See, I think this is wrong. People didn't, in fact, stick with D&D at the point where Pathfinder launched. Pathfinder was (relative to the third party RPG market) a huge success. And 4e D&D was objectively a failure in the market (though sure, it sold more than Pathfinder).

Where Wizards won was with the 5e rules. And the 5e rules are better than Pathfinder in fundamental ways that lead to higher sales and more player satisfaction.

And the reason is that 5e is, really for the first time since the Holmes Basic Set of 1978, accessible to the mass market. Kids like D&D again! Prior to covid, I ran a 2-year campaign for my 10-12 year old son and a bunch of his friends and they loved it. Some of them are hooked hard now. Likewise, couples play 5e; random groups in offices. You can watch people play it on the internet, and apparently that's a big thing too. There are communities of women and queer folks plugging a game that used to be associated mostly with unwashed cloistered incels.

It's a straightforward, easy game that gets out of the way and exposes the actual fun part of in-person RPGs to people who would never have had the patience to read through the tomes full of prestige classes and feats that 3.x/Pathfinder require.

Basically: with 5e WotC finally got back to the promise we all saw in the early 80's. Pathfinder is a fine game, but it's really just trying to hang on to a player culture from 2004 that doesn't have a lot of growth in it.

In the same way that "pro-life" does not literally mean anyone who is in favor of life generally, I think you're misusing that term, which refers to a particular culture that did not exist in 1978 or even 2004. Come on, somebody has to defend 80s nerds. ;)

It was only when 5th edition came out and it became popularized in the mainstream that WotC regained its seeming ascendency.

And I get it, 5th edition is much more streamlined and accessible than its predecessors (not that they were Fate-level challenging or anything).

Tangentially, I think 4th edition and now 5th edition lost a lot of the creative soul of earlier editions - the lore is much more heavily integrated with the rule set and feels a lot more prescriptive. but that could just be nostalgic bias as I grew up with 2ed.

This could be because I was involved with Living Greyhawk in 3rd edition, which was by its nature bound pretty strictly to RAW; or because I came into 5th edition when it was brand new and rules-barren. But I feel like they lifted a lot of restrictions in 5th edition. Example: alignment restrictions on classes. These days I don't even play with alignments at all, but the chaotic good paladin of freedom that I rolled in 5th edition would explicitly contradict the 3rd edition rules. And spells that used to interact with alignments have now been rewritten to target more objective things like creature type instead.

I think part of it is just us getting older. DnD is one thing when you’re a bunch of 12 year olds eating cheetos in a basement, and it’s something else when you’re a bunch of 30-somethings with families and jobs carving 4 hours out of a Sunday afternoon. It helps to have a more well-defined and approachable game.

That said, the 5e material does feel much more narrowly focused on creating “adventures” rather than creating a world. Like the 3e books had rules for buying a castle and hiring guards for it. Even if no one really did that, just its presence in the book indicated possibilities outside of “run this printed campaign set in the forgotten realms”.

3e was the first open core version (and the first version designed from the ground up at WotC, rather than pre-WotC TSR), and WotC learned a lot about the first/third-part split and what worked well in core/supplement split between 3e and 5e.

What they had for this in the core in 3e wasn’t really adequate for people who wanted rules for it (and there was a first-party supplement for it). By 5e, this kind of subsystem isn’t the kind of thing that they really do much in first-party supplements, but there is prominent third-party support leveraging the open-core nature of 5e (a feature it shares with 3e):

https://shop.mcdmproductions.com/products/strongholds-follow...

I know that it’s not that you can’t buy a castle in 5e, and a big part of the game is grokking that the rules aren’t a list of what you can do, but how. But finding that section of the book as a kid was a real imagination kickstarter. Having it in there was just fun, even if the actual rule was clumsy and would’ve been better as a fleshed out supplement.

I really am a fan of 5e, and have been having a lot of fun running it. I wouldn’t go back to 3e (or AD&D for that matter, which was a little bit before my time), but the kitchen sink approach in 3e had a kind of charm that I could see people missing in the new, more coherent material.

I have the same feeling; I had it with 4e as well. I can see why, given that the target audience is much wider and, as you point out, often has much tighter time constraints. I can't even begin to estimate how many hours I spent as a teenager doing world building for our D&D campaign (which started with 1st Edition Advanced D&D), hours I couldn't possibly spend today.

5th is finally starting to get some better flavor, however, now taht 3rd parties, and WotC seem to be filling in the gaps. Goodman Games has a line of reissued classic adventures, like Castle Amder and Barrier Peaks, and these books are fabulous. They're updated for 5e, so they offer that old school charm in 5e rules.

Additionally, 5e has so little in the way of specializations and customizations for characters, but that's being cleared up in the newest official D&D book, Tasha's Caldron of Everything. It's got a bunch of specialized subclasses, like the Bladesinger, and a lot of more flavorful text and items to go with your campaigns.

I feel like 5e started off kinda bland, but has been becoming significantly more fleshed out and living over time. And that makes sense: it takes time to add to these worlds.

Oh, also, Kobold Press' Tome of Beasts 1 & 2 are also fantastic 5e books. Great monsters.

In any case, Dungeon Crawl Classics[1] is like a mainlining RPG nostalgia. It's the one product that put me in the back of the bus with my 4th grade buddies working their way through the Caves of Chaos. The art, rules and just general vibe are so Old School metal, you can practically hear Zeppelin playing in the background.

Magic is uncertain and rare, and death in DCC is the natural result of real danger. Encounters are not gradually scaled to fit the current Challenge Rating of the party. Can't say enough about how much fun this game is. Great community too.

[1] https://goodman-games.com/dungeon-crawl-classics-rpg/

IMO 5e isn't engaging in the right ways -- characters, and combat, become the primary context everything revolves around, and the dungeon itself falls to the wayside. Both because it's fairly easy, and encourages the DM to not kill you (even subtly, like the absurdly time-consuming character generation), so there's little reason to see the dungeon itself as a threat, and a tool. Skills get so minutely defined that even if you have a novel strategy, your character background strongly defines whether you can execute it (to the point that it's much easier to fall into standard patterns, and the dungeon is so nonthreatening that you can continue to do so indefinitely).

There's simply too little freedom and leeway in how you approach things, defining so many rules and contexts its not worth the trouble to continuously do novel things, but at the same time so expansive that it takes ages to get anything done. And the rules largely slow down the most uninteresting parts of the game -- standard combat, basic activities (leaping caverns and such), standard communication with NPCs, etc.

I mean its slow. The ruleset is fundamentally and ridiculously slow.

Pick a target background, race, and class, and race, spend a few seconds rolling or assigning stats, pick a handful of options from your race, class, and background, and maybe buy a little custom gear (though the default for class and background often has you covered).

5e chargen is usually lightning fast, even with a non-first-level start, unless you are creating your character by doing something like original optimized level 20 theorycraft. Which is probably a waste of time, even if you are dedicated to min/maxing, because someone's probably done the theorycraft you want online and you can just look it up.

The DM my group plays with has no issue killing off PCs, we're level 4 and have had 3 deaths across our party of 4 so far. (Two for the same player!).

DCC, which I've been playing and running for a while, is lethal in comparison. Which is a mark against it for many people, but my group loves it. We don't have a death a week, but we had several deaths over the past year. The threat changes the play style versus what we saw with 5e where it just felt like PCs couldn't die unless the DM went out of their way to create an excessive challenge that bordered on a forced TPK scenario.

You might just be too good at the game for usually appropriate encounters. My group's having a blast, and we've come to rely on all that healing to push our luck: jumping into more dangerous encounters, building our characters more for story and less for optimization, being able to play even when two of the five can't make it (usually the healer). If imagine newer players also need that healing, even when they're trying their hardest.

That's not to say you're wrong for not liking 5e. If it's too easy for you, then it's too easy. You could try to account for that by using tougher or more monsters, but that makes balancing encounters harder for the DM.

That's not to say the current situation is bad but it definitely sounds very different

Well, compared to the “classic” versions (through, oh, AD&D/2e), 5e’s handling of cantrips and assignment of hit dice to classes make the primary casters more active and less like eggshells at low levels, and healing outside of “healer” character abilities is much more generous by default (but there is also, in the books, a simple option that makes it grittier reverses all of that except the not-eggshells parts, by increasing the time for “short rests” and “long rests” which are key for both healing and spell recovery.) Also, I feel like lots of tables by people who come from older versions underuse exhaustion.

But this is one of the great things of this hobby:

1. There are thousands of systems to select from.

2. No one forces you to play it RAW.

3. If you do want RAW, you can probably find a system that works for you.

The most important parts are: what's fun and conveys the sense you want for the game; agreeing on the rules (either RAW or house) with some consistency (What do you mean I can't jump down 10'? You let him jump off a 50' cliff without getting hurt just last week!).

https://olddungeonmaster.com/2014/08/30/bounded-accuracy/

The TL;DR is that AC/attack bonuses/saving throws/save DCs used to scale a lot more than they do now. The upshot of this change as a DM is that you can plan out encounters differently. Feel like your first-level characters aren't getting enough of a workout? Throw a CR 3 or 4 encounter at them. I ran Curse of Strahd as my very first 5th Edition campaign, and there was an encounter at the end of the early section where I'm like, they already lost one character earlier in the dungeon, this is a straight-up TPK. But they handled it fine, although they used about a day's worth of abilities/spells that recharge with a long rest in a single encounter. That's where I started to get a much better feel for how encounter balance works in 5e.

I felt the same way about 4e: overpowered early on, but underpowered (compared to earlier editions) at higher levels. It basically felt like playing a party of 30th-level characters wasn't all that different from playing a party of 1st-level characters.

I think that's it: the stakes are too low. You don't have to ration your spells, there are few constraints, and your investment in your character is so great it's customer abuse to write them out of the story. Which is not say I don't get attached to my DCC guys.

This is the biggest issue I've run into with some individuals/groups, and one thing DCC really helped with (for them). Character creation in DCC take about 5 minutes, if that. 6x3d6, assign to stats in order, roll on a few more tables, spend your starting coin, ok let's go. It got several people over their hatred/fear of PC death even in our non-DCC games. I'm starting up a Call of Cthulhu game (which is very rough on PC health, both physical and mental) and there's more effort needed to create characters and much more invested in each character, but now that their fear is gone the game should be more enjoyable. Even with the possibility of characters disappearing in the night or losing their minds and becoming useless.

The later editions have much more general audiences from much different generations than those early ones, and so the game changes - and that's not a bad thing. Buuuut, combine that with the impetus of a corporation to make their product sanitary and palatable to that wide range of tastes, you end up with something bland and inoffensive.

edit: none of that is to say that I think 5ed is a bad game, it's not, it's just different in kind and in philosophy to the earlier editions.

I think that’s true in a superficial way that helps people new to it get into it, but I also think the core is more streamlined and easily adaptable than the earlier versions (particularly the pre-3e versions), and there’s quite a diversity of different-setting-and-flavor options in the core (primarily, in the DMG), and a good diversity of both generic tools and specific built settings and reusable setting elements, both first- and third-party, so even if the core doesn’t push as hard for “build it yourself”, the support for that is as good as earlier editions.

I don't particularly want to learn 5.0, but I'm feeling I might be forced to if I want to join/start any current games...

My friends and I still play AD&D (run by a couple of the guys), or OSR systems if run by myself and the other guys. I've played 5e and 4e, but never felt like it was forced on me, because, you know, I own books for other systems and so do my friends. And since I didn't enjoy 4e, I just dropped that game. I haven't played 5e since the playtest days, but with OSR systems out there that already covered the same terrain, it held no appeal to me or my group.

But it manages to avoid, IMO, the super-metagamey feel of 4e.

Here's 3.5th Edition magic missile: https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magicMissile.htm

Here's the same spell in 5th Edition: http://5e.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magicMissile.htm

Very similar. The 5th Edition version is a bit simpler to read/understand, but frankly if you sit there at the table and think you're casting the 3rd Edition magic missile you will get it right 8 times out of 10.

And then on page 20 of this quickstart rules, you can see the 4e magic missile, which is a very different spell altogether: https://issuu.com/biggerstaffhosting/docs/quickstartrules

I'm not sure I would characterize 1st Edition AD&D as "less complex". In many ways the evolution of the D&D ruleset has consisted of removing unnecessary complexity to make the game easier to manage. For example: a standardized simple formula for computing attack rolls instead of pages and pages of "to hit" tables (I remember when bootleg copies of the tables in the 1st Edition DMG were passed around in my school because the book had just come out and not everyone had it yet); standardized experience points to gain each level instead of class-specific; a more standardized pattern to class progressions instead of a hodgepodge of ad hoc rules; standardized mechanics like skills and feats instead of class-specific ones.

Without going back and checking, wasn't PF a fork of the open core of D&D/3.5e?

> Perhaps more, because D&D 5 was in some ways (though not all) an explicit attempt to go back to earlier, less complex editions of D&D.

D&D/4e and 5e are pretty clearly the most simple versions outside of the simplified versions after OD&D and in parallel with AD&D (B/X, BECMI, Black Box, Rules Cyclopedia), and in many ways both newer versions are simpler so long as you only consider similar similar scope, though they have broader (but not a superset, because neither has domain management or divine ascension as a first-party subsystem, while BECMI has both and the Cyclopedia retains BECMI’s coverage of the former) scope.

5e seemed to be more an effort to restore flavor elements many perceived as lost from the very complex AD&D/1e through D&D/3e than to revert to simplicity lost (since the opposite was true) in 4e.

Yes, this is why it was often referred to (at the time at least) as 3.75. Mechanically, if you knew 3/3.5 you could almost jump in without looking at any rules in Pathfinder. It did change things around spells and classes (having its own being the biggest issue more than changes to the standard/common ones with 3/3.5).

I see someone's forgotten about weapon speed factors, weights measured in gold pieces, modifiers based on opponent's armor class, nonweapon proficiencies with different numbers of slots required, ranged being measured differently based on environment, round vs turn distinctions, and any number of other things.

It's just that that one system had a lot of moving parts. Every point of AC had to come from somewhere, everything had to be typed, and there's absolutely a lot of logic behind it, but instead of just AC, you've got touch AC (without the armor bonus), flat-footed AC (without the Dex bonus), etc.

They have different kinds of complexity. One is a patchwork of countless little subsystems that you can never all remember, and the other has one really big system that does everything.

Though the real complexity in D&D 3 is in the builds. A whole industry sprung up around figuring out new broken builds, what classes to dip for what bonus, etc. I think the easy multiclassing was a mistake.

(Despite having played RPGs since 1984, D&D 5 was the first D&D that I ever bought. I was mostly playing other systems.)

Thanks Internet Archive once again!

So, a brief history: Once Upon A Time there was TSR, which published two lines of D&D books, based on the original D&D: Dungeons and Dragons (which started with the Basic Set and added other sets over time) and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which got two editions. TSR went bankrupt and was bought by Wizards Of The Coast, which was flush with cash from the success of Magic: The Gathering. They put out a Third Edition for D&D, which unified both lines but kept the AD&D numbering, hence Third Edition. It was a rather thorough reworking of the rules to D&D -- everthing is unified around a central mechanic using d20 (20-sided dice, which is why the underlying rules are called the "d20 System"), which eliminates a bunch of tables and complexity. The game removed restrictions around what races could use what classes and got rid of a lot of the vestiges of old D&D, where "elf" was a character class in the same way that "thief" was. It introduced feats... essentially, D&D 3rd Edition was a new game compared to AD&D 2nd Edition. They bundled up a bunch of errata into what was awkardly called the "3.5th Edition" at some point down the line, and most books published for 3rd Edition were really 3.5th Edition books.

At the time, Wizards of the Coast did two things that are notable here:

1) They licensed a third-party company, Paizo, to publish the Dungeon and Dragon magazines. Paizo did a brisk business in these, driven in part by their popular "adventure paths." 2) They released a stripped down version of the core rulebooks, removing some "product identity" and some of the rules around character creation, as the System Reference Document, which was released under the Open Gaming License, basically an open source license for RPG materials. The point of the OGL/SRD was to allow people to publish third-party supplements for D&D. This _mostly_ went very well, but there were some releases that WotC was unhappy with, either because they were controversial (like the Book of Erotic Fantasy) or because they were not supplements for D&D but competing games using the d20 System that Wizards had built for D&D.

At the end of 3rd Edition, they announced a Fourth Edition, which was roughly as radical a departure from 3rd Edition as 3rd Edition was from AD&D 2nd Edition. They also revoked Paizo's license to publish material for D&D, and they decided that 4th Edition wouldn't be released under the OGL, and they released a much less useful "System Reference Document" under a much more restrictive license. Paizo's entire business at the time was D&D 3.5th Edition supplements, so this left them out in the cold. So what they did was release a new game, Pathfinder, based on the 3.5th Edition SRD, published under the OGL. The changes from 3.5th Edition to Pathfinder First Edition were pretty small, which led it to be nicknamed "3.75th Edition" by D&D players around the time of its release.

And, despite WoTC owning the rights to all of the trademarks -- all of the popular settings, NPCs, what have you -- Pathfinder outsold D&D 4th Edition. Because it was a lot more comfortable with what 3rd Edition players wanted from the game.

D&D 5th Edition basically throws out most of the changes from 4th Edition and goes back to a 3rd Edition base. It is streamlined from 3rd Edition, but if you have played 3rd Edition or Pathfinder and you want to play a 5th Edition game someone can teach you enough to start playing in about seven minutes.

The tradeoff is that 5th Edition has far fewer options to customize characters than 3rd Edition did, but is more streamlined and easier to adjudicate at the table. Pathfinder has retained much more of the spirit of 3rd Edition in the sense of giving a lot of options to customize characters. But neither of them is, in a rules sense, closer to AD&D than the other.