D&D General Things That Bug You

[Mind of tempest]

The reason why rogues and thieves (and clerics) became more martially proficient was the forced and protected roles. You get the LFG problems of MMOs at the table. And if you rolled in order for stats....


I've always that that Bows should be the ultimate ranged attacker but be very Dex and STR intensive. A bowman, a longbow fighter, archer elf, or long ranged ranger would be feared as their volley of high damage shots would take people out from afar. But you would need high Dex and Str to unlock it.

Crossbows and throwing weapons would be the easy mode of range attack available to those without both good Strength and Dexterity

interesting.

 

[Stormonu]

I think you meant @Lanefan. I don't necessarily disagree with them, but it wasn't on my list; most video games do it too. Guess I've just gotten used to it.

Oops! You're right. I got the beards mixed up.

 

[JEB]

All 5E specific (and nitpicky):

• Monsters of a given CR almost always having less HP (i.e. a lower Defensive CR) than the DMG says they should, in that table in the back. You should be able to just look at that table for, say, CR 5, and pull the stats across the board, and have it compete with official CR 5 monsters without adjustments... but that's almost never true.
• Only providing official character races that are comparable in size and power to the core races, so that anyone who wants to play a pixie or a giant or a mind flayer or the like is totally reliant on homebrew for guidelines.
• That paladins can start at level 1 without first picking an oath. What the heck is a paladin without an oath supposed to represent?
• Rogues still having Use Magic Device. Replace it with something more generically rogue-y, please. (Use Magic Device would be fine as a feat, though.)
• Too many creatures have darkvision, including most PC races. (But I don't know that I really want low-light vision or ultravision or whatever back, so I'm pretty sure I'm just being a whiner here.)
• Lists of spells for monsters that I have to look up separately, instead of being concisely provided in the stat block. (Exception: Having lists of spells in statblocks for monsters or NPCs that are actually supposed to be casting spells, like wizard NPCs, is fine.

EDIT: Had my complaint about CR backwards.

 

[Burnside]

I was eight in 1999 and I still say module

You see this?! Just look what you’re doing to the children!

 

[dave2008]

Hit Points: I actually really like the abstraction of hit points, but I also want some real meat points too.

Armor/AC: again, I like the abstraction of AC, but I also want some real damage reduction from armor.

Those are the 2 things we house rule in every edition we have played since 1e.

 

[Mind of tempest]

most of the player's handbook races are just dull and non-player handbook races just lack proper setting integration.

 

[Manbearcat]

Precious GMs

Passive players

Opaque, GM-facing resolution mechanics

Settings that orient the game around NPCs

Sessions without meaningful conflict

Fiddly, yet ineffective, Classes/Features

 

[dave2008]

All 5E specific (and nitpicky):

• Monsters of a given CR almost always having way more HP (i.e. a higher Defensive CR) than the DMG says they should, in that table in the back. You should be able to just look at that table for, say, CR 5, and pull the stats across the board, and have it compete with official CR 5 monsters without adjustments... but that's almost never true.

I disagree with this. The table from the DMG almost always has more hit points and higher DPR per CR than the MM monsters. That is then balanced by the fact the table typically has lower AC and to hit bonuses. I also find you can just pick a CR from the table and use those stats for an add-hock monster and it works fine. The issue is when you introduce the special features that complicate CR without taking them into account.

Examples:

Monster	CR	MM Hit Points	DMG Hit Points
Bugbear	1	27	71-85
Air Elemental	5	90	131-145
Stone Golem	10	178	206-220
Purple Worm	15	247	281-295
Pit Fiend	20	300	356-400
Marut	25	432	581-625
Tarrasque	30	676	806-850

 

[Rob Kuntz]

Glad to see Alignment can even confound the oldest of oldskool.

I had to do with separating game from world. Alignment, as I see it proposed, is less an individualized Fantasy world concept than it is a severely abstracted gamist/design-oriented system which is embedded in the rules but which then dictates a strict set of (median) World-oriented and unalterable circumstances, whereas the truth from differentiated World feedback is way more granular and indistinct by comparison. I posed many interrogations of it (some in extremis) before nixing it totally and redefining it in 1975. As-is it works if you accept it as a design and are less concerned with defining the World as a real one based upon individuated world tenets as defined by singular histories and not by shoe-horned one-size-fits-all philosophies. YMMV. It works for me.

 

[RobJN]

Dexterity adding to ranged weapon damage. Strength, if its thrown, sure, that'll fly. But Dex? No.