jasper
Rotten DM
I like mounting a M2 on my technical; it is a better set up than a M60.
D&D General Rant: Sometimes I Hate the D&D Community
jasper
Rotten DM
AHEM and pass me the new update. Now I got go update my new cheat sheets for newcomers.
I mainly do Adventure League. So, when a new book, or AL update comes out. I have to check my knowledge and reload. Or I get a "Lore Lover" correcting me over a minor issue which really does not matter to the rest of the table. Correct me if I wrong but with SpellJam Or SpellJelly dropping next month, AL will have 54 legal races and WOTC has dropped 67 races.
DrunkonDuty
he/him
I recently joined a 5e game. As part of actually trying to grock this thing 5e) I have been reading the threads about 5e rules. (Yes, I've also been reading the rules.) From reading of the threads I have to ask, does anyone playing 5e actually like it as a system?
Many posters here wax lyrical and lovingly about favourite campaign settings, lineages, classes, and of course the great moments in their games. But very few posters speak kindly of the actual system.
Am I wrong in this supposition?
Many posters here wax lyrical and lovingly about favourite campaign settings, lineages, classes, and of course the great moments in their games. But very few posters speak kindly of the actual system.
Am I wrong in this supposition?
Zardnaar
Legend
Loves probably the wrong word but it's top 3 favorite edition for me and what we play because it's what people want.
The other 2 in that top 3 editions are 2E and B/X. They do things that 5E can't they're not better as such but different enough to be interesting and I like running them.
The other 2 in that top 3 editions are 2E and B/X. They do things that 5E can't they're not better as such but different enough to be interesting and I like running them.
Nikosandros
Golden Procrastinator
I don't love it, but I like it well enough. It does its job. There are some warts, but which game doesn't have them? Also, it is relatively "tunable" for different campaigns.
Oofta
Legend
I like the rules, it's my favorite version of the game and I've played them all. People I play with enjoy the game and the majority of the rules.
On the other hand nothing is perfect. I think strength based characters should have better range weapon options, and it's dumb that longbow (which require a great deal of strength in real life) use dex. So I make them versatile in my campaign.
There's also no way to please everyone. I think they made the right choice on stealth rules, other people want something I would dislike.
It's a complex game. Everybody finds things they don't like and some people just like to complain.
I think a lot of the criticism does come from a place of...well like Zardnaar said, not love, but affection. 5e has the potential to be a truly great system. But you would expect, after 50 years of gaming, that all the warts and bugbears (not the monsters, lol, they are fine) would be smoothed out by now.
In making their "greatest hits" edition, we got some of the obtuse, and even arcane quirks that every edition is known for, and sometimes the murkiness of why something works a particular way, or even how something is intended to function, is so unclear it reminds me a lot of AD&D.
And the developers like to claim that this is on purpose, so that every table can approach a problem in a way that makes sense to them, and lets them have fun.
But really. You could do that in any edition, any game. People play Uno and Monopoly wrong in households across the world, and that's just fine- it doesn't mean that Hasbro is suddenly going to stop printing a rulebook for Monopoly and say "you can just make up the rules!".
But people accept that with D&D. I've been playing ttrpg's since the 80's, and I'm going to be honest here. I am not a profession game designer. I have made it my mission to try and learn the rules of the games I play, and even try to understand why they are the way they are, so that if I do make a house rule, I'm hopefully making a good one.
WotC are professional game designers. They could have given us a better game, with less strange interactions, odd rules, and bizarre loopholes to deal with. They chose not to, and told us to fix it, like we're Bethesda's modding community.
But that has two problems. One, we can never say that the game is as polished as one made by professionals (if we're all being honest). And even then, even if it's perfect and fine for a given group, it makes it almost impossible to have a discussion about the game, because everyone plays it differently!
Pick any thread about rules debates. You have these long arguments about what the rules say you can and can't do, often over the most trivial things, because we're each interpreting what is "fun" and "fair" from our own experiences alone!
One person might say, for example, that not letting a guy with a two handed sword take his hand off said sword to cast a spell, and then put it back to swing it without the Use an Object action is a proper ruling, because they feel it's unrealistic (as in, it affects their verisimilitude), or it's a balancing factor for powerful builds.
Another might find tracking such things trivial, as you're rarely talking about a difference of more than a point or two of damage for doing the exact same thing with a versatile weapon like a longsword!
But we argue these points because we don't have common ground, because the developers refused to clarify any kind of corner cases.
Can I use an AoE spell while under the effects of Symbol of Hopelessness? One guy says sure, it's RAW. Another says it's against the spirit of the rules. Who is right?
Well the DM is, but this sort of thing means that a guy who plays at one table, who moves to another, might end up having to deal with a completely different set of rules when playing the same game!
You might say, well, every table has house rules, but those are usually handed out in a six page document. In this case, the DM doesn't consider it a house rule, because that's how he thinks the game operates!
And that strikes me as being a ridiculous state of affairs in 2022.
In making their "greatest hits" edition, we got some of the obtuse, and even arcane quirks that every edition is known for, and sometimes the murkiness of why something works a particular way, or even how something is intended to function, is so unclear it reminds me a lot of AD&D.
And the developers like to claim that this is on purpose, so that every table can approach a problem in a way that makes sense to them, and lets them have fun.
But really. You could do that in any edition, any game. People play Uno and Monopoly wrong in households across the world, and that's just fine- it doesn't mean that Hasbro is suddenly going to stop printing a rulebook for Monopoly and say "you can just make up the rules!".
But people accept that with D&D. I've been playing ttrpg's since the 80's, and I'm going to be honest here. I am not a profession game designer. I have made it my mission to try and learn the rules of the games I play, and even try to understand why they are the way they are, so that if I do make a house rule, I'm hopefully making a good one.
WotC are professional game designers. They could have given us a better game, with less strange interactions, odd rules, and bizarre loopholes to deal with. They chose not to, and told us to fix it, like we're Bethesda's modding community.
But that has two problems. One, we can never say that the game is as polished as one made by professionals (if we're all being honest). And even then, even if it's perfect and fine for a given group, it makes it almost impossible to have a discussion about the game, because everyone plays it differently!
Pick any thread about rules debates. You have these long arguments about what the rules say you can and can't do, often over the most trivial things, because we're each interpreting what is "fun" and "fair" from our own experiences alone!
One person might say, for example, that not letting a guy with a two handed sword take his hand off said sword to cast a spell, and then put it back to swing it without the Use an Object action is a proper ruling, because they feel it's unrealistic (as in, it affects their verisimilitude), or it's a balancing factor for powerful builds.
Another might find tracking such things trivial, as you're rarely talking about a difference of more than a point or two of damage for doing the exact same thing with a versatile weapon like a longsword!
But we argue these points because we don't have common ground, because the developers refused to clarify any kind of corner cases.
Can I use an AoE spell while under the effects of Symbol of Hopelessness? One guy says sure, it's RAW. Another says it's against the spirit of the rules. Who is right?
Well the DM is, but this sort of thing means that a guy who plays at one table, who moves to another, might end up having to deal with a completely different set of rules when playing the same game!
You might say, well, every table has house rules, but those are usually handed out in a six page document. In this case, the DM doesn't consider it a house rule, because that's how he thinks the game operates!
And that strikes me as being a ridiculous state of affairs in 2022.
Oofta
Legend
It may strike you as a ridiculous state of affairs, it strikes me as the decision by the development team to create a flexible game. They tried answering every question with errata or additional source books with 3.x, it was a never-ending rabbit hole of clarifications. They tried locking it down to specific things you can do and had the unintended consequence of practically eliminating creativity and spontaneous approaches to resolve challenges* in 4E. They had a set of concrete rules for stealth, they chose not to use them because they could never cover every scenario and felt it worked better to let each group decide how to handle it. It was the right decision.
I think the fact that we have different ways of doing things so that my game can have a different feel than yours is a strength, not a weakness. There is no way the devs could answer every possible edge case. Even if they could, people would just complain about the answers.
*At least for a lot of groups, I'm sure there were exceptions.
One of the things that won me over to playing 4e, as I was very comfortable playing 3.5 with all the books I had amassed- sure the game had lots of warts, but enough options existed that I could cobble together something remotely balanced and fun out of it- and it was a game I knew well, unlike this strange new game that seemed half-baked, was it's public play.
D&D Encounters was a blast, and got me out of the house every Wednesday to head to my local game store. And it was a gateway to Living Forgotten Realms, which represented the majority of my ttrpg gaming for a few years.
Why do I bring this up? Because 5e is atrociously bad for public play. The game is impossible to run "as written", and, if each individual table has it's own rulings to follow (or worse, in the case of my FLGS, tries to use RAW and developer tweets as rules over any kind of common sense, lol), it quickly becomes a headache.
Does my character work the same way at table A or table B? I only occasionally had to worry about that in 4e, but man oh man, is it a pain in 5e. After a year, I was done. IMO, 5e can only be played in a home game successfully, which is sad, since I like meeting and playing with other gamers often.
payn
He'll flip ya...Flip ya for real...
It's everybody's second favorite system!
Similar Threads
