D&D 5E Is 5e "Easy Mode?"

[Mistwell]

Correlation does NOT equal causation bringing it up to quiet complaints is a double fallacy. Popular can be good... can also be right place right time

I might also be good but not to your taste such that you're having a hard time seeing it in a way others see it and looking for reasons other than saying that a majority do find it good.

I don't think the right place right time arguments hold up well. It was selling extremely well before the streaming started to become popular. It sold extremely well even when competition wasn't selling very well but had previously sold well. It sold extremely well with new people who had never even seen some of the streaming and other "right time" elements in the industry. It's holding and increasing sales well even with those who previously liked other editions of the game.

All of the indications which would tend to show it's as objectively "good" a game as you might measure with the tools available are indicating it is rating as "good" by those indications.

Which doesn't mean you have to like it. But it might mean you should consider if maybe popular in this case is also good according to a very large number of people. Unless you think a whole lot of people are just not able to fairly form their own opinions about the game or are just fibbing to others or themselves when they say they think it's really good?

 

[Garthanos]

Your confusion over the absorption shield built into 5e indicates a poor understanding of 5e's rules. If you are legitimately confused rather than putting on an act

Describing an insta-death threshold as an absorption shield and dissing people over why people do not know what you are talking about is um not a kosher arguing method.

 

[Lanefan]

Someone uttered a marketing phrase about modularity seven years ago.

If memory serves, it was a bit more than just someone uttering a marketing phrase.

Modularity was, at the outset, repeatedly stated as a key feature of 5e design, where different elements could be added or dropped or tweaked with a minimum of knock-on effects. The reasoning given was that this modularity would allow them to design modules that would allow a DM to in effect emulate any prior edition.

And up went my little ears, 'cause this was exactly what I wanted to see.

People interpreted it be to be something that could never actually work.

I took them at their word; and had they delivered on said word I'd highly likely be running 5e now with all the 1e elements turned on and all the others turned off.

But once I saw the final product I realized that while they'd made a pretty decent system, far better than any previous WotC attempt, they hadn't come anywhere close to delivering on the promised modularity; and to make 5e into a game I'd want to run would be far more effort than simply working with what I already have.

And since 5e's release there's been ample time to put out modular add-ons for each prior edition, as in "Rules and elements to make 5e play like the 4e you love" or "1e Rules for Your 5e Game"; where the designers would add and remove modular elements so as to allow 5e to more closely emulate a prior edition.

These wouldn't necessarily have to be deep systemic changes, though they could be. For example, they could add in many of the combat tactics - sliding, shifting, conditions, grid-based, etc. - to make 5e feel much more like 4e while still keeping 5e's resting rules instead of AEDU, or if they wanted to risk a systemic change they could put AEDU back in. For 0-1-2e they could go to a flat + or - model instead of advantage-disadvantage, and a slower level advance rate; while a systemic change required would be how multiclassing works. For 3e it'd be fairly simple to add in magic item pricing and creation, but I'm not sure how they could systemically change the by-level power curve from 5e's relatively flat to the steepness of 3e.

 

[tetrasodium]

Describing an insta-death threshold as an absorption shield and dissing people over why people do not know what you are talking about is um not a kosher arguing method.

You misunderstand. The original exchange was that casters were "low hp" so.. When it was pointed out that casters had their current hp minus one plus that much again there was faux confusion. A player with one hit point can be hit for their full hp minus one point & be back in business after getting healed for "any" amount of health. That was the reason for showing the section on instant death & incapacitation.

 

[Mistwell]

If memory serves, it was a bit more than just someone uttering a marketing phrase.

Modularity was, at the outset, repeatedly stated as a key feature of 5e design, where different elements could be added or dropped or tweaked with a minimum of knock-on effects. The reasoning given was that this modularity would allow them to design modules that would allow a DM to in effect emulate any prior edition.

And up went my little ears, 'cause this was exactly what I wanted to see.

I took them at their word; and had they delivered on said word I'd highly likely be running 5e now with all the 1e elements turned on and all the others turned off.

Naw see I think they meant Thing A when they said Modularity and you thought they meant Thing B when they said Modularity and then when it turned out to be Thing A you said they had failed to deliver on their promise.

I will give you an example. Mike Mearls, in July 2012, is asked directly about this question. His answer shows he means Thing A about that term Modularity, and not your Thing B:

On to D&D Next, one of the announced goals of the new edition is that it will try to bring together players of different editions. Not only will the system be modular enough to handle the different playstyles of the older editions, but it will supposedly allow people with different preferences to play together at the same table. Can you tell us a bit about how you are planning to do this? What is it like dealing with a target audience that seems to want very different things?

There have always been a wide range of people who play D&D, so in some ways were merely addressing the range of tastes that have been with the game since the beginning. If you think of how people talk about the game – mechanics, story, creating campaigns – that’s been there since the beginning.

The first step is to get a sense of how people play D&D and what they like about the game. That’s where the playtest serves a huge role. That gives us the basic targets we need to aim at for creating the game.

The feedback also shows us where we need to be flexible. For instance, we know that while many people like the classic D&D wizard, there are also big groups that want alternative ways to play spellcasters. With that in mind, we can take some of our classes and give them mechanics and story elements that are more distinct and unique. You might not like how the wizard uses magic, but that means you can opt to play a warlock or sorcerer.

So there, Mike Mearls gives the example of modularity as "sorcerers and warlocks are alternatives to the traditional wizard."

Here is another example, another interview in June 2012, Mearls is again asked about modularity:

MM: I think one example is pretty obvious: we’ve seen it with minis and the grid. A good chunk of the audience says “those should be required.” And there’s a bigger but not decisively bigger chunk that says “no, those should be optional.” Not to make this a cop-out – people have said that modularity is just an excuse to say “play with whatever!” and that the game is nothing- it really is about saying that people have different views in what D&D should be, and what is important about D&D.

I think there are some things everybody agrees on. D&D is a roleplaying game. There’s going to be a game master/DM who is in charge of the rules and the world, then there’s people playing characters. But some people would say- oh, here’s one example. I was reading somewhere, probably EN World, where someone was really unhappy with the playtest. He was a 4th edition player, and I was thinking “oh, that makes sense, he really likes tactical combat.” And what he said was what he really likes about 4th edition is that he and his friends are just sitting on couches, and his friends describe what they want to do. He makes up a DC, and they roll a die, and if he rolls high enough, they succeed. And so I was like “huh?” and the theory in the office is that the only book he bought is the DMG and that’s the only book he owns.. But for that guy, that’s D&D for him, and not only that, that’s 4th edition for him.

When you have that approach, where the game is very idiosyncratic in deciding what is important to you, modularity is hugely important. Here’s one example: I have this old Livejournal post that people have been pointing to. I don’t know what people think it means, so I can only say what I thought when I wrote it. The idea is that if you really like combat you want tactical problems to solve, and you’re happier when the DM is making fewer judgment calls and more just applying the rules. So the player knows that if he wants cover from the Orc, he knows exactly where to move. He doesn’t want the DM to say “well, that tree is really thin, so you really can’t hide behind it.” They don’t want to run into stuff like that. They want more predictability. So if the rules are predictable, the tactical challenge is what ability do I want to use, where do I want my character to go, where do we want to force the monsters to go, stuff like that.

If you’re a guy who really wants to just play his character, to play the story, to explore the world, you might think “I want combat to be 5 minutes long” and you’re fine with the DM making calls, and you don’t want to move a guy around the grid: you just don’t care. You just want to say I attack the orc, I cast fireball, and so on. Both kinds of players would describe themselves as hardcore D&D fans, and they want polar opposites in the system.

So that’s really where modularity can come in. We can make the core for the guy who really doesn’t care about combat and is pretty happy because the rules are straightforward. Then the guy who wants rich, tactical combat in battles, he can say “I want complexity.” That way, a game defaults to being simple all around, and you can pick which parts you want to add rules to. I just drop in the depth I want as I go.

Here, Mearls gives the examples of playing with or without a grid, and also the examples of just telling your DM in general what you do, while someone else might want to be highly specific in saying what they do, and both being satisfied with the same rules.

I don't think they ever meant Thing B when they said Modularity, and I think they told people that fairly early on, but people read Thing B into it anyway because it's what they wanted out of those rules. But they always seemed to mean "flexibility in the rules" when they said modularity.

 

[Oofta]

If memory serves, it was a bit more than just someone uttering a marketing phrase.

Modularity was, at the outset, repeatedly stated as a key feature of 5e design, where different elements could be added or dropped or tweaked with a minimum of knock-on effects. The reasoning given was that this modularity would allow them to design modules that would allow a DM to in effect emulate any prior edition.

And up went my little ears, 'cause this was exactly what I wanted to see.

I took them at their word; and had they delivered on said word I'd highly likely be running 5e now with all the 1e elements turned on and all the others turned off.

But once I saw the final product I realized that while they'd made a pretty decent system, far better than any previous WotC attempt, they hadn't come anywhere close to delivering on the promised modularity; and to make 5e into a game I'd want to run would be far more effort than simply working with what I already have.

And since 5e's release there's been ample time to put out modular add-ons for each prior edition, as in "Rules and elements to make 5e play like the 4e you love" or "1e Rules for Your 5e Game"; where the designers would add and remove modular elements so as to allow 5e to more closely emulate a prior edition.

These wouldn't necessarily have to be deep systemic changes, though they could be. For example, they could add in many of the combat tactics - sliding, shifting, conditions, grid-based, etc. - to make 5e feel much more like 4e while still keeping 5e's resting rules instead of AEDU, or if they wanted to risk a systemic change they could put AEDU back in. For 0-1-2e they could go to a flat + or - model instead of advantage-disadvantage, and a slower level advance rate; while a systemic change required would be how multiclassing works. For 3e it'd be fairly simple to add in magic item pricing and creation, but I'm not sure how they could systemically change the by-level power curve from 5e's relatively flat to the steepness of 3e.

I would say that 5E is fairly modular. Maybe not as modular as you would like, but feats, multi-classing, heck even magic items are all optional. Different people have significantly different takes on how the game actually plays with just a little bit of nudging and different rulings here and there. That and I remember Mearls talking about modularity at the beginning of the design process but it became less and less as the release approached. I suspect that at one point they wanted more, and perhaps some people over promised. But design goals shift, reality sets in.

I think what you say you want for example is not particularly practical nor is it in demand. I'm not sure anything they release will ever be "modular enough" while still maintaining any consistency. There's simply not enough demand to swap out entire subsystems, you'd be talking about effectively supporting multiple versions of the game simultaneously.

They continue to do surveys and playtests, I think if there was enough demand for a big book o' options it would have come out by now. Maybe it will still happen someday.

It's kind of like that modular phone that google promised a few years back. Great in theory, basically impossible to deliver in reality while still being profitable.

 

[Garthanos]

I might also be good but not to your taste such that you're having a hard time seeing it in a way others see it and looking for reasons other than saying that a majority do find it good.

I have disagreed with majorities since I was age 5 and I will continue to do so without abatement I am sure.

I don't think the right place right time arguments hold up well. It was selling extremely well before the streaming started to become popular. It sold extremely well even when competition wasn't selling very well but had previously sold well. It sold extremely well with new people who had never even seen some of the streaming and other "right time" elements in the industry.

Every new edition of D&D gets a bit of initial burst isn't that the excuse for why the terrible horrible nasty COMPLETELY NOT 4e did so well at first?
Then the biggest right time element to kick the ball rolling faster was economic turn around in the US... Subsequently followed perfectly I think with the snowballing cultural elements you are mentioning

Those many many new people who have never interacted with pathfinder or old 3.5 d20 might find those versions better than 5e heck some might like OSR we don't know but that isn't the new thing on the cultural table when they entered the D&D picture AND humans are extremely tribal

Betamax was outsold by a superior competitor was it advertising I think they managed to pick the perfect price point. But it demonstrates the popular thing isn't the best.

I feel like 4e fans got kicked out of the tribe more often than not.

 

[Garthanos]

It's kind of like that modular phone that google promised a few years back. Great in theory, basically impossible to deliver in reality while still being profitable.

Well many did indeed say impossible to deliver on the modular design idea but I do not think that is true. But you have to approach the initial design as complex then surgically and structurally - deintegrate the design so that pieces can be reintegrated together seamlessly later. You sort of are then building the simple core with the complex already figured out.

 

[Garthanos]

Here, Mearls gives the examples of playing with or without a grid, and also the examples of just telling your DM in general what you do, while someone else might want to be highly specific in saying what they do, and both being satisfied with the same rules.

"Then the guy who wants rich, tactical combat in battles, he can say “I want complexity.” That way, a game defaults to being simple all around, and you can pick which parts you want to add rules to. I just drop in the depth I want as I go. "

I kind of feel like that is a bit of what we are saying failed.

 

[Garthanos]

As far as it goes for my taste 5e is my second favorite D&D... and yeah 13A might just be 3rd but I find it has some annoyances, and with 3e following if I had more experience with it (pf2 might be better than 3e not sure)... 1e will always have a place in my heart as the first roleplaying I did the most (and some of the flavor of 2e and late 3e is still awesome and almost unmatched).

I will criticise design decisions in every game and popularity is a crappy shield.