D&D 5E What are the "True Issues" with 5e?

[fluffybunbunkittens]

If the fluff doesn't match the rules, something has to change.

That we can agree on. DnD worlds should be written so they act in the way rules present them as working.

Ridiculous carrying weights, how damage is healed, falling only being a danger if you haven't been to the goblin caves at least once, etc

 

[Ruin Explorer]

no he didn’t, he said the gods intervened to help them (favored by the gods)

The end result is the same. It genuinely doesn't matter which is causing it, but this a setting where men and women have equal upper body strength and equal peak capacities, where humans can scale 30ft walls in 6 seconds in full armour with a backpack on, where the average human can leap a 10ft gap utterly reliably, where humans can sleep off any injury that doesn't kill or disease them, and so on.

If the god working up a sweat 24-7 by constantly monitoring humans to ensure they can do these things, or have delegated it to the celestial bureaucracy of making sure humans are badasses, it doesn't really make any difference, because the de facto impact is, humans can do these things.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm not really engaging in hyperbole - you asked for something else to be explained as well, of a similar nature. At some point you have to start trusting that the capabilities asserted to characters in the game are the capabilities they have, and work back from there, rather than saying "Wrestle an ogre, obviously impossible!", which I know you aren't doing in actual 5E games, which does make your position purely rhetorical.

In my games, if someone does something humans aren't physically capable of doing, there's an explanation for it. The fact that the current edition of D&D from WotC refuses to provide one is a weakness in the game.

Nothing rhetorical about it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That we can agree on. DnD worlds should be written so they act in the way rules present them as working.

Ridiculous carrying weights, how damage is healed, falling only being a danger if you haven't been to the goblin caves at least once, etc

Sure. I'd rather change the rules than the fluff, but it works better either way.

 

[Campbell]

The things high level D&D characters routinely do are just not consistent with the idea that their peak athleticism is the equivalent of an Olympic athlete. A giant has several times the mass of a gorilla. Here in meatspace you would be positively insane to engage in mortal combat against a gorilla. Much less to face the likes of giants, dragons, mariliths, djinn and fey lords on a regular basis. Particularly if you actually want to portray such legendary creatures in their full majesty.

There are plenty of games where a human is a human is a human. In RuneQuest fighting a giant without massively skewing things in your favor would be insane for instance. D&D has just never been that game (by the actual rules of the game).

 

[Micah Sweet]

The end result is the same. It genuinely doesn't matter which is causing it, but this a setting where men and women have equal upper body strength and equal peak capacities, where humans can scale 30ft walls in 6 seconds in full armour with a backpack on, where the average human can leap a 10ft gap utterly reliably, where humans can sleep off any injury that doesn't kill or disease them, and so on.

If the god working up a sweat 24-7 by constantly monitoring humans to ensure they can do these things, or have delegated it to the celestial bureaucracy of making sure humans are badasses, it doesn't really make any difference, because the de facto impact is, humans can do these things.

Causes always matter, or verisimilitude is broken.

 

[Minigiant]

5E should, if they'd have sense, as part of the "apology edition" thing, have reverted to 2E-like magical items. But it did not. So we're as likely to see a headband granting 19 INT as we are gloves granting 19 STR or whatever, and that means the magic items that were specialized in supporting martials are gone.

It is even worse.

The older editions made it were some other the best items were only usalabe by classes with martial weapons. Combined that with the vastly better combat stats of a martials, it was "smart party tactics and strategy" to give the warriors the magic axe, magic armor, flying items etc. Because if things ever came down to fighting, you needed the best buffed warrior you can field. And its' not like your wizard could wield a magic axe..

But in 5e, the combat stats of a nonwarrior is not that far from the warriors and some of them can use the better magic armor and weapons. So parties share evenly instead of "Build a Thor/Superman".

 

[billd91]

Nope, and honestly, @Baron Opal II's argument completely destroys yours here, just rolls over it like a steamroller. The removal of magic items completely screws martials without harming casters in the least.

Nobody's removed magic items from the game at all. They're just no longer part of the necessary upgrade. Fighters still have access to them like they always had. But as far as the magic items go, +1 weapons are only uncommon so they're not that hard to find in a treasure hoard, on random tables, and affordable via downtime. Wands are considerably curtailed compared to 3e days. Good armor isn't hard to find on the treasure tables either (consider adamantine armor being uncommon and offering immunity to crits). And most magic weapons and armor don't even require attunement slots.
I'm not seeing the problem here.

 

[Micah Sweet]

What fluff doesn't match here?

There's no fluff saying "these humans are Earth humans". There's no mismatch unless you make up that they are and assert it on that impossible-to-support basis.

Why would you assume that a species labeled "human" is fundamentally different from any real life human? In what media is that true without explanation?

 

[mamba]

The end result is the same. It genuinely doesn't matter which is causing it

I agree, the end result is the same, but in one case the human is what we understand a human to be, and in the other case it is not.

Gygax sided with humans being humans, not some superhero species that due to some weird coincidence has the same name