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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8695879" data-attributes="member: 6877472">I think a lot of the criticism does come from a place of...well like Zardnaar said, not love, but affection.  5e has the potential to be a truly great system.  But you would expect, after 50 years of gaming, that all the warts and bugbears (not the monsters, lol, they are fine) would be smoothed out by now.In making their "greatest hits" edition, we got some of the obtuse, and even arcane quirks that every edition is known for, and sometimes the murkiness of why something works a particular way, or even how something is intended to function, is so unclear it reminds me a lot of AD&D.And the developers like to claim that this is on purpose, so that every table can approach a problem in a way that makes sense to them, and lets them have fun.But really.  You could do that in any edition, any game.  People play Uno and Monopoly wrong in households across the world, and that's just fine- it doesn't mean that Hasbro is suddenly going to stop printing a rulebook for Monopoly and say "you can just make up the rules!".But people accept that with D&D.  I've been playing ttrpg's since the 80's, and I'm going to be honest here.  I am not a profession game designer.  I have made it my mission to try and learn the rules of the games I play, and even try to understand why they are the way they are, so that if I do make a house rule, I'm hopefully making a good one.WotC are professional game designers.  They could have given us a better game, with less strange interactions, odd rules, and bizarre loopholes to deal with.  They chose not to, and told us to fix it, like we're Bethesda's modding community. But that has two problems.  One, we can never say that the game is as polished as one made by professionals (if we're all being honest).  And even then, even if it's perfect and fine for a given group, it makes it almost impossible to have a discussion about the game, because everyone plays it differently!Pick any thread about rules debates.  You have these long arguments about what the rules say you can and can't do, often over the most trivial things, because we're each interpreting what is "fun" and "fair" from our own experiences alone!One person might say, for example, that not letting a guy with a two handed sword take his hand off said sword to cast a spell, and then put it back to swing it without the Use an Object action is a proper ruling, because they feel it's unrealistic (as in, it affects their verisimilitude), or it's a balancing factor for powerful builds.Another might find tracking such things trivial, as you're rarely talking about a difference of more than a point or two of damage for doing the exact same thing with a versatile weapon like a longsword!But we argue these points because we don't have common ground, because the developers refused to clarify any kind of corner cases.Can I use an AoE spell while under the effects of Symbol of Hopelessness?  One guy says sure, it's RAW.  Another says it's against the spirit of the rules.  Who is right?Well the DM is, but this sort of thing means that a guy who plays at one table, who moves to another, might end up having to deal with a completely different set of rules when playing the same game! You might say, well, every table has house rules, but those are usually handed out in a six page document.  In this case, the DM doesn't consider it a house rule, because that's how he thinks the game operates!And that strikes me as being a ridiculous state of affairs in 2022.</blockquote>

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