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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6857969" data-attributes="member: 2067">I don't think your opinion is unusual - there's a lot of powergamers I know who are a little underwhelmed with 5e, for probably similar reasons (and with probably similar edition preferences)I think it's sometimes useful to talk about these in terms of play goals. What some powergamers hope to get out of a game can be very different than what other players hope to get out of a game, and they can conflict. By way of demonstration, here's what I see at work in your points.5e is swingier than 3e and 4e - the dice have a larger influence on the outcome of a fight than they did there. This can be a desirable thing, though - if your play goal is to use the dice to help fuel an interesting story, a high roll or a low roll is an interesting point in that story, and the unpredictability of the roll keeps everyone engaged in the outcome of it. What you roll matters in 5e, in part because "Everything went exactly as planned" isn't an interesting story or a tense moment. That can compete with the kind of mastery that some powergamers love to exhibit, because "everything went exactly as I planned, and I frickin' handed that encounter its butt on a silver platter" is a cool moment that increased variance kind of gets in the way of. The dice won't let you just be the frickin' master of this game. You also have to be lucky - something no amount of skill will ever fix.In as much as 5e hopes to appeal to a more "casual" audience, a high variability is a good thing - more woohoo! more arrgh, character-building matters less, etc. But the price it pays is that folks who want that kind of mastery don't get it as strongly as they would from 4e or 3e. Characters (and monsters, compared to 4e) drop faster in 5e, and even high-AC or high-HP characters can be killed by the lucky. This can be a desirable thing, though - if your goal is to keep monsters viable threats for more levels, giving a random group of goblins a chance to take down a 5-person part that is level 15 is something you want to support. So being able to totally outclass a monster is not something 5e wants on the table - you are ALWAYS vulnerable. It's also desirable if you want fast fights - you've gotta make every hit feel tense and risky. That can compete with one of the thrills of powergaming - being "untouchable" (or nearly so). Similar to the above, being able to ignore whatever enemies throw at you can be an awesome moment, a payoff for all the effort you put into balancing DEX with other scores and buying good armor and the like. For a more "casual" audience, that fragility is a good thing - another element of the arrgh to woo-hoo swing, and from the DM side, letting them apply more varied monsters and threats. But the price they pay is that for the powergamers, you can't get good enough that you push the system to its limits.If you're oriented on your own character,  yeah, playing support probably won't be satisfying in any e. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />That's something of a symptom of there being less options and less mastery overall in 5e. 5e doesn't rely on a bunch of character options that can be compared and contrasted, and its flexibility and DM judgement lends itself to less hard-and-fast guidelines. An optimization guide has less to say about making your Champion Fighter The Best than it did in 3e/4e. This can be good if what you want out of a game is to easily make an effective character. It doesn't help folks who love to optimize much, though.A continuation of 4e's tamp-down on spellcasting power. This is a good thing if you don't want spellcasters to dominate! It's not great for folks who are looking for a dominant strategy, though (especially coming from 3e). ....so, overall, we've got some trade-offs. Ultimately, I think this means that there's a niche that 5e's design has left open - there's an audience of mastery-focused players who would snarf up a 3e/4e style game that focused on skill and character-building strategies, because 5e doesn't fire as strongly on that. I'd recommend someone get all over that with an OGL, personally!</blockquote>

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