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

[Parmandur]

I don't agree that players and customers are particularly satisfied with the results, and the circular logic remains in place. You assert that, because official adventure sales are allegedly good, people must be satisfied. This is does not follow at all. On the contrary, the inability of people to make their own adventures work as well as the frankly weirdly designed WotC ones may well drive sales, as people seek something that works better. With 3.XE and PF there can be not the slightest shred of doubt that the complexity and effort involved in constructing encounters for those systems helped drive adventure and AP sales. Thus I suggest sales of official adventures may well reflect a problem with the system, not satisfaction. I have never seen a WotC survey result saying "Oh yes we love 5-8 encounters per day!" even.

As for "they work fine with less", you're contradicting your own, recent statements! Where you called less than 6-8/day "wonky"! Correctly, I would say. They work poorly with less, but player instincts are to pull back earlier and it's hard to write anything but a dungeon where 5-8 encounters in a day doesn't seem contrived in the extreme (certainly if it keeps happening! One day can work, but two or three or more?).

The guidelines do not explain how to make a "viable challenge" because 5E is badly designed here and utterly reliant on spamming encounters in a ludicrous way for challenge, and ill-suited to typical D&D play. And players do notice. My own players have commented that 5E encounters are a lot easier than 4E, and even if I dial the difficulty up, as you say, that makes things "wonky" because the encounters simply become swingy and deadly and blow resources in a disorderly way.

TLDR - 5-8 encounters per day forces DMs to write around this bizarre requirement, and that's perverse because design should serve DMs, not vice-versa. But if it sells adventures and APs I am indeed sure WotC is richly satisfied.

WotC reports satisfaction numbers with the game as a whole in the 90% range. I see some people on the internet expressing frustration with the adventure day as set up, but rather muted and not offline at all. The books have guidelines on how to brew it at home, and they have published thousands of pages of examples now. It is still an artform and not a science, but it is well supported and embraced by the player base.

Lower encounter days are wonky in terms of things like Wizard or Paladin balance: some Classes get more powerful if they can Nova confident that they won't get in trouble, while other Classes won't get their non-Nova chance to shine if the Nova capable Classes aren't pushed past their limit. But a lot of people don't care about that (again, I point to Critical Role), and have fun anyways. The game is a game of attrition, and not everyone pushes it to the limit. If it was changed to a game that challenged players with a handful of encounters, the attrition game becomes untenable, which wouldn't go over well.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't believe A are the main group and I'd like to know why you think they are.

WotC publishes 3-4 hardcovers a year. At least two of those every year are adventures that follow the guidelines of the game. We can be quite certain, then, that the prime audience of the game (at least those who spend money) is made up of people who like the gameplay provided by those guidelines. Otherwise WotC would have changed direction due to commercial pressure. Not only have they not changed, the adventure products have gotten more and more bonkers in that direction over the years.

Tuning for D would not leave A dissatisfied. That's straight up irrational and illogical. A don't write adventures, they buy them. Thus if you balanced for 2 or 20 encounters a day, so long as the official adventures had that, A would be fine.

If you want to separate A out into the larger A1 who buy adventures and much smaller A2 who write adventures and love the 5-8 number and find it works well for them then I would say A2 is probably far smaller even than D, even ignoring B which is likely the vast majority of people playing 5E. And don't even try "well if B were really the biggest they'd be catered for!" that's never been true in either TT RPGs or MMORPGs. I mean look at 90s WoD - Katana and Trenchcoat was the main way the TT (and to a lesser extent the LARP) was played, but was it supported? No (or rather, not intentionally). Indeed Revised was basically a metaphorical attempt to throw acid in the collective faces of the majority of players. WotC aren't that dumb but they either intend 5-8 as quasi-DRM (unlikely) or made a mistake when setting that, but not a big enough mistake to be worth correcting, as it would require an entire new edition to do so, and it works wonkily but just about okay.

I see no logical reason to doubt that WotC is not currently serving the market what the market wants.

Accepting your A1-A2 distinction (though it undoubtedly isn't clear cut like that), I see no reason to doubt they are a significant portion of the fanbase.

I think you misunderstand my logical catagory of Group B: it is folks who undershoot the guidelines but remain satisfied (such as Matt Mercer). By definition, this group is happy playing an underpowered game, and wouldn't be overly affected by a change downwards in tuning, positively or negatively. I suspect that a lot of people are in this catagory.

Most everyone I have seen in actuality falls into the satisfied A and B buckets: clearly D exists, but again, tuning the game for D is mutually exclusive with group A's perspective, they cannot be reconciled in one game ruleset. The game can work for A & C or A & B or B & D, but not other combinations. WotC made a choice, and clearly it has worked for the game.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The telos of game design is to make games that appeal to people and get played. Designing a game is about selling a game, exact identity in terms.

The point of a game is to be played. That may be by people who pay for the privilege, or not, or it might be for just the designer and a few of his friends.

I get the desire to insert sales as the relevant goal - it would justify an ad populum argument, and the only remotely objective evidence we have for D&D being 'good' is it's relative popularity. But, you can't pretend that the point of game design is sales. You can sell a game on a number of bases, depending on why people might buy it.

You can sell a game as game, for no other reason that it's fun to play. In theory. In practice, you can barely give games away for free on that basis, alone. There are myriad games in the public domain, for instance, that can be played with a few dice, or a deck of cards, or paper & pencil, etc... You can't expect a for-profit, trademarked, game to compete with all that.

Instead, games are sold on the basis of cultural-icon status, association with family, familiarity & recognition through advertising or past market dominance, association with famed/admirable people that potential customers can feel a connection to by playing (or just owning) that game, etc.

I mean, briefly, I'm sure there's been many a master's thesis published on such topics, if you want to dive into the scholarship. Personally, I find microeconomics like these the more-dismal half of the dismal science.

 

[Parmandur]

The point of a game is to be played. That may be by people who pay for the privilege, or not, or it might be for just the designer and a few of his friends.

I get the desire to insert sales as the relevant goal - it would justify an ad populum argument, and the only remotely objective evidence we have for D&D being 'good' is it's relative popularity. But, you can't pretend that the point of game design is sales. You can sell a game on a number of bases, depending on why people might buy it.

You can sell a game as game, for no other reason that it's fun to play. In theory. In practice, you can barely give games away for free on that basis, alone. There are myriad games in the public domain, for instance, that can be played with a few dice, or a deck of cards, or paper & pencil, etc... You can't expect a for-profit, trademarked, game to compete with all that.

Instead, games are sold on the basis of cultural-icon status, association with family, familiarity & recognition through advertising or past market dominance, association with famed/admirable people that potential customers can feel a connection to by playing (or just owning) that game, etc.

I mean, briefly, I'm sure there's been many a master's thesis published on such topics, if you want to dive into the scholarship. Personally, I find microeconomics like these the more-dismal half of the dismal science.

It is impossible to separate the design of a game, creating something fun for people to play, from selling the game in terms of getting people to play (money exchanged or otherwise). They are the same thing.

 

[Tony Vargas]

It is impossible to separate the design of a game, creating something fun for people to play, from selling the game in terms of getting people to play (money exchanged or otherwise). They are the same thing.

I just explained why they're not even vaguely related. I mean, most games sell to people who haven't played them yet - they're actual quality as games has no influence on that purchase! They might have seen advertising, noticed it on the shelf because of the art or the name, read a blurb on the back...

Sales is very much its own thing.

If they let a player play the desired archetype, and have fun, without making fairly casual or “low system mastery” players notice the system in a negative way, it isn’t broken.

By that standard, most D&D classes have been broken to tiny pieces. They're extremely poor at matching desired genre archetypes, for instance.
One of many reasons I like to use pregens: you give new players a choice of characters, they pick one, and may notice moments when it's reminiscent of a genre archetype. You ask them, "what sort of character from fantasy would you want to play" so you can guide them through rolling up a character and help them pick a class, you invariable end up explaining to them why that character won't measure up to the one they called out - and, if as is so often the case, the closest match is fighter, why it /never/ will. Even if it's not, why it's magical powers, while they'll eventually far exceed those of the archetype they're going for, will never work much like them, at all.

Funny thing is, even if you did balance the classes, at least to the point you could say "not broken" with some confidence, they /still/ wouldn't necessarily start modeling genre well - though closing the gap between martial &caster characters by making the former more broadly capable and the latter more specialized & limited would do both.

 

[5ekyu]

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?

Honestly, four charisma classes is a bit out of whack - bard, sorc, warlock and paladin.

Really how hard us it to not see twelve classes, six abilities and fail to suggest "hey, what if it was two classes for each ability" and then have sub-classes that hit other secondaries? Just one example set...

Str Fighter Monk
Con Barbarian Sorcerer
Dex Ranger Rogue
Int Wizard Warlock
Wis Cleric Druid
Cha Bard Paladin

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I just explained why they're not even vaguely related. I mean, most games sell to people who haven't played them yet - they're actual quality as games has no influence on that purchase! They might have seen advertising, noticed it on the shelf because of the art or the name, read a blurb on the back...

Sales is very much its own thing.

By that standard, most D&D classes have been broken to tiny pieces. They're extremely poor at matching desired genre archetypes, for instance.
One of many reasons I like to use pregens: you give new players a choice of characters, they pick one, and may notice moments when it's reminiscent of a genre archetype. You ask them, "what sort of character from fantasy would you want to play" so you can guide them through rolling up a character and help them pick a class, you invariable end up explaining to them why that character won't measure up to the one they called out - and, if as is so often the case, the closest match is fighter, why it /never/ will. Even if it's not, why it's magical powers, while they'll eventually far exceed those of the archetype they're going for, will never work much like them, at all.

Funny thing is, even if you did balance the classes, at least to the point you could say "not broken" with some confidence, they /still/ wouldn't necessarily start modeling genre well - though closing the gap between martial &caster characters by making the former more broadly capable and the latter more specialized & limited would do both.

I’ve literally never in my life had to do any such thing, except when play a Star Wars RPG, and even then it was only because they wanted to play something the system just didn’t support, like some obscure Force Tradition with very specific iconic abilities.

In DnD? Nah. Especially in 5e, I ask what sort of character they wanna play, and just help them make that character.

 

[Sacrosanct]

An ad populum can be a fallacy. But it doesn’t mean it has to be. That’s why context matters. And other factors we can look at. Like satisfaction surveys. By looking at all of the data, 5e is popular not just because it’s popular, and can be said it’s good design regardless of how popular it is. After all, every edition has the D&D branding, but some editions did better and worse than others for popularity. Ultimately people play games they enjoy. And the bottom line is that D&D had a directive as its vision statement to be the #1 game again. In that regard, it appears that requirement was a resounding design success.

so I don’t put much weight into the argument that we shouldn’t use popularity as a factor because an ad populum fallacy is a thing. Sometimes. We need to look at all things together, and understand the project requirements. And by doing that, popularity is a valid metric to use

 

[Undrave]

Would be nice if there was an ACTUAL exploration pillar in the game. Not just one guy rolling for Survival to not get lost and some spell caster obviating the challenge with some spells (like Goodberry feeding everybody).

I agree with the AngryGM, there's not really that much in the DnD exploration pillar. It barely exists. What Makes Exploration Exploration?

 

[Sacrosanct]

Would be nice if there was an ACTUAL exploration pillar in the game. Not just one guy rolling for Survival to not get lost and some spell caster obviating the challenge with some spells (like Goodberry feeding everybody).

I agree with the AngryGM, there's not really that much in the DnD exploration pillar. It barely exists. What Makes Exploration Exploration?

Um...there is. If all your exploration parts of the game are a survival check and good berries, you’re really missing out. The easy answer is to point you to the DMG and PHB on the relevant sections that address exploration.
Anecdotally, my last session was 5 hours long, and was entirely social and exploration pillars. Not a single combat this session. Much of the exploration was exploring the sewers in Waterdeep. It included searching for clues of guild signs, not getting lost, mapping the sewers, finding secret passages, dealing with the stench of the sewer and other unsanitary conditions, recognizing and avoiding hazards, both traps and creatures, using light sources, and resource management (both in fear and what spells to prepare*)

*because I prepped my spells for exploration, it doesn’t mean we obliviated the challenge. I had limited spells, and had to also prep some in the event we did have combat.