D&D General Let's list/complain about things we don't like

[Lanefan]

LOL the stuff I don't like... ok let's get on with it. CAVEAT: My entire focus is WotC material (in general) and 5E. I never had any complaints about B/X (BECMI) or AD&D (1E or 2E).

All the "non-tradition" races.
Sorcerer and warlock classes.
All the subclasses.
The over abundance of features.
Feats and ability score increases.
Hit point bloat.
Damage bloat.
How easy it is to hit creatures.
The lack of truly scary effects (level draining, etc.)
How common magic is.
The insane amount of pointless spells.
The creatures which aren't worth using.
Too many variant rules which should be standard.
Lack of rules in favor of "rulings".
And probably more...

A good, fine list. But please allow me to add:

Ease of hit point recovery (just one long rest and you're all good to rock!)
Lack of mechanical reflection of physical and mental differences among species (i.e. stat adjusts decoupled from species)
PCs not being representative of their own species (goes with previous)
Too big a mechanical gap between commoners and 1st-level characters
Too-fast levelling
Milestone or story-based levelling (as opposed to xp)
Group levelling (as opposed to individual xp where PCs earn their own levels and bump at different times)
Point-buy and array stat generation
Skimpy treasure at low levels
No way of destroying or breaking items or possessions, whether magic or not
Ranged healing
Combat casting and other things that make casting easier and more reliable than it should be
Lack of focus on downtime (though the bastion rules in '24 are at least a nod this way)
And probably more...

 

[ezo]

A good, fine list. But please allow me to add:

Ditto! Nice additions.

Off-hand I don't think there is anything there I would disagree with.

 

[Dausuul]

Ability scores.

And I don't mean the current set of six. I mean the whole mechanic. They are a blight on the game, especially since 3E when they became integrated into absolutely freaking everything.

Imagine how much simpler it would be to learn and teach the game, how many options for character concepts would open up, if you just didn't have to consider them.

 

[tetrasodium]

Ability scores.

And I don't mean the current set of six. I mean the whole mechanic. They are a blight on the game, especially since 3E when they became integrated into absolutely freaking everything.

Imagine how much simpler it would be to learn and teach the game, how many options for character concepts would open up, if you just didn't have to consider them.

Going to strongly agree & add to this. I started with ad&d2e☆. I didn't find the shift from +/-1 at ~6 & ~15 to 12 & 8 all that problematic in 3.5, probably because the math was so much more tightly tuned & magic items better supported variance there, but god do I miss the days when minmaxed ability scores were not considered to be so critical.

☆or maybe redbox, we played both around the same time

 

[Jack Daniel]

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[Swarmkeeper]

It's not a plus thread anymore so go on ahead and continue that thought!

Ok then - people constantly complaining about editions/games they rarely, if ever, have played.

 

[Deset Gled]

Am I going to have to look this up due to morbid curiosity?
Is it going to be a train wreck?

The original blog post that started it is closer to mediocre than a train wreck, when judged as a blog post. The bigger problem is the way discussing it snowballed in internet forums about RPG theory. Allegorically, imagine if there was a sizeable group of people that regularly referenced and discussed Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 in forums about the art and history of cinema. As if it were the next Shawshank Redemption or Pulp Fiction.

I've never really understood how the essay was popularized; maybe someone else can give some more insight.

 

[Jack Daniel]

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[Thomas Shey]

My pet peeve is the disdain held by wide swaths of the community for the use of (any edition of) D&D as a universal system.

Whenever I encounter this, my response is always thus.

You can pound nails with a wrench, but that doesn't require me to think its the right tool for the job.

 

[Thomas Shey]

If I was to start, it'd be so much basic stuff that it adds up to "Not really a fan of most mechanical decisions core to games in the D&D adjacent sphere" and I no longer see much point in getting that far into the weeds.