We are entering the last days of Dungeons & Dragons, 5th edition. Yes, I know that Wizards of the Coast wants you to believe that the 2024 edition is not a new edition of the game, but everything we’ve seen indicates a significant overhaul of the player-facing mechanics of the game.
It’s still compatible, in that way in which AD&D 1E was compatible with AD&D 2E, and Basic D&D (Holmes, Moldvay, or Mentzer), but you’re going to have to make adjustments.
The real question is whether this new edition of the game will continue on the trajectory of success of the old. I have a suspicion that the current era has peaked, and it’s going to still do well, but not at the levels of its peak years.
How successful is the current edition? Amazingly. It’s sold more Player’s Handbooks than any other edition – by a significant margin. There are a bunch of idiots in the OSR who still think the game was bigger in the old days. They’re wrong.
My suspicion that the game has peaked is not based on any concrete evidence, and is entirely a feeling based on my reaction to current products. Personally, I think D&D was in a real creative streak through 2014 through 2017. But following that, the wheels began to fall off. Individual products could still be of worth, but there was a lot of energy that dissipated – in my view and that of others – afterwards.
Xanathar’s Guide to Everything is a fantastic product. Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything? Disappointing.
My own chief interest has always been the adventures. And, though I took a break from the official line due to covid, I was back running three more recent releases – Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen, Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk, and, currently, Vecna: Eve of Ruin.
All three of those adventures are adequate, but have poor relationships with the existing lore of the game, and worse understanding of how to design an adventure.
Shadow of the Dragon Queen is the best in my estimation. It fumbles a lot of stuff, and has real trouble understanding anything beyond a linear storyline – an ongoing problem with Wizards adventures. But the bones are solid, and I had fun running it.
The Shattered Obelisk has moments of greatness, but once it comes up with a solid threat, fails to implement that in a way that is apparent to the players.
And I would like an adventure with Vecna in the name to have more Vecna in the adventure. I’m more up on it than some of my friends, but the Ravenloft section is Tier 1-level design in a Tier 3 dungeon.
Yes, it is hard to impress me with adventures. But it is also very true that I don’t expect perfection. I want to see ambition, and ambition getting close – if it doesn’t quite make it, that’s fine.
But what I see in Wizards’ recent adventure releases is mediocrity.
The new edition of Dungeons & Dragons will be fine. But, for me, it’s unlikely to be special.
Yeah, I basically agree with all of this. Tasha’s was really the turning point for me. There’s not been a single WotC release since that book that I haven’t taken issue with. My favourite semi-official stuff since then have been the Arcanum Worlds books that WotC has put out for Extra Life – Minsc & Boo’s Journal of Villainy and the Chains of Asmodeus adventure. It’s not surprising the team behind the OG Baldur’s Gate games can deliver good books, but it’s disappointing when they’re so much better than what the actual D&D team is producing.
I’ll be curious to see if quality improves once 5.5 is out and presumably less of the team’s resources are spent on it, but frankly I’m surprised they didn’t go back to outsourcing adventures during development because you’re absolutely right that the adventures coming out during this period have been really lackluster.
This was spot on. I place the milestone on ToA. Everything went downhill from that point on: adventures, sourcebooks, content, writing, every aspect of the game.
On a side note, one of the original Vecna adventures, “Die Vecna Die” was also a textbook low-level dungeoncrawl disguised as a high level adventure. It was abysmal.
One of these days I’ll get around to reading my copy of Die Vecna Die! – I have run Vecna Lives! and was surprised how well it played.