D&D General 5.5 and making the game easier for players and harder for DMs

[UngeheuerLich]

Battle maps and grid combat burned me out so badly that I did not run games for years.

If WM adds a ton of tactical mess that slows the game and increases my burden, then that is a no.

As a DM, I already have to know and track a ton of stuff and half the time remind players of their own stuff.

A player is not going to track bleed damage for instance. If WM adds a ton of effects etc, then it can die in a fire. They players will not track their own stuff. It will be on me or 2 rounds later there will be a “oh yeah, this should have happened.”

I do not want to play a tactical grid, minis game.

I don't want that either. I don't know where you got bleed damage from though.

I am not a fan of weapon masteries that constantly push and slow and trip, to be honest. I would have been fine if we got mainly cleave and damage on a miss. And nick. It something that people wanted though. And I accept that. Lets see how disruptive it is first.

Most arguments however boild down to: "martials should not get nice things at will".

 

[tetrasodium]

Battle maps and grid combat burned me out so badly that I did not run games for years.

If WM adds a ton of tactical mess that slows the game and increases my burden, then that is a no.

As a DM, I already have to know and track a ton of stuff and half the time remind players of their own stuff.

A player is not going to track bleed damage for instance. If WM adds a ton of effects etc, then it can die in a fire. They players will not track their own stuff. It will be on me or 2 rounds later there will be a “oh yeah, this should have happened.”

I do not want to play a tactical grid, minis game.

Of course it will increase the burden & be a mess... When even people who like the tactical grid stuff are concerned about the obvious result of trivialized at will trip push slow etc lockdowns it makes that bolded bit look likely. In some ways it looks likely that someone took a look at 3.5 spiked chain tripper builds & decided "wow that looks great!"

 

[Remathilis]

Off the top of my head? In no particular order

• While life is unfair, I see no reason a game should be.
• I don't want a one time roll of the dice to dictate who my character is. I envision who my character is before a single ability score or class is chosen, the rules are there to allow me to play the character I want.
• I don't want either extreme of an overly buff PC that is statistically better at everything.
• I don't want to play the guy who hides in the back because their scores are s**t, even if they live longer because they're hiding in the back.
• I want balance between the starting point for all the characters in the group.
• If my character has poor scores they would have just stayed on the farm.
• I've seen the DM allow a reroll for "poor" scores if they like the player.
• I've just never, and I mean never, going back to 1E days seen the point. We used various methods to ensure we had decent scores back in the day. I started using a variation of point buy system back in 2E based on the rules used for Living City.
• I don't want to.

I second everything on this list with one additional thought. A D&D character is a commitment. What I create, I'm theoretically playing for months if not years. And I don't play in more than one game at a time these days. So I want my time spent playing a character I really want to play. If I'm playing a character I don't enjoy, it's a waste of my time. Which is why I don't like random generation: the more elements you take out of my control, the less likely I am to get the concept I want and thus the less likely I am to enjoy and engage with them.

 

[Belen]

I don't want that either. I don't know where you got bleed damage from though.

I am not a fan of weapon masteries that constantly push and slow and trip, to be honest. I would have been fine if we got mainly cleave and damage on a miss. And nick. It something that people wanted though. And I accept that. Lets see how disruptive it is first.

Most arguments however boild down to: "martials should not get nice things at will".

If it is easy to remember and happens immediately and is easy to adjudicate, then fine.

If every player turn becomes, hit, saving throw, effect, move here, move there, “I am sorry, I need a visual map to understand what is happening with this combat (whine),” sorry, I forgot this effect, and on and on, then that is a hell no.

Let’s not even talk about a playtest that is not a true cross section of the players but mainly run by gamists and influencers who need complexity to sell how to play videos or who thrive on it because they are the one power gamer at the table.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

If it is easy to remember and happens immediately and is easy to adjudicate, then fine.

Yes.

If every player turn becomes, hit, saving throw, effect, move here, move there, “I am sorry, I need a visual map to understand what is happening with this combat (whine),” sorry, I forgot this effect, and on and on, then that is a hell no.

Accepted.

Let’s not even talk about a playtest that is not a true cross section of the players but mainly run by gamists and influencers who need complexity to sell how to play videos or who thrive on it because they are the one power gamer at the table.

Which one do you mean? What has it to do with 2024 D&D?

 

[Belen]

I second everything on this list with one additional thought. A D&D character is a commitment. What I create, I'm theoretically playing for months if not years. And I don't play in more than one game at a time these days. So I want my time spent playing a character I really want to play. If I'm playing a character I don't enjoy, it's a waste of my time. Which is why I don't like random generation: the more elements you take out of my control, the less likely I am to get the concept I want and thus the less likely I am to enjoy and engage with them.

At least you get to play. I have been stuck as GM only since 1995 with the exception of a Vaesen game run by Crothian.

 

[payn]

I think the framing of kill here is incorrect. I am around a lot of new DMs, and their frustration comes from not being able to challenge the PCs without the threat of having a TPK. If framed that way, then these new class powers will indeed frustrate some DMs, even experienced ones.

The old rule of - wait and see - should be our go to here. As we really haven't seen the MM yet. But, for pure speculation's sake, the new class abilities might frustrate DMs.

On a separate, yet similar topic, the new classes definitely seem like they will slow combat a lot.

Since we are on the subject of framing, I am instantly suspicious of "think of the newbs" arguments. Especially, when it comes to old schooler frustrations.

 

[CapnZapp]

Life doesn’t give balanced talents, so D&D having randomized abilities makes sense to me.

That is certainly the original idea.

On the other hand, "because realism" has never been a great argument for anything regarding D&D...

That game indeed works better on average if everybody starts at equal footing, so the only way I would consider random stats is if a) stats doesn't matter as much as in D&D and/or if b) the game features an equalizing mechanism somehow.

Just to take the simplest possible example to show what I mean by b): if every player uses the SAME set of random stats, that'd be something, I guess. (Whether the group rolls 18, 18, 16, 16, 13, 12 or 12, 10, 8, 8, 6, 4 no longer matters as much since every player gets the same array to use for stats placement, and the DM can always make encounters harder or easier to match the party's abilities). Of course, a more involved solution would probably be preferable, but the main reason so few games try such solutions is because it's just not worth the increased complexity. In the end, just sticking with the standard array is much simpler and perfectly adequate. After all, it COULD happen that random rolls resulted in precisely this distribution... I mean, if you only play a single character in a year, why waste that on grossly imbalanced groups?

 

[tetrasodium]

.

The old rule of - wait and see - should be our go to here. As we really haven't seen the MM yet. But, for pure speculation's sake, the new class abilities might frustrate DMs.
.

No we absolutely should not "wait and see", what reason has wotc given GMs to hang that sort of hope on? We have a decade of wotc focusing exclusively on giving more of the candy that 19/20 todd..players voted for and nine of nine UAs with an identical focus on candy. Plus the lead rules designer is spinning up the or machine to excitedly share with us how much gm's are going to hate s subclass with the same grinning excitement displayed whenever talking up weapon masteries. There is absolutely no justification for a "wait and see" approach because these are not problems that can be patched after the fact by mm or dmg and wotc has shown zero interest in loading that hype machine with details and discussions related to anything that was a gm pain point they even recognized

 

[Belen]

No we absolutely should not "wait and see", what reason has wotc given GMs to hang that sort of hope on? We have a decade of wotc focusing exclusively on giving more of the candy that 19/20 todd..players voted for and nine of nine UAs with an identical focus on candy. Plus the lead rules designer is spinning up the or machine to excitedly share with us how much gm's are going to hate s subclass with the same grinning excitement displayed whenever talking up weapon masteries. There is absolutely no justification for a "wait and see" approach because these are not problems that can be patched after the fact by mm or dmg and wotc has shown zero interest in loading that hype machine with details and discussions related to anything that was a gm pain point they even recognized

Unfortunately, nothing will change now. The books are done.