The-Magic-Sword
Small Ball Archmage
One thing I thought about a lot when I was listening to this, was that for the most part I agree with him, except I don't think that his "getting back to the basics" and anti-playing-for-rules ("why am I adding numbers as a barbarian!?") works very well for a significant portion of experienced players who don't have severe time constraints.
Which he said as much in terms of the existing market of the old 3.x players. But I think one thing is that new players don't stay new forever. Which is I think something thats been playing itself out for a while?
DND fandom spaces since before XGTE were essentially policing themselves in their desires-- just jump back to like, the mystic debate and you can see a lot of people arguing directly that other people need to cut out their expectations to stop the game from growing the beard.
In that sense, they did "err on the side of being too accessible" but in such a backloaded way that I think we're only now seeing it play out. Specifically, I think they erred by letting that tone overtake the whole product line, instead of just the core.
Homebrew and Third Party has been acting as a pressure valve for that sentiment.
Also, kinda related-- its weird to me that systems oriented players are characterized as such a small possible demographic, my sense is that they're damn everywhere and games that cater to them in the broader games space do really well.
Which he said as much in terms of the existing market of the old 3.x players. But I think one thing is that new players don't stay new forever. Which is I think something thats been playing itself out for a while?
DND fandom spaces since before XGTE were essentially policing themselves in their desires-- just jump back to like, the mystic debate and you can see a lot of people arguing directly that other people need to cut out their expectations to stop the game from growing the beard.
In that sense, they did "err on the side of being too accessible" but in such a backloaded way that I think we're only now seeing it play out. Specifically, I think they erred by letting that tone overtake the whole product line, instead of just the core.
Homebrew and Third Party has been acting as a pressure valve for that sentiment.
Also, kinda related-- its weird to me that systems oriented players are characterized as such a small possible demographic, my sense is that they're damn everywhere and games that cater to them in the broader games space do really well.
