D&D General The Monsters Know What They're Doing ... Are Unsure on 5e24

[mamba]

Overall I have to say that his points all hit home for me, and I'm curious what y'all think... and, as per the questions he poses later on in the post, what direction you think he should take?

“One of the things I love—and I speak in the present tense—about 5E14 is, even as it substantially streamlined D&D’s rules and options, it still both maintained the feeling of playing classic D&D and permitted play in a wide range of styles, from gritty, grimy low fantasy to wild high fantasy and everything in between. But it was clear from the moment the 5E24 Player’s Handbook dropped that D&D was going all in on wild high fantasy, to the exclusion of other styles, and also that it had chosen to fully indulge a decade’s worth of munchkin demands for MOAR POWER!“

“But it’s not just the shift in the balance of power between DMs and PCs that bothers me about 5E24. There’s a palpable change in design approach between 5E14 and 5E24. In 5E14, it seems to me, the designers began with a narrative in mind, then thought about how best to implement that narrative mechanically. The sense I get from 5E24, on the other hand, is that the designers began with mechanics they wanted to implement, then came up with narratives to rationalize the mechanics. Which is how you end up with warlocks signing lifetime contracts with supernatural entities whose identities they don’t even learn until they’re level 3, and Beast Master rangers who form bonds with immortal spirits instead of, you know, wild animals”

I fully agree with his take. I bounced off 2024 for this reason. Players are just too OP, there are no hard / permanent choices any more and the result does not feel like a real world but like a power fantasy in Disneyland.

Initially I looked forward to the 2024 revisions, but once released they made me move away from 5e instead…

As to what he should do, still release The Monsters Know 2024 I guess, beyond that, I have no idea

 

[Parmandur]

Do you think it's fair to call it knee-jerk?

Yeah, pretty much.

 

[TiQuinn]

If you’re no longer inspired by the material, by all means, find something else, though I really think it’s in keeping with his curmudgeon attitude to kind of crap on things on his way out the door.

 

[TwoSix]

Sim-oriented guy mad new rules less sim-oriented, news at 11.

 

[tetrasodium]

I think complaining about creature ststblocks with things like an 18 attrib and mundane weapon rather than a 12 & choice between useless weapon or +3 weapon is silly. Attributes in creature statblocks need to serve the mechanical need that creature is designed to fill for the gm rather than the statblock servicing some nebulous bit of fluff for the reader/frustrated novelist imagining a game of d&d.

With that said, a large majority of what remains is very on target. We had a decade of the narrative first crowd of nonplaying traders steering the ship of d&d as a ruleset and at no point could they agree to do anything but shovel more coal into the munchkin turbine boilers with a heaping side dish offered to the consequence free opportunity cost free impossible to fail cozyrpg reader crowd who imagined that the risk and potential for failure would really bubble up to the surface if only someone would up their gm game. With 5.00024 that trend largely continues and I'm just not interested in taking another crack at the sisyphean "we did that feature/subsystem [half-assed & incomplete] so it's easy to homebrew" while the rest of the system is actively designing against actually making any changes to how said feature/subsystem impacts gameplay. The only direction 5e can generally be homebrewed without full heartbreaker level rewrite tends to be "MOAR POWAH!!!111!!" & deeper into overt Gary Stu/Mary Sue author self insert munchkinism but 5.00024 has already gone all in on servicing that style of play & there isn't much need to double down on it when that dial already went past 11 and got torn off so it could look for a higher value

 

[TiQuinn]

It’s funny when people think D&D should be one specific type of fantasy and then start lashing out at the other types of fantasy that it does resemble.

 

[aco175]

I found that some of the monster design was to make monsters last only a few rounds of combat. I noticed this the other day with the scout and soldier both having 3 hit dice and both having multiattack. Their other powers are meh, especially compared to PCs. They are easy to play and run and designed to be killed and move on. Look at the casters with having only a few spells they can cast. It should not represent all their spells, but only the ones that might be needed in combat.

 

[tetrasodium]

It’s funny when people think D&D should be one specific type of fantasy and then start lashing out at the other types of fantasy that it does resemble.

There's a difference. It's trivial to raise PC power by giving higher attributes st chargen higher attributes at various levels (as darksun once did) adding some insulation between being beaten down and death or awarding more powerful permanent/consumable magic items. Going the other way when the system is designed for no cost no risk no magic item super hero ultra high bright fantasy is not so trivial because the mechanical hooks don't exist and there are too many individual areas of the ruleset/PC options to accomplish the goal of turning that dial the other way.

I find it sad when people fail to understand and ignore that in order to throw shade in service of the OneTrueWay of play enshrined by 5e because that only serves to ensure the bar is lifted even higher for how much effort is required for someone who does to try.

 

[TiQuinn]

There's a difference. It's trivial to raise PC power by giving higher attributes st chargen higher attributes at various levels (as darksun once did) adding some insulation between being beaten down and death or awarding more powerful permanent/consumable magic items. Going the other way when the system is designed for no cost no risk no magic item super hero ultra high bright fantasy is not so trivial because the mechanical hooks don't exist and there are too many individual areas of the ruleset/PC options to accomplish the goal of turning that dial the other way.

I find it sad when people fail to understand and ignore that in order to throw shade in service of the OneTrueWay of play enshrined by 5e because that only serves to ensure the bar is lifted even higher for how much effort is required for someone who does to try.

I don’t think it’s trivial at all. One of the major changes of 2024 was to make monsters more powerful because a lot of people were saying they were weren’t providing enough of a challenge for PCs at stated levels. If it’s trivial to up that power, why did we need books like Forge of Foes or Flee, Mortals, or Monster Manual revisions at all? I think power shifts in either direction are a matter of design choices and restrictions that have to be carefully thought out, and that’s why there’s a market for such products. It also requires the DM to curate the content they allow in their game if they want a particular power level. Sometimes, it’s just easier to play a completely different game, which is perfectly fine too. Frankly, I’m exhausted with stances that adamantly say the game cannot evolve unless it supports the play style desired by one group of people, completely ignoring those on the other side who want that type of game.

I think it’s a fallacy to believe D&D can be all fantasy genres for all power levels. Even if it could be, you’d be looking at a series of books well in excess of the three core books we currently have, and hundreds of extra pages of content to cover the myriad options necessary to support that. I don’t have a problem if they attempt that, personally, but then you run into issues where people gripe about a single class or spell from another book being under or overpowered.

Again, I go back to if you’re no longer inspired by the game to create content for it, find a game that you are inspired by, but don’t be one of those sad, grumpy old men who shows their full ass on the way out.

 

[DEFCON 1]

If the dude doesn't want to play 5E24 and wants to remain with 5E14, that's fine. No skin off of anyone else's nose. Same way no one cares if someone wants to keep playing 4E or 3.5 or PF, or switch over to TotV, A5E, Shadowdark, Draw Steel! or the like. Everyone can play what they want.

What the blog post quoted really sounded like to me was another "I've been left behind" woe-is-me post. Which happens a lot every time there is a change in game, edition or even just supplement. And that's more about personal ego than it is anything having to do with the viability of the games themselves. Their preferred game is not the game that most of the "audience" is going to be concerned about, which will limit the eyeballs on their blog (if that sort of thing matters to them.) But it is something every single person has to go through... when the powers-that-be create a new game that they themselves don't like, and thus they have to deal with the blow of no longer being a part of the "in-crowd" for the new game.

But you know... too bad. It has happened before and will happen again. You grow up and accept it.