D&D 5E 5e's stumbles

[Jester David]

Alright, fine. My conversation apparently made you feel bad so you've come and made me feel bad and now we all feel bad. Next you can pretend you don't feel bad so I'm the only one who feels bad and then you win the thread. GG.

I clicked on this thread to see if I could comment on any questions or solve problems. But no questions were asked and no solutions were sought. So I replied with the only thing I could.

I responded to you not to make you feel bad, but to say why I didn't like this thread (or, "why I felt bad"). Not in the hopes that it would make you feel bad, but that it would make you think about why you posted and maybe alter future posts. I was attempting - however clumsy my attempt - to influence things away from the negative into the positive.

If I make things positive next time, then, yes, I "win" this thread.
If things remain negative and the only result is that I made someone feel bad, then not only have I not "won" this thread, but I've lost as a human being.

 

[Sacrosanct]

My assertion is that the criticism of the thread is much more negative than the criticism of 5e contained in the thread. Please stop treating me like I am an aggressor or an ignoramus.

I'm sorry you feel I'm treating you like an aggressor or ignoramus. That certainly isn't what I'm going for. What I am saying, is that if you start a thread complaining about something, it's a bit odd to accuse others of making it negative. You sort of established the foundation for that. Context is important too. This isn't just some one off thread devoid of context. These pop up every couple days, and almost always about the same thing over and over again.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[procproc]

Frankly, I find the thread quite constructive and helpful -- at least, the on-point comments and not the meta comments complaining about the thread. It helps me identify issues that may not have come up yet in my own games, and think about how to address them.

My own peeve with 5e is concentration. It seems like everyone else has largely made their peace with it, but I don't think a week goes by that we don't have someone cast two different spells requiring concentration, or forget to make concentration checks on taking damage, or something else related. My own fix (for sub level 10 games) has been to ignore the concentration check on damage rule, but the whole system felt inelegant to me when I first read it and hasn't gotten better with actual experience playing with it.

 

[cmad1977]

And all I'm saying is that this thread should be moved into one of the countless other similar threads. Isn't that like... Forum etiquette or something?


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[Tony Vargas]

... and i like that all the classes keep getting really cool things as they go up levels, but not ridiculous amounts of powers that I can never remember ... I guess in 4e that was neat flavour but it really is a lot for someone with memory issues to remember... when you get closer to 40th level... whew!

The trick was you only had to remember the ones you actually picked at chargen/level-up, that topped out around 10 attacks and 6 utilities at 20th level (including at-wills), you'd swap some around and maybe pick up a capstone somewhere over the next 10 levels, but that's about it. That's about the number spells (including at-will cantrips) you'd need to remember for an 8th level Cleric or Wizard in 5e, at 20th you'd likely be prepping 25 spells in 5e on top of 5 cantrips - and those prepped spells can be different each 'day.' Of course, there's no 30th in 5e (and there was no 40th in 4e).

I'm a bit perturbed about how important the number of encounters per day is for class balance.

It's nothing new, it's just been presented explicitly. Sure, in classic D&D class balance was heavily impacted by encounters/day, but there were absolutely no numeric guidelines, either in how to design a challenging encounter, nor in how many of them to have (there was plenty of Gygaxian circumlocution on the topic, of course), while in 3e, it took far more than just encounters/day to try to hammer down Tier 1 classes enough that any sort of balance was even on the horizon - either way, the encounters/day aspect was clearly there, the 5MWD clearly a problem, but there was no clear answer from TSR or WotC what they were shooting for in their design. In 4e there was an encounter/day guideline, but deviating from it didn't matter too much to class balance - so again, the encounter/day guideline didn't seem that important (though it really was nice to have to keep encounter balance where it was designed to be).

During the Next playtest, Mike Mearls came right and said there would be 'Crystal Clear Guidance' as to where, in encounters/day, the classes would be balanced. It turns out it was 6-8, with 2-3 short rests. There were a lot of promises and promise-sounding goals set out for 5e, and no other was met quite so neatly & succinctly as that one.

 

[Gradine]

Who is more complain-y? The complainer, or the one who complains about him?

Complaining about complaining is not only counterproductive, it's counter-intuitive. Is it true that "identifying the problem(s)" is a crucial step of problem solving? Yes. Is it also true that "identifying potential solutions" is also a crucial step, and without it the previous step is largely fruitless, screaming into the void? Yes.

One would think, though, that rather than engaging in more fruitless problem-identifying about how identifying problems without asking for or seeking solutions is counter-productive; the easier and more logical way to move the discussion to a more productive place would be... moving it there yourself?

Take the OP, for instance, which identifies 5 potential problems. I don't really agree that #5 is a problem; and in fact accepting "rulings not rules" as a feature and not a bug has allowed me to largely ignore or easily resolve problems #1, #4, and a to a somewhat lesser extent #3 (of which there has been a good deal of constructive discussion in this thread about). #2, however, sticks in my craw as well, particularly as someone who always wanted to but never got the chance to DM 4e. But I've learned long ago when preparing my session notes how to write-up enemies (even those from the MM) in a pseudo-4e style that makes running them vastly easier and more interesting for me. For spellcasters that usually means narrowing down their MM spell-lists to a few signature spells, usually 1-2 at-will cantrips and a handful (depending on the caster's power level) of other higher levels spells they tend to prefer, either allowing x/day or even bringing back the recharge mechanic for spells that, tactically, they should be spamming but would make for a largely uninteresting encounter if that's all they did. For encounters with multiple versions of the same spell-casting enemy this allows me to diversify and specialize them so the players feel like they're fighting actual people (or non-"people" entities) with personalities and preferences and not carbon copies of each other, a problem even 4e monster design philosophy sometimes struggled with.

Yeah it's a lot more work but I find it makes running the actual encounters way more satisfying as a result.

 

[procproc]

The trick was you only had to remember the ones you actually picked at chargen/level-up, that topped out around 10 attacks and 6 utilities at 20th level (including at-wills), you'd swap some around and maybe pick up a capstone somewhere over the next 10 levels, but that's about it. That's about the number spells (including at-will cantrips) you'd need to remember for an 8th level Cleric or Wizard in 5e, at 20th you'd likely be prepping 25 spells in 5e on top of 5 cantrips - and those prepped spells can be different each 'day.' Of course, there's no 30th in 5e (and there was no 40th in 4e).

I can't speak to your experience, but a lot of players I know avoid casters for precisely that reason -- and while in other editions you can just not play a caster, it's baked into every class in 4e.

I mean, point taken, and the comparison seems valid, but it's still a problem for at least some people's preferences.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Yeah, except Mearls said you can play the bagpipes with perform. I don't get it.

It is important to remember a particular detail about any answers that Mike Mearls gives to questions about D&D: He, according to himself, is just giving his own opinion as DM - not any kind of official or even semi-official stance.

So when Mike seems to be going against what the rules seem like they say, it's because he is (even if it is unintentional - I don't think he checks the rule-book before providing his answers, he just gives an answer as to how he might rule at his own table)

 

[Tony Vargas]

I can't speak to your experience, but a lot of players I know avoid casters for precisely that reason -- and while in other editions you can just not play a caster, it's baked into every class in 4e.

My experience is that, yes, in old-school D&D and 3.x, and even 5e, people avoid casters because the Vancian system is onerous, having to know all the available spells well enough to make good choices among them every 'day' when you prep your spells can just be too much, and because it's counter-genre and just unintuitive, and, particularly in 3.5, because they're just too broken to be fun. Not even the Wizard, the only class in 4e that was remotely Vancian, approached that level of issues, though.

For me, personally, it was the organization of spells in 3.0 that put me off casters for a bit (until I tried out a Sorcerer, that is). In 1e, I could play a first-level magic-user, go through the 30 first level spells, and get a clear idea of what I had a potential to do, then either pick (or have randomly assigned) 4 known spells, and just figure out how to use those really effectively until I found new ones, then, at 3rd level, repeat the process with 2nd level spells. The spells were all neatly arranged by class and level, so I could just browse through and familiarize myself with what a caster of a given level could potentially do. 2e, same thing. In 3.0, one little change - all the spells dropped in one alphabetized list - just blew that for me. 4e went back to the 1e layout, except, in even smaller chunks, 4-6 powers instead of 10-30 spells at each choice point. 5e, in spite of being so classic-feel across the board, inexplicably went back to the 3e format.

I mean, point taken, and the comparison seems valid, but it's still a problem for at least some people's preferences.

I really question that old saw. Yes, some players would balk at Vancian - particularly because it was nothing like what they expected from magic. And, yes, some would balk at the complexity of the system (even the simplest RPG is complex compared to something like monopoly). But players overwhelmingly choose a class because they like the idea of the archetype, not because they want a simpler/lower agency experience. Once they obtain some system mastery or internalize some community preconceptions, that can change, of course... they start to realize that there's the character they want to play, the character that will be most effective in theory, and the one that might be the most fun to actually play, and that they're all different.

6. Drawing your weapon as part of the attack action is fine, don't even worry about it, but you can't draw both weapons before attacking with them unless you're implementing an entirely optional system of character customization and wait until level four when you will be allowed to sacrifice your basic stats in order to pick up that capability. Seriously?

How hard is it to let slide, though? Let anyone draw two weapons to fight two-fisted. Let anyone draw as many daggers as they can throw, as well as as many arrows as they can loose. Let the drummer play his drums as an action, even though he has to pull out the drum and /both/ sticks (OMG, so many things!).

7. Anyone with a swim speed can swing a maul (or flail) underwater, with no issues whatsoever.

Rule otherwise. In an underwater scene, rule that everyone has resistance to bludgeoning. Done. It's not a mistake, but a missing detail: fill it in.

(Yeah, I know, I'm doing '5' again.)