D&D 5E Have the designers lost interest in short rests?

[Asisreo]

Honestly? The most effective tool for the playerbase to have any effect on game mechanics is to complain loudly about how terrible the game is, and stop buying new books. As long as people keep buying whatever they put out, they have no reason to actually address anything.

Hard disagree. The only thing that does is put you on the list of people that WoTC won't even bother thinking about.

Why would they cater to people that yell and complain about the game when they aren't even buying it?

The way you convince WoTC is if a large influx of players politely and calmly inform their staff about what they enjoy from the game in a broad sense.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Hard disagree. The only thing that does is put you on the list of people that WoTC won't even bother thinking about.

Why would they cater to people that yell and complain about the game when they aren't even buying it?

It worked last time. The primary design goal of 5E was to attract players who complained loudly about 4E and weren't buying any more books.

 

[Quartz]

It the range on thrown weapons suck. And you can't really multi attack.

+10 damage is nothing to sneeze at. And multi-attack works just fine if you're throwing small weapons like daggers or shuriken. Just make sure you can compensate for the -5 to hit.

 

[Asisreo]

Yes they can start with it, but the fighter chooses from "chain mail or (b) leather, longbow, and 20 arrows" & is more likely to choose the chain mail while a paladin can choose from "
a martial weapon and a shield or (b) two martial weapons" & is again not likely to choose a long bow because they aren't really a ranged class & the javelins are probably good enough to help the raged types until things are close to melee if it comes up.

Fighters can get both Chain Mail and a longbow because they then get the choice of a martial weapon and a shield or two martial weapons immediately after. I agree with your assessment on Paladins but its possible for them to take the 2 martial weapons option and grab a Greatsword and a longbow.

Your 1st level spotlight example wasn't just an niche abstraction it was an isolated white room example so far removed from actual play as to be irrelevant. Concern about the spotlight at level 1 is so minimal even in a game that drags things out like my precovid campaign where the party spent about three months of weekly games just surviving & gathering basics before reaching first level.

The complexity of actual play further heightens my example's point. Each character will get an ever expanding repertoire of inimitable abilities as their level increase. Some will be specialized while others will be generalized, but either way, a DM can tell that the level when fighters get extra attack 3 is a good time to give them something like a Sword of Life Stealing or even a simple +2 sword as they're the ones that benefit the most from it.

A DM can facilitate the inter-player balance of the game in no way that a system can predict. The closest WoTC has gotten is through modules, which still cannot capture the essence of how a player may be feeling at the moment.

 

[Don Durito]

Hard disagree. The only thing that does is put you on the list of people that WoTC won't even bother thinking about.

Why would they cater to people that yell and complain about the game when they aren't even buying it?

Well it worked the last time around!

 

[Charlaquin]

Part of the issue here is that the most natural time breakdown for resource management in rpgs is the game session. This does have to figure in to calculations.

If you're doing lots of social interactions with an average of one combat a night (sometimes two, sometimes none, not particularly unusual to my experience) then it could be 6 weeks between long rests. This means that you have abilities you may be using once every 6 weeks (assuming you play weekly - if fortnightly longer), at a certain point the game is going to strain under that long a refresh time, and it's almost certainly going to creep shorter.

I definitely think it is best when possible to have the the adventuring day line up with the game session. Sometimes you need to extend an adventuring day over multiple session but it isn’t ideal. But I don’t see it as particularly difficult to fit 4-6 encounters in one session and still have time for non-encounter scenes, so long as the group stays on-task. Especially if a few of those encounters are social and/or exploratory. 7 or 8 encounters would probably be a bit much to fit in one session, but that gives you some wiggle room for a few of your 4-6 to be Hard or Deadly.

 

[Charlaquin]

Fighters can get both Chain Mail and a longbow because they then get the choice of a martial weapon and a shield or two martial weapons immediately after.

But then they will have to buy a quiver and arrows with the pocket change they get from their background.

 

[Zardnaar]

But then they will have to buy a quiver and arrows with the pocket change they get from their background.

Or you just roll for cash and buy what you want.

 

[Asisreo]

It worked last time. The primary design goal of 5E was to attract players who complained loudly about 4E and weren't buying any more books.

That's probably not what happened.

What's likely is that they specifically asked for feedback on the game from local communities and their playtest team over the years and matched that feedback with the ones that surveys had said.

The designers specifically don't listen to anyone on forums since they recognize its such a small area of D&D players.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

People complained about the universal resource mechanic feeling too same-y, but the real issue was always with giving Encounter and Daily abilities to martial classes. That's the part which "didn't feel like D&D anymore" and should have been fixed.

And yet Barbarians have exactly that, a daily allocation of rage. Granted, it is several uses, but that is still a daily effect... There are one or two other minor 'daily' effects scattered around the martial characters. I don't see people complaining about them now. Honestly, I was never convinced this was a big problem, and other games have also gotten away with it without much comment. I think the issue was more the presentation of powers and the way 'slots' are very up front, so it makes people focus on them more.

In any case, IN PLAY, it was always much less problematic than people made it out to be as a 'white room' sort of problem. Players IME weren't really worried about it, and when a couple of people tried the Slayer they got bored quickly (it is really very similar in many ways to the Battlemaster). Battlemaster, as an 'encounter only' class in 5e is OK, but it really would benefit a lot from having some 'finishing moves', or some way to do some astounding mythic sorts of stuff that would rival spell casting a bit better.

I'm almost level 5 with my current BM, and it is really getting kinda boring at this point! I have basically one shtick where I blow action surge and a superiority die as a sort of 'alpha strike' and then its just mostly deciding between using another superiority die or not with each attack from then on. Frankly one of my combat maneuvers is vastly superior to the other two, 95% of the time, so I really just have 2 things I do, make my attack and bonus attack (two weapon fighting) or the same plus rolling an extra 1d8 damage and granting the next guy advantage (assuming I hit, and that seems pretty easy to do).

There are things that are nice about 5e, the way build choices are varied but fairly substantial and not overly frequent is a nice one. The lack of daily powers isn't one of them.