D&D 5E Is 5E Special

[darjr]

Stranger Things, most likely.

Stranger things definitely dwarfs D&D but it came out in 2016? Right?

 

[Baldurs_Underdark]

I joined friends who played other TTRPGs in the past. D&D (forgot which version, maybe 4E) and warhammer (again can't be more specific). I just sat at the table with a beer to observe and learn. Friends tried to explain the rules and I asked questions. And at the end of the afternoon/evening, I still didn't understand the base mechanics.

I joined a 5E D&D game. I was immediately playing (instead of only looking), and at the end of the day I understood so much that I started reading the PHB looking for some information about weapons, armor and the various classes.

And that is why 5E is special. A complete newbie can get sucked in on a single afternoon. I don't know of any other roleplaying game that is similar in that regard.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Stranger things definitely dwarfs D&D but it came out in 2016? Right?

I thought someone said it came out in 2018. My bad. I don't watch it so it's not exactly on my radar.

 

[Audiomancer]

That rank is out of all books on Amazon. Note it hit #1 not once, not twice, but three times, the third in 2018.

Huh? What happened then?

Well, I got married in 2018. Right around the same time the PHB peaked, too. But I seriously doubt there’s a connection.

 

[Reynard]

Sure it’s possible. The actual math of any given level 5 party isn’t going to vary that wildly.

That is not my experience at all. 5E isn't coded in a way that ensures damage output is consistent across parties because there is too much variation and too many unintended consequences. They flattened the math behind damage by level but then failed to lock the characters into, so instead of becoming a predictable standard it became a cap. And since 5E uses hit points as the primary descriptor of monster CR, unpredictable damage output throws the CR system out. It's a mess. You eventually get a feel for it, but it isn't because of the math.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

As I recall, the massive smite bombs were actually one of the few ways martials could keep up-- it's been a few years, so I don't have the calcs on hand, we started realizing it when we also realized that fireball was excellent single target damage due to them beefing it up due to its iconic status. The caster will do more damage than a martial in a round, which is supposed to be counter balanced by the martial's sustain, but as a practical matter forcing out a bunch of encounters to weaken the party as 5e encourages for its long rest and short rest balance mechanics, was difficult, even when we moved to an adventuring week via modified gritty realism rules. There were other strong spells too, fireball was especially egregious because it was written to be better, and there was almost nothing to it, it was a complete First Order Optimal Strategy that doesn't fall off at any level of skill.

Under normal rules, if players aren't deliberately hobbling themselves and don't have a forceful time pressure, they end up resting according to resource drain meaning the casters had an incentive to play pretty aggressively, but if the time pressure is on, they generally won't even want to stop for an hour and the short rest classes feel even worse. Plus, around a table of friends, there's a general sense that if someone wants to rest, the other party members aren't going to fight them about it arbitrarily. We did push, but the 6-8 encounter mark is rough, and we observed that it did take that much.

In a game that utilizes relatively accessible magic items, you had even more castings being thrown around (I know we banned the wand of fireballs and other casting increase items outright at one point) and I should emphasize that the number of encounters you need to burn out the spells was pretty high to begin with. This led to a scenario where it became very demanding to police the pace of any given adventure, and therefore to design encounters that weren't shut down by aggressive casting-- especially since spamming combat encounters to suck up resources isn't something the group generally enjoys, and the West Marches format at the time made it, so we couldn't wring multiple sessions of play out of a single rest.

I was active online, kept up with multiple blogs giving GMing advice, and while I could basically do a bunch of the stuff @Oofta was talking about to make my encounters work (actually, I also really like Tome of Foes, the kobold press book, because the monsters just have a bit more bite) like, create specialized boss monsters that cheated action economy and stuff to be interesting and a threat, it was way too much work for me to stick with on a regular basis to negotiate session prep.

It also backed us into a weird corner where we wanted to get rid of SS and GWM because they made those two weapon styles much better than any other martial weapon style in the game-- and wanting to have active access to magic items made not taking them much more of a newbie trap in our west marches, but they were also one of the few ways to drag back some ground. We actually had houserules trying to buff some martial styles (like I know the TWF's actual bonus was free, and then I think I built the effect of the TWF feat into the fighting style...) to try and get it where we needed it to be. I was actually pretty active on r/unearthedarcana because of the amount of Homebrew I was creating, and we were using, and for a little bit I thought that was the problem until one of our power gamers broke down what a bog-standard wizard could do, and pointed out which characters were even using any, vs. CRB options, their Volo's Hobgoblin Wizard for instance was RAW.

Add that to all the house rules and rulings I was making in general were reaching a significant volume, the lack of out of combat support, the relative dearth of character options that weren't part of a me curated Homebrew collection and other weird game breaking spells and items, and this decade-long GM called it quits. I casually grabbed the Pathfinder 2e PDF on launch day, thinking I'd probably wanna stick with 5e since I'd invested so much into it, and uh, it dragged me kicking and screaming over to Pathfinder with how well it addressed literally every pain point 5e had created for us-- to put that into perspective, I had vaguely resented Pathfinder for years from having started with and loving 4e and getting the "uhh you should be playing Pathfinder, it's just better than 4e in every way" treatment.

So, speaking primarily as a 5e player who still hasn't played pathfinder 2e as long as I did 5e, that's my story, and in tandem with things I see out in the wilds of the community, is why I'm ambivalent about 5e's balance and accessibility. I think it back-loads a lot of its more user hostile elements, which is unusual for an RPG, and I think as a system, that might be its strongest claim to approachability. But I also think it's contributing to some serious salt build up by creating unhealthy pressures on the culture in the community.

Everything you say here was iterated times and times again, and I can just say: in a game where everyone knows about this, using an optional rest rule solves all those problems.
In groups where people just don't play that way, 5e runs very smooth and is quite balanced.
I have DMed for both groups of people and find 5e better balanced than any edition before that (except for maybe 4e).

That said, I fully support changes to rest mechanics in 24 edition to get rid of those problems.

As those problems won't be noticed by the average beginner group, your estimation that 5e is successful despite its mechanics seems very flawed to me.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Well, I got married in 2018. Right around the same time the PHB peaked, too. But I seriously doubt there’s a connection.

You sell yourself short. Correlation always implies causation after all.

 

[darjr]

Sometime in the distant future a historian:
No really! This guy got married and everything changed! Look this other guy marked it in EVERY graph of the times!

Apologies if my posts are a bit much.

I dint think 5e is magic but I do like it and think it is pretty special.

 

[payn]

That is not my experience at all. 5E isn't coded in a way that ensures damage output is consistent across parties because there is too much variation and too many unintended consequences. They flattened the math behind damage by level but then failed to lock the characters into, so instead of becoming a predictable standard it became a cap. And since 5E uses hit points as the primary descriptor of monster CR, unpredictable damage output throws the CR system out. It's a mess. You eventually get a feel for it, but it isn't because of the math.

This is going to vary by taste and preference as a system take. PF2 is wound very very tightly and the opposite of 5E here. I dislike it very much because every combat is exactly as you think it would be. There is no swing, no unpredictability, its just same ol same ol. Some take comfort in an entirely reliable CR system as such, but as a GM and player, I would take 5E or PF1 any day over it. (You can sort of loosen the tightness a little with the Proficiency Without Level variant, but the base system remains.)

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

5e?