D&D 5E D&D is Not RAW: The Importance of Custom, Culture, and Mods in 5e

[Snarf Zagyg]

There's also an expenditure of the DM's social capital involved in creating player-facing houserules, one that scales with the length of one's houserule document. (At least if you expect players to read it and learn it!)

Given that you're usually pretty lucky when all the players have read the PHB, asking them to read a long houserule document that modifies books that they haven't read is usually a bridge too far.

 

[Ancalagon]

One trick is undeclared DM side house rules. In 1e, for example, the DM would just ignore certain parts of the DMG .

That's a big factor, and especially for someone who's played a lot of versions of D&D. It's not hard to use an old rule and fool oneself into thinking that the old rule is also the new rule. I may have a list of 3-5 houserules, but the actual list may be much longer...

 

[TerraDave]

There's also an expenditure of the DM's social capital involved in creating player-facing houserules, one that scales with the length of one's houserule document. (At least if you expect players to read it and learn it!)

I think this gets right to the heart of the issue. Even how you format and present your house rules can even be an issue.

And it could even create tradeoffs, between say presenting more houserules, versus say homebrew setting details which are not actually houserules.

 

[Lyxen]

When people say that some kind of rule is "broken" it means "it doesn't match my expectations". Sometimes the expectations are just stupid and there are no grounds for having such expectations.

Sometimes, well, they are pretty reasonable. Stealth is one of them -- if I can build a sneaky character, I generally expect to have some more reproducible and reliable rules that govern sneaking around. Well, to be honest, there are such rules but they are spread so thinly all over the PHB (and maybe the DMG, I don't really remember) and figuring them out requires some effort. But I've very rarely seen people who call 5e stealth rules "broken", in my experience, people more often just find them confusing.

And for these people who don't understand out of the box that stealth has so many edge cases that it cannot be reasonably covered by rules, there is a podcast that spells out exactly that: trust your DM, he is not playing against you, and he will be the only one who actually knows everything that needs to be known in these situations, so he will tell you. Your character is stealthy, so he has a very high chance to succeed, but it's not foolproof as there are things that he will not know as this is a roleplaying game and not Skyrim.

Another example would be yo-yo healing pattern. It's pretty reasonable within the design of the game (healing is purposefully weak, so there can be no healbots), but at the same time, it's kind of stupid. It doesn't really make sense "on screen", so I can certainly see some people thinking that it's broken.

Where I'me with you here is that it's because people don't understand or like the principle that they call it broken, but it mirrors fairly well a lot of shows or books where people go down but are still not really out of the fight. I agree that this is more due to 5e wanting to be fun as no-one wants to spend a long time unconscious while others are having fun, but with the totally abstract nature of hit points and healing, there are ways to make it work narratively.

As of new players better getting the rules -- it also comes down to expectations and is apparent pretty much everywhere. There's a point where people can't just grasp that something may work differently than what they're accustomed to. New programmers "get" functional programming faster than those who are accustomed to OOP, but slower than those who know enough to know when to leave their expectations at the door; when I was learning my second language I had a really hard time, but now I know that there's no reason to expect Finnish work the same way as any of them I already speak; new players get 5e faster than 3.5e players who can't figure out why the hell standing up doesn't provoke AoOs; etc; etc; etc.

It's even more apparent outside of D&D, but I talk about other systems on this board way too much, so I'll shut up.

I agree, it's a generalised behaviour...

 

[Garthanos]

Where I'me with you here is that it's because people don't understand or like the principle that they call it broken, but it mirrors fairly well a lot of shows or books where people go down but are still not really out of the fight. I agree that this is more due to 5e wanting to be fun as no-one wants to spend a long time unconscious while others are having fun, but with the totally abstract nature of hit points and healing, there are ways to make it work narratively.

Solid agreement with you on that this is both service to a trope in fantastic/heroic action fiction and service to fun. I think this amounts to "working as intended"

 

[Lyxen]

Solid agreement with you on that this is both service to a trope in fantastic/heroic action fiction and service to fun. I think this amounts to "working as intended"

Indeed, the difficulty being that some people want more "realism", others want a "harder" game, or a "challenging game", or maybe "lower fantasy", etc.

YCMV of course, and preferences are absolutely natural, but it would still be nice for people who want different views to apply to their game to be a bit fairer in their assessment, especially since they can of course modify it as needed for the ambiance that they want.

 

[Ancalagon]

I started with 2nd and then played a heavily house ruled 3e for quite some time. 5e was a return to form for me. I felt right at home. I find that brand new players to the hobby tend to pick up the general idea of it with ease. Takes them a few sessions to learn their abilities of course.

I see 3e players banging their heads against the wall about it 7 years in. They often have the hubris that the game is fundamentally broken and the 10s of millions of people who get along with it just fine are in fact oblivious to this fact rather than that they are playing it wrong.

My situation is very similar to yours. I started with 2nd ed, switched to 3e after maybe 10 years of that and at first I was very impressed with 3e. But I grew weary of it.

And when I started looking into 5e (a few years late ha) it felt really comfortable. Even though the "engine" is probably closer to 3e than 2nd ed, the "feel" felt pretty natural to me because I see these echoes of 2nd ed a lot.

 

[Greg K]

No one asks for a rules-lite version of Rolemaster

People may not have asked for rules-lite, but they have asked for lighter versions of Rolemaster which is how HARP (and I believe also Rolemaster Express) came along and also why some people prefer MERP and Against the Darkmaster to full blown Rolemaster.

 

[Greg K]

I started with Holmes Basic and moved to 1E, then 2e, and then 3e. I also have played some OD&D and B/X. I "need" house rules to run (and play) each of those editions. Having looked over 5e, the same holds true for it as well.

 

[Maxperson]

D&D is not RAW. D&D is half-baked.