D&D 5E (2024) What Improvements Would You Want with 6E?

[Tony Vargas]

.And for me that is....Balanced Play for 1-2 encounter per day groups. In all my years of DMing, the concept of 4-6 encounters a day has never been the norm. I'm not going to do that 6 times a day for balance.

I've always been a little perplexed by 5e taking it out to 6-8, when I've never seen any indication that even 3e's 4-or-so assumption was broadly borne out in the wild.

For all of the optional rules 5e presented to cater to different players taste (including a variety of healing options), there really was nothing to address this style of play.

The hard need for a long-slog adventuring day (with 1 hr breaks) is built into the class designs - and something that player-facing and pervasive, though it might be mathematically simple to adjust (halve short-rest resources, divide long-rest by 6, for an average 1-2 encounter day), would be a challenge to get players to accept, especially if done dynamically, it enable varied pacing, rather than one alternate pace.

 

[Parmandur]

Interesting. Most OP or ridiculous builds in 5E involve Warlock at some point and if they'd been INT that simply wouldn't have been possible, because they'd have had sufficient MAD. What were they in 3.5E? Weren't they CON in 4E?

Not aure about 3.x, it was pretty obscure, but I think it was Charisma. 4E was Charisma or Constitution, variously.

 

[Parmandur]

I've always been a little perplexed by 5e taking it out to 6-8, when I've never seen any indication that even 3e's 4-or-so assumption was broadly borne out in the wild.

The hard need for a long-slog adventuring day (with 1 hr breaks) is built into the class designs - and something that player-facing and pervasive, though it might be mathematically simple to adjust (halve short-rest resources, divide long-rest by 6, for an average 1-2 encounter day), would be a challenge to get players to accept, especially if done dynamically, it enable varied pacing, rather than one alternate pace.

Shorter adventure days are definitely possible, they are just wonky cakewalks. But if people want a wonky cakewalks (like Critical Role) that is fine. The Classes are well balanced when pushed to the limit: if a group doesn't want to push the limits, then balance isn't a problem.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Shorter adventure days are definitely possible, they are just wonky cakewalks.

Or wonky trans-deadly near TPKs, if you dial them up enough to be a challenge.

The Classes are well balanced when pushed to the limit.

They theoretically become roughly balanced, around single-target DPR, at that point. Exactly how it shakes out depends on level, whether feats are opted in, the mix of chalkenges faced, system mastery/skilled play - and DM force.

 

[Parmandur]

Or wonky trans-deadly near TPKs, if you dial them up enough to be a challenge.

They theoretically become roughly balanced, around single-target DPR, at that point. Exactly how it shakes out depends on level, whether feats are opted in, the mix of chalkenges faced, system mastery/skilled play - and DM force.

The game part, qua game, does boil down to Hit Points either taken through damage or restored through healing. Everything else is dressing. So, yes, the Fighter and the Wizard balance for DPR, but they also narratively balance: both have their moments to shine in a full day.

For a challenge, the full adventure day is the way to go.

 

[Lanefan]

1. Go back to roll-in-order as default, substituting (eg) 15 for one stat. Pretty much how 4e D&D Gamma World did it. Eliminates all need for stat-balancing.

Sounds nicely old-school.

2. Go back to 4e style increased hit points at 1st level. Dying in round 1 of your first combat is fine in OSR, but the standard D&D game shouldn't be so much more lethal at 1st level than subsequently. Adding full CON to level 1 hp as in 4e works well.

Where I'd rather see it go the other way: instead of making 1st level less lethal, increase the danger of higher levels so 1st isn't so much of an outlier.

Particularly given that 5e, which would doubtless be the baseline, has revival effects available so cheaply and at such low level (something else I'd change).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Shorter adventure days are definitely possible, they are just wonky cakewalks. But if people want a wonky cakewalks (like Critical Role) that is fine. The Classes are well balanced when pushed to the limit: if a group doesn't want to push the limits, then balance isn't a problem.

The problem is it's basically bad design on the part of the 5E team, though. Like, who the heck writes adventures where you honestly have 6-8 encounters which actually use up resources in a day? I've been playing since 1989 (as I often note), and outside of a few dungeon crawls, that's completely unheard-of. It's just weird. Like, it would be like assuming the average person walked 20000-30000 steps/day and everything should be designed around that, when the reality is that 10000 or less is typical. Why go with a bizarre extreme that few will reach and that most DMs struggle to design for?

And yeah, did they learn nothing from 4E? 4E showed even 4/day was pushing it. 3E showed even lower numbers.

Maybe this is what happens when you basically playtest exclusively in weird dungeons and then 80%+ of the people actually playing the game spend 90% of their time outside dungeons and similar environments.

 

[Parmandur]

The problem is it's basically bad design on the part of the 5E team, though. Like, who the heck writes adventures where you honestly have 6-8 encounters which actually use up resources in a day? I've been playing since 1989 (as I often note), and outside of a few dungeon crawls, that's completely unheard-of. It's just weird. Like, it would be like assuming the average person walked 20000-30000 steps/day and everything should be designed around that, when the reality is that 10000 or less is typical. Why go with a bizarre extreme that few will reach and that most DMs struggle to design for?

And yeah, did they learn nothing from 4E? 4E showed even 4/day was pushing it. 3E showed even lower numbers.

Maybe this is what happens when you basically playtest exclusively in weird dungeons and then 80%+ of the people actually playing the game spend 90% of their time outside dungeons and similar environments.

They've said that their expectation, after playtesting with hundreds of thousands of people, is that the average fight takes 2+3 rounds, and there will be 5-8 such fights in a day with two Short Rests. This is how the Adventure books are written, which continue to sell like hot cakes, and satisfaction with the base assumptions remains high. So, I trust their data as to what a normal day looks like.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

They've said that their expectation, after playtesting with hundreds of thousands of people, is that the average fight takes 2+3 rounds, and there will be 5-8 such fights in a day with two Short Rests. This is how the Adventure books are written, which continue to sell like hot cakes, and satisfaction with the base assumptions remains high. So, I trust their data as to what a normal day looks like.

I don't, and I don't think it's particularly rational to assume that, to be honest. I strongly suspect the vast majority of people who run those books (probably a small minority of people who actually run D&D) actually do not run them as 5-8 encounters per day. I've played in plenty of groups, and podcasts and streams and so on pretty much universally reflect a lower number of encounters on the vast majority of days. It also only allows for extremely narrow "intense but not that intense"-type design of the adventuring day, and doesn't at all support how D&D and other RPGs have been played historically and continue to be played.

It's bad design.

EDIT - It's also circular logic. They designed the game for 5-8 encounters/day (which was seemingly already an assumption when they started playtesting, I note - I wonder where this came from?), and then playtested with weird little dungeon crawls as literally the only kind of adventure they were playtesting, and designed the entire game around 5-8 encounters/day and because they've done that, they release adventures with 5-8 encounters/day. So is it any surprise they remain satisfied with their own logic? Yeah, if you design for a ridiculously high number of encounters/day, and then release adventures that fit that, unlike the adventures humans actually write and run, sure, you're bound to be "satisfied". It's just totally circular logic, though.

A paranoid man might wonder if it they made it intentionally incompatible with how people normally run games, in order to make it so their own weirdly-designed adventures worked! Almost like DRM or something. But I suspect it's more likely to just be a weird fetish based on a dungeon obsession. It's downright hard to write a wilderness or urban adventure with that many meaningful, resource-draining encounters/day though.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't, and I don't think it's particularly rational to assume that, to be honest. I strongly suspect the vast majority of people who run those books (probably a small minority of people who actually run D&D) actually do not run them as 5-8 encounters per day. I've played in plenty of groups, and podcasts and streams and so on pretty much universally reflect a lower number of encounters on the vast majority of days. It also only allows for extremely narrow "intense but not that intense"-type design of the adventuring day, and doesn't at all support how D&D and other RPGs have been played historically and continue to be played.

It's bad design.

EDIT - It's also circular logic. They designed the game for 5-8 encounters/day (which was seemingly already an assumption when they started playtesting, I note - I wonder where this came from?), and then playtested with weird little dungeon crawls as literally the only kind of adventure they were playtesting, and designed the entire game around 5-8 encounters/day and because they've done that, they release adventures with 5-8 encounters/day. So is it any surprise they remain satisfied with their own logic? Yeah, if you design for a ridiculously high number of encounters/day, and then release adventures that fit that, unlike the adventures humans actually write and run, sure, you're bound to be "satisfied". It's just totally circular logic, though.

A paranoid man might wonder if it they made it intentionally incompatible with how people normally run games, in order to make it so their own weirdly-designed adventures worked! Almost like DRM or something. But I suspect it's more likely to just be a weird fetish based on a dungeon obsession. It's downright hard to write a wilderness or urban adventure with that many meaningful, resource-draining encounters/day though.

I didn't say that WotC was satisfied with the results, but that players and customers are satisfied with the results, which play well when followed while pulling the near trick of working fine if people want to undershoot the expectation (as you point out, many do). Sure, won't be as challenging, but the guidelines point out how to make it a viable challenge.