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

[AnotherGuy]

Another, more serious, though about this.

Over the past 18 months or so I've GMed around a dozen sessions of Torchbearer. This game has a strong survival element - the PC equipment lists include food, and cloaks, and woollen sweaters, and shoes - except 3 of the 4 PCs in the game don't have shoes, because they wore them out trudging through the wilds and haven't been able to afford to replace them.

Part of how the game works is that it uses slots for inventory (head, neck, 3 torso slots, hands, feet, 3 belt slots, 2 carried slots), and has simple but effective mechanics for overloading (the Labourer skill).

It also has a uniform resolution system, and it's easy for gear to factor into that (having appropriate gear adds +1D to your pool).

Its weather rules take up half-a-dozen or so pages: you roll on a season-appropriate chart, and then look up the effects of the result. In our last session there was rain, and as per the rules for rain I required the players to roll Health checks for their PCs. One got +1D because his PC was wearing his sweater (1 torso slot).

Journey generate easily-calculated "toll", which has to be bought off (a little like 4e D&D Dark Sun's "survival days") - that's why three PCs have no shoes, because they sacrificed their shoes to buy off toll last time they went hiking, rather than take debilitating conditions instead. And they have not been able to replace them since (there is no cobbler in the village about the Wizard's Tower to sell them shoes, and they haven't tried to buy any direct from a peasant or villager).

Another thing that happened in our last session was that the sweater-wearing PC preserved 5 portions of fresh rations (mechanically, the player succeeded on a fairly challenging Cook test). This reduces the number of inventory slots they take up, and means they do not spoil and require discarding when the PCs return to town.

The Cook PC is also the toughest fighter in the group (a Dwarven Outcast, for anyone who knows the system). Generally fighting is more exciting than cooking, but the system doesn't make the latter inherently less interesting or mechanically weightier than the former. They both sit within a consistent, more-or-less uniform system of PC build and action resolution.

I've set all this out in a bit of detail to make the point that it is perfectly possible to have a wonderful RPG that makes exploration, inventory, trekking, and the like key to play (though Torchbearer doesn't track ammunition - the quiver is just another piece of gear that takes up a belt or torso slot, and running out of arrows/bolts/stones is something the GM would narrate as an equipment-related complication, like having your tinderbox spill out of your satchel and fall through an upper-storey window during a struggle, which is also a thing that happened in our last session). And I do think Torchbearer is a wonderful, brilliant RPG.

But it's not the only one. I love Agon 2nd ed too, and Agon is at absolutely the other end of the spectrum. PCs have a "look", but no equipment list.

And there are great systems that use gear, but not equipment lists - eg Marvel Heroic RP. And systems that have equipment lists but don't really care about personal logistics at all, like Prince Valiant.

The issue for WotC, with 5e and its revision, is not a shortage of possible approaches to RPG design in this space. I agree with @Composer99 that the problems for WotC are reconciling D&D tradition (which has used weight rather than "slots" to handle inventory) with the fact that most people don't want logistics to matter, but do want magical equipment to matter, while there are a small handful who want something more low-level-Gygaxian.

It's a customer satisfaction problem rather than a design problem in the abstract sense.

I did purchase Torchbearer 1e. In your opinion is it easy enough to port the equipment rules across (amended obviously) into D&D? I've got 5 more levels of 5e to do for our campaign and my table has no issue with my homebrew tinkering every now and then and we are do for some changes on some other fronts.. so now would be a good time as any.

EDIT: You can introduce torn/damaged clothing like boots or armour but then most issues such as this are undone by the Mend spell which the great powers that be sought to list the spell amongst the cantrips.

 

[Velderan]

Pathfinder is on its 2nd edition and Call of Crhulhu is on its 7th. Savage worlds is 2 or 3, and Fate is at least 2. That’s just off the top of my head.

There's also the tiny little fact that by the time a lot of us had started playing whatever version of D&D was current when we started, the game had already changed quite a bit since the version of the game that was played in the mid-70s. If you (general you) complain about WotC changing the game in 5e to fit what players seemed to want out of a TTRPG today but you embraced anything released after the initial version, congrats on being part of the problem.

 

[mamba]

Pathfinder is on its 2nd edition and Call of Crhulhu is on its 7th. Savage worlds is 2 or 3, and Fate is at least 2. That’s just off the top of my head.

Not all editions are like the D&D ones, Call of Cthulhu edition 1 and 7 are easily as compatible as 5e 2014 and 2024. The big jump in your list is Pathfinder 1 to 2.

 

[mamba]

If all they cared about was profit they wouldn't be doing another massive survey before making changes to the current product.

I do not see how that follows, they want to make sure what they release is popular, i.e. sells. Not doing a survey got them 4e, something they definitely want to avoid a repeat of because of the low sales it got.

 

[Oofta]

I do not see how that follows, they want to make sure what they release is popular, i.e. sells. Not doing a survey got them 4e, something they definitely want to avoid a repeat of because of the low sales it got.

If they didn't care about what people want from the game they could have just published a new version of the game in 2024 without a survey. It likely would have sold decently, even if long term sales would have been a gamble. They aren't doing the survey out of the goodness of their hearts, they need to make money in order to justify their careers. Making money and creating a game people want to play are not mutually exclusive.

What's odd is people stating that they should cater to a small minority of people who want something else instead of making something that has broad appeal. D&D is not the niche market game producer for TTRPGs, it's the mass market game. I don't see that as an inherently bad thing.

 

[mamba]

If they didn't care about what people want from the game they could have just published a new version of the game in 2024 without a survey. It likely would have sold decently, even if long term sales would have been a gamble. They aren't doing the survey out of the goodness of their hearts

that is basically my point reiterated

What's odd is people stating that they should cater to a small minority of people who want something else instead

I am not saying that, I only said their survey is done to maximize sales / profit (or at least the likelihood of that)

 

[Warpiglet-7]

I did purchase Torchbearer 1e. In your opinion is it easy enough to port the equipment rules across (amended obviously) into D&D? I've got 5 more levels of 5e to do for our campaign and my table has no issue with my homebrew tinkering every now and then and we are do fir some changes on some other fronts.. so now would be a good time as any.

EDIT: You can introduce torn/damaged clothing like boots or armour but then most issues such as this are undone by the Mend spell which the great powers that be sought to list the spell amongst the cantrips.

Is the problem really the magic?

I have a campaign specific thing in which the light cantrip is not a thing.

I wonder what would happen if goodberry and the like were dropped.

I have not done it yet—light changes have campaign specific reasons for me—-sacred fire so on and so forth.

But I wonder if a few magic changes would improve the feel.

 

[Bacon Bits]

The true issues, from least severe to most severe:

1. Polymorph and summoning effects need to use templates or they will never be balanced. It's the only fix, and the developers have only showed us deeply unsatisfying versions of it, but it's the only fix that scales. The other partial fix is a fixed list of what you're specifically allowed to do, and that's basically the same thing but worse.
2. Multiclassing warps class design. Abilities that should be very early are pushed later to make level 1-3 into a "tar pit" to try to give multiclassing a hidden cost that players won't complain about. The truth is that the game would be better without multiclassing.
3. Spellcasting, especially spells above level 6, are so wildly better than any other ability in the game that the only abilities in the game that feel viable are spells. Any new ability introduced into the game, whether it's Supremacy Dice, or Ki, or Weapon Mastery, or anything else, is so wildly outclassed by spellcasting that they don't feel relevant. Because they're not relevant. This is also why basically every ability turns into spellcasting. It's such a dominant ability that it's the only relevant ability.
4. The game cannot be fixed. D&D is designed to replicate past game editions, not to be a good TTRPG. Matt Colville's critical comments on the equipment list and what dungeons are for are entirely correct. This is permanent until the game fails so catastrophically or becomes so out-of-touch that nobody wants to play it. Like it was in 1997 -- ignoring the fact that there were a lot of people still playing it and just not BUYING it -- and we are currently so far from that reality that it's not even possible to conceive of the game improving in a real or meaningful way. The game is broken. And it will not be fixed. Not in the next 10 years or 20 years. Probably not in our lifetime. If you want a TTRPG that doesn't have the flaws above, do not play D&D.

 

[pemerton]

I just thought I'd add that this feels like a massive improvement over D&D. If you actually care about survival then caring about whether you wear a sweater (and how well your cooking preserves rations) are to me things that enhance the experience massively beyond anything I've ever seen in D&D, especially tracking the number of arrows you have when arrows are inherently reusable.

And this is a far more interesting and visceral trade-off over anything I've seen D&D offer. Shoes matter and add to the realism of the game world - and while the shoes are in some ways effectively hit points (you lose them rather than take other consequences) they make the world more rather than less comprehensible.

And this is why the request for old school D&D survival mechanics really confuse me. Not only are they a niche play style - they aren't very good at what they are trying to do. Torchbearer, of course, started out by the designer going back to really old school D&D, playing it a lot, then trying to build a game based on the parts that had been lost.

As it happens, I 100% agree! On the GM side, I find the Torchbearer treatment of supplies, journeys etc far more compelling than old-fashioned D&D. I think it's just better design than simply counting things.

But WotC are constrained, in relation to 5e, by the apparent demand from some parts of their customer base - or at least their perceived customer base - to retain features of D&D which aren't especially good design but are seen as key to the game. Like an equipment list with the weights of things.

 

[pemerton]

A shame WotC can't bring themselves to throw a bone to the Classic fans with a robust logistics system, even as an optional one. It can be done better than they have.

Why can't you use the AD&D or B/X one?