Yaarel
🇮🇱 🇺🇦 He-Mage
I enjoyed the YouTube by Indestructoboy. He voices his love for D&D 5e, and his frustration with it as a DM.
A central point is, 5e is easy for players to play, but less easy for DMs to DM. All of the mechanical burdens are on the DM. The players can do pretty much whatever they want. The DM has to figure out how to make this freeform workable as a game. Different DMs have different feelings about this burden. Some DMs ignore mechanical rules, with a style that can feel arbitrary or inconsistent. Other DMs defacto rewrite a new game from scratch. A complaint is, 5e is rules-light for players. But it remains rules-heavy for DMs.
Indestructoboy calls for WotC to give more products that make the 5e DMs job easier.
The DM needs solid, reliable, and easy to understand, rules for creating new combat encounters. Relatedly, there must be a clear way to know exactly how much more powerful one magic item is than an other magic item. Hopefully, the anniversary DMs Guide will revamp and recallibrate these mechanical issues for ease of use.
Personally, I hope all things in the DMs Guide evaluate according to their appropriate character level. Whether a powerful creature, a powerful magic item, a powerful spell, a powerful feat or boon, a powerful race or class feature such as at-will flight, need to assign to a specific character level where the DM can be confident that it is unlikely to imbalance the gaming engine. If a DM wants to introduce a monster whose level is way too high, that is fine and can be fun on occasion, but the disparities in level should inform the DM how disruptive the situation is likely to be. Similarly, if the DM wants to grant powerful magic items to players, the mechanical rules need to inform the DM what the DM is getting oneself into. Some things can be blurry and refer to "tiers". Even here, I prefer each tier to refer to a useful cluster of levels, namely 1-4, 5-8, 9-12, 13-16, and 17-20. The 9-12 is important because it works like neither level 5 nor level 16. These tiers correspond to when the profiency bonus improves, so there is a real mechanical upgrade for each of these tiers. An adventure is an example of something that can target a tier, rather than a specific level.
As far as I can tell. 5e doesnt need more rules. It needs the rules that it already has to work better. If character level becomes a universal measure to measure everything from characters to monsters to magic items, then have a single metric makes the DMs job much easier. Of course, the assigned levels actually need to work reliably, mechanically.
