D&D 5E What official material is considered problematic to the point where it is not balanced and presents a problem?

I'm A Banana said:

I've seen these rulings cause some dramatic shifts in the power of various strategies and builds. Generous stealth rules and permissive surprise make ambushes really good, and emphasize DEX and light armor, weakening the heavier melee characters. Using Perception more than Investigation during exploration similarly privileges WIS over INT and can skew characters to dump INT. Hand-juggling rulings can lead to crippling the action economy for various gish builds. These are pretty significant things that DM adjudication can make or break!

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Sure. I just tend to ignore the existing Stealth rules, running the game as I've always done.

I'm sure its possible for a newbie DM to find herself in the unenviable situation where a player says "but the rules says I can".

I don't know what you mean by "permissive surprise". My impression is that surprise is neatly contained in this edition - there isn't even a surprise round. Could you expand on why you feel 5th edition "breaks" ambushes (more than other editions)?

I agree INT is a bit of a dump stat in this edition. Still, not sure that qualifies as a game-breaker. I mean, dumping INT is equally beneficial to all classes... (except Wizard I guess )

Hand-juggling rules is a great term! I really need to start using it. Yes, if you mean the way the hand-juggling rules can make a character try to pull off execrable stunts like "i drop my weapon on the floor to cast my spell, then the first thing I do next round is pick it up to attack..." you're right. I guess I just can't take sequences like that seriously. Yes, if you run it by the book, things like that can happen. I guess I just deny it, so I don't have to think about it.

What official material have I found problematic?

The Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide.

And I don't mean "this cantrip is too OP" or "this subclass is useless and underpowered" or "these mechanics are ambiguously worded"

What I mean is, I'm hard pressed to point to any of the mechanical offerings that I'd feel comfortable including in my 5th edition games, because they are shoddy and haphazard mechanics with little narrative weight that are utterly dissonant to the premises and philosophy of 5th edition.

Prism said:

Yes I am too. I wasn't very clear in my post. What I meant was that the guidelines don't account for this at all, nor provide any suggestions about how to plan for or adjust combats based upon the adventuring day.

Now common sense applies of course that combats will get harder towards the end, and it very much depends on how well the party conserves their strength. And in a sandbox its not that relevant anyway. But some thoughts and maybe some scaling advice would be nice.

Having a table that states xx number of xp = deadly seems kind of pointless with so many moving parts

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Especially since their "deadly" means "not completely pushover"...

The fundamental thing they should have done was to assume "too few" encounters rather than the current 6-8, which is definitely uncommon in many campaigns and definitely "too many" generally.

By this I mean it would have been so much more useful if they assumed 3-4 encounters; made "deadly" commensurate with that, and then said "if you have many more encounters than that, be sure to halve the difficulty of each".

Because that is exactly what they do anyway! It's just that not all of us appreciate a string of 8 individually meh encounters.

Some (most?) of us want there to be some excitement, danger and challenge in the encounter itself. Some (most?) of us want more than merely the excitement, danger and challenge that comes from having to face that eighth encounter "low on gas".

Especially since the game is set up to make it trivial to "refuel" (long rest) well before such an individually meh encounter becomes exciting, dangerous and challenging due to "low on gas".

The entire foundation of the encounter model is broken.

With the guidelines assuming 3 encounters, the "deadly" rating would actually live up to its name, and resting "before schedule" wouldn't have become such a powerful (I'd say disruptive) strategy.

No longer do I need to make up story-based reason after story-based reason for why you need to press on and shouldn't rest, merely to satisfy an impractical and unrealistic design assumption!

Instead, coming up with time constraints would be optional, and would be coupled with (the fairly obvious advice): "if you double the number of encounters, consider halving the difficulty of each one".

It irritates me to no end that the designers never seem to have to face this subject. Are they even aware how big of a problem this is for some of us? Have they ever adressed the way they built in ridiculous amounts of time-pressure to make their game even work?

Saelorn said:

That's meta-gaming, though, by asking the players to make a different decision than their characters would make. Any mechanic which encourages meta-gaming as a solution is a broken mechanic for an RPG.

A better solution would be to just ban the spell outright, or skip the twenty minutes of solo play and hand the players a map. It sounds like this spell removes an interesting element of gameplay for some groups, but that's no different than a spell to create food and water which removes a different element of gameplay that another group might enjoy. It's kind of a thing that higher spell levels will let you ignore more and more inconveniences, starting with Light and ending with Teleport.

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Well, not having to find food and water is one thing.

But that's not what we're talking about here - we're specifically talking about activities that lead to solo play.

Your stance is completely understandable. I just have seen it a dozen times, and know it won't hold.

That is why I skip directly to the end realization: No amount of rules or bans can ever prevent a player that wants to solo from doing so.

The only thing that can prevent solo runs is if the group decides to stay together.

In the end analysis (skipping all the intermediate discussion steps, again, because I've experienced it all before), the only argument that really holds is "but if you go off scouting the dungeon solo, that means less fun for me". Something that carries the seed for conflict within the group.

So it all boils down to whether the player with Arcane Eye (or whatever) is a dominant player or a team player. Every group has both. There's nothing wrong with either. If it's a team player, there should be no problem. It's when the player with Arcane Eye focuses more on the benefits of the solo scout (and these really exist) than the disadvantages of doing it solo the problem occurs.

But as a DM, you are in a position to forestall tension and resentment within the group, by helping a dominant player to understand the advantages of sticking together, and asking him or her to make a small personal sacrifice for the greater good.

I'm A Banana said:

A short list of RAWs That Are Kind Of Borked IMO:

• Stealth
• Perception vs. Investigation
• Surprise/Ambushes
• Mounts (especially as they relate to beastmaster rangers)
• The rules for what occupies each of your "hand slots" during a fight and what it takes to swap out those slots

Depending on who you ask, you might add certain feats (GWM, Sharpshooter, Crossbow Expert, Polearm Master), certain classes/subclasses (Champions, Beast Masters, Sorcerers, Moon Druids), and the encounter guidelines ("I need to go 8x Deadly to even have my party feel a SLIGHT challenge!" / "These don't work well for draining all of a party's resources in 1 encounter") to the list, though I personally think those are A-OK.


"Balance" is a moving target. If balance falls in a forest.

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I generally agree. Perception vs investigation is ok. But it is not applied consitently. In my opinion: perception is noticing things. Investigation is noticing that something is wrong with thise things.
That leads to investigation being a skill that may be circumvented by attentive players.
For finding secret doors I tend to have both checks in different orders.
Ivenstigation may hint that a room seems missing. Perception will find the door. Investigation may help opening it. More art than science.
Surprise works better than thought... still not my preferable rule.
Stealth is ok.
Mounts are ok except when you decide to sometimws control them and sometimes not. Initiative changes are a problem here.

Saelorn said:

The short definition of role-playing is "making decisions based on what your character would do". The short definition of meta-gaming is "making decisions based on information that your character does not have, such as the fact that it's a game".

They are directly antithetical. If you are meta-gaming, then you are definitively and objectively not role-playing while you do so. In the context of a role-playing game, meta-gaming is bad. It's in the Ten Commandments of RPGs - Thou Shalt Not Metagame.

I shouldn't need to tell you this. You should know it already. If you're just trolling, then I apologize to everyone for wasting so much space on stating the obvious, but it's important that new players not come away with the wrong idea.

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I happen to believe you're really crippling yourself and your conflict resolution ability if you truly believe that. I consider an experienced Dungeon Master to be one that can spot when an issue is really best handled out of game.

For instance, the old chest-nut of a player killing prisoners. Is this a reasonable safety measure taken to prevent prisoners from calling for help (or returning later to make future fights more difficult)? Or is it cold-blooded murder?

The old-school solution would be to impose alignment changes on the player character.

But this completely ignores the real issue, which is that the player and the DM might have completely different perceptions of one and the same actions. "I kill brutal orcs". "You kill unarmed prisoners". None of them wrong. Both of them right.

The only REAL way of resolving this is for the player and the DM to talk. To make them understand the opposite perception.

In contrast, having your character become chaotic evil solves nothing and explains nothing.



In fact, early rpgs are notorious in how they avoid having to make the players talk with each other, which is probably where you got your "ten commandments" from.

You will simply have to accept that some of us have moved on. To us, trying to solve every conflict within the game is a silly and useless restriction.

I am prepared to agree to disagree - I'm not trying to convince you Saelorn of anything. I just feel you deserve a blunt and direct explanation of why people might "metagame".


Have a nice day and good luck with your gaming,
Zapp

Flamestrike said:

Ive gotta agree here.

Unless your character is aware he is in a roleplaying game Deadpool style, you cant both metagame and roleplay at the same time.

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To everyone: please read my post (just above).

The advice to "talk with your player" and "metagaming" are two completely different things.

Horwath said:

Armour categories.

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Sorry for cutting you off, but I really consider the way different armors aren't equal to be a feature.

Having Hide armor to be strictly inferior is to me definitely not a bug, to pick the perhaps most prominent example. It *should* have the appearance (and stats) of something primitive that you wouldn't choose if you had a choice.

Scalemail (or is it banded mail) - same thing, it *should* be inferior. (Unless it's dragon scales! ) It makes things more interesting, not less.

MiraMels said:

What official material have I found problematic?

The Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide.

And I don't mean "this cantrip is too OP" or "this subclass is useless and underpowered" or "these mechanics are ambiguously worded"

What I mean is, I'm hard pressed to point to any of the mechanical offerings that I'd feel comfortable including in my 5th edition games, because they are shoddy and haphazard mechanics with little narrative weight that are utterly dissonant to the premises and philosophy of 5th edition.

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Could you pick an example where you explain what exactly you mean by "shoddy", [MENTION=6855497]MiraMels[/MENTION]?

Likewise for "haphazard", "little narrative weight", and especially "utterly dissonant to the premises and philosophy".

Thank you

I gotta admit we have a swashbuckler rogue and haven't seen any problems. Spells too haven't been an issue.