Again, don’t really care and was just going with the thread. If they don’t then yay for them. Someone asked what the video was about and what I meant and I said what the impact would be.
Actually anything that is not specifically updated is rules legal in 3.5 by following the conversion guides. Many 3.0 prestige classes and spells are still usable in 3.5 (Spelldancer is, to this day, a staple of many of my caster builds, even considering the extreme feat cost for entry).
In any case, not very likely. 5th Edition has been a system that has served only to infuriate me anytime I run into its many, many limitations - attunement, extreme overuse of the otherwise clever Concentration mechanic by putting it on way too many spells, lack of bonus spell slots for high ability scores, and various other limitations including the extreme lack of content (which leads to a severe lack of options for character builds and concepts). 3.5 was the current edition for half as long as 5th edition has been out, and 1/5th the books have been published for 5e, not counting adventures; there are over 100 books that are not adventures for 3.5, and about 20 for 5th edition as far as I can find. I find it unlikely they’re planning to reverse course and go back to the good old days of producing more content and less limitations.
This, in addition to Hasbro’s fucking around with the OGL (and I understand they’re doing it again now, a little more subtly) means the only WOTC products I’ll ever purchase from now on are the occasional reprints/digital editions of old 1st, 2nd, and 3rd/3.5 books, should they choose to publish some of them, in their unaltered form. I have zero confidence in them doing any corrections or even a fresh round of errata for them, so if they’re changed at all, even just to fix mistakes, I still doubt I’ll purchase such reprints.
Yep, WotC did that on purpose. In 3.5 once you got past a certain level, martial characters were useless, and served only as meat shields for the casters. No longer.
After Xanathars and tashas, not to mention other books and on line sources- there are plenty of player options.
You mean where a company leaked a draft, the fans hated it, so they not only pulled back but apologized? Not to mention the OGL is a free gift.
You can buy a digital code that links back the WotC ecosystem. You cannot buy a PDF of their books.
Yeah, I think there’s only one WotC 5e book that came out as a PDF and it’s an early non-core book. Some adventure book or setting guide.
Not from WotC, no, but since it is open system, several folks have done one. Just search.
Anecdote time!
I had a… friend is the wrong word, probably competitor or irritant in a gaming group back in the 3.5 days. We were probably too similar in temperament and had a hard time cooperating. Anyway, 3.5 was his first exposure to D&D (he would have been about 5-10 years younger than I) and while he enjoyed playing, he never bought books… but he did pirate the hell out of them.
And for the next 4-5 years, long after I stopped playing in groups with him (best for all concerned) that was his style - he loved everything about various RPGs, loved the sense of adventure, power, etc, that many of us also love, but didn’t want to invest his money in them, when it was so easy to find it online.
Which became a massive irony when he decided to borrow quite a bit of money and live the dream of opening his own gaming shop. And he loved that as well, loved people coming in to talk shop, play games in the side room, and look through the newest stuff.
But… most of the people who came in were a lot like him. They’d talk about their passions, look at what was new and cool, take the great gaming space, but they rarely bought anything. And less than a year later, his store was gone.
NOW DON’T GET ME WRONG, I am not white knighting for the poor corporate overlords as Hasbro, or even the remaining core staff at WotC. One of the reasons piracy is such a thing for the content is that a lot of it is IMHO totally overpriced - they know their audience and want to make sure ever rules lawyer (
) buys their own copy to better min-max, or avoid having to share, or just to have the resources to one day become a DM/GM, not just a player.
But if all you want to do is have fun, having to invest a lot isn’t always attractive. A la Carte seems to be A fix, but not one that would appeal to me at least. But as been said before in thread, I don’t think Hasbro is aiming at the board’s demographic, most of which probably has all their 1st-4th edition hardcopy manuals, possible () held together with duct-tape and hope, along with files of old characters.
We can and will continue to use old, homebrewed, altered or otherwise pre-invested versions of games until we fall over dead. We may be written off as a spent demographic, correctly or not, so the emphasis is on hooking new fans, with new techniques, and of course monetizing the hell out of them.
Good? Bad? I don’t know, I’m indifferent for the reasons mentioned upthread. But while I realize I’m not the target, overall I prefer that the game and hobby continue in one form or another, which means I acknowledge the need to make money, and hope that the current owners don’t squeeze so hard that they kill the game for a generation, the way 2nd ED seemed to with it’s endless series of sub rules and excess of expensive boxed settings.
What exactly are we doing here?
Is a person who has made a YouTube channel dedicated to D&D gaming really a hater?
5e is not “open source” in that anyone can just replicate the official rulebooks. It allows players to use the framework of the game including most spells to create their own publishable content. From the SRD FAQ:
Why does the SRD only have one background and one feat? Why do the PC races not include all of the subraces?
The goal of the SRD is to allow users to create new content, not to replicate the text of the whole game. We encourage players, DMs, and publishers to come up with their own backgrounds and feats.Why is the SRD missing some spells, magic items, and monsters?
In general, the criteria for what went into the SRD is if it (1) was in the 3E SRD, (2) has an equivalent in 5th edition D&D, and (3) is vital to how a class, magic item, or monster works. For example, the 3E SRD has the delay poison spell, but in 5th edition that’s handled by the protection from poison spell, so protection from poison is in the SRD.
If someone is selling a PDF of the rulebooks, either just scanned pages or “rewriting” it complete with the various races, subclasses, full spell list, etc then they’re just bootlegging it in violation of the SRD. That such a thing would sell on Amazon doesn’t mean much since Amazon famously sells all sorts of bootleg and counterfeit garbage.
That said, I couldn’t actually find such a thing when I briefly looked now; just the option to buy a D&D Beyond key as a Players Handbook purchase option. No PDFs or other digital distribution.
There’s a reason why gaming stores make most of their money off M:tG and Pokemon cards. Even among players fully willing to buy physical copies from a local store, there’s only so many books to buy, especially if you only play and don’t DM. Maybe add in a set or two of dice and a mini but you run out of things you need pretty quickly and aren’t going to making weekly purchases each time you drop in.
When I bought my first Player’s Handbook in 1989 it was $18.00. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s inflation calculator that is approximately $45.00 in today’s money. The full retail price of the 2014 D&D Player’s Handbook is about $50.00. I don’t think most WotC products, or role playing games in general, are overpriced at all.
And when I bought a new book (my biggest vice, and therefore used was a preference) around then a paperback was 3.99-4.99. Hardcovers were out of my price range as a teen, but IIRC they were normally 2-3 times that. So each person is going to define expensive differently.
But I’ll agree and disagree again. First, you’re correct, that if all you’re buying is the PHB or the equivalent in other systems, it’s not unbearably expensive. But, let’s be honest, those are the gateway drugs of the TT-RPG world. If you ever move past the casual stage, you’ll be buying ever thinner, ever more OP supplements until the end of time. And that’s just as a -player-. As a DM, it very quickly spirals into serious investment of either time (you home-brew everything) or money in monster manuals, maps, supplements, compendiums of spells and partially created content that you then modify, and on and on.
When I last played heavily in 3.5, my gaming backpack was heavier than the backpack I used in Junior high where the lockers were all but unusably far from my classes!
Now, counter, compared to a lot of other hobbies, it isn’t unbearable, I mean everything from golf to target shooting have far greater initial and operating expense, but especially things like modules are often very thin on material for a premium price - what you’re saving is again, time and effort.
And don’t get me started on -branded- variants. OMFG, during the 3.5 era when I was also playing a fair bit of Star Wars D20, you were looking at a manual that was 40-50% lightly modified D20, 30-40% publicly “known” information about the universe, and maybe 10-20% truly needed unique stuff. But because of the Lucas Licensing, every manual that came out had nearly a flat $10 surcharge above and beyond any other D&D/D20 branded thing.
Still, all my complaints are that, complaints. And you’re still basically correct - if you play primarily, and especially if you play only a single game, it’s not a terrible experience cost-wise. Probably better than most honestly. But the more you’re involved, the more you branch out, the more it adds up.
It’s not overpriced though. Given the quality of the RPG books produced today, $50 is a perfectly reasonable price. In my experience, the gamers who pirate their material are doing it because they can not because they can’t afford it. Like most Dopers, I’m a cranky old SOB, and at no point in my long gaming history have I considered the hobby as a whole to be overpriced. And I’m saying that as someone who is typically the GM and purchases a lot of books. (If you want to talk about overpriced let me introduce you to my Games Workshop collection.)
Then we disagree. No big deal. For me, looking at D&D especially, seeing multiple releases of “new” material that is often 60-70% recycled and updated prior material at full price is excessive. Or in the case of, say, 3.5, 90+% recycled. Things that could have been a free or $5 errata pamphlet nearly.
Which brings us back to (some) of the reports about 6th Edition. Will it be a truly new system? Will it be basically 5.5? Will it be a pivot to an predominantly online experience for gaming? I don’t know, but I do know it almost certainly won’t be for me.
Once again, YMMV.
Same. Gaming is a hobby where you essentially spend as much as you want to spend. You can play it basically for free with (legit) downloadable rules, a dice app and some imagination or you can spend a bajillion dollars on 3D battle terrain, mammoth ivory d20s and every book printed.
They’ve been clear that it’s essentially 5.5. Same basic rule framework but with stuff cleaned up, some new options, things revised for modern sensibilities (racial stuff, etc) and other things like that. But it’s intended to be compatible with 5e.
I will not be buying it. I still prefer 2nd edition. Change is bad.
Somebody said the new 5e PHB was overpriced, so I looked around- PF2 is more expensive, and Gurps, Call of Cthulhu and similar hardcover books were about the same.
But they ain’t cheap, that’s for sure.
Games workshop OTOH is overpriced, and they gleefully admitted gouging their American customers in an interview once.
As someone who is only loosely familiar with D&D and rpgs in general can someone please explain to me what exactly people mean when they talking how “crunchy” a game is? I NOT familiar with THAT term in this context.
Broadly, degree of rule complexity, with a concomitant increase in ways to manipulate the rule system. For example, Pathfinder, a very “high crunch” system, has a very complicated system for assigning bonuses in the game - bonuses can come from a lot of different sources, and bonuses of the same kind don’t stack with each other. It’s very complicated, but if you understand it, you can pull in bonuses from a lot of different sources to make a very powerful character. D&D 5e is lower crunch - instead of having a bunch of different bonus types, bonuses usually come in the form of “rolling with advantage,” where you roll twice and take the best result, and you can only get advantage once on any given roll. This is much easier to learn and play, but gives fewer opportunities to figure out cool combinations of effects to get a really strong outcome.
Think of crunch as the dials and buttons you have to manipulate to play the game. Crunchier games have more stats to track, more dice to roll, more math to consider, etc.
In a game without much crunch, you might say “I attack the monster” and roll a single die against a single number (your attack skill, say) no matter the context.
In an extremely crunchy game, you might have to account for armor, range, ammunition, your exhaustion level, your relative move speeds, environmental hazards, initiative order, weapon type, magical effects, class features, race features, subclass features, buffs, debuffs, tactical positioning, etc etc etc.
5e D&D is probably on the lower end of mid-range when it comes to crunch.