this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
184 points (95.1% liked)

Dungeons and Dragons

10988 readers
1 users here now

A community for discussion of all things Dungeons and Dragons! This is the catch all community for anything relating to Dungeons and Dragons, though we encourage you to see out our Networked Communities listed below!

/c/DnD Network Communities

Other DnD and related Communities to follow*

DnD/RPG Podcasts

*Please Follow the rules of these individual communities, not all of them are strictly DnD related, but may be of interest to DnD Fans

Rules (Subject to Change)

Format: [Source Name] Article Title

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 47 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Definitely gonna get enshittified

[–] CosmoNova 27 points 9 months ago

I despise Tencent and the general business model of just buying up shit, but worse than Hasbro? Tencent played quite the part in BG3‘s making (By buying 30% of Larian years ago to keep cash flowing) and everyone loves it. They usually let western companies do as they please. If anything Hasbro selling it is yet another proof of why they shouldn‘t have it in the first place. And if WotC had anything left of a spine they would try to buy themselves free but that sure as hell is not going to happen because they do not care.

[–] Hrothgar59 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)

That would be anything produced after 3.5. The brand has been going down for a long time. That's not to say there is nothing good in the current 5e, just for me it seems like it lost its soul with corporate oversight.

[–] chemical_cutthroat 21 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I moved to Pathfinder 2e and I couldn't be happier. The only issue I have is that one of my players is Mercer-coded (is that a thing?) and really hates any time a skill, class, or spell isn't a 1:1 copy of DnD. He recently grabbed Bane as part of a feat for his barbarian and learned it isn't the same as DnD Bane and had a meltdown.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (2 children)

That sounds like a miserable person to play with

[–] chemical_cutthroat 10 points 9 months ago

We're all close friends outside of the game and we are all used to each other's quirks. It's a pain sometimes, but he does genuinely enjoy the game, though. He'd only played 2 campaigns of DnD before-hand (Strahd and Frostmaiden), but has listened to every episode of Critcal Role. I decided to homebrew a full 1-20 campaign for the group as an introduction to Pathfinder so we could all (GM included) get a taste for it across the entire span of character growth, and it's been a learning experience for us all.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I don't understand why being mercer-coded would make them hate anything not dnd, mercer plays various systems when his friends do oneshots, and knows several systems.

He seems like an asshole though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Mercer as in a merchant of textiles? I guess that's wrong but it would be hilarious if textile merchants are famous for that behaviour :D

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

4e was D&D for people who would rather be playing WoW.

5e is a watered-down anemic shadow of 3.5.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

That's a common way of putting down 4e, but it's not so. I have no interest whatsoever in WoW but I really liked 4e. 4e's approach was to build a very consistent and rigorously-defined framework for the game, and then build its various elements (classes, monsters, abilities, etc.) strictly within that framework. I think it actually hit a very nice sweet spot; the framework was sufficiently flexible that a huge amount of interesting and distinctive content could be made, but it was also well-defined enough and simple enough to understand and apply that everything "just worked." You could play as a fighter for a whole bunch of levels and then pick up a completely different character sheet for a wizard and you'd find that most of the mechanics worked the same. Combat was very positional, with lots of abilities that allowed you to set other players up for success, which encouraged teamwork and player interaction.

It annoys me greatly that WotC tried to set the system up to be dependent on their online tools, failed, and then tore the tools down to leave the wreckage largely unplayable. I can still play a 3.5e campaign just as easily as I did back in the day but it'd be rather hard to play 4e as easily even though I still have the books. The best tools were WotC-owned and they don't allow third parties to fill the void they left when they decided to transition to 5e - presumably to avoid another Pathfinder situation.

[–] seejur 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I actually quite like the 5th edition, since it simplifies some of the most convoluted/boring areas of the 3rd edition.

Also coming after the 4th edition might have helped quite a bit in the perception

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

You say simplified, I say dumbed down.

But yeah 4e didn't say an especially high bar.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They're going to abuse their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves?

[–] darganon 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

That word with a very specific meaning is popping up everywhere and used as "made worse" and it's grating.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Language is fluid. Nothing new.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Sure, but that doesn't mean we can't complain about the directions the fluid is flowing. In this case a specialized term for something that didn't previously have a popular term describing it has been rapidly diluted to mean "bad change I don't like." So that thing doesn't have a specialized term any more, which hampers discourse.

[–] agitatedpotato 2 points 9 months ago

The perils of language in the modern age, most people are not smart, and once a new word gets popular enough the majority of people using it will resemble the majority of society, ie, not smart people.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The thing is, "enshitification" was never defined as "abusing their business customers to claw back all the value for themselves". That's merely one of the stages that Doctorow outlined as part of the enshitification process.

Enshitification, as a whole, is the process of stripping value from a product or service from everyone except for shareholders.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

It's a specific process, though. It's the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. Dungeons and Dragons doesn't have that sort of structure, and that's not the sort of quality decrease that the people who are using "enshittification" are talking about.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

We'll just say 'shitted up' from now on.