Quote from: hedgehobbit on August 20, 2022, 02:27:32 PM


I completely disagree. RPGs should focus on optimizing the face to face experience. This is what I saw happening during the boardgame explosion of the early 2000s.

Ah, so you ARE posting from the early 2000s. Gotcha.

News Alert - what you saw in the early 2000s was 20 years ago. Things that worked great then for entertainment, really are not so working right now. That's how entertainment goes. Stuff changes.

I'm underwhelmed.

So the goal for 6e is to have people playing D&D with brown-skinned demon-blooded Tiefling 'genderqueer' characters on the Internet with their computers or smartphones, instead of playing games face-to-face? Hasbro wants massive centralization of the rpg hobby and industry, for the sake of brainwashing the plebes? It sounds like a giant wet fart to me. I'm sure they'll have lots of casual fair weather customers buying their app, but so what? I've played D&D on my computer with my friends, when I played games like NWN (Neverwinter Nights) and DDO (Dungeons & Dragons Online). Well, what makes playing 6e ("GroomerDnD/WokeDnD/OneDnD") on Hasbro's website/app more enticing than that?

I could create characters with DDO or NWN. My characters could have classes, skills, feats, ability scores and more. I could equip my characters with weapons and armor, play with my friends, and go on adventures. So what's supposed to be the allure of 6e? Is it so that people can play games on their computers or smartphones, while pretending that they're not actually playing a computer game?

Oh, well. I'm sure 6e will have lots of Critical Race Theory and lots of groomer propaganda. But I shouldn't be surprised, since Hasbro (which controls D&D) is receiving ESG investment capital from giant mega-corporations like BlackRock and Vanguard, and every single company that receives ESG investment capital pushes Critical Race Theory and pro-groomer propaganda. Well, Vanguard is the largest shareholder of BlackRock. Do we know who the actual shareholders of Vanguard are?

No, of course not. 

Quote from: hedgehobbit on August 20, 2022, 02:27:32 PM

Quote from: Mistwell on August 20, 2022, 12:52:18 PMAre you guys posting from the year 2000? Because we're decades in to the digital revolution and that prediction, which at this point is about as old as Y2k fears, never happened. In fact, D&D has grown massively during this era of virtual tabletops, while multiplayer video games have shrunk a bit.

Over the last 30 days, more than 62 million people have played Genshin Impact. That's more than WotC's optimistic estimates for the total number of people who have ever played D&D during it's entire existence. The RPG hobby is still pretty small.

QuoteTo thrive, old school RPGs need to work with virtual table tops. Stop trying to make the game in-person only, in a world where in-person gatherings have shrunk enormously, game store numbers have reduced, and populations have dispersed more.

I completely disagree. RPGs should focus on optimizing the face to face experience. This is what I saw happening during the boardgame explosion of the early 2000s. Games like Settlers of Cataan and Puerto Rico came out that focused on optimizing the boardgame experience. Emphasizing player to player interaction while reducing the tabletop's limitations by having reasonable setup times and a good (not to long, not to short) game length.

RPG should, as well, focus on what makes face to face gaming different from online gaming. This isn't to say that online RPG sessions aren't allowed, but they should be viewed as sub-optimal. Something to do when you can't actually meet IRL. Designing a game specifically to make it work better online is the wrong way to go.

This goes back to the whole point about video games not taking the place of RPGs. This can only happen if RPGs provide some sort of experience that video games cannot. The more you change RPGs to work in an online environment, the less different RPGs will be from these video games and the two will just get closer and closer until that advantage is lost. Better, IMO, to run the other way.

I agree with you. NOBODY has been really focusing on optimizing the FACE-TO-FACE experience for tabletop rpgs. Nobody. And that includes the content creators in the OSR movement. Furthermore, virtual tabletops CANNOT compete with computer games that do MOST of what VTTs do anyway, except with less mind caulk. If I have to choose between VTT or a computer game, the computer game wins..........because the VTT PRETENDS that it isn't a computer game, when it really is.....while the computer game has better graphics, and I can play it whenever I want. Don't get me wrong; VTTs are useful, but having rpgs focus primarily on the VTT market is a dead end.....because the end game for VTTs is ultimately people just playing yet another computer game (whether people like to admit it or not). Not to mention, the last thing we need....is to encourage people to become even more socially retarded than they already are, by consigning everyone to a digital ghetto. This 'Great Reset' social distancing wankery has gotten out of control.

Anyway, I'd like to see some type of tabletop rpg/board game hybrids, or OSR games that are sold with miniatures or large maps or cards or tokens or whatever. Even the character sheets for most roleplaying games are an afterthought. It really wouldn't hurt for tabletop rpg content creators to take some lessons from the board game industry.

Meanwhile, where are the OSR games and OSR campaign settings with highly detailed wikis and SRDs? Where are the OSR adventure paths (like "Shackled City", or whatever)? How about even a couple OSR 'Endless Quest' books with masculine straight white male protagonists? Furthermore, if you publish a tabletop rpg, then it behooves you to sell a magazine that showcases what your precious game actually does.

Imagine if the creators of OSRIC provided an SRD (like the d20 SRD), a couple monthly magazines, and sold magic item cards and spell cards and more. And even had a well-drawn quarterly comic book. And created their own tabletop rpg campaign setting boxed set, with spell cards, magic item cards, miniatures, a game board, and monster cards. And hey, maybe an OSR company could even produce a couple short cartoons. Just for starters. I don't see stuff like that anywhere, and I didn't see it 20 years ago.

But whatever. If I want a digital D&D experience, I have computer games for that.....that bring me close enough to VTT (without being VTT), acting as a more convenient surrogate for VTT. And furthermore, if I play DDO (or whatever), I don't have to deal with Critical Race Theory Babylon 2.0 wankery and Satanic groomer degeneracy. And by the way, I'm gonna call this 6th Edition, and not 5.5. The difference between 5E in 2014, and what I'm seeing here now is greater than the difference we see between 1e vs 2e.

And it looks horrible.

This is a new edition of D&D, but without Hasbro openly admitting it. Remember when Hasbro called 5e "D&DNext"? I remember, and now they want to call 6e "OneDnD". You just wait. Hasbro will eventually have a Satanically inverted rainbow flag on their site in a few years. But whatever.

Fuck 6e, the Groomer Edition.

Quote from: Jam The MF on August 20, 2022, 12:56:46 AM
I've been waiting to hear your take on it, Pundit.  Like the rising of the sun, I knew it was forthcoming.

Hope you liked it. Spread the word, share the video!

Quote from: jhkim on August 20, 2022, 12:06:04 PM

Quote from: hedgehobbit on August 20, 2022, 11:35:14 AM
Digital D&D is a dead end. Inevitably, a multi-player computer game will be released that has 90% of what a digital D&D session has and everyone will switch over. Hasbro hopes that such a game is D&D branded but that isn't a certainty.

People have been saying this for decades -- citing MMORPGs like World of Warcraft -- but currently, it seems to me that D&D is bigger than it has ever been. I was just on a road trip through the Southwest, and the park ranger as we entered the Grand Canyon told us that she had an all-ranger play group she was in - though she was the only one who played a ranger. (heh!)

I don't think the future is going to be either all-digital or no-electronics. Some DMs like me will like having their laptop and other computerized play aids, even when playing in person.

I agree that this is an unlikely development. But it's also especially unlikely on account that WoTC has an absolutely terrible track record when it comes to online/virtual stuff.

I finally watched the whole "Wizards Presents 2022" video and I noticed a couple of things.

- The main host appeals to male heterosexuals. Good looking white woman with bare legs (*). Believe me: every single detail in these presentation is debated for months. It seems that they know very well what their main audience is.

(*) "Hey! That's sexist!"

- The team of "D&D Beyond" is mostly white. I saw a Asian woman and a guy with brown skin, but the majority the main cast is white and straight. Now, this comes from an observation that a black friend of mine made about Amazon's "The Rings of Power" (which races-swap the shit out of Tolkien but also has a white woman as the producer and two white male showrunners); I think that it applies here too:

"Isn't this the 'White Saviour Complex?' We want to be 'diverse and inclusive' but the job falls to three white people. Why they don't have a black showrunner?"

True. The manager of Magic is Asian (no problems with this, to be clear), but, generally speaking, the majority of the people you see in the presentation is white. There are many women but, since they use pronouns, we can say that they are straight white females. Why they don't have a rainbow of PoC working on "representative D&D?" These guys, literally, don't have faith for black people to run things. Even worse, they are tone-deaf about this. Put a black dude in the team just for marketing purposes - even a paid actor would do. No: whites reign.

- The "Japanese Dungeons & Dragon" spot is as racist as fuck. These people are not Japanese (well, maybe the actors are): they are how Americans imagine the Japanese. And, again, three Japanese are in a bad situation but D&D arrives to save the day. What follows is out of a Hong Kong wuxia movie.

Boy, how glad I am to be able to raise my eyes and see my collection of BECMI ---> 3.5E books.

Quote from: Reckall on August 21, 2022, 10:42:16 AM
I finally watched the whole "Wizards Presents 2022" video and I noticed a couple of things.

- The main host appeals to male heterosexuals. Good looking white woman with bare legs (*). Believe me: every single detail in these presentation is debated for months. It seems that they know very well what their main audience is.

(*) "Hey! That's sexist!"

- The team of "D&D Beyond" is mostly white. I saw a Asian woman and a guy with brown skin, but the majority the main cast is white and straight. Now, this comes from an observation that a black friend of mine made about Amazon's "The Rings of Power" (which races-swap the shit out of Tolkien but also has a white woman as the producer and two white male showrunners); I think that it applies here too:

"Isn't this the 'White Saviour Complex?' We want to be 'diverse and inclusive' but the job falls to three white people. Why they don't have a black showrunner?"

True. The manager of Magic is Asian (no problems with this, to be clear), but, generally speaking, the majority of the people you see in the presentation is white. There are many women but, since they use pronouns, we can say that they are straight white females. Why they don't have a rainbow of PoC working on "representative D&D?" These guys, literally, don't have faith for black people to run things. Even worse, they are tone-deaf about this. Put a black dude in the team just for marketing purposes - even a paid actor would do. No: whites reign.

- The "Japanese Dungeons & Dragon" spot is as racist as fuck. These people are not Japanese (well, maybe the actors are): they are how Americans imagine the Japanese. And, again, three Japanese are in a bad situation but D&D arrives to save the day. What follows is out of a Hong Kong wuxia movie.

Boy, how glad I am to be able to raise my eyes and see my collection of BECMI ---> 3.5E books.

I also noticed that the Asian women were mostly there to talk about how important it was for them to "finally" have characters that looked like them in the game. Cuz Asian characters apparently were never a thing right out of the gate back in the Kung Fu flick obsessed era the game came out, and there were never dozens of D&D products dealing with Asian content specifically till those two women came into the team

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 21, 2022, 11:42:13 AM
I also noticed that the Asian women were mostly there to talk about how important it was for them to "finally" have characters that looked like them in the game. Cuz Asian characters apparently were never a thing right out of the gate back in the Kung Fu flick obsessed era the game came out, and there were never dozens of D&D products dealing with Asian content specifically till those two women came into the team

You forget.  5E is year zero for most of the current WotC staff.  What came prior doesn't exist.

Quote from: Mistwell on August 20, 2022, 01:01:32 PM
That's not really the direction they're taking this though. By the time this comes out it will have been TEN YEARS since the last edition came out, and they've kept the errata EXTREMELY low, and even these changes are not a new edition but using the old edition with additions and some slight tweaks. You can't push that "oh it's going to be errat'ed every month" line with zero evidence. Even Gary thought updating the rules every decade was a reasonable path for a game.

You're aware of how often they errataed or retconned 5e though, right?  Officially if you licence it you have to even mark "5.1e" in the OGL - yet no one says they're going to play some "5.1e" like they would "3.5e", they still just call it 5e, so even though it's technically a new edition - no one noticed or cared outside of niche nerds like myself.

Also I know sarcasm is hard to read on the internet so no I don't literally think they're going to update and change the book twice a month like a MOBA changes character stats.  They released a splat every 13 months average - I hardly doubt they'd put that kind of effort into their live service.  My point with outlining "D&D as a live service" was the possibility of such, couple this with the censorship we've seen in the past two years, and the game is setting itself up for a Nikolai Yezhov treatment. That is the point of my concern.  Using the concept of a digital format to gut, change, edit, remove content, and pretend it was always like that or if it was different "it's better now anyway."

Finally: New edition?  It's a new release, sure, but from the sounds and the look of the playtest it's more a 5.2e than anything else.  And all the marketing of "don't worry, all new content is backwards compatible" certainly solidifies it as 5.x of some sort.

Quote from: Palleon on August 21, 2022, 11:44:40 AM

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 21, 2022, 11:42:13 AM
I also noticed that the Asian women were mostly there to talk about how important it was for them to "finally" have characters that looked like them in the game. Cuz Asian characters apparently were never a thing right out of the gate back in the Kung Fu flick obsessed era the game came out, and there were never dozens of D&D products dealing with Asian content specifically till those two women came into the team

You forget.  5E is year zero for most of the current WotC staff.  What came prior doesn't exist.

This is basic wokespeak. When the most recent "Charlie's Angels" bombed, the (female) director said that "male fans are unable to accept strong female characters". Not only Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley never existed, but "Resident Evil" with Milla Jovovich had just become the most profitable horror franchise ever (when nu-Resident Evil fiascoed, people started to say "You know? Those movies with Milla...").

The actress playing Reeva on "Obi-wan" declared "Finally a black character in Star Wars!" This offended not only Billy Dee Williams who played Lando Calrissian in 1980, but even John Boyega who played Finn until 2019!

And here? "More options! More spells!" So, 3E? Gasligthing 101.

WOTC is hoping the D&D movie will boost the game, and that this large next generation of players will walk into WOTC's new subscription/app model of the game. WOTC may plan to augment their VTT with mandatory AI DMs that Hasbro corporate enjoys central control over for full woke driving. It probably won't work for them perfectly but I suppose it could work. It's all about profits and you can only generate large steady profits by either supplying a need (a game is not a need) or by controlling the customer, by hook or by crook.

I noticed in the One D&D playtest videos I watched on YT; that there is now a Primal Spell List, alongside Arcane and Divine?  That seems like a tip of the hat, to Pathfinder 2E; which added Primal and Occult Spell Lists, alongside Arcane and Divine.  Hmm.....

That also reminds me of Primal Powers, from D&D 4E.

Quote from: Mistwell on August 21, 2022, 12:27:10 AM

Ah, so you ARE posting from the early 2000s. Gotcha.

News Alert - what you saw in the early 2000s was 20 years ago. Things that worked great then for entertainment, really are not so working right now. That's how entertainment goes. Stuff changes.

While it would be great that someone would optimize the face to face experience imo it's not where the money is at.

Whether we like it or not more and more players especially the younger ones are learning to play RPGs online. I prefer books though given getting older and lack of space switching to digital for most of my rpg buying. I'm 49 and I no longer want to lug or carry a bunch of books to a game session.

I really wish many of the members here would stop coming off as the stereotypical anti-tech gamer Luddite. You all act as if social media and the Internet is some new fad destined to go the way of the dodo. It's simply not. I'm in an area where we had more severe Covid restrictions and it was either learn and adapt to using Discord or RollD20 or not game at all. It was either do that or not game it alll and it was two years and counting before I made the switch.

I'm not saying people here have to like online gaming. At the same time try to not come off as Mistwell says and look like your knowledge is 20 years out of date. It's like one of the players who refused to ho online in one of my games because he had to buy a second screen and he was not spending 800$+ on a new monitor. My response was when did you last go buy a monitor in 1980. I bought a second one around Christmas a year ago from Walmart 120$ tax on with free shipping.

I'm not buying One DND too many fantasy RPGs st home and I cannot justify it financially. With noting so far interesting me in the rules either.

In Belgium, as I'm sure as in other countries, during COVID there was a time "mass gatherings" at home (I'm talking five or so people) were forbidden but we still had to get our RPG on. So I tried to do it over Discord using the Cypher system. It just didn't work. It was just... barely bearable. The party was kick-ass, the rulesystem was good but playing online... It's just not my thing. When I filled out a survey for DnD they were already talking about going much and much more digital / online (kind of forgot what it was about) but we couldn't say a lot about it. Now I don't care as they kicked me off of their page. But then I felt it: D&D isn't for us anymore. Neither the mindset nor the age group. Just look at Wizards Presents... a whole lot of this digital this and digital that (bundles for books and OneD&D). I'll just keep playing fifth or pathfinder until my books wear out, I guess.

Quote from: TrueWOPR on August 21, 2022, 12:28:24 PM

Quote from: Mistwell on August 20, 2022, 01:01:32 PM
That's not really the direction they're taking this though. By the time this comes out it will have been TEN YEARS since the last edition came out, and they've kept the errata EXTREMELY low, and even these changes are not a new edition but using the old edition with additions and some slight tweaks. You can't push that "oh it's going to be errat'ed every month" line with zero evidence. Even Gary thought updating the rules every decade was a reasonable path for a game.

You're aware of how often they errataed or retconned 5e though, right?  Officially if you licence it you have to even mark "5.1e" in the OGL - yet no one says they're going to play some "5.1e" like they would "3.5e", they still just call it 5e, so even though it's technically a new edition - no one noticed or cared outside of niche nerds like myself.

Also I know sarcasm is hard to read on the internet so no I don't literally think they're going to update and change the book twice a month like a MOBA changes character stats.  They released a splat every 13 months average - I hardly doubt they'd put that kind of effort into their live service.  My point with outlining "D&D as a live service" was the possibility of such, couple this with the censorship we've seen in the past two years, and the game is setting itself up for a Nikolai Yezhov treatment. That is the point of my concern.  Using the concept of a digital format to gut, change, edit, remove content, and pretend it was always like that or if it was different "it's better now anyway."

Finally: New edition?  It's a new release, sure, but from the sounds and the look of the playtest it's more a 5.2e than anything else.  And all the marketing of "don't worry, all new content is backwards compatible" certainly solidifies it as 5.x of some sort.

Well, here's a question. How different will '6e/OneDnd' be from '5e/DnDNext'?

To give a comparison, AD&D and 2e were different editions of D&D, but you could take a 2e character and play him in an AD&D campaign with very little adjustment, and also do the exact opposite.....by putting an AD&D character into a 2e campaign, and likewise have it barely noticeable by most people.

So how different will 6e be from 5e, compared to 'AD&D vs 2e'? The biggest change between AD&D and 2e, was a difference in TONE. The actual game mechanics of AD&D vs 2e were almost identical and largely compatible. What's coming in 2024 looks to be a major tonal shift from what '5e/DnDNext' was in 2014-2015.

Racial bonuses will be removed? Half-orcs and halflings will have the exact same strength score, because biology doesn't exist any more? Ability score bonuses will have no connection to your race? Furthermore, making Drow and Orcs not evil any more is not a minor change. Stuff like that represents a huge tonal shift. And we still don't know the full extent of the changes in game mechanics in regards to 5e vs 6e.

This is a new edition of D&D, that will be AT LEAST as different as the differences between AD&D and 2e.

Quote from: King Tyranno on August 20, 2022, 11:55:59 AM

Quote from: Rob Necronomicon on August 20, 2022, 11:16:04 AM
The RPG underground scene (like the OSR) is where all the exciting developments happen.

So I don't really mind what happens to 5e, and in fact, I think it might actually be a good thing as it will suck up a lot of those the kiddy wokescolds and faux hobbyists.

Good riddance I say!

The wokescolds and faux hobbyists have never been interested in the OSR in the first place. Can you guarantee that you'll always be able to find people willing to play the niche and barely known RPGs of the OSR? If you can, cool. You have nothing to worry about. But I had trouble for years just getting a group for something like Call of Cthulhu or VtM. Most people just lean towards whatever is popular at the time unfortunately. And you end up in a position where you either have to play the latest version of DnD. Or just don't play RPGs at all.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on August 20, 2022, 11:35:14 AM

Quote from: King Tyranno on August 20, 2022, 10:05:18 AMWhen those editions get harder to find it incentivizes Zoomers who already want to go to digital solutions to only pursue this app.

Digital D&D is a dead end. Inevitably, a multi-player computer game will be released that has 90% of what a digital D&D session has and everyone will switch over. Hasbro hopes that such a game is D&D branded but that isn't a certainty.

Quote from: Rob Necronomicon on August 20, 2022, 11:16:04 AMI think it might actually be a good thing as it will suck up a lot of those the kiddy wokescolds and faux hobbyists.

Exactly. People who only want to play D&D through an app are not in the same hobby that I am. To thrive, old school RPGs need to focus on what can only be done in a face-to-face situation. Stop trying to make the game deterministic and easily app-able.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend of my current group of Zoomers who wanted to join. Let me try to remember it.

"Hey I'm running an RPG session. Do you wanna join, it's super cool."
"Oh yeah that Dungeon and Dragons thing."
"Oh this is Old School Essentials. It's an old edition of DnD. But cleaned up and super simple to use."
"Why aren't you using the new version of DnD. The old versions are buggy and complicated. All the you tubers make it seem so complicated and like there's lots of reading."
"Well if you want to try this game you might be surprised. It was designed to be simple for beginners. It's actually a lot like 5e"
"Okay, where's the app?"
"Oh there's no app. You get dice, a pencil and paper. It's really simple."
"No app? How do you calculate all the dice stuff then? That's way too complicated for normal people."

Now bear in mind this was a 12 year old so I was patient. He wasn't interested and that's okay. I didn't push it much further. But what I'm trying to get at is this. YOU may define DnD one way. And make a distinction that everything is separate. But you are making a dangerous assumption that other people will be as knowledgeable as you and make the right choice. And distinguish things as you do. Or at the very least people who think like you are either in the majority or are at least in enough supply that you can find groups easily.  When in actuality. The core demographic being targeted sees DnD in Stranger Things and thinks they are playing the same DnD to fit in with all the other people playing DnD. They are told DnD is online now. And that's it. That's DnD for those people. If you play in a way the majority does not you are not fitting in and you won't make friends that way.

I don't think you're right about computer games though. Even ignoring the fact that DnD has far less of an entry point than the average video game, Lots of computer games offer "90% of what a digital DnD session has" Off the top of my head, Neverwinter Nights with it's persistant worlds and GM tools, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 with multiplayer, every MMO ever made. But people want to play DnD as a game for the lifestyle brand recognition. They are specifically playing that thing that Critical Role and Stranger Things said was cool. You can run One DnD on your shitty phone or tablet. Which everyone has. As opposed to a games console or a gaming PC. Which are expensive.

Here's the thing. Having apps is great if they are *tools* to aid the prep for play rather than the raison d'etre.  The old FRCS Electronic Atlas still sits on my computer because it's useful.  The old Steve's Spellsheets excel spreadsheets to print out the *massive* number of spells for your character sheet during the 3e era - useful. Herolab - useful. But no different than Campaign Cartographer or Word or GIMP - tools that help you prepare for play. Even pdf books are great for prep, but not during play since it's much quicker to thumb through a book after scanning the index than scroll through a PDF or try a search term that may or may not be able to get you the topic you are looking for.

When the tool overtakes the game itself, it's a problem.

And that is the best thing about OSE or earlier editions - less info = less need for electronic tools.