D&D 5E What (if anything) do you find "wrong" with 5E?

[Guest 7034872]

I really wish I could organize a weekly game and advance slowly (at least for lower levels). But...reality is that we have difficulty getting together once a month.

Yeah, that just seems to be modern life, doesn't it?

 

[Hussar]

Well, I wonder what the actual rate of advancement people generally have.

My Candlekeep Mysteries campaign, which started in May 2021, has been playing pretty steadily weekly (only a couple of missed weeks really) in 3 hour online sessions. We've just tapped 10th level. So, overall, that would be about 60 sessions of play (give or take). So, averaging 6 sessions/level overall, although, the first three levels blew past in a hurry.

Thing is, going back to my 3e campaigns, we played in similar time frames - 3 hour sessions, online, 1/week - and advanced at pretty much exactly the same pace - about 6 sessions/level. I polled En World back in 2007 with How fast do you level in 3.x? (read before you vote) and most people leveled up after about 3-6 sessions.

I wonder if this is just another case of people's experiences not matching up with what WotC is seeing from a higher altitude. If people have been leveling up every 3-5 sessions since 3e, I doubt that it's going to change too much. But, there is this feeling that it's too fast.

 

[MockingBird]

For those who want wotc to release more options for more customization: how do you deal with bloat and cognitive load? And do other games (e.g. pathfinder 2e) not have this problem, or does that game just appeal to people who can manage more active things at once.

For example, for the one 5e game that I'm in, I was thinking of playing a college of creation bard, but then I read it and realized it was just too much. For example, the mote of potential provides additional effects based on how it is used. In fact, if it is used for a saving throw it provides another effect on top of that:



So now your fellow player has to keep track of the bardic inspiration, at a particular die size, pay attention to the variable effects depending on what type of roll they are making, and then remember to add the temporary hp that have a bonus equal to the cha modifier of a different PC. If everyone is really proficient with the game and paying attention, this might not take so long, but there are many "fail" points in there that cause extra time per round (rule or stat lookups, reminders to use something, action economy). At 6th level, the same bardic bonus actions can be used to control their summoned flying weapon, which has this feature:


So you send the dancing weapon into battle and now all of a sudden a handful of creatures have either increased or decreased movement rates for the next turn. More tracking!

Is this what people want? Do you find this adds friction and lengthens combat time at your table? The recent UA struck me as full of stuff like this. It seems the designers have been trying to maximize the action economy (providing more uses for bonus actions and reactions) and utilize the "design space" of things that are somewhat peripheral to the core game, like temporary hit points.

I don't think it's about being veterans of the game or not. My table is half people who have been playing for the entirety of 5e, and the other half people have been playing since AD&D. But we play for only two hours a week, in the evening, after kids have gone to sleep, and we have no energy for those types of options.

I wonder the same thing. I don't want those things. I want the simplicity. I've noticed players totally forgetting they have all the options they get sometimes. We don't have the time either and just want to play the game.

 

[Hussar]

The other issue is that complexity often increases exponentially. Adding one more option doesn’t necessarily only make a system slightly more complicated e cause of how that one option interacts with all the other options. So one player played a more complicated character like a Druid say, and that’s not too bad. But then you add a bard. Then an artificer. Now because everyone has stuff that interacts with everyone else’s stuff we wind up with a shopping list of combinations that grind the game down.

I think that’s probably the biggest reason why DMs don’t use too many different critters in an encounter. Just too much crap to deal with.

 

[TwoSix]

I wonder if this is just another case of people's experiences not matching up with what WotC is seeing from a higher altitude. If people have been leveling up every 3-5 sessions since 3e, I doubt that it's going to change too much. But, there is this feeling that it's too fast.

3-6 sessions per level, depending on how long/productive the sessions are, does feel pretty much right, purely in terms of gut feeling.

 

[tetrasodium]

I wonder the same thing. I don't want those things. I want the simplicity. I've noticed players totally forgetting they have all the options they get sometimes. We don't have the time either and just want to play the game.

I think that the character sheet shares more than a little bit of the blame for that sort of behavior. Even using a fillable pdf and setting the "features & traits" field to scroll or the font size to mice type will quickly result in usability issues.
Players wind up trying to fit in something that is both uselessly dense with features and pointlessly vague on mechanics.

There's all kinds of stuff backing up how we can handle about seven plus or minus three things in memory but if more than that is chunked into things we learn as a chunk that goes up. By design 5e thwarts the ability to remember or document chunkable abilities thanks to everything being a one off edge case. That design choice makes it easy to seem simple when there is no initial crunch & initial jargon to learn, but that endless pile of simplicity comes with a cost of working against how memory works.

Class design takes that hurdle a step further when it comes to the character sheet making up for it. None of the classes is on a matching schedule of where they get bread & butter abilities vrs ribbons and dead levels or even number of things gained at level x to provide some structure. so you wind up with a less than useful character sheet. Worse still is that because everything is a one off crunch & jargon free one off you can only do it with thirteen different truly excessive sheets. More better more purple does it but then you have a sheet bordering on pdf based apps for each class before you can start using the sheet to start doing the heavy lifting of chunking unique one off abilities. With a class for each sheet a player needs to use some of the mental workspace just to handle the class specific monolithic sheet if they don't exclusively play one class.

Postit notes and register printout receipts are simple while a spreadsheet or database is more complex. That only goes so far thoue since a disorganized jumbled pile of unrelated receipts & Postit notes can be orders of magnitude more complex & less useful than a nicely formatted spreadsheet or database.

 

[MockingBird]

I think that the character sheet shares more than a little bit of the blame for that sort of behavior. Even using a fillable pdf and setting the "features & traits" field to scroll or the font size to mice type will quickly result in usability issues.
Players wind up trying to fit in something that is both uselessly dense with features and pointlessly vague on mechanics.

There's all kinds of stuff backing up how we can handle about seven plus or minus three things in memory but if more than that is chunked into things we learn as a chunk that goes up. By design 5e thwarts the ability to remember or document chunkable abilities thanks to everything being a one off edge case. That design choice makes it easy to seem simple when there is no initial crunch & initial jargon to learn, but that endless pile of simplicity comes with a cost of working against how memory works.

Class design takes that hurdle a step further when it comes to the character sheet making up for it. None of the classes is on a matching schedule of where they get bread & butter abilities vrs ribbons and dead levels or even number of things gained at level x to provide some structure. so you wind up with a character sheet. Worse still is that because everything is a one off crunch & jargon free one off you can only do it with thirteen different truly excessive sheetslike more better more purple does. Before you can start using the sheet to start doing the heavy lifting of chunking unique one off abilities. With a class for each sheet a player needs to use some of the mental workspace just to handle the class specific monolithic sheet if they don't exclusively play one class.

Postit notes and register printout receipts are simple while a spreadsheet or database is more complex. That only goes so far thoue since a disorganized jumbled pile of unrelated receipts & Postit notes can be orders of magnitude more complex & less useful than a nicely formatted spreadsheet or database.

Yeah, I use D&D Beyond to build my kids characters hoping that would solve the often overlooked things. It doesn't, like you said the font is so small it's easy to overlook.

 

[FireLance]

Unfortunately, 5e was not designed around the idea that a PC should have 6-8 key abilities, each of which can be written onto an index card, and maybe another 2-4 additional key abilities per tier.

Or would that turn D&D into a card game instead of a role playing game?

 

[Garthanos]

For example,

The A5E barbarian let's you choose between Unarmored defense or Heavy Armor.

More fighting styles (that aren't fixes to broken rules like thrown fighting or unarmed fighting)

The Berserk seems great. The entirety of A5e is in the right direction.

 

[Helldritch]

Unfortunately, 5e was not designed around the idea that a PC should have 6-8 key abilities, each of which can be written onto an index card, and maybe another 2-4 additional key abilities per tier.

Or would that turn D&D into a card game instead of a role playing game?

That is why they made and now sell spell cards! Now I see the utility of these... But sorry, these are not for me.