D&D 5E "People complain, but don't actually read the DMG!" Which sections specifically?

[Parmandur]

Mmm... I would dare to say that "what you need" is almost always going to be in those 20-30 pages under "running the game" but before variant rules.

Perhaps it could have been better if those 20-30 pages had been put at the beginning of the book instead of after more than 200 pages with everything about worldbuilding and adventure design, both of which are optional activities for DMs, unlike being able to actually run the game.

Sure, but there is more sprinkled throughout, and after nearly.8 years it has become easy to suss out criticisms that are based in "I didn't read the DMG."

 

[prabe]

I don't see why not.

Fair enough. I really don't think there's supposed to be one single way so easy to apply. Especially since it's so easy to move around an opponent in 5e.

 

[Parmandur]

Fair enough. I really don't think there's supposed to be one single way so easy to apply. Especially since it's so easy to move around an opponent in 5e.

Crawford has said that they expect Rogues to be able to get Advantage every single Round of combat, so it is supposed to be easy for players to do.

 

[prabe]

Crawford has said that they expect Rogues to be able to get Advantage every single Round of combat, so it is supposed to be easy for players to do.

Did he say they expected Rogues to be able to get Advantage every round, or to be able to pull off Sneak Attack every round? The latter seems more like a reasonable expectation, and you don't need the former to do it.

 

[Parmandur]

Did he say they expected Rogues to be able to get Advantage every round, or to be able to pull off Sneak Attack every round? The latter seems more like a reasonable expectation, and you don't need the former to do it.

Both, actually. It was in response to some UA feedback about an ability granting Advantage "too easily."

 

[prabe]

Both, actually. It was in response to some UA feedback about an ability granting Advantage "too easily."

I agree that a Rogue should be able to Sneak Attack every round. I'm ... less convinced about Advantage.

As for Flanking ... It's so easy to move around an opponent that it becomes a costless way to get Advantage, making any way that requires any cost-benefit balancing irrelevant. (At least, in my experience, running with the Flanking rules.)

 

[Staffan]

I think the rule is supposed to be simple. I'm not sure it's supposed to be as easy to do as those optional Flanking rules make it.

I don't see why not.

In 3e, 4e, and Pathfinder 1 and 2, movement has a cost. In 3e/PF1, movement other than a 5' step takes a move action, and provokes attacks of opportunity. 4e is similar, except (IIRC) even a 5' step ("shift") costs a move action. And in PF2, movement would take at least one of your three actions per turn and might provoke an attack of opportunity, although they're not as common there. In addition, in all these games the benefit of flanking is +2 to hit (expressed as "combat advantage" in 4e and the opponent being "flat-footed" in PF2, which can be relevant because it means it doesn't stack with other things giving those things). In other words, flanking in each of those games is kind of hard to do, for a moderate reward.

But in 5e, movement is easy. Movement doesn't compete with your other actions, at least not as long as you don't move more than your speed. And movement doesn't provoke attacks of opportunity, unless you're leaving an opponent's reach. These are mostly good things, as it lends itself to more mobile combat. But if you add flanking to that, you basically get free advantage on melee attacks. That very much devalues other means of getting advantage, such as the barbarian's Reckless Attack.

 

[Charlaquin]

I just took up the book again to browse through it, and it took me only 20 minutes.
I guess I am not the target audience for this book. Though I also don't complain that the game "does not have rules for this". (Only that the rules for various things are anemic and every halfway decent GM should know better than the writers.)

The big issue I encounter is that when I read a page, I don't feel like I found any rules. Occasionally there are suggestions for alternative rules that you can use to replace rules in the PHB if you want, but nothing that seems like it's an actual mechanic of the default game.

That’s because most of what’s in the book is not rules of the game but guidance on how to run the game. The are rules here and there as well, (see, for example, pages 242-245, which are rules for exploration and social encounters), but that’s not what the majority of the book is.

Someone mentioned the assumptions for XP.
The assumptions stated by the book are that party can easily handle eight medium and hard encounters per day. As nearly everyone keeps saying, nobody seems to play that way. I certainly have no clue how I could cram that much combat into one day without the game turning into one giant bloodbath. And even if you follow that, it takes 13 days of such adventuring to get characters to 8th level. Which is frankly just absurd.

I play that way. It works very well. Keep most encounters simple, and set the expectation for your players to be familiar with their abilities and pay attention during other players’ turns.

Switching to the rule to make short rests a night and long rest a week, it would turn into something like maybe a fight per day, and reaching 8th level in three or four months. Get in some more days without fights and you could maybe stretch it to a year. That still seems really hard to justify as sensible fiction.

You can justify anything if you get in the habit of looking for how things can be instead of looking for why they can’t.

From what I can tell, the rules for giving treasure are literally "whatever you feel like seems rewarding for the players."

There are extensive treasure tables, both for individual monsters and treasure hordes, and guidance on how many treasure hordes of what tier a group should encounter over the course of a campaign.

 

[Parmandur]

In 3e, 4e, and Pathfinder 1 and 2, movement has a cost. In 3e/PF1, movement other than a 5' step takes a move action, and provokes attacks of opportunity. 4e is similar, except (IIRC) even a 5' step ("shift") costs a move action. And in PF2, movement would take at least one of your three actions per turn and might provoke an attack of opportunity, although they're not as common there. In addition, in all these games the benefit of flanking is +2 to hit (expressed as "combat advantage" in 4e and the opponent being "flat-footed" in PF2, which can be relevant because it means it doesn't stack with other things giving those things). In other words, flanking in each of those games is kind of hard to do, for a moderate reward.

But in 5e, movement is easy. Movement doesn't compete with your other actions, at least not as long as you don't move more than your speed. And movement doesn't provoke attacks of opportunity, unless you're leaving an opponent's reach. These are mostly good things, as it lends itself to more mobile combat. But if you add flanking to that, you basically get free advantage on melee attacks. That very much devalues other means of getting advantage, such as the barbarian's Reckless Attack.

So, don't use the option. Doesn't matter much h either way.

 

[Charlaquin]

I think my issues with the 5e dmg can be epitomized by the section on experience points. Here's a typical problem: a new DM wants to award experience points for the social and exploration pillars of play. "How should I do that?" they ask the internet. Well, there's a section in the DMG all about awarding experience points! Here's what it says on that topic (p. 261)

Are those sentences of advice helpful? Are they specific to 5e in any way? If our hypothetical new dm just decided to make up a system of how to award non combat xp, what are the chances it would look exactly like this, but be better and more detailed?

Also why did our new dm not find these "rules" to begin with? Let's see where they are located in the book: they are in the chapter "running the game," which for some reason is chapter 8, near the end of the book. The section on awarding xp--a central facet of the DMs role--is located after rules for chases, siege equipment, diseases, poisons, and madness. Those are all not only not essential, but they very well may never come up in most campaigns.

The thing that probably frustrates me most about the dmg (and I realize this is an odd thing to be annoyed about) is the layout. Let's look at the actual page:

View attachment 148963


WTH is going on here? Instead of just fitting all the "rules" for experience points onto one page, they split it over two pages (the second page is half text and half art). Moreover, the section is actually split by the "madness" tables, which are much more prominent on the page. The 5e DMG is full of layout like this. It's like they just copied and pasted the text into their layout software and called it a day. It might not seem like a big deal, but it really affects the usability of the book, and makes it so that rules and advice (which, imo, is often half-baked to begin with) gets lost on the page.

So it might not be that people are being "lazy" in not reading the dmg. Rather it's a hard book to read and reference, the text is difficult to quickly parse, information is scattered and poorly organized, and pieces of good advice or helpful rules are lost amid all of the anodyne suggestions.
/rant

Nobody claimed the DMG was well presented or organized.