Originally Posted by
Oracle_Hunter
QFT
If there's one thing I've learned from playing RPGs is that if I buy a game, I want it to be one I couldn't have made myself.
I am not a team of professional (read: paid) game developers with a cadre of artists and veteran roleplayers; they should have ideas of their own that they can develop and implement on their own. At the moment, all that the 5e development seems to consist of is The Internet and some guys with a stack of old D&D books cribbing ideas and mechanics and slapping them together into a single book. Not only could I do that, I've seen what those games look like -- pick up any random "fix" of 3.x and you have it. Hobbyists put them together with the input of The Internet and regardless of your opinions on such games it is true that they did not require the resources of WotC to make them.
Has WotC had some good, even innovative, ideas in 5e? Yes -- Expertise Dice and their modular character design were at least novel attempts to grapple with the WotC D&D framework. But those ideas were just jumping-off points: they're not enough to build an entire system around. Yet WotC isn't spending their time developing those mechanics or even introducing new ones. Instead, they are sending out surveys and polishing the skeleton instead of adding meat to the bones.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: WotC is abandoning (at their peril!) their strengths as a game development company and is instead trying to retread the ideas that were popular during their first big hit -- 3.0. Appealing to nostalgia might get you some money in the bank, but it is invariably the death knell of a franchise.
Re: D&D 5th Edition: Thread #7
