D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[Tony Vargas]

The only goal I see with 5E was to create a game that is fun to play even if you don't have a lot of time that cleaves closer to past editions of D&D than the previous edition. It was a distillation of previous editions of D&D into a simpler format that allowed for quicker play and preparation.

So you'd add 'simpler' to 'feels like D&D?' I guess 5e is less baroque than AD&D, and, obviously, not as bloated as 3.x was. It seems like it still suffers from some of classic D&D's needless complication (by which I don't mean the exact same thing as 'complexity'), but then it strives to feel like classic D&D.

So, yeah, definite success on both fronts.

4E versus 5E doesn't matter. Creativity doesn't have anything to do with the game system and everything to do with the individual players. You could have used Stunting in 3E. You could have used it in 1E. It's nothing more than a set of checks to accomplish something. ...
Creativity existed in every edition of D&D in equal measure according to the creative capabilities of the people involved.

Exactly right. Creativity is something you bring to the game, not something that the game blocks or shoves down your throat.

 

[Imaro]

I was thinking of a spirit-soaked common room area rug spanning most of the floor. Multiple tables, lots of bad guys on the rug. So (a) you have the immediate AoE followed by (b) the burning zone residual damage. Sorting out the balance of various AoE increments, based on #s affected rather than the unit itself (eg radius 5 = n damage of the total budget), on the fly is burdensome mental overhead that bogs down the adjudication and negotiation process of the stunt..

Wait so I have a chance to hit every enemy in the room... not expend a spell (light it with a cantrip) do comparative damage for up to 4 rounds... and you would rather use firebolt and possibly hit one enemy... for half as much damage? Could you explain to me why this stunt isn't worth it again?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You do realize that the first 1e book was first published in 1977, right? So "long before" that really makes me highly dubious of this claim. Especially since your posts give me an impression of a game style that was the opposite of how the game was played back then, along with outright false claims you've made (about there being no rules). If you like, I can point you to the Strategic Review articles that outline exactly what you said never existed. There's a reason why most people used the same rule for ability checks and used terms like "THAC0" before they became official rules, and it wasn't because everyone spontaneously came up with the same ruling all at once.

Yup, I bought my AD&D Monster Manual right off the shelf, and immediately started using those monsters with what I was playing at the time, which IIRC was Holmes Basic which we extended with the XP, to hit, etc charts from OD&D with a few reasonable extrapolations, some added spells gleaned from various sources, etc. By then I'd been playing for about 2 years. My sister and I actually made up our own rules whole cloth when we heard descriptions of early D&D, and I played in a game or two soon after. We eventually acquired our own copies of the original rules, rather piecemeal, but I have all those books somewhere, and we subscribed to SR/TD sometime around late 76. I bought a copy of the 1e PHB as soon as that came out, and pre-ordered a DMG.

And yes, our goals and ideas about RPGs were quite different in those days, though now I can trace back the roots of my thinking on the subject to various experiences and tendencies I had in my earlier game play. I never did find D&D to be ENTIRELY satisfying in its 'classic' incarnation. I never had a big problem with the milieu but up until 4e it never really quite did what I wanted. 4e doesn't always do it perfectly, but it was aimed at what I wanted. A game that catered to heroic fantasy and had fairly well-structured but open-ended rules, and a backstory that was conducive to fantasy action adventure.

 

[Manbearcat]

Wait so I have a chance to hit every enemy in the room... not expend a spell (light it with a cantrip) do comparative damage for up to 4 rounds... and you would rather use firebolt and possibly hit one enemy... for half as much damage? Could you explain to me why this stunt isn't worth it again?

No, you do not. I'm just presenting you the fiction I'm envisioning. The whole rug isn't going up in flames instantaneously. For balance it couldn't be that way. It isn't uniformly saturated with spirits and (just from a process sim perspective) thicker pile rugs are more flame resistant. Check out my descriptions of both again.

4e

Arcana Medium DC (0 % failure chance in this case)

Burnin Down the House! Single-Use
Standard Action - Ranged 10 Burst 1
Check: Arcana (Medium DC) with a Fire Spell to light the spirit-soaked Common Room rug.
Success: The rug is set ablaze, make a burst 1 attack.
Attack: + 6 (Lvl + 3) vs Reflex (NPC Reflex at this level is typically 16-18 with a stray 19 and very rare 20).
Damage: 1d6 fire damage and 5 ongoing fire damage (save ends).
Miss: 5 ongoing fire damage (save ends).
Effect: The burst creates a zone that lasts until the end of the encounter. Any creature that enters the zone or ends its turn there takes 5 fire damage. The fire spreads to each adjacent square, until it reaches the perimeter of the rug, at the end of your turn.

The to-hit would yield around 40-50 % chance (depending on NAD spread)

5e

Arcana Medium DC (35 % failure chance in this case)

1 Action - Radius n (not sure here...maybe 5 ft?)
Check: Arcana Medium DC
Saving Throw: DC 12
Damage: 3d10 fire damage
Miss: 1/2 damage
Effect: Burn for 1d4 rounds. Any enemy that starts their turn in the fire hazard takes 1d6 (I guess?) fire damage. The fire spreads 5 ft at the end of each the Wizard's subsequent turns.

DC 12 would yield around 45ish% success rate for enemies (assuming Dex save between 1 - 5ish)

 

[Ashkelon]

My favorite part of improvisation in 4e was the fact that due to encounter and daily resources, you could improvise bigger and better effects, at a cost.

When a player says he wants to perform a spinning sweep with his axe to hit three enemies at once, he can with not extraneous ability checks needed. He merely needs to exert himself s bit and give up a use of an encounter power. If he is out of encounter powers, then the additional checks and penalties come into play, but until then, improvising should be quick and easy. This gives players improvisation a good chance of success and leads to some memorable moments without the heavy handed DMing that usually leads to players having to jump through 5 hoops to improvise anything interesting.

 

[Corpsetaker]

My favorite part of improvisation in 4e was the fact that due to encounter and daily resources, you could improvise bigger and better effects, at a cost.

When a player says he wants to perform a spinning sweep with his axe to hit three enemies at once, he can with not extraneous ability checks needed. He merely needs to exert himself s bit and give up a use of an encounter power. If he is out of encounter powers, then the additional checks and penalties come into play, but until then, improvising should be quick and easy. This gives players improvisation a good chance of success and leads to some memorable moments without the heavy handed DMing that usually leads to players having to jump through 5 hoops to improvise anything interesting.

Could I get an actual game mechanical play by play as to how this is going to happen?

Remember, I'm not looking for an explanation that would apply to any edition.

 

[Imaro]

No, you do not. I'm just presenting you the fiction I'm envisioning. The whole rug isn't going up in flames instantaneously. For balance it couldn't be that way. It isn't uniformly saturated with spirits and (just from a process sim perspective) thicker pile rugs are more flame resistant. Check out my descriptions of both again.

4e

Arcana Medium DC (0 % failure chance in this case)

Burnin Down the House! Single-Use
Standard Action - Ranged 10 Burst 1
Check: Arcana (Medium DC) with a Fire Spell to light the spirit-soaked Common Room rug.
Success: The rug is set ablaze, make a burst 1 attack.
Attack: + 6 (Lvl + 3) vs Reflex (NPC Reflex at this level is typically 16-18 with a stray 19 and very rare 20).
Damage: 1d6 fire damage and 5 ongoing fire damage (save ends).
Miss: 5 ongoing fire damage (save ends).
Effect: The burst creates a zone that lasts until the end of the encounter. Any creature that enters the zone or ends its turn there takes 5 fire damage. The fire spreads to each adjacent square, until it reaches the perimeter of the rug, at the end of your turn.

The to-hit would yield around 40-50 % chance (depending on NAD spread)

5e

Arcana Medium DC (35 % failure chance in this case)

1 Action - Radius n (not sure here...maybe 5 ft?)
Check: Arcana Medium DC
Saving Throw: DC 12
Damage: 3d10 fire damage
Miss: 1/2 damage
Effect: Burn for 1d4 rounds. Any enemy that starts their turn in the fire hazard takes 1d6 (I guess?) fire damage. The fire spreads 5 ft at the end of each the Wizard's subsequent turns.

DC 12 would yield around 45ish% success rate for enemies (assuming Dex save between 1 - 5ish)

What is my purpose in trying to do this stunt?

 

[Imaro]

My favorite part of improvisation in 4e was the fact that due to encounter and daily resources, you could improvise bigger and better effects, at a cost.

When a player says he wants to perform a spinning sweep with his axe to hit three enemies at once, he can with not extraneous ability checks needed. He merely needs to exert himself s bit and give up a use of an encounter power. If he is out of encounter powers, then the additional checks and penalties come into play, but until then, improvising should be quick and easy. This gives players improvisation a good chance of success and leads to some memorable moments without the heavy handed DMing that usually leads to players having to jump through 5 hoops to improvise anything interesting.

Are there examples or guidelines for this in 4e? If so...where because I don't remember ever seeing them.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Are there examples or guidelines for this in 4e? If so...where because I don't remember ever seeing them.

No, and in all fairness it would pretty well blow the whole power system to smithereens IMHO. If you can do basically any sort of 'encounter stunt' by spending an 'encounter slot' then where would your selected powers come into it?

Its worth revisiting WHY 4e doesn't have this structure, a point system effectively. Its because it leads to heavy spamming. Its the same reason you can't just take the same power more than once, the designers wanted each PC to have a wide repertoire of tricks. In a 4e combat each non-at-will power use is unique, you haven't done it before, and won't do it again in that situation. You CAN 'stack', but you have to stack similar effects, not the same one repeated over and over.

 

[Tony Vargas]

It was sometimes stated in various AD&D books that you could do some sort of an 'ability check', but it was never clearly defined as a standard mechanic

It certainly wasn't. Not only did different sub-systems use different rolls (d20, d20 vs a matrix, d6, %), but different stats gave different bonuses for the same value (18 CON? +4, if you were a fighter, otherwise +2), 16 STR +1, 16 DEX -2, &c and had different checks CON? Make a percentile 'system shock' roll. STR? d6 to force open a door or % to bend bars DEX? d20 + reaction bonus, maybe? Then there's roll d20 or 3d6 under your stat (or my favorite, roll high on d20 without going over the stat). Consistency was not high on the list of classic-D&D virtues.

5e doesn't really have that one page. It talks about different types of checks in a few places. Skills are presented as non-core rules and their explanation is actually pretty obtuse if you go and just read it cold. In fact they're almost not explained, though anyone who knows modernish D&D and understands the core mechanic will 'get it'. 4e is much more concise and explicit in this sense.

4e strove for relative clarity, while in 5e clarity would almost be superfluous beyond the key explanation of the core resolution mechanic, which is a sentence, not a page. Along the lines of: the player describes an action, the DM decides if a roll is required (if so the player and/or DM might roll) and describes the results of the action.

That's really the bottom line across the board, everything else is window dressing. The rules say this or that, which may or may not be clear or broken or even workable, and you have some stuff on your character sheet that the DM may or may not take into consideration or even look at, but ultimately the DM is told up-front, to do whatever he wants, and that fulfills 5e's promise of DM empowerment, inclusion, modularity, and being all D&Ds to all D&Ders. Which is all, really, very much in keeping with the vision EGG laid out in the 1e DMG, just with a bit less obfuscation.

I find this to be an issue with 5e, so many of its core systems are presented as 'options' that later on when they talk about game process they have a hard time formulating an overall vision of how play proceeds at the table. Thus really needed expositions like 4e's page 42 simply don't exist AT ALL in 5e, instead we get scattered around the books some suggestions that aren't very well cohered together.

Play proceeds at the table in the basic cycle of DM description, player action, DM ruling, optional dice rolling, and back to DM description.

Its worth revisiting WHY 4e doesn't have this structure, a point system effectively. Its because it leads to heavy spamming. Its the same reason you can't just take the same power more than once, the designers wanted each PC to have a wide repertoire of tricks. In a 4e combat each non-at-will power use is unique, you haven't done it before, and won't do it again in that situation.

It was an anti-boredom provision, like that, yes. It also limited the impact of a broken power slipping through the cracks. A traditional or neo- Vancian or spontaneous caster that gets his hands on even one broken spell can cast it a lot, multiplying the impact of that spell-design oversight.