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

[Mannahnin]

Hiding in combat, for ranged characters.

To be clear, I'm not saying it doesn't do what you say it does, just that the designers almost certainly knew that.

Hiding costs an action (or a Bonus Action for L2+ Rogues) though, and is situationally-limited based on terrain and so forth.

 

[Parmandur]

Hiding costs an action (or a Bonus Action for L2+ Rogues) though, and is situationally-limited based on terrain and so forth.

Yeah, and flanking requires getting into position, which can be complicated by the DM (see also, any combat in Critical Role).

Don't like it, don't use it. I don't, but I use TotM anyways and don't need the noise. My point is thst is not "half-baked," in that the designers know what it will do in practice.

 

[billd91]

Attacking someone who is blind, paralyzed, prone within five feet of the attacker, restrained, or stunned. Attacking while invisible.

Sure - but chances are it took something to get them into that condition in the first place. That would be the "cost" here. Following up on something that was a cost with another attack isn't really a cost-free advantage.

 

[jmartkdr2]

Hiding in combat, for ranged characters.

To be clear, I'm not saying it doesn't do what you say it does, just that the designers almost certainly knew that.

I'm not as convinced - it really doesn't feel like a well-thought-out or thoroughly tested option. Being in the DMG as an optional rule gives me the impression that it was just where they were with the concept at time of publishing, and they already knew it wasn't good enough to make a general rule. (Which is why it isn't in the PHB)

On the other hand - designer intent doesn't matter in the end. The effect on play does - and in my experience, it makes the game less tactical and makes you hit a lot more often. For myself these are generally negative, but I have played with flanking for advantage in play and it doesn't 'ruin' the game or anything so dramatic. It just pushes the game away from Combat as War and more towards Combat as Performance.

 

[Voadam]

I use the 5e optional rule of flanking gives advantage. It gives out a common situation for melee people to get advantage and favors the group with more melee combatants. I want to favor melee combat a bit and have combat go quickly so making melee combatants hit more works for my preferences.

The costs are the movement and positioning which are commonly achievable in open areas and tougher to achieve if there are walls that can block paths of specific flanking position or if there are multiple combatants who can block paths or threaten attacks of opportunity for maneuvering to a flanking position, or threaten to set up their own flank if you spread out to flank a specific foe.

I still see the barbarians in my games use reckless abandon tactically a lot and I throw in narrative advantage and disadvantage as seems appropriate.

 

[overgeeked]

Yeah, and flanking requires getting into position, which can be complicated by the DM (see also, any combat in Critical Role).

Don't like it, don't use it. I don't, but I use TotM anyways and don't need the noise. My point is thst is not "half-baked," in that the designers know what it will do in practice.

It is a really bizarre refrain. "I don't like it" is somehow transformed into "the designers don't know what they're doing".

 

[overgeeked]

Absolutely.

I reference the 5e DMG and the 1e DMG a lot. The 1e DMG I have on PDF with bookmarks which makes it much easier to get to sections I am trying to find than flipping through either in hardcopy. I remember in the 80s having read the 1e DMG enough to sort of remember where some things were when flipping around but it was often not quick or easy.

The 5e one is not the easiest to find stuff either. I can find specific magic items fairly easily because it is an alphabetically organized subsection of the book that covers a bunch of pages, but most other topics take a bunch to find where you are and where you want to go from there when flipping around.

I found the 4e rulebooks' superior and clean layout made finding stuff easier.

I vastly prefer the 4E books' layout and design all the way down to the fonts.

Any more I prefer to make a ruling that's consistent with my view of the fiction rather than worrying about what exactly the books say. If you're running 5E, 95% of the time it's going to be some version of "make an ability check with modifiers vs a DC". The specifics are almost irrelevant outside a few edge cases. The majority of checks will be skills, next saves, then ability alone. The majority of DCs will be between 10-20, any lower and there's basically no point in rolling.

 

[Parmandur]

It is a really bizarre refrain. "I don't like it" is somehow transformed into "the designers don't know what they're doing".

Yeah, for real.

On the format front, I don't think it's an accident, though, that the one person fired after the release of the care books is the editor responsible for layout and the index.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm not as convinced - it really doesn't feel like a well-thought-out or thoroughly tested option. Being in the DMG as an optional rule gives me the impression that it was just where they were with the concept at time of publishing, and they already knew it wasn't good enough to make a general rule. (Which is why it isn't in the PHB)

Again, people complained about the lack of flanking option in the open playtest, and WotC said they weren’t going to include flanking by default because flanking is difficult to use without a grid and they didn’t want a grid to be an expectation. They suggested those who wanted a flanking rule grant advantage for it. That’s the reason it’s an optional rule in the DMG; because it’s something WotC was well aware a lot of players wanted, but they had a specific design reason they didn’t want it to be a rule in the base game.

A lot of the optional rules in the DMG are like that - slower natural healing and the resting variants are the same way. There are also some optional rules in there that were default rules at one point in the playtest, but feedback showed that most players didn’t like it - proficiency dice and healer’s kit dependency come to mind.

The optional rules that strike me as half-baked are the ones that were never (to my knowledge) in the playtest or requested by playtesters. Honor and Sanity scores, for example.

On the other hand - designer intent doesn't matter in the end. The effect on play does - and in my experience, it makes the game less tactical and makes you hit a lot more often. For myself these are generally negative, but I have played with flanking for advantage in play and it doesn't 'ruin' the game or anything so dramatic. It just pushes the game away from Combat as War and more towards Combat as Performance.

I agree that flanking has undesirable outcomes on play in 5e. But, I don’t think that’s evidence it wasn’t well thought-out. Rather, I think they thought it out quite well because it was something a lot of their player base wanted, and they came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t play well, so they left it out of the base game but included it as an “optional rule” to satisfy the folks who were adamant that the game needed it.

 

[Yora]

A bit late now, but this discussion makes me wonder why nobody ever tried making a fan-made "Dungeon Master's Handbook", made by people who actually run games, to teach people how to run games.