What 5e got wrong

[Bawylie]

What else they got wrong:

1.) 3 books (kudos, though to basic rules package)
2.) format & layout (indexes, tables, & references particularly)
3.) XP & encounter building (math is solid for encounter building & leveling but the explanations for encounter building are arcane. They also lack meaningful non-math difficulty modification and advice).
4.) Monster building (good system, bad explanation).
5.) adventure & campaign writing advice.
6.) lacking "modules" (over promised; under-delivered

Overall: great game, poorly explained.

 

[Sacrosanct]

You know what they got wrong? Not pleasing everyone. Seriously, what were they thinking?

 

[ccs]

Why is Initiative just dex which over values dex it should be based on the characters main stat to balance the initiative role just one mans opinion.

By main stat, do you mean;
A) the Stat that is generally implied - though never actually mandated by the book - to be most useful to a class?
B) Or is it the Stat that I put the highest # in for whatever reason
(Say I rolled randomly, going straight down the line. Or the character I envision needs more in x than he does in whatever his classes traditional favorite stat is.)
C) What if I somehow get another stat raised higher than whatever my "main" stat is? Do I now have a new main stat? Should my inititive be recalculated? If not, why are you punishing me by not letting me use my highest modifier like everyone else???
D) What happens when I multi-class?

Btw, please show me an example of how my 20 con would even apply to determing initiative.

Thanks.

 

[hejtmane]

By main stat, do you mean;
A) the Stat that is generally implied - though never actually mandated by the book - to be most useful to a class?
B) Or is it the Stat that I put the highest # in for whatever reason
(Say I rolled randomly, going straight down the line. Or the character I envision needs more in x than he does in whatever his classes traditional favorite stat is.)
C) What if I somehow get another stat raised higher than whatever my "main" stat is? Do I now have a new main stat? Should my inititive be recalculated? If not, why are you punishing me by not letting me use my highest modifier like everyone else???
D) What happens when I multi-class?

Btw, please show me an example of how my 20 con would even apply to determing initiative.

Thanks.

Hence I replied back it was a suggestion and we had a discussions where I said i can see that point of view and we talked about maybe allowing dex, wisdom or int to be used

Dex which is based on reaction

Wisdom experience and knowledge allow you to decipher weakness exploiting those weaknesses

INT you are smart and have a high understanding of tactics using that to your advantage

 

[TheCosmicKid]

This bears repeating. For example, a lot of people say INT is underpowered. This strikes me odd because we have a lot of puzzles and insight checks come up very often. So it really comes down to the DM style.

Insight is Wisdom based. And yes, Intelligence helps with puzzles. But every ability helps with some sort of obstacle -- it's just that most of them also provide some broader advantage. In 3E, Intelligence was just as useful for solving puzzles, but it also gave you precious precious skill points. And it was the key ability for the very important Search skill, which now RAW is yet another a function of the already-top-tier Perception. (I've houseruled it back to Investigation.)

So it's not just a matter of style. Whatever DM style you have, Intelligence has lost ground.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Insight is Wisdom based. And yes, Intelligence helps with puzzles. But every ability helps with some sort of obstacle -- it's just that most of them also provide some broader advantage. In 3E, Intelligence was just as useful for solving puzzles, but it also gave you precious precious skill points. And it was the key ability for the very important Search skill, which now RAW is yet another a function of the already-top-tier Perception. (I've houseruled it back to Investigation.)

So it's not just a matter of style. Whatever DM style you have, Intelligence has lost ground.

My bad, I meant investigation, not insight. I dunno, maybe our group spends a lot of time in out of combat things, like doing research into the area before we just march blinding into it. History, arcana, and investigation checks are very common in our games.

 

[Tony Vargas]

5e was a huge opportunity to do some modernizing to the traditional ruleset of dungeons and dragons.

No, no it wasn't. 5e is fundamentally a revival product, bringing back a fad from 30-20 years ago. It re-wound a lot of 'modernization,' fed hamburger into a meat-grinder in reverse and popped sacred cows out the other end with preternatural success.

It didn't just re-print the traditional ruleset with new art, though, so yes, there's some cool stuff preserved from d20 and even built upon, a little. But if you judge it by how 'modern' it is, you're really not being fair to it, at all.

However, my biggest complaint by far about 5e is how they made almost no updates to the traditional attribute system d&D has always used, which frankly has a lot of problems.

I can't imagine how that'd remotely have been on the table. 5e was absolutely committed to re-capturing the feel (and lapsed fans) of the 20th century editions of the game. Attributes are one of the few things that weren't terribly desecrated by the sacrilege of 3e & 4e modernization. They probably regarded them as some sort of untouchable 'third rail.' You could no more get away with changing the traditional attributes than you could switch from d20 to percentile. Be thankful they didn't go back to arbitrarily different bonuses for each stat, and kept the +1 mod per 2-above-10 formula (BTW, first introduced in the 4th ed of Gamma World, c1992, iirc).

Pillars of Eternity is a great example of how the 6-score system of D&D could have been easily updated into something more coherent, sensible, modern, and balanced.

For every rule between the covers of a D&D book, there is some other game some where that does that particular sort of rule way better - but D&D can't afford to go emulating that other game, because it's not D&D.

There's no such thing as a dump stat. Some stats may be more useful for some builds than other stats, but it comes much closer to being class-independent than D&D.

There are a lot of negatives to class system, but one of the positives is that they do simplify the decisions of character generation. Obvious 'prime' and 'dump' stats are part of that. 5e does go further than prior editions in trying to make each stat relevant to all characters, though, with all six being used for saving throws (however rarely half of them get used), and with proficiency/level bonuses being small enough, and DCs 'bounded' enough, that a decent stat mod is always helpful. So they really did make an effort, there.

I definitely think that they didn't streamline the magic system as much as they could have. Sure, it's way more forgiving in terms of spell preparation, but not more than 3E was more forgiving than 2E.

They could have ditched spell preparation for all classes, but they didn't, and that makes me sad.

In favor of what, exactly? Spontaneous casting of any spell on your class list?

There are thousands of RPGs out there, and they pretty much all use different attributes/stats/ability scores. You know why?

Copyright law? ;P

You know what they got wrong? Not pleasing everyone. Seriously, what were they thinking?

That'd've been funnier if pleasing everyone ("who ever loved D&D," that is - I guess if you're not pleased by 5e you never really loved D&D, you were just leading it on?) hadn't been a goal from the first announcement of 'Next.'

 

[Sacrosanct]

That'd've been funnier if pleasing everyone ("who ever loved D&D," that is - I guess if you're not pleased by 5e you never really loved D&D, you were just leading it on?) hadn't been a goal from the first announcement of 'Next.'

It was? I seem to recall them saying that they wanted to put elements from everyone's favorite edition into 5e. Which is not the same as saying they wanted to please everyone.

 

[Einlanzer0]

This bears repeating. For example, a lot of people say INT is underpowered. This strikes me odd because we have a lot of puzzles and insight checks come up very often. So it really comes down to the DM style.

This is fallacious reasoning. The usefulness of a stat should not be dependent on how much the DM is willing to handhold it. They need to be as balanced as possible in the hard, mechanical rules of the game.

 

[TwoSix]

My bad, I meant investigation, not insight. I dunno, maybe our group spends a lot of time in out of combat things, like doing research into the area before we just march blinding into it. History, arcana, and investigation checks are very common in our games.

Heh, research. "Blindly leaping into danger" is pretty much our party's motto in my own game.