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

[Willie the Duck]

Do you think it's fair to call it knee-jerk?
But I understand how you say you expected something more "thoughtful," that's part of what the surprise was for me in reading the post... That it seems to repeat the common issues that I've seen voiced, rather than.. I don't know, try to come up with something else. But I think what we're reading here is someone who has come to accept that the direction WotC's 5e has taken is no longer for them. But for it to come from such a "storied blog" as you put it, that made its reputation and "fame" on 5e .. that's quite a post.

I don't know if it is knee-jerk specifically. However, you don't make comments like "that it had chosen to fully indulge a decade’s worth of munchkin demands for MOAR POWER!" if you did not start with the premise that it was a baby game for babies and kids these days just want everything spoon fed for them (cue Bloodtide's old schtick) and worked one's way backwards. It might have taken a year of playing with the system to come to the conclusion (admittedly contradicted by his statement "But it was clear from the moment the 5E24 Player’s Handbook dropped...," but it definitely feels more like a visceral old-mantrum based on a sense of not-belonging more than a careful and well-thought-out neutral observation.

To me there is a real struggle with a lot of people in the hobby of having the game look like a certain way and what the positive and negative aspects of it looking that way. And sometimes many people struggle with the aesthetics being pushed away for actual gameplay enforcement.

If the Guard Captain having 18 strength annoys you then that shows that you care more about how the captain looks then how it functions. The 18th strength along with the +2 proficiency bonus is there in order to get the +6 attack. If you reduce the 18 down to 12, you have to either create another three points of bonus that is unexplained or figure out a way to explain three more points of bonus.

D&D has long struggled with the question of how important to make attributes (particularly class-relevant ones). AD&D and WotC editions have all made the disparity between a fighter with a middling and high strength be rather extreme, with the obvious answer to 'how do you play a fighter with a 9-13 strength?' be 'make their strength not be 9-13.' It means that some narrative figures like brave-but-weakling wannabe fighters like Taran from the Chronicles of Prydain or any smarter-than-strong Puss in Boots-types not coded as Thief class simply not work well. 5e doubled down on it by making your non-attribute to-hit number a smaller component of the total, and of course all of WotC made it odd for the guard captain by making them have stats. At some point, I stopped treating attributes as being that meaningful (because their impact means you want all your fighters to have as high a Str as possible, so the answer to who is stronger -- your Boromir or Conan analog -- is which one you've levels to more ASIs, not which one has more of a strength-based narrative theme). For someone else who still wants their numbers and aesthetics to match, maybe the guard captain with an explained-away 3 pt bonus would be the better choice.

Or The Beastmaster Ranger having a spiritual animal because a real animal would die and stripped the class of many of its class features. Thus requiring another class feature to allow the ranger to constantly be able to resurrect the Beast cheaply. Something else they might hate.

This is a problem that existed for the last 25 years or more. Gameplay issues that cannot be fixed by maintaining the exact same tone of the game genre because the genre tone itself does not have a solution for it.

Definitely, and more than 25. Both 3e and AD&D Ranger animal companions were fragile low-hd, low-AC pets you got, were coded as caring about, and couldn't really use very much because they'd die against anything you couldn't easily handle without them. Like many things in past updates, these are things that address stuff people had trouble with in the previous iterations (sometimes for years, as mentioned).

Daggerheart solves the ranger companion problem by having the companion run away when it runs out of hit points. This works because it isn't wedded to certain D&D-isms like death being the main fail state or answering sim questions like 'but what if it can't run away and has to keep fighting?' or the like. It'd be interesting to see what kind of like-minded solutions D&D could implement and achieve buy-in from the base.

I heard a lot of the same complaint with 4e and 5e14. So what is different with 5e24 IYO? Personally, I am not seeing any real difference in play. I let my players chose whichever book they want to use for their characters. It doesn't matter to me as a DM. I don't feel the 24 PCs are more difficult to challenge then 14 PCs (though my experience is obviously limited).
PS - I do want to clarify that we use a modified ruleset in that we have a lot of houserules. However, we apply these equally to both 5e14 and 5e24 characters so I am not sure it makes a difference (thought it may).

Yep. It's pretty common among those who are newer to the hobby, and especially those who are focused on implementation and technique within one system rather than playing a broader swathe of games. They lack the familiarity with the concepts of how different systems work, so changes feel much more consequential then they actually are.
Like, a lot of people seem to view 5e24 as some kind of epochal change; to me, it barely registers as a different ruleset.

It is interesting, particularly with people who are not new gamers and/or you know have indeed played other games (such as myself, I've done this plenty of times and I know how long I've been gaming and how many systems I've played). It would seem that someone coming from RuneQuest or GURPS Fantasy or WFRP likely would not see 5e.14 and 5e.24 as wildly different. Honestly, with the exception of the 'Dragonlance renaissance' shift in playstyle change, no shift between D&Ds seem like wild changes within the universe of TTRPGs as a whole. Yet the pattern persists. I think perhaps it has to do with how much people treat D&D as a statement, as much as a game. Even if we know darn well that differences in DMing style or what you end up doing with your party or whether you roll stats vs. point buy might make a bigger difference, that rule change over there represents ABC and I see D&D as BCD and thus I have really big opinions on it, even if Traveller is off over there doing WXY, etc.

 

[TiQuinn]

For me, it was more the statements of "They're making changes for the game first, and not basing it on the STORY!"

That's been the cri de coeur of frustrated simulationists for decades now.

I read that and thought “Okay, so it’s not the story he had in his head” but it does emulate other kinds of fantasy. Again, what I bristle at is there is a very derogatory undercurrent that puts the kinds of storytelling he wants on a pedestal but belittles storytelling that others want.

I could kinda sorta understand that if this were still 1989 and there wasn’t an OGL, and finding game systems and players that did match the fantasy genre you wanted to play in was much more difficult, but in the year 2025, Keith Amman has choices of games that he can go play. I’ve spent the past year playing Not D&D. There’s no rationale in my mind for why someone needs to tear down a game anymore when there’s not only another game system out there for you, but an online space for you to play that game as well as a community of fans for it.

 

[TwoSix]

It is interesting, particularly with people who are not new gamers and/or you know have indeed played other games (such as myself, I've done this plenty of times and I know how long I've been gaming and how many systems I've played). It would seem that someone coming from RuneQuest or GURPS Fantasy or WFRP likely would not see 5e.14 and 5e.24 as wildly different. Honestly, with the exception of the 'Dragonlance renaissance' shift in playstyle change, no shift between D&Ds seem like wild changes within the universe of TTRPGs as a whole. Yet the pattern persists. I think perhaps it has to do with how much people treat D&D as a statement, as much as a game. Even if we know darn well that differences in DMing style or what you end up doing with your party or whether you roll stats vs. point buy might make a bigger difference, that rule change over there represents ABC and I see D&D as BCD and thus I have really big opinions on it, even if Traveller is off over there doing WXY, etc.

I think it's just the very universal situation that the more you're immersed in a specific topic, the more the small details seem like major consequential events.

Like, I'm pretty familiar with WoW, and it's amazing how you'll see thousands of people howling about how they'll quit the game because one skill of one class gets lowered in damage by 8%. Utterly trivial, and yet they're completely consumed by it.

Seeing individuals magnify the minor changes of 5e24 into major changes just telegraphs to me that the person is highly invested in 5e concepts and its character build metagame.

 

[The Firebird]

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.

I love this, from the article, because it hits on the same pain points I have with the new edition. Especially low level, especially clerics and warlocks.

The result probably is better from a balance perspective. That's what the redesign optimized for--they asked highly engaged players to fill out long surveys and used that as feedback. So they got responses from people who had made dozens of characters and wanted to prioritize their optimization choices.

 

[Parmandur]

I think it's just the very universal situation that the more you're immersed in a specific topic, the more the small details seem like major consequential events.

Like, I'm pretty familiar with WoW, and it's amazing how you'll see thousands of people howling about how they'll quit the game because one skill of one class gets lowered in damage by 8%. Utterly trivial, and yet they're completely consumed by it.

Seeing individuals magnify the minor changes of 5e24 into major changes just telegraphs to me that the person is highly invested in 5e concepts and its character build metagame.

I mean, I can only imagine that the stress of having successfully monetized your hobby can get intense if you are getting a little but burned out or tired of it. I can always walk away and take a break with other interests, but there is a lot of pressure for indie content creators to keep up their production no matter how they might feel.

 

[The Firebird]

I could kinda sorta understand that if this were still 1989 and there wasn’t an OGL, and finding game systems and players that did match the fantasy genre you wanted to play in was much more difficult, but in the year 2025, Keith Amman has choices of games that he can go play. I’ve spent the past year playing Not D&D. There’s no rationale in my mind for why someone needs to tear down a game anymore when there’s not only another game system out there for you, but an online space for you to play that game as well as a community of fans for it.

To be charitable to Keith, he has a successful brand and series of books for 5e14. Moving on isn't just a matter of running a new system--it means finding a new, undoubtedly smaller audience for his work. Or, he could continue working in a system he doesn't care for. I get some disappointment in that case.

 

[TwoSix]

I mean, I can only imagine that the stress of having successfully monetized your hobby can get intense if you are getting a little but burned out or tired of it. I can always walk away and take a break with other interests, but there is a lot of pressure for indie content creators to keep up their production no matter how they might feel.

Absolutely. If it isn't your hobby, it's your job. And I'm going to read your opinions very differently if you're talking about your job versus talking about your hobby.

 

[tetrasodium]

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.

Its usually the case that a single player will find it easier to agree to join a game then maintain an overtuned baseline pc by poisoning the social atmosphere at the table with grumpiness over "unplayable" house rules aimed at raising difficulty as described in post 18 than it is to force their gm to raise pc power when a convincing case needs to be made & negotiated for the gm to grant them hose kinds of post 18 power bumps when the bas line is one where PC's are not tuned to upper super hero Gary Stu/Mary Sue super hero levels before magic items. That is a good and rational nontrivial difficulty because players are not the ones for deciding which house rules their gm will allow in the game they are running. If a player does not like that lack of authority over the GM's chosen house rules the simple solution is to say "sorry, I don't want to play the game you want to run unless you give me $houserule", but doing so opens them to criticism over unreasonable expectations alongside a shrugged "no that's not reasonable have fun with your $day"

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.

There's the exclusionary OneTrueWay 5e has spent far too many years catering to

 

[mamba]

If 5e 2014 was fine, why would WOTC make 5e 2024 exactly like 5e 2014?

if they are exactly alike, there is no new edition…

If 5e 2014 had problems, why didn't the people who were left behind state there solutions?

WotC is not in the business of listening to solutions and then incorporating them into their game. At best they propose something and unless enough people object, they include it - and it’s not like the D&D player base at large agrees on any solution to anything

 

[mamba]

My point is he’s still lashing out. Cries of MOAR POWER as if that’s an argument that everyone will simply nod and agree with just seem childish to me.

I mean, he may be exaggerating, but I do not disagree with

“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!“

you can argue about ‘indulge muchkin demands’, but I definitely see 2024 as leaning into high fantasy over grim and low fantasy. I agree that 2014 was tenuously hanging onto that to begin with, but 2024 certainly did not improve things in that regard