Objectively, 4th Edition, given that it's the only edition of D&D that has ever been outsold by an English-language competitor under any circumstance - and to add insult to injury that competitor was just a clone of a previous edition of D&D.
4th edition. Yeah this
Like whether you personally are/were pro, against, or neutral on whatever side of the edition you fell is irrelevant. This schism rocked D&D. You can ignore a bunch of silly podcasters and still play 5e just fine. During the 3/4 divide? Some game stores would actively not play one or the other edition. So it actually and factually affected how and when you played.
Add in the edition war b***hing. Yeah this affected players majorly.
And whether or not Pathfinder outsold 4e, what definitely happened was sky rocketing a small time magazine company into the major leagues. Even from a business preceptive this was leaving thousands of dollars on the table for someone else to grab- and they did.
A mere change in edition shifted and changed the RPG market. No other edition in any other game can claim that.
Not even the recent 5e SRD / D&DONE & related debacles had a drastic of change.
>This schism rocked D&D
You are too young to remember the 2e/3e split.
The only difference is that you had the internet full of trolls and shitters insisting on pushing the bullshit for lulz.
Nothing that Wizards did was any different than what they did with 3e.
By last age thread. I am very likely older than you Anon. I was around for the 2e/3e split as well.
I very much agree with you that the difference was the internet. When 2e switched to 3e. Nothing happened. New players started with 3e and the old guard kept playing their games. In fact WotC kept producing reduced 2e stuff for 2-3 years after the official switch. Still have my physical copy of The Apocalypse Stone which I picked up the same day as 3.0 PHB.
When 4e happened the internet spread trolls like fire. And the switch was a hard cut off.
If the internet was as big when 2e went to 3e? Sure I'd agree the same thing could have happened, but it very simply didn't. And it certainly didn't affect anyone's play style, schedule, or have that big an impact on the industry. (Probably cause RPGing was healthier around that time too. White Wolf was bigger, Traveler was still a thing, etc)
False dichotomy: it’s was both. WorC was smaller, though still the dominant force in tabletop RPGs once it acquired D&D. But White Wolf was also bigger, big enough that chain book stores like Barnes & Noble and the lost and mourned Borders and Waldenbooks would have significant sections of their RPG shelf space devoted to them.
7 months ago
Anonymous
They published non-game stuff, too; I remember reading a compilation of columns by Harlan Ellison and seeing the White Wolf logo on the back, and that threw me a bit.
White Wolf faced similar structural and financial issues to TSR. Iirc, one of their old execs said that the D20 license and Sword and Sorcery significantly stabilized the financial situation there.
>I very much agree with you that the difference was the internet. When 2e switched to 3e. Nothing happened. New players started with 3e and the old guard kept playing their games. In fact WotC kept producing reduced 2e stuff for 2-3 years after the official switch. Still have my physical copy of The Apocalypse Stone which I picked up the same day as 3.0 PHB.
Apocalypse Stone and Die Vecna Die were released several months before 3rd edition. They were the final 2e products and intended as campaign enders and were part of the run up to 3e's release. All 2e stuff in LGSs after 3e released was leftover stock from 2e.
The biggest thing that let the 2e ->3e transition work was that 2e was 11 years old at the time and the game had gone fallow. The issue that the 3.5 -> 4e and 4e -> 5e transitions had is that the previous edition still felt alive and active when they were killed off to make room for new and vastly different editions.
>When 4e happened the internet spread trolls like fire.
The biggest issue were 4rries. They made any discussion impossible, any criticism was defended to absurdity. They even called them "4vengers" in the wotc boards.
This type of morons can be still found in rpg.net but they are spilling over here and reddit.
4e outsold pathfinder for most of its runtime. The only time PF beat out 4e was when 4e stopped producing any content fur over a year and even then it only barely eked out a lead right at the tail end, and then immediately list the lead when the next 4e book dropped.
That's just blatantly a lie. 4e outsold every other game on the market for its entire print time each and every time a book was dropped. You are moronic.
This too. Making everything variant humans as if race is a wacky hair color is cancerous. Racial differences in terms of both physiology and psychology, how it relates to their environment and thus subsequently their culture should all be emphasized, not glanced over.
It sounds like your issue isn't with "humanizing" the other races, but rather, just stripping them of their previously baked-in flavor and mechanics--which I would agree with.
It is the same thing. If you make them human - humanizing them, anthropomorphizing them - you implicitly strip them of or fail to endow them with everything that makes them meaningfully different, and the shallowing of mechanics follows (but there are other reasons added to the stripping-down of mechanics, such as an over-emphasis on "muh balance").
[...]
[...]
sorry for the blog but I've been in a chair for 25 of my 30 years and trust me when I say, anyone who's had to actually deal with the life that comes with that is not going to want to mirror such a mundane, unfun situation an escapist fantasy setting. I assume any "disabled 'people'" that are vocal about demanding wheelchairs in elf games (as opposed to accessibility features) are not as oppressed as they wish they were and I'd go so far as to say a lot of them are malingerers. high likelihood of personality disorders and troonery as a bonus. many such cases
>muh escapism
Look, I share your disdain and emphasize, but you need to get your tourist ass back to whatever hobby you came from.
Lorraine Williams. It caused damage that was still being felt all through 3e. Then the guy who was doing the digital platform for 4e committed suicide and Paizo stole most of the 3e purists.
>Paizo stole most of the 3e purists.
I don't think "stole" is the right word, since all they did was provide a service and correctly guess that the market existed for that service. Or in other words I think you're overestimating the people who would have continued on to 4e if Pathfinder didn't exist; I think those people would have just kept playing 3e.
I wanna say Faerun because it's the epitome of bad D&D settings, but the real killer for D&D is simply that it's suffering from success. What the frick does an ideal session of 5e even look like? It's not focused around dungeon crawling or exploration, because that's not what the system focuses on. But it's also not focused on intrigue or heists or something, because that's also not what the system focuses on. There is no such thing as an ideal session of 5e. 5e is designed to awkwardly allow you to have weirdly gamey fights in between badly supported roleplaying. Everything jank about 5e makes total sense when it's in first and second edition because those editions are autistically fixated on dungeon crawling and overworld exploration, but that's not what 5e is for.
So how well does 5E do dungeon crawling? I like the idea of quick-to-make disposable characters with RNG stats, but I'm trying my hand at TTRPGs with GURPS and it simply doesn't do that.
There would be no D&D today without Lorraine. She rescued the company from Gygax and the Blumes mismanagement.
Was she perfect? No. But Gygax etc al has driven the company into the ground by 85, and Wizards is still coasting on things that were made on her watch.
This. People forget fricking Gary brought her on in the first place to do exactly what she ended up doing: putting a metric shitton of product on shelves. And the issue didn't even really turn out to be whoring out the brand, it was the sheer breadth of stuff flying at the wall to the point that the product was competing with itself because no one could feasibly own it all (or even be interested in it all).
>There would be no D&D today without Lorraine. She rescued the company from Gygax and the Blumes mismanagement.
Okay, and? She was still a fricking moron and barely any better than Gygax at running the company. She just kept it afloat long enough for someone else to come along and buy it and that led us to WotC who has been great for the business and bad for everything else.
You're forgetting people here prefer things to die so they can be sad and muster about how good would It be if they didn't die and pretend how awesome their imagined version of the past was.
That's because half this board or more are nogames losers that think being perpetually angry and alienated is a great substitute for having hobbies and a personality. "Wahhhh, they're pandering to SJWs and LGBT+ when they should be pandering to ME" etc.
Lorraine was good at identifying and promoting talent: DiTerlizzi, Greenwood, Hickman's, Brom, Monte Cook, the entire Dark Sun crew, etc. The publishing deal that made them bankrupt was irresponsible in a similar way to Enron, but it wasn't stupid.
She wasn't perfect, but she was at worst as bad as Gygax. But if you give both an honest assessment, Gygax was more incompetent and negligent as a manager than Lorraine was. All the cash grabs people mock about late 90s TSR, pre-Lorraine TSR was also doing while Gary was off doing coke in California.
Sounds more like people sought out to work for the legendary TSR and Lorraine was lucky enough for a few good ones to stick around. Don't mistake that for business acumen, because everything else about her life and employment history does not paint the picture of someone "good at identifying and promoting talent" seeing as the company still fricking burned under her.
And it fricking burned under Gygax for doing the same and worse, but Gygax gets a fraction of shit flung at him when frankly he deserves it more. And a lot of the things that came out under her watch were iconic. WotC is coasting on a back catalog of 2e stuff. What original things have they made in the last 20 years for D&D - Eberron, Nentir Vale, and some Magic tie ins. Of those, only Eberron is iconic, and it's almost 20 years old now.
Even then 30 year old Forgotten Realms material, rehashed, is a significant portion of what they sell today.
7 months ago
Anonymous
I'm not disagreeing at all. I just don't think Lorraine was the lesser of two evils. The company was fricked either way, and the fact that Monte Cook's career can be blamed on her is probably the biggest sin of all.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Monte Cook
isn't he that dood who watched a japanese performance artist eat his own dick?
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Monte Cook
his talent is watching a japanese performance artist eat his own dick
3rd edition, where he was one of the main writers, had the longest legs of a D&D edition since AD&D, with a 19 year long print run. His post-WOTC games have won awards and are generally well received.
You can hate the guy, but he's a moneymaker and his brand is one of the better seals of quality in the ttrpg industry.
7 months ago
Anonymous
nah, i don't have time to hate someone for designing a game i never even played
but i do have time to laugh at him for watching a japanese performance artist eat his own dick
7 months ago
Anonymous
the frick you talking about
7 months ago
Anonymous
>Revenue equals quality
This is your brain on Disney
7 months ago
Anonymous
Seeing as we're not shareholders and gained nothing from that moneymaking, it doesn't fricking matter and seeing as the game got significantly worse the more Monte Cook and WotC got involved, I can still confidently say it was a bad thing to happen to D&D.
7 months ago
Anonymous
>his brand is one of the better seals of quality
Profits =/= quality
His games fricking suck and are nothing more than a novelty for braindead consumers like you to put on their shelf and never play.
7 months ago
Anonymous
Lorraine fired Gary's cronies and righted a sinking ship. She busted open a new revenue stream of D&D novels.
If TSR dies in 1985, RPGs as whole are significantly moronic. As seen in the 90s and D20 boom, a rising tide lifts all ships, and when at its nadir, the pie shrinks for everyone.
>Then the guy who was doing the digital platform for 4e committed suicide and Paizo stole most of the 3e purists.
He committed murder, but never any usable code. WotC hired a literal murderhobo.
>for adding all they gay sissy shit like pcs in wheelchairs
I agree with this. Playing rpgs was about escaping reality for a few hours. Playing hulking barbarians that fight dragons in melee combat or playing wizards that can reshape reality. And now for some reasons people want to be shackled to their physical disability even in their mind.
>Have friend >Cerebral Palsy as frick since birth >Loves D&D, plays some hulking beefed up barbarian mostly >Thinks the combat wheelchair is stupid as frick
Successful video games. Authors looked at the success of video games and decided to simulate it, but the problem is that there is a difference between controlling one character and the whole party. So dnd has become a very boring system that encourages the creation of one trick pony, which is extremely boring for most normal people. So dnd became a system for autistic people and those who play irregularly.
Every problem D&D has today can ultimately be traced back to the incompetent business practices of TSR, and especially the Blumes' attempts to 'diversify their holdings' by doing shit like buying a fricking needlepoint supplies company.
So I guess the worst thing to happen to D&D was Gygax and Kaye seeking an angel investor.
>Melissa had taken out an order of protection against her husband on July 21, eight days before he murdered her.
didn't think I'd get my heart broken on /tg/ but here we are
The enshittification began with Greyhawk. Not the thief class, mind, but the expanded ability score modifier tables. The next step into the dumpster was Unearthed Arcana, when the OP deep races were made playable and the normal races had their class restrictions eased and their level limits raised.
The appeal of scripted entertainment and performance instead of role-play. Even Gary lost the company because he went Hollywood. Now it not only collaborative storytelling/fake ttrpg (Critical Role) with control freaks, narcissists, trend chasers, and wannabe actors, it's the lack of grasping even the most basic principles of what the game was supposed to be from WotC (Perkins in pic).
D&D doesn't really have a monopoly-level hold on RPGs. It usually sits around 50% of games being played. Which is very high, but nowhere close to being a monopoly. It's also a gateway drug. It doesn't decrease the ability of other RPGs to flourish--it literally creates the market for them.
There was one moment in history when D&D was a monopoly. In 1974, when it was released, because it was the only RPG. Ever since then, what it has done is create a market for other RPGs to be sold in.
Just did a sample watch of this video
I hope this fricker dies by bleeding through his ass
By watching this video you just know this troony posts pics of himself wearing skirts saying he is slave to black wiener.
>transphobic curse >cursed item that changes your sex against your will >somehow this homosexual's problem is that it's implying that being changed against your will is bad >and this somehow also attacks people with genital deformities and "non-binary" people who didn't exist at the time of publication
I know it's a troony and that mental illness is a given, but good lord.
What the frick, I've watched a few shorts of these performative morons and they seem to me like the most despiseable bunch of people...
Its much worse that critical role, Jesus Christ
In modern day?
Progressives / Leftists / Woke / ESG.
Via the mind-rot of self-censoring and pushing those ideas to allowing those values to bring in people who don't know what they're doing and who can only make the worst possible decisions.
It's done more to dampen, hinder, and damage the brand far more then any satantic panic soccer moms ever could do, and it's got a decent chance of StarWars-ing it.
I honestly wonder how the hobby looks from the outside and how much the turbo-woke messaging truly gets seen by the median normie, or if it's something that we long-term asylum residents are locked in together with. Seriously, honest question.
There's an attitude I've run in to a few times where it seems like some new player has been "warned" (primed, really) ahead of time that the hobby is full of bad people who will try to gatekeep and mansplain at you, you shall know them by their whiteness and cisness.
It's the difference between someone complaining about wokeness because they've got IRL experience/greivance with it, and some boomer who's only exposure to wokeness is from a fox news talking head reading lefty tweets, but they still complain about it constantly.
Why don't you play Racial Holy War, have a smile and a Coke, and go cry in the corner some more? More pathetic whining, Jesus. You sound like a bitter old man.
Yeah, Stjepan Sejic, he's been working for DC lately.
Very samefacey women, but decent overall. Too bad Death Vigil vol2 is still locked behind patreon
Unironically the popularity, because it attracted all the wrong kinds of people who aren't imaginative and don't particularly enjoy TTRPGs, but they'll still want D&D to change for everyone. I specifically DO NOT care about how other people play the game, since anyone who can pass the mirror test will tell you that the only gaming group that matters is your own. What sickens me are the people who want control of the game itself for their own shitty purposes >Every little moron in this thread who sees D&D as their personal culture war >Lorraine Williams and every other corporate executive that helped turn D&D into a lifestyle brand >Gary Gygax and his unfun preaching >Hasbro in general >All these nogames Youtubers that seem like they think about 5th Edition D&D really hard a whole lot and yet not a single one of these mouthbreathers after Spoony ever seem like they actually have worthwhile experience >Speaking of nogames Youtubers, frick the shills in particular who are sponsored by Deck of Many. Their product art looks like it was drawn by a pedophile >All the useful idiots on Twitter, Lebbit and Tumblr who ALSO see D&D as their personal culture war >Critical Role fans >Critical Role haters >All the soulless monsters who are only interested in D&D because it's popular, and all the soulless monsters who will tell you it's good and exempt from criticism BECAUSE it's popular >The designers and writers who see D&D as nothing more than their personal soapbox for their made-up problems, who declare the past history of D&D to be racist only to demonstrate themselves as more racist than anything we had in the past
PEOPLE are why homebrew content will forever be king. D&D helped me realize my love of fantasy adventure and gave me the tools to get started, and the rest has been up to me ever since I was a kid. People try to tell me that they sanitized and rereleased Spelljammer and Curse of Strahd and I just laugh.
This is the best response in the thread. Seriously a community driven hobby is at it’s best when it’s niche and controlled by people that care about the hobby itself.
Tasha's cauldron of everything; the perfect storm of pandering to woke weirdos and subtle yet incredibly powerful munchkinism, all wrapped up in the simple concept of "racial ability modifiers shouldn't exist, because racism". It almost completely destroyed any reason to play a race other than human and made subraces largely pointless.
I know some people hate bounded accuracy but I love the ability to sprinkle low-level enemies into a high level encounter and have them remain relevant
Motherfricker, if you cant kill at least one 40 hp or less goon with a single resourceless action by mid levels, that's on you managing to intentionally frick up with how few noobtraps exist in 5e, them being able to sometimes still hit thus inconvenience the party or combo unless you work together with your bros AND it being without moronic temps or cheapo spells the monster shouldnt have is pure positive.
>he wants his special snowflake pc to be invincible
I don't know where you're from, but you have to go back.
7 months ago
Anonymous
D&D was always like that until 5E and it was a good thing.
7 months ago
Anonymous
then I guess I still play rpgs incorrectly. Characters become memorable after they survive for half a year or year of gameplay. They don't start as special mary sues that have no chance of dying.
That pic is so intellectually dishonest. The "then" It's professionally done art for an official published book and does not depict an actual group's actual makeup, while the "now" pic is fanart done for fun but DOES depict an actual group's actual makeup.
Show me AD&D fanart of an actual group. Prove to me that it wasn't full of aasimar and kender and bariaurs and thri-kreen.
You're right, i just used that pic as a lazy placeholder banner for my post. I'm old enough to remember a lot of 90s comics capeshit art in my lgs ad&d 2e groups (i remember a guy that was obsessed with witchblade and darkness)
>and does not depict an actual group's actual makeup, while the "now" pic is fanart done for fun but DOES depict an actual group's actual makeup.
the "then" picture is depicting characters from dragonlance, which was based on characters played by tracy hickman, margeret weis, etc. in their D&D campaigns; you're an actual dipshit
Who I wouldn't exactly have called a typical group of players. We're still talking about professional writers and game designers making professional art for a published game, verses some internet rando's art of his personal table.
I mean if you want to compare THEN/NOW in a more fair way why not use this pic from the 5e DMG, in which I see a human, a dwarf, a halfling, and what's probably another human.
>Prove to me that it wasn't full of aasimar and kender and bariaurs
Didn't exist in AD&D >thri-kreen
Unplayable, monster race because players and (unlike today) had scruples, embarrassed by advantages of four arms.
Assimar were playable in Planescapes. Kender were playable in Dragonlance which was a 1e campaign setting. Bariaurs were playable in Planescapes. Thri-Kreen were playable in Dark Sun and Spelljammer and Forgotten Realms.
Boom you're wrong.
Yeah, try telling your new D&D group that we are not taking the botched 5e FR lore into consideration after BG3 happened.
>In the 13th century by Dale Reckoning...
Problem solved.
>Problem solved.
Not really. Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes goes all in to torpedo the lore in previous editions and all the new 5e lore is built on that. You'd still have to dance around shit like elven Gender Wars and strong independent Zariel being a demonic be-all and end-all.
My group has a 23 year old and a 50 something year old (my IT guys). I think you're making up a problem that simply does not exist for real human beings. The notion that "boohoo there was a video game so it's fundamentally impossible for a human being to ever learn any other lore" is fricking ridiculous.
>Boom you're wrong. >TSR 2.0, Lorraine Williams "AD&D", where snowflakes like Drizzt (clueless to the main points of the game) are accepted, where just a few years earlier would be laughed out of the room.
I stand corrected, I guess.
People who think CR, Stranger Things, troons, etc. ruined D&D are /misc/tard tourists who've never played a TTRPG in their life and just want a reason to b***h about muh heccin ess jay double yoos on boards besides /misc/
Getting mad about other people playing D&D in a way you don't like is autistic. Not metaphorically but literal autism. People will always like and do things you don't like. I don't care how others play D&D because it's not my table and doesn't affect me or my players at all.
4e killed D&D, 5e buried it. D&D was dead before CR was even a thing. I have no hope for the next edition because it seems they're doubling down on what made 5e bad and not even addressing its problems.
But that's the good part of D&D, you can ignore what you hate and keep what you do, and add onto it. Which was the whole spirit of 3.5e and why it's the best edition. Take what you want, leave what you don't. Each table would have their own disgusting eldritch abomination of 3.5e and it was wonderful.
>What the "now" picture shows is that the players care more about their personal identities and sexualities than giving a frick about roleplaying characters entirely separate from themselves in a fantasy setting.
Prove it. Post something actually comparable to the "now" picture. Show me D&D fanart drawn by some rando I've never heard of back in the '80s of his D&D group.
Also, prove that the "now" picture is about personal identities and sexualities and not just "tieflings are cool, I wanna be a tiefling".
You know, the same thing that made people play drow elves in the '90s. Or elves and dwarves in the '70s, for that matter, given that the only reason they're in the game is because some of Gygax's players were LotR fans and wanted to play Legolas and Gimli knockoffs. The thing that prompted Gygax to state that there's nothing wrong with a player playing a dragon in the original DMG.
Because until you can demonstrate that, you're a disingenuous frick
>It's because they always put a focus on identity and sexuality
I mean okay, prove it. Tell me what about the picture is putting focus on identity and sexuality. Be specific and remember to limit yourself to JUST the picture, not things you know about the characters, because the idea that you can intuit this information solely from a picture is your entire premise.
This, also, the anon you're replying to is so young they don't remember everyone wanting to play a rogue outcast drow after Drizzt dropped... fricking toddlers.
The Anon I'm replying to will have arbitrary and obviously incorrect reasons for why 5e tieflings and firbolgs are totes different y'all from drow and 2e tieflings.
That's because half this board or more are nogames losers that think being perpetually angry and alienated is a great substitute for having hobbies and a personality. "Wahhhh, they're pandering to SJWs and LGBT+ when they should be pandering to ME" etc.
>no u
Nta but that’s terrible bait. Acting like a corporation’s opinion fricking matters is genuine bootlicker behavior. Corporations are not your friend and any help they rend is merely incidental to their bottomline.
The thing that killed D&D was 3e's OSR concept and the way it completely destroyed the industry by hypercommercializing literally everything. D&D being treated as a generic system and cash cow birthed economically motivated grognardism and the butchery of creativity in the hobby. Anyone who disagrees with this is a victim of this process.
The OGL?
On one hand, it did revitalize ttrpgs as a hobby via sheer exposure due to volume, on another profit as the primary motive does tend to ruin creative endeavors.
So yeah, I think you are probably right, or at least more right than wrong.
3.5e is still my favorite edition.
>Anyone who disagrees with this
is not a butthurt moron.
Also nice copout because you have no ACTUAL counter argument.
The harsh truth is that the OGL kept the game going when 4e (which is not DnD) came out, and gave birth directly or indirectly to a lot of gems, even if the noise is high.
>which is not DnD
D&D is the tag, the name, the brand. Hell, if D&D is the system, then there's only OD&D. Because everything else is vastly different in gameplay. 4e is D&D. It's different, but it is.
>When 4e happened the internet spread trolls like fire.
The biggest issue were 4rries. They made any discussion impossible, any criticism was defended to absurdity. They even called them "4vengers" in the wotc boards.
This type of morons can be still found in rpg.net but they are spilling over here and reddit.
>4vengers
Holy shit that's stupid. I'm so glad I never went to WotC boards. With that said, it's always been like this. When 3e came out you had some people defend everything about it. And you see this with 5e, PF1 and PF2, CoC/BRP. Hell, we had a thread a few weeks ago about Ryuutama. Admittedly there the criticism was about group world building and that it "doesn't have enough combat" and that it's "D&D 5e". The only valid one was about the four rolls that make up travel and lack of quick access tables, but breaks down when the anon ignored the other rules.
4e is getting popular again because VTTs and PF2. PF2 really is just 4e but more streamlined. But then, they know the audience. They know the audience plays on VTTs, and they saw that no one plays 5e as intended. Everyone runs maybe one combat and mostly RP. Even though the XP system still demands 12 to 13 combats, they know the DM will make story levels. So that's what they did. Paizo always did copy WotC, just got rid of the mistakes.
PF2 and 4E are cases of convergent evolution. They're both designed to fix identical problems, so you see overlap, and PF2 learned a little from 4E but it plays nothing like 4E. The games' turns look nothing like each other whatsoever.
The real truth is that the OGL fricked 3E's postcore sales so badly that D&D was on the chopping block because of it. 3.0's core sold well, 3.5's core sold well, everything else sold like shit, and it's because WotC had to deal with third party products ruining their business model by adding to the swamp. It worked for Paizo up to a point because Paizo made their money off of modules and it works for 5E because of 5E's glacial product development.
You are brainless. You think law is real and social forces are fake. What people believe they can do and what they will be rewarded for doing has a lot more influence on behavior than arbitrary codes like "legality."
Lorraine Williams. Everything to follow up till now rests on her shoulders, including another Williams fricking it all up. Gygax was no saint and his bad decisions killed business and friendship alike, but Williams was always worse.
Mainstreamization, commodifying every aspect of the hobby, involvement from multi-national corporate conglomerates, moving away from dedicated niche bases. Bean counters and the like.
Opened this thread to say Lorraine Williams. I'm glad to see /tg/ has already gotten there and has said the needful.
There's been plenty of other damaging things happen to D&D over the years, but nothing worse than losing its soul, and thats what that b***h took. She was when D&D went from hobbyists making something they enjoyed and making money at it, to a corporate interest that didn't care about the hobby and ONLY cared about money. D&D has never recovered, and likely will never do so. >pic unrelated
Gygax's paranoid and self-destructive homosexualry didn't help. In a different time line he didn't burn that bridge with Arneson and D&D would have never fallen into Lorraine's hands.
>for adding all they gay sissy shit like pcs in wheelchairs
I agree with this. Playing rpgs was about escaping reality for a few hours. Playing hulking barbarians that fight dragons in melee combat or playing wizards that can reshape reality. And now for some reasons people want to be shackled to their physical disability even in their mind.
sorry for the blog but I've been in a chair for 25 of my 30 years and trust me when I say, anyone who's had to actually deal with the life that comes with that is not going to want to mirror such a mundane, unfun situation an escapist fantasy setting. I assume any "disabled 'people'" that are vocal about demanding wheelchairs in elf games (as opposed to accessibility features) are not as oppressed as they wish they were and I'd go so far as to say a lot of them are malingerers. high likelihood of personality disorders and troonery as a bonus. many such cases
>anyone who's had to actually deal with the life that comes with that is not going to want to mirror such a mundane, unfun situation an escapist fantasy setting.
This is, in part, why the infamous "Combat Wheelchair" is so contentious. Because it can't be a disability. These cowards would never list off the unpleasant and difficult realities of being paraplegic in mechanical terms. So it would otherwise be effectively cosmetic... But that's not enough, so it has to be a specific item with various bonuses, abilities, and fluff that makes sure you know it's a wheelchair, but it's not a hindrance, but also that it's functionally better than it has any reason to be. More disability fetishism than representation.
I'm mostly pissed with mental gymnastics they are going with for including everyone. And they actually insult people instead.
Scrawny guy can play Conan the Barbarian. Shy guy can play bard or rogue. Guy who is not really good with math but really enjoys casting 5d6 fireballs because he finds blowing shit up can with no problem play a wizard that bends laws of reality.
And for your Paul to be likewise included we decided to implement wheelchair mechanics so you are constantly reminded. We won't remind Jim that he is shy and has penalties on social checks and that Sam has penalties on strength checks because in reality he is scrawny. But specially for you we gonna create wheelchair mechanics.
Wow anon, thank you so much for explaining to other people what they should think and how they should feel. That's a truly valuable contribution you've got, there.
>And for your Paul to be likewise included we decided to implement wheelchair mechanics so you are constantly reminded.
...why? Paul's character is only in a wheelchair if Paul decides for him to be in a wheelchair.
>We won't remind Jim that he is shy and has penalties on social checks
That's because Jim decided to roll up a character with high Charisma. Paul can roll up a character with two functional legs just as easily. And Jim could easily play a socially awkward character just by having low Charisma and no social skill ranks.
This analogy? It's not a good one.
Look I hate the combat wheelchair too but the reason why I hate it is purely because its creators - not WotC, by the way, it's a fan-made supplement, even if WotC doesn't seem to mind it - in an effort to make sure that a character in a wheelchair is just as capable as everyone else, have created an item that you have to wonder why every adventurer, abled or not, doesn't use. I dislike it because it is, mechanically, too good. You need to think up reasons for a character to NOT want it rather than reasons for a character TO want it, which is usually what i consider the first sign of something being overpowered.
I agree if you mean it in the marxian sense and not the freudian sense but that's also true of like swordgays and dice collectors and shit. It's not a meaningful observation.
Not sure when it happened, but PCs became basically unkillable. My cleric took twice max HP from successive breath weapons, made 3 easy saves and was fine. I RPed the shit out of him being blackened and burnt all over, choking out his words, and so on- but it was all lost. That's not how people play anymore, you're either dead (which seems impossible) or you're alive and well, invincible like some Marvel Avenger capeshit fricker.
Nothing ever has or really could damage DnD. Pick the things you like and use them, like everyone else. No addition to it can cause harm. It can simply cause something you ignore.
I think it was the fans who didn't gatekeep the tourists who basically took it over for a cheap platform due to it's popularity. Had people kept the woke out when they first came due to Critical Role and nerd culture is "in" right now. Half of these problems wouldn't have happen. Though sadly another big problem is simply WOTC is completely rotten with "diversity hires". So I have little to no to hope of them fixing themselves. We need to let the "woke" companies die unless like they did for the left. "Bend the knee" for us and won't listen to the "tourists" again.
This is such a moronic, zoomer take on a bullshit non-problem from people who don't play these games at all. >Waah there was a supplement that had wheelchairs and gays!
So don't use them in your group, moron. Like the millions of us who actually play these games have done with countless supplements we weren't interested in, over the past fifty years.
I don't usually reply to posts like that, it's enough for me that we won, normies see the value of playing strategy-math-pretend and the world is now more fun. Rightoids complain about things they don't like, who cares, they were going to do that anyway.
Honestly, the normies want the classic Dragonlance of the Rings. It's the nerd fandom who wants freakshit and sparkles. The problem is that nerd culture is rotten.
Video games sold under the license. With them became secondaries and video game logic in tabletop games became the norm and was even embraced in later editions.
I'm an actual troony and I'd get a permanencied alter self or whatever and never think about it again. Maybe roll a couple of reincarnations later to avoid dispel fricking me over.
>and I'd get a permanencied alter self or whatever
In fairness: Rules As Written, this doesn't work in 3.PF, as Alter Self isn't something that can be subject to the Permanency spell. It would require Polymorph Any Object,
The good news is that it should be pretty easy to get a Duration Factor of permanent since the changed subject is same the kingdom, same class, same size, related, and same intelligence (total DF of 13 and we only need a 9). But as an 8th level spell, and therefore requiring a spellcaster of at least 15th level, it is *expensive*. 1,200 gp per the official rules. This is gonna be outside the reach of most low-level characters who don't come from a noble background.
(in 5e it would require True Polymorph and, using the formula for spell costs extrapolated from the Adventurer's League, cost 810 gp, which is still outside the range of any non-noble background - and requires you to know where to find a spellcaster of at least 17th level to boot since True Polymorph is a 9th level spell).
Just want to add something to this: "I became an adventurer in order to break a terrible curse" is a classic adventurer motivation. I don't see why a quest to change sex wouldn't naturally fall under that.
>don't see why a quest to change sex wouldn't naturally fall under that.
Because I don't want trannies in my games in the first place because I agree with neither their politics nor their existence. They can have valid reasons for adventuring some reason other way, but I don't want their brain rot in my games, period, and I'm willing to abuse and hurt as many people as necessary to ensure that happens.
The worst thing that happened to d&d was that 3.5 was so flexible and coincided with the burst of the internet. In doing so it led to every half assed piece of schlock setting and rules to come into existence which just poisoned the community well - everything became about balance and avoiding hurt feelings.
putting Lorry in chage of the business
Dragonlance.
Objectively, 4th Edition, given that it's the only edition of D&D that has ever been outsold by an English-language competitor under any circumstance - and to add insult to injury that competitor was just a clone of a previous edition of D&D.
Salesgays are genuine subhumans.
No, that's wrong. That happened a few times with V:tM too.
Yeah back when gaming was fricking healthy and not lorded over by one juggernaut.
Is easier to play other games now than ever.
Nope. vampire never managed to outsell D&D, at least not in the English-language market. Only Pathfinder gets to claim that.
4th edition. Yeah this
Like whether you personally are/were pro, against, or neutral on whatever side of the edition you fell is irrelevant. This schism rocked D&D. You can ignore a bunch of silly podcasters and still play 5e just fine. During the 3/4 divide? Some game stores would actively not play one or the other edition. So it actually and factually affected how and when you played.
Add in the edition war b***hing. Yeah this affected players majorly.
And whether or not Pathfinder outsold 4e, what definitely happened was sky rocketing a small time magazine company into the major leagues. Even from a business preceptive this was leaving thousands of dollars on the table for someone else to grab- and they did.
A mere change in edition shifted and changed the RPG market. No other edition in any other game can claim that.
Not even the recent 5e SRD / D&DONE & related debacles had a drastic of change.
>This schism rocked D&D
You are too young to remember the 2e/3e split.
The only difference is that you had the internet full of trolls and shitters insisting on pushing the bullshit for lulz.
Nothing that Wizards did was any different than what they did with 3e.
By last age thread. I am very likely older than you Anon. I was around for the 2e/3e split as well.
I very much agree with you that the difference was the internet. When 2e switched to 3e. Nothing happened. New players started with 3e and the old guard kept playing their games. In fact WotC kept producing reduced 2e stuff for 2-3 years after the official switch. Still have my physical copy of The Apocalypse Stone which I picked up the same day as 3.0 PHB.
When 4e happened the internet spread trolls like fire. And the switch was a hard cut off.
If the internet was as big when 2e went to 3e? Sure I'd agree the same thing could have happened, but it very simply didn't. And it certainly didn't affect anyone's play style, schedule, or have that big an impact on the industry. (Probably cause RPGing was healthier around that time too. White Wolf was bigger, Traveler was still a thing, etc)
>White Wolf was bigger,
White wolf was bigger? Or WotC was smaller?
Think about it.
>White wolf was bigger? Or WotC was smaller?
False dichotomy: it’s was both. WorC was smaller, though still the dominant force in tabletop RPGs once it acquired D&D. But White Wolf was also bigger, big enough that chain book stores like Barnes & Noble and the lost and mourned Borders and Waldenbooks would have significant sections of their RPG shelf space devoted to them.
They published non-game stuff, too; I remember reading a compilation of columns by Harlan Ellison and seeing the White Wolf logo on the back, and that threw me a bit.
White Wolf faced similar structural and financial issues to TSR. Iirc, one of their old execs said that the D20 license and Sword and Sorcery significantly stabilized the financial situation there.
>I very much agree with you that the difference was the internet. When 2e switched to 3e. Nothing happened. New players started with 3e and the old guard kept playing their games. In fact WotC kept producing reduced 2e stuff for 2-3 years after the official switch. Still have my physical copy of The Apocalypse Stone which I picked up the same day as 3.0 PHB.
Apocalypse Stone and Die Vecna Die were released several months before 3rd edition. They were the final 2e products and intended as campaign enders and were part of the run up to 3e's release. All 2e stuff in LGSs after 3e released was leftover stock from 2e.
The biggest thing that let the 2e ->3e transition work was that 2e was 11 years old at the time and the game had gone fallow. The issue that the 3.5 -> 4e and 4e -> 5e transitions had is that the previous edition still felt alive and active when they were killed off to make room for new and vastly different editions.
>When 4e happened the internet spread trolls like fire.
The biggest issue were 4rries. They made any discussion impossible, any criticism was defended to absurdity. They even called them "4vengers" in the wotc boards.
This type of morons can be still found in rpg.net but they are spilling over here and reddit.
4e outsold pathfinder for most of its runtime. The only time PF beat out 4e was when 4e stopped producing any content fur over a year and even then it only barely eked out a lead right at the tail end, and then immediately list the lead when the next 4e book dropped.
Take your schizo babbling back to your containment thread 4rry.
Ladies, please. You're all pretty. Now put down the b***h blades.
You are absolutely correct.
That STILL makes 4e the only edition of D&D that was ever outsold by a competitor in the English-language market, however.
Stop encouraging him you moron
>fur
Frick off Dani.
Sure, this is why the head was fired every year.
Because it was so successful.
That's just blatantly a lie. 4e outsold every other game on the market for its entire print time each and every time a book was dropped. You are moronic.
humanising monsters
>lowercase inflammatory post
Is this the only kind of attention you get in your life?
portraying orcs, goblins, drows as evil, conquering, oppressive societies is downright distasteful and problematic
portraying human empire as evil, conquering, oppressive is fine. In the end we were monsters all along
hypocrisy at its finest
>here is your lowercase inflammatory post
No one portrays all humans as evil though. That's the difference.
fool. if you go woke the right way, you don't have to change anything at all.
This, thanks to modern morality now every fantasy race behaves exactly like humans! Isn’t that epic?
>now
I agree that the nu-D&D racial schema is incredibly gay and tedious. You can smell the urbanite estrogen dripping off of it.
Wizards of the Coast
This too. Making everything variant humans as if race is a wacky hair color is cancerous. Racial differences in terms of both physiology and psychology, how it relates to their environment and thus subsequently their culture should all be emphasized, not glanced over.
It sounds like your issue isn't with "humanizing" the other races, but rather, just stripping them of their previously baked-in flavor and mechanics--which I would agree with.
It is the same thing. If you make them human - humanizing them, anthropomorphizing them - you implicitly strip them of or fail to endow them with everything that makes them meaningfully different, and the shallowing of mechanics follows (but there are other reasons added to the stripping-down of mechanics, such as an over-emphasis on "muh balance").
>muh escapism
Look, I share your disdain and emphasize, but you need to get your tourist ass back to whatever hobby you came from.
Humanizing monsters started with Tolkien.
Lorraine Williams. It caused damage that was still being felt all through 3e. Then the guy who was doing the digital platform for 4e committed suicide and Paizo stole most of the 3e purists.
>Paizo stole most of the 3e purists.
I don't think "stole" is the right word, since all they did was provide a service and correctly guess that the market existed for that service. Or in other words I think you're overestimating the people who would have continued on to 4e if Pathfinder didn't exist; I think those people would have just kept playing 3e.
I wanna say Faerun because it's the epitome of bad D&D settings, but the real killer for D&D is simply that it's suffering from success. What the frick does an ideal session of 5e even look like? It's not focused around dungeon crawling or exploration, because that's not what the system focuses on. But it's also not focused on intrigue or heists or something, because that's also not what the system focuses on. There is no such thing as an ideal session of 5e. 5e is designed to awkwardly allow you to have weirdly gamey fights in between badly supported roleplaying. Everything jank about 5e makes total sense when it's in first and second edition because those editions are autistically fixated on dungeon crawling and overworld exploration, but that's not what 5e is for.
Murder-suicide. Total piece of shit.
So how well does 5E do dungeon crawling? I like the idea of quick-to-make disposable characters with RNG stats, but I'm trying my hand at TTRPGs with GURPS and it simply doesn't do that.
There would be no D&D today without Lorraine. She rescued the company from Gygax and the Blumes mismanagement.
Was she perfect? No. But Gygax etc al has driven the company into the ground by 85, and Wizards is still coasting on things that were made on her watch.
This. People forget fricking Gary brought her on in the first place to do exactly what she ended up doing: putting a metric shitton of product on shelves. And the issue didn't even really turn out to be whoring out the brand, it was the sheer breadth of stuff flying at the wall to the point that the product was competing with itself because no one could feasibly own it all (or even be interested in it all).
>There would be no D&D today without Lorraine. She rescued the company from Gygax and the Blumes mismanagement.
Okay, and? She was still a fricking moron and barely any better than Gygax at running the company. She just kept it afloat long enough for someone else to come along and buy it and that led us to WotC who has been great for the business and bad for everything else.
You're forgetting people here prefer things to die so they can be sad and muster about how good would It be if they didn't die and pretend how awesome their imagined version of the past was.
That's because half this board or more are nogames losers that think being perpetually angry and alienated is a great substitute for having hobbies and a personality. "Wahhhh, they're pandering to SJWs and LGBT+ when they should be pandering to ME" etc.
Lorraine was good at identifying and promoting talent: DiTerlizzi, Greenwood, Hickman's, Brom, Monte Cook, the entire Dark Sun crew, etc. The publishing deal that made them bankrupt was irresponsible in a similar way to Enron, but it wasn't stupid.
She wasn't perfect, but she was at worst as bad as Gygax. But if you give both an honest assessment, Gygax was more incompetent and negligent as a manager than Lorraine was. All the cash grabs people mock about late 90s TSR, pre-Lorraine TSR was also doing while Gary was off doing coke in California.
Sounds more like people sought out to work for the legendary TSR and Lorraine was lucky enough for a few good ones to stick around. Don't mistake that for business acumen, because everything else about her life and employment history does not paint the picture of someone "good at identifying and promoting talent" seeing as the company still fricking burned under her.
And it fricking burned under Gygax for doing the same and worse, but Gygax gets a fraction of shit flung at him when frankly he deserves it more. And a lot of the things that came out under her watch were iconic. WotC is coasting on a back catalog of 2e stuff. What original things have they made in the last 20 years for D&D - Eberron, Nentir Vale, and some Magic tie ins. Of those, only Eberron is iconic, and it's almost 20 years old now.
Even then 30 year old Forgotten Realms material, rehashed, is a significant portion of what they sell today.
I'm not disagreeing at all. I just don't think Lorraine was the lesser of two evils. The company was fricked either way, and the fact that Monte Cook's career can be blamed on her is probably the biggest sin of all.
>Monte Cook
isn't he that dood who watched a japanese performance artist eat his own dick?
3rd edition, where he was one of the main writers, had the longest legs of a D&D edition since AD&D, with a 19 year long print run. His post-WOTC games have won awards and are generally well received.
You can hate the guy, but he's a moneymaker and his brand is one of the better seals of quality in the ttrpg industry.
nah, i don't have time to hate someone for designing a game i never even played
but i do have time to laugh at him for watching a japanese performance artist eat his own dick
the frick you talking about
>Revenue equals quality
This is your brain on Disney
Seeing as we're not shareholders and gained nothing from that moneymaking, it doesn't fricking matter and seeing as the game got significantly worse the more Monte Cook and WotC got involved, I can still confidently say it was a bad thing to happen to D&D.
>his brand is one of the better seals of quality
Profits =/= quality
His games fricking suck and are nothing more than a novelty for braindead consumers like you to put on their shelf and never play.
Lorraine fired Gary's cronies and righted a sinking ship. She busted open a new revenue stream of D&D novels.
If TSR dies in 1985, RPGs as whole are significantly moronic. As seen in the 90s and D20 boom, a rising tide lifts all ships, and when at its nadir, the pie shrinks for everyone.
>Monte Cook
his talent is watching a japanese performance artist eat his own dick
So you mean she was bad? Because if the whole thing crashed and burned we'd definitely be better off today.
If it crashed and burned in 1985, you probably wouldn't be playing ttrpgs at all.
>Then the guy who was doing the digital platform for 4e committed suicide and Paizo stole most of the 3e purists.
He committed murder, but never any usable code. WotC hired a literal murderhobo.
Spaghetti code is a dangerous thing.
>Niche hobby gets sold off to a transnational corporation.
The various pozzed crap is just a symptom, but that's the root of it.
Vanguard.
Blackrock.
Obviously Critical Role not for making it more popular but for adding all they gay sissy shit like pcs in wheelchairs
>for adding all they gay sissy shit like pcs in wheelchairs
I agree with this. Playing rpgs was about escaping reality for a few hours. Playing hulking barbarians that fight dragons in melee combat or playing wizards that can reshape reality. And now for some reasons people want to be shackled to their physical disability even in their mind.
Skill issue. I play roleplaying games to roleplay as somebody radically different to myself. I don't want to play as a god like adonis.
If you've been a cripple long enough you're in that fricking thing even in your dreams. Another reason I don't play disabled characters.
>Have friend
>Cerebral Palsy as frick since birth
>Loves D&D, plays some hulking beefed up barbarian mostly
>Thinks the combat wheelchair is stupid as frick
Successful video games. Authors looked at the success of video games and decided to simulate it, but the problem is that there is a difference between controlling one character and the whole party. So dnd has become a very boring system that encourages the creation of one trick pony, which is extremely boring for most normal people. So dnd became a system for autistic people and those who play irregularly.
Wizards of the Coast
Every problem D&D has today can ultimately be traced back to the incompetent business practices of TSR, and especially the Blumes' attempts to 'diversify their holdings' by doing shit like buying a fricking needlepoint supplies company.
So I guess the worst thing to happen to D&D was Gygax and Kaye seeking an angel investor.
When Dungeon crawling modules changed into epic heroic adventures about invincible PCs
Joseph Batten
5E
>what was the most damaging thing to happen to D&D?
It being made in the first place.
Normalgays and casuals
WotC
Cell phones and social media.
4e was a very dark time for D&D, and 5.5e is tempting fate yet again.
>Melissa had taken out an order of protection against her husband on July 21, eight days before he murdered her.
didn't think I'd get my heart broken on /tg/ but here we are
Yeah, what a fricking b***h.
The enshittification began with Greyhawk. Not the thief class, mind, but the expanded ability score modifier tables. The next step into the dumpster was Unearthed Arcana, when the OP deep races were made playable and the normal races had their class restrictions eased and their level limits raised.
The 2016 election.
A woman assuming CEO status in TSR.
The appeal of scripted entertainment and performance instead of role-play. Even Gary lost the company because he went Hollywood. Now it not only collaborative storytelling/fake ttrpg (Critical Role) with control freaks, narcissists, trend chasers, and wannabe actors, it's the lack of grasping even the most basic principles of what the game was supposed to be from WotC (Perkins in pic).
Ganker.org
Everything after 3.5e
We need to go back
World of Warcraft and its consequences
Lack of rape rules
The community's reaction to 4e
It taught WoTC that know wants to play a game with good mechanics they just want to play something that looks like dnd
Taking balance feedback from martialtards
WoTC. They enabled a whole generation of fat manchild charop autists.
Dragonlance
Critical Role
All the people saying Critical Role when if we're going that route I'd say Dimension20 is worse, far worse.
Neve heard of Dimension20, but I supposed It is much less popular, so Id say its also less of a problem.
critical role opened the door to tourists like this
?si=ydWadXI70Fl85XCg&t=4810
Jesus Christ a 2 hours video essay. can anyone who has watched it summarize It for me?
D&D having a near monopoly level of market share is bad for RPGs as a creative medium.
D&D doesn't really have a monopoly-level hold on RPGs. It usually sits around 50% of games being played. Which is very high, but nowhere close to being a monopoly. It's also a gateway drug. It doesn't decrease the ability of other RPGs to flourish--it literally creates the market for them.
There was one moment in history when D&D was a monopoly. In 1974, when it was released, because it was the only RPG. Ever since then, what it has done is create a market for other RPGs to be sold in.
Now, I am 100% sure that is not what was said in the video...
It’s the opening premises and the closing point.
There is some other stuff but that’s the core.
Just did a sample watch of this video
I hope this fricker dies by bleeding through his ass
By watching this video you just know this troony posts pics of himself wearing skirts saying he is slave to black wiener.
>skip to the recommended games section
>Troon shills nechronica
How..."surprising"
>transphobic curse
>cursed item that changes your sex against your will
>somehow this homosexual's problem is that it's implying that being changed against your will is bad
>and this somehow also attacks people with genital deformities and "non-binary" people who didn't exist at the time of publication
I know it's a troony and that mental illness is a given, but good lord.
It's definitely gayer.
What the frick, I've watched a few shorts of these performative morons and they seem to me like the most despiseable bunch of people...
Its much worse that critical role, Jesus Christ
In modern day?
Progressives / Leftists / Woke / ESG.
Via the mind-rot of self-censoring and pushing those ideas to allowing those values to bring in people who don't know what they're doing and who can only make the worst possible decisions.
It's done more to dampen, hinder, and damage the brand far more then any satantic panic soccer moms ever could do, and it's got a decent chance of StarWars-ing it.
I honestly wonder how the hobby looks from the outside and how much the turbo-woke messaging truly gets seen by the median normie, or if it's something that we long-term asylum residents are locked in together with. Seriously, honest question.
There's an attitude I've run in to a few times where it seems like some new player has been "warned" (primed, really) ahead of time that the hobby is full of bad people who will try to gatekeep and mansplain at you, you shall know them by their whiteness and cisness.
It's the difference between someone complaining about wokeness because they've got IRL experience/greivance with it, and some boomer who's only exposure to wokeness is from a fox news talking head reading lefty tweets, but they still complain about it constantly.
Why don't you play Racial Holy War, have a smile and a Coke, and go cry in the corner some more? More pathetic whining, Jesus. You sound like a bitter old man.
Wow the guy just described you and you showed up to prove him right, awesome!
People like this homosexual are why dnd sucks now
Hasbro.
It's threads like this one that remind me how many unironic leftards and Tumblrinas make up the denizens of /tg/.
Is this art by Nebezial or Shiniez
Yeah, Stjepan Sejic, he's been working for DC lately.
Very samefacey women, but decent overall. Too bad Death Vigil vol2 is still locked behind patreon
3.x
Being created.
Unironically the popularity, because it attracted all the wrong kinds of people who aren't imaginative and don't particularly enjoy TTRPGs, but they'll still want D&D to change for everyone. I specifically DO NOT care about how other people play the game, since anyone who can pass the mirror test will tell you that the only gaming group that matters is your own. What sickens me are the people who want control of the game itself for their own shitty purposes
>Every little moron in this thread who sees D&D as their personal culture war
>Lorraine Williams and every other corporate executive that helped turn D&D into a lifestyle brand
>Gary Gygax and his unfun preaching
>Hasbro in general
>All these nogames Youtubers that seem like they think about 5th Edition D&D really hard a whole lot and yet not a single one of these mouthbreathers after Spoony ever seem like they actually have worthwhile experience
>Speaking of nogames Youtubers, frick the shills in particular who are sponsored by Deck of Many. Their product art looks like it was drawn by a pedophile
>All the useful idiots on Twitter, Lebbit and Tumblr who ALSO see D&D as their personal culture war
>Critical Role fans
>Critical Role haters
>All the soulless monsters who are only interested in D&D because it's popular, and all the soulless monsters who will tell you it's good and exempt from criticism BECAUSE it's popular
>The designers and writers who see D&D as nothing more than their personal soapbox for their made-up problems, who declare the past history of D&D to be racist only to demonstrate themselves as more racist than anything we had in the past
PEOPLE are why homebrew content will forever be king. D&D helped me realize my love of fantasy adventure and gave me the tools to get started, and the rest has been up to me ever since I was a kid. People try to tell me that they sanitized and rereleased Spelljammer and Curse of Strahd and I just laugh.
This is the best response in the thread. Seriously a community driven hobby is at it’s best when it’s niche and controlled by people that care about the hobby itself.
As the thread goes on this post just gets proven correct over and over and over
Pic related is the ULTRAKILL dev talking directly to his fans. It reminds me of you guys
Ah, yes. The buttplug guy who unironically takes feedback from troons.
Tasha's cauldron of everything; the perfect storm of pandering to woke weirdos and subtle yet incredibly powerful munchkinism, all wrapped up in the simple concept of "racial ability modifiers shouldn't exist, because racism". It almost completely destroyed any reason to play a race other than human and made subraces largely pointless.
5th edition.
Bounded accuracy
I know some people hate bounded accuracy but I love the ability to sprinkle low-level enemies into a high level encounter and have them remain relevant
Why? The best part of the game is utterly destroying massed groups of enemies that were a huge ballache several levels ago.
Motherfricker, if you cant kill at least one 40 hp or less goon with a single resourceless action by mid levels, that's on you managing to intentionally frick up with how few noobtraps exist in 5e, them being able to sometimes still hit thus inconvenience the party or combo unless you work together with your bros AND it being without moronic temps or cheapo spells the monster shouldnt have is pure positive.
It's not pure positive because them no longer being able to hit you was the best part.
>he wants his special snowflake pc to be invincible
I don't know where you're from, but you have to go back.
D&D was always like that until 5E and it was a good thing.
then I guess I still play rpgs incorrectly. Characters become memorable after they survive for half a year or year of gameplay. They don't start as special mary sues that have no chance of dying.
Noone said they started that way.
becoming mainstream.
That pic is so intellectually dishonest. The "then" It's professionally done art for an official published book and does not depict an actual group's actual makeup, while the "now" pic is fanart done for fun but DOES depict an actual group's actual makeup.
Show me AD&D fanart of an actual group. Prove to me that it wasn't full of aasimar and kender and bariaurs and thri-kreen.
You're right, i just used that pic as a lazy placeholder banner for my post. I'm old enough to remember a lot of 90s comics capeshit art in my lgs ad&d 2e groups (i remember a guy that was obsessed with witchblade and darkness)
>and does not depict an actual group's actual makeup, while the "now" pic is fanart done for fun but DOES depict an actual group's actual makeup.
the "then" picture is depicting characters from dragonlance, which was based on characters played by tracy hickman, margeret weis, etc. in their D&D campaigns; you're an actual dipshit
Who I wouldn't exactly have called a typical group of players. We're still talking about professional writers and game designers making professional art for a published game, verses some internet rando's art of his personal table.
I mean if you want to compare THEN/NOW in a more fair way why not use this pic from the 5e DMG, in which I see a human, a dwarf, a halfling, and what's probably another human.
>the "then" picture is depicting characters from dragonlance,
Generic unspecified setting, certainly not Dragonlance.
>you're an actual dipshit
Ironic.
There are people who literally hired Elmore to do portraits of their adventuring group and it's just as cringe as the one pictured above.
>Prove to me that it wasn't full of aasimar and kender and bariaurs
Didn't exist in AD&D
>thri-kreen
Unplayable, monster race because players and (unlike today) had scruples, embarrassed by advantages of four arms.
Assimar were playable in Planescapes. Kender were playable in Dragonlance which was a 1e campaign setting. Bariaurs were playable in Planescapes. Thri-Kreen were playable in Dark Sun and Spelljammer and Forgotten Realms.
Boom you're wrong.
>In the 13th century by Dale Reckoning...
Problem solved.
>Problem solved.
Not really. Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes goes all in to torpedo the lore in previous editions and all the new 5e lore is built on that. You'd still have to dance around shit like elven Gender Wars and strong independent Zariel being a demonic be-all and end-all.
My group has a 23 year old and a 50 something year old (my IT guys). I think you're making up a problem that simply does not exist for real human beings. The notion that "boohoo there was a video game so it's fundamentally impossible for a human being to ever learn any other lore" is fricking ridiculous.
>Boom you're wrong.
>TSR 2.0, Lorraine Williams "AD&D", where snowflakes like Drizzt (clueless to the main points of the game) are accepted, where just a few years earlier would be laughed out of the room.
I stand corrected, I guess.
>he doesn't know about the early days of vampire and balor PCs
WotC taking over and creating 3e
We could be done with DnD
Adding thieves
its crazy how i can tell the exact politics and personality of the artist who drew that picture just by looking at it.
its crazy how i can tell the exact politics and personality of the annon who made this post just by looking at it.
People who think CR, Stranger Things, troons, etc. ruined D&D are /misc/tard tourists who've never played a TTRPG in their life and just want a reason to b***h about muh heccin ess jay double yoos on boards besides /misc/
Getting mad about other people playing D&D in a way you don't like is autistic. Not metaphorically but literal autism. People will always like and do things you don't like. I don't care how others play D&D because it's not my table and doesn't affect me or my players at all.
4e killed D&D, 5e buried it. D&D was dead before CR was even a thing. I have no hope for the next edition because it seems they're doubling down on what made 5e bad and not even addressing its problems.
But that's the good part of D&D, you can ignore what you hate and keep what you do, and add onto it. Which was the whole spirit of 3.5e and why it's the best edition. Take what you want, leave what you don't. Each table would have their own disgusting eldritch abomination of 3.5e and it was wonderful.
>Sweet 69 of truth
You want to play GURPS and waste everyone else's time trying to make a dungeon crawler into it.
>What the "now" picture shows is that the players care more about their personal identities and sexualities than giving a frick about roleplaying characters entirely separate from themselves in a fantasy setting.
Prove it. Post something actually comparable to the "now" picture. Show me D&D fanart drawn by some rando I've never heard of back in the '80s of his D&D group.
Also, prove that the "now" picture is about personal identities and sexualities and not just "tieflings are cool, I wanna be a tiefling".
You know, the same thing that made people play drow elves in the '90s. Or elves and dwarves in the '70s, for that matter, given that the only reason they're in the game is because some of Gygax's players were LotR fans and wanted to play Legolas and Gimli knockoffs. The thing that prompted Gygax to state that there's nothing wrong with a player playing a dragon in the original DMG.
Because until you can demonstrate that, you're a disingenuous frick
>It's because they always put a focus on identity and sexuality
I mean okay, prove it. Tell me what about the picture is putting focus on identity and sexuality. Be specific and remember to limit yourself to JUST the picture, not things you know about the characters, because the idea that you can intuit this information solely from a picture is your entire premise.
This, also, the anon you're replying to is so young they don't remember everyone wanting to play a rogue outcast drow after Drizzt dropped... fricking toddlers.
The Anon I'm replying to will have arbitrary and obviously incorrect reasons for why 5e tieflings and firbolgs are totes different y'all from drow and 2e tieflings.
WotC was the most damaging.
From where I'm sitting, losing people like you is a net gain... and the company agrees with me.
out of the woodworks...gays
Companies always want the lowest common denominator consumer.
this, and currently they are critical role fanboys and trend-chassers who wouldn't have played before because it wasn't seen as socially acceptable.
You can keep sitting on your dragondildo and false sense of moral superiority, just as long as you're useful to your corporate masters
Disgusting bootlicker.
You are literally describing yourself, idiot. You are such a slave to authority and oppression that you can even "badthink" without whipping yourself.
>no u
Nta but that’s terrible bait. Acting like a corporation’s opinion fricking matters is genuine bootlicker behavior. Corporations are not your friend and any help they rend is merely incidental to their bottomline.
The thing that killed D&D was 3e's OSR concept and the way it completely destroyed the industry by hypercommercializing literally everything. D&D being treated as a generic system and cash cow birthed economically motivated grognardism and the butchery of creativity in the hobby. Anyone who disagrees with this is a victim of this process.
The OGL?
On one hand, it did revitalize ttrpgs as a hobby via sheer exposure due to volume, on another profit as the primary motive does tend to ruin creative endeavors.
So yeah, I think you are probably right, or at least more right than wrong.
3.5e is still my favorite edition.
>free license
>hypercommercializing
You morons never cease to amaze me, your hateboners make you irrational and pathetic.
>Anyone who disagrees with this
is not a butthurt moron.
Also nice copout because you have no ACTUAL counter argument.
The harsh truth is that the OGL kept the game going when 4e (which is not DnD) came out, and gave birth directly or indirectly to a lot of gems, even if the noise is high.
>which is not DnD
D&D is the tag, the name, the brand. Hell, if D&D is the system, then there's only OD&D. Because everything else is vastly different in gameplay. 4e is D&D. It's different, but it is.
>4vengers
Holy shit that's stupid. I'm so glad I never went to WotC boards. With that said, it's always been like this. When 3e came out you had some people defend everything about it. And you see this with 5e, PF1 and PF2, CoC/BRP. Hell, we had a thread a few weeks ago about Ryuutama. Admittedly there the criticism was about group world building and that it "doesn't have enough combat" and that it's "D&D 5e". The only valid one was about the four rolls that make up travel and lack of quick access tables, but breaks down when the anon ignored the other rules.
4e is getting popular again because VTTs and PF2. PF2 really is just 4e but more streamlined. But then, they know the audience. They know the audience plays on VTTs, and they saw that no one plays 5e as intended. Everyone runs maybe one combat and mostly RP. Even though the XP system still demands 12 to 13 combats, they know the DM will make story levels. So that's what they did. Paizo always did copy WotC, just got rid of the mistakes.
PF2 and 4E are cases of convergent evolution. They're both designed to fix identical problems, so you see overlap, and PF2 learned a little from 4E but it plays nothing like 4E. The games' turns look nothing like each other whatsoever.
The real truth is that the OGL fricked 3E's postcore sales so badly that D&D was on the chopping block because of it. 3.0's core sold well, 3.5's core sold well, everything else sold like shit, and it's because WotC had to deal with third party products ruining their business model by adding to the swamp. It worked for Paizo up to a point because Paizo made their money off of modules and it works for 5E because of 5E's glacial product development.
>The thing that killed D&D was 3e's OSR concept
>completely destroyed the industry
If D&D was killed and the industry was completely destroyed then 5e wouldn't exist and there would be no rpgs.
That’s a load bullshit.
Paul did all the work for D&D. Janelle hasn't published anything of note.
I can't tell anything about their sexualities other than that the drow halfling(?) fricks the most.
You are brainless. You think law is real and social forces are fake. What people believe they can do and what they will be rewarded for doing has a lot more influence on behavior than arbitrary codes like "legality."
Lorraine Williams. Everything to follow up till now rests on her shoulders, including another Williams fricking it all up. Gygax was no saint and his bad decisions killed business and friendship alike, but Williams was always worse.
Mainstreamization, commodifying every aspect of the hobby, involvement from multi-national corporate conglomerates, moving away from dedicated niche bases. Bean counters and the like.
Purchase by Hasbro
Gates were not kept, normalgays corrupted it.
Opened this thread to say Lorraine Williams. I'm glad to see /tg/ has already gotten there and has said the needful.
There's been plenty of other damaging things happen to D&D over the years, but nothing worse than losing its soul, and thats what that b***h took. She was when D&D went from hobbyists making something they enjoyed and making money at it, to a corporate interest that didn't care about the hobby and ONLY cared about money. D&D has never recovered, and likely will never do so.
>pic unrelated
Gygax's paranoid and self-destructive homosexualry didn't help. In a different time line he didn't burn that bridge with Arneson and D&D would have never fallen into Lorraine's hands.
Me liking it. I’m the King Midas of garbage. Everything I like turns to garbage. Except cats.
sorry for the blog but I've been in a chair for 25 of my 30 years and trust me when I say, anyone who's had to actually deal with the life that comes with that is not going to want to mirror such a mundane, unfun situation an escapist fantasy setting. I assume any "disabled 'people'" that are vocal about demanding wheelchairs in elf games (as opposed to accessibility features) are not as oppressed as they wish they were and I'd go so far as to say a lot of them are malingerers. high likelihood of personality disorders and troonery as a bonus. many such cases
This is always the case. The most vocal morons demanding representation are not themselves the people they want representation for.
I need a wheelchair statblock solely so I can play a mermaid.
>anyone who's had to actually deal with the life that comes with that is not going to want to mirror such a mundane, unfun situation an escapist fantasy setting.
This is, in part, why the infamous "Combat Wheelchair" is so contentious. Because it can't be a disability. These cowards would never list off the unpleasant and difficult realities of being paraplegic in mechanical terms. So it would otherwise be effectively cosmetic... But that's not enough, so it has to be a specific item with various bonuses, abilities, and fluff that makes sure you know it's a wheelchair, but it's not a hindrance, but also that it's functionally better than it has any reason to be. More disability fetishism than representation.
Yes anon, in fantasy you need to replicate the same shit you experience in life, God forbids you can live some fun fantasy about it.
Why not fantasize about not being bound to a fricking wheelchair then, or fantasize that you have an actual brain, moron?
Sorry anon, we didn't mean to have fantasies without checking with you whether they were the right ones to have, first.
You fricking dipshit.
Fetishism has no place at the table, moron.
>he thinks anything he doesn't like is a fetish
Because it wouldn't be nearly as hot
I'm mostly pissed with mental gymnastics they are going with for including everyone. And they actually insult people instead.
Scrawny guy can play Conan the Barbarian. Shy guy can play bard or rogue. Guy who is not really good with math but really enjoys casting 5d6 fireballs because he finds blowing shit up can with no problem play a wizard that bends laws of reality.
And for your Paul to be likewise included we decided to implement wheelchair mechanics so you are constantly reminded. We won't remind Jim that he is shy and has penalties on social checks and that Sam has penalties on strength checks because in reality he is scrawny. But specially for you we gonna create wheelchair mechanics.
Wow anon, thank you so much for explaining to other people what they should think and how they should feel. That's a truly valuable contribution you've got, there.
>And for your Paul to be likewise included we decided to implement wheelchair mechanics so you are constantly reminded.
...why? Paul's character is only in a wheelchair if Paul decides for him to be in a wheelchair.
>We won't remind Jim that he is shy and has penalties on social checks
That's because Jim decided to roll up a character with high Charisma. Paul can roll up a character with two functional legs just as easily. And Jim could easily play a socially awkward character just by having low Charisma and no social skill ranks.
This analogy? It's not a good one.
Look I hate the combat wheelchair too but the reason why I hate it is purely because its creators - not WotC, by the way, it's a fan-made supplement, even if WotC doesn't seem to mind it - in an effort to make sure that a character in a wheelchair is just as capable as everyone else, have created an item that you have to wonder why every adventurer, abled or not, doesn't use. I dislike it because it is, mechanically, too good. You need to think up reasons for a character to NOT want it rather than reasons for a character TO want it, which is usually what i consider the first sign of something being overpowered.
The ones demanding wheelchairs and shit and fetishists, unironically.
The last thing I want is to be reminded of my disability.
I agree if you mean it in the marxian sense and not the freudian sense but that's also true of like swordgays and dice collectors and shit. It's not a meaningful observation.
Not sure when it happened, but PCs became basically unkillable. My cleric took twice max HP from successive breath weapons, made 3 easy saves and was fine. I RPed the shit out of him being blackened and burnt all over, choking out his words, and so on- but it was all lost. That's not how people play anymore, you're either dead (which seems impossible) or you're alive and well, invincible like some Marvel Avenger capeshit fricker.
In the last few years? Jeremy Crawford in charge of D&D.
Overall? WotC in general and 4e in particular.
Nothing ever has or really could damage DnD. Pick the things you like and use them, like everyone else. No addition to it can cause harm. It can simply cause something you ignore.
until everything they add is something to ignore and you're a stranger in your own hobby
I think it was the fans who didn't gatekeep the tourists who basically took it over for a cheap platform due to it's popularity. Had people kept the woke out when they first came due to Critical Role and nerd culture is "in" right now. Half of these problems wouldn't have happen. Though sadly another big problem is simply WOTC is completely rotten with "diversity hires". So I have little to no to hope of them fixing themselves. We need to let the "woke" companies die unless like they did for the left. "Bend the knee" for us and won't listen to the "tourists" again.
This is such a moronic, zoomer take on a bullshit non-problem from people who don't play these games at all.
>Waah there was a supplement that had wheelchairs and gays!
So don't use them in your group, moron. Like the millions of us who actually play these games have done with countless supplements we weren't interested in, over the past fifty years.
I don't usually reply to posts like that, it's enough for me that we won, normies see the value of playing strategy-math-pretend and the world is now more fun. Rightoids complain about things they don't like, who cares, they were going to do that anyway.
>I don't usually reply to posts like that
It's like a soda burp. Sometimes it just slips out and I can't help it.
>the world is now more fun
I'd counter that but looking at everyone fight proves your point.
Yeah, try telling your new D&D group that we are not taking the botched 5e FR lore into consideration after BG3 happened.
Honestly, the normies want the classic Dragonlance of the Rings. It's the nerd fandom who wants freakshit and sparkles. The problem is that nerd culture is rotten.
the lack of good r34
Critical roll followed by tifflings
Video games sold under the license. With them became secondaries and video game logic in tabletop games became the norm and was even embraced in later editions.
I'm an actual troony and I'd get a permanencied alter self or whatever and never think about it again. Maybe roll a couple of reincarnations later to avoid dispel fricking me over.
>and I'd get a permanencied alter self or whatever
In fairness: Rules As Written, this doesn't work in 3.PF, as Alter Self isn't something that can be subject to the Permanency spell. It would require Polymorph Any Object,
https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/polymorphAnyObject.htm
The good news is that it should be pretty easy to get a Duration Factor of permanent since the changed subject is same the kingdom, same class, same size, related, and same intelligence (total DF of 13 and we only need a 9). But as an 8th level spell, and therefore requiring a spellcaster of at least 15th level, it is *expensive*. 1,200 gp per the official rules. This is gonna be outside the reach of most low-level characters who don't come from a noble background.
(in 5e it would require True Polymorph and, using the formula for spell costs extrapolated from the Adventurer's League, cost 810 gp, which is still outside the range of any non-noble background - and requires you to know where to find a spellcaster of at least 17th level to boot since True Polymorph is a 9th level spell).
Just want to add something to this: "I became an adventurer in order to break a terrible curse" is a classic adventurer motivation. I don't see why a quest to change sex wouldn't naturally fall under that.
>don't see why a quest to change sex wouldn't naturally fall under that.
Because I don't want trannies in my games in the first place because I agree with neither their politics nor their existence. They can have valid reasons for adventuring some reason other way, but I don't want their brain rot in my games, period, and I'm willing to abuse and hurt as many people as necessary to ensure that happens.
Normies.
My penis.
The worst thing that happened to d&d was that 3.5 was so flexible and coincided with the burst of the internet. In doing so it led to every half assed piece of schlock setting and rules to come into existence which just poisoned the community well - everything became about balance and avoiding hurt feelings.
The big bang theory and Im not even memeing
That show has done more damage to the ttrpg scene than critical role ever has
gay autosage is gay