are finally starting to get their act together.
Implicit here is, are they really going to go back to basics and spell out vancian magic for that movie or TV audience, or are they going to wipe away that per-diem based magic system in favor of something that feels more in place and requires less exposition. Because if vancian magic is overlooked in the show or movie, or played out as something different altogether in the name of drama, the next editions’ audience will be that much more 🤷♂️confusedguy🤷♂️ by the concept of spell slots. I actually had this but about the movie in the video at one point. The spell system is even more jeopardized by “monetizing the IP” and the simplifications that come with it.
Only my opinion of course. It feels like some games have changed to try to appeal to the masses. The Role side seems to be really downplayed and on a bunch of tables removed altogether in favor of a more mini wargame board game approach. (Tables vary of course and your table might be amazingly focused on RP.) There has been over the last 10 years narrative games. Rules light which push character and story more than anything else. Star Trek (bit crunchy but its focus away from combat and the setting itself leans heavily on RP) Tales from the Loop which is a huge RP, Doctor Who RPG from Cubicle 7 very narrative rules. The new Robotech RPG, 7th Sea is all narrative and Genesys. We use Genesys for our Shadowrun game and after 40+ episodes its a very different game than if we stayed with the SR rules. There are so many options though if game X is now not what you want not crunchy enough try Pathfinder. Want pure story try 7th Sea. We have options no matter what.
See I've had the exact opposite observation about how the game has shifted in the service of mass appeal. The rules get more streamlined and as a result, more jank. The influx of people who have a misguided idea of what the game is based on the boom in streaming games and are more interested in the "amateur theatre", to use garry's phrase, aspects of the game. So the games core as a miniatures war game are ignored in favour of "story" which seems like missing the point of a sandbox game, but Hasbro knows what it's doing.
As I outlined in the video, I believe it’s not really a tension between wargame style maps and miniatures play vs “amateur theater” as much as it is a tension between Imagining the game as centered on the characters, mostly improvised in the moment and thus setting aside “objective reality” or a constancy to the otherworld. 5 years ago, that tension did exist, was perceived to be important for paizo in developing PF2 and Starfinder, thus they doubled down on tactical combat as a standout feature for their games. Truth is I believe there are reasons for crunch in and out of combat, there are huge leaps of genre authenticity come systems can realize, so I do not see the “rules light” buzzword as being in tension with the alleged (by some) “miniatures wargame heritage” of the hobby. Instead I think the appellation to “rules light” and “streamlined” is informed by two main factors: a) the perceived effort required of pulling people away from D&D. If a game is complex, the authors worry that it won’t be able to capture users whose brains are already taxed by D&D. (Note that this doesn’t have to be true, and I don’t think it is, but others believe it and act upon their belief. And b) “why can’t a video game do this and let’s leave tabletop gaming to do what it’s best at.” There are complex strategy games that are successful in the PC world, like Europa Universalis or Oxygen Not Included. The perception that mechanical complexity and bookkeeping should be left to the 🖥 . I also don’t think this isn’t correct::there are plenty of ways to design around human limitations and pare down maths without sacrificing nuance (fantasy flight Star Wars comes to mind) Anyway, if you’re looking for a reason they do that sort of thing, those are the reasons. And maps miniatures have been a perceived entry barrier in the past (less relevant with the virtual tabletop scene becoming more competitive)
This style of editing more or less demands music or some other tell to the viewer to communicate that it’s a “less than real” video; jump cuts have come to be widely accepted by audiences but still require prompts I specifically select music with less high frequency content “lo-fi” and that is set up to coexist with spoken word “beats.” All of the tracks are side chained around the vocal (ducking) and are at a -22db level or more besides. I have experimented and anything quieter becomes inaudible on phones or other devices without stereo separation. The specific EQ and frequency response on the listener’s end is another matter I am working to understand what I can do to control for. This may come down to dynamics processing or something still more complicated. In any case i hope this is a worthy explanation for why the music is included at all (to hold up and legitimize the jump cut editing)
@@The_CGA I'm probably at the upper end of your age demographic so less able to exclude extraneous noise to focus on the words. [Don't get my started on things like the legibility of Star Trek for old eyes - small white font on black background]
I doubt I'll be participating in D&D6E when it comes. 5E has taken path of simplicity, narrative and illusions. And it isn't the path I want. Longer explanation beneath but. I think players who started with something like 3.X, who enjoy the 4 Ms (minis, maps, math and mechanics) will be left out and be unwelcome and undesired in 6e like they are in 5E. School of illusions is winning, and driving away those in the school of war magic. I suspect that I will remain in Pathfinder 1st edition and non-D&D games, even if it requires me to use old editions and old games. More and more new rpgs to me fall into school of illusion issue, as well as the focus of drama and making as many things fluff as possible. However something this school of thought to me always gets wrong is that a good story involves a believable world, it involves interesting and varied cast (usually), and it involves peril. From my point of view, the school of illusions is making away with these. A game where only focus is having a good night, where failure gets fudged away, loses concreteness and becomes just a fluffy piece of cloud, a thing without substance. In making characters mechanically simple narrative archetypes (such as 5e does, where your last choice in customising yourself mechanically comes at level 3, and moreso in things like apocalypse world and blades in the dark models), the game becomes repetitive to play and it becomes dependent on good actors. Not all players are good actors, and not all good actors are good players. A gaming group who enjoy rules complexity, tactics, planning, math.. but aren't excellent actors who can make dozen voices and portray dozen believable personas.. they have nothing to grasp on in these games. And a game that ensures players always succeed removes peril, and like that you could just ask your friends to make you an audiobook on story you wrote, for all the impact it'll have. Lot of the advice I see online or in some games (cypher, blades in the dark, fate, powered by the apocalypse) is to let the players be partially in charge of the world and co-author it. However, and our table found this out the hard way. Some of players... don't want to, myself included. I want to be there to play a game and tell a story, make our own character and focus on that, and let the GM guide the story. I suspect 6E might go on that road, try to take the co-authorial way.. and in that too it loses me and my table. I'll end the rant here before I end up rewriting it for the seventh time.
The future of D&D, and TTRPGs at large is to be killed by going mainstream. Whatever quality that the game might have had will be washed out in favor of accessibility and wide audience appeal & appetite. Just look at the trends happening to 40k.
@Paul Gauthier I agree, competition is a good thing. That said, there is something to be said when an IP goes mainstream and people who don't actually like or play the game start to chirp in on how this and that element are problematic and that the 'rough edges need to be sanded down' to have broader appeal. Since you mention VtM, look at the evolution from 2e to New WoD VtM. I don't care what people do in their personal lives, but one of the character examples in the new book shoves its diversity prerogatives in your face. I see that shit creep in and I drop that game. I want escapism FROM their forced diversity bullshit, not TO it.
I totally agree! Thing is, if I want anyone to play with me, I need to understand where they’re at, what they think is important, why they did or didn’t like a given movement in a direction, so that I can then articulate why I think they might be able to enjoy playing things that I like. I don’t know about you but in my RPG life I have to do a lot of evangelizing and listening in order to prepare myself and shape my approach going into games with folks that otherwise spend all their time in the D&D world
