D&D General Design issues with 5e

[Horwath]

M

More like the hybrid classes in PF1. Ex. Brawler class- Fighter and Monk, Hunter class- Druid and Ranger.

why complicate it?
give more feat slots, turn all those features into feats. with some level as other feat pre requirements.

 

[Zardnaar]

Strong Combat buffs last for 1 minute, so that should be target duration of most fights, so you feel rushed to finish it before your spells wear off.

Well if you know what to do it takes around 2-3 rounds.

If you dont know what youre doing its gonna be even slower. Its the amount of RL time to resolve.

30-45 minute combats aren't to unusual. Hour for high encounters depending on the encounter design.

Keeping track of everything. We have bought spell templates and condition rings.

Feeling a bit more like 3E and 4E.

Hell might go back to 5.0 we'll see.

 

[Horwath]

Well if you know what to do it takes around 2-3 rounds.

If you dont know what youre doing its gonna be even slower. Its the amount of RL time to resolve.

30-45 minute combats aren't to unusual.

vs solo monsters, yes, but those fights are bad design by default.
action economy and debuffs will "stunlock" the solo opponent.

with many opponents you can even stagger their entry into fight by round or two, basically chaining several encounters into one.

 

[Corinnguard]

why complicate it?
give more feat slots, turn all those features into feats. with some level as other feat pre requirements.

Pathfinder 2nd edition took that approach already and made things more complicated IMO.

 

[Horwath]

Pathfinder 2nd edition took that approach already and made things more complicated IMO.

well, there is doing it, and there is overdoing it.

too much classes in PF2, too many feats that are more or less the same but with different class name attached.

 

[Corinnguard]

well, there is doing it, and there is overdoing it.

too much classes in PF2, too many feats that are more or less the same but with different class name attached.

Another Goldilocks issue. How many feats in 5e is just right?

 

[Zardnaar]

well, there is doing it, and there is overdoing it.

too much classes in PF2, too many feats that are more or less the same but with different class name attached.

We looked at PF2. Everyone was positive.

Who's gonna run it? Everyone was negative. Even tbe player who owned it.

We didnt play.

 

[tetrasodium]

The 5e skill system is too awful on too many levels. Dms best friend combined with bonus types was objectively better than "oh I help" in every way unless you assume that the skill system's entire role in play is to support some kind of free form roleplay where it has have no role whatsoever. That kind of assumption is absurd in ways that should never have been placed at the apex of primary design goals for the skill system.

Beyond that the choose your overly combined starting skills and they auto scale cradle to grave under the guise of simplification or whatever compared to class/cross class skills with ranks assigned level by level ultimately just puts more pressure to cookie cutter select the single most optimal combo or else. Gone are the days where a PC might have a couple ranks in a few oddball skills for prereqs to something or flavor because the player thought some basic competency would be useful to that PC, now any skill check of weight is just an echoing chorus of "oh I'm proficient too ill help/can I try" rather than "I think I could use [totally different skill] to help Bob do that by using it to do [specific thing]. Even the adnd2e Oriental adventures (?) proficiency based skill system recognized the need for a more granular level by level set of skill choices than 5e.

Switching from reasonably distinct fort reflex and will saves to six needlessly indistinct and overly split saves watered down by a poorly implemented version of bounded accuracy is another sin that's come up a few times already

I'm sick and freaking tired of being told to use waves of go bloated monsters to avoid players stun locking solo monster types because the level appropriate ogre troll lich dragon or whatever is itself reduced to a bag of hp and 5e removed the tactical grid combat elements that allowed a handful of mooks to present a meaningful hurdle between PCs/the solo

 

[Horwath]

Another Goldilocks issue. How many feats in 5e is just right?

take every class feature from all classes in PHB, turn them into half-feats or full feats.
add rest of the feats.
maybe cut some of them as there will be some overlap.

 

[Sulicius]

5.5 fights take longer.

CR 3s with 81 hp vs 45 etc.

Indirectly nerfed damage spells. They were already on life support in 5.0.

With 5E weak saves control is meta atm imho.

5.5 also tweaked encounter design. RAW you'll end up with buckets of hp to chew through.

81 hp instead of 45 is one monster. Stop exagerrating. The average is still about 60. And we all agreed with the old encounter design things were too easy. I don't blame HP. They mostly just moved monsters to the average.

Below I made a table of all CR3 monsters in both 5e MM and 5.5e MM. For most the HP stayed the same. For a couple it changed, often when they have very few, but not always. I put the difference in brackets.

Monster	HP
Ankylosaurus	68
Basilisk	52
Bearded Devil	52 --> 58 (+6)
Blue Dragon Wyrmling	52 --> 65 (+13)
Bugbear Chief/Bugbear Stalker	65
Displacer Beast	85 --> 76 (-9)
Doppelganger	52
Giant Scorpion	52
Githyanki Warrior	49
Gold Dragon Wyrmling	60
Green Hag	82
Grell	55
Hell Hound	45 --> 58 (+13)
Hobgoblin Captain	39 --> 58 (+19)
Hook Horror	75
Killer Whale	90
Knight	52
Kuo-toa Monitor	65
Manticore	68
Minotaur (of Baphomet)	76 --> 85 (+9)
Mummy	58
Nightmare	68
Owlbear	59
Phase Spider	32 --> 45 (+13)
Quaggoth Thonot	45 --> 67 (+14)
Spectator	39 --> 45 (+6)
(Warrior) Veteran	58 --> 65 (+7)
Water Weird	58 --> 65 (+7) Lost resistance to nonmagic b/p/s
Werewolf	58 --> 71 (+13) Lost immunity to nonsilver b/p/s
Wight	45 --> 85 (+40) Lost resistance to nonsilver b/p/s
Winter Wolf	75
Yeti	51
Yuan-ti Malison	66

In total, these are 33 monsters, with an average of 59 HP in 5e, and an average of 63 in 5.5e.