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

[Micah Sweet]

Oh, sure. And I’m much the same. Don’t make me count the pounds and I won’t make you count the pounds. That is, be reasonable and we’ll get along.

I still find it amusing that we have people who are arguing endlessly for realistic encumbrance while being perfectly fine with absurdly unrealistic abstractions.

Give me an example other than hit points, the use of which I've already told you is not an excuse to abandon verisimilitude.

 

[Red Castle]

So, illusionism and contrivance all the way then.

That Star Destroyer is going to be in a certain place at a certain time for a certain length of time, and if the PCs' ship arrives there at some other time they're going to get lucky and miss encountering it. Good for them.

Call it what you will, but I like to at least prepare some encounters for my players.

So let’s say they need to move from point A to point B, they’ll have to choose which road to take, but each road will have an encounter design into it. In one way it could be a Star Destroyer intercepting them, im the other it could be navigating through a nebula that was not suppose to be there. Random encounters could work too, but I never been a fan of those (nothing against them, just not my personnal style).

But whatever happens between point A and B (it could be uneventful), the actual time spent between each point is not important, there will be one or two or three encounter between them depending on how I feel as the DM that there should. But I won’t bother to count the actual number of day and say things like « day one… nothing happens… what do you do?… day two… nothing happens… what do you do?… » I’ll simply tell my players that the travel should take a couple days (or whatever what I feel like it should take) and ask them what they are planning to do during those days. Then, if i planned an encounter they’ll meet it.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

You know where they can find room for equipment rules in the PHB? Cut down on some of the ridiculous wordiness of some of the spells. I'm not even suggesting we have less spells, oh no! We can have just as many - if they don't make them do things that require long-winded explanations.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You know where they can find room for equipment rules in the PHB? Cut down on some of the ridiculous wordiness of some of the spells. I'm not even suggesting we have less spells, oh no! We can have just as many - if they don't make them do things that require long-winded explanations.

Needless words and pointless circumlocution are a big problem with spells in general.

 

[M_Natas]

If it doesn't need to be mentioned in the movie, why does it need to be mentioned in the RPG? And if it doesn't need to be mentioned in the RPG, why should it matter.

I play some RPGs which require tracking of time by the day, and sometimes more fine-grained than that - eg Classic Traveller.

I play others that don't require tracking time at all - eg Marvel Heroic/Cortex+.

As far as contemporary D&D play is concerned, I think keeping track of time spent between rests probably matters (for spell durations and the like), and noting when a rest occurs matters, but beyond that the passage of time seems like mere colour.

In my new campaign I track time. So when the players ask I always know what day and what hour it is (+-1 or 2 hours).

So I always know the light situation (day, night, dawn ...) and there are several things that are time sensitive. Their asteroid Hopper will be upgraded by the Gnome workers in 3 days. The bigger Spelljammer Ship, that promised to tow them to the next bigger Settlement, will leave in 7 days.
The exhaustion one of my players has from dying and gottong raised from the death will be completely gone in 2 days (if he long rests every day).
If they fly with their Hopper or go on the bigger ship there is a certain amount of air that will only last for X days (depending on size of ship and number of living things on board). At the moment they have rations to feed themselves for 10 days on their Hopper if they go out into the asteroid belt and so on ...

And keeping track of time is like ... not hard at all.

 

[Lanefan]

Call it what you will, but I like to at least prepare some encounters for my players.

So let’s say they need to move from point A to point B, they’ll have to choose which road to take, but each road will have an encounter design into it. In one way it could be a Star Destroyer intercepting them, im the other it could be navigating through a nebula that was not suppose to be there. Random encounters could work too, but I never been a fan of those (nothing against them, just not my personnal style).

That's fair.

But whatever happens between point A and B (it could be uneventful), the actual time spent between each point is not important, there will be one or two or three encounter between them depending on how I feel as the DM that there should. But I won’t bother to count the actual number of day and say things like « day one… nothing happens… what do you do?… day two… nothing happens… what do you do?… »

Oh, I do this pretty much every damn time!

Why, you ask? Because it gives the players a sense of the passage of time, along with a chance to get a little bored and restless (just like their characters), and bored players sometimes do weird and wonderful things.

In D&D if they're travelling I'll usually at least tell them each day's weather, if for no other reasons than a) some weather conditions can slow or speed travel and b) it gives some atmosphere and mood.

 

[Lanefan]

You know where they can find room for equipment rules in the PHB? Cut down on some of the ridiculous wordiness of some of the spells. I'm not even suggesting we have less spells, oh no! We can have just as many - if they don't make them do things that require long-winded explanations.

Thing is, without those long-winded explanations some of the spells become wide open to exploits and shenanigans. If anything, a lot of spells need longer write-ups rather than shorter, to lock in some of the more common rulings DMs have had to make. More concise wording and maybe a better layout could help a lot here.

 

[overgeeked]

You know where they can find room for equipment rules in the PHB? Cut down on some of the ridiculous wordiness of some of the spells. I'm not even suggesting we have less spells, oh no! We can have just as many - if they don't make them do things that require long-winded explanations.

The poster upthread had the right of it. Model gear after the crowbar.

"Crowbar. Using a crowbar grants advantage to Strength checks where the crowbar's leverage can be applied." —PHB, p151.

Gear. Using a piece of gear grants advantage to appropriate checks where the piece of gear can be applied.

Done. There's your gear rules. The other thing gear does is grant narrative permission. You want to stay warm during a blizzard? That's what winter clothes does. No rolls, no checks, just narrative permission. What does 50ft of rope do? Gives you advantage on relevant checks. Climbing a wall? Advantage. Tying someone up? Advantage. What does a crowbar do? Gives you advantage on relevant checks. Can be used as a mace. Etc. You don't need dozens of pages dedicated to things like describing what a tent is, what it can do, and how it works.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I mean, even bad rules (driving advantage even further into the ground until you hit the core of the Earth) are rules, which is better than rulings I guess.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The poster upthread had the right of it. Model gear after the crowbar.

"Crowbar. Using a crowbar grants advantage to Strength checks where the crowbar's leverage can be applied." —PHB, p151.

Gear. Using a piece of gear grants advantage to appropriate checks where the piece of gear can be applied.

Done. There's your gear rules. The other thing gear does is grant narrative permission. You want to stay warm during a blizzard? That's what winter clothes does. No rolls, no checks, just narrative permission. What does 50ft of rope do? Gives you advantage on relevant checks. Climbing a wall? Advantage. Tying someone up? Advantage. What does a crowbar do? Gives you advantage on relevant checks. Can be used as a mace. Etc. You don't need dozens of pages dedicated to things like describing what a tent is, what it can do, and how it works.

You don't need "dozens of pages" to have good equipment rules either. I literally have like 90% finished build-your-own-weapon rules, complete with dozens of pre-made weapons. Their entire length (I have them saved as separate .txt files for organizational purposes only) couldn't possibly be more than a dozen pages, and there are far more weapons in this than there are in actual 5e.

And I'm with @Vaalingrade, the last thing 5e needs is to make Advantage even more ridiculously ubiquitous than it already is.