D&D 5E (2024) Do You Prefer D&D 5.5E/2024 to D&D 5E/2014?

[FitzTheRuke]

what do you mean hope, if you never saw him again it probably did…

No, I just don't remember how he felt about it, it was decades ago. I'm sure that we played together for some time afterward. Everyone else thought it was funny, but I can't recall if he did or not.

 

[Distracted DM]

I once had a bandit shoot a PC in the face with a crossbow bolt, in the first attack of the first encounter.

We had just finished two hour of character generation and the first scenario was a "guard the caravan". Bandit says "money or your life" and PCs naturally jump to attacking the bandits.

PC died on the spot from a well-aimed Crit. Worse, the player had never played RPGs before. I hope it didn't sour him...

The same thing happened to a player of mine, in the opening 2-goblin fight of Phandelver. It soured him for a couple years. That's one of the few times I wish I'd pulled a punch instead of letting the dice fall as they may. Or if we were using A5E's massive damage rules, it wouldn't have even been a question of insta-death:

Massive Damage and Instant Death​

Massive damage can injure or kill you instantly. If you are reduced to 0 hit points after taking an amount of damage equal to or greater than 20 + three times your character level (or Hit Dice for creatures), you make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw . On a failure, you die instantly, while on a successful result you live, but suffer one level of fatigue and one level of strife.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

There are more resources for new GMs than there have ever been, from multiple starter sets to popular books aimed at them to whole channels on YouTube. The DMG is a reference book that helps GMs run the game and build awesome adventures. It should be useful for the life of the game. Turning the DMG into the "new DM's Guide" limits its value over time. Better to put that stuff in a cheap, easily accessible thing.

I mean, if there were just a single "New DM" chapter, maybe. But 5E has already always been extremely stingy with the kidns of support long term GMs actually need and using up space in the DMG that is useful for a half dozen sessions just exacerbates the problem.

No other resources are the core books.

That is it, that is the entire equation. New players and DMs should be able to use nothing but the core books. Anything else must always be completely 100% optional for them.

The rest of us already know how to find 3rd party resources and resources from olded editions, which still work just fine.

The only way i would bend on this is if the PHB become the Core Book and had new-DM stuff, but i also hate how gigantic a lot of single core books like that are, so i would still say it is better to have them separate.

And no, 1 chapter is not sufficient. The DMG should always be written with novice, intermediate, and advanced DMs in mind in that order of priority.

 

[Reynard]

No other resources are the core books.

That is it, that is the entire equation. New players and DMs should be able to use nothing but the core books. Anything else must always be completely 100% optional for them.

The rest of us already know how to find 3rd party resources and resources from olded editions, which still work just fine.

The only way i would bend on this is if the PHB become the Core Book and had new-DM stuff, but i also hate how gigantic a lot of single core books like that are, so i would still say it is better to have them separate.

And no, 1 chapter is not sufficient. The DMG should always be written with novice, intermediate, and advanced DMs in mind in that order of priority.

I find this to be a strange demand since it has literally never been that way.

 

[Tigris]

I find this to be a strange demand since it has literally never been that way.

Just because things were bad in the past does not mean we need to repeat them.

Also there are people starting with just the core books. Why should someone from not the hobby assume they need more than the core books?

AND core books if they are sold should be enough to learn. If people want money from me for a product, that product must be self cotained. If I also need to find youtube tutorials to watch and spend time on those, then its an awfull product and the company should get absolutly awfull ratings for the product.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I find this to be a strange demand since it has literally never been that way.

It has always been that way, under wotc. I never played 2e or older except with experienced older players so i dont know about that era in this context.

But wotc dnd has always been constructed such that only the core books are needed for new groups, and even just the phb can be used if you dont mind potentially not knowing about some parts of the game.

What you are claiming amounts to dnd having always been a crap game made by extremely bad game designers. It is literally fundemental that a game must be fully playable withiut supplemental materials.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Just from second hand knowledge i wiuld strongly challenge the notion that any professionally published version of dnd needed secondary materials for new groups to play it.

I mean sure ODND didnt make much sense and required reference tables to play but those tables were in the core materials, as far as i know!?

 

[Zardnaar]

They say the encounters weren’t broken, not the builders. Like most of us who learned our trade before some fool attempted to mathmaticise the unmathmaticisable, we know encounter builders are useless.

Its an art not science

 

[Paul Farquhar]

No, I just don't remember how he felt about it, it was decades ago. I'm sure that we played together for some time afterward. Everyone else thought it was funny, but I can't recall if he did or not.

So, there are decades of bottled up trauma…

 

[Reynard]

What you are claiming amounts to dnd having always been a crap game made by extremely bad game designers. It is literally fundemental that a game must be fully playable withiut supplemental materials.

I am claiming no such thing. You may be, but I'm not.

I am claiming that no DMG outside of an actual Basic Set Dm's book has been aimed at the complete novice. They have always assumed some level of understanding of what the game is and how it is played (mostly because traditionally players turned into DMs). The DMGs are referenced for the DM, and therefore have the information the DM needs. They discuss how to DM, for sure, but not as a guide to the completely uninitiated.

But really, how would we know, since no one ever read the DMG?