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

[M_Natas]

And when it doesn’t? When the fun doesn’t outweigh the chore? What then?

So far what I have seen the most complains about 5e is the opposite. Not to much chore but it being to easy and boring.

• Like Wilderness exploration. It is not really a challenge. Why is it not a challenge? Because those People play without incumberance, without the tracking of mundane ressources, without the rules for drinking and eating, removing the survival aspect - a pillar of Wilderness exploration.
• Like combat. (Inexperienced) DMs use the combat guidelines in the DMG, but not enforcing the Adventure Days recommended 6 to 8 medium encounters and then they and the players complain, that battle is to easy. Which it is if you have only one or two medium encounters a day.

And now the 5e designers do it to. Like on the really bad spelljammer box set - the Astral Sea is the most boring stuff ever. You don't need food, drink, you don't need to navigate. You just think hard and arrive. You maybe have a random encounter in-between but that's it.
I mean, yeah, the 2e phlogistan is corny, but at least it was exciting.
In 5e spelljammer, they removed any challenge of travel between the crystal spheres (and the crystal spheres itself, making it more boring).

Players think, that they want it easie4. That they don't want a challenge. But the moment they turn on the cheat codes and get unlimited money in Fallout and maximum Stats in skyrim, they quit the game because it got boring. Like whenever players realise that the DM will not kill their characters no matter what, the game stops being fun.

Without challenge there is no game. A game needs obstacles. Without challenging parts D&D devolves into 5 people sitting at a table telling each other how great their characters are. Even for 5 year olds that is only fun for maybe 10 minutes.

And that seems to be the main problem with 5e and the people playing it - by itself 5e is not very challenging. And then people remove "chore" rules they don't like, making it even less challenging.

I never saw any post here or in any other D&D forum/social media group that people complained that D&D is to hard/challenging, except for maybe levels 1 and 2, which are actually the most fun levels to play but are also the most skipped levels.

I agree that the current encumberance version may not be the best, but if you remove it from the game, you need to account for it, because it removes aspects of the game. Encumberance interacts with many parts of the game, from how much food you can carry for your Wilderness exploration to how much loot you can carry back to town to what battle gear your Strength 6 halfling can actually carry to can you carry your ally out of the danger zone. Without encumberance and ressource tracking Wilderness exploration stops becoming a challenge, combat gets easier, looting gets easier and so on.

That is the game mechanic aspect of the game.

The second aspect is the immersion in into the world.
One other big complain I regularly stumble upon is the lack of player immersion. That they just don't care about the world and the people that live within and just go around murder hoboing ...

And tracking ressources and encumberance helps (there are other parts, too) with the immersion.
Every time you tick of an arrow from your equipment list it puts you into the world it makes the game world a little bit more real. Because, yes of course the quiver gets emptier when I fire an arrow. That's how real life works. The world becomes a little bit more relatable. It is the little mundane aspects that makes it believable that I'm currently a halfling wizard who's getting roped into a civil war between a mage academy who controls the city and the magical mafia who wants to control the city.
Immersion into the world is broken, when this halfling would run around with 10 battleaxes on their back.
If you remove the mundane stuff it becomes harder to immerse the players into the world.

 

[M_Natas]

See below...

How so? The characters are in theory inhabitants of a world as real to them as ours is to us, right?

With all due respect to your late wife (condolences, by the way), gardening is a hobby with many different moving parts and I'd be willing to bet big money there were aspects of gardening she really liked doing and other aspects she did only because she had to. I say this on the basis of having known other gardeners (my mother among them, long ago) for whom this was invariably true: some parts of gardening were fun, other parts a chore, and the sum total was an enjoyable hobby.

I would even say without the chore parts it would be less fun. Because doing something that feels hard (if it's fun it's not feeling hard) gives you a good feeling. Going to the Gym is hard. It is a chore. Bit after you finish it you feel better. You accomplished something.

By the same token I quite enjoy DMing; but there's certain aspects of prep and-or follow-up that I neither like nor enjoy doing, and that I do only because I have to in order to facilitate the fun bits. Adventure writing is one such thing: yes I enjoy coming up with the ideas and basics for an adventure but getting it all down on paper (be it real or virtual) in a readable edited form complete with maps etc. is for the most part a long and bloody tedious chore; a chore I do because the payoff is that I then get to run said adventure.

For adventures that aren't my own, the chore part is (if necessary) converting them from another edition and (always) chopping out all the backstory and replacing it to fit into whatever else is going on in the campaign and-or setting.

That's why I don't use published adventures. Prepping and running a (medicore) WotC adventure is way more work for me than coming up with my own great adventures. Maybe except for light of xyraxis. That looks like really easy to run.

Same here.

Some parts - and not the same parts for everyone - of playing D&D are or can be a chore. Other parts - again not the same for everyone - can be great fun. One example in our crew is treasury tracking and division. Some players see this as a chore and don't want to do it (and in rare cases in the past might not have been trusted to do it!), meanwhile I'm fine with doing it and thus end up as treasurer in almost any game I'm ever in. Mapping is another one: as player I see it as a chore (I do enough mapping as a DM, thanks!) but there's always another player who enjoys it, and so it gets done.

As long as the "fun" outweighs the "chore" to the point that the end result is enjoyable overall, all is good.

Some problems are actually due to modern gaming helps.
Like Mapping. Mapping can be really rewarding (of course if you are a DM or a professional map maker you don't wanna do it as a player), but with virtual table tops and printable battle maps, Mapping became useless, because you can see everything right there on the screen.

Like on Sunday I ran a small side quest in my spelljammer campaign because some players were missing. So the rest of the group infiltrated/attacked a Thieves Hideout. One of the players mapped the hide out and when she figured out, thanks to her maps, that this tunnel there could be a back entrance where they could sneak in, man were she and the group excited. But that was only possible because I use Theater of the Mind and don't show my players exploration maps.

I mean, I once had a DM who put our tokens on a map on a market to show us which stall our characters were and what what was (no battle or anything, just shopping) and I was like ... whaaaaaat?

 

[overgeeked]

So far what I have seen the most complains about 5e is the opposite. Not to much chore but it being to easy and boring.

Like Wilderness exploration. It is not really a challenge. Why is it not a challenge? Because those People play without incumberance, without the tracking of mundane ressources, without the rules for drinking and eating, removing the survival aspect - a pillar of Wilderness exploration.

You've got it by the wrong end. It's not a challenge because by default RAW it's not challenging. The DCs for survival checks is ridiculously low. Outlander obviates rolling to search for food and water. Outlander is the single most popular background choice. Ranger obviates navigation in their favored terrain. Darkvision and the light cantrip obviate worrying about darkness and light sources. Etc.

So...as a result of the designers making exploration meaninglessly easy to skip, most people just skip it...because it's not challenging. They don't find it challenging RAW, decide to gut the mechanics and house rule away the challenge...only to then complain that it's not challenging.

Like combat. (Inexperienced) DMs use the combat guidelines in the DMG, but not enforcing the Adventure Days recommended 6 to 8 medium encounters and then they and the players complain, that battle is to easy. Which it is if you have only one or two medium encounters a day.

That mostly comes down to monsters being pushovers in 5E and the 6-8 medium encounters being an incredibly bad design choice that only makes sense in incredibly rare circumstances, like say in a dungeon crawl. You're doing overland travel and you might get one random encounter per day. It's literally pointless bother running that fight. Unless you only do dungeon crawls or house rule things, you're never going to hit 6-8 encounters per day with any kind of regularity.

And now the 5e designers do it to. Like on the really bad spelljammer box set - the Astral Sea is the most boring stuff ever. You don't need food, drink, you don't need to navigate. You just think hard and arrive. You maybe have a random encounter in-between but that's it.
I mean, yeah, the 2e phlogistan is corny, but at least it was exciting.
In 5e spelljammer, they removed any challenge of travel between the crystal spheres (and the crystal spheres itself, making it more boring).

Players think, that they want it easie4. That they don't want a challenge. But the moment they turn on the cheat codes and get unlimited money in Fallout and maximum Stats in skyrim, they quit the game because it got boring. Like whenever players realise that the DM will not kill their characters no matter what, the game stops being fun.

Without challenge there is no game. A game needs obstacles. Without challenging parts D&D devolves into 5 people sitting at a table telling each other how great their characters are. Even for 5 year olds that is only fun for maybe 10 minutes.

Absolutely.

And that seems to be the main problem with 5e and the people playing it - by itself 5e is not very challenging. And then people remove "chore" rules they don't like, making it even less challenging.

Again, that's backwards. Most people remove that stuff because it's not challenging enough to bother with RAW. If it were challenging RAW, people wouldn't be complaining about how not challenging it is. This is literally one of my biggest complaints about 5E. RAW is not challenging and there's a lot of pointless bookkeeping kept because it was in older editions where it actually mattered. It doesn't matter in 5E. At all. It's not challenging. At all.

If you remove the mundane stuff it becomes harder to immerse the players into the world.

While I agree, I also recognize that not everyone plays that way nor cares to.

 

[pemerton]

No financial sense, certainly. I remain unconvinced that WotC cares about literally anything else.

Why would they? They're a huge commercial games publisher!

 

[pemerton]

Spells need to be fully defined because they are strictly inventions of the game.

This isn't true. Moldvay Basic and Cook/Marsh Expert didn't details spells in the way AD&D did and 5e does. Rolemaster is often even pithier than B/X.

4e D&D was also often pretty pithy in its spell descriptions.

 

[Hussar]

Then there's a problem, likely soon followed by a search for another hobby.

Not every hobby is for every person. As a kid I was big into model trains, but the chore part (set-up, making the model buildings, engine maintenance, etc.) came to greatly outweigh the fun part, and so I packed it in.

Or … as an alternative, you just don’t do the chore stuff and do the stuff you like.

You don’t HAVE to have ship to ship combat. It’s not a requirement in a naval based fantasy game. I mentioned Conan earlier. Despite spending years as a pirate, I cannot remember an actual story that talked about ship to ship combat. The narrative always starts at the point of boarding.

I find it rather sad that dms would rather just not run a game at all unless they get 100% of everything they want to do.

No thanks. Not as a player or dm. Dms just aren’t that important.

 

[Hussar]

This isn't true. Moldvay Basic and Cook/Marsh Expert didn't details spells in the way AD&D did and 5e does. Rolemaster is often even pithier than B/X.

4e D&D was also often pretty pithy in its spell descriptions.

Heh. It’s funny. People freaked out because 4e didn’t specifically tell you that fire could light things on fire.

But the same people have no problem with the game being completely silent about the details of mundane equipment.

 

[pemerton]

Or … as an alternative, you just don’t do the chore stuff and do the stuff you like.

Crazy talk!

You keep saying all these crazy, mind-blowing things.

 

[pemerton]

Heh. It’s funny. People freaked out because 4e didn’t specifically tell you that fire could light things on fire.

Even moreso, they freaked out about this although there were rules about keywords in the PHB and DMG which explained that fire can set flammable things alight.

I agree with your other crazy ideas though!

 

[Lanefan]

I would even say without the chore parts it would be less fun. Because doing something that feels hard (if it's fun it's not feeling hard) gives you a good feeling. Going to the Gym is hard. It is a chore. Bit after you finish it you feel better. You accomplished something.

Going to the gym - which I've not done in ages - didn't leave me feeling like I'd accomplished anything other than to remind myself why I don't go to the gym.

That's why I don't use published adventures. Prepping and running a (medicore) WotC adventure is way more work for me than coming up with my own great adventures.

I'm the other way around: converting and tweaking a canned module generally takes me less time and effort than designing my own, particularly if I write it out in full. If nothing else the maps are already done, and doing my own maps (properly, rather than scratched on a bit of scrap paper) takes me ages.

But either way, most of it is "chore" work.

Some problems are actually due to modern gaming helps.
Like Mapping. Mapping can be really rewarding (of course if you are a DM or a professional map maker you don't wanna do it as a player), but with virtual table tops and printable battle maps, Mapping became useless, because you can see everything right there on the screen.

As players we map the whole dungeon or adventure site, not just the battle-y bits; and I'm talking strictly about in-person play here. Obviously, a VTT does the mapping for you (and if the DM is running a homebrew adventure, shifts a crap-ton of work onto the DM to prep it all).

Like on Sunday I ran a small side quest in my spelljammer campaign because some players were missing. So the rest of the group infiltrated/attacked a Thieves Hideout. One of the players mapped the hide out and when she figured out, thanks to her maps, that this tunnel there could be a back entrance where they could sneak in, man were she and the group excited. But that was only possible because I use Theater of the Mind and don't show my players exploration maps.

We use a gridded chalkboard and minis, on which they map what I describe. Someone then transcribes that to a paper map because what's on the chalkboard will be erased as soon as the party goes somewhere new which needs to be mapped.

I mean, I once had a DM who put our tokens on a map on a market to show us which stall our characters were and what what was (no battle or anything, just shopping) and I was like ... whaaaaaat?

It's odd the DM would place your PCs unless there was a specific reason to e.g. there was a need to randomly determine which PC(s) were nearest the wine merchants' stall when it got robbed, or whether anyone was in a position to notice something subtle, that sort of thing.