D&D 5E How crunchy is D&D 5E

[Umbran]

I rather like that distinction

I came upon it professionally, but it can help a lot in discussions like these. It is god to recognize that convoluted and highly interacting rules, and too much content, can both be problems, but they are different problems, and call for different approaches to help players through them.

 

[overgeeked]

Overall I'd put 5e D&D at:

Character creation & build: 7-8
Combat: 5-7
Exploration: 4-5
Social: 2-3

Overall I'd say 6-7.

Weird. That’s almost exactly what I was thinking.

CC. 7-8.
Combat. 6-7.
Exploration. 3-4.
Social. 2-3.

Overall. 5-7. So I voted 6.

 

[Umbran]

Perhaps you’d like to work through this flowchart for off-board artillery in Advanced Squad Leader?

So, so many hours of my youth...

 

[SkidAce]

So, so many hours of my youth...

 

[John R Davis]

It's a 4

In the grand scheme of the many RPG games I've played over the vast aeons it's not that complex, but just complex enough for my ageing soul

 

[Deset Gled]

IMNSHO, 5e is the least crunchy of any edition of D&D I've played. And D&D is the default RPG. So 5e must rate below a "rules medium" 5.

 

[Scott Christian]

I'm with @Imaculata . I used other D&D games as a comparison, and then also added other games: PF, PF2, MERP, The Witcher, Zweihander, Legend of the Five Rings, Numenara, Dragon Age, etc.

 

[FriendlyFiend]

1e AD&D looks worse than 5e D&D, but that's only because it's so arcane and unintuitive. In reality you have very few choices out of the rule books that really matter. Mastery of AD&D isn't particularly difficult, either: Be a fighter type or a magic-user and multiclass, multiclass, multiclass. AD&D is actually much lighter as far as rules, it's just that the rules that exist are obtuse. It's just much, much worse at design and presentation, and the overwhelming majority of systems in AD&D just never get used. The weight is largely empty.

This is so true. As someone who pretty much left the hobby after 2E, then drifted back in with 5E, I know I find 5E harder to DM than I ever did 1 or 2E.

 

[Rune]

The 5th edition of D&D is:

a) less crunchy than it used to be

but:

b) more crunchy than I wanted it to be.

I guess that makes it a 5 or 6. Which is, I suppose, a good reflection of where most players were in 2012-2014, when playtesting was happening.

I do wonder what 5e would look like if run through that process again (in advance of the 2024 revision), given that a large chunk of current players probably weren’t even around during the development of 5e.

My guess: it would probably include at least a little advice on how to play for an audience. No particular guess on where the game would fall on the crunch-scale (except that it would probably be in-line with wherever streamed games tend to be).

 

[Alzrius]

Definitely a 4. Compared to some of its popular contemporaries and recent versions, such as D&D 3.5, D&D 4E, Pathfinder 1E or 2E, Starfinder, etc. it's got nowhere near the same level of mechanical complexity.