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> There was a huge marketing push to make the game more attractive to a broader market along with the release of fifth edition. This grew the game enormously because fifth edition is a lot more "streamlined" than previous versions.

No. 4th edition was the most streamlined, to a fault. Thank god they worked some decent mechanics back into 5E.

> I find it all so dull. I like the numbers and crunch, theorycrafting crazy builds, I like games that reward a deep knowledge of the ruleset. 5E is none of this

Be glad you missed out on 4E.

That being said, most people I know of who also missed the crunch played Pathfinder instead.

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3.5E was clearly too crunchy, and the crunch had some exploits that were made obvious by the internet sharing those exploits. Pathfinder closes a lot of those loopholes and was just superior for the internet age.

3.5E probably was fine pre-Internet. But now that you can just "download a build" with all of the crazy exploits making level 1 overpowered, you can't just have untested crazy builds like that anymore.

EDIT: The age of Pathfinder 1.0 is over though. Its been a good run, and Paizo has a huge amount of respect from me for taking care of the venerable 3.5-like system for so long. Maybe my next campaign will be Pathfiner 2.0, but a lot of my players are old-dogs who don't want to learn a new rule system.

D&D 4e remains one of the best, most varied combat systems in tabletop roleplaying. It gave well-balanced, tactical combat with a well fleshed-out item and character progression system.

It just didn't have any roleplaying attached to it, and the combat systems sacrificed verisimilitude for game design. It honestly had more in common with Gloomhaven than D&D, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

3.5's combat was highly based around:

1. Prepared casters using the right spells to "solve" encounters -- Glitterdust and Invisibility purge "solves" invisibility. "Fly" solves flying enemies. "Wind Wall" solves enemy arrows.

2. Beatsticks having a good enough build to handle all the cases that #1 can't handle. Ex: maybe the Druid doesn't have "Daylight" to counter the deeper-darkness the enemy Lich cast, but the Beatstick might have scent (Barbarian) or blindfight to handle the case anyway.

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These spells and situations were so incredibly varied, and it really is fun to play with. Haste beats slow. Dimensional Anchor beats Dimension door. Etc. etc.

Pathfinder specifically made fighter-types deal incredible amounts of damage, ensuring that they'll be relevant. (Fighter Archer will almost certainly outdamage Wizard fireballs).

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4th edition felt like... everyone was playing roughly the same thing. Wizards spell options were largely just damage, and not so interactive. You had nothing like the "Daylight vs Deeper Darkness", or "Force Cage vs Dimension Door", or "Invisibility purge vs Invisibility Sphere" system before.

So there just wasn't any real amount of "division of labor" going on in 4th edition. Everyone was basically a beatstick.

3.5 / Pathfinder had the issue that if two players played the same role (ex: a Fighter + Paladin), it felt redundant, and one of the players will feel left out.

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Gloomhaven is probably a good description of 4E. But 3.5 / Pathfinder was more like DOTA or Overwatch. Players are in a team, and there's no class that can fulfill all roles. By subdividing the party's jobs between different players, everyone has something to contribute in the dungeon.

As long as the DM ensured that the party compositions were decently balanced and with less redundancy. (Even if two fighters were chosen, you can still play different roles with different weapons. Archer vs Beatstick for example).

You do know there's other systems besides D&D.

There's even revised versions of the original systems.

Check out stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOPmh7lkQIE&t=370s

Or you can just use your old rulebooks. No one's taking away your old books.

> And it seems 5e is all most people want to play anymore.

Emphasis added.

RPG's are an inherently social activity.

Maybe it's just my group of friends but if someone says "hey I've made a campaign for $system, who's in?" We generally jump at the chance to try somethig new.

This is a (maybe) feature of longterm gaming groups, not something you will find trying to meet new people to form a new group.

While it probably doesnt help for in person playing there are Discord/reddit communities for pretty much any game under the sun that have "Looking For Game" sections.

For less Covid times I've had reasonable luck meeting gaming groups on meetup.com or your friendly local gaming shop. You might have some luck there.

Pathfinder is great for optimization nerds like us. If you can't find tabletop group check out pathfinder:kingmaker and pathfinder:wotr computer games. I think I spent equal time on character sheet than actually playing. Some META builds are borderline funny, e.g. top one from https://www.neoseeker.com/pathfinder-wrath-of-the-righteous/... : Monk1, Sorcerer4, Loremaster 1, Dragon Disciple 4, Eldritch Knight 10, Lich 10.

I did switch to Pathfinder for a while but then I moved cities and trying to find a new, Non-5E group has been fruitless.

The last game I was in actually was Kingmaker, so I was quite delighted to see it made as a CRPG

I find this amusing, because in the 80s “rules lawyer” and “min-maxers” were derogatory terms.

Anyone who favoured a build over a story and using your imagination would have been told to join a war gaming club, or to take up chess.

D&D has a bit of a identity crisis. It's a lot of things to a lot of people.

For the mainstream, it's a way for a group of friends to group roleplay. You don't really want someone to be left behind because of a bad build. If someone's boyfriend stops playing because it's too hard, eventually the couple drops off, which leads to more people abandoning the game.

It's still board game-ish and not a full roleplaying system. Something like FATE is more suited to RP, but you have to actually write characters in depth. There's more emergrnt stories, but that's too much effort for people who just want to kick orcs and roll dice.

The character builds metagaming has branched into Pathfinder and roguelikes, where you get a tighter loop of whether your wizard build can kill liches.

At first I thought, OK, they’re letting us focus on storytelling—role playing! I too have a romance for the gnarly mechanics (love 2e) but it’s the collapsing of richness in the worlds and characters that dismays me. Now it’s clear we’re marching steadily towards a Marvel superheroization of the experience.

More widely appealing, bite-size, far less varied. Far less interesting. So it goes with mass-market culture. The good news is there are plenty of more interesting artifacts out there…but now we have to do the work of looking for them and sharing them when we found them.

This is my issue with 5e. Where are all the cool classes? Where are all the neat races I can play as? Where are all the cool things I can do with my characters (prestige classes, etc.) to make them seem unique? Instead, there's just your main classes and a few subclasses, with your standard races. Like, I just wanna play as a kitsune summoner without having to just 'flavor' everything that way. I want it to actually feel unique instead of having to rely on imagination to make it feel that way.

That said, thank goodness for places like /r/unearthedarcana...And Pathfinder 2e, though I've been struggling to find a group.

> I've been playing DnD since the 90s and it feels like Wizards of the Coast is slowly wringing out all that I enjoy about the game with each edition that is released.

When someone starts like this, the "problem" is usually the one who says it, not the game. You found yourself a game that you enjoyed, you would have played something else if you didn't like it. Add a good bit of nostalgia to it and any change will make you unhappy. But no change will get you bored, you can't win, that's the curse of growing up.

Just move on, you probably won't play D&D all your life and neither will your friends. If you find a group to play the older editions your loved, you will probably be disappointed... Or continue playing, who am I to judge? It is rare but maybe the passion is still there.

The funny part is Wizards of the Coast makes that other game that is all about numbers, crunch, knowledge and theorycrafting. In fact, when I was roleplaying, rule lawyering was heavily frowned upon, we didn't care about numbers except as a guideline. To those who focused on numbers and rules, we told them do go play Magic instead, which, btw, is a great game we also played. But we made a strong distinction between tabletop RPGs, based on storytelling, and mechanics-based games.

From a commercial perspective, Reducing the on-boarding friction and an increase in diversity & inclusion effort would lead to attracting a broader market, thus leading to an increase in revenue and market share, which ultimately would (hopefully) generate more value for the stakeholders.

I can also understand why it would isolate many traditional DnD players, due to the reduction in features. Do you think that's a decision weighted by the decision makers at Wizards of the Cost and assessed accordingly?

> Do you think that's a decision weighted by the decision makers at Wizards of the Cost and assessed accordingly?

I'm sure they weighted it, and then money won out

I have gone from being core demographic of theirs to not a customer of theirs at all, but for everyone like me they've pushed away, they've probably on-boarded twenty new customers. Right decision for them, sucks for me.

> I'm sure they weighted it, and then money won out

> for everyone like me they've pushed away, they've probably on-boarded twenty new customers

That’s not just a money decision, that’s also an audience decision—making something that more people will enjoy, bring more life and more ideas into the hobby, and introduce the fun of TTRPGs to a much bigger group of people. That sounds like a huge artistic win as well as a good financial decision.

This might be the first time I've ever heard anyone argue that something being engineered for lowest common denominator mass-market appeal makes it more artistic.

Respectfully disagree.

> This might be the first time I've ever heard anyone argue that something being engineered for lowest common denominator mass-market appeal makes it more artistic.

I don't think I'd argue for that. But I would argue that making something that appeals to a very narrow, static group of people is probably less artistic than something that appeals to a wider group of people.

Or think of it like a band—they release an album, it attracts a group of fans. They can keep making the same thing over and over again and attract the same group of people—and many bands do this. But it's very static. Or they can expand their horizons, explore music more, and experiment. They'll lose some old fans who are looking for the same sound that they've always gotten, but if their experiments are successful, then they'll reach new people who are interested in some of their new ideas. And some of those people might listen to the band's older catalog, and develop an appreciation for music they might not otherwise encounter. And maybe their experiments fail, and they lose their original audience, without attracting a new one. That happens all the time, too. But at least they pushed the boundaries, instead of playing it safe.

Honestly I like 5E better and I suspect I'm not the only one, so it's not necessarily a step backward.

Plus, I suppose you could argue that capitalism has succeeded in this case by giving us a competing solution: for those who prefer emphasis on mechanics, there's Pathfinder.

Pathfinder 2E is also a step in this direction. So yes, while older systems still exist with the style I enjoy, people tend to gravitate towards the new, which is unfortunate for me.