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

[Micah Sweet]

Why would they? They're a huge commercial games publisher!

Well, they do make a creative product. Perhaps they should care about that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Heh. It’s funny. People freaked out because 4e didn’t specifically tell you that fire could light things on fire.

But the same people have no problem with the game being completely silent about the details of mundane equipment.

I don't know who those people are, but they're not me.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Pathfinder is on its 2nd edition and Call of Crhulhu is on its 7th. Savage worlds is 2 or 3, and Fate is at least 2. That’s just off the top of my head.

And you can basically play Call of Cthulhu 1e using 7e rules and vise-versa. Few games change as much as D&D from edition to edition.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Another, more serious, though about this.

Over the past 18 months or so I've GMed around a dozen sessions of Torchbearer. This game has a strong survival element - the PC equipment lists include food, and cloaks, and woollen sweaters, and shoes - except 3 of the 4 PCs in the game don't have shoes, because they wore them out trudging through the wilds and haven't been able to afford to replace them.

Part of how the game works is that it uses slots for inventory (head, neck, 3 torso slots, hands, feet, 3 belt slots, 2 carried slots), and has simple but effective mechanics for overloading (the Labourer skill).

It also has a uniform resolution system, and it's easy for gear to factor into that (having appropriate gear adds +1D to your pool).

Its weather rules take up half-a-dozen or so pages: you roll on a season-appropriate chart, and then look up the effects of the result. In our last session there was rain, and as per the rules for rain I required the players to roll Health checks for their PCs. One got +1D because his PC was wearing his sweater (1 torso slot).

Journey generate easily-calculated "toll", which has to be bought off (a little like 4e D&D Dark Sun's "survival days") - that's why three PCs have no shoes, because they sacrificed their shoes to buy off toll last time they went hiking, rather than take debilitating conditions instead. And they have not been able to replace them since (there is no cobbler in the village about the Wizard's Tower to sell them shoes, and they haven't tried to buy any direct from a peasant or villager).

Another thing that happened in our last session was that the sweater-wearing PC preserved 5 portions of fresh rations (mechanically, the player succeeded on a fairly challenging Cook test). This reduces the number of inventory slots they take up, and means they do not spoil and require discarding when the PCs return to town.

The Cook PC is also the toughest fighter in the group (a Dwarven Outcast, for anyone who knows the system). Generally fighting is more exciting than cooking, but the system doesn't make the latter inherently less interesting or mechanically weightier than the former. They both sit within a consistent, more-or-less uniform system of PC build and action resolution.

I've set all this out in a bit of detail to make the point that it is perfectly possible to have a wonderful RPG that makes exploration, inventory, trekking, and the like key to play (though Torchbearer doesn't track ammunition - the quiver is just another piece of gear that takes up a belt or torso slot, and running out of arrows/bolts/stones is something the GM would narrate as an equipment-related complication, like having your tinderbox spill out of your satchel and fall through an upper-storey window during a struggle, which is also a thing that happened in our last session). And I do think Torchbearer is a wonderful, brilliant RPG.

But it's not the only one. I love Agon 2nd ed too, and Agon is at absolutely the other end of the spectrum. PCs have a "look", but no equipment list.

And there are great systems that use gear, but not equipment lists - eg Marvel Heroic RP. And systems that have equipment lists but don't really care about personal logistics at all, like Prince Valiant.

The issue for WotC, with 5e and its revision, is not a shortage of possible approaches to RPG design in this space. I agree with @Composer99 that the problems for WotC are reconciling D&D tradition (which has used weight rather than "slots" to handle inventory) with the fact that most people don't want logistics to matter, but do want magical equipment to matter, while there are a small handful who want something more low-level-Gygaxian.

It's a customer satisfaction problem rather than a design problem in the abstract sense.

I agree with you. While it's not doing it in a way I prefer, I do appreciate the strong efforts they've gone to, and I'm sure it works quite well for you.

A shame WotC can't bring themselves to throw a bone to the Classic fans with a robust logistics system, even as an optional one. It can be done better than they have.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This is slightly missing the point. Chores are easy and boring. They just take time that feels pointless. This is relevant for 5e in two ways.

• 5e might have fewer mechanics than other D&Ds - but still has multiple rulebooks that fill hundreds of pages and characters are complex. This can feel like a chore.
• Knowing which mundane resources to bring is just a checklist which you continue to develop. It only becomes fun rather than a chore IME when you get to the test-your-luck part and you are improvising because there are problems. The more work you put in to avoiding chaos the less fun it gets.

The thing here is that not all the difficulties are the same. There are types of difficulty that most find a lot more fun than others do. I might find it a challenge to compare two lists of 200 numbers and find the two that are different - but that's not a fun type of difficulty. And it's this sort of difficulty that basic encumbrance and basic kit lists cover.

YMMV and everything comes with a cost. Every time you need to focus on the mechanics or mark your character sheet the more it pulls you out of the gameworld and into the game mechanics. Every time you tick off an arrow from your equipment list it forces you to acknowledge that you are a person sitting at a table holding a pencil or a tablet and playing a game, breaking immersion and making the game world a little bit less real.

The question is whether the cost is worth the benefit. In the case of tracking arrows I (and others) think the answer is "under very rare circumstances". I (and others) think that the cost to immersion thanks to a gratuitous character sheet interaction is higher than the benefit here. Especially when arrows are reusable.

Which is an entirely different issue to tracking the number of arrows you have - and other than people walking off with ludicrous amounts of loot to sell I've not seen this. The way to avoid the golf bag of weapons is stop making it beneficial to carry so many.

And if you make the players focus on the character sheets it becomes harder to immerse the players into the game world. Everything is a balance.

Tell me: aren't you a 4e fan? How can you condemn tracking mundane equipment as interacting with the character sheet too much when you enjoy 4e, a game with a quite lengthy and complex character sheet full of buttons to push? No offense to 4e, but I see your position here are hypocritical.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Last time I checked these are people who make a living selling a game. Caring about sales is hardly a negative.

Caring  only about sales is a negative,, as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Pathfinder is on its 2nd edition and Call of Crhulhu is on its 7th. Savage worlds is 2 or 3, and Fate is at least 2. That’s just off the top of my head.

Of all of those, only Pathfinder has made big changes to the game with their edition change, and those changes certainly don't lack controversy.

 

[Oofta]

Caring  only about sales is a negative,, as far as I'm concerned.

Companies are sales driven so of course they care. But in order for there to be price gouging and unfair pricing policies the product needs to be a necessary item. TTRPGs are not, by any stretch of the imagination, a necessary item.

They produce product that they think will sell because it is widely popular and something that people either find useful or enjoy. If all they cared about was profit they wouldn't be doing another massive survey before making changes to the current product. The products they produce may not work for you but they do work for millions.

 

[Hussar]

But a tent is real. Tents exist, magic does not. They can't give details on every mundane topic in the book. What's next? Capacity of a cooking pot? Details on how to use a flint and steel in order to start a fire?

They have to make some basic assumptions. Telling people that it's a canvas tent for 2 is enough information, people can look up details if it matters to their campaign. I've never seen anyone get that detailed and I can't imagine why anyone would expect that level of detail for a D&D game, there are a thousand other details to truly simulate a survival situation if you need that kind of information.

Yes but that’s the point. Leomunds Hut could simply create a nine man canvas tent. Poof. Don’t need any other details according to you. Heck does 5e even include the word “canvas” in its tent listing?

Why does the spell take an entire paragraph while the tent is a sentence?

 

[Oofta]

Yes but that’s the point. Leomunds Hut could simply create a nine man canvas tent. Poof. Don’t need any other details according to you. Heck does 5e even include the word “canvas” in its tent listing?

Why does the spell take an entire paragraph while the tent is a sentence?

Because there's no magic in the real world and the spell does a lot more than a tent. Where would this clarification stop? What level of detail would ever be enough?

Why on earth would they need anything more than "A simple and portable canvas shelter, a tent sleeps two." This is a game where every sword that could be used one or two-handed is a longsword, where pretty much everything is simplified for ease of play. This obsession with the description of a tent not being detailed enough is one of the odder side-tracks that I've seen for a while.