D&D 5E Is 5e really that different?

[FrozenNorth]

Speaking for myself…

I don’t think 5e does anything “to make people upset”. It’s a great edition and I love playing it. In fact, it is currently the RPG I enjoy playing the most.

But it’s not perfect. And that’s OK. No game is, and no game is perfect for every playstyle. If I see something that can be improved, I’ll point out, often with suggestions for fixes.

People get heated about every edition of D&D. The main reason earlier editions didn’t suffer from it as much is that the internet and posting weren’t as developed.

Then, there’s the elephant in the room. 5e players and GMs are more diverse than preceding editions. In part, this is due to the exploding popularity of the game. This is a good thing, but it does mean that “one-size-fits-all” is being stretched further across different playstyles and frames of reference. When you say “demi-humans”, a new player may be more likely to picture tabaxi or dragonborn than halflings.

 

[Maxperson]

There's a great bit here that's not explicitly said that we can bring up. Any time someone says something is "too X", there is actually an implied qualifier - a purpose.

Take, for example a simple statement, "This blender is too underpowered." What the speaker may really mean is, "This blender is to underpowered to crush all the ice I need for my parties." If you do lots of drinks at parties, this is an entirely valid point - but we can also then admit that there ought to be blenders for people who are using them for making smoothies or soups, but not crushing lots of ice.

So, the game is too easy... to achieve what purpose? The game is too easy to challenge you, personally? That is totally a reasonable opinion to have. But then we get to ask the question - should the default of the game be to challenge you, or players like you? Or should the default be something else? It sounds like you've found the basic bit - the default probably has to be somewhere comfortable for people who don't know much about the dials yet.

I raise this more because this can be a useful tool for any opinion that sounds like a generalization of what a game should be or should have. Who, exactly, is the audience for the suggested change?

Yeah. I get that, which is why rather than saying it should be changed, I just said that I turn the dials myself to make it harder.

When it comes to new players, I really don't have much to go on with regard to how easy it should be. It SEEMS reaaaally easy and perhaps a bit too easy, but I haven't been a new player in more than 30 years and cut my teeth on 1e, which for all that 5e is said to be like the old days, is still a very, very different edition of D&D.

To make things even more complicated in figuring out where 5e should be on the ease scale, over the years I have taught many new players. Some have taken multiple games to even get to understand the basic workings of attack rolls and saving throws. Others have jumped right in and in the first game or two started trying to do complicated things that many long time players wouldn't think of.

 

[Asisreo]

People who say that are not saying that the DM cannot dial things in 5e up to the point where they challenge hard core players. They are saying that the default setting of 5e dials is pretty darn easy, and I agree.

I've actually made a challenge using RAW, bounded by DMG guidance on making an encounter. I challenged players to beat this combat challenge, playing no-holds-barred with strangers. Two of them quit after their characters got killed in two rounds.

I'll admit. It was more complicated than a tarrasque, but according to the DMG, it was no more challenging (actually a bit less).

By the way, the characters were at level 20 and had access to magic items. This was a oneshot with random players and I made it clear the game was made to be difficult and I didn't use any shenanigans like a hostile terrain.

This is all to say that the default dials can be very difficult if you're ruthless and clever as a DM. Though, that skill isn't well translated into the DMG.

 

[Maxperson]

I've actually made a challenge using RAW, bounded by DMG guidance on making an encounter. I challenged players to beat this combat challenge, playing no-holds-barred with strangers. Two of them quit after their characters got killed in two rounds.

I'll admit. It was more complicated than a tarrasque, but according to the DMG, it was no more challenging (actually a bit less).

By the way, the characters were at level 20 and had access to magic items. This was a oneshot with random players and I made it clear the game was made to be difficult and I didn't use any shenanigans like a hostile terrain.

This is all to say that the default dials can be very difficult if you're ruthless and clever as a DM. Though, that skill isn't well translated into the DMG.

The Tarrasque can be killed by a 5th level wizard with acid splash and flight.

 

[Hussar]

The thing is, a hostile environment does not breed quality. Instead of having a community like the OSR, who prizes experimentation to see if it will lead anywhere good/interesting, we shut down experimentation because we arrogantly think that the end result can't be good.

THere's lots of bad classes. Lots of bad adventures. Lots of bad content. But when you make content, and then you get not only no positive reaction, but nothing but negative reaction, it poisons the well. It makes it so only a select few really stick it out and continue publishing material or trying to get better.

If people that played 5E were a little looser in their judgement, and tried to help add to quality instead of shutting down innovation, I think a lot of tension would disappear in the market.

But, that's the point. In the OSR, you don't have a 600 pound gorilla leading the pack. All you have is home-brew. New "official" material hasn't been made in over twenty years. Good grief, it's getting very close to the point where WotC has published D&D longer than TSR did. So, of course you see lots of experimentation. That's all you have.

When your hobby is nothing but home-brew, then, well, home-brew is what you have. When your hobby is massively dominated by a single publisher, any single book probably outselling all home-brew options combined, then of course official is the way to go.

It's not that people are more judgmental about 5e home brew, it's that, like OSR, the overwhelming majority of the material comes from a single source. The only difference is that in OSR that single source is home-brew whereas in 5e, it's WotC.

The old canard that home-brew is this source of superior material if only the majority of players would realize it has been around since the earliest days of the OGL.

 

[dave2008]

People who say that are not saying that the DM cannot dial things in 5e up to the point where they challenge hard core players. They are saying that the default setting of 5e dials is pretty darn easy, and I agree.

I must admit that I don't really know what this means. D&D, IMO, is not supposed to be hard or easy, it is supposed to be fun. What does hard even mean in the context of an RPG. Easy to do what? Easy to learn? Easy to master? Easy to play? I would much prefer my D&D, and really any game I play, to be lean on the easy side of those. So Is it easy to challenge players? I think so. Is it easy for players to defeat challenges? I find the answer to that is: it depends. It can be or it can't be - all completely RAW too.

 

[Maxperson]

I must admit that I don't really know what this means. D&D, IMO, is not supposed to be hard or easy, it is supposed to be fun. What does hard even mean in the context of an RPG. Easy to do what? Easy to learn? Easy to master? Easy to play? I would much prefer my D&D, and really any game I play, to be lean on the easy side of those. So Is it easy to challenge players? I think so. Is it easy for players to defeat challenges? I find the answer to that is: it depends. It can be or it can't be - all completely RAW too.

Easy to overcome the level "appropriate" challenges as set forth by the default rules. I think this stems from the design(poor in my opinion) of 6-8 medium to difficult encounters in an adventuring day balance. If you're expected to beat that many encounters on 1 day's worth of resources, no like level encounter can really be all that hard. It's an endurance run(6-8), not a sprint(1 challenging encounter). The overall feel to me is that the game is very easy.

 

[dave2008]

Easy to overcome the level "appropriate" challenges as set forth by the default rules. I think this stems from the design(poor in my opinion) of 6-8 medium to difficult encounters in an adventuring day balance. If you're expected to beat that many encounters on 1 day's worth of resources, no like level encounter can really be all that hard. It's an endurance run(6-8), not a sprint(1 challenging encounter). The overall feel to me is that the game is very easy.

So you are just talking about the encounter building guidelines and you determine 5e is easy? That seems to be a very narrow and small group of rules to define the entire edition as "easy" IMO. However, I agree that the encounter guidelines are set up to be easy (just look at the definition of "Deadly"), they are telling you that. So if you use them straight up, that shouldn't be surprising. However, there is nothing in the RAW stopping you from using more difficult encounters. I mean "Epic Encounters" are also RAW and much more challenging.

Why should a like level (and by this I assume you mean CR) encounter be hard (not the guideline definition, but really hard)? That is not what the numbers of the encounter suggest it will be. You would need an epic encounter for that IMO.

 

[Maxperson]

So you are just talking about the encounter building guidelines and you determine 5e is easy? That seems to be a very narrow and small group of rules to define the entire edition as "easy" IMO. However, I agree that the encounter guidelines are set up to be easy (just look at the definition of "Deadly"), they are telling you that. So if you use them straight up, that shouldn't be surprising. However, there is nothing in the RAW stopping you from using more difficult encounters. I mean "Epic Encounters" are also RAW and much more challenging.

Hence the dials we speak of

Also, aren't those epic encounters from rules outside of core? When I'm in a discussion about default design, I don't typically use splat book rules since it can't be assumed that any given table even has them, let alone uses them.

 

[dave2008]

Hence the dials we speak of

Also, aren't those epic encounters from rules outside of core? When I'm in a discussion about default design, I don't typically use splat book rules since it can't be assumed that any given table even has them, let alone uses them.

No the epic encounters use the numbers from the DMG. That table is fan made, but it uses the encounter / daily XP budgets from the DMG. They are the RAW numbers, just extrapolated to provide an encounter more challenging than "deadly."