Looking back at thoughts and speculations four years ago on what would be in '6e' in this the age of 5.5e and one of the first lines held true - 5e indeed had road ahead of it. There was no official fork but the work is being done to let 5e and 5.5e run at the same table.
We've seen a notch up in power for the 5.5e stuff - I'm going to take a stab and say it'll be worth maybe a half level to a level. You will be able to use a rule of thumb like for Pathfinder vs 3.5e and say that a 5.5e party could take on a 5e challenge that is on paper a level above them. Game structure wise so far it is the same thing as 5e, no significant mechanical changes like addition of social encounters or the like.
Beyond that the only thing I have seen as a change is that more folk are turning up to our open table games with characters on D&D Beyond on their phones. Which is a thing, because the network sucks and we have no wifi at either of our locations we use but we have figured out the workaround is load everything outside then come in and it will run on your phone throughout.
Appetite for digital games is not coming across on our forum - admitedly we are dedicated to running in-person games but we do not even see people coming in *asking* after digital sessions which I find telling. Most of the DMs are running a pretty analogue operation - they might have a laptop or tablet with digital books on it or D&D Beyond but I am not seeing anything like virtual tabletops or any of that. I will be intrigued to see how/if that evolves as new fancy tools come available.
This time last year myself and my old gaming table were talking about what might be in the new DMG - optional rules tied to settings was our big speculative guess if the pitch was to experienced DMs or better tools to teach new DMs was another if the direction was that way.
From what I have read the view seems to be that the new DMG has a better go than the 5e DMG at teaching cold-start DMs how to do the job. I still think a few more starter packs could be a money-tree for WotC if they wanted - tutorial adventurers for different types of things would be snatched from the shelves by new DMs. Even 'add on' guides for say the lowest level games of an anthology - the first heist of Golden Vault having a seperate 'how to' guide for beginning DMs on sale for $10 on Roll20 seems like it would be welcomed.
One thing that is apparent is that behemoth has shrugged off the pretenders to the throne - all the many post-OGL D&D killers have failed to slay it, even where they may have found some modicum of success. Critical Role is having a go pushing their own systems and maybe they will jump off D&D to something else but the window for that to have an impact has passed in my opinion. The 5.5e launch is 2/3 of the way done and it looks like the switch over is happening. They played it safe and they've consolidated what they hold.
All bets are off if Elon snaffles up Hasbro and feeds it to his AI games-corp but short of that happening, as today, so tomorrow.
I play on a VTT because my old players are scattered in three different states. I suspect that may be the case for a number of older players getting back into the game. We don't ask about it, it just sort of happened as the only solution for being in different states.
ReplyDeleteWe've taken to using a very minimal VTT even when we meet in person - for maps, visibility, & tokens - because
ReplyDelete(1) I have players who struggle with visualisation of theatre of the mind, and really value the concrete spatialisation
(2) we do have players who are travelling but available during our time slot about 1 session in 4
(3) it lets me spend 2X time preparing in advance rather than X time in the middle of the session trying to draw the map with markers on a dry-erase grid.
But even though the old-timers who insisted on face-to-face play as soon as COVID lockdowns ended moved on to other jobs, there's little interest among us in moving online-by-default. For my 22-year-old, though, pretty much all gaming happens online - real-world travel is seen as a barrier and gaming friends are too far-flung.