Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="thecasualoblivion" data-source="post: 6965571" data-attributes="member: 59096">I mostly posted this as an update to my threads on playing in Curse of Strahd, which a number of people here found interesting. It does bear saying that I have a lot less to say about things this time around, on account of my negative reaction to DMing 5E.My negative reaction has come somewhat as a surprise to me. I got through an entire campaign as a player in more or less good spirits and wanted to come back for the next campaign. It wasn't until after a few months of running Storm King's Thunder, and we've been having better sessions honestly than my Curse of Strahd group did, that things really started bothering me to the point where I'm about to walk away. A bit of hard feelings yest, though not specifically about Essentials. I was in the crowd who initially embraced Essentials as an addition to 4E, though I later soured after it became clear that it was the new way going forward and that the old 4E design was more or less being abandoned. I haven't given WotC a cent since they announced 5E, I do all my current gaming using other people's books.It was never something that bothered me in earlier editions, except maybe the 3E skill system, and it was something the stuck out as a sore spot from the first moment I started playing 5E at the table. My reaction to it during my first session shortly after the 5E launch was the primary reason I didn't come back for a second. Years of 2E, 3E, and 4E never caused that sort of reaction in me, and I've played 2E since 5E's release and I didn't have that reaction there. It looks similar to earlier editions, but it plays different. There is a lot of that I find in 5E.The issues there are motivation and workload. Motivation comes down to that beyond 5E being popular and familiar with prospective players, there isn't much I really like in the system. I don't particularly like any of the classes, I hate how the core mechanic works, I find 5E's flavor to be too vanilla, I'm not a fan of 3E-style multiclassing, I'm thoroughly unimpressed with bounded accuracy, and while combat faster than 3E or 4E might have been nice, 5E went way too far in the wrong direction. 5E doesn't really offer me anything but the name when considering building a homebrew D&D that will take a bit of effort. I honestly much prefer AD&Ds core combat engine, and to tack on a non-combat system from somewhere or just free-form everything like we did back in the 90s.Or I could just disregard the skill system almost entirely like I did running 2E and as I mostly did running 3E. It's not really a selling point for 5E.None of that really adds the agency I'm craving back into the game.</blockquote>

Verification