D&D 5E I LOVE 5th Editon... BUT... (Why No Simple Table of Rituals?) And Other Little Quibbles.

[Aaron L]

I'm sorry if someone else started a thread about this, but I searched and couldn't find one anywhere.

First off, I have to say that I absolutely love 5th Edition. This is in no way a complaint about the game. I am deliriously happy with it; it's like all the best parts of OD&D, AD&D, Basic D&D, 3rd Edition, and even the few good parts of 4E (which I did NOT like) all mixed together in the best possible way. It combines the simplicity and elegance of OD&D and Basic with the character customizability and personalization of 3E, doing a wonderful job of keeping the numbers and modifiers low, and all the while taking the game back to a feeling of gritty tomb-raiding Pulp adventurers.

I do have a problem with the Player's Handbook, but it has nothing to do with the game itself.

Why are there no tables, or even breakdowns in the Class spell lists, delineating spells by school? That would have been very useful, and has pretty much been standard procedure since at least 2E. However, that's actually just a minor quibble; my main problems is why, oh WHY, are there no indicators of any kind marking out what spells can be cast as Rituals, except buried in the individual spell descriptions themselves? A simple asterisk beside the spells with Ritual versions would have been trivially easy to add, and been an immense time-saver for everyone. I'm torn between wanting to keep my book pristine, and wanting to take a pen and add my own asterisks to the spell lists to mark out the Rituals, and I think the "pristine" brigade is going to lose to the attacks of the "usefulness" contingent.

I'm just a bit flabbergasted; did seriously no one think to add such indicators, or did someone think to do so, but someone else decided to nix the idea for some reason? Because I have a hard time believing that no one, at any point, thought it might be a good idea to specify which spells can be cast as Rituals, without having to literally read through every spell description to find out.

Thank Yog-Sothoth for Mousferatu's wonderful Spell Sorter spreadsheet, or I would probably still be trying to find all of the Rituals (and probably have missed at least one.) Thanks again, Ari; you've proven once again how awesome you are (as if Before I Wake wasn't enough already! )

OK, that's all; that's my big gripe with 5th Edition. And it says something about how much I love this new Edition that that is the only real complaint I have with it. Spellcasters do seem to have a rather teensy-tiny number of higher level spell slots, never getting more than 1 6th-9th level slot per day, but I think I can see the reasoning behind that decision. Still, it is a little bit irksome. If a spellcaster wants to cast spells of those levels, he has to give up 4 of his rather limited number of prepared spells every day just to cast each one once. But, as I said, it's a minor quibble compared to how much I love this new version of the rules. Probably my favorite Edition ever (and I never thought that would happen.)

 

[Dausuul]

I'm sorry if someone else started a thread about this, but I searched and couldn't find one anywhere.

First off, I have to say that I absolutely love 5th Edition. This is in no way a complaint about the game. I am deliriously happy with it; it's like all the best parts of OD&D, AD&D, Basic D&D, 3rd Edition, and even the few good parts of 4E (which I did NOT like) all mixed together in the best possible way. It combines the simplicity and elegance of OD&D and Basic with the character customizability and personalization of 3E, doing a wonderful job of keeping the numbers and modifiers low, and all the while taking the game back to a feeling of gritty tomb-raiding Pulp adventurers.

I do have a problem with the Player's Handbook, but it has nothing to do with the game itself.

Why are there no tables, or even breakdowns in the Class spell lists, delineating spells by school? That would have been very useful, and has pretty much been standard procedure since at least 2E. However, that's actually just a minor quibble; my main problems is why, oh WHY, are there no indicators of any kind marking out what spells can be cast as Rituals, except buried in the individual spell descriptions themselves? A simple asterisk beside the spells with Ritual versions would have been trivially easy to add, and been an immense time-saver for everyone. I'm torn between wanting to keep my book pristine, and wanting to take a pen and add my own asterisks to the spell lists to mark out the Rituals, and I think the "pristine" brigade is going to lose to the attacks of the "usefulness" contingent.

I'm just a bit flabbergasted; did seriously no one think to add such indicators, or did someone think to do so, but someone else decided to nix the idea for some reason? Because I have a hard time believing that no one, at any point, thought it might be a good idea to specify which spells can be cast as Rituals, without having to literally read through every spell description to find out.

Thank Yog-Sothoth for Mousferatu's wonderful Spell Sorter spreadsheet, or I would probably still be trying to find all of the Rituals (and probably have missed at least one.) Thanks again, Ari; you've proven once again how awesome you are (as if Before I Wake wasn't enough already! )

OK, that's all; that's my big gripe with 5th Edition. And it says something about how much I love this new Edition that that is the only real complaint I have with it. Spellcasters do seem to have a rather teensy-tiny number of higher level spell slots, never getting more than 1 6th-9th level slot per day, but I think I can see the reasoning behind that decision. Still, it is a little bit irksome. If a spellcaster wants to cast spells of those levels, he has to give up 4 of his rather limited number of prepared spells every day just to cast each one once. But, as I said, it's a minor quibble compared to how much I love this new version of the rules. Probably my favorite Edition ever (and I never thought that would happen.)

Agreed on pretty much all points. The presentation of spells really leaves a lot to be desired; Mouseferatu's Spell Sorter is a godsend, but it sure would be nice not to need it. At the very least, I'd like to see an indicator for school (on wizard spells) and ritual option (on all spells) in the spell lists. It'd also be nice to have indicators for spells that require concentration and those that require consumable material components, though I could live without those.

Like you, I'm probably gonna take a pen to my PHB and ink 'em in.

 

[Grimstaff]

Agreed. While bursting at the seams with goodness, the PHB does leave a little to be desired in terms of utility. In addition to the missing breakdowns of schools/rituals, I was a little irked to see just "Backgrounds" in the table of contents, instead of broken down further for ease of access, or even just knowing what's available. Minor quibbles, to be sure, but for them to stand out so quickly to me after three days makes me wonder how it didn't stand out more to designers spending months with it lol.


As an aside, did anyone else love the illustrations from the Conditions section of the book? I did, kind of reminded me of the Tom Wham cartoons in the 1e dmg. And poor "Incapacitated" trapped behind the sidebar haha!

 

[Aaron L]

I love all of the illustrations in the PHB! Simple wonderful, all of them. Extremely nice, beautiful, naturalistic fantasy paintings. It made me genuinely happy when I opened the book and saw how it was illustrated.

No more "dungeonpunk" for every single illustration in the book. While I don't have a problem with some of the pix in that style (it is set on whole other planets of magic and fantastic alien races, after all,) it got very tiring seeing every single person having spiky hair, wearing spiky armor, wielding wonky, oddly proportioned weapons, and carrying jagged, bizarrely shaped shields that looked like pieces from a broken jigsaw puzzle, which in no way could do their job of covering and protecting the bearer's body. Shields were shaped the way they were for good reasons, and the reasons weren't fashion statements.

That was one of the big things I wanted changed in 5th Edition (that wasn't rules related) and spoke out about here and on the WotC forums; that and weapon and shield weights, and shield materials. There was never ever such a thing as a solid "steel shield," and a 15 pound shield would be so heavy as to be utterly useless.

Unfortunately, they added a whole new ludicrousity to the rules in 5E; 40 pound heavy armor Ring Mail. First off, Ring Mail is nothing but the product of lazy 19th century historians, who were notoriously arrogant and misguided about anything medieval. They misidentified "chain" maille armor on the Bayeux Tapestry because some was drawn with bigger circles, and so decided it "must" be a different type of armor. The speculated about it and came up with "big metal rings sewn on leather backing" despite there never being any kind of artifact fitting that description found anywhere, nor any description of anything matching it anywhere in the historical record. So they then wrote about this armor they had invented for years, and that's where the early-to-mid 20th century wargamers, and later Gygax, got the description (Charles Ffoulkes, Arms and Armor, 1909, according to a note he made in the magic armor section of the DMG.)

Unfortunately, it was nothing but lazy historians of the 1800s making stuff up.

But even worse than including "ring mail" which might almost kind of work as a glorified studded leather, they made it heavy armor! Fairly obviously because they needed the AC 14 Heavy Armor slot to fill, and someone pulled "ring mail" out of a hat. Unfortunately, 40 pound ring mail heavy armor is ridiculous. Chain "mail" as heavy armor is fine; that stuff is heavy, and covers the wearer head to toe. People didn't stop wearing it because it didn't offer good protection, they stopped wearing it because they found stuff that was lighter and easier to wear. But making "ring mail" a heavy armor is so ludicrous I burst out laughing the second I saw it in the book.

I am replacing the AC 14 Heavy Armor with something far more appropriate to its position as a heavy armor. As of now I am considering lamellar, but I'm not quite positive yet. I have to do some more checking and researching. But 40 pound "ring mail" heavy armor is not going to be a part of my D&D; the very idea is so utterly ridiculous as to stand out even amongst all of the other ridiculous weapon and armor weights of any edition of D&D. And that is including 2nnd Edition's laughably stupid 15 pound two-handed swords.

 

[Salamandyr]

I love 5e. I'm playing 5e. With the exception of making ranged attacks more accurate than melee attacks (for fighters), I like pretty much every mechanical decision made with 5e. Even ones I didn't think I wouldn't like (like the battlemaster fighter) have largely won me over. Nearly every class has something that makes me want to play it. Hiding some class abilities (like Hunter's Mark) in the spell list, and not being entirely clear about it, isn't my favorite thing, but that's a quibble. And yeah, I too would really like a better spell list, and a separate list of rituals.

But the biggest disappointment for me is the art. I hate the art. The majority appears to have been chosen on the basis of its inoffensiveness, rather than its ability to excite. And to top it off, many of the pieces are cluttered by extraneous decoration, to close a focus on the action, or extraneous decoration robbing the pieces of what little negative space they have. I'm not going to go into why I think they chose what they did, and why I think it's a mistake, but I find the art so offensive I would happily pay them more money to print another book with no art that I could buy just so I would never have to look at this one again.

 

[Sadrik]

How about not having a listing of feats. That is like not having an armor table and listing everything in the narrative text. How do you not have a listing of feats.

What we do get though is some really cool scripts of Draconic, Elvish, and Dwarvish. Oh and a very nice trinket table. A bit of a trade off, flavor tables in exchange for utility tables.

 

[Bacon Bits]

I totally 100% agree on the spells chapter. I know they wanted to avoid shortened spell descriptions like 3e had because too many players never looked up the spell. However, for the classes that care about them they should have listed the spell schools. They could have intentionally incomplete spell descriptions, too, like they could describe Fireball as "Deals fire damage in a large area." That tells you what the spell does, but you still have to look at spell to know what it really does. And they could have put page numbers on the spell lists, too! That costs like nothing! I also think they should have classes and domains that have access to the spell in the spell description. All you need to do is match the spell lists back.

The whole organization of spells is just super lackluster and plain sloppy. It's not as bad as 1e, but it's certainly not better than 3e.

I'm not a fan of the halfling art. I just don't like it. Personal preference. The ones on p26 and p132 are the ones that did it. They look like caricatures. It didn't bother me at first, but the more I see it the less I like it. The one on p132 looks like a Tom Wilkinson or J.T. Walsh caricature with mutton chops.

Most of all I'm irritated that they didn't include a foreword explaining what they were trying to do with a new edition of D&D. Like, they could have printed the Bounded Accuracy article or something. Nope! Existing players have to guess why Proficiency Bonuses are the way they are and why spellcasters have so few spells now. That's just infuriating when people like Spoony pick up the book and clearly just don't get what Mearls & company are trying to do. Everything in the PHB acts like there's no such thing as D&D prior to this edition. It's just... I don't understand. There's 30 years of this game already in print, and you don't want to tell us why you thought a new edition was a good idea?

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I'm not a fan of the halfling art. I just don't like it. Personal preference. The ones on p26 and p132 are the ones that did it. They look like caricatures. It didn't bother me at first, but the more I see it the less I like it. The one on p132 looks like a Tom Wilkinson or J.T. Walsh caricature with mutton chops.

Right? The halfling art is utterly bizarre. I miss the iconics of old.

I did miss the tables from other books -- both the feat summary tables and spell summary tables. Both would make the book more usable. It's a shame they have to keep relearning this lesson each edition.

 

[dream66_]

Most of all I'm irritated that they didn't include a foreword explaining what they were trying to do with a new edition of D&D. Like, they could have printed the Bounded Accuracy article or something. Nope! Existing players have to guess why Proficiency Bonuses are the way they are and why spellcasters have so few spells now. That's just infuriating when people like Spoony pick up the book and clearly just don't get what Mearls & company are trying to do. Everything in the PHB acts like there's no such thing as D&D prior to this edition. It's just... I don't understand. There's 30 years of this game already in print, and you don't want to tell us why you thought a new edition was a good idea?

Actually I'm very glad they didn't do that, everything that I've seen on the website and interviews tells me they couldn't have written about WHY they made a new edition without trashing on 4e and the interviews turned me off enough having that in the book itself would have hurt my enjoyment of the book.

 

[dd.stevenson]

I totally 100% agree on the spells chapter. I know they wanted to avoid shortened spell descriptions like 3e had because too many players never looked up the spell. However, for the classes that care about them they should have listed the spell schools. They could have intentionally incomplete spell descriptions, too, like they could describe Fireball as "Deals fire damage in a large area." That tells you what the spell does, but you still have to look at spell to know what it really does. And they could have put page numbers on the spell lists, too! That costs like nothing! I also think they should have classes and domains that have access to the spell in the spell description. All you need to do is match the spell lists back.

The whole organization of spells is just super lackluster and plain sloppy. It's not as bad as 1e, but it's certainly not better than 3e.

Yeah, all of this. As it is, the spell section is nearly unusable. I would really love to know what they were thinking with this layout direction.