D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

I think there's plenty of room for many different experiences to have been had, and undoubtedly the same events can be seen in many different lights. I'd prefer it if the response was more along the lines of "I didn't see my suggestions being greeted with any enthusiasm by others." Part of the problem was the whole divisiveness. I don't know exactly where that originated from, but REALLY early on the first thing I started hearing was just exceedingly low brow unhelpful "this is just crap, its just like an MMO, its all just unmitigated gamist crap, blah blah blah." This is why [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]'s "its not a video game" is so purely political and his attempt to cast it as a semantic argument so thin, because it was a bloody flag that was raised on day one sometime in July of 2008. Its not something you can answer with any intelligent debate. Its a pure "I hate your game" putdown.

So, I feel like you may well have felt branded with, and by some people were branded with some label you may not have deserved. OTOH you have to ask yourself with whom you sided in those debates. Was it such people? Maybe the reaction you got was related to standing too close to some people who did deserve to be painted with that brush? I don't know.

I'm also not sure what anyone could do during the time period in question. I think there was a lot of material and suggestions that were put forward around how to do different things with 4e, what it was all about, etc. quite early on. It took a couple years for people like myself to fully digest the game though, and even 7 years in we are still exploring the ramifications of 4e. It is quite clear it raises a lot more questions about what is central to D&D than 5e does.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Yeah, and to me it is a complete backsliding. I had absolutely no problems with the 4e wizard. I have no idea why people call it 'neutered'. The classic D&D wizard was an example of vastly too broad class design. It stepped all over every other character at each and every turn, and the little bit that was done to tone down its ridiculously over broad capabilities was like a bandaide applied to a sucking chest wound, and even the bandaide fell off in 3e.

Now comes the 5e wizard, which in many respects even adds to the problems! Instead of being forced to at least pre-declare which of the vast array of wondrous class features you were going to pick from today you now get to spam the most appropriate one or two again and again, and even amp them up to better handle higher level situations if you want. Beyond that you can cast many key utility spells over and over as rituals without even needing to select them! I grant you, SOME of the spells are more limited in certain ways, but overall a 5e wizard IMHO is mostly a pretty nice power boost from a 2e wizard, which was already kinda game-breaking.

I mean really, the 4e wizard had unlimited rituals (albeit they weren't all free to cast, but they covered a HUGE range of capabilities) and a pretty nice selection of powers, many of which were pretty handy outside combat situations (and a slew of which were utility powers that were often the equal of any 5e wizard's utilities).

I will agree on one point. The original Vancian AD&D wizard's powers are more straightforwardly tied to fiction and each edition of the game up until 4e went out of its way to establish the nature of that fiction (it varied a bit across editions). 4e's wizard, while it does have a bunch of fluff, doesn't get its mechanics mapped in such an explicit way to a specific fictional interpretation. In 1e you have a book, a memorization procedure, and casting spells causes them to be forgotten. In 4e only a few spells can only be cast once, the book's mechanics don't exactly match up with 'a library of spells', and there's no attempt to explain in concrete terms how the process of memorizing and casting works narratively. If you interpreted it roughly like 1e does, at least for daily powers, you COULD find that the mechanics didn't quite support you, if you say decided to retrain one of those powers. Encounter spells didn't fit well at all with the central idea of Vancian magic, though at-wills could be passed off pretty easily (as were cantrips in 5e).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

And just to have fun and quote myself... This may point out a place where 5e is incoherent. It not only says basically "DCs are based on objective physical reality", but THEN it says "and we don't want to make firm rules for that objective reality!" Its kinda weird. If your game is going to use objective DCs, it should go out of its way to explicate how to set them objectively. The most logical approach would be a very large and comprehensive list of DCs and factors which should modify them.

 

[BryonD]

I think there's plenty of room for many different experiences to have been had, and undoubtedly the same events can be seen in many different lights. I'd prefer it if the response was more along the lines of "I didn't see my suggestions being greeted with any enthusiasm by others." Part of the problem was the whole divisiveness. I don't know exactly where that originated from, but REALLY early on the first thing I started hearing was just exceedingly low brow unhelpful "this is just crap, its just like an MMO, its all just unmitigated gamist crap, blah blah blah." This is why [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]'s "its not a video game" is so purely political and his attempt to cast it as a semantic argument so thin, because it was a bloody flag that was raised on day one sometime in July of 2008. Its not something you can answer with any intelligent debate. Its a pure "I hate your game" putdown.

So, I feel like you may well have felt branded with, and by some people were branded with some label you may not have deserved. OTOH you have to ask yourself with whom you sided in those debates. Was it such people? Maybe the reaction you got was related to standing too close to some people who did deserve to be painted with that brush? I don't know.

I'm also not sure what anyone could do during the time period in question. I think there was a lot of material and suggestions that were put forward around how to do different things with 4e, what it was all about, etc. quite early on. It took a couple years for people like myself to fully digest the game though, and even 7 years in we are still exploring the ramifications of 4e. It is quite clear it raises a lot more questions about what is central to D&D than 5e does.

I would have preferred some things be different as well.
In the end, the 4E fanbase had more to lose.

I have, on multiple occasions stated that I disagree with the "videogame" claim and other claims. But I also maintained that it was the obligation of WotC and the 4E fanbase to try to understand WHY people felt that way.
I think blowing off simplistic arguments as pure "'I hate your game' putdowns" is simply closed minded and short sighted. Obviously it lacks elegance. But if you make zero effort to try to understand why someone would feel that way in the first place, then you are never going to get anywhere. And, again, the 4e fanbase had more to lose. And you did.

I did, hell, I *DO* find 4E to be way to "gamist" for my taste.

And don't go blowing smoke about who I aligned myself with. Tony is STILL throwing "H4ter" around routinely and in this very thread. Are you calling him out? He still rolls out the grand conspiracy theory on a regular basis. Are you proclaiming yourself guilty by association? Or can we drop that line of propaganda?

I don't know that anything could have been done either. 4E is a tightly engineered system and the alternatives on the market set a high bar. But you can't complain about not enough time to repair broken widows when your whole team is out there throwing rocks. You guys didn't try.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I grant you, SOME of the spells are more limited in certain ways, but overall a 5e wizard IMHO is mostly a pretty nice power boost from a 2e wizard, which was already kinda game-breaking.

Maybe it's been too long since you played AD&D 2nd edition, but let me rattle off a few tactics and see if they jog your memory:

1.) Magic Jar the Tarrasque at 9th level
2.) Polymorph a mouse into a Gold Dragon at 7th level
3.) Animate Dead unlimited numbers of monstrous corpses at 9th level (5th for clerics)
4.) Create an army of almost-permanently dominated slaves with Dominate at 9th level.
5.) Emplace multiple Fire Traps in the same location to kill anyone who you can trick into going there at 5th level.
6.) All-day invisibility at 3rd level.
7.) Teleport Without Error at interplanetary/interstellar distances at 14th level.

None of these capabilities exist for 5E wizards at any level. The 5E wizard has more flexibility but far less raw power. A 20th level 5E wizard has a scope somewhat similar to an 7th to 9th level AD&D wizard, but more depth within that scope. I.e. he can do fewer and less powerful kinds of things, more times per day.

 

[BryonD]

And just to have fun and quote myself... This may point out a place where 5e is incoherent. It not only says basically "DCs are based on objective physical reality", but THEN it says "and we don't want to make firm rules for that objective reality!" Its kinda weird. If your game is going to use objective DCs, it should go out of its way to explicate how to set them objectively. The most logical approach would be a very large and comprehensive list of DCs and factors which should modify them.

H5TER!!!!!!




Seriously, I believe that 5E is SUCKS in the RAW form. (lets take this thread back to the OP)
I see some awesome bits and pieces in it and I see a vast amount of ready customization in it.
I'm playing a mostly pure 5E game right now. (Healing by RAW never saw the light of day, a few other things, but pretty close.) And I'm seeing some frayed edges just one campaign in. I'm not here to proclaim 5E anything.
But I love the way it opens itself up to houseruling and I *think* it can be rigged more toward 4E just as my next campaign will be rigged even more toward 3E.
So I think that is a good thing.

I want WotC to throw as big a net as possible. But as I've said before, 4E was awesome at being what it was and if you are in the perfect niche market, there may be no way anything else is going to replace that.
The goal of having 100% of players jump onboard would be absurd. As I just said upthread, there are people who hate 3E and 4E. 3E did really well without them. It is what it is.
If 5E was a game I HATED, but had a big enough share of the market, then I'd have no ground to stand on.
And just the same, I've zero interest in trying to persuade anyone to play their fourth or even second favorite game.
I am interested (within perspective, we are just geeks ranting on a website after all) in seeing WotC produce a D&D game that appeals to "enough" people.
I hope you are one of them, but much more I hope you have a game YOU love AND WotC sells a popular game which may or may not be that same game.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I would have preferred some things be different as well.
In the end, the 4E fanbase had more to lose.

I have, on multiple occasions stated that I disagree with the "videogame" claim and other claims. But I also maintained that it was the obligation of WotC and the 4E fanbase to try to understand WHY people felt that way.
I think blowing off simplistic arguments as pure "'I hate your game' putdowns" is simply closed minded and short sighted. Obviously it lacks elegance. But if you make zero effort to try to understand why someone would feel that way in the first place, then you are never going to get anywhere. And, again, the 4e fanbase had more to lose. And you did.

Well, I don't know. I'm not sure FANS had any huge obligation to go in and analyze anything. WotC might have had some INTEREST in doing so, and in fact I would argue they did exactly that. I'm not the greatest fan of their response, but clearly they did respond. First they incorporated elements that were requested into 4e, then they published a 'spin' of 4e that was clearly intended to address many of those criticisms (at least the more coherent ones that COULD be addressed), and then they released 5e.

The problem for us, as fans and advocates, was that a lot of the commentary was unaddressable in any productive way. What do you say to "that isn't even an RPG, its just WOW on paper!" Even when the commentary had some element at the root of it that you could potentially engage it seemed most often that the criticism was coming from a place that was hopelessly hostile. It was the "Me and 4 of my friends that all didn't like this game before we even played it spent 3 hours confirming our opinion that it sucks." They might have pointed out specific things they didn't like, but when its clear there's no interest in even giving it the slightest chance... To this day I interact with people who never played 4e, never read one paragraph of even the PHB1, and know nothing about it telling me that they wouldn't ever play, it sucked, etc simply based on 'troll poo' they heard 3rd hand off some forum.

I did, hell, I *DO* find 4E to be way to "gamist" for my taste.

And that's fine. I can comprehend that. I have answers for it in the sense that the way the game is composed is that way for a REASON, there are things gained, and things potentially lost, though if you approach it a certain way the losses seem insignificant. Still, its OK. I don't feel any need to respond negatively to that sort of comment, nor did I do that 7 years ago that I can recall.

And don't go blowing smoke about who I aligned myself with. Tony is STILL throwing "H4ter" around routinely and in this very thread. Are you calling him out? He still rolls out the grand conspiracy theory on a regular basis. Are you proclaiming yourself guilty by association? Or can we drop that line of propaganda?

I've never espoused those views, or used the same rhetoric. Really I don't know what things you said exactly, which is why I didn't make statements that you said X or Y. Nor do I think that it was a situation where only one side ever said inflammatory or derogatory things. One problem is that in a sense WotC, in its utter stupidity, threw the first brick, and all of us got blamed for that, so there was a rather heavy amount of being told I was bad simply because I liked the game and someone made up a joke ad that promoted said game at the expense of the one they played. I didn't do that either. I'm just saying, you got hit in the crossfire in something very heated. At this point I don't know the details, so I can't say if you really asked for it or not. Many did, some didn't.

I don't know that anything could have been done either. 4E is a tightly engineered system and the alternatives on the market set a high bar. But you can't complain about not enough time to repair broken widows when your whole team is out there throwing rocks. You guys didn't try.

Oh, I spent endless hours convincing people to play. Many many hours advocating for styles of play and techniques that would improve play experience, etc. There was a lot of that on Enworld, which was at least good about squashing the worst trolling.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Maybe it's been too long since you played AD&D 2nd edition, but let me rattle off a few tactics and see if they jog your memory:

1.) Magic Jar the Tarrasque at 9th level
2.) Polymorph a mouse into a Gold Dragon at 7th level
3.) Animate Dead unlimited numbers of monstrous corpses at 9th level (5th for clerics)
4.) Create an army of almost-permanently dominated slaves with Dominate at 9th level.
5.) Emplace multiple Fire Traps in the same location to kill anyone who you can trick into going there at 5th level.
6.) All-day invisibility at 3rd level.
7.) Teleport Without Error at interplanetary/interstellar distances at 14th level.

None of these capabilities exist for 5E wizards at any level. The 5E wizard has more flexibility but far less raw power. A 20th level 5E wizard has a scope somewhat similar to an 7th to 9th level AD&D wizard, but more depth within that scope. I.e. he can do fewer and less powerful kinds of things, more times per day.

He can still polymorph, fly, go invisible, etc etc etc. He can still do even more high level things than that, AND he can cast his lower level spells with slots right up to a 9th level slot, making them all relevant to play right up to 20th level. Maybe there are some extreme exploits he can't pull off, but my 14th level AD&D wizard never jumped through any of the hoops you list, some of which are highly suspect (IE polymorphing a mouse into a dragon is expressly forbidden). Still, there were quite surely some nice spell exploits. Many creative uses for spells continue to exist in 5e however. In fact my Transmuter has a class feature which lets him convert one cubic foot of one material to another, and it isn't even a spell! I've already done many very clever things with THAT.

I think wizards are alive and well. There are many less of the 'cheaper' forms of exploit, but you still have clear plot dominance and an even wider than ever range of ways to carry out most tasks.

 

[bert1000]

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

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.

Thanks for the well thought out response. I get the distinction a bit better now, but not sure I get how it applies to 4e.

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?"

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).

The Doom Pool is MHRP seems like a good case of DCs changing on the fly in the service of narrative/pacing. I imagine when to use Fate points in Fate would also be this. So details of the fiction are fluid and influenced by the narrative decision to use meta currency in service of pacing/drama. So I do see that as “subjective” DCs.

4e doesn’t really have this kind of meta currency though. The 4e suggestion that “at level encounters will produce good drama” is in service of narrative/pacing, but I fail to see how it’s different than an older D&D game (or 5e) where higher level PCs are going to be given rumors and hooks for higher level dungeons. Or as they level, they will attract the attention of higher level threats. 4e just gives you more tools to calibrate the threats.

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).

Could you say more about “setting a high DC and justifying it by reference to fate or luck, or a spontaneous "wild magic zone"”? How would this work in 4e? Not that it couldn’t handle this, but not sure I see this as a normal way to link the fiction and DCs in 4e (at least, I’ve never seen it in play).

I could see the desire to have challenges of “level” in 4e perhaps leading to some creation of more fantastical and crazy fiction as the DM is trying to ‘up’ the fictional landscape to match the assumed power level of the PCs. And I could see more of the “I need X DC, what would that look like?” type of planning.

But again, I fail to see how this is “subjective”. The DCs are always linked to the fiction, and once the DCs are defined in play they don’t change.

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.

I’m only familiar with the 4e examples, but isn’t this just the case of resetting the DCs to a new ‘reality’. So it’s certainly ‘subjective’ to the reality you are playing in but once you decide on the reality it basically reverts back to ‘objective’ (within that reality).

Again I don’t see the distinction between 4e and 5e here. In 5e, if I was going to run a game in a traditional D&D world, dwarven locks would probably be a high DC, say DC25. If I was going to run a world where dwarves are mostly peaceful shepherds with no connection to crafting, then dwarven locks would be an easy DC, say DC10.

Thanks for the thoughts.

Once you take off the table the whole "everything automatically scales to your level, regardless of the fiction" stance, I'm really struggling to see the difference between 4e and 5e/3e, other than 4e lays bare the math.

 

[Manbearcat]

The Doom Pool is MHRP seems like a good case of DCs changing on the fly in the service of narrative/pacing. I imagine when to use Fate points in Fate would also be this. So details of the fiction are fluid and influenced by the narrative decision to use meta currency in service of pacing/drama. So I do see that as “subjective” DCs.

4e doesn’t really have this kind of meta currency though. The 4e suggestion that “at level encounters will produce good drama” is in service of narrative/pacing, but I fail to see how it’s different than an older D&D game (or 5e) where higher level PCs are going to be given rumors and hooks for higher level dungeons. Or as they level, they will attract the attention of higher level threats. 4e just gives you more tools to calibrate the threats.

<snip>

Once you take off the table the whole "everything automatically scales to your level, regardless of the fiction" stance, I'm really struggling to see the difference between 4e and 5e/3e, other than 4e lays bare the math.

I'm going to take a crack at this if you don't mind. There are a few things at work here:

1) 4d Skill Challenges do have a sort of analogue to MHRP's Doom Pool and Plot Points. Respectively, they are:

a) the Hard DCs in a Skill Challenge that the GM can deploy to escalate the conflict and up the stakes

and

b) the Advantages the PCs can deploy to either proactively dictate the fiction (eg step down a medium DC to an easy DC) or to mitigate the GM "move" of using a hard DC (and step that down to a medium DC).

The feedback isn't dynamic (there is no interchange/economy of doom dice and plot points) but the premise is the same. It is just sort of a "steady state" meta currency.

2) Healing Surges and Gold are meta currency as well. You can expend them for Skill Challenge boons/successes or you can expend them on Martial Practices/Rituals for boons or to outright transition scenes.

3) 4e gives more than just tools to calibrate threats. The fundamental ethos of 4e is "skip the gate guards and get to the fun." This is an obfuscating, D&Difying of Vincent Baker's indie principle of "at every moment, drive play towards conflict." 4e is all about the conflict-charged scene (in D&D terms, the "encounter"). Whether it be a combat action scene or a noncombat action scene, something must be on the line, the stakes must be high, and the action must be full throttle. Play should naturally snowball from this formula and feel like Indiana Jones meets Die Hard meets mythic fantasy. High stakes, intense action, fast-paced, climax city.

If the stakes are low and there is no conflict, you skip it outright or transition to the next conflict-charged scene with a montage or expository dialogue. The reason why 4e's subjective DCs, and of-level challenges, are relevant to this ethos is because they fuel the resolution mechanics machinery in achieving the sense of always being in a high stakes, conflict-charged scene.

The predicate of objective DCs and below appropriate challenge level encounters is to confirm the existence of the conflict-neutral/benign components of the world to the PCs. The ethos here being "you're exploring a living, breathing world" so look at all of this "stuff" that should exist right along beside this other conflict-charged stuff. We have to give these mundane moments their due of on-screen time to suspend your disbelief and maximize your versimilitude. Therefore we need to talk to these gate guards. We need to haggle these merchants. We need to potentially involve ourselves with caravan guarding and bandit routing even though it is well below "level-appropriate" because that stuff wouldn't just cease to exist. Hence, we need an objective, world-centered DC spread to reflect so you can engage with that stuff.

4e doesn't engage with that stuff. It still exists, but it is all off-screen, zoomed-out, or transitioned via synopsis/montage. The only thing we spend on-screen time on that conflict-charged (hence level-appropriate) stuff.

Hopefully that helps.