D&D 5E CHALLENGE: Change one thing about 5e

[Blue]

Rewards tied to one style of play

Issue: Tying character advancement (XP for levelling, most loot/magic item acquisition, etc) to killing creatures mechanically encourages a OneTrueWay of playing about killing and looting. Clever play to do things like expend resources to avoid random encounters, talk or stealth past challenges, or other combat-less solutions are not supported mechanically by the base game.

Solution: Use story- or milestone-based XP rewards. Treasure, much like 4e's "Treasure Packets" handle the same way. So if you kill the bandits, you get X about of XP and loot. If you capture them and turn them in, you get a reward vs. X amount of Loot. If you decide their cause is just and join them, your share plus the "can you use this" is worth X amount of XP and loot. You come up with something else the DM considers a win, you get X amount of XP and loot. You fail at all of these, nothing for you.

 

[Blue]

Problem: There's too much healing. It trivializes the significance of combat, since anything other than death can be recovered from almost immediately. It trivializes healing magic, since a Cure spell or healing potion is less powerful than a nap. It creates an unbelievable world, where the outcome of getting struck by a weapon isn't that you're physically wounded, and it's hard to take that world seriously.

Solution: Set the default healing rate to 5% of your maximum HP per day (minimum 1 per day). Get rid of Hit Dice, or require them to be used in conjunction with healing magic (like Healing Surges).

I can get see your problem, but don't agree with your solution. It predicates on that getting a "hit" on the attack roll is the equivalent of getting struck with the weapon. Different tables have how much of HP is luck, wearing you down, etc. vs. actual wounds, I often see "half HP is the place you actually start to take wounds".

With that in, having a bit of magic to restore some energy and such makes sense.

Now, both 4e and 13th Age have surges/recoveries that are merely triggered by healing spells, which kind of makes sense for this - HPs are a buffer (which is why you can fight just fine at 1 HP), but spending your surges to regain some of your vim isn't something that spells are curing, leading those to show more long-term problems. Of course, both of those systems still refill all of those at a long-rest/full-heal-up.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Solution: Divorce resource recharge from player-controllable actions (letting time pass, taking rest, etc.).

Solution option A: Perhaps a current short-rest ability comes back every other combat encounter. Or is prorated for things that can be broken up like Ki so you get back level/2 Ki every encounter. Long-rest resources can also come back after 7 encounters, again possibly pro-rated.

That doesn't really solve your problem. It just forces players to wander around aimlessly, or do something else to trigger a combat encounter. It's an extra hoop to jump through, so that gaining the benefits of a rest requires more time at the table, without actually advancing anything.

I've played video games where the only healing available was in-combat healing. It doesn't encourage clever resource management. It encourages farming.

 

[Blue]

3) Nerf the moon druid. Absolute damage sponge with very little risk. Find a way to add risk to this.

I haven't seen druids getting played, but my friends who have say that they are great at 2nd level but lousy at mid-levels and onward. Basically it's self-correcting.

Do you have any practical experience with them at higher levels?

 

[Blue]

I've griped about this in a couple of threads here now, but you asked for it: the Wizard chassis stinks. All the wizards are only minor variations of the same thing, and all of them get the same spells. That's my gripe.

My solution is to limit specialists to spells from their speciality school only. Read magic and detect magic become class abilities of the Wizard.

A "mage" class would also be added, that can learn from any school, but whose spells top out at 6th level (basically a 3/4-caster progression, spread across a full class progression). You can be versatile the expense of power, or powerful at the expense of versatility. A diviner is a diviner, and isn't just a guy with a some foresight nuking everybody with a fireball (just like the necromancer).

How about a variation - wizards cast spells outside their specialty using a slot one higher. And, of course, rounding out all the thin spell schools.

So that diviner cast levitate as a 3rd level spells, and never gets Meteor Storm, etc.

Would need some other perks to balance the nerf, but that could serve to make the specialties more unique anyhow.

 

[Blue]

Altered action economy. Instead of attacks, Fighters and lesser 'fighter lites' like the Paladin and Barbarian get additional actions per round. Spellcasters and spells in general have multi-actions (and thus, often multi-round) casting times.

Earthdawn had multi-round casting. Wait 15 minutes for it to come to your action to declare gathering threads and then wait another 15 minutes.

Huge fail in terms of fun.

I'd be okay with this if you can get to my action every 5 minutes or less - regardless of number/complexity of PCs or foes. If it's not fun, it's not worth playing.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I can get see your problem, but don't agree with your solution. It predicates on that getting a "hit" on the attack roll is the equivalent of getting struck with the weapon. Different tables have how much of HP is luck, wearing you down, etc. vs. actual wounds, I often see "half HP is the place you actually start to take wounds".

That's a position which is in the book. It's the default position, right next to the side-bar about how different DMs describe HP loss differently.

The single most crippling problem with 5E, which it seems to have copied directly from 4E, is that the default position is so far to one side that it makes the other side untenable. You can't play a game where getting hit with a sword means you were actually hit with a sword, because all remnants of that hit are erased overnight. Even in the absolute grittiest options available, you can still recover completely overnight (by spending Hit Dice during a short rest).

And it's hard to take the game rules seriously as a model for what's happening in the world, if you can get "hit" without actually getting hit; it leads to all sorts of secondary issues, like characters knowing how many HP they are down when they have no way of observing it, and what exactly a healing potion is doing if it's not closing your wounds. And if it's not a useful model, then there's not much reason to play it; you might as well play a board game, for all that the game rules actually mean anything.

 

[Blue]

Problem
Weapons are boring. Look at the Glaive and the Halberd - they are the exact same weapon.

I like your solution of more differentiation. My other option would be a heck of a lot less mechanical differentation. For example, 13th Age has three categories of melee weapons - small, light or simple, and martial or heavy. And then the number of hands needed. Each class then defines them - so fighter types have bigger dice, wizards get a big penalty for martial or heavy, rogues find small just as effective as everyone else finds martial. And then it's entirely up to the players how they want to skin it and describe it.

(They do the same thing for armor as well.)

Finally, put speed factors on weapons - so that heavy powerful weapons slow down the character in initiative.. but when they hit you feel it!

Is this a backdoor change to put in rerolling init every round, or are we supposed to modify them based on weapon use or not? How about moving while wielding, is that slowed? Moving, throwing a held javelin, moving more, drawing the heavy weapon, and then attacking with it? Seems to add complexity that would slow down combat with only a moderate payoff.

 

[Blue]

That doesn't really solve your problem. It just forces players to wander around aimlessly, or do something else to trigger a combat encounter. It's an extra hoop to jump through, so that gaining the benefits of a rest requires more time at the table, without actually advancing anything.

It exactly covers my problem. I can run a mega-dungeon-crawl where they get their "long term" resources back thrice before sleeping, and I can run a 20 day mostly-quiet sea journey with only getting back long-term resources once.

Now, you bring up a separate problem with it that players may actively seek an encounter in order to recover resources. I haven't had that issue in my 13th Age game. 13th Age uses at-will, encounter, and "full-heal-up" which is four encounters regardless of time.

I've played video games where the only healing available was in-combat healing. It doesn't encourage clever resource management. It encourages farming.

Yeah, I have an otherwise fun video game Darkest Dungeon that does the same. Luckily D&D is a tabletop game.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Now, you bring up a separate problem with it that players may actively seek an encounter in order to recover resources. I haven't had that issue in my 13th Age game. 13th Age uses at-will, encounter, and "full-heal-up" which is four encounters regardless of time.

That raises the separate issue: Why haven't you seen the obvious decisions being made in your 13A game? Are the character somehow not aware of how their powers work, and what it takes to recover? Or are the players meta-gaming by not seeking out easy encounters, the way that their characters would if the world actually worked that way?

I get the sense from people who play a lot of 13A and FATE that the characters have no idea how their respective worlds actually operate, but they all pretend that they do, and everyone agrees to not talk about it.