D&D 5E What (if anything) do you find "wrong" with 5E?

[MoonSong]

FInally being able to read Hussar's long-hidden salt is delicious. I agree with all of this. Only diff is, druid has cooler subclasses than wizard lol.

Because wizard has all of the flavor and thematic diversity of a narrow subclass. And the obvious subclasses (schools) all are equivalent to a single subchoice inside a subclass -like druid terrains, dragon sorcerer ancestor or a fighter's combat style -

 

[Mind of tempest]

FInally being able to read Hussar's long-hidden salt is delicious. I agree with all of this. Only diff is, druid has cooler subclasses than wizard lol.

well, that is just untrue both have terrible sub-classes.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think it was very clear that WotC/Hasbro higher ups only cared about D&D as an IP factory, so Mearls and co got a free hand to do whatever as long as it did not cost too much. The fact that D&D could be successful enough as a game to please Hasbro took everyone by surprise.

I doubt seriously there was no managerial level between Mearls and the people you're talking about.

That is pretty much exactly what happened. It is also pretty much exactly what I said happened, and pretty much the opposite of what you said happened in the post I responded to. Which make your first seven words rather confusing (why "no", and then go on to confirm my version of events, and what are the "it" and the "that".

You indicated they didn't feel betrayed until the 4e style support didn't materialize. I think the people paying attention figured out that was never going to happen well before even the end of the "playtest".

It was "D&D Next".

Thanks. Had a feeling that wasn't right.

Not just "derisive", factually inaccurate. In theory inaccurate praise would also need correcting, but I don't recall that ever happening with 4e.

There were 4e fans that would at least project how something worked that worked for them personally as more of a universal good than was warranted. But of course that was vastly under represented proportionate to the negative hyperbole and such (though back when the trenches were up, there were some comments lobbed at 3e fans that were probably just as hyperbolic, but by that point it was pretty much on.)

You cannot not assume, you either assume their absence or their presence. 5e claims to assume their absence, but someone was saying upthread they admited in a sidebar in a supplement that martials are screwed without magic items, so in practice their presence is assumed.

Yeah, at least with quantitative magic items, you assume them in or you don't. The closest you can do to have it both ways is the Pathfinder 2e approach of assuming them in, and then having a patch if you're not going to use them so the numbers come out approximately the same anyway.

Criticism of 3e was and is often based on things that are actually problems with 3e. When that is not the case (which used to be not uncommon, but has virtually died out now), the reaction was generally similar. At least mine was, I cannot speak for everyone obviously.

You'd get some weird cases where you'd get people who would try to, for example, defend the functionally useless/counterproductive CR system (which could be vaguely sensible at the bottom but became less and less so as levels accrued), but that was probably just reflexive nothing-is-ever-wrong-with-a-game-if-I-like-it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Early in the 4e marketing some of the WotC designers did say some significantly negative things about 3e (many, but all, of which were entirely justified). And the fans of that version were indeed extremely prickly.

Yeah, there was some hyperbole there, though since part of 4e's design was to try and get a version of D&D that was genuinely at least approximately balanced, and the fact that especially as it was evolved over time, 3e was a notorious mess there, there was plenty of legitimate low hanging fruit to target. Unfortunately, they couldn't just leave it at that.

 

[billd91]

AND, for some reason, druids are the summoning class while actual Conjuration wizards can't actually summon monsters.

If anything, that's a deficiency in the conjuration wizard, not something new to the druid. Having played them since 1e, druids have always been a significant summoning class.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I've always been of the opinion that 4e's biggest mistake was basing the game off of organized play principles. Virtually all the things that 4e set out to fix were issues that came up in organized play. And, the reason for nearly all the design decisions for 4e was based in the idea that you would be playing with strangers a significant amount of time.

Those two things are, IMO, the primary reason for the rejection of 4e by a large segment of the fandom. People with stable groups (or even semi-stable groups) who had no experience or interest in playing with strangers couldn't begin to understand why 4e did the things that it did and explained the reasons the way they explained them.

I dunno, man. I never played 3e with anyone but one of my extent groups, and most of the reasons for the 4e design elements were abundantly clear to me. I just found it a bridge too far, but the issues it was designed to address were real and not limited to organized play.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Virtually all the things that 4e set out to fix were issues that came up in organized play.

I've never been part of organized play and I saw a lot of the problems that were fixed.

Unless one assumes those problems aren't problems if the DM can do whatever they want up to and including rewriting entire classes, subsystems and game philosophy.

 

[James Gasik]

There were 3.5 players who had not yet embraced the idea of classes like the Warlock, who was unchained from the Vancian model of spellcasting, instead having unlimited use powers, nor the "encounter-based" design of the Tome of Battle. The WotC developers had decided that balancing a game around spell slots and set numbers of encounters was problematic because many groups did not run their games that way.

(And still don't, which is a recurring issue with 5e).

That 4e was going full steam ahead with both this new paradigm, when you had old school gamers perfectly content with resource management and slow grindy adventuring days really stuck in the craws of a lot of people.

See, there was a huge disconnect between the way people talked about 3.5 on forums, and the way it was being played in home games. On forums, you had tier lists, a solved metagame, and complaints about "why not Tippyverse" or "why not scry and die" or "why not God Wizard" or "why not Mind Redacted" or "why not 5 minute work day"?

In home games, you had people playing PHB1 Fighters and not having any problems.

WotC, of course, paid the most attention to the vocal part of the fanbase, who were constantly pointing out the flaws of 3.5, griping about the bloat, and showcasing ridiculous builds.

So 4e was made to address those concerns, giving us classes that were balanced against one another (more or less), shiny new options, sticky Fighters, and a massively rebalanced magic system along with toned down magic items with more conservative benefits.

And well, I know I was a DM for one of those groups that was not yet ready for the changeover. Eventually we were, and we had a lot of fun with the new game. But just as there are people who consider 1st Edition to be "true" AD&D, and there are people who rejected 3e as "that horrible WotC edition", there were always going to be people who rejected the fancy polish of 4e. "Where's my Gnomes? Why are Dragonpeople in the PHB?", they cried, despite the fact that a given D&D player has seen maybe 5 Gnome PC's in their gaming career.

The irony is, if D&D had remained the only game in town, I think more people would have accepted it, just as many people have accepted 5e. But...Paizo made their move, and gave people who wanted a "fixed" 3.5 a new game with new content and shiny new art, and from that moment, 4e was doomed.

Never no mind that Pathfinder 1e ended up just as bloated and ridiculous as 3.5 (though admittedly in different ways) by the end, lol.

 

[billd91]

The irony is, if D&D had remained the only game in town, I think more people would have accepted it, just as many people have accepted 5e. But...Paizo made their move, and gave people who wanted a "fixed" 3.5 a new game with new content and shiny new art, and from that moment, 4e was doomed.

That was a bad and dismissive argument then ("oh, you'll eventually come around" like we were a bunch of wayward, willful teenagers), it's a bad one now. If Paizo hadn't put out Pathfinder, people would probably just have continued playing 3.5 like my Thursday group did. In that group, we never made the shift to Pathfinder, we just went back to a D&D version we found more acceptable than 4e - 3.5.

I have no doubt Pathfinder hurt 4e in the sense that it ruptured the idea that 4e, no matter how well it did on release day and that it was profitable, could keep D&D as the flagship RPG in the market and thus hastened it being shelved in favor of 5e. But the argument that we'd have eventually accepted 4e is insulting.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

The Monk is more of a support class than anything.
It should not be the main tank.
It should not be the main scout (unless build for it).
It is not usually the main damage dealer.
But it exactly where you put it. In the middle. There are a few classes like this. And that is good!
In a group of 6 peoples, some are bound to be support and specialists as this is exactly at this number (well, 5 actually) that you start to need generalist or specific tasks specialists. The specialist should not be gimping the party but should be able to contribute. And the monk is one of those.

Being B tier at a couple things isn't exactly a sexy niche. It works for the bard, who is ALSO a 9 level spellcaster. What is the monk's excuse?

Existing to spam stunning fist is kind of lame. I feel it is a bit too strong compared to other options and crowds out other uses (should probably be 1/round). Monk's really just need some kind of mid-fight resource recovery mechanic.