I liked 4e for what it was. I wouldn't go back to it though.
/s
I guess it depends on how you define "quality", but yeah - it's actually very common for hugely popular things to not be very sophisticated or critically acclaimed.
Like, no one is ever going to argue a McDonald's burger is a particularly good burger, but dammit if they don't sell millions upon millions of them.
All depends on the metric you're employing, and often it's easy to skew things one way or the other by simple implicit bias - like ignoring cost, for example (very popular), or focusing entirely on one "quality" characteristic while ignoring others.
Remember: to the movie industry, a "good" film is often the one that makes the most profit :P
Of those 3 only Critical Role is exclusively D&D5E (at least as far as the actual campaigns), GCP is mostly Pathfinder 1E (and now starting to move into 2E), AZ is mostly 5E with a little bit of other systems.
I only mention it because, while it won't have a huge effect on the listeners enjoyment, there are some mechanical differences between the systems to keep in mind for people planning on eventually playing in their own campaigns.
“The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand. We listen to reply,” Stephen Covey.
I think i just kind of outgrew D&D and the type of game it represents, but boy was Planescape fun back in the day! Even with bad rules it just had so many interesting ideas and concepts.
My personal D&D is and always will be Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment. Yes they're very specific slices of very specific and very modified rule sets - but that's what D&D is to me, not the Pnp weirdness of the n-th iteration.
Besides, at this point it's probably important to distinguish between the lore and the mechanics anyway - the film is likely to focus heavily on the WORLD of D&D, while people playing it have to engage with the mechanics of it, which likely won't feature much in the film. I do expect them to add a nod or two; maybe someone rolls an actual die and it lands on a 20 (or 1) or something, or we have some counter-intuitive behavior that's a veiled allusion to some abstruse mechanic. But it'll be a small, momentary thing.
How to destroy a MOVIE thread with endless and pointless drivel on an unimportant related topic in a franchise known for its wide berth on implementation imagination.
Courtesy of Syegfryed.
/spit@Blizzard
Dude the discussion ended a while ago, you brought back and are derailing it, read the room
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For each his own i suppose, i do like, that tieflings are devil people, what i don't like, is that they stop there, demon and yugoloth tiefling should be a subrace by now, but the abyssal tiefling UA never came to pass
Quality wise a lot of the supplements were excellent too. Fun reads, useful stuff, great settings to use. Of course, they did too many and then hit a slump and then 3e came along and the game exploded into a billion companies with a trillion settings. 4e was just never to my liking, though the DM makes the game, so the campaigns we had were fun enough I suppose. 5e is nice enough, but the shift about a year ago really seems to be going down hill, so guess we'll see how it ends up (especially with a 5.5e thing in the process I suppose).
I'm curious about new Spelljammer, due in 2 weeks or thereabouts, but hard to say if they'll capture that moment in time.
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The real wierd thing is how aasimar are just an afterthought. I guess maybe tieflings were popular with folks, but no one locally cared about them in the least. Warlock also "made the cut", but was never really played with anyone I know until 5e.
I like Chris Pine, not sure if he'll be the best fit for this movie, but everyone else seemed great. The main thing that bugs me is the whole "we're thieves" speech. No adventurer ever called themselves thieves, no matter how many graves we robbed and orc dens we looted.
"I only feel two things Gary, nothing, and nothingness."
downhill? from what i saw 5e is going uphigh, from the top of my head ravenloft and Fizban were amazing books, Tasha, while not quite xanathar quality, was great, and motm also was heavily necessary, most of the changes were saw as positive and high acclaimed, despite some people in reddit.
On Settings, Eberron, Exandria and even the MTG ones were good, Eberron is by far, my favorite, and Theroes was a damn useful book for DMs.
With the recent UA we might as well get planescape after spelljammer, so i don't think we are going downhill...
As someone that grew up with the D&D cartoon but never getting to really play any P&P rpg, this looks fun and way better that the early 2000's one with Mr Irons. Would have been nice if the group had a Gnome/Halfling but that trope has been done to death.
"Would you please let me join your p-p-party?