D&D General What are your Pedantic Complaints about D&D?

[jasper]

That this thread took so long to reach 150 gripes. Come you are games. GRIP AWAY.

 

[Eltab]

Having a Reach weapon does not mean I can reaction-attack an enemy who carefully keeps an empty 5-ft square between me and himself as he moves. I picked up that Whip so I could do the cool Indiana Jones tricks !

 

[ParanoydStyle]

[MENTION=6923088]Aebir-Toril[/MENTION]:

I am being pedantic by pointing this out which is almost painfully meta, but you mean to use the word 'petty', not 'pedantic', in your opening question/topic title.

To continue being pedantic--purely for illustrative purposes, I assure you!--you also mean "venomous", not "venemous".

Anyway, alignment is pretty terrible but that's not a piddling concern. The same is true of you being at 100% fighting capacity until you lose your last hp and then effectively exploding in a cloud of blood: that's a thing I don't love about D&D but it's not a small thing. Now keep in mind, I have learned to love both of these problems in the very specific context of D&D. There are other games I can play if I want wound penalties or a game that doesn't try to cram the vast, complicated, nuanced spectrum of human morality and ethics into nine neat little boxes.

I'm stretching to think of truly finicky complaints here, and I keep thinking of things that aren't, in fact, punctilious at all. Like, CR fails to be an accurate representation of a monster's threat/challenge to an average party in the case of about half of monsters. I think that possibly being a game designer and consciously NOT a perfectionist has trained my brain to only notice/care about problems with a game that are at least somewhat substantive. I do have one pet peeve that I've mentioned here before but I think it was fixed in 5E.

1) On average, monsters in 5E have too much hp.
2) Plant type enemies having resistance or immunity to fire and cold damage, two types of damage they should logically be vulnerable to has always driven me nuts. I'm pretty sure I've complained about this before on here. It makes the opposite of sense. It makes less sense than Wookies on Endor. That said, this was specifically a beef I had with 3.5 (and by extension Pathfinder). I think this was corrected in 5E.
3) The selection of weapons in 5E is somewhat lacking. I don't mean magic modifiers to apply to weapons, I mean the mundane weapons themselves. Would it have killed them to add a bastard sword between longsword and greatsword (it would have the versatile trait, use a d10 damage die one handed, d12 damage die two handed, requires Str 13 or Str 15 (I'd have to actually think about which) to use and cost more than either a longsword or a greatsword. I know that you get into the land of the ridiculous very quickly when you head down the path of caring about the difference between a glaive-guisarme and a guisarme-glaive or whatever, but it'd have been nice seeing more of a variety of polearms to pick from.
4) How dare they stat Sharktocrab before me!

 

[niklinna]

The brittle magic system, with fixed lists of approved spells, often incredibly specific in effect and therefore hard to customize to a non-trope character concept. For one incredibly basic example: Why is there no generic ranged-damage cantrip that lets you pick the damage type (acid, force, fire, etc.) when you select it? Or, if amounts need to depend on damage type for some reason, why is there no full set of ranged-damage cantrips for each damage type? The argument applies all the way up to 9th level.

By contrast, the incredibly broad set of skills, albeit each tied hard to a particular ability. Wizards may go on about three pillars, but you can see the relative sizes of them from the page counts of combat & (mostly-combat) spells rules vs. skills rules.

Races with their fixed ability bonuses. RPGs are supposedly about playing exceptional characters, but if you wanna be a great dwarf wizard, you are handicapped and can't be that exceptional dwarf without cheesing the character generation.

The need to shoehorn any character concept into one of the established ABC menu system of character classes, instead of being able to choose a set of features to fit the concept.

Combat is boring. Too many instances of "nothing happens" on a failed die roll.

Absolutely no scaling of concentration by character level. Even being able to concentrate on 2 spells by some mid-high level would make a huge difference in fun.

I'll just stop there!

 

[ParanoydStyle]

Actually, I take it back about the polearms. 5E has just enough differentiation with spear, glaive, halberd, lance (not technically a polearm but close enough), pike, and trident. Any more would be too much.

Also yeah why ARE pikes so heavy?

 

[Tony Vargas]

The brittle magic system, with fixed lists of approved spells, often incredibly specific in effect and therefore hard to customize to a non-trope character concept. For one incredibly basic example: Why is there no generic ranged-damage cantrip that lets you pick the damage type (acid, force, fire, etc.) when you select it? Or, if amounts need to depend on damage type for some reason, why is there no full set of ranged-damage cantrips for each damage type? The argument applies all the way up to 9th level.

By contrast, the incredibly broad set of skills, albeit each tied hard to a particular ability. Wizards may go on about three pillars, but you can see the relative sizes of them from the page counts of combat & (mostly-combat) spells rules vs. skills rules.

Races with their fixed ability bonuses. RPGs are supposedly about playing exceptional characters, but if you wanna be a great dwarf wizard, you are handicapped and can't be that exceptional dwarf without cheesing the character generation.

The need to shoehorn any character concept into one of the established ABC menu system of character classes, instead of being able to choose a set of features to fit the concept.

Combat is boring. Too many instances of "nothing happens" on a failed die roll.

Absolutely no scaling of concentration by character level. Even being able to concentrate on 2 spells by some mid-high level would make a huge difference in fun.

I'll just stop there!

But, you haven't gotten to the pedantic part, yet!?

Also yeah why ARE pikes so heavy?

Asked and answered: they only feel heavy after you take them out of the water.

 

[generic]

It was a typo, but thanks!

Of course it's venomous, not venemous.

Sorry, but I had to bite​.
[MENTION=6984451]ParanoydStyle[/MENTION]

 

[Lucas Yew]

My question below;

In 5E, why do some creatures' Proficiency bonus scale off HD, a static value, and why for others it's based on CR, a floating value? It's like claiming there are two separate Gravitational Constants working in the universe, and that makes me want to throw up badly...

 

[oreofox]

In a continuation of Lucas Yew's point above, I have one similar. Monster ability DCs. From what I gather, after making many a new monster (conversions of older monsters, really), I have noticed practically every DC listed in the monster's stat block is based off of their Constitution bonus. I check the math against the Con modifier, the base 8 for all DCs, and the proficiency bonus taken from their CR according to the "Making a Monster" portion of the DMG (which checks out when you take their attack bonus minus either Str or Dex to get the same number). HOWEVER, this isn't true for every DC, and not even within the same Monster stat block. Mostly dealing with Escape DCs for a grapple or swallow type move. This particular DC is something like 2-3 points higher, and I don't know how they come up with it.

Honestly, I had to figure out how to go about calculating the DCs as that part isn't mentioned in the Making a Monster section (not that I could find, anyway). So at first, I thought if it called for a Dexterity saving throw, you add the monster's Dex modifier to the DC. Looking back, that was rather dumb of me. So everything is based off Con unless they have Innate Spellcasting, in which those DCs are almost always based off Cha.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*