D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

Celtavian · Jun 30, 2015

Manbearcat said:
Don't have time to address specific posts at the moment. However, I always find that getting "under the hood" of actual play examples are a kajillion times more instructive.

In light of that, does anyone want to make a level (say) 6 4e character and a level (say) 4 5e character and I can frame you into the same short, noncombat conflict. We can resolve it, put our thoughts as footnotes, and then evaluate the differences in play procedures and outputs?

I don't see this as necessary. Haven't had an edition of D&D I couldn't get done what I needed to get done. As I said this argument seems to me nothing more than caviling.

Tony Vargas · Jun 30, 2015

Aenghus said:
This seems to ignore those who embraced 4e and it's aspirations to varying extends as "their D&D" and see 5e as nostalgic backsliding.

Yes.

It seemed like a fair assumption, when Next was on the horizon, that anyone who had given 4e that kind of chance would also embrace 5e - that they were the kind of long-time, loyal fans who would always support the current ed. (That and there was never going to be a 4e analogue to Pathfinder as an alternative.)

I think that's how it's worked out: You don't see a huge edition war being brewed by angry 4e fans. You do see 4e fans trying 5e and appreciating it for that nostalgic factor it delivers so well, even if they don't stop playing 4e entirely, right away.

And it does do a little more than just nostalgia, as it also seems to have undone the RAW-uber-alles phenomenon that plagued 3.5/Pathfinder.

And it's kept a few refinements from 3.0 that survived (and were further refined) through d20, 3.5, 4e, Essentials, and Next... Things like de-facto between-combat and overnight healing, a single exp chart, even advancement (via proficiency, this time, rather than ranks or other per-level bonuses), symetric bonuses from all stats, and so forth. There's lots of still-reasonably-modern d20 in 5e - it just doesn't detract from the nostalgia factor.

Celtavian · Jun 30, 2015

Eric V said:
You have it wrong. You ask "Give me a reason why this would continuously occur?" when the question I am asking is "Why should that occur even once?"

I'll tell you an instance that would cause me to do just this. If the player considers "imagination" to be finding a rules exploit that allows him to break the game killing the BBEG, I'm going to stop that right there and right then. There are these types of DM minefields all over Pathfinder/3E. I did not tolerate them. I don't consider imaginative play to be finding a method of manipulating the rules to a point that you can't be defeated or can trivialize encounters. If some player springs some goofy combination on me and says, "It works RAW." I'll stop that right there, tell him he did not get that oked with me prior to using it, and it does not work. If I get flack from that player during the game, I'll tell him "You can discuss this after the game. It's not happening right now." If he doesn't respect that, I'll stop DMing right there and go find another group. I'm a DM. Finding a group of players is way easier than finding a quality DM if you want to discuss DM leverage in these situations.

That's why the DM always has final say to halt any thing he feels is disrupting the game and creating a rules exploit that a player is trying to force down his throat. No player has a right to do this to a DM.

Fortunately, I've never had to deal with this in my older years. My entire group has always respected the DM's authority and left serious rule discussions for after the session. DM having final say is a courtesy dating back to the early days of gaming. Players respect it or find someone else to DM.

Aenghus · Jun 30, 2015

Tony Vargas said:
Yes.

It seemed like a fair assumption, when Next was on the horizon, that anyone who had given 4e that kind of chance would also embrace 5e - that they were the kind of long-time, loyal fans who would always support the current ed. (That and there was never going to be a 4e analogue to Pathfinder as an alternative.)

I think that's how it's worked out: You don't see a huge edition war being brewed by angry 4e fans. You do see 4e fans trying 5e and appreciating it for that nostalgic factor it delivers so well, even if they don't stop playing 4e entirely, right away.

4e is the major victim and casualty of the edition wars. 4e players have their share of the battle fatigue fallout of the wars, and I suspect a good fraction of them see the futility of them.

And it does do a little more than just nostalgia, as it also seems to have undone the RAW-uber-alles phenomenon that plagued 3.5/Pathfinder.

And it's kept a few refinements from 3.0 that survived (and were further refined) through d20, 3.5, 4e, Essentials, and Next... Things like de-facto between-combat and overnight healing, a single exp chart, even advancement (via proficiency, this time, rather than ranks or other per-level bonuses), symetric bonuses from all stats, and so forth. There's lots of still-reasonably-modern d20 in 5e - it just doesn't detract from the nostalgia factor.

Your theory should be modified so as not to conveniently ignore those who won't convert. There are always holdouts for any particular edition, and this will continue to be the case. Some players will find an edition that suits their purposes, maybe with houserules, and get off the merry-go-round of new editions.

Tony Vargas · Jun 30, 2015

Aenghus said:
4e is the major victim and casualty of the edition wars. 4e players have their share of the battle fatigue fallout of the wars, and I suspect a good fraction of them see the futility of them.

One way of looking at it, I suppose. I do think 4e fans included most of D&D's 'early adopters' as well, and are thus inclined to give each new ed a try.

Your theory should be modified so as not to conveniently ignore those who won't convert. There are always holdouts for any particular edition, and this will continue to be the case. Some players will find an edition that suits their purposes, maybe with houserules, and get off the merry-go-round of new editions.

That's why they can be discounted, because they're inevitable.

Though, really, 5e is trying to re-capture past hold-outs.

AbdulAlhazred · Jun 30, 2015

Manbearcat said:
Curiously, the "5e doesn't have a thriving economy (mundane/magical) that players can spend money on" refrain is one that I don't think has much teeth. It seems to me that a table-driven economy for hirelings would be tremendously easy to establish using:

1) The Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic as a boon scheduled at an Extended Rest Recharge for n $ or a Short Rest Recharge for n * 3 (or something) $

2) A fictional trigger that the player(s) can use to invoke the Advantage/Disadvantage boon

You could have Guides whose Advantage boon is triggered when you're blazing a trail on a perilous journey or sponsored expedition, Huntsmen whose Advantage boon is triggered when you're tracking something in a wilderness setting, or Bodyguards whose Disadvantage boon as an immediate action is triggered when you're attacked in melee, or Heralds whose Advantage boon is triggered when your reputation, titles, or legacy would come into play in a social conflict. Etc, etc, etc.

This seems to be trivially easy and intuitive to implement and shouldn't be too terribly invasive, especially with a system that plays fast and loose with the rules, expects each table to own/hack their own game, and whose encounter budgeting is squirelly (and top down predicated on the adventuring day rather than bottom up) with severely diverging PC resource scheduling.

Its a nice idea. 4e has something pretty similar with its hireling rules (the ones that came out in MME/Dragon). I think they're more effective though when you have an abstract system like SC to give them more leverage. You can get something out of the advantage mechanic, but I just liked things like "make this Hard DC check into a Medium DC check" kind of thing. It worked well in SCs.

AbdulAlhazred · Jun 30, 2015

Kamikaze Midget said:
I know I've felt more than once that 4e is largely a "level-less" game for all its 30 levels (of which I played about 18). And 5e, over the course of 7, is already showing me that setting the DC's relative to the world is a part of the edition's strong antidote to that. In 4e, I always felt at about the same level of badass ("fairly"). In 5e, I've felt the growth that comes from a tier-shift in a way 4e never achieved (going from "not very badass" to "a little badass!"), and in a way is a little more subtle and interesting than bigger numbers.

I think the difference is 'badassness' in 4e didn't come from easily passing DCs. The math was largely irrelevant to that. It came from the DM building more and more amazing fiction around the DCs, and from everything else. You might hit a Balor about the same way you'd hit an Orc at the appropriate levels, but FIGHTING a Balor is WAY different. It has an aura, resistances, and powers that have a number of varied effects. The PCs at that level also can do things like get really screwed up by a bunch of effects and then just shake them all off, or fall dead and stand right up again, etc. Even at Paragon you find that your characters really are a LOT more potent in absolute narrative terms than they are at lower levels.

So what I found was that the mechanics 'fall away'. The game becomes highly narratively focused, or at least focused on what the PCs want to DO, and not really on numbers. I think there were definitely some flaws. The SC system didn't quite work right until the RC version, and the build process was too focused on making the numbers. However, it worked.

Now, I can see, since your game apparently was so focused on tactical skirmishes that nobody even took non-combat utility powers or feats, then it became a one-dimensional game. That's too bad, but the other dimensions of the system DO exist, and they're really powerful.

I don't think there's anything horribly wrong with the way 5e does things, it just focuses much more on numbers. Everything seems to be about whether or not you can get the hard DC. I don't think the story in our game is bad, but mostly I just miss the way in the 4e game we could pull crazy stuff that I wouldn't dare to even try now.

Imaro · Jun 30, 2015

AbdulAlhazred said:
I think the difference is 'badassness' in 4e didn't come from easily passing DCs. The math was largely irrelevant to that. It came from the DM building more and more amazing fiction around the DCs, and from everything else. You might hit a Balor about the same way you'd hit an Orc at the appropriate levels, but FIGHTING a Balor is WAY different. It has an aura, resistances, and powers that have a number of varied effects. The PCs at that level also can do things like get really screwed up by a bunch of effects and then just shake them all off, or fall dead and stand right up again, etc. Even at Paragon you find that your characters really are a LOT more potent in absolute narrative terms than they are at lower levels.

So what I found was that the mechanics 'fall away'. The game becomes highly narratively focused, or at least focused on what the PCs want to DO, and not really on numbers. I think there were definitely some flaws. The SC system didn't quite work right until the RC version, and the build process was too focused on making the numbers. However, it worked.

Now, I can see, since your game apparently was so focused on tactical skirmishes that nobody even took non-combat utility powers or feats, then it became a one-dimensional game. That's too bad, but the other dimensions of the system DO exist, and they're really powerful.

I don't think there's anything horribly wrong with the way 5e does things, it just focuses much more on numbers. Everything seems to be about whether or not you can get the hard DC. I don't think the story in our game is bad, but mostly I just miss the way in the 4e game we could pull crazy stuff that I wouldn't dare to even try now.

I don't see how creating amazing fiction around mechanics is a component of the particular game (especially a game where the fiction is called out as being mutable)... Any good DM can do this with nearly any game

The Crimson Binome · Jun 30, 2015

AbdulAlhazred said:
I think the difference is 'badassness' in 4e didn't come from easily passing DCs. The math was largely irrelevant to that. It came from the DM building more and more amazing fiction around the DCs, and from everything else. You might hit a Balor about the same way you'd hit an Orc at the appropriate levels, but FIGHTING a Balor is WAY different.

I dunno. I don't really feel awesome when I fail to hit a balor half the time, anymore than I felt awesome when I used to miss an orc or a giant half of the time.

To contrast, it does make me feel more awesome when I go from missing an ogre half the time (for 10% of its health) to hitting it 90% of the time (for half its health). Nothing shows progress quite like trivializing what used to be a challenge. When I'm facing a lock that is objectively Hard, and I remember when my chance of success was slim, and now I succeed on a 3 or better, that's awesome.

AbdulAlhazred · Jun 30, 2015

Hemlock said:
RE: "lack of precise knowledge on the part of the DM," this is what makes the Portent ability interesting to me. By dictating die rolls, 5E's Portent manages to give the feeling of knowing the future even without the DM actually knowing the future. "I knew all along he would fail that save if we could just wait for the right time."

There's no reason a DM couldn't create a similar mechanic for Augury in an unknown situation: "If I say 'Weal', you get an auto-Portent die for the next half hour. If I say 'Woe', I get one. Okay, ready to cast your spell?"

Another way of handling this is to just grant a 'plot coupon' when someone uses a divination of this type. The narrative is "you get an obscure response" and the player then at some appropriate point invokes an interpretation of the response which gives him success or whatever. It obviously has to relate to the question that the augury/portent was meant to apply to, so its a limited option and the GMs 'obscure response' could also put some additional limits on it, meaning its probably not going to totally undermine a major aspect of the current story, it will just give the PCs an edge or provide the logic for the player's to apply some information they have to the in-game situation.