[meme] ask for takes about canons, i don't spend enough time in fandom to know what's hot, what isn't, and what they think

dungeons and draguns

I can see that they desperately want to capture the more narrative-focused playerbase, but they have far too many relics of the old Gygaxian community left in the system for pure narrative roleplaying to work properly while also abandoning too many of the old functions to keep the wargaming/strategy-focused playerbase happy.

What they need to do is introduced an even more stripped down version for people who want to be powerful and tell sweeping stories about saving the world from lich-kings and armies of darkness while also keeping a slightly more complex and strategy-based version for the people who get into D&D for the dungeon crawls and the survival aspects.

The game's very easy to learn and pick up now, but I'm not that sure it's actually any easier than older editions, it's just presented better. They've also shot their balance to hell by buffing up everyone's chances to hit and offering healing to people while ignoring the need for enhanced defenses for a lot of classes.

Also, they keep making characters more powerful and I think that they should scale that back and make characters slightly weaker, at least in early levels. Part of this is to help negate the insanely overpowered caster classes.

Cantrips, for instance, shouldn't be useful in combat. I can understand the idea why they pack so much punch now, in order to make wizard/sorcerer/warlock players feel less useless once they've blown their load, but at the same time it's like.

The original idea for cantrips was that they were spells for apprentices to learn magic and do chores with. By turning them into AoE short sword attacks and energy blasts that hit as hard as a heavy crossbow but without the need to reload... I don't know, it feels supremely unbalancing and makes me feel for the martial classes.

"I can heal myself once per day."
"Oh. Legit. Now stand back, I'm gonna layer these illusion cantrips to look like a warrior and then make a flaming sword for him."

That said

The OSR community really isn't doing itself any favors. The last time I looked in on them it was just... Not great.

It's not that the older editions were better

Did I like them more? Yeah. Were they written well? I mean. No. No, not at all.

The presentation of 5E is a lot better and explains things much more intelligently.

And as little as I care about Crit Role, Acquisitions Inc., and TAZ, they're all doing a far superior job of bringing the brand to new people than we've ever seen before.