D&D (2024) Is Combat Tedious on Purpose?

[evilbob]

Thread title aside: I have noticed that 5.5 is more... cumbersome than 5.0.

Part of it is that there's just so many options. All the time. Players get new abilities every level, magic items give new abilities, and the complexity keeps going up. Cannot tell you how many times players in our recent game said something along the lines of, "oh I forgot I even had this ability."

But part of it is that the crunch went up as well. This can be used proficiency bonus times per day as a bonus action and does stat modifier + proficiency bonus damage and each short rest you get 1d3 charges back... There's a lot to track any more. It DOES feel a bit more "game-ified." Every class has a running list of "stuff to track" and it's MUCH easier to do that on a computer/phone. Also cannot tell you how many times a player recently said, "oh I should have been adding X to this every time."

And there ARE 4.0 design elements at play here. Classes are more balanced. Powers keep piling up. Movement is more precise and there are more ways to do it. Conditions are more plentiful. But all this is more to track as well.

Someone mentioned this in another thread and it's a hard idea to implement but I love the idea of having new powers replace old ones. By level 20 I don't want 25 options every round; I think ~5-7 is fine. Don't give me 3 new spells every level - I'd rather replace 3. D&D design went so hard away from the "magic item gives static +2 to stat" because it was boring - but it was also really, really easy! I've been drawn recently to games more like Dungeon World in recent years because you simultaneously have fewer options and you can do more things.

Anyway, glad to know that others are feeling the crunch weight as well.

 

[HappyHubris]

Thread title aside: I have noticed that 5.5 is more... cumbersome than 5.0.

Part of it is that there's just so many options. All the time. Players get new abilities every level, magic items give new abilities, and the complexity keeps going up. Cannot tell you how many times players in our recent game said something along the lines of, "oh I forgot I even had this ability."

But part of it is that the crunch went up as well. This can be used proficiency bonus times per day as a bonus action and does stat modifier + proficiency bonus damage and each short rest you get 1d3 charges back... There's a lot to track any more. It DOES feel a bit more "game-ified." Every class has a running list of "stuff to track" and it's MUCH easier to do that on a computer/phone. Also cannot tell you how many times a player recently said, "oh I should have been adding X to this every time."

And there ARE 4.0 design elements at play here. Classes are more balanced. Powers keep piling up. Movement is more precise and there are more ways to do it. Conditions are more plentiful. But all this is more to track as well.

My observation here is that there are fun features added or enhanced at the cost of more dice rolls.

5E14 Warding Flare for Light Cleric: 5 times per long rest, an extra dice is rolled as disadvantage on an attack roll.

5E24 Warding Flare: 5 x Short Rest charges, and each charge adds 3 dice rolled (disadvantage plus the two dice used for the temp HP). Your party also has to stop to record the temp HP.

So a table will have to pay tighter attention to get through the same amount of combat, even if combat is more interesting per encounter.

 

[Desdichado]

Yes, it's tedious. I hadn't played D&D per se since playing 3.5 back... oh, as recently as 2016, I think, until picking up 5e. It feels the same to me. Whatever differences there are are more annoying because I don't remember them correctly, because it's basically the same. The tediousness is mostly the same, at least at the level that I'm playing 5e now. Might be different at higher level. Can't comment on that yet.

No, it's not on purpose. Combat in D&D has always had some degree of tedium, but it got worse by a significant margin with the advent of 3e, and hasn't gone back down very much. I think its more inertia and the unwillingness of the designers to make too radical a change to the mechanics more than anything else, though. If online tools are essential to play the game, it's more around the tedium of character creation and management than it is around combat. Although combat with the current system ONLINE without a VTT and some kind of tools seems pretty daunting.

 

[evilbob]

Yes, it's tedious. I hadn't played D&D per se since playing 3.5 back... oh, as recently as 2016, I think, until picking up 5e. It feels the same to me. Whatever differences there are are more annoying because I don't remember them correctly, because it's basically the same. The tediousness is mostly the same, at least at the level that I'm playing 5e now. Might be different at higher level. Can't comment on that yet.

No, it's not on purpose. Combat in D&D has always had some degree of tedium, but it got worse by a significant margin with the advent of 3e, and hasn't gone back down very much. I think its more inertia and the unwillingness of the designers to make too radical a change to the mechanics more than anything else, though. If online tools are essential to play the game, it's more around the tedium of character creation and management than it is around combat. Although combat with the current system ONLINE without a VTT and some kind of tools seems pretty daunting.

What's weird to me is that 5.0 seemed far less tedious than 3.5. And now 5.5 is more comparable, tedium-wise. It feels like they took a step closer to 3.5/4.0 with 5.5 than 5.0, IMO. 5.0 was actually quite refreshing to me in that way; 5.5 is less so.

Just FYI, higher levels still get far, far more tedious - but even 5.5 seems like it can't match 3.5's level. I remember spending an hour just BUFFING in 3.0. That can't happen in 5e, mostly thanks to the massive change that is concentration.

The problem with online play is that it's impossible to actually replicate what we do with pencil and paper on a computer. Roll20 is still FAR better at this than any WotC product to date, but the core issue is that there are too many variables because how people actually run games is - by design! - not constrained. If a player happens to decide they want only vanilla options from 5e, you can load all that into Beyond: but even then, Beyond can't handle ALL the interactions between items, powers - oops I mean abilities, class features, etc. Roll20 gets much closer in play and it may even be possible with vanilla, but the tradeoff is doing more prepwork. But the further you step outside of vanilla, the more online tools can't keep up. And most of the time you can get "good enough" and that's fine; but it will never be 100% because you cannot programmatically account for everything everyone everywhere can make up.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

What's weird to me is that 5.0 seemed far less tedious than 3.5. And now 5.5 is more comparable, tedium-wise. It feels like they took a step closer to 3.5/4.0 with 5.5 than 5.0, IMO. 5.0 was actually quite refreshing to me in that way; 5.5 is less so.

Just FYI, higher levels still get far, far more tedious - but even 5.5 seems like it can't match 3.5's level. I remember spending an hour just BUFFING in 3.0. That can't happen in 5e, mostly thanks to the massive change that is concentration.

Honestly, not really sure what you see in either version of 5e that makes it so fast/non-tedious. Sure, some classes (read: non-casters) have slightly fewer things to do. I still find that combats took--and take--quite a while despite being billed as "fast", even at level 5-6.

For me, at least, it's sort of a worst-of-both-worlds thing on this front. It isn't a meaningful time savings over an engaged group for the longer-combat editions (e.g. any given combat rarely take less than 20-30 min even with players who are engaged and know what they're doing), but because they've stripped out SO MUCH of the possible mechanical heft and engagement, it's 20-30 minutes of....mostly doing a lot of the exact same things over and over. It's all the dearth of yesteryear, without nearly enough speed. It's most of the slow of more recent D&D design, without the satisfying chew.

The problem with online play is that it's impossible to actually replicate what we do with pencil and paper on a computer.

A spicy take, considering I've exclusively played digitally.

Roll20 is still FAR better at this than any WotC product to date, but the core issue is that there are too many variables because how people actually run games is - by design! - not constrained. If a player happens to decide they want only vanilla options from 5e, you can load all that into Beyond: but even then, Beyond can't handle ALL the interactions between items, powers - oops I mean abilities, class features, etc. Roll20 gets much closer in play and it may even be possible with vanilla, but the tradeoff is doing more prepwork. But the further you step outside of vanilla, the more online tools can't keep up. And most of the time you can get "good enough" and that's fine; but it will never be 100% because you cannot programmatically account for everything everyone everywhere can make up.

Except that in combat, which is where 99.9% of these tools are used, there really aren't that many interactions that need to be handled. There really aren't THAT many ways to decide how to stick 'em with the pointy end. There really aren't THAT many ways to cast a spell that makes somebody die. Etc.

It's the out-of-combat stuff where that so-called "tactical infinity" actually manifests (it really isn't infinite there either, humans are shockingly predictable, repetitive, and similar to one another), but the people who design these VTTs know that. They know how pointless it is to try to capture that part within a digital space. That's why they never even try. Just as with 4e, the rules ACTUALLY DO "get out of the way". They say: "You know more about what you want from the non-combat than we do. So we're going to mostly avoid giving rules for that." (I say "mostly" because 4e did have SCs, but people act like they're some kind of horrible straightjacket imposition when they emphatically are not anything like that.)

 

[evilbob]

It isn't a meaningful time savings over an engaged group for the longer-combat editions (e.g. any given combat rarely take less than 20-30 min even with players who are engaged and know what they're doing), but because they've stripped out SO MUCH of the possible mechanical heft and engagement, it's 20-30 minutes of....mostly doing a lot of the exact same things over and over.

This is exactly my experience as well, time-wise.

Glad playing digitally is working for you! We're both talking broadly about different points there, and I'm sorry I wasn't more clear. I was specifically talking about combat, and 100% disagree with "there really aren't that many interactions that need to be handled," especially with 5.5. For example, I was disappointed when Beyond couldn't even do something as simple as add a vanilla weapon's extra damage dice to damage rolls automatically. Just imagine the hoops we'd have to jump through to get an entirely new class we made up to work! To expand what I meant: it's impossible to fully, 100% replicate what we do with pencil and paper on a computer all the way down to doing one thing to resolve any chosen action like you can on a table - especially when you start getting into some crazy houseruled stuff - because the options IRL are unconstrained and all computer programs have constraints. Infinity will always be larger than non-infinity - that's my "spicy take."

But talking about concentration reminded me of another thing that's frustrating about 5e: the complexity doesn't always translate into more choices! And I think that might be what EzekielRaiden was saying as well. Just because I have 35 spell options doesn't mean I actually have 35 choices: it means I only have about 5 choices, with 30 things that are just taking up mental space moment-to-moment. Once you've cast your concentration spell, your choices narrow dramatically. Similarly, you may have 10 superiority die options, but you're probably just going to knock an enemy prone 90% of the time, because that gives you advantage. All those other options are fun niche cases, but they ultimately don't always contribute to choice: but they do contribute to the mental tax you have to play the character each round.

 

[jgsugden]

I know we all like to dig into our opinions and defend them regardless of the facts ... but ...

There are DMs and players alike that are here to tell you that you can run a game under the 2024 rules without the game being tedious, monotonous, lagging or boring. That inherently means it is not an inherent flaw of the rule set. Once that is established, the question should shift from, "Is the game inherently tedious" to "what am I doing that is making it tedious that other groups are not seeing?" From my perspective, this rule set is no more tedious than 5E ... and there is a pretty balanced mix between things they improved and things they broke (Conjure Minor Elemental upcasts / Summon Undead + Poison condition for paralysis lock / etc...) I find that running 2024 is just a minor shift and house ruling some broken stuff until they errata the obviously broken problems. However, I have not found any sessions tedious in the new edition.

 

[tetrasodium]

This is exactly my experience as well, time-wise.

Glad playing digitally is working for you! We're both talking broadly about different points there, and I'm sorry I wasn't more clear. I was specifically talking about combat, and 100% disagree with "there really aren't that many interactions that need to be handled," especially with 5.5. For example, I was disappointed when Beyond couldn't even do something as simple as add a vanilla weapon's extra damage dice to damage rolls automatically. Just imagine the hoops we'd have to jump through to get an entirely new class we made up to work! To expand what I meant: it's impossible to fully, 100% replicate what we do with pencil and paper on a computer all the way down to doing one thing to resolve any chosen action like you can on a table - especially when you start getting into some crazy houseruled stuff - because the options IRL are unconstrained and all computer programs have constraints. Infinity will always be larger than non-infinity - that's my "spicy take."

But talking about concentration reminded me of another thing that's frustrating about 5e: the complexity doesn't always translate into more choices! And I think that might be what EzekielRaiden was saying as well. Just because I have 35 spell options doesn't mean I actually have 35 choices: it means I only have about 5 choices, with 30 things that are just taking up mental space moment-to-moment. Once you've cast your concentration spell, your choices narrow dramatically. Similarly, you may have 10 superiority die options, but you're probably just going to knock an enemy prone 90% of the time, because that gives you advantage. All those other options are fun niche cases, but they ultimately don't always contribute to choice: but they do contribute to the mental tax you have to play the character each round.

That's a new 5e exclusive problem 5e created and used concentration to paper over the gushing wound inflicted when it switched from vancian to neovancian in the name of simplicity. It could have been avoided by including a sidebar with slot progression and prep rules for standard vancian prep, but that would go against the idea of onetruewayism

 

[CacklinSlayers]

I often wonder if I worry too much about keeping my players engaged during combat. I constantly feel like I have to keep things moving. No pauses, no time to look up rules, just keep the flow going to hold their precious attention.

But the truth is, a lot of players are surprisingly patient. They’ll happily spend minutes leafing through their multi-page D&D Beyond sheets (which are MONSTROUS. It's shameful that this is often the first sheet new players play with). They have no problem waiting while their friends do the same, too.

Maybe I’m the impatient one?