Something that has to be called out is 5e is a DM-centric RPG. Where Stonetop says "not only should you do that, you must" 5e leaves it up to the DM. Throughout the rules you'll see that principle stated and restated.
The choice to make 5e-centric DM-centric has specific and intentional consequences. "You must" is off the table. That's empowering to some groups, frustrating to others. 5e says - even though we drop you in at the deep end, our rules are good enough to catch you - and that is almost always true. The system is streamlined, expressive, resilient. A product of a quantity of playtesting that few other design teams can match.
Yeah...I find pretty much every part of those last two sentences incorrect. It is not meaningfully streamlined (and in fact has several snarl points that I personally have had to deal with)
unless the DM handwaves or elides things out. It is not particularly expressive, as demonstrated by the many calls from people who liked the
ideas of 3e and PF1e but who find 5e restrictive and suffering from a dearth of options. It
certainly isn't resilient, given the known issues with the CR system and, as stated, the
at the very least extremely swingy difficulty of low levels.
And, as stated, the playtesting for 5e was a joke. They wasted
at least a year and a half dithering about on ideas that weren't popular, but which were "designer's pet" things, like the Expertise Die (which Mearls all but admitted was his baby, because he loves rolling lots of dice). As another example, "Specialties" were something they tried to go all-in for...and they just didn't work and weren't popular, so they had to ditch them relatively late in the process...at which point they were now trapped, unable to implement the "Warlord Fighter" they'd promised because they had previously committed to putting all of that into a healing-focused Specialty. Yet on the flipside, they also rolled over at the slightest sign of difficulty for any idea they weren't committed to, which is what killed the Sorcerer and Warlock so thoroughly that we never even got to
see them again in the public playtest. (This, incidentally, is a significant part of why both Sorcerer and Warlock are weaker classes--they simply
did not get public playtesting, and their final forms were almost certainly developed over a much shorter time scale than other classes.)
Admittedly, the D&D Next playtest was
less of a joke than things like certain PF1e public playtests, like the Gunslinger, where they legitimately outright
banned people for giving critical feedback. (
Some of the people who got slapped with Paizo forum bans had in fact been nasty. But others legit simply pointed out serious flaws and called for improvements...and got banned for their troubles.) The class was published pretty much unedited, and guess what? The critics were right on the money. (Specifically, the "misfire" mechanic, due to being rolled
for every attack roll made, actually causes misfires to occur MORE often for highly-skilled Gunslingers! Though there were also other issues.)
5e is by design a game that most people can play. It is designed for high functionality and expressiveness. What I mean by the latter is that you can see throughout the design the patterns and interfaces that create design-space and designability. The 5e designers, knowing their past, are on the whole avoiding using this expressiveness to sell a million splatbooks. Instead responding to what they see players leaning into or away from.
Yeah, I'm gonna have to join the chorus on this one. You're just flat
wrong that 5e was designed for that--the word you're looking for is "transparency." 4e is one of the most maximally transparent "high crunch" systems ever made. It is really clear what it expects of players and how to get those things. Instead of "natural language" that (in my experience) invites
arguments and
confusion (because different people understand natural terms differently....as this thread has repeatedly shown!), 4e used clear, consistent keywords and clean, exception-based design, so you could pretty much instantly figure out what things did and how they worked together.
Gods! Do we all want to play just one game?
Not particularly. That's kind of the problem though; for many, it's not that they
want to only play one game. It's that D&D
is the one game they're even
able to play, because
nobody nearby plays anything else. Or, in my case, because a good 75% of all the games on offer are 5e, and about 15% are some variation of 3.X/PF1e, and it's
rare as hell to see 4e, 13A, or a similar system I'm into. I looked for several months, even posted threads hoping maybe a DM might bite. Nothing. I eventually gave up. Hence, if I can't get the games I actually love playing, I have to do what I can to see that the play I love gets represented in games people are likely to play.
So, 3e fighters are just a terrible implementation. The whole 'full round attack' thing and how multi-attacks work, the way any move that isn't "I swing my sword" is basically either worthless or has to be built heavily with feats/skills (and is then too niche to be viable). Fighters lose their MAIN claim to fame from AD&D, which was a really significant hardiness against magic/poison/etc. And then there's just no options, you get swings, and more swings, and... There REALLY IS no particular reason to ever play a non-caster past about level 3. At least half of all the classes in the game will never haul their own weight past level 3-5 or so. People can say it doesn't matter, but that's BS.
I already quoted from this post earlier, but this paragraph merits mention for a couple reasons. First, it highlights an area where 3e design, in a way similar to (other, non-related) aspects of 5e design, actively works against itself in a completely unnecessary way. In 3e, as you say, if you want to do the most damage you can as a physical fighter, you must use Full Attacks, and thus you cannot move. But the system was designed around the idea that people would be moving around, able to dodge, etc. The
entire Monk class, for example, is supposed to be built around being a lightly-armored, unarmed, highly-mobile skirmisher....which is a specialty that
simply sucks. Likewise, the idea with the Fighter was
supposed to be that they were incredibly customizable and powerful due to having significantly more feats....but the problem was, any good feat requires at least one mediocre or even outright
bad feat (e.g. Spring Attack requires Mobility), sometimes
several. And even the really good feats were rarely more than small incremental bonuses. The whole thing is just poorly-conceived.
And we can see how
other designers, trying to fix this lumpy
mess of a system, have used other techniques instead. The "Spheres" PF1e options from
Drop Dead Studios are meant simultaneously as a de-powering and enforcing
focus on magic-users (replacing Vancian casting entirely), while the Spheres of Might were specifically made to
increase the power of martial characters. As part of this, the SoM rules almost always rely on "special attack actions," NOT full attacks. A special attack action is something you can ONLY do by taking a regular Attack action, so as to encourage players to
actually move around the battlefield rather than parking themselves in the most stab-appropriate square and moving as little as possible. (Ironically, its hyperfocus on special attacks actually makes anything that
requires full attacks to be significantly weakened in comparison!) The Spheres rules are significantly better-balanced than PF1e, despite allowing for some crazy combos,
because they dispense with several key design elements that outright fight against the 3e chassis' own gameplay goals.
What I like about advantage is it is distinctive. So in my HoML game the ONLY allowable situational modifier is Advantage/Disadvantage. If something is not significant enough for that, then its too trivial to bother with at all, and by making all permanent type modifiers bonuses/penalties to the DV of the check, there's little chance of things getting confused. Cheapening of Advantage by over-generously granting it could be a thing, but I would like to think that the design of the game makes it pretty clear this is meant to signify that someone has a real genuine significantly improved chance of success. I DO grant it for 'tactical reasons' like flanking and surprise, I think situational tactics should be emphasized, and 4e spent a lot too much ink on 'procedural advantages' (IE you did X in the turn right after Y, or whatever). If you flank someone, if you get the jump on them, if you have a lot better cover than they do, well, they're kinda forked. It means that often the fiction just reads more plausibly, and that really isn't a bad thing.
Yeah, again I'm going to go up to bat for this: You have excessively reduced the benefit-space already. Either searching for Advantage is a generally wasted effort, because you have to bring overwhelming benefits to get it and that's not gonna happen much, or it's a
pointless effort, because you already have it and thus never need to do anything further. From what you've said here, you aren't actually solving the "it's the weapon of last resort being used simultaneously as the weapon of first resort" problem. You've just added a "...first resort should only come when you can't justify
not doing something" clause.
There's still plenty of space for where you have a
small edge that might matter, but not one so great as to be Advantage. (Personally, my preference is to have a sliding scale: something like +2, +2-and-Advantage, auto-success, mirrored for negatives. This also permits the possibility of -2+Advantage or +2+Disadvantage, allowing for "risky-but-powerful" and "restrained but reliable.") Plethoras of tiny bonuses are a problem, I don't deny that. But surely there is a space between "literally just ONE bonus" and "an absolute smorgasbord of things."
Free Kriegsspiel, as actually practised by the Prussian army, has fairly clear success conditions beyond the merely aesthetic. (EDIT: that condition being, do our officers win wars?)
That's one reason why, like you, I find the FKR nomenclature a bit puzzling. The FKR games, as I understand them, seem to emphasise high concept simulation, with an emphasis on setting, and the principle resolution mechanism being Drama (in Tweet's sense) flowing from the GM's adjudication of the fiction.
This is good to hear, since that's what I was getting out of it as well. It's a teaching tool, in game form. Like a CPR practice dummy. They aren't meant to actually
simulate real people. They're meant as a teaching aid, so that you get practice with the basic skills just in case you ever need them for a real person who isn't breathing.
The goal of Kriegsspiel was officer training. The goal of Free Kriegsspiel was more efficient and realistic officer training.
Efficient and
effective officer training. Unless you mean to claim that Free Kriegsspeil's referees would have been happy if their work was more realistic but
did not produce effective officers? That doesn't seem to be the case, from what I'm seeing. It seems to be that there was no gain
in officer training from the precise rules, so they ditched the unnecessary weight of (what I call) Simulation in order to more effectively Emulate the
experience of "commanders of armies." Because that experience is what's valuable, isn't it? It doesn't matter if the skill comes from totally unreal things or extremely precise realism.
