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

[Chaosmancer]

No it's extremely relevant to point out that there are materials like silver that could have been included to bypass damage immune/resist to allow both campaign types to exist without needing to place the onus on the gm of building such a thing for wotc. They included silver as a half measure because they wanted to give nonmagic campaigns something special for certain monsters, but because they were too focused on faerun they forgot to include materials added by eberron & other settings in both the phb & more importantly the monsters in the monster manual (someone mentioned red steel & others earlier).

There is also the fact that it's not simply a matter of having the "right stuff" & it's disingenuous or just pure lack of experience speaking to keep saying it... given how many times this has been covered I'm wondering if it's a deliberate misrepresentation?

Take the

Spoiler: old stone golem

View attachment 119248

. t was not immune to nonadamantine damage, it shaved off the first 10 points of anything that hit it meaning that you eeded to have a heavy hitter like a chaging/power attacking/etc raging barbarian/crit fisher/etc hit it hard or someone else like a build built for reliable average damage to get lucky with the damage rolls leaving those big number builds feeling valued in their choices by getting to show off abilities like charger & such that often took some setup. A gm with lots of reliable low-medium damage number players & no big number ones should probably think twice about using such a creature & instead use creatures those reliable low to mid number damage players an handle more often. That's opposed to the 5e one

Spoiler: here

View attachment 119250

where you have a 178 hp creature turning into a mindnumbing 356hit point slog of just hitting it again.

so clearly the most logical course of action was to remove any nuance & depth from resistances rather than including a blurb along the lines of a gm running a campaign world with no magic items or extraordinary materials may want to avoid using creatures with resistances & immunities to nonmagical damage or include some mundane way of damaging these creatures such as having weapons blessed by a religious figure or bathing them in a particularly pure stream if they are used." Also does your no magic campaign lack weapon choices that deal bludgeoning piercing or slashing damage that would prevent creatures from being undefeatable if they had resistances & immunities to those?

Please read your own statblock pictures again.

DnD 5e Stone Golem has no damage resistances, so it never becomes a "mindnumbing 356 hit point slog". Actually in this example, the Golem who ignores 10 damage from every attack and has 107 hp could be the longer slog.

 

[tetrasodium]

Please read your own statblock pictures again.

DnD 5e Stone Golem has no damage resistances, so it never becomes a "mindnumbing 356 hit point slog". Actually in this example, the Golem who ignores 10 damage from every attack and has 107 hp could be the longer slog.

Your right about the 5e golem but plenty of other monsters have resistance. Also no, things like power attack, powerful charge, leap attack, improved critical & crit fishing builds, improved bull rush, shock trooper, various buffs/debuffs, class abilities & many more changed it from a slog to an interesting tactical challenge as opposed to "I hit it again".but your right that I chose a bad monster to compare, a cr5 large earth elemental & cr5 earth elemental are a better one to compare that keeps the original statements accurate after adjusting the numbers, so I fixed it for you

edit... also @Ashrym I can provide evidence that your no magic items no magic world style is a minority, the results of wotc's own product line include how many hardcover adventures fitting that mold?... zero... yea, zero. That's dogfood that even wotc is not willing to touch let alone happily feed the market. It's fine that you want to play or run a game like that, but it's not contentious to say that is a unusual style game outside the norms of the majority of games.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Your right about the 5e golem but plenty of other monsters have resistance. Also no, things like power attack, powerful charge, leap attack, improved critical & crit fishing builds, improved bull rush, shock trooper, various buffs/debuffs, class abilities & many more changed it from a slog to an interesting tactical challenge as opposed to "I hit it again".but your right that I chose a bad monster to compare, a cr5 large earth elemental & cr5 earth elemental are a better one to compare that keeps the original statements accurate after adjusting the numbers, so I fixed it for you
View attachment 119251

edit... also @Ashrym I can provide evidence that your no magic items no magic world style is a minority, the results of wotc's own product line include how many hardcover adventures fitting that mold?... zero... yea, zero. That's dogfood that even wotc is not willing to touch let alone happily feed the market. It's fine that you want to play or run a game like that, but it's not contentious to say that is a unusual style game outside the norms of the majority of games.

Okay, so how does 68 hp and I take -5 from every single hit I ever take more interesting than 126 hp and half if you are using non-magical damage? In fact, it looks like the 3.5 Earth Elemental is far weaker than the 5e one, since it will take far less effort to kill it.

Also, if we want to include feats.... Great Weapon Master is similar to Power Attack. .

Leap Attack seems to only allow moving when you Power Attack? That is pointless in 5e, because unlike 3.5, you can move and attack on your turn. A limitation that seems to be ignored most of the time when talking about major changes 5e made.

Improved Bullrush seems to be pointless in terms of damage, just makes you less likely to take AO's and gives you a bonus to pushing.

Powerful charge is a damage increase, but remember what I was talking about with Leap Attack? Moving in 3.5 automatically reduced your damage output by limiting your attacks. That is why you had the charging rules at all, because they allowed you to move and attack, but that was not as much damage as simply standing and taking a full attack action. Powerful Charge helps counter that, by increasing your damage when you charge. But, since 5e allows you to allows charge by moving and making your full attack, charging rules are largely pointless.

And 5e does have a Charger feat regardless, giving you a damage boost or push bonus on a bonus action you take after using your action to dash, very reminiscent of how these feats worked.

5e also has crit fishing builds. Not as many, but they do exist.

So, since every 5e character has some of these feats included in them naturally, by allowing moving and a full attack sequence, and the 5e elemental actually seems to be a bit tougher... it seems you are not making the point that you would like to be making here


Edit: Let me be more clear with what I mean by that.

In 3.5, you needed a slew of feats to simply move and attack the enemy effectively. Plus, since it seems the feats you listed were intended to increase the damage dealt, the lower hp of the monster and minor but universal damage reduction means that their is no tactical challenge.

You will move up, generally hit hard with your charge, and then stand next to the monster to finish it.

5e doesn't require all those feats, but it also doesn't require them for the monster. Unlike the 3,5 elemental, the earth elemental can charge as well. It is also faster than the 3.5 version and more capable of using it's unique Earth Glide ability to harry the party instead of wanting to simply smash them with basic attacks.

I also notice that the 3.5 monster just had the ability to hit multiple targets if it drops one, or hit one target very hard with power attack. Yes, the 5e version lacks this, but has some other interesting abilities to compensate, such as the siege ability to destroying the environment. So, the 5e version could Earth Glide up a cave wall and attack the ceiling, collapsing it on the party, which is something the 3.5 version may not be able to do (don't know what Earth Mastery means) and even if they did, it would take far more turns than the 5e version would, allowing the party to probably finish it off with ranged attacks. Because again, it has much lower health than the 5e version does.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Your right about the 5e golem but plenty of other monsters have resistance. Also no, things like power attack,

Great Weapon Master feat.

powerful charge, leap attack,

There's no Full Attack rule in 5e, so you don't need special feats to make moving more than 5 feet and attacking not be worthless. An 11th-level 5e fighter can run a full 30 feet, knock you to the ground, and Action Surge 5 attacks in your face with advantage as part of the base model, before any upgrades or subclass feats kick in.

improved critical & crit fishing builds

Improved Critical is literally a subclass feature. You also have Brutal Critical, the Half-Orc, the Assassin Rogue, and the Paladin (whose crits are idiotic).

, improved bull rush,

Grappling and shoving don't provoke AoO in 5e to begin with. The typical Fighter is already good at pushing people around by dint of being strong.

shock trooper, various buffs/debuffs, class abilities & many more changed it from a slog to an interesting tactical challenge

It's telling that you have reach deep into the splats to make the 3.5 fighter supposedly interesting as opposed to a Power Attack bot that quickly gets obviated by wizard spells like Summon Tsar Bomba or the cleric layering spells on himself to become Invincible Giant Hammer Jesus. At some point, these increasingly obscure feats just make me nostalgic for 4e. Say what you will about the game, the Warlord was a heck of a lot of fun to play.

Sure, 3.5 has a lot more fiddly bits in it, but a lot of the fiddling you're describing is just to work against the famously bad design of the Fighter. 5e's Fighter doesn't start off as a problem needing 4 feats to fix.

 

[tetrasodium]

Okay, so how does 68 hp and I take -5 from every single hit I ever take more interesting than 126 hp and half if you are using non-magical damage? In fact, it looks like the 3.5 Earth Elemental is far weaker than the 5e one, since it will take far less effort to kill it.

Yes. That is why there were

Spoiler: three higher cr ones in the mm alone

and I'm pretty sure there were some other versions in other mm analogs (mm2 mm3 etc) that were special & deserving of their own name beyond just earth elemental similar to the mtof 202 earth elemental myrmidon but not recalling their names or the books they were in I'm not going hunting for them.

Your own observation shows how far off the mark & deep into blatant disingenuous arguments that some people keep making claiming that bypassing DR was required. Also keep in mind that because elemental traits made a creature immune to critical hits & flanking in this case crit fishers couldn't help (and were dramatically more effective at getting crits even at level 1 in 3.5 than 5e's mid-late game ones) not could a rogue's sneak attack. The fact that this creature was immune to both barring some class features or something shows how easy it was for a creature to shake things up & force the players to shift tactics because of having more involved systems than "half damage unless you have a magic weapon"

so you looked to the high strength barbarian & other builds aimed at getting big hits on the first hit rather than more reliable damage across multiple attacks

Great Weapon Master feat.

There's no Full Attack rule in 5e, so you don't need special feats to make moving more than 5 feet and attacking not be worthless. An 11th-level 5e fighter can run a full 30 feet, knock you to the ground, and Action Surge 5 attacks in your face with advantage as part of the base model, before any upgrades or subclass feats kick in.


Improved Critical is literally a subclass feature. You also have Brutal Critical, the Half-Orc, the Assassin Rogue, and the Paladin (whose crits are idiotic).


Grappling and shoving don't provoke AoO in 5e to begin with. The typical Fighter is already good at pushing people around by dint of being strong.



It's telling that you have reach deep into the splats to make the 3.5 fighter supposedly interesting as opposed to a Power Attack bot that quickly gets obviated by wizard spells like Summon Tsar Bomba or the cleric layering spells on himself to become Invincible Giant Hammer Jesus. At some point, these increasingly obscure feats just make me nostalgic for 4e. Say what you will about the game, the Warlord was a heck of a lot of fun to play.

Sure, 3.5 has a lot more fiddly bits in it, but a lot of the fiddling you're describing is just to work against the famously bad design of the Fighter. 5e's Fighter doesn't start off as a problem needing 4 feats to fix.

Yes, improved critical is a class feature for one fighter archtype giving you 19-20 crits, but in 3.5 even simple weapons had 19-20 crit weapons with martial & exotic weapons having 18-20 crit weapons that would both be extended with a larger crit range with improved critical & such. Also power attack was in the phb as were high damage weapons using 2d6/d12 & things like weapon specialization (+2 damage with a specific type of weapon such as a greataxe)

Also it's a bit off the mark to say a fighter needed 4 feats because I made an extreme example.. especially considering they would have that by 4th level

and could have power attack at first with weapon focus/weapon specialization(Level 4 prereq there) plus two other feats by 4th.

Regardless of what you think about all those feat chains, the fact remains that there are severe problems with implimenting wotc's own published variant rules because they went so far overboard expunging this sort of combat & the problems caused by trying to impliment the dmg's optional flanking and facing discussed over here because if so much missing structure attest to that. The ironic thing is that a variant rule to "simplify" combat and allow it to function "so you don't need special feats to make moving more than 5 feet and attacking not be worthless. An 11th-level 5e fighter can run a full 30 feet, knock you to the ground, and Action Surge 5 attacks in your face with advantage as part of the base model, before any upgrades or subclass feats kick in. " could have been done with a couple sentences that don't require the gm to fix the variant rule by rebuilding the core rules.

edit: don't get me wrong, 5e did a lot of things that improved the game, but at the same time they went too far in many many areas & ended up creating new problems by not giving enough considerations to how removing things in the name of streamlining gameplay would affect other parts of the game

 

[Ashrym]

No it's extremely relevant to point out that there are materials like silver that could have been included to bypass damage immune/resist to allow both campaign types to exist without needing to place the onus on the gm of building such a thing for wotc. They included silver as a half measure because they wanted to give nonmagic campaigns something special for certain monsters, but because they were too focused on faerun they forgot to include materials added by eberron & other settings in both the phb & more importantly the monsters in the monster manual (someone mentioned red steel & others earlier).

It's irrelevant because it doesn't increase the challenge. It increases the amount of gear carried. If a monster takes half damage from nonwhatever weapons and full damage from whatever weapons the half damage is moot simply by carrying the whatever weapon and has zero impact.

5e enables DM's to build from the basics instead of forcing them to deconstruct from complexities.

There is also the fact that it's not simply a matter of having the "right stuff" & it's disingenuous or just pure lack of experience speaking to keep saying it... given how many times this has been covered I'm wondering if it's a deliberate misrepresentation?

"given how many times this has been covered" has never made someone's opinion more valid. An argument doesn't improve through repetition. I've been playing a very long time, and I know what I like or don't like from a given edition.

so clearly the most logical course of action was to remove any nuance & depth from resistances rather than including a blurb along the lines of a gm running a campaign world with no magic items or extraordinary materials may want to avoid using creatures with resistances & immunities to nonmagical damage or include some mundane way of damaging these creatures such as having weapons blessed by a religious figure or bathing them in a particularly pure stream if they are used." Also does your no magic campaign lack weapon choices that deal bludgeoning piercing or slashing damage that would prevent creatures from being undefeatable if they had resistances & immunities to those?

There was no nuance to begin with. "Carry x items" isn't complex.

I also literally quoted a blurb for you.

 

[tetrasodium]

5e enables DM's to build from the basics instead of forcing them to deconstruct from complexities.

Since it's so simple, please fgo over here & settle the apparently easy problem of implementing the dmg's optional flanking & facing rules without running into the serious problems several people in that thread pointed out with trying to use those half baked options. Clearly it's not as simple as you make it out to be given that nobody has even tried to correct people pointing out those problems.
I look forward to the simple solution you post.

 

[Ashrym]

Since it's so simple, please fgo over here & settle the apparently easy problem of implementing the dmg's optional flanking & facing rules without running into the serious problems several people in that thread pointed out with trying to use those half baked options. Clearly it's not as simple as you make it out to be given that nobody has even tried to correct people pointing out those problems.
I look forward to the simple solution you post.

The only concern raised on flanking in that thread was that it might marginalize abilities that characters have to grant advantage. And you made a long post.

Flanking grants advantage and it also restricts movement to have that advantage as a tradeoff. It also favors opponents because of the size rule for large and above.

That's not a lot of issue.

 

[tetrasodium]

The only concern raised on flanking in that thread was that it might marginalize abilities that characters have to grant advantage. And you made a long post.

Flanking grants advantage and it also restricts movement to have that advantage as a tradeoff. It also favors opponents because of the size rule for large and above.

That's not a lot of issue.

What's that? Sounds a lot like you are admitting that you can't solve this problem, or this. or these, or this.

 

[Oofta]

What's that? Sounds a lot like you are admitting that you can't solve this problem, or this. or these, or this.

Only if you think those are actually problems. They just got rid of game components that didn't add enough to the game to offset the cost. You're looking only at your preference and what you like without taking into consideration what everyone else enjoys.

Sounds like you're being selfish to me.