D&D 5E [+] What are your favorite things about 5e?

[JTorres]

There are so many things I love about 5th edition but the following is a list of my current favorites.

• The ease of converting 1e/2e adventures
• Building, re-skinning, and customizing monsters is quick and easy
• All the random tables in the DMG
• The spell slot system
• The overall reduction of modifiers to keep track of; this on its own makes encounters run quick and smooth

And while not directly something that 5th edition has done, I like how this edition has quickly been embraced by many gamers and all the resulting homebrew material and tools that have popped up. In less than a year, the community that has sprung up around 5th Ed has tools for quickly generating characters, NPCs, encounters of all kinds, or for tracking different aspects of the game, adventures, and too many others to name. Seeing the DIY spirit come to life in so short a period of time and pick up the slack on where WotC has stumbled a bit has been one of the best things about 5th Edition.

 

[seoanalyst]

My favorites is Backgrounds

 

[Bihlbo]

One of my favorite things about 5th edition is also one of its greatest weaknesses: The rules are very incomplete.

This means that you literally cannot ever run a game without making up rules. Either you start from the beginning with a book of house rules that fill in the barren wastes and refine which optional things your game will use/disallow, or you have to make up things on the fly. I like consistency, so making up rules as I go along doesn't suit me, but I love writing rules and content for D&D. In the past I could play 3.5 without house rules, but I didn't want to - and that meant I had to apologize to players when I slapped more than 2 pages worth of house rules in front of them. With 5th edition 2 pages of house rules isn't even adequate, and I don't have to apologize for beans because the RAW are just so lacking.

Also, the bounded accuracy and the blandness of monsters means that I can go with my gut on any new thing and feel confident that it won't throw things out of whack. The difference between high and low-level monsters in the MM is mainly hit points, which is the easiest thing to fudge on the fly anyway - so if some new thing makes a fight seem too easy, add another 10 hp to everything and see what happens. It's not as though the Challenge number on monsters means much of anything, so throw bigger baddies at them until you find the right balance. You have to do that without any house rules at all, so adding just whatever for the PCs is generally fine and dandy.

If I want to write up 8 more backgrounds or let players write their own (and I do) then it's okay. If I want to get rid of the tool system and turn it into something good (and I do) then it's okay. If I want to use Expertise as a game mechanic that extends to non-rogues (and I do) then it's okay. If I want to define things that the rules doesn't touch, like climb speed, how animal handling works, or all the class options we expected and didn't get (and I do) then it's okay. And so I get to do the thing I really enjoy, which is prepare the rules that govern the games I'm running. 5e is the first D&D that makes me want to run the game more than play the game.

 

[Votan]

Magic, in general, has been improved. Magic items are optional. It's hard to build up a ton of buffs. Spellcasters have a lot of flexibility. The lack of scaling spell power (except for cantrips) by level makes casters a lot less exponential in power and makes the high level slots precious.

The cap of 20 on ability scores and the fast improvements, mean that everyone gets to be awesome at high levels -- you just have different speeds of getting there. That means that a Half-Orc wizard will end up as competent as an Elf wizard, in the long run, making race-class match-ups more flexible. I once played a gnome barbarian . . .

 

[Kaato]

-Bounded accuracy
-less focus on magic items, they've become fun gadgets not your necessary +5 butterknive

 

[dd.stevenson]

I like that there are lots of mechanics (lair actions, backgrounds, downtime activities) that are just begging for conversion to the Birthright setting.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

As a sort of positive counter to the "Why does 5e SUCK" thread (a thread which I have admittedly spent way too much time in)... I thought I'd ask people what are some of their favorite things about 5e. Maybe list your top 3 or top 5... or just list as many as you want. I'll be back shortly to list some of my own but I figured I'd get the ball rolling ahead of time...

I'm coming from AD&D2, so here's my list:

Reactive spells like Shield and Counterspell.
Mobility in combat.
Archer fighters are awesome now instead of lame.
Spell DCs that scale with level.
Non-Vancian magic: spell points are now the default (as "spell slots").

I also like the fact that there's no magic item treadmill, but AD&D was like that too, except for CRPGs. At least, it was if you were a wizard. For fighters, 5E is even better at avoiding the magic item treadmill due to the almost complete absence of "immune to nonmagical weapons."

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

(*ridiculous grognard digression: I don't know why we have to call 'em 'house rules.' Back in the day, they were 'variants.' And, published adventures were called 'modules.' Now published variants are 'modules,' so the game can pretend to be 'modular.'
bah! humbug... kids these days ... get off my law... :shakes cane: ... insert ageist stereotype of choice... etc..)

I don't know about you, but I picked up the term from playing Axis and Allies. I've also used it with strategy/wargames like Dominions IV. I still use the term "variant" in 5E, but usually only for variants which have been published somewhere. Any tweak that I personally make gets called a "house rule" by analogy to A&A.

 

[Li Shenron]

What are your favorite things about 5e?

- class and subclass structure
- proficiency
- simplified combat
- rulings rather than rules
- improved multiclassing
- more emphasis on narrative

 

[Sacrosanct]

If there's any more proof that people like to focus on the negative rather than the positive, the "Why does 5e Suck" thread has 130 pages, and this has 5.