Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
At this point your claims just seem punative.
D&D 5E What are the "True Issues" with 5e?
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Vaalingrade
Legend
Long Dark even handily recreates certain D&D games where the game gets upset at you for going certain places and just spawns a cloud of unstoppable wolves to kill you.
Vaalingrade
Legend
Survival Horror as a genre is so far from Survival that you could not see one from the other with the James Webb telescope.The video game industry would like a word about the sales potential of survival horror games. Resident Evil 4 sold more than 12.3 million copies. Even if they only made $1 from each (hint: they made way more than that), then that title alone is in excess of $10 million. Now add in all the other survival horror games and see what that looks like.
Top Survival Horror Games by sales and revenue on Steam as of 2025 – Steam Marketing Tool
Best 6,070 Survival Horror games on Steam starting from $410 million in net revenue by reviews number, reviews score, price. Average, median and total revenues of all gamesgames-stats.com
And that's just Steam.
It makes no sense for them to artificially limit their appeal so that a minority of people would be happier.
Composer99
Hero
This comes across as willfully obtuse; D&D 5e might be the introduction to tabletop roleplaying games for the majority of today's 5e players, but I guarantee that they have been "exposed" to plenty of other forms of gaming, whether board games, card games, or video games. Remember, hobby TTRPGs - even D&D! - are a small slice of the game market pie.
What is more, I guarantee the majority of today's 5e players have also been "exposed" to a wide variety of fantastic fiction, whether the most popular stuff (superhero comics and films, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones) to well-known genre fiction (Discworld, Harry Dresden) to older or relatively niche stuff (Michael Moorcock's fiction for instance).
And I guarantee that the vast majority of those stories are about heroic adventure (albeit possibly "heroic" in the classical Greek sense) and don't centre themselves around logistics; they instead treat such things as "set dressing" or as an occasional plot-driving occasion (for instance, the plight of the dwarves and Bilbo as they traverse Mirkwood in The Hobbit). I also guarantee that was just about as true in the 1970s and 1980s as it was today. In how many Conan stories, I wonder, are Conan's heroic deeds and adventures (albeit possibly "heroic" in the classical Greek sense) the focus of the story, and in how many stories is the story focus instead "Conan carefully plans out his rations and equipment outlay for his upcoming expedition or risks starvation"? I can't say 100% for sure, but suffice to say I thiiiiink I have a pretty good idea!
Little wonder, then, if today's 5e players have sensibilities about what heroic fantasy gameplay ought to look like that don't tend to include "did I remember to tell the DM I brought a crowbar?" as a meaningful part of gameplay.
Finally, given the tenor of your post, I would be remiss if I did not plainly and publicly state that a game being popular does not make it bad (even if, in all fairness, it does not make it good).
So, the below is somewhat of an exaggeration for comic effect, but... not much.Chess would be genuinely better for many players if their pawns could all move like queens so those players could focus instead on winning strategies without having to worry about the limitations of their pawns; but they can't, and thus have to put up with the challenges of pawns being limited to what pawns can do.
Needless to say, I disagree on both counts.
Odd though it may seem, I agree with all of that except the bolded.
What's being wilfully ignored, however, is that without in-game logistics none of these things can happen!
It's the same as hitting the road and focusing only on the interesting questions such as "which route do I take to get to town" or "where am I going on my road trip" while actively ignoring the boring-but-essential logistical question of whether the car has any gas in it.
It might not be an interesting question but it's sometimes an essential one. See gas-in-car, just above.
I'll agree that tracking encumbrance is - ahem - cumbersome as it stands. The problem is that there really isn't anything else that's both simpler and equally (or more) realistic; and I don't like trading away realism for simplicity. I think the game long since did enough of that.
That last bit alone makes challenge far more than "minimally" good for play, as boring play very quickly leads to no play and part of the point of an RPG is (usually) to have people continue playing it.
Sometimes you just gotta take the bad with the good in order to get to a desirable end result. A hockey player, for example, might love playing hockey and yet detest having to tape his sticks or sharpen his skates before the game; but he's still gotta do those things.
That said, I really do think there's an encumbrance/carrying system out there (as yet uninvented) that is both simpler in practice yet realistic in fiction.
You come across as conflating your own personal preferences for RPG play with "objective standards" for play. That is not merely a matter of disagreement or agreement. It's simply incorrect, period.
Bad Analogies
Since you bring up a poor chess analogy in an attempt to lampoon my position, let's start there:
There is no "genuinely better" or worse set of chess piece properties and legal moves: the "best" set of chess piece properties and legal moves is the set that people who want to play chess want to use - and right now, people who want to play chess want to play with pawns as pawns, rather than as queens.
Likewise, to the best of my knowledge, the two largest D&D player bases want to either play a casual "kick in the door, kill stuff, get their loot, rinse repeat" game of heroic adventure, or play a player-character-decisions-driven-game heroic adventure (whether those decisions are narrative or mechanical - or both - in their basis) while having enough D&D-isms to "feel like D&D". At the same time, because of its market position, rich history, and reputation as a "big tent" game that ostensibly facilitates other styles of gameplay, there are also a non-trivial number of players who want to play D&D in a different way - but who still want to play D&D. Therefore, the "best" version of D&D is the version that best satisfies the gamut of preferences of people who actually want to play D&D while minimising rules confusion or conflict when different sets of preferences don't coincide. That does mean, of course, that the "best" version of D&D probably won't "perfectly" satisfy the gameplay preferences of any of its player groups, but on the upside it does meant that it can support a broad player base (as indeed it does).
Likewise, the "best" version of Apocalypse World is the version that best satisfies the preferences of people who want to play Apocalypse World. I am quite confident that AW has probably done a good job on that score since its second edition, to the best of my knowledge, is far closer to what one would normally expect from an "edition" as the term is traditionally used in publishing than as the term has been used in the D&D-sphere. On the one hand, AW has the advantage over D&D of being more narrowly-focused, meaning it can more "perfectly" line up with its players' preferences. On the other hand, that does restrict the potential maximum size of its player base. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.)
Your post wraps up with another poor analogy about hockey. Guess what? The D&D equivalent to a hockey player sharpening their skates and tying their laces so that they can play hockey is a D&D player remembering to bring their character sheet or the DM remembering to bring their notes for tonight's game. That is, you are trying to draw a parallel between "things that are a prerequisite to physically playing the game of hockey" and "something that you decide is worthwhile explicitly making part of the "foreground" in-game fiction as part of D&D gameplay". That is a false parallel on its face.
In-Game Logistics
I had planned to go on at length about what are or aren't important goings-on in the in-game fiction of a D&D game, but have since decided to just get to the point:
You insisting that "in-game logistics" are functionally or figuratively equivalent to real world logistics is factually wrong. Period. So is your seeming insistence that players must be obliged to attend to them on the basis of nothing more than your personal sensibilities.
It is factually the case that logistics gameplay is only important in a game to the extent that players value it. This means that players who don't value logistics will eschew games that intentionally include or focus on it, and players who do value it will eschew games that exclude it - or that players will play games that tickle their fancy one way or the other as it changes.
The kicker for D&D is that it happens to be in a situation where it is trying to appeal to multiple player constituencies who have diverging attitudes towards logistics gameplay. Assuming the game wants to make a good faith effort to make good on that appeal, it's faced with trying to make it so that these constituencies can all play D&D. I am sure it could do a better job on this score by cutting out the half-baked logistics gameplay rules it does have and putting together a robust-but-optional set of such rules for them as want it.
Hobby versus Chore
Another bottom line here is that there is a difference between a hobby and a chore.
I can, for instance, find a sense of accomplishment when I finish a load of dishes or when I catch up on laundry. But I do not, and will never, do dishes or laundry for fun. I do not draw enjoyment from the act of doing dishes or laundry: I do them because I must, and if I could get a robot to do them, I would leap at the opportunity.
By contrast, my late wife enjoyed gardening as a hobby. Gardening is not a game, so I wouldn't go so far as to say that she found it fun, but she definitely enjoyed the act of gardening in and of itself as well as the results of her gardening work. For my part, I do not enjoy gardening as a hobby. To me, it is a chore. Because it is not obligatory the way dishes and laundry are, I do not voluntarily garden. I do just enough to keep my late wife's favourite plants alive, and no more.
In fact, I am quite certain that, almost by definition, one only engages in an activity in the capacity of "hobby" if one enjoys the undertaking of that activity in and of itself. Feelings of post-facto accomplishment by themselves are clearly inadequate to keep people in a hobby, or I daresay far more people would be quilting than actually are - or, for that matter, my old Blood Bowl miniatures would all be painted! - the activity itself must be enjoyable to the person undertaking it more often than it isn't.
D&D and other tabletop roleplaying games are defined as "hobby games". So yes, it's fair to say that they aren't meant to elicit quite the same affective/emotional response as games such as Unstable Unicorns, Doom, or Charades are. But at the same time, they are games, and they are hobbies, meaning they ought to be enjoyable while you are playing them.
What you come across as asserting is that playing D&D ought to be a chore for players who aren't you, that its rules ought to force such players to engage in gameplay they don't value and don't enjoy in order to "earn" some sort of sense of "accomplishment". Well, that's simply wrong. Instead, players should be able to engage in the gameplay they enjoy according to their own lights - players who find logistical gameplay rewarding should be able to indulge in it, and players who don't shouldn't be made to endure it. If D&D is in the awkward position of having to please player constituencies with very different views on logistical gameplay, that is on D&D, but I do think it's nominally possible and I hope WotC can continue to do a better job threading that particular needle as the years go by.
All that said, I hope that's not your position and that I'm misunderstanding. But I fear I'm not.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
No financial sense, certainly. I remain unconvinced that WotC cares about literally anything else.
Vaalingrade
Legend
I'll also point out how even in survival sim games, some of the first things modded are inventory restrictions and the speed of food/water drain.
You'll often see 'Added four new bosses, one of whole removes your skin if you think of him, made all water poison, fall damage breaks your legs, armor breaks twice as fast, one hits kills the player -- adds 64 slots to the inventory.
You'll often see 'Added four new bosses, one of whole removes your skin if you think of him, made all water poison, fall damage breaks your legs, armor breaks twice as fast, one hits kills the player -- adds 64 slots to the inventory.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Given WotC's current design priorities, what makes you think they're going to do a better job of "threading the needle" than the half-arsed job they're doing now?
And when I asked how many 5e gamers have been exposed to other forms of gaming, I meant other styles of TTRPG, not board games, card games or anything else. And I expect by the metric I intended many WotC 5e players have little to no experience with any other RPGs.
RPGs are not stories, and maybe trying them out as the very different experience that they are in more than WotC 5e form would be enlightening.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
Spells need to be fully defined because they are strictly inventions of the game. A two-person tent is something for which we have real world context. Do I really need a more detailed description than “two-person tent”?
overgeeked
Open-World Sandbox
I think having players gain an inspiration for having food, water, ammo, etc be a problem would be good enough. For the player who wants that drama, there you go. For the player who doesn’t, skip it. It’s at best tedious paperwork that doesn’t matter unless your whole game centers around the abstract logistics of D&D. In 5E, it’s literally a waste of time to track.
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