D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yep.

This is certainly the case in RM, and mostly the case in BW.

I agree with your last paragraph in particular. You can see it in some of the posts on that old thread about bear-taming and water weirds that I linked to earlier. Complaints about the manner in which DCs are set and actions adjudicate end up being complaints about things being too easy, or not easy enough. It's a concern about challenge and "neutrality", not about simulation or the fiction at all!

Yeah, I'm probably overstating it a BIT when I say "nobody ever knows anything about", but we still don't know MUCH. I mean, for instance, in a real melee combat what's the ratio of attempted attacks to successful damage dealing blows? How effective are defensive tactics? What happens if an enemy 'goes kamikaze' what's his chance of landing a blow in that case? These are only a tiny fraction of the questions, and nobody has even the slightest objective evidence for any given answer. The questions often don't even have objective answers because it depends on exactly how you imagine the abstraction working. Often games don't even have a coherent idea of what the abstraction is exactly. D&D is especially guilty of this, HP and AC are notoriously slippery concepts.

About the best we can hope for is that people might be able to classify things as "easy" or "hard", but even then those are highly subjective judgments based largely on what we ourselves happen to be good at, what we THINK we know, but often don't, etc. IMHO most of what people call objective DCs are just about worthless as actual predictors of how something might go in the real world, and as already stated if it isn't objectively drawn from real-life than it logically must simply be invented and is just representing some other agenda.

I feel the same way about claims that you can 'design a realistic simulation of a world', its just utterly impossible. With our greatest supercomputers we can't even determine what the climate of said world would be. Its all DM fiat (say it like "its turtles, it just turtles all the way down").

 

[Gilladian]

Originally Posted by AbdulAlhazred
I just thought, when we fought the three owlbears under the dead wizard's tower for instance, that the wizard kinda had the day there. I forced one back with CoD, and a 2nd one back with T-Wave, and then both got murderized with ranged attacks. I don't know if we would have survived in close combat with several owlbears at once. It seemed like the linchpin of the Dragon Slaying/Trapping was the Alarm spell. Without some sort of magic along those lines we'd have had no plan at all.

I'd forgotten those three owlbears! Hmmm... don't have any specific remembrance of magic being extraordinarily useful. Just that someone in the party tried to befriend one of them and failed. And was it Alzardel who ended up with the two intact hides? I know Doodle blew several stealth checks, and that you guys nearly got ambushed by the big guy sneaking up from behind, when Gia failed her perception check to hear him coming.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'd forgotten those three owlbears! Hmmm... don't have any specific remembrance of magic being extraordinarily useful. Just that someone in the party tried to befriend one of them and failed. And was it Alzardel who ended up with the two intact hides? I know Doodle blew several stealth checks, and that you guys nearly got ambushed by the big guy sneaking up from behind, when Gia failed her perception check to hear him coming.

Yeah, Alzardel stuck a CoD on the one in front, which then either had to take the nasty damage every round or back off, at which point Doodle and the fighter pincushioned it. The 2nd owlbear was stuck behind that one and basically in the same boat (IIRC it retreated). The big guy snuck up, but then Alzardel went back to that end of the tunnel and T-Waved it off Gia, who then baked it with her Cantrip, and I forget what else happened, but it died.

I feel like my options are not often really game changing, but they're always GOOD, and then the fighters, well, aside from ironically both having cantrips that they use heavily they do really nice damage, but the variety of really different options is low, and neither of them has anything that feels terribly impressive or plot bending outside of fights.

 

[Diamondeye]

Having read the rules but so far not had an opportunity to play it, I'd say it's a significant improvement over 4E but if I had my pick of systems it still takes at best 3rd place behind 3.X and PF.

I would definitely play and run this system, it just isn't my first choice, and I wouldn't run it without some house rules that, as far as I'm concerned, it's unplayable without. That said, positives first:

• Baked-in fighter/mage option as a fighter archetype
• Huge improvements to the monk
• Wide racial and subrace options
• Addition of the warlock to as well as the 3E class list
• TWF is a real option not hidden behind massive feat taxes or the Ranger
• single-weapon without shield is viable
• Much better approach to multiclass spellcasters than 3E
• class archetypes in general that in many cases open up very different options from the tradition of the base

Not exhaustive but all I can think of off the top of my head

Now, on to the topic - things that at first glance I really dislike

• Crit rules - terrible. They do not differentiate weapons from each other and as a result, the weapons list is compressed yet again because of insufficient differentiators. If running the game I would use 3.5 crit values and balance be damned.
  
• Feats - should be a mandatory, base part of the system and much more extensive.
  
• Armor - Amazingly, worse than the 3.X list, easily the worst part of that system, with a total failure to give any reason to use more than a few options. DEX minimums need a complete revision with scaling within types, chain shirt needs moved to light, bare minimum. Armor charts might seem like an unimportant thing, but since lots of characters wear armor the "mithril breastplate or GTFO" of 3.X got old a long time ago.
  
• Magic items - DMG list is unusable. Magic items are expected to be far fewer (unacceptable) and far less powerful (unacceptable). D&D has always been a system where magical items were important. Customized items are basically gone, and some iconic items like the Frost Brand are essentially gutted. This is the biggest thing that would mitigate against playing in this system as opposed to running it - the fear that a DM might actually use this train wreck. D&D should not attempt to duplicate fantasy where magical items were rare or nonexistent; lots of items are not optional. The DMG was a total waste of money for that alone.
  
• Saving throws - lol.

The player base is also still way too concerned with "unbalanced" options. Balance is YOUR job. It's not the systems job. Players need to quit shoving their job off onto the game designer. You know what your group wants, he doesn't.

 

[Jester David]

I think my only real, huge complaint at the moment is still the absence of an OGL.

 

[BryonD]

TODAY I would say that I don't think I consider 'keeping everyone on the d20' to be critical. 5e obviously does, and if the game had been released in 2008, or maybe 2000, I'd have probably thought that was a great and worthy design goal. Now I think its fine if one guy has a much higher DC, the other guy just better bring some element into the conflict that lets him do something effective! And I'm not likely to ask for more than one check using a given skill before the fiction moves on, so at worst you get stuck trying to fumble through something, and hopefully you invent a reason why the endurance check is really arcana, or etc.

On the one hand, the bounded accuracy of 5E clearly pushes in this direction. But it is hugely different than 4E in the sense that characters who are experts in something can and will leave others far behind. A 15th level character with a +0 Dex save is completely feasible. That couldn't happen even in 3E. (granted the 15th level character will almost certainly have a few pluses from magic items). For example, in my game the characters just hit L10 and Wis saves range from +1 to +10. The rogue has +14 in a few skills.

So there are points where you can draw a clear similarity with either 3E or 4E. But the final result is pretty unique from either.

 

[BryonD]

But he was not talking about "shifting DCs for static challenges". He was talking about setting a DC . Setting a DC is not shifting it.

Understood. But you seem to not grasp that when you frame it as a function of character level, the implication that it will continue to be a function of character level is present. Thus when character level changes the result will follow the function and "shift". I accept that you say you DON'T actually do this. I suppose you just track what level the party was the first time they go anywhere so you know what the DC was when it first came into existence.

Unneeded by whom? The fact that you don't use a particular GMing technique doesn't determine the question, for the rest of humanity, whether or not they want to use that technique!

When did I ever suggest otherwise? I have said OVER and OVER that I greatly respect the merits of 4E for the niche it services. I've repeated that there are legitimate reasons a lot of people don't like 4E and this is one of them. I'm talking from the perspective of a portion of that other group. You need to quit inserting yourself as the center of every comment.

 

[BryonD]

Or is there a different “fundamental issue” you are referencing?

Nope.

Expect the issue of the swinging pendulum of "if you like 4E it is because it is vastly better" and "if you don't like 4E it is unfair to claim that anything is different at all".

As, you say here: They are different. And different groups prefer each and both sides need to accept that.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Understood. But you seem to not grasp that when you frame it as a function of character level, the implication that it will continue to be a function of character level is present. Thus when character level changes the result will follow the function and "shift". I accept that you say you DON'T actually do this. I suppose you just track what level the party was the first time they go anywhere so you know what the DC was when it first came into existence.

Yeah, I just write down the DC. In my 4e hack I just refer to the level of effects, not the DCs and you can look those up on the chart. If you wanted to change the relationship between fiction and levels you'd just adjust the DC chart. So, consequently, my current practice is to simply assign everything in the game world a level.

 

[Marshall]

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).

Thoughts?

I disagree. Its not the objective DCs themselves that leads to grittiness, it's the fact that objective DCs are so subjective that your chances of success are unfathomable. Aside from a handful of fixed, obvious challenges(ie doors, locks, walls) everything else is set difficulty at the whim of the GM based on his subjective feelings at that second. 99.9% of the time, that judgement is going to give a DC that is wildly to difficult for the task at hand even tho it is ostensibly based on objective reality of the fiction. Truly objective DCs will quickly lead to gonzoland as the PCs rapidly(even at 5e's anemic pace) outlevel their surroundings.
OTOH, subjective DCs ground the GM into a here-and-now reality that both sides of the table can predict. It also lets you slide the grittiness meter simply by choosing the higher or lower end of the scale and/or knowingly exceeding it.