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

[payn]

I got schooled. I was thinking of my wife’s face soap with exfoliating beads!

Right! The candy looking packets! They are not sweet if you are curious.

Heard it from a friend.

Tide wanted to use "melts in your mouth, not in your hand" but it was already taken.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

Tide wanted to use "melts in your mouth, not in your hand" but it was already taken.

Oh lord!

 

[niklinna]

Tide wanted to use "melts in your mouth, not in your hand" but it was already taken.

And "melts your mouth" would have been a little too accurate.

 

[Hussar]

I don't measure quality from a business perspective.

Fair enough. But, it appears that you measure quality based on how closely it appeals to you personally. Which is probably why you get a fair degree of push back. After all, this:

That's the thing. 5e is so popular that WotC no longer has to actually produce quality product to sell tons. They have no motivation to do their best work, because they're popular enough that it won't affect the bottom line.

is absolute rubbish. I'm sorry, but, it's just not true. Not producing quality products? Seriously? WotC probably has the highest production values of any gaming books, probably the highest quality art, the writing is very well edited and the adventures have few, if any, actual mistakes in them. How is that not a "quality product". Unless quality means, "appeals specifically to me" of course.

You can piddle on WotC for a lot of things. Not being terribly adventurous with mechanics, for one. Fair enough. They tend to say pretty solidly in the middle of the road. I'll admit that I find the naval combat rules in Ghosts of Saltmarsh to be very lacking, for example. There are far better, for me, mechanics out there.

But, here's the thing. My "great naval combat mechanics" was absolutely panned by my group. They hated it and wanted the WotC mechanics to be used because they have zero interest in dealing with the more complex mechanics that I prefer. They want naval combat to be mostly narrative and abstracted. So, which rules should I use? The fantastic ones that I really want to use but my players hate, or the boring, vanilla ones that are in Ghosts of Saltmarsh that my players actually enjoy?

And, which one is higher quality?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Its focus on combat, how any non combat action is linked to the same proficiency value which is mainly affected by your level (and thus combat power) and, by now, the class and level system itself.

In 5E its impossible to make a character which is good at non combat skills but bad at combat nor is it possible to make an expert for one skill but bad at every other skills.
I think that modular systems like the one from Shadowun, Traveller or DSA are vastly superior to restrictive class/level system like in D&D.

To be fair, these are strongly connected; once it got out of the "We're trying to do anything but actually fight if possible" era early on, D&D has focused on action-adventure fiction, which is usually perceived as heavily about combat.

Given that its almost certainly seen as actively undesirable to have characters who are incompetent in combat. For all that I'm not a fan of class-and-level either, given the basis of the kind of adventures it focuses on, I can't say they're wrong.

 

[Garthanos]

I

Its focus on combat, how any non combat action is linked to the same proficiency value which is mainly affected by your level (and thus combat power) and, by now, the class and level system itself.

Spend a feat and your one skill will get double the benefit of level it allows you to somewhat specialize... go ahead and put the wrong attribute for combat as your best but which is best for that skill... tadah bad at combat great at a skill. Not as extreme as you mentioned but definitely hinting at it.

 

[Pentallion]

Bring back 18(00) strength.
Get rid of short rests. They're for video games. Change the system to allow for increasing to hits and increasing AC. ie bring back better protection items. Let ACs head further past 20, even to 30 and increase to hits accordingly as levels advance.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Question: What (if anything) do you find "wrong" with D&D 5E?
Answer: One D&D UA Material.

 

[Vaalingrade]

This is the one wrong answer.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Nope, best answer yet.