D&D 5E Is 5e the Least-Challenging Edition of D&D?

[Garthanos]

DAMN RIGHT IT IS!

Well it depends on what you want the Harley or Bicycle for ... I mean the Harley has a cool factor that is hard to touch but I need to lose weight and get around the downtown area and I live in warm climes is kind of a lot of overwhelming benefits for the bicycle.

 

[tetrasodium]

One plot line I like and its sometimes called the McGuffin basically you have an unbeatable scenario or adversary and you need to acquire something special to overcome it. As a DM you convey the unbeatable-ness to the group (one way is to have them fight something difficult then have them discover that the adversary they are now up against took out the hard to beat enemy trivially), Another is just never present it as anything but a need for the McGuffin by the game world.

Indeed, maybe that snape hunt mcguffin is to obtain the components needed for the king's artificer's I mentioned to make all that ghost touch armor. People act like there weren't solutions that could be found or that sometimes the impossible obstacle is the point.

 

[Oofta]

Indeed, maybe that snape hunt mcguffin is to obtain the components needed for the king's artificer's I mentioned to make all that ghost touch armor. People act like there weren't solutions that could be found or that sometimes the impossible obstacle is the point.

It also assumes a style of play where the PCs always know what they're going to be facing, or at least most of the time.

Personally I'm glad 5E went away from the finicky book keeping aspects of the game. Of course there's no pleasing everyone.

 

[Garthanos]

It also assumes a style of play where the PCs always know what they're going to be facing, or at least most of the time.

Personally I'm glad 5E went away from the finicky book keeping aspects of the game. Of course there's no pleasing everyone.

I think there is a huge responsibility on the DMs head to pull anything like that off and have it work well, its why nothing I described required specific game mechanics (because there arent any) in many ways when the point is to trigger the enabler questing.

From what I heard russian fables feature that a lot where you have a sequence of quests to overcome an obstacle and things you do on those side quests sometimes come back as enablers even if they were not obviously so. (rewards for always being the good guy I suppose),

 

[Ratskinner]

Which brings me to the topic of the thread: Is 5e the easiest edition of D&D? Are you less likely to lose a character?

I feel like in the editions I've played, it's easily the less threatening edition. 4e was pretty hard to die in, but it required some sharp tactical play. 5e, conversely, seems to be the very forgiving, training wheels edition. Especially after 3rd level.

AFAICT, any edition is only as "hard" as the DM makes it. Success or failure in the early editions had little to do with "hard" or "easy" and more to do with random or whimsy, IME. Random, in this sense, means everything from a missed save, bad HP rolls, or bad stat rolls. Whimsy means whether or not the DM "approves" of your clever scheme. Then again, my observations of older editions tend to run counter to what people usually assume about them in a lot of ways. The possibility of dying from the first shot to hit you really doesn't say anything about "harder" because its determined by a bunch of dice. (You might as well be asking if flipping a coin is "harder".) Deadlier != harder.

Now, if you had meant "easiest" in the sense of comprehensible rulebooks....I think it might be a close second. In that regard, the earlier editions were certainly harder.

 

[Arilyn]

Agree completely.

The problem is, recent editions have taken out the other things that often put the fear of god into players, those being a) level drain and b) catastrophic magic item loss via failing a save vs AoE damage.

Thus, death - and TPK - are about all you've got left.

Poison is boring now. I liked how different poisons in 3e could temporarily reduce different stats. Poisons that reduced charisma by causing you to break out in boils, or wisdom draining poisons that made you act drunk, or dexterity affecting poisons that caused you to stiffen up, etc.

And mummy rot. Man, I was truly scared of my characters contracting mummy rot. And ghoul paralysis gives you a save every round. I kind of get this, as ghouls are not considered a high CR monster, but they're just not as scary.

I miss having to research a monster's weakness because normal weapons are worthless. Now, even if a monster has resistance, it just means the party will take a little longer to hack it to death.

It's one of the reasons I like the Kobold Press monster codexes. They've put some scary stuff back in.

I am not an old schooler and I'm not a big fan of character death, but 5e monsters as written are rather dull, relying on their hp to be challenging.

 

[Don Durito]

I think it is a little more modular than you give it credit for.

As a personal example, I've houseruled that you do not recover all your hp after a long rest. You just get to spend hit dice, same as a short rest, and recover half your hit dice.

This has had a pretty big impact on the attrition, because you need 2 days of no fighting to full recover everything, and in a scenario where the players are under constant threat, like wilderness travel or the apocalypse like my current game, that means they are usually starting the day with fewer resources.

I think this is an example of what I meant. It sounds like this should make a difference, but in my experience it does not (and this was mentioned earlier in the thread). Take away the free healing and all remaining spell slots get spent on healing and then recovered during the long rest. Or you do is create bookkeeping. It's an example from the DMG of a poorly thought out variant.

The only way it matters is if the PCs have been pushed so far they're out of spell slots and can't blow any on healing. But this is another example of the attrition dial I mentioned, being the only real one you have. And if you've got that far you don't need the variant (and if you use it under such circumstances you face the situation of all the casters being ready to go with their spells, but the frontline characters being extremely vulnerable, therefore messing with class balance. Of course this could lead to casters spending some of their spell slots to heal the warriors, but this is more bookkeeping - and if that's the result wouldn't it be simpler to just limit spell slot recovery rather than healing?).

 

[Lanefan]

Best by whose measure?

By the measure of whoever's doing it at the time, I'd think.

I find Bob1 Bob2 Bob3 the super poorly characters whose only distinctions are randomly determined kind of a bad thing and a natural repercussion of the instant character mechanics.

Perhaps, but one can with any luck rely on one's players to be a bit more creative than Bob I, Bob II, Bob III etc.

I can do an almost choiceless 1 click character creation using character builder in 4e and honestly its the same thing ... the character so created lacks player investment and will always be less interesting than where you made choices and thought about it.

Ah, now the rub appears: you need a program to do it for you - which, while fine for some perhaps, ain't my cup of tea at all.

 

[Chaosmancer]

This also affected magic item capabilities. You can't have things like ghost touch, a glass club,different acp/asf/crit range/crit mod equipment, a bonus you already have but on a different slot allowing some other item to be used for lateral advancement, etc. Now magic items are either objectively better in silo'd advancement than what people have now or "maybe we can sell it" with almost no subjective qualities left That purely simulationist logic feeds into the adam west batman feel to combat onramp too.

Honestly? I kind of like this to a degree.

Sure, it would be nice to have a wider range of weapons, but not for stuff like overcoming resistances. I'd much prefer to choose to wield a sword because I get +1d6 lightning damage as compared to the axe where I can gain temp hp when I strike with it, that is an interesting decision.

Going to the blacksmith and saying "Well, I need a sword, a cold iron sword for fey, a red steel sword for aberrations, an iron wood sword for rust monsters, a true ice sword for fire elementals, a silver sword for demons, a..." when they all do the exact same thing, it just matters what they hurt more... That is complexity for the sake of bookkeeping, not interesting decisions to be made in your loadout.

I think they went a little too far, we definetly need more interesting magical items (especially for Druids, Monks, Barbarians, Clerics and Rangers) but I like cutting back on that endless list of "special materials"

 

[Garthanos]

Ah, now the rub appears: you need a program to do it for you - which, while fine for some perhaps, ain't my cup of tea at all.

Nope instant throw away character seems problematic in what it encourages so it is not my cup of tea regardless of the tool used to do it which I acknowledged. The difference is a system that utterly lacks and provides only trivial character description tools shrug it compounds the issue out of the box. So yeah the boom I will spend no time and make a new one is not a feature to me it is a bug.

To be honest not sure why it would make any difference for you its one button trivial creation and you have a character that works with zero effort and zero thinking on your part. That part is definitely not a big diffference.

oh wait you might have to think about how to play the more elaborate character (true of the later games) even if its created for you that must be it. But we were talking about the creation process not the play so I think you wandered off thread.

Or we both did.