D&D 5E Fifth Edition.....Why?

Aspects07 · Nov 17, 2017

When I started gaming it wasn't on AD&D, it was West End Games Star Wars, TSR Star Frontiers, Top Secret, Shadowrun 3rd Edition, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Vampire the Masquerade. It wouldn't be until about 4 years into my gaming tenure when my grandmother would purchase the blue and red box of original DnD for me complete with the crayon to mark the dice with. Having begun my RP experience with systems that offered generous character options and variability. I disliked the limitation of AD&D where humans only actual benefit was they could progress through a class for a bit, then could restart progression in another class, and there was no limit to their progression, however, no group I ever played with followed that proscription, and for every 40th level Human 20 rgr/5 fgtr/ 5 rogue/ 5 mage/ 5 cleric there was a 40/40/40 Elven multiclass that shouldn't have ever been allowed. I didn't get into DnD until 3rd Edition where some of Ed Greenwood's characters in his novels finally made sense statistically. And I adored 3rd edition, it allowed me to create the fantasy character I wanted to play in an easy to delineate manner. Then came fourth edition which eliminated everything great about 3rd Edition but tried to turn the system into a tabletop World of Warcraft, a system I promptly demonstrated the idiocy of its lack of thought with by building a fey aspected warlock with a cape of the mountebank which let me basically deal damage and teleport, the damage and teleport, and when the GM tried to be clever and isolate me then I used the cape to teleport me back behind the line the party had formed, the whole system was stupid, not to mention the abject horror they turned the Forgotten Realms into.
Then I bought the 5th Edition players handbook, It seemed to actually streamline the 4th Edition and make it less a tabletop MMO while bringing back the simplicity of the old school blue and red boxes. However what drove me to ignore the rule set was that fundamental lack of variability that 3rd Edition actually offered. It seems like I'm pretty much stuck in the class I began the game in and I can either choose a mediocre stat bonus where I used to be able to alter the standard progression path by taking a feat, and the stat bonus would come later which demonstrated a focus in a differing area of my character's priority.
So, why should I play 5th Edition? It eliminated the wonderful options a player could take his character and even it's weak multiclassing can't portray the most famous characters of our favorite DnD novel characters. I mean, stat out Elminster the way he should be in 5th Ed, or even Mirt the Merciless.

Sacrosanct · Nov 17, 2017

Then don’t. Keep playing 3e. Hang out at 3e forums. Have fun.

I disagree that you can’t recreate your favorite characters. The opposite in fact with how backgrounds and feats work; I find it the easiest edition. Obviously you don’t agree. So rather than try to convince you of something you’ve already got your mind made up on, I’ll just say keep playing 3e. Your books are still fine.

TheCosmicKid · Nov 17, 2017

It sounds to me like you may have misunderstood some rules in the 5E Player's Handbook, because you refer to feats and multiclassing as if they're vastly different from 3E, when really they're almost identical. (As I recall, Elminster in the 3E Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting was something like a 20th-level wizard/10th-level fighter/3rd-level cleric. That combination is as legal in 5E as it was when the FRCS was printed.)

But the real answer to your question is that if you adore 3rd Edition, you should play that. Some people find 5E an improvement on 3E. Some people prefer 4E. Some even prefer 1E or 2E. And that's all fine. D&D is a game written for our enjoyment, so play the version you most enjoy and don't let anybody tell you otherwise.

Charlaquin · Nov 17, 2017

Please don’t insult other people’s preferences. Just because you don’t like 4e doesn’t mean it’s idiotic, and if you prefer 3e over 5e, just play 3e. Nobody is interested in hearing you ramble about why you think the systems they like are garbage.

ccs · Nov 17, 2017

Why?
Because $. The answer is always $.

Next stupid question?

Oh, right. You ask why you should play a game you don't like.
A: You shouldn't.
Unless of course your being paid to do so. Then the answer defaults back to $.

Ark the Pie King · Nov 17, 2017

4th edition did plenty right, and it was for a different gaming type. My longest campaign ever was in 4e, and I still think fondly on that character and that story. It was fun, and epic, and wonderful, and the gameplay was engaging and tactically challenging. 3.5e is also wonderful for separate, very distinct reasons and I love to crack open the old books and tinker with the system to see what amalgamations I can come up with. 5e, with the release of the new book who's name my brain is intent on forgetting despite my best efforts brings back a lot of that tinkering, but honestly? You sound like an old curmudgeon who's yelling at kids to get off his lawn, and how things were back in your day, etc. Go play the old systems if you want. Nobody's interested in stopping you, or in arguing with someone who's clearly gonna be bullheaded about the whole ordeal.

5ekyu · Nov 17, 2017

As others say - if you don't like 5e - or your imagining of 5e - you should play the game you prefer if you have others who feel as you do.

Its as simple as that.

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5ekyu · Nov 17, 2017

Only question I have is how, after all the experience in all those games one would not already have learned this?

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Shiroiken · Nov 17, 2017

It has been my experience that the players who have had the hardest time adjusting to 5E have been those who started in 3E. While the mechanics of 5E are closest to 3E, the design style is vastly different, being much closer to AD&D and 4E. 3E attempted to have detailed rules for many different possible scenarios, while 5E has tried to simplify the rules as much as possible. 3E had system mastery, where player skill in character design was a huge benefit, while optimized characters in 5E aren't that much stronger than the average character.

As others have said, there is nothing wrong with not liking 5E, and you should play a game system that fits your preferences. Rather than suggest you continue to play 3E, however, I would suggest looking into Pathfinder as an alternative, since not only is it a cleaned up system, but it is a currently supported product by Piazo. Happy gaming.

Fanaelialae · Nov 17, 2017

I'll echo what others have said. Play what you want.

That said, there are several reasons that my group and I prefer 5e over 3.x despite having played 3.x through its lifecycle.

Making a complicated character in 5e takes about an hour (assuming you're familiar with those options already). IME, making a complex 3e character can take many hours, despite deep familiarity with the system. (Some people prefer the latter, but I'm not in college anymore; I'd rather spend my game time actually gaming than making a character.)

Broken means something very different in 5e vs 3e. In 5e, you can stack options to maybe make a character who can reliably hit a DC in the 30s. In 3e, you could use the various options to reliably hit a DC in the 50s. 5e just generally has less number bloat than 3e. (Again, some people will prefer the big numbers of 3e and there's nothing wrong with that, but I'd rather just play than have to remember all those various modifiers.) You could make a single character in 3e who outshined the rest of the party. You'd be very hard pressed to do that with 5e. (Some people prefer a game that rewards system mastery, but I game with some serious gamers and some newbs and some guys who are somewhere in between, and I don't want to have to worry about that stuff.)

So those are a few reasons that I prefer 5e over 3e. Still, as I've been saying, if 5e is not for you play what you like.

I'm nitpicking here but, in AD&D, assuming equal xp totals there's no way to have a dual classed human who is 20/5/5/5/5 next to an elf who is 40/40/40. Just based on how the xp charts scaled and the fact that a dual-classed human who switched classes would progress as if a level 1 character.

Per the High Level Campaigns book, it takes 250,000 xp for a fighter to go from level 29 to 30. For a multiclassed character with 3 classes, you could roughly triple that for somewhere around 750K xp (classes progressed at varying rates, so a thief or bard only required 120K xp, whereas a druid needed 500K xp to go from 29th to 30th). If a dual classed character picked a new class at the same time that the multiclassed character needed 750K xp to go from level 29 to 30 in all three classes, the dual classed character ought to be somewhere between levels 10 and 13 in the new class by the time Mr Multiclass gains the 750K he needs. I'll grant you, the rule about only gaining one level at a time (you would stop 1 xp shy of the next level) might cause the human to fall behind slightly, but it shouldn't be anywhere near as dramatic as you describe.

When a fighter/mage/thief is 30th level (22,500K xp), his human companion should be something like 20 ranger/20 wizard/20 cleric/20 thief/20 fighter/20 paladin/20 druid/20 bard based on xp.