D&D 5E My biggest gripe with 5e design

[Ruin Explorer]

5e is dangerous over the course of an adventuring day.

...

If failure is not allowed to happen at a table then yes, 5e is not dangerous or tension filled.

These two points are well made. The issue with the first is that it takes a lot of encounters to kick in. 5E chose a high threshold at 5+ encounters, I feel. Outside of actual dungeons it is often hard to plausibly have 5+ resource-draining encounters in a day. Which means playing 5E in a more naturalistic or sandbox-to way can lead to lessened challenge and/or swingy encounters (if you try to compensate with increased difficulty). Particularly in overground situations. I think if they'd set it to 3-6 instead of 5-8 we'd see far fewer people experiencing issues here.

The second point is unarguably true though. Any edition can be run that way. I actually saw it a fair bit with 2E and 3E and less with 4E because it was far easier to have an "accidental" TPK in those editions, especially at low levels. Whereas 4E encounters tended to go as expected more, from the DM side. 5E just has the issue that it is easy to accidentally "go easy" on the PCs by not having enough encounters/day. I've still seen plenty of deaths in it though.

 

[Oofta]

Sure, but if this is what you think we are saying, you are completely misunderstanding heroism.

So to you being heroic means having lucky dice?

 

[Arnwolf666]

Meh, if your 10th level MU had 25 HP, then you were doing something wrong. By that time, you'd found multiple wishes, probably a magic pool or two, and likely something else that granted immunities and whatnot. I mean, a simple Protection from Fire spell (or is that the 2e version, it's been a while) protected you from like 80 points of fire damage. Never minding that gaining magic items that gave immunities wasn't all that rare. Oh, and nice cherry pick of choosing the one dragon that could do that kind of damage. Let's ignore things like 5th level parties killing ancient huge black dragons (DL 1 - ends with an ancient huge black dragon).

But, again, nice cherry pick. Let's pick the character with the LEAST hp to show how dangerous the game was. That 10th level fighter probably ran somewhere towards a 100 HP (he'd have at least a 16 Con by that time and probably a 19 or a 20 given the PLETHORA of magic items). I'd point out that actually, there's zero difference in HP between an AD&D 9th level fighter and a 5e one.

OTOH, the monsters dealt about 1/4 of the damage going from AD&D to 5e. Maybe 1/2. See, you keep saying it's not about the save or die effects, but, ignore the fact that 1e monsters were puny compared to their 5e counterparts. Less HP, less damage, hit less often, etc. Compared to their 3e counterparts, AD&D monsters were a bad joke.

The only reason the odds were tougher is because the game was designed to bypass the combat system in order to make creatures threatening.

Tell you what, run a spectre against a 7th level AD&D party, but, take away it's level drain. It's not scary. So, the only thing scary about it was the fact that the designers had to basically create entire subsystems to bypass character power in order to be an actual threat.

Every year we see this same tired old tripe pedaled out again and again. Things were so much harder back in the day. We had to walk uphill in the snow both ways just to reach the stick that we'd beat ourselves over the head with. It wasn't true then and it certainly isn't true now.

Im sorry we never had ability scores and items like that when I played ad&d. You were lucky to have one 16. Any score over 15 was rare. And we were not getting wishes. Very rarely did that ever happen. Now wizards knowing how to use their spells to negate damage and buff was a must.

 

[Oofta]

Meh, if your 10th level MU had 25 HP, then you were doing something wrong. By that time, you'd found multiple wishes, probably a magic pool or two, and likely something else that granted immunities and whatnot. I mean, a simple Protection from Fire spell (or is that the 2e version, it's been a while) protected you from like 80 points of fire damage. Never minding that gaining magic items that gave immunities wasn't all that rare. Oh, and nice cherry pick of choosing the one dragon that could do that kind of damage. Let's ignore things like 5th level parties killing ancient huge black dragons (DL 1 - ends with an ancient huge black dragon).

Bah, back in my day we fought dragons with sticks! They weren't even pointy sticks! And we were happy to get those. There wasn't any Monty-haul campaigns for us with "multiple wishes". If you saw a pool it was probably full of acid and the fountain was probably a giant mimic that would eat you. Because nothing says "monster" like a mimic disguised an ottoman. That's right, even the furniture tried to kill you!

Wait, where was I?

 

[Arnwolf666]

Bah, back in my day we fought dragons with sticks! They weren't even pointy sticks! And we were happy to get those. There wasn't any Monty-haul campaigns for us with "multiple wishes". If you saw a pool it was probably full of acid and the fountain was probably a giant mimic that would eat you. Because nothing says "monster" like a mimic disguised an ottoman. That's right, even the furniture tried to kill you!

Wait, where was I?

Lol. All is true for me except the pointy sticks. The fighters had swords. But the poor wizards stick wasn’t. He had a blunt staff. And when we had to fight a dragon we hope he was in his lair where he couldn’t fly and he was sleeping so we could get surprise attacks and kill it before it could breathe. Okay when you put it like that it’s not so heroic. But discretion is the better part of valor.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Im sorry we never had ability scores and items like that when I played ad&d. You were lucky to have one 16. Any score over 15 was rare. And we were not getting wishes. Very rarely did that ever happen. Now wizards knowing how to use their spells to negate damage and buff was a must.

1E and 2E certainly had a huge variance in how they were played, wider, I suspect, than any other editions, including earlier D&D. You had a huge variety of stat generation methods being used in a large number of ways, tons of optional rules or simply rules being frequently ignored (demihuman level limits for example), settings which themselves had significantly variant rules, and limited DM guidance and communication, plus a young player-base meant DMs ranged from Monty Haul to "if no PCs died in a session I can't control my language so the mods have to edit med up"-types very commonly. I mean those DM types still exist but back then it felt like they were, like, 20% each of the DM population, and now they seem more like 1%.

Mod Edit: Inappropriate language removed. ~Umbran

 

[Oofta]

These two points are well made. The issue with the first is that it takes a lot of encounters to kick in. 5E chose a high threshold at 5+ encounters, I feel. Outside of actual dungeons it is often hard to plausibly have 5+ resource-draining encounters in a day. Which means playing 5E in a more naturalistic or sandbox-to way can lead to lessened challenge and/or swingy encounters (if you try to compensate with increased difficulty). Particularly in overground situations. I think if they'd set it to 3-6 instead of 5-8 we'd see far fewer people experiencing issues here.

Which is why I use the alternate rules from the DMG, short rest overnight long rest multiple days without interruption. So you could go for weeks while traveling with no long rest.

 

[Arnwolf666]

I do think there should be more opportunity to die from stupidity and carelessness in 5E. Basically from not paying attention and being sloppy.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Which is why I use the alternate rules from the DMG, short rest overnight long rest multiple days without interruption. So you could go for weeks while traveling with no long rest.

Yeah I think that's a sort of messy compromise and for me the issue is that many actual settings, including the one I run assume that the rules re resting are a reality of the world, so changing to multi-day long rests would change the economics of the world and so on. It also feels weird to have short rests be so rare to me. Its not something that 5E can really fix - they'd need a new edition as it's seriously baked in.

 

[jasper]

I hated level drain. Failing a save and dying was a horrible mechanism. Failing a save and immediately being turned to stone sucked. Losing that item that I risked everything to get because it failed a save after I got hit by a spell was lousy. I could go on.

As a DM back in the day I never used monsters that did things like that because I hated the repercussions to the game and the permanent impact that had on players that did nothing wrong but happened to roll poorly on a saving throw.

As far as 5E only being HP you're ignoring all the conditions that can be inflicted from blinded to unconscious. Do we get multiple saves for some conditions? Yes. I think that builds tension. It also means that DMs like me, will actually monsters that have special damage types when I didn't in the past.

So what am I missing? The rules changed because the majority of people, like me, didn't like them.

Back then I had players who red spiral notebook was 40 thieves of different levels. Green was his fighter notebook with 60. And you could roll up and stat out a non caster in 3 minutes of any level.
Spell casters took 5 minutes.
So.
DM. Oofta you lose 2 levels.
Oofta. I cut my throat.
Bob. Sigh.
Oofta I going to bring in a 7th thief this time.
Back in the day Most dms I met would let you do a hot swap of pcs during the adventure. Yea you may have did the pizza run while we finished the battle with Count the Count but we would find your new to the group pc in the next room. Of course my groups were more IT is A GAME. Not This loving STORY of group of PCs trying to save the world.
To Sum up. Most groups I had played with frequent save points and pc rebuilds. You . Little save points, no rebuilds, so monster TKO and not killed.