D&D General Design issues with 5e

[Stormonu]

you don't have to make them give up anything if you can give humans their own bonus thing, and i think the idea that 'humans are quick versatile learners' is pretty established, an extra feat, some extra proficiencies (especially if it could be expanded beyond basic skill proficiencies) and your humans have their own defining perk as good as strong crits or teleportation.

I definately prefer carrot to stick.

In the homebrew I've been working on, I try to make abilities that have tradeoffs where I can. However, in a few places I have put in (race) abilities where you can opt in on a penalty to gain a benefit elsewhere.

For example, rather than force halflings (Hillenfaey) to take a penalty to Strength, I made it an option.

Spoiler

On Dwarves, rather than exclude them from being wizards, I gave them the option that if they don't take a class/ability that grants them spells, they get Magic Resistance.

Spoiler

 

[Tessarael]

If you enforce the "have to have free hand to cast spells", that generally cuts out shield plus shield, short of the character burning a feat to get War Caster. [..]

You are correct, as they cannot sheathe a weapon as a free object interaction to cast the Shield spell as a reaction. But there are very few spells that are limited in this manner by the rules as written (RAW): Absorb Elements, Counterspell, Hellish Rebuke, and Shield.

For other cases, where you just want to cast a spell on your turn:

By the RAW, as sheathing or drawing a weapon is a free objection interaction. So if you are wielding a weapon-and-shield, or two-weapon fighting, you do the following: sheathe weapon, cast spell; then draw the weapon again on your next turn. The disadvantage for the weapon-and-shield user, is that they cannot make an opportunity attack on the turn that they sheathed their weapon to cast a spell; whereas the two-weapon fighter can still do so. And if you're using a two-handed weapon, you can just hold it one-handed temporarily.

Now if you require that free object interaction be used for the somatic component of a spell, then they cannot sheathe/unsheathe on the same turn, and hence War Caster is needed.

 

[Lanefan]

One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is the crappiness of treasure in 5e. Not the magic items I think those are generally fine (as always there are a few eye brow raising ones and some stinkers, but on the whole they are good).

I'm talking raw gold. Everyone jokes in 5e about "useless gold". We got the stronghold rules which were....pretty meh. Finding a way to have that treasure be meaningful in some way would be great to see.

A functional magic item economy and price list would help immensely here. 5e punted on this one.

By 'functional', I mean rooted in the sort of quasi-barter system that would naturally arise when a) adventurers met other adventurers in town and the idea of trading items came up, and b) adventurers (or others) commissioned artificers to make items to order; eventually leading to a comprehensive price list that reflects each item's usefulness, rarity, ease of manufacture, raw material cost, and 'cool factor'. And this cannot be done by a formula.

The 3e and 4e price lists are not the least bit functional because they are done to a hard-coded formula which only looks at rarity and nothing else. This ends up with some fairly useless items being crazy expensive and very useful items being cheap as dirt (the poster children for the latter being Wands of CLW in 3e and Bags of Holding in 4e).

'Cause yeah, 5e treasure is pathetic as written. Every time I look at a 5e adventure or module with thoughts of converting it to run, the first consideration is how I'll have to up the treasure to make it worth the PCs' while to do it.

 

[Stormonu]

If spells had rarity, you might be to factor that into the cost of magic item creation too.

 

[Minigiant]

If spells had rarity, you might be to factor that into the cost of magic item creation too.

5e was too afraid to outright say which effects were supposed to be gated behind a tier. I don't know if this was because they wanted dms to rule this or if their preferred style of play by the designers was to be playing willynilly.

It would have been great if affects wars, tied to a tier and magic spells, magic items, and class features.That offer those effects were places placed in those tiers.

This would have tide magic to one of DND's core attachment tropes of level.

Then you can just make the economy, trade adventuring, treasure, and crafting all be level based.