D&D (2024) Command is the Perfect Encapsulation of Everything I Don't Like About 5.5e

[TiQuinn]

No. It was far, far worse, especially once 3.5 and the rise of tactical, grid-based combat.

The amount of time players and DMs spent arguing over the tiny bits of movement, effects, etc was enormous. Combat would take hours!

Rules lawyers were rampant. This continued with Pathfinder and 4e.

It was no where near that bad in 2e or 5e. In a game where rules are king, the players will argue, interpret, and bog down play using rules to “get” the DM.

While I liked 3e for a time, primarily because it provided greater options for players who had been asking for more variety in the game, after a very short while, I saw all the same issues you did. Combat was a grind. Did they incur an AoO or not? Did this stack? HOW much is that bonus? The game started to crawl.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

A poorly organized book, which still has valid information, does not make the game difficult to DM.

I genuinely don't understand how it wouldn't. It's literally both the guide that new DMs would turn to and the reference manual for session to session play. How could a badly-made DMG not make the game difficult to DM?

You keep citing the advice on the internet as though it's uniformly good and easily accessible. Neither of these is true. There's reams of absolute trash DM advice out there, and even more reams of advice that is only good for experienced, well-versed DMs who know how to handle stuff.

And even without all of that? The culture-of-play for 5e for at least the first three or four years after launch was "you're the DM, you figure it out." There was active resistance to giving advice to DMs for a long, long time. It took the community as a whole realizing that telling brand-new, fresh-faced DMs that sort of thing tended to drive newbie DMs away for them to realize "oh, maybe we should be actually providing advice and guidance rather than throwing newbies to the wolves and expecting them to come back with pelts..."

The old hands had nearly everything they could have asked for (except robust novice levels and actual support for survival challenges). They pissed this advantage away by presuming "sink or swim" would produce lots of great swimmers. It didn't, and the hobby as a whole will be paying a price for that for years to come. Rewriting the DMG and addressing the serious problems with 5.0's initial culture-of-play won't be enough. The damage is already done. It's a Red Queen's race, and 5e started off running backwards.

5.0 was written for seasoned poets who just need a jumping off point every now and then. It was then given to middle school children, expecting them to be able to use tools and techniques meant for Wordsworth and Frost and Plath. Now, we've had a decade of middle-schoolers who grew up trying to imitate the masters without having the fundamentals first. That's not something compensated for (let alone overcome) overnight, and it's definitely not something that merely changing your attitude and rewriting the textbook could possibly fix.

 

[Belen]

This was so much not my experience. 3e was a huge breath of fresh air where we could just play without constantly having to have rules discussions. The rules just worked. 4e was perhaps a step too far, fair enough. And, frankly, 5e was a step too far back the other way. Again, IME and all that.

Not mine. I burned out on 3e style games often. The rules were so intense and managing them was awful. Prep time as a DM sucked. In play, it was hours of people forgetting their abilities or bonuses or spending 30 minutes reading a rule or arguing of grid position or tactics.

It was exhausting compared to 2e.

 

[SableWyvern]

Again, you're simply spinning things with longer winded explanations. What do you think "open ended... leaving room for interesting interpretations" means? That's the definition of vague. But, at least we've managed to get over the hurdle of getting you to clearly point at what you see as the problem.

See, to me, it's not the players at all. Not really. If the rules weren't written in vagu... oh, sorry... open ended fashion, then the players wouldn't be constantly testing the boundaries of what the rules allow. IOW, no one ever argues about a fireball or magic missile spell. It does precisely what it says on the tin. No one ever argues about how Produce Flame works. It's clear what it does and how it works.

And it's still an incredibly versatile spell.

Being va... err... open ended does not make a spell more versatile.

OK, I get it. Some people have to deal with players who will argue with everything they can any time they think it will provide them with additional advantage, and it clearly disrupts their games. That, to me, makes it a plyer issue, and I don't know why people are OK in groups like that, but clearly it's a thing some people are willing to endure.

I don't blame the rules, because in my experience I can use those vague, or open-ended rules, or however you want to describe them, and my players don't become disruptive.

You're clearly adamant it is the rules, not the players, and I'm not going to change your mind, so I guess I will leave it at that.

 

[Minigiant]

I agree the DMG needs improvement. A lot of the older DMGs were also poorly organized. Fortunately there are live streams, blogs and podcasts galore to help people out if they need it.

A poorly organized book, which still has valid information, does not make the game difficult to DM.

It does again if the DM don't look online.

Especially since much of the online DM advice for fifth edition came well well after it was published.

The designers have more or less went on an apology tour about "yeah we screwed up the DMG So new DMs were left confused or unsupported". And it will rev back up with the new DMG.

 

[Oofta]

I genuinely don't understand how it wouldn't. It's literally both the guide that new DMs would turn to and the reference manual for session to session play. How could a badly-made DMG not make the game difficult to DM?

You keep citing the advice on the internet as though it's uniformly good and easily accessible. Neither of these is true. There's reams of absolute trash DM advice out there, and even more reams of advice that is only good for experienced, well-versed DMs who know how to handle stuff.

And even without all of that? The culture-of-play for 5e for at least the first three or four years after launch was "you're the DM, you figure it out." There was active resistance to giving advice to DMs for a long, long time. It took the community as a whole realizing that telling brand-new, fresh-faced DMs that sort of thing tended to drive newbie DMs away for them to realize "oh, maybe we should be actually providing advice and guidance rather than throwing newbies to the wolves and expecting them to come back with pelts..."

The old hands had nearly everything they could have asked for (except robust novice levels and actual support for survival challenges). They pissed this advantage away by presuming "sink or swim" would produce lots of great swimmers. It didn't, and the hobby as a whole will be paying a price for that for years to come. Rewriting the DMG and addressing the serious problems with 5.0's initial culture-of-play won't be enough. The damage is already done. It's a Red Queen's race, and 5e started off running backwards.

5.0 was written for seasoned poets who just need a jumping off point every now and then. It was then given to middle school children, expecting them to be able to use tools and techniques meant for Wordsworth and Frost and Plath. Now, we've had a decade of middle-schoolers who grew up trying to imitate the masters without having the fundamentals first. That's not something compensated for (let alone overcome) overnight, and it's definitely not something that merely changing your attitude and rewriting the textbook could possibly fix.

The DMG should be better, it is not useless. There are virtually unlimited resources to learn how to DM a google search away, vastly more than we had growing up. There is no way D&D would have seen the growth it's had if it were that hard to DM.

The DMG will never be the best way to learn how to DM for the majority of players, the only way to really learn how to DM is to do it. Fortunately people have been doing that for half a century now.

 

[Minigiant]

The DMG should be better, it is not useless. There are virtually unlimited resources to learn how to DM a google search away, vastly more than we had growing up. There is no way D&D would have seen the growth it's had if it were that hard to DM.

The DMG will never be the best way to learn how to DM for the majority of players, the only way to really learn how to DM is to do it. Fortunately people have been doing that for half a century now.

Older DMs mostly did it without a large influx of new gamers of different demographics and without social media adjusting how they think about the game.

The internet had a big change on how you DM if you did not play with a consistent group and this is something that most games have not adjusted to unless they started off as an internet RPG game.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This was so much not my experience. 3e was a huge breath of fresh air where we could just play without constantly having to have rules discussions. The rules just worked.

LOL wow.

That is literally the diametrical opposite to my experience of 3.XE, with multiple different DMs. We absolutely constantly had to have rules discussions because of the "a rule for everything" effect, and the fact that many rules piled on top of each other. Stuff that in 2E would have been disposed of as a called shot, so just an attack at -4 would often require multiple rolls, some at penalties, and we constantly had to look up whether a certain attack or whatever had pre-existing rules, and what they were.

Combine that with AoOs, grid-based movement, vastly more complex arrays of situational bonuses and penalties, combined with tons more stacking buffs, and the rules got in the way just insanely more than 2E.

I'd like to say there were fewer ambiguous rules in 3.XE than 2E, but that wasn't true. As a proportion of the total rules, 3.XE had fewer ambiguous rules, but it had so many more rules than 2E that you bumped into ambiguous ones just as often.

We saw combats that'd have been resolved in 15-30 minutes in 2E take 2+ hours in 3.XE, even after playing for years. Especially if anyone wanted to try anything fun or clever.

4E started off better than 3.XE because they ditched "a rule for everything" and went with a much smaller number of more general rules, combined with a lot of exception-based design for class abilities, which meant far, far less checking rules, and far more looking at the character sheet and immediately seeing the info. 4E also largely killed buff-stacking and significantly reduced situation modifiers. But as you went up levels, more and more Reactions, Immediate Actions, and Interrupts got involved in proceedings, combined with increasingly complex abilities/magic items on the PC side, and more complex monsters on the DM side, and it slowed down to not quite 3.XE levels of grind, but significantly slower than was fun (whereas at lower levels it was a lot of fun).

A poorly organized book, which still has valid information, does not make the game difficult to DM.

D&D is inherently more demanding to DM than most RPGs, because it more heavily relies on DM interpretation by design than most RPGs (which has positive and negative effects), and also asks for significantly more prep work, and more adherence to certain concepts than most RPGs (like in encounter-building).

So at a baseline, if we grade RPGs on how hard they are to DM, D&D is already one of the ones which demands making more calls at the table, and doing more work before the table, hence probably one of the "harder" ones.

Add to that that the 5E DMG was both exceptionally poorly organised (even compared to older editions), and very, very lacking on the "Good advice on how to DM", especially for a newer DM, and you're creating a situation where one of the harder to DM RPGs has been made harder still to DM. Plus the DMG was featured a lot of largely irrelevant waffle (admittedly not uncommon in DM books for various games), which I think must have helped confuse people a bit re: what D&D was about.

Does that make the game "difficult to DM"? I don't know, because difficulty is relative. Is any RPG "difficult" to DM? D&D is more demanding than most, that's for sure. But I would say given how many people taught themselves to DM, I don't think D&D was "difficult to DM" in an objective sense, like vertical free-climbing is difficult, say. I do think WotC made it harder than it had to be. The book wasn't just poorly-organised, it was fundamentally lacking as a DMG. It's probably the worst DMG D&D has ever had (4E's being probably the best, interestingly). And it was likely that way because it was rushed out, like all of 5E 2014 was.

Fortunately there are live streams, blogs and podcasts galore to help people out if they need it.

I would say these were a mixed bag, because finding the wrong ones could be very off-putting (in the sense that that level of DMing seemed unachievable) or not actually help at all because they don't really offer relevant, basic advice. Further, a lot of the info was pretty contradictory and often presented in quite prescriptive ways. There was absolutely gold out there, albeit not really much in 2014/2015, but you had to either get lucky, get a good recommendation, or sift through a lot of dross-you-wouldn't-know-was-dross to find it.

I do think that these existed probably significantly lessened the impact of the 5E DMG being terrible though, so overall a positive for sure, but WotC didn't support them in any way, so essentially they got lucky after putting out a pretty rubbish DMG. Certainly just being able to watch D&D being played helps people who have never seen it.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

No. It was far, far worse, especially once 3.5 and the rise of tactical, grid-based combat.

The amount of time players and DMs spent arguing over the tiny bits of movement, effects, etc was enormous. Combat would take hours!

Rules lawyers were rampant. This continued with Pathfinder and 4e.

It was no where near that bad in 2e or 5e. In a game where rules are king, the players will argue, interpret, and bog down play using rules to “get” the DM.

I agree, the obsession 3.5 and Pathfinder had with rules made me outright quit the hobby for years, 5e brought me back.

 

[the Jester]

The Experienced DMs mostly flipped the bird at anything new, stuck to OSR, and refused to teach the new anything but what they like.

So here we are.

Did they, though? This sounds like an anecdote, but if you have evidence to back it up, I'm open to seeing it. As far as my experience goes, every old DM who's running a game is running 5e (except maybe one I know in another town).