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

[AnotherGuy]

Is the problem really the magic?

...(snip)...

But I wonder if a few magic changes would improve the feel.

Improve the feel might be subjective - it is more what you want at the table and the DMG certainly includes magic as one of those things that can change the feel of a campaign i.e. low magic campaigns.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

Improve the feel might be subjective - it is more what you want at the table and the DMG certainly includes magic as one of those things that can change the feel of a campaign i.e. low magic campaigns.

If people want more use of skills and supply management in survival and adventuring contexts, would some changes to or elimination of some spells help?

This would be vis a vis the other possibility that skill use for survival is bad in and of itself.

 

[Gammadoodler]

First, mold earth and move earth do different things. But I really don't understand what you're getting at. I've dug a lot of holes in my time and how easy it is to dig varies wildly. From "easier with a shovel but could do it by hand" to "a jackhammer would be nice". Mold earth, being a cantrip can handle the former loose dirt, move earth would be required for the latter because it's mostly dry clay.

Not sure what you're trying to solve here - defining a spell as what someone could do with a shovel doesn't tell you anything about how much you could do with a shovel. Kind of like the old "How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood." But it also doesn't end there, how much equipment would need detail and how much detail is enough?

I'd say any equipment that gets listed in the rulebook should in some way interact with those rules.

Otherwise it's useless bric-a-brac, it takes up space for no purpose.

It is an unnecessary encumbrance within the rulebook.

 

[Cadence]

If people want more use of skills and supply management in survival and adventuring contexts, would some changes to or elimination of some spells help?

A5E (level-up) nerfed some of them iirc.

 

[Composer99]

How so? The characters are in theory inhabitants of a world as real to them as ours is to us, right?

No, because RPG characters, the world they live in, and their activities are, quite literally, figments of our imagination. They're not real at all. We have no obligation to spend time thinking about "what is real" to figments of our imagination or even "what is important" to them! On the other hand, we can do so if we value doing so.

I want to hammer home this idea of value. An RPG tailored to satisfy your preferences ought to value the same gameplay you do, more or less. Well and good! An RPG tailored to satisfy the various player constituencies of 5e ought to value the gameplay they value, more or less. Also well and good! What is mystifying is that you can't seem to get past conflating "gameplay you value" and "what is objectively correct design for RPGs writ large" or "what RPG gameplay, writ large, ought to look like".

What I am getting at is that what makes high-fidelity, high-resolution, highly-granular gameplay as regards in-fiction logistics so appealing to you is that it matches what you, personally, value - which is great! - but also that there is no "objective" or "universal" basis to assert that all RPGs must include that kind of gameplay: including it does not make an RPG better and excluding it does not make an RPG worse - it only makes it a better or worse fit with the kind of gameplay you value.

With all due respect to your late wife (condolences, by the way), gardening is a hobby with many different moving parts and I'd be willing to bet big money there were aspects of gardening she really liked doing and other aspects she did only because she had to. I say this on the basis of having known other gardeners (my mother among them, long ago) for whom this was invariably true: some parts of gardening were fun, other parts a chore, and the sum total was an enjoyable hobby.

By the same token I quite enjoy DMing; but there's certain aspects of prep and-or follow-up that I neither like nor enjoy doing, and that I do only because I have to in order to facilitate the fun bits. Adventure writing is one such thing: yes I enjoy coming up with the ideas and basics for an adventure but getting it all down on paper (be it real or virtual) in a readable edited form complete with maps etc. is for the most part a long and bloody tedious chore; a chore I do because the payoff is that I then get to run said adventure.

For adventures that aren't my own, the chore part is (if necessary) converting them from another edition and (always) chopping out all the backstory and replacing it to fit into whatever else is going on in the campaign and-or setting.

Same here.

Some parts - and not the same parts for everyone - of playing D&D are or can be a chore. Other parts - again not the same for everyone - can be great fun. One example in our crew is treasury tracking and division. Some players see this as a chore and don't want to do it (and in rare cases in the past might not have been trusted to do it!), meanwhile I'm fine with doing it and thus end up as treasurer in almost any game I'm ever in. Mapping is another one: as player I see it as a chore (I do enough mapping as a DM, thanks!) but there's always another player who enjoys it, and so it gets done.

As long as the "fun" outweighs the "chore" to the point that the end result is enjoyable overall, all is good.

Thanks for your condolences; with all sincerity, they are much appreciated. (The same is on offer for your mom if she has also passed.)

As your own example of model train building and my example of abandoned painting of Blood Bowl minis shows, to my mind an enjoyable end result is not enough to sustain a person's interest in a hobby - somewhere along the line, the process itself also has to be enjoyable, or, at the very least, enjoyable enough. I am sure it is correct to say there are aspects of the process of gardening my late wife did not enjoy, but she must have enjoyed the process enough to persist with gardening as a hobby - otherwise, she would have abandoned it, just as you abandoned model trains and I abandoned miniatures painting.

The distinct thing about RPGs is that they have a whole lot more flexibility when it comes to gameplay process and when it comes to what we bother including in the explicitly-declared fiction: if we want to play a game of grand heroic adventure, we can downplay or exclude gameplay processes that force us to consider logistical questions within the fiction, and if we want to play a game of grim and gritty survival, we can include and "foreground" such gameplay processes. We can, in a very real fashion, get the most enjoyment out of the hobby for the least amount of chore.

I think at this point I have said my piece on this topic.

 

[Oofta]

I'd say any equipment that gets listed in the rulebook should in some way interact with those rules.

Otherwise it's useless bric-a-brac, it takes up space for no purpose.

It is an unnecessary encumbrance within the rulebook.

The assumption of the game is that other than magic or exceptions for simplification the world works just like ours. They don't need to explain how a blanket keeps you warm or how a flint and steel works. We may not know exact details, but we know how such things work in reality. We can't know how spells work in reality because they don't exist. Shovels, tents, pots, flutes, drums are all their real world counterparts.

What rules would you need for (random item) "soap"? We know what soap is. There's no reason to have more than a sentence or two for mundane items, the game can't include every possible use and implementation. I wouldn't want it to because then my PC couldn't use soap to create a wet and slippery surface or write something on a window that can easily be removed or added to a soup to make the soup terrible tasting or some other wacky idea I could come up with that makes sense in the moment.

 

[Retros_x]

So what do the characters in your game do with the gold etc. they accrue while adventuring?

sorry for the late answer. They buy stuff. Early game basic items, resources, inns etc. Mid game downtime expenses like buying magic items, training, research etc. Late game kinda depends on the campaign, they are half gods at this point, and half gods usually dont care about money. I had one campaign where the players bought castles and built expansions, mercenaries etc.

I never felt a big economic imbalance because neither me nor my players treat it as an economy, similar how you don't think about economic logic and balance in most video games, if they are not some sort of simulation strategy.

 

[Cadence]

The assumption of the game is that other than magic or exceptions for simplification the world works just like ours. They don't need to explain how a blanket keeps you warm or how a flint and steel works. We may not know exact details, but we know how such things work in reality. We can't know how spells work in reality because they don't exist. Shovels, tents, pots, flutes, drums are all their real world counterparts.

What rules would you need for (random item) "soap"? We know what soap is. There's no reason to have more than a sentence or two for mundane items, the game can't include every possible use and implementation. I wouldn't want it to because then my PC couldn't use soap to create a wet and slippery surface or write something on a window that can easily be removed or added to a soup to make the soup terrible tasting or some other wacky idea I could come up with that makes sense in the moment.

I would point out that, based on some other threads, this is apparently not the default for all groups. (I mean it is my default...)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

We may not know exact details, but we know how such things work in reality.

What you're still not taking seriously is that a lot of people kind of don't. Including a significant fraction of DMs.

I don't know if you're from a more rural or citified background, but I'm from a citified one, but had a wealthy enough upbringing to get a lot of outdoors experience, and interested enough in the middle ages and renaissance to know a lot of the details of how things worked. But my long experience playing with players and DMs also from a citified background is that a lot of them genuinely don't have the level of functional knowledge that you're assuming.

I guess you had a ton of this knowledge, because you out-of-hand dismissed the value of Aurora's for example (which even for me was educational), but that doesn't mean that's the norm, and I think there's a genuine point to be made about either having detailed or very abstract equipment lists as workable, but ones that are kind of in a wibbly-wobbly in-between aren't worth much.

Re: soap, sure we can all come up with examples of stuff that needs less explanation than other things, but most survival, including tents? That could do with a bit more - at the very least an illustration if no description. I think you'd be genuinely shocked by some of the discussion I've had with players over the years about equipment items and what they actually were - not a single one of them was the player acting in bad faith - they just had, to my mind, somewhat wacky ideas about a thing, but based on the limited information they had, those ideas were not dismissed until we discussed it.

(As an aside, I should point out I absolutely love equipment. I'm one of the two people in my main group who actually wants to play Torchbearer, for example. But a number of RPGs have equipment lists that are pretty worthless, for the most part, and current 5E is absolutely one of them. I rather hope 2024 does better.)

 

[Gammadoodler]

I dearly wish it did do that.

I'd be fine with that too if either...

1. The mechanical benefits of camp equipment were better defined and less subject to variable DM adjudication

Or..

2. The benefits of spellcasting, generally, were less explicitly defined and more subject to variable DM adjudication.

But in the current situation, defining the spells in this way would just add more nonsense to the game.