NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DinoInDisguise" data-source="post: 9705724" data-attributes="member: 7045806">I voted no because I feel 5e needs less rules bloat, not more.[SPOILER="Rant on why I dislike the change."]I think OSR variants like Shadowdark get combat right. It's fast, brutal and decisive. Weapon masteries, especially ones that add rolls, are moving away from that. We risk turning combat into 3-4 hour chess matches and not the fast-paced action of a fight.In my experience, most players struggle with real-time decision-making, and the added micro-decisions these masteries bring often compound 5e’s pacing issues. The system isn’t crunchy enough to justify the slowdown, but it's too complex to move through quickly. It ends up in this awkward middle ground, with just enough friction to bog things down, and not enough depth to make it worthwhile.So we end up spending 2 hours on a minor fight, debating decisions that have no bearing on the outcome, all so we can claim we did more. But if we look at it from a more holistic perspective, we did less per minute because everyone taking twice as long to do anything. Each player only actually contributing every 35 minutes, so we just turned what in other systems would be 10 minutes of intense action, into an exercise in doom scrolling social media.And we do all of this so we can make, mostly, meaningless choices. That extra damage, or that prone condition, isnt going to change the outcome in 95% of fights. But the resulting decision tree will make everyone of those fights longer. It's the inconsequential rules bloat that 5e is famous for.But feel free to ignore me, as I've never been a fan of 5e's combat. But I think this is an example of how the 2024 revisions moved the system in the wrong direction. They should have cut the fat, not added more.[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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