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

[mamba]

It's not just the higher Charisma. It's having friends and charm person and Bardic Inspiration (since, y'know, you can inspire yourself), and JOAT if you don't have proficiency for some reason, and enhance ability, and...

yes, that was covered by the ‘nerf casters to the ground outside of combat’ part

I don't necessarily think it needs to completely die out. But I think that what problems you can just wish away with a single spell should be either limited to only really really early level difficulties, or to only a very small subset for each individual caster, so even a full team of 4-6 casters would struggle to achieve that.

works for me, I guess

 

[Warpiglet-7]

i mean, standardising the weights of equipment into something a little more abstract like 'heavy(5 Weight), medium(3 W), light(1 W) and superlight(5 objects=1 W), it's not equipment/weight slots but it would probably be much more easier for people to keep track of than individual pounds and ounces.

if people still want to have expendable resources with that system maybe go with depletion rolls i think they're called? a quiver of arrows starts with a d12 depletion dice, after each time you use your arrows roll the depletion die, if it's a 1, reduce the size of the die by one, when you roll a 1 on a d4 depletion die the quiver is empty.

I have seen a lot said about tracking ammunition.

We just say 50% recovered. Was that combat 4 rounds? Ok. I mark off half of the arrows I shot.

If I miscount rounds of fire (shrug) close enough. The missing one subtraction is just random error.

I am not saying people should not have other means to track this but will never understand how keeping a rough count is hard to do. Especially when folks saying it is are asking for more complicated combat options.

The only explanation I have heard is “it’s not fun” to mark off arrows follow your bliss but please don’t tell me making a hash mark on a sheet is hard work

 

[Gammadoodler]

I have seen a lot said about tracking ammunition.

We just say 50% recovered. Was that combat 4 rounds? Ok. I mark off half of the arrows I shot.

If I miscount rounds of fire (shrug) close enough. The missing one subtraction is just random error.

I am not saying people should not have other means to track this but will never understand how keeping a rough count is hard to do. Especially when folks saying it is are asking for more complicated combat options.

The only explanation I have heard is “it’s not fun” to mark off arrows follow your bliss but please don’t tell me making a hash mark on a sheet is hard work

I don't think the difficulty of it is the problem so much as the pointlessness of doing it. Ammunition in 5e is trivially inexpensive.

The end result of rigorous ammo tracking in 5e is that eventually the ranged PC drops 50gp in a well-stocked town, and throws 1000 arrows in their bag of holding and then they're good for roughly 100 encounters even if they lose every arrow they fire.

At that point, you, as the DM have to decide how closely you plan to monitor ammunition usage for the player over at least 100 encounters. This could represent tracking over months or years of IRL time and at-best only pays off once before the PC drops another 50gp.

It's not difficult. It's just that the payoff is so low, unlikely, and easy to prevent that the effort isn't worth it.

 

[Maxperson]

Nope. This is talking about what the game itself should be designed for. That martial characters should not be allowed to do certain things, because martials doing those things lacks "verisimilitude" (but similarity to what truth, exactly?) or "realism" (but we are talking about chokeslamming dragons, none of this is like reality anyway.) Hence: truthiness.

He literally says...

"I take the opposite tack, and assume that real-world limits exist until and unless the game both tells me they don't and explains why they don't. Put another way, the burden of proof is on the game to explain itself, not on me to explain reality."

At no point in the quote is he saying that they must redesign the game and make it as he views it. Only that he assumes realism unless the game has told him otherwise.

Per Dictionary.com:

"Realism" does, in fact, mean "correspondence to actuality or to ordinary...experience" or depicting things "as they are experienced or might be experienced in everyday life." Every definition listed here except the first points to this idea. I left out the fifth because it's the technical term from philosophy, which goes in a completely unrelated direction (talking about the independent existence of things, separate from observation by individuals.)

That's a cool definition, but it's not how it's used in RPGs. It's 100% impossible to run an RPG true to life. We can't do it. Realism in an RPG is a sliding scale with pure unrealistic chaos at one end and real life at the other extreme. In the middle is the sliding scale of RPG realism.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

I don't think the difficulty of it is the problem so much as the pointlessness of doing it. Ammunition in 5e is trivially inexpensive.

The end result of rigorous ammo tracking in 5e is that eventually the ranged PC drops 50gp in a well-stocked town, and throws 1000 arrows in their bag of holding and then they're good for roughly 100 encounters even if they lose every arrow they fire.

At that point, you, as the DM have to decide how closely you plan to monitor ammunition usage for the player over at least 100 encounters. This could represent tracking over months or years of IRL time and at-best only pays off once before the PC drops another 50gp.

It's not difficult. It's just that the payoff is so low, unlikely, and easy to prevent that the effort isn't worth it.

It is not expensive and we have useless gold.

We track it because if we are on days’ long trips we cannot buy it. It become a decision point or inspires other actions choices.

I don’t think rigorous is really a descriptor I would use for our process.

 

[Vaalingrade]

It is actually not. It creates verisimilitude.

Like I said, a terrible fate indeed.

 

[Gammadoodler]

It is not expensive and we have useless gold.

We track it because if we are on days’ long trips we cannot buy it. It become a decision point or inspires other actions choices.

In my experience..it inspires a decision point once, maybe twice, a campaign. And it is a nothingburger of a decision.

"I stop in a store and buy a bunch of arrows"

I'll grant that it's more than zero.. but time spent tracking it for the 'decision point' is a bit like spending 50 cents in postage to get a 5 cent rebate.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

He literally says...

"I take the opposite tack, and assume that real-world limits exist until and unless the game both tells me they don't and explains why they don't. Put another way, the burden of proof is on the game to explain itself, not on me to explain reality."

At no point in the quote is he saying that they must redesign the game and make it as he views it. Only that he assumes realism unless the game has told him otherwise.

Of course there's no need to redesign the game. He already has a game that does that. This is being given as a reason not to do it--to keep the existing crappy, biased rules and their favoritism of magic-users over non-magic-users.

That's a cool definition, but it's not how it's used in RPGs. It's 100% impossible to run an RPG true to life. We can't do it. Realism in an RPG is a sliding scale with pure unrealistic chaos at one end and real life at the other extreme. In the middle is the sliding scale of RPG realism.

Except that it's exactly how it's used. That's literally what people are doing when they make crappy jokes like "shouting hands back on" and the like, or snide jabs like accusing a game of being "superheroes" etc.

The use is, very clearly, that things which do not conform to Earth-like situations are unacceptable. Unless something is explicitly magic--which almost always means spellcasting. Then it's totally fine, do whatever you want. Because only one side of this is required to conform to something (usually less than) what is possible on IRL Earth.

 

[Maxperson]

Except that it's exactly how it's used. That's literally what people are doing when they make crappy jokes like "shouting hands back on" and the like, or snide jabs like accusing a game of being "superheroes" etc.

The use is, very clearly, that things which do not conform to Earth-like situations are unacceptable. Unless something is explicitly magic--which almost always means spellcasting. Then it's totally fine, do whatever you want. Because only one side of this is required to conform to something (usually less than) what is possible on IRL Earth.

No it's not. What is meant when they say that is that they like more realism than you do, not that they want the game to be real. I'm willing to bet that none or nearly none of those people have their PCs go to the bathroom several times a day and sneeze periodically. None of them have their character pause to catch his breath or stop to rest aside from meal breaks like people do. None of them roleplay stopping briefly to take in a beautiful natural scene. None of them are asking for hit points to go away completely. None of them are asking for an accurate combat model where everything truly is happening simultaneously. None of them are asking for a true to life attack, parry, riposte system. None of them are asking to model becoming weak from blood loss.

None of them are asking for reality to be mirrored 100%. They simply enjoy more realism(though still not mirroring reality) in their game.

 

[Vaalingrade]

It is not expensive and we have useless gold.

We track it because if we are on days’ long trips we cannot buy it. It become a decision point or inspires other actions choices.

I don’t think rigorous is really a descriptor I would use for our process.

Action choices like... not getting to play your character concept because you ran out of stuff, or do a bunch of tedious bean counting.

I'd like to return this choice for literally nothing, please.