payn
Glory to Marik
Agreed, mostly. I think 5E is more flexible than folks give it credit. Part of the awkward bits of 5E is around having SAD and MAD classes, as well as, short rest and long rest ones. Those combinations make a game design stretched in my opinion. It makes published adventure design more difficult since you have no idea what the party make up will be, and as noted, it can be quite varied in 5E. Though, it offers a wide assortment of play styles and adventures too.My experience playing and reading 5E adventures suggests that it works best with scene (or perhaps to avoid confusion - encounter) based design built around set piece that are encounters placed within a branching (but ideally well pruned) pre-defined grand narrative.
I don't think this distinction or these limitations/styles take away from 5E as a system (or OD&D for that matter), and I am not trying to suggests that 5E fans should play dungeon crawls, even using X or Y rules or systems. However, I do think that one of the places we suffer as a hobby is trying to claim that a games can be all things at once, rather then acknowledging that different rule sets and play cultures aim at different things.
Again the questions I find compelling are:
What form of adventure design best supports the particular system of 5E (or 5E clones/alikes) and its preferred play style?
Why wouldn't this be the WotC style "epic"?
Why would it instead be something akin to the 1980's TSR module system of drop in location based adventures (or even mini-portal realm adventures like Castle Amber...)?
I dont think the hobby suffers at all. I think folks say things like that becasue they dont like things they dont prefer. The internet has taught folks to make up arguments for why things they dont prefer are bad instead of just another option.