D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[AbdulAlhazred]

As a 4e fan, I can definitely tell you I perceived a lot of the same on the other side of the fence as well. All I'm really saying is the whole load of it was terrible. Terrible for fans of any edition of D&D. And what you say is so completely on point, but people tend to have trouble with criticism, which makes it tough for some not to take things to extremes. Which isn't to say that's an excuse - people should be willing to mature and grow and be capable of both receiving and giving criticism (and learning from it, like you say!) - but I think this is just easier for some than it is for others.




It's amazingly refreshing to read a cogent, non-hyperbole-laden explanation of why someone does not/did not care for 4e. Shame it took so many years before I saw one but I'll take it

My perspective on it is exceedingly simple. All I ever wanted to do was discuss the game I liked with other people. Constructive criticism, like "oh, that's not so good, lets do this other thing" or "I'd like it better if..." etc is FINE. What we actually got was literally unending vitriole. Every single thread in almost every forum was derailed for SIX YEARS without fail by the same tired griping. And it was, and still is, almost all highly unproductive. Its of the "this isn't a game, its crap, it can never satisfy me in any way" and then repeated and constant reiteration of that same message. It was never "how would I change things so it might work better for me" or anything like that. The starting point was always "its crap and it can't be fixed and WotC screwed us."

So, when I hear another of those posts, then really, its like there's little desire to agree with our find any commonality with that person, its like its just a lost cause, straight up.

 

[BryonD]

It was never "how would I change things so it might work better for me" or anything like that. The starting point was always "its crap and it can't be fixed and WotC screwed us."

I call complete BS on that.
Obviously the over and over theme of just pure ranting is true.

But there were NUMEROUS times when many different people, myself included, suggested ways to make the game better and we were attacked and spewed upon by 4E fans with just as much vitriol as any "h4ter" ever offered. The fundamental premise of 4E was unappealing to a very large number of people. And proposing changes to bring those people into the tent was decried as "backwards" and "fear of change", and we were told that if that was what we wanted then D&D didn't need us anyway because 10 new players would join the ranks for every one that that left.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Congratulations, you fell for the 'excluded middle.' Saelorn claims that the majority of gamers agree with him, and backs it up with the reasoning that he can't be the only one. Between 1 and 51% is the vast excluded middle where the truth probably can be found. Frankly, it's probably a lot closer to just him, but I offer no fallacious reasoning for that, it's JMHO.

Ayup. In all of creation its hard to find a single unique individual, it is true. Someone somewhere probably holds some PoV similar to Saelorn's. That doesn't make his position anything more than minusculely less idiosyncratic.

 

[Celtavian]

I certainly felt screwed by WotC as a person that loves to play caster characters. I felt they neutered the D&D magic system and told me they didn't care that I didn't like it. Judging from what 5E did with magic, that is pretty much one of the main things they worked hard to fix in 5E. It's very noticeable that the main problem with 4E was its magic system. I'm back to 5E because they fixed the magic system enough that I felt like a wizard again. I'm glad Mearls took the time to figure out a magic system that handled some of the problems in 3E and eliminated the weaknesses of 4E enough to make a wizard that is powerful and versatile enough for a caster player like myself.

 

[tyrlaan]

I certainly felt screwed by WotC as a person that loves to play caster characters. I felt they neutered the D&D magic system and told me they didn't care that I didn't like it. Judging from what 5E did with magic, that is pretty much one of the main things they worked hard to fix in 5E. It's very noticeable that the main problem with 4E was its magic system. I'm back to 5E because they fixed the magic system enough that I felt like a wizard again. I'm glad Mearls took the time to figure out a magic system that handled some of the problems in 3E and eliminated the weaknesses of 4E enough to make a wizard that is powerful and versatile enough for a caster player like myself.

Two comments to this.

One:
I felt they fixed the magic system in 4e and dramatically prefer the A/E/D power system over the old 3e spell system. Why? Because I didn't like the fighter<->wizard power divide, I grew tired of looking up spells in game and losing time, and I didn't like having to hope I picked the right spells for the day or poring through multiple books to find the right spell for the next day.

I'm not mentioning this to have a debate over which magic system is better because the answer is incredibly simple - the one you personally enjoy the most. But I'll come back to this in a moment.

I am mentioning this because clearly 5e has reverted to most of the things I disliked in pre-4e magic systems. Yes, I realize it's not completely the same, but it is the return of spell lists and the power divide and looking up spells. I consider this a huge step backward but that's because I don't like the "old" magic system. However I don't feel "screwed by WotC" because of this. WotC is a business, and as such they exist to make money. If what they feel they must do to best make money does not sync with my preferences in gaming, then so be it. It's not personal, it's just business.

So yeah, releasing 5e is kind of like them telling me they didn't care that I liked 4e, except for the fact that WotC did not make their decisions with my specific tastes in mind. No company is going to cater my specific tastes and it does me no good to take their decisions personally...because they will never be personal.

Two:
I think you believe the magic system in 4e was broken and that it was the "main problem" with 4e and that they "fixed it" in 5e. This is of course personal preference and not empirical data. Perhaps its fair to guess that many people didn't like that about 4e, but it wasn't broken - it worked just fine for me when I ran a game with it for 5ish years.

I'm stating this because what you wrote very much reads like "4e was broken and I'm glad they fixed what was broken about it when they made 5e" when it should really read more like "the stuff in 4e that was a deal breaker for me was removed/changed in 5e, which is awesome because it means 5e doesn't have that thing I don't like in it."

Or in other words, as I stated earlier, neither system is better, its just about which one you like more and that's all there is to it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Thanks, and yes - different slimes. So the fiction is boring but not inconsistent.

I don't think it even HAS to be boring, its just up to the DM to elaborate the fiction if he wants to have a plethora of Cave Slimes. They could be the spoor of some sort of Far Realm entities that the PCs are after, with each one being the sign of a different aberration.

I think this is really no different from what a 5e DM might do with the 5e version of Cave Slime, he could make different DC versions that are left by different monstrosities.

It's a fair question. In some of my posts over the past few pages I've been trying to say a bit about it, but it's probably not as clear as it could be.

I certainly don't want to be dogmatic about anything; on the other hand, from 1990 to 2008 I GMed a lot of Rolemaster (objective DCs), from 2009 to present I've GMed a lot of 4e (subjective DCs) and also some MHRP (subjective DCs) and BW (objective DCs), and this has given me an intuitive conviction that there is a difference.

I'm going to take a stab at three main differences. Analysis, and relevant play experiences that shed light, are very welcome!

First difference: "subjective" DCs encourage the GM to approach framing keeping in mind concerns of pacing/story - "How big a deal do I want this to be for the PCs, for the players, given the other dynamics going on in the campaign and at the table, etc?"

This of course we understand that some players find to be anathema. I guess the theory is that a purely 'emergent story' is in some sense better than one which is an explicit above-board consideration. The usual response is "but you just plan these things covertly instead, which leads to various forms of DM force being applied to get there." etc.

A really concrete demonstration of this might be deciding, in MHRP, whether or not to drop in a die from the Doom Pool (with the appropriate fictional narration for the opposition) - the fiction and DC are correlated, but the choice of what fiction to be created is driven by the narrative/pacing concerns and not just extrapolation from ingame concerns (like impersonal causal processes + NPC motivations).

And the response of course is that even the GM should be barred from explicitly playing the meta-game. They might say "well, its OK if an NPC motivation is abstracted as a 'Doom Pool' access, where the pool represents the NPC's resources, but its not OK for the DM to have resources, because then they don't represent some causal process within the game world, and every mechanic must only represent causal processes."

Second difference (but not disconnected from the first): "objective" DCs put the focus squarely on ingame causal processes. What has happened, in the fiction, to make it the case that this gameworld element of this degree of difficulty is present here-and-now? As Luke Crane puts it in his Adventure Burner, DCs are the mechanism whereby the GM shows off the gameworld to the PCs and lets them get a concrete handle on it.

This tends to discourage too much off-the-wall craziness (say, setting a high DC and justifying it by reference to fate or luck, or a spontaneous "wild magic zone"). With "subjective" DCs players tend to rely on knowledge of the game's mechanical parameters to support their action declarations - so the fiction is something that has to be respected and accommodated as a parameter for action declaration, but meta-knowledge about pacing and story and so on. Whereas with "objective" DCs I think players are encouraged more into ingame-oriented tactical/optimisation reasoning (Burning Wheel has other bells and whistles in place to push back against this encouragement).

I think this is at least part of why "objective" DCs push towards grittiness. I think it also helps explain how objective DCs fit with bounded accuracy (which is part of 5e, and BE, and Rolemaster in virtue of its open-ended and crit/insta-death rules).

Sounds about right. Objective DCs tend to invoke causal process, which is then almost sure described in terms of the physics of our actual world. The closer you are to real world physics, the closer you are to the ultimate level of grittiness (nothing is grittier than reality, maybe that's an assumption?).

Third difference: "subjective DCs" tend to allow the looseness of fit between fiction and mechanics that we see in HeroQuest revised, Maelstrom Storytelling, 4e's adaptation to Dark Sun or Neverwinter or Gamma World, etc. Whereas "objective" DCs tend to encourage a greater integration of particular aspects of mechanics with particular minutiae of ingame causal processes.

Thoughts?

I think objective DCs have to be spelled out. That is a system really needs to list them out because the only way to determine them is by analysis of game world (and by analogy real world) physics. Given that most people have only a loose idea of how things work in the real world its hard to count on them to know how to set those DCs themselves. Subjective DCs generally come ahead of fiction, a game like 4e could in theory not describe ANY fiction and simply have a DC chart, you'd just make it up and as long as it was fun it would be right.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Blame the change to Magic Missile. An always-hitting (but never hitting) always-damaging (but not missing) power was a real monkeywrench. That was a bit of 'design space' that could have been left closed.

Eh, MM wasn't really a problem there, at least the wizard had to dedicate an attack to zotting a minion, so it tied well to the fiction and truthfully a standard action to kill one minion? Hardly efficient.

It was things like spreading around curse damage, 'auras' (think Rain of Steel), or some other forms of unavoidable zone damage where no to-hit role is required. These get to be pretty prevalent in paragon and almost ubiquitous in epic. So I found that minions were quite nasty against heroic PCs. In fact I had a couple scenarios where they pummeled upper heroic parties. 20 orc archer minions were a famous one that nearly decimated an 8th level party. It was an at-level encounter that really hurt them quite a bit.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

We had the PHB and... I think it was the Forgotten Realms book ? The point is, we were early adopters. For my first character, I went to make a healer, because I enjoy playing healers.

And I saw that I had an at-will power to grant temporary HP, which was really neat! But my hopes were immediately dashed when I realized that there was nothing I could do without making an attack roll.

That things worked out better at high levels, or later on in the edition cycle, was irrelevant to me at the time. Everyone else had shiny new toys to play with. Even the fighter, who never had powers before. Even the wizard, who was previously limited to a meager handful of spells per day, and could now throw Magic Missiles and Thunderwaves at-will. The healer seemed like the only one left out of the fun.

This isn't rhetoric. This was genuine disappointment. I mean, it was short-lived disappointment, and there were plenty of other things to explore besides just being a healer, but that doesn't make it any less genuine.

It just felt weird to me that the lack of a way to play a PURE healer that never attacked at all was considered so vital when the 4e cleric was so much a reaction to 3e cleric that always ended up turning 100% of his spell slots into CLWs unless there was some real catastrophe that he needed to fix (poison, curses, etc). Plus the fact that CLW was really not worth it as in-combat healing, since it healed less points than even the cleric could likely do by whacking something with a mace. It was one of those things that really came out of left field for the developers I'm sure.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is a very key point, one that I've made over and over and over again about several things with 4e. My only caveat here being that I do agree with @AbdulAlhazred about 4e messaging being a bit more vacillating in some areas than I would have liked it to have been (and it wasn't all that vacillating...just more than I would have liked). You've seen me make posts about that before I'm sure.

4e was often raked over the coals for the perception of language that was meant to exclude playstyles, "skip the guards and get to the fun" being the most infamous. However, I don't feel that, sum total, 4e was nearly as divisive in its messaging than is claimed. In a lot of ways, it felt like it bent over backwards to caveat any strong messaging or exclusive language by embracing and explaining alternative approaches/player archetypes. In fact, my surmise is that Heinsoo would have liked to have had a much more focused, non-vacillating, and transparent instruction in the core books as he and Wyatt put out in 13th Age. My guess is that he met a lot of resistance internally and "too many cooks in the editor kitchen" made the core books have fantastic instruction but mixed messaging in certain key places. And beyond that, some of the decisions for language was just weird. It was like they were trying to "de-indify" some (obviously indie-inspired) things to make it more accessible (I guess) to some D&D players or to make it less controversial to grogs who hate indie games/The Forge (if this was the impetus for it, it wouldn't surprise me at all!). I mean, why in the world would you say "skip the guards and get to the fun" when Vincent Baker already established the clear, instructive, and less incendiary indie principle of "at every moment, push play towards conflict."

The DMG2 and Neverwinter (and several other books including Worlds and Monsters and tons of the online articles) suffered no such mixed messaging. In my estimation, they were as focused and as insightful as to the design impetus, play procedures, and play goals of 4e as one could have asked for.

I pretty much agree with you, in many ways, but I think that Rob and James might have underestimated or just not understood the degree to which certain things needed to be established or explained, like [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]'s characterization of the levels of fantastic terrain as being PC-level scaled constructs with no definite DCs, vs generic setting components that could have a DC set to match the DM's idea of the fiction.

Another area where WotC completely missed the boat was in terms of the whole tone of the game, which is clearly a vastly more suitable game to a 'fantasy supers' or at least 'fantasy action-adventure hero' tone vs the classic D&D procedural dungeon crawl's gritty low fantasy meat grinder tone. The adventures, at the very least the first 9, seem firmly rooted in roughly an AD&D 2e or even earlier mode, where there is very little dynamic action, loads of sequential series 'monster-in-a-box' type tactical challenges, and really no scope for the rollicking crazy stunt-filled Indiana-Jones-esque high adventure that 4e comes alive for. Even the later adventures, while many of them seem to be a lot looser are still really at their cores pretty traditional tactical situations.

Now, I don't know if James and Rob would have pushed for a different style of adventure or not. I'm not familiar with their 13a Adventures either, though I did play a bit. So I am not really sure exactly what sort of action sequences they advocate, or if in fact even those 2 were in the '4e as action adventure system' boat.

I continue to maintain that it was an overall lack of coherency of vision, WRT at least tone, that was 4e's most salient problem, and the clarity with which 5e approaches its '2e-esque' tone that sets it off by comparison. Whatever process WotC went through in 2007/2008 didn't yield consensus, instead it yielded a compromise game, as you've alluded to. The brief appearance and disappearance of Monte Cook on the 5e team takes on a great significance here. It would be easy to see it as a failure to achieve unified vision followed by an "it is better if you continue on your quest alone, Mike."

 

[BryonD]

However I don't feel "screwed by WotC" because of this. WotC is a business, and as such they exist to make money. If what they feel they must do to best make money does not sync with my preferences in gaming, then so be it. It's not personal, it's just business.

First of all, THIS.
And for the record, through all the years of my negative comments regarding 4E and its lack of value to me personally (gross simplification there), I repeated this point numerous times.
I NEVER felt they owed me anything.


That said, I think it is clear that you can take two people on opposite sides and have them both say "Your version moved the game backward." and have BOTH of them walk away convinced that they didn't say anything offensive but the other person was full of vitriol.

I also think that if WotC drew a cartoon showing a 4E fan as a literal troll and having a dragon crap on them, the 4e holdouts as a collective would not show the acceptance of this (or semi-official "we fired them" comments) that they so easily assume 3E fans should have shown when these things actually did happen to them.
WotC didn't owe anything, but they blundered their plan and their PR on more than one occasion. (and they fanbase compounded that many many time over)

And finally, there are also people out there that love OD&D and think both 3E and 4E suck. Does their opinion count as much as yours or mine? Absolutely yes. But does their opinion carry the same weight in the overall marketplace? Nope. You can't just say "two sides of equal merit". Nose counts matter.