Most frustrating quirk of 5E?

[guachi]

The index.

The "we know our weapons tables are weak, so here are 50 more spells".

 

[Umbran]

The font size.

Really. Getting old enough to *not quite* need bifocals makes the book really annoying in that tiny font. Especially because you aren't always playing int he best lit rooms...

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

- The general impression than the base druid class' features revolve around the Moon druid and its superior Wildshape while not doing much for the other circle. Its such an important feature of the class but only one circle (maybe two with the Spore druid) really do something with it.

 

[DM Howard]

I think my frustrating quirk of 5E would have to be how little is available in regards to in-store products is almost directly inverse to how popular the game is compared to past editions.

The font size.

Really. Getting old enough to *not quite* need bifocals makes the book really annoying in that tiny font. Especially because you aren't always playing int he best lit rooms...

I wear glasses and contacts anyway, but being only 29 I can still feel your pain and wish the font was a little bigger.

 

[Blue]

Putting the balance point between at-will, short-rest, and long-rest classes way out at the 6-8 encounter mark.

Too few encounters, and those with the limited-but-more-powerful resources clean up. (And doing that sometimes and doing the other way at other times would be okay, but no-one ever regularly exceeds eight-encounter-days.)

Not enough or too many short rests and that whole category is borked in terms of balance vs. the other recovery models, and because of the nature of short rests when you can be doing things like riding in a wagon some modes of play will offer lots of them, while others like a sneaky infiltration where you can't waste an hour will offer none. At least this sometimes you have feast and sometimes you have famine, and as long as the DM does both it averages out. (But they don't tell a DM that.)

I like narratively to be able to use in different lengths as well as fit to player agency where they miss or take on more encounters, and if was balanced around something like 4 encounters per long rest so that sometimes I'm over, sometimes under, it would work a lot better.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Full healing after a long rest mostly.

Personally, I would consider that more of a "game-breaking flaw" than a "frustrating quirk"; but that's just me.

If I keep my complaints to the one-point level, I would probably go with Dexterity-to-damage. I can buy that an air elemental's windy pseudo-pod is as accurate as a an earth elemental's club-arm, but I can't buy that it hits as hard. Further along that same note, it bugs me how much monks rely on Dexterity to the complete exclusion of Strength, when the classic archetypal monks like Yang Fang Leiden and Sabin Rene Figaro were super-strength powerhouses.

 

[Bawylie]

Every class is a caster.

Used to be a criticism of 4E I hear often enough but now it’s literally true - you have to go out of your way to NOT cast spells.

 

[DQDesign]

1. The armor table. I mean it's incredibly ludicrous and arbitrary to begin with (why is ringmail now a heavy armor, for one example). But the cherry on top is that they got rid of banded armor (which historically existed), but kept splint armour (that didn't as a suit, and only then occasionally as pieces that covered limbs).

why should a fantasy game care about historical accuracy?

 

[Ragmon]

Spell descriptions dont indicate which class can cast them.

Races receiving features that overlap with class features, such as weapon and armor proficiency also the goblins Nimble Escape (and not receiving compensation in the case of overlapping)

 

[Sacrosanct]

Every class is a caster.

Used to be a criticism of 4E I hear often enough but now it’s literally true - you have to go out of your way to NOT cast spells.

yeah, I have to admit I thought about that as well. I think another one would be how they organized the spell list.