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

[Vaalingrade]

For D&D it is as pretty much anything after 1990 is barely supported with character and setting rules.

I'm honestly still waiting for them to catch up with 80's cartoons and/or Anne Macaffery.

How is it that there's a setting whose literally title is a weapon used from dragon-back and yet we haven't had decent rules for riding dragons in the quarter century I've been playing?

There have been five Draconomincons in that time.

 

[Malmuria]

Well that's just Tiers of play.

There's still stuff like Avatar, WOW, Wahammer, Dragonball, Street Fighter. Harry Potter, Demon Slayer, League or Legends, Frozen, POTC, One Piece, Black Clover, and much of the MCU that is over Tier 1 which could work in D&D.

For D&D it is as pretty much anything after 1990 is barely supported with character and setting rules.

It would seem that 5e does work best in tiers 1 and 2, and that there is little official support and/or general player interest in tiers 3 and 4 comparatively. But if we are thinking of how popular contemporary franchises map onto dnd, it is clear that people who get into fantasy via, say, the Witcher, will find the implicit dnd setting to be reasonably similar. And in a worst/best case scenario, they might actually pick up the Witcher RPG.

 

[James Gasik]

Also, just as an aside, the Potterverse has got a lot more to do with urban fantasy than it does swords-and-horses style fantasy. There absolutely are examples of the latter that have powerful magic (Draegera comes to mind) but they aren't particularly the common thrust of modern fantasy I think.

The Belgariad, the Elenium, The Sword of Truth, and The Codex Alara have pretty powerful magic.

 

[Malmuria]

I'll grant GoT, sadness simulator that it is, but trying to do Witcher combat with 5e is going to be... lacking. At the very least, Worst Superman doesn't have to stand there and job while he drinks a potion or tosses an effect; Skyrim has mana-based, at-will magic (would need one of those new classes we're never going to get) and the at-will Shouts, and Elden Ring has magic weapons that make pretty much everything on offer right now with their paltry per day abilities curl up and cry. Also, you can't roll everywhere to avoid damage--and didn't they do a 5e souls that needed new mechanics?

I agree that translating the mechanics exactly will be difficult, but within the fantasy genre skyrim/witcher and the like will feel familiar to the dnd genre, in part, obviously, because the conceits of dnd (classes, levels, hp, etc) guided crpg development over the years. In other words, if, when a new player thinks "elf," they think of an elf from the witcher world instead of LOTR, they'll still be able to ground themselves easily in dnd tropes.

 

[Minigiant]

It would seem that 5e does work best in tiers 1 and 2, and that there is little official support and/or general player interest in tiers 3 and 4 comparatively. But if we are thinking of how popular contemporary franchises map onto dnd, it is clear that people who get into fantasy via, say, the Witcher, will find the implicit dnd setting to be reasonably similar. And in a worst/best case scenario, they might actually pick up the Witcher RPG.

Why?

You could replicate the stuff in the Witcher, GOT, or Harry Potter decently well with the right subclasses, spells, feats, monsters or even whole new classes and races.

A lot of "go play another game" talk feels a it weird when D&D is a mix of themes and genre of other older media. Newer media? Nah. Play Something else.

It's not like ATLA couldn't fit in D&D. The 4 Elements Monk was just designed poorly.

D&D 5e has a half dozen types of elf but only 1 orc despite there being many new interpetions of orc after LOTR. Warcraftish Tribal non-evil orcs aren't in any offical non-borrowed setting yet.

 

[tetrasodium]

There's lots of "modern fantasy" that still fits within dnd's ambit: the witcher, game of thrones, skyrim, elden ring, etc. If anything, 5e is too overpowered for those settings/concepts (but still can work, I think). And if there are genres and concepts that 5e doesn't do well...that's fine, I think? Maybe instead of more 5e kickstarters, we can get some actual new games

Going to have to hard disagree on lots of "modern fantasy" that fits within 5e. There's really only one genre of entertainment that fits within 5e is a good chunk of isekai anime with shallow one dimensional characters who have no needs ties or obligations to the world. Some fantasy themed Shonen anime like 7 deadly sins comes close but those characters generally have more ties links & obligations to the world even if the invulnerability & lack of risk kind of aligns.

 

[Garthanos]

The problem with your hybrid rogue/fighter is you're going to end up either starving them of resources they would have individually had (By say, only limiting a number of points), or giving them things useless to their archetype.

Probably giving them options they wont use often which happens already for a dex fighter .. ie already you can use plate armor with your Dex fighter but you probably wont you will dress up just like the rogue ... it doesnt seem too painful. That using bonus action for better movement cannot be done while in heavy army seems simple to me.

 

[Hussar]

As long as 5e is the big dog, actual new games will a distant second, I'm afraid.

And to be fair, 5e is WAY overpowered for most modern fantasy fiction. You have to restrict the heck out of it to make something like GoT work, for example.

Yeah, well, this has always been a bit of a sticking issue with me for 5e. I really don't like how D&D has become SO high magic. Once upon a time, you saw a spell or magical effect once every couple of encounters. Then, in 3e, it was probably every encounter, and at higher levels, maybe a couple of times. Now, it's every round of every encounter, usually multiple times in every round. It's far, far more Potterverse than anything else.

Now, as far as the 4 Elements Monk goes, I've only seen it played once and it worked pretty well. But, to be fair, it was a fairly short campaign - we played out Lost Mines of Phandelver and a chunk of Hoard of the Dragon Queen, so, it only was up to sixth or seventh level. Not really a big example.

But, claims that it was "designed poorly" has to be based on actual play. It just has to be. I've seen far too many games that read great and played crap and conversely, games that read terribly but played great to theory craft "poor design".

So, if you want to make claims that it was "designed poorly", I'm sorry ,but, you have to show your work. Run a dozen or so tables through, let's say, Storm King's Thunder and another dozen or so tables through Wild Beyond the Witchlight and see how the monk player does. Is the monk player happy at the end or not? Because, otherwise, it's just theory and no proof. "Poorly designed" is pretty vague. What? It's not doing enough damage? It's being overshadowed in play? It fails to provide an enjoyable character for the player? What, exactly, does "poorly designed" actually mean?

Frankly, considering that we've got such a range of adventure types just from WotC (and not counting 3rd party and homebrew), claims that something is "poorly designed" needs a HELL of a lot more to back it up than, "Well, it doesn't look like Avatar the Air Bender".

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Being someone who took part in every stage of the D&D Next playtest, it's my honest belief that the "crowdsourced playtest" was at least partly a scam to maintain interest in D&D as a product* while they were working on a new edition of the game, while paying only lip service to actual playtest data.

*Since by taking down the online tools and content, while the game wasn't dead, it's support was gone, and for many players, it became difficult to continue playing without easy access to content via the character builder, and there was therefore no new version of the game playable for two years.

Being someone who took part in every step of the playtest and followed every commentary, I am sure they actually did take the feedback into account. If you look at the first playtest, you still see more 4e in it (starting hp, dwarven cleric attack+heal). Sadly so much was rejected because of 4e's (undeserved*) bad reputation.
Calling it a pure marketing scam is most probably wrong.
I do agree, that it was also creating interest and most importantly good will from their former audience who was lost during 4e.

I also do agree that pulling the plug of 4e tools showed what made 4e cumbersome: the reliance of tool to even be able to play the game.
I am sure with some more consolidation as in 4essentials, the game would have been playable. Actually I still have all the essentials rulebooks and probably you could play it from the books with no problems.

*bad reputation was undeserved, because many people rejected it untested.

 

[James Gasik]

I think the main issue with the Four Elements Monk is just that their powers are so expensive with Ki. If a standard Monk feels like they can't use many of their neat tricks in an encounter at low levels, it's likely much worse for the Four Elements Monk.

But as with all things, there is a caveat when it comes to actual play. Most classes can perform at a baseline level in 5e; while there are balance issues between classes, it's less heinous by far than in, say, 3.5. There's a lot of factors that are hard to predict, like how many short rests you can get, and the difficulty of an individual encounter.

Storm King's Thunder, for example, has a few objectives that are basically one big fight, which can really mess with the expected power level of a class- that fight might be long and grueling, quickly causing short rest classes to run out of gas in the tank, while the long rest classes can burn through their resources with impunity.

If, as expected, the Anniversary Edition eliminates short rest recharges, I expect it will become much easier to rate the differences between a given class or subclass with other options.