D&D 5E What does 5E do well?

[CleverNickName]

I never played 4th Edition, so I can't really say what it "did well" or "didn't do very well."
What I can tell you is that I don't feel like I've missed out.

I'm enjoying the heck out of 5E. I think it does storytelling best...it gives the DM the tools they need to keep the rules in the background where they belong (in my opinion), and avoid the quagmire of rules from the 3.X Editions.

 

[ad_hoc]

It does action/adventure stories well.

Pacing is huge and something other editions just aren't great with.

This coupled with the ability for players to come up with their own solutions to problems using the rules at hand end up allowing the group to create great stories and have fun doing it.

 

[OB1]

It does action/adventure stories well.

Pacing is huge and something other editions just aren't great with.

This coupled with the ability for players to come up with their own solutions to problems using the rules at hand end up allowing the group to create great stories and have fun doing it.

Exactly! I was going to say that it does a great job of allowing players to enjoy pretending they are part of an epic story about heroic adventurers facing deadly perils.

And it does that by being really, really good at having enough structure to guide yet also bend without breaking either the game (mechanics fall apart) or the players (too much to remember for people with busy lives).

It's core resolution mechanic is easy enough to be picked up in minutes (DM describes the scene, players describe how their characters react, DM asks for a die role if there is uncertainty) and yet the more time you put into the game and the more rules and lore you encounter the richer an experience it can become.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It's a deceptively simple question, but there's not an easy answer. I picked this up from Matt Colville by way of @Aldarc.


For those who cannot see the tweet:

"I said 4E is great for Heroic Fantasy: you're already a hero at level 1 with several dope powers! And it's not super good for dungeon crawling or survival? But it is great for "Save the world" adventures! Someone asked "What is 5E good for?" And...I did not have...a good answer?"

And this video, around the 1:35 mark.

I'm phrasing the question a bit softer than Matt did, but I still think it's a good question.

What I'm looking for is a playstyle answer. What style of play does D&D5E do best? Or even better than other editions. This isn't an edition war thread, it's an honest question.

5E doesn't do survival well because there are several class features, background features, and spells that completely negate the challenges of survival. It doesn't really do exploration well because again, there are several class features, background features, and spells that completely negate the challenges of exploration. It doesn't handle dungeon crawling particularly well without a few hacked in rules. It doesn't do roleplaying any better than any other edition of D&D. Combat? Whatever you think of 4E, it had better balance in combat. Some say to the point of blandness, but it was better balanced. Monster design? Again 4E had far more interesting monster design. Fast combat? Any TSR edition had faster combat. Character options? Again nope. 2E, 3x, and 4E all had more character options. It's not the best for character optimization, charop people say that left, right, and center. It's not the easiest to learn. Basic would be easier to learn, 2E would be easier to learn...and arguably 4E is easier to learn.

So what does 5E do really well as a game? What playstyle or area of play is its strong suit?

(I know the urge to say some variation of "it's popular" or "it brings in new players" will be nigh overwhelming, but for the sake of conversation, do resist as none of those are actual answers to the question.)

I think you keep looking at individual trees in this post, when what 5e excels at is the whole forest.

It doesn’t have to do combat better than 4e to do combat well. It also strikes a better balance of character options IMO than 4e or 3.5, making a better “casual but compelling OC generator” than either edition.

5e learned other editions lessons and applied them to a single edition. It’s fun to play, it lets you make unique characters without inducing option overstimulation.

 

[Mercurius]

Lots of good replies, but I'll offer my take very simply. What 5E does best (imo) is two things:

One, it does nothing poorly. People who like specific styles of play might find it lacking to their stringent standards for that specific style of play, but it works for almost everything reasonably well, if not as well as more specialized games or editions. Meaning, it is very flexible.

Two, it facilitates theater of mind very well, including the ability to 'wing it' as needed without constantly needing exact rules in every situation, and allowing for the locus of attention to be in the imagination.

 

[Oofta]

One of the things I keep seeing is people saying that "4E combat was better". But that's just the thing when you start making subjective calls on better and worse. I think 4E combat was more controlled and more constricted by the options people had available. Did that make it better? For some people I'm sure it did. For other people 3.x or other versions (including 5E) does combat best.

But as @Mercurius just said, 5E doesn't do anything poorly. You can always do things better, but better is in the eye of the beholder. Even high level play up to level 20 holds together reasonably well, for me it's the best of any version so far.

No game can be everything to everyone. But 5E is the okayest version IMHO.

 

[Parmandur]

One of the things I keep seeing is people saying that "4E combat was better". But that's just the thing when you start making subjective calls on better and worse. I think 4E combat was more controlled and more constricted by the options people had available. Did that make it better? For some people I'm sure it did. For other people 3.x or other versions (including 5E) does combat best.

But as @Mercurius just said, 5E doesn't do anything poorly. You can always do things better, but better is in the eye of the beholder. Even high level play up to level 20 holds together reasonably well, for me it's the best of any version so far.

No game can be everything to everyone. But 5E is the okayest version IMHO.

4E is a more involved tactical experience than 5E...but Fire Emblem is even more tactical on the Nintwndo Switch.

 

[cbwjm]

I don't know what 5e does well, all I know is that it works well for what I use it for and my group has a lot of fun, some of that is due to 5e, some of that is probably due to the scenarios I create more than the game system. I've used systems in 5e for something other than their intended purpose, this was due to not knowing the chase rules and not wanting to make everyone wait while I read up on them. Instead I used the death saving throw rules to run a skill challenge to escape an enemy.

I do think that 5e doesn't do monsters well, or at least they have made many of them so basic that it makes them less interesting. But maybe that's also good, sometimes you don't want to run an enemy (or enemies) with a lot of options, other times you can just add in some additional abilities to make that ogre more of a solo threat to a party. One thing I dislike is a bag of hit points that just attacks and absorbs attacks.

As for style, no idea. 5e seems to be able to do a lot quite well. There may be some systems that do things better but often, I just need something that can be done well enough in a session or 2 of DnD.

I'm a little drunk, sorry if I'm rambling.

 

[Scott Christian]

4e combats are longer but I think that's because they average more rounds. In terms of time per round, I think 4e is pretty fast.

5e is faster than 3e pretty much across the board, and once your at the 8-9th level its night and day faster....3e just has so much to track at that point.

All I can say is that in my experience combat ground to a practical halt after the lowest levels. High level combat? An hour or more per round was typical; my high level campaign got to the point where if I did little else I could still only get in two combats per 6 hour session.

Hi Stalker,
All I an say is that I am glad it worked for your table. Like Oofta, our combats for 4e ran fairly quickly too, until fourth level. From that point on, there was no combat that did not last an hour. Which from a story telling standpoint is miserable, imho.

 

[Stalker0]

Hi Stalker,
All I an say is that I am glad it worked for your table. Like Oofta, our combats for 4e ran fairly quickly too, until fourth level. From that point on, there was no combat that did not last an hour. Which from a story telling standpoint is miserable, imho.

I guess my main question here is where you using MMI monsters or monsters from later books?

I actually wrote a guide back in the day which was a guide to anti-grind (one of my most popular posts other than my Obsidian Skill challenge system): Stalker0's Guide to Anti-Grind

However, I found that later monster designs had fixed some of the grind issues I had complained about, and they ran very quick. The thing is 4e characters just don't have the innumerable bonuses and statuses and XYZ of 3.5 to worry about, they aren't having to literally rewrite their character sheets after getting hit with a dispel magic, etc.

So I just never found 4e combats that grindy and slow, again I think they ran longer than 3e and 5e combats but that was due to number of rounds, not time per round. So the combats were "longer" but felt "quicker"