D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[BryonD]

There are quite of few things between the covers of the 5E books that I think greatly suck on face value.

But there is some great innovation in there are well. My "mostly"-5E campaign has evolved a little as we go along. But there are quite of few things from Pathfinder I fund myself missing. So I've started working on my own hybrid houserules for the next campaign (and possibly well beyond that). In my mind I was going to re-tool PF with some of the cool innovation from 5E. But when I finished the initial notes it was clear that it looked a lot more like 5E heavily house-rules with some bits and pieces from PF than the other way around. Which speaks well for the innovations and the flexibility of 5E.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There are quite of few things between the covers of the 5E books that I think greatly suck on face value.

But there is some great innovation in there are well. My "mostly"-5E campaign has evolved a little as we go along. But there are quite of few things from Pathfinder I fund myself missing. So I've started working on my own hybrid houserules for the next campaign (and possibly well beyond that). In my mind I was going to re-tool PF with some of the cool innovation from 5E. But when I finished the initial notes it was clear that it looked a lot more like 5E heavily house-rules with some bits and pieces from PF than the other way around. Which speaks well for the innovations and the flexibility of 5E.

Which ones did you like? I really only found one area where I really thought 5e improved, and that was simplification of bonuses and action economy. Advantage is a great trick for streamlining the whole twiddly bonus nonsense that really was ugly in previous editions. I think getting rid of the minor action was probably a good idea too, though I don't like the way 5e pretends that actions don't exist separately from what you do with them, it creates awkward rules text and some confusion. Still, I think those are at least incremental improvements, probably the only ones in the whole game IMHO.

 

[tyrlaan]

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.

This sounds like a potential amazing hack of 4e actually Though to be fair, if every player action required, effectively, on the fly building of the effect, it would probably work better with some digital support so play wouldn't slow to a crawl.

 

[Ashkelon]

This sounds like a potential amazing hack of 4e actually Though to be fair, if every player action required, effectively, on the fly building of the effect, it would probably work better with some digital support so play wouldn't slow to a crawl.

We had a few tweaks to the base system that made the game work really well IMHO.

First off, we used black and red poker chips (3 of each) instead of daily/encounter powers. Your encounter and daily powers represented powers known. You spend a chip to use a power. This mean you could repeat the same power multiple times in an encounter if you really wanted to. To limit spamming, we said that you could not repeat the same power twice in a row.

Secondly, to improvise, you merely needed to spend a poker chip and describe what you are trying to accomplish. Damage and effect was largely based off pg 42 and the type of chip used. It was actually super easy to make off the cuff rulings. Typically, an improvised action was somewhat inferior to a regular encounter power, but was useful if you needed a specific effect that you could not otherwise get (slow, daze, prone, AoE, etc).

I noticed far more improvisation in my 4e games than in my 5e ones. It was also easier to create the rulings for improvised actions. But 4e combats just took far too long and there were far too many bonuses/numbers to keep track of that we eventually decided to make the switch to 5e.

 

[Razuur]

The only things that I hate that the release schedule is so low and that it does not sport an ogl. I really feel that those two things will lead it to be not as popular as it could be over the long haul.

Other than that it is a perfect blend of everything I liked about 3e and OSR. Nice, neat, and tidy. Easy to adjust, and easy to use with OSR, 1e, 2e, 3e, & PF products.

Thank goodness for the OSR bloom we are experiencing right now, because a lot of that stuff is eminently portable.

ET

 

[Tony Vargas]

There are quite of few things between the covers of the 5E books that I think greatly suck on face value.

But there is some great innovation in there are well.

What is so sucky (or innovative) about 5e? Virtually everything in 5e came from some prior ed of D&D (and the few bits that didn't, like, say attunement, had been done in other games long since), and it was thoroughly screened for suck in a protracted playtest, erring on the side of rejecting things that didn't suck at all, lest something sucky get sucked in.

Even when some minority of playtesters thought something sucked, while others thought it was awesome, they'd either cut it or make it explicitly optional.

(It doesn't suck, is what I'm trying to convey here, in case anyone missed it. Sorry if I sucked at making that point, but it'd suck if someone left the thread thinking "Why Does 5e Suck?" was anything but ironic.)

In my mind I was going to re-tool PF with some of the cool innovation from 5E. But when I finished the initial notes it was clear that it looked a lot more like 5E heavily house-rules with some bits and pieces from PF than the other way around.

Cool. It's rare to see a Pathfinder fan defecting back to D&D.

The only things that I hate that the release schedule is so low and that it does not sport an ogl. I really feel that those two things will lead it to be not as popular as it could be over the long haul.

I picked up a module at Free RPG day this weekend, by Goodman Games, it was for "Fifth Edition Fantasy," using the 1.0 OGL (c)2000. It was a perfectly functional 5e adventure, just carefully avoided ever saying it was for 'Dungeons & Dragons' - it did say it was for 'the fifth edition of the first RPG.'

Don't think lack of an OGL is going to be a huge problem for 5e. If anything, better no 5e-specific OGL than something like the infamous GSL.

Between the potential for "Fifth Edition" 3pps under the old OGL, and the relative ease of porting classic D&D & OSR stuff to 5e, the lack of a constant stream of splatbooks might not be so bad, either.

 

[Celtavian]

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.

I didn't feel this way about 4E at all. It felt restrictive. It relied on extremely limited mechanics. Worst of all, it was repetitive. Every fight went nearly the same with a character blowing off encounter powers with an occasional daily worked in. People selected for the best abilities as is common to these games. There was very little differentiation amongst casters because nearly everything was damage based and slightly different derivative of another power based on the character's main stat.

You felt like that was heroic fantasy more so than Patfhinder/3E where you could build a more complex and complete strategy with a vastly more complex and interesting use of spells. I have no idea how that last statement doesn't apply to every edition of D&D. I do not see how you could argue on the basis of mechanics that 4E was more open-ended than previous editions of D&D or the current one. In fact, you could probably empirically prove that it was less open-ended due to the structure of its combat system. Character creation and powers were very limited in scope.

Were you really not that creative in 3E? The open-endedness and options in 3E were nearly endless. You had a huge number of actions codified while still allowing for improvisation that lead to outside the box thinking. I allowed things like a wizard to modify a fireball on the fly using Spellcraft to create a wind effect to clear a gas cloud or a really strong fighter to hurl a person up a 30 or 40 foot wall by virtue of their strength. I don't see any reason to believe 4E accomplished this in any better fashion than previous editions.

The only parts of 4E I looked at as innovative were the skill stunting as long as you didn't use it too often and make the reasons it worked absurd. The open-ended monster creation which they transferred to 5E in a very easy to use format. I found the character creation system stunted and very lacking in creativity. Character creation went from extremely open-ended in 3E to extremely closed in 4E. It seems to be somewhere in-between in 5E.

 

[Tuzenbach]

....that if I wanted to use a knife, the rules would push me to either a dagger or a dart.

 

[Tony Vargas]

It relied on extremely limited mechanics. Worst of all, it was repetitive. Every fight went nearly the same.... People selected for the best abilities as is common to these games. There was very little differentiation amongst casters...

That's D&D in a nutshell, sure. You see the same 'best' spells and combat options used relentlessly in every day (then rest to get them back). Casters all draw from the same spell lists, so you can't tell the players apart without a scorecard.

You can't blame 5e for that, it's just the nature of the beast. Every edition has had it's obvious best choices, and re-use of mechanics and/or overlapping spell lists.

So Clerics, Druids, Bards, Warlords, Artificers, Paladins, Shamans, Psionics, Priests, and other classes have all been able to heal in one ed or another, it doesn't make them all Clerics, even though several of them all used the exact same Cure..Wounds spells to do it.

You felt like that was heroic fantasy more so than Patfhinder where you could build a more complex and complete strategy with a vastly more complex and interesting use of spells. I have no idea how that last statement doesn't apply to every edition of D&D.

Spells have been the main source of meaningful options and effective tactics or complex strategies in most editions of D&D, yes. 5e does keep it's few non-casters relevant with big DPR, though.

I do not see how you could argue on the basis of mechanic was more open-ended. In fact, you could probably empirically prove that it was less open-ended due to the structure of its combat system. Character creation and powers were very limited in scope. I found the character creation system stunted and very lacking in creativity. Character creation went from extremely open-ended in 3E to extremely closed

While it was option-rich - thousands upon thousands of options, at the very least - far too many of those options were non-viable, or even just sub-optimal, so were essentially 'closed.' Worst case anything but the few Tier 1 classes and the odd outre power builds were it. So the better the other editions were balanced, the more of the (fewer) options that they presented were actually viable. 5e 'only' has 38 sub-class choices, for instance, but probably at least 30 of them are arguably viable - potentially all of them if you limit consideration to viability in combat over the prescribed 6-8 encounter 'day.'

Were you really not that creative in 3E? The open-endedness and options in 3E were nearly endless. You had a huge number of actions codified while still allowing for improvisation that lead to outside the box thinking.

It was really open-ended at chargen/level up, thanks to the MCing system, which 4e abandoned but 5e brought back, and to the large number of feats, which 4e expanded but 5e paired away and made individually 'bigger.' Really, 3.5 was the most prolific edition as far as sheer number of character options, even if a lot of system mastery was required to comb through them for the best ones.

I allowed things like a wizard to modify a fireball on the fly using Spellcraft to create a wind effect to clear a gas cloud or a really strong fighter to hurl a person up a 30 or 40 foot wall by virtue of their strength.

Well, those would both have been in conflict with the RAW in 3e (not that the intent of 3e was for RAW to be final, but the community went the way it did), but might be done with less controversy in other editions, either because there was no specific rule, so DM fiat came into play, or because the available rules were more flexible.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I didn't feel this way about 4E at all. It felt restrictive. It relied on extremely limited mechanics. Worst of all, it was repetitive. Every fight went nearly the same with a character blowing off encounter powers with an occasional daily worked in. People selected for the best abilities as is common to these games. There was very little differentiation amongst casters because nearly everything was damage based and slightly different derivative of another power based on the character's main stat.

Yeah, I liked the way that everyone was 'playing the same game' when it came to the mechanics of defeating things. The whole 1e Assassin thing where you just killed things in one blow (albeit there were restrictions, it wasn't easy) was just bizarre. Blungo the Great, swordsman extraordinaire couldn't possibly kill a dragon in one shot with even the most extreme luck, but his buddy the assassin could insta-gank it with a dagger. Just never worked for me.

As far as 'same combat' went. Well, in any edition of D&D if you had say a bunch of orcs in a fairly featureless room things would pretty much go about the same. Now, in 4e you could create some complicated terrain, give the orcs a ballista, set up some sort of goal other than killing them all using an SC or etc. Obviously none of this is IMPOSSIBLE in AD&D either, but 4e had some pretty nice rules for it. We just didn't play bland vanilla encounters over and over again. I realize that 4e adventures and, apparently, most DMs literally did that, they just duplicated the same 5 or 6 encounter templates again and again with only minor variations. Its a shame. When you fill the game with Indiana Jones-esque crazy stuff it really works incredibly well.

I never thought of any of the rules as being 'in the way', they just added a whole new dimension that wasn't really there in AD&D where any kind of stunt or etc was just totally 'out there' and unless you had spells a fight was just "I hit it again".

You felt like that was heroic fantasy more so than Patfhinder/3E where you could build a more complex and complete strategy with a vastly more complex and interesting use of spells. I have no idea how that last statement doesn't apply to every edition of D&D. I do not see how you could argue on the basis of mechanics that 4E was more open-ended than previous editions of D&D or the current one. In fact, you could probably empirically prove that it was less open-ended due to the structure of its combat system. Character creation and powers were very limited in scope.

Yes, all RPGs are in some sense open-ended, but what I mean is 4e has a set of rules frameworks and material that sits in them for a very wide variety of things, much wider than what even 3e has. I don't think you can 'empirically prove' anything about an RPG, so lets not try.

Why does 4e have heroic fantasy? I can have my fighter run up to a chasm, leap across, and take a huge roundhouse blow at the dragon, and then another similar blow, and I can do that at level 1 and without even improvising. Oh, but most importantly, I know the odds of it working, and I know the implications of being in melee with that dragon, and I know I can probably at least survive the consequences of failure if I'm at full strength. My AD&D character? He's probably toast, I don't know how far he can jump, but if he falls short he'll probably break his neck in the fall, and in any case even a couple dice of damage is a big deal. My 1e fighter hacked at things and mostly got in the way of them ganking the wizard, my 4e fighter leaps, makes amazing attacks when the chips are down, gets back up after having his arm half-bitten off, etc. I call that heroic.

Were you really not that creative in 3E? The open-endedness and options in 3E were nearly endless. You had a huge number of actions codified while still allowing for improvisation that lead to outside the box thinking. I allowed things like a wizard to modify a fireball on the fly using Spellcraft to create a wind effect to clear a gas cloud or a really strong fighter to hurl a person up a 30 or 40 foot wall by virtue of their strength. I don't see any reason to believe 4E accomplished this in any better fashion than previous editions.

Well, 3e at least has a d20 core mechanic much like 4e's, so in that sense improvisation is at least supplied with SOME mechanics. 4e's version just couples that with a healing, hit point, action surge, etc mechanics that highlight the 'do heroic things' part of the game.

As for all those examples, you can modify a spell (or other power) in 4e, do any improvised action, use a skill, or perform a whole skill challenge. These are all quite well-supported concepts. The thing is, with the short list of skills you aren't wondering which one might apply, or being saddled with a lot of useless ones that never do. With the SC system you can know the stakes pretty well. Powers provide a great universal framework for 'things characters do', one that offers a lot of possible options in terms of house ruling, improvising, making interesting items, etc. Its just a system that covers a LOT of stuff and happened to deliver that kinda crazy superheros sort of game that I always envisaged.

The only parts of 4E I looked at as innovative were the skill stunting as long as you didn't use it too often and make the reasons it worked absurd. The open-ended monster creation which they transferred to 5E in a very easy to use format. I found the character creation system stunted and very lacking in creativity. Character creation went from extremely open-ended in 3E to extremely closed in 4E. It seems to be somewhere in-between in 5E.

I think CHARACTER POWER and EXPLOITABILITY of the character creation system were extreme in 3e, and much more dialed in in 4e, but you can support all of the same character concepts in either edition, and they will work pretty well in both. 5e is REALLY much more like 2e in this sense. It has pretty limited options, but you can add on backgrounds and you get a subclass at 2nd/3rd level that gives you some more choices. If you want to use MCing then it gets a bit closer to 3e, but the 5e classes aren't as generic and flexible as the 3e ones.

The 4e character system has a crazy amount of stuff you can do. Just power selection by itself is a huge ways beyond any 3.x derived system. EVERY 4e fighter is unique, and that uniqueness WILL show in combat (and probably elsewhere).

That's how I see it anyway. Unfortunately for people like me this is why 5e 'sucks', it definitely doesn't cater so well to the high action kind of game. Its not quite the gritty low-fantasy grinder that 1e was and 2e could be if you played it that way. At the same time it feels a lot more like low fantasy and a lot less like you're really a fantastical character, at least for the first 6 levels.