D&D 5E What are the "True Issues" with 5e?

[Gammadoodler]

Great. I'm all for other fantastical elements. List them. In the book. Dont just assume their existence because of how the rules work.

I don't see a particular benefit to putting fantasy in a box except in a

"here are some examples of stuff that may exist, feel free to come up with your own"

kind of way.

 

[Mistwell]

The gold issue is real for us and our primary DM fixed it.
The DMG stinks issue is real for us and we just ended up not using the DMG much.
The CR system is a real issue but was a fairly simple matter of still using that CR number in a different manner after getting a feel for the system.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

But they never say it. They never tell you humans in D&D are different from humans on Earth, so I have every reason to assume they aren't different, and that therefore the rules don't make sense.

Gygax did say it, as you discussed.

That they don't say it doesn't mean much, frankly. Would it be better if they did? Sure. But we can see from what's happening in D&D that these humans - like a fair number of humans in fantasy novels, note, are "made of sterner stuff" than us.

I mean, your position here seems to be dangerously close to "I require D&D to explain every single way it's different to the real world, otherwise I'll be sad and annoyed", and I feel like you're too much of a grown-up to really believe that. I feel like you're taking a rhetorical position - and one I sympathize with - it's always better if they say it - but it's not a very solid position.

 

[Baron Opal II]

I dunno if it's the sole issue, but it's certainly an issue. 3E and 4E absolutely required magic items, and arguably 1E and 2E made them basically integral to how D&D was actually played, to the point where not having them meant a lot of play was impossible, and it was seen as abnormal and weird.

The reasons and scale of the items changed as well. The gauntlets of ogre power and girdles of giant strength gave tremendous boosts to a character's strength. No other magic item had similar adjustments to attributes. Usually, with some definite but rare exceptions, all you had were the magic books to boost other attributes by +1 per use, once. And the reason why one attribute had significant adjustments and the others didn't is because strength, especially fantastic strength, was directly tied to the fighter's damage output. No other attribute / class combination had such synergy. Clerics received more spells from a higher wisdom, but there was no means to gain a similar magnitude of increase and the extra spells did not have as great an influence as being able to double the fighter's damage.

Rather than changing that balance and granting fighters half their level in damage bonus, or something, attribute boosting items reached parity with the strength items. Designers then had to adapt procedures to determine how equally fantastic attributes affected all the classes.

The bug / feature balance is a matter of taste, I think, but it seems a bit of a blunder to me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If I stab my leg and go to sleep, I will still have a worrisome wound on my leg the next morning.

If a DnD human stabs their leg and goes to sleep, they will wake up as if it never happened.

You can argue 'that's just midichlorians in the world around them seeping into them', but is that really any different then.

That is another argument for the rules not making sense. The book still doesn't say what you're claiming.

 

[mamba]

Fixed it for you.

I think you misunderstood the meaning of ‘>’

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't see a particular benefit to putting fantasy in a box except in a

"here are some examples of stuff that may exist, feel free to come up with your own"

kind of way.

Examples would be great. They don't give any.

 

[billd91]

It's not and you can't rationally argue that, because "older" doesn't make something "more D&D". That's a completely irrational and sentimental position of the absolutely worst kind. That's not the good argument you think it is.

<snip>
What?! I mean genuinely what are you talking about? 34 years of D&D, like a dozen groups, I dunno how many people, and I don't I've ever seen a player go "Oh I love this magic item but I have to throw it away so I can use this higher number one, oh I'm so sad!", which seems to your contention here. And 5E does not solve that at all unless the player literally cannot do math or understand rules.

In 5E magic item with more pluses is worth MORE than they were in previous editions. In 3E and 4E, magic items were assumed into the rules. Whereas in 5E, they're not - and thus in 5E, they break bounded accuracy (inarguably), and thus more plus are more powerful, pound for pound as it were, in 5E. 5E some really insane high-damage items too, like the +2d6 on a flaming sword, which absolutely laughs at the bonus values on items in earlier editions (relative to the per-swing damage).

Oh, it's a great argument. One of the biggest shifts in how D&D played at tables was the addition of easy item creation rules. They allowed players to sell off stuff they didn't want and basically convert them into the items they wanted. And what they wanted were the Big 6 (weapon, armor, prime stat boost, ring of protection, cloak of resistance, amulet of natural armor) because they were a lot more useful all the time than the more conditional but far more interesting items like the ring of shooting stars. That's the kind of item people were getting rid of by selling them and picking up the Big 6. The 3e/4e versions of the game made that kind of thing so easy to do that the way the game played really shifted. 5e's take on magic items helps shift it back and it's one of the reasons I like it as much as I do.
And I think your calculus on items with more pluses being worth more is way off. Thanks to bounded accuracy, +1 is QUITE sufficient. In fact, the main reason I want it as a player is to cut through most damage resistance more efficiently and a higher plus doesn't really help me do that. But you know what? Even without a magic weapon, I can STILL hit monsters and kill them, it just takes longer. So that's even an improvement over AD&D days.

 

[Undrave]

Assuming that was true, whatever you exactly mean by that... would they have needed to replace it with something?

If the rule was created to a solve a problem and you remove it, the problem might still be there. It's your job to ask yourself why it's there in the first place and what happens if you remove it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The reasons and scale of the items changed as well. The gauntlets of ogre power and girdles of giant strength gave tremendous boosts to a character's strength. No other magic item had similar adjustments to attributes. Usually, with some definite but rare exceptions, all you had were the magic books to boost other attributes by +1 per use, once. And the reason why one attribute had significant adjustments and the others didn't is because strength, especially fantastic strength, was directly tied to the fighter's damage output. No other attribute / class combination had such synergy. Clerics received more spells from a higher wisdom, but there was no means to gain a similar magnitude of increase and the extra spells did not have as great an influence as being able to double the fighter's damage.

Rather than changing that balance and granting fighters half their level in damage bonus, or something, attribute boosting items reached parity with the strength items. Designers then had to adapt procedures to determine how equally fantastic attributes affected all the classes.

The bug / feature balance is a matter of taste, I think, but it seems a bit of a blunder to me.

Great point, well made - yes - there used to be tremendous support with magical items to bring up the power of martial-type characters and it tended not to do the same for magical characters, who already had an edge - and access to a bunch of items most martials did not (scrolls, for example).

3E abandoned this and it was a huge mistake. But 3E basically went all-in on caster supremacy. Whoever designed that game knew and wanted LFQW to happen. Either that or they were a profoundly incompetent designer... but we know it Jonathan Tweet, and he isn't, so he wanted LFQW.

4E it was absolutely fine, there was genuine party, but is a fundamentally different system, mechanically, to all other editions.

5E should, if they'd have sense, as part of the "apology edition" thing, have reverted to 2E-like magical items. But it did not. So we're as likely to see a headband granting 19 INT as we are gloves granting 19 STR or whatever, and that means the magic items that were specialized in supporting martials are gone.