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

[UngeheuerLich]

So while most points are hinting to little problems in 5e they are blown way out of proportion.

 

[dave2008]

I don’t want a 6e. I want a slight reset with an improved action economy similar to Pathfinder 2e. Expansion of subclass options and backgrounds, most popular new races added into the core rule book. Things like that rather than a revamp. New art. Maybe a section in the DMG on Phandelver or a similar location in the Realms. Very little needs done to 5e really.

Adopting the PF2e action economy would be a major re-write and warrant a new edition.

 

[teitan]

I don’t see how it would be a major rewrite. It wasn’t a major rewrite changing the action economy in 3e to the action economy of 3.5. It seems more a simplification

 

[GreenTengu]

I don’t want a 6e. I want a slight reset with an improved action economy similar to Pathfinder 2e. Expansion of subclass options and backgrounds, most popular new races added into the core rule book. Things like that rather than a revamp. New art. Maybe a section in the DMG on Phandelver or a similar location in the Realms. Very little needs done to 5e really.

You cannot fix the broken weapons table, fix that certain classes and races are just trash because no thought or care was put into them, that Intelligence is an utterly worthless attribute that no one has any reason to have higher than 8 while Dexterity is a god attribute that allows you to have the highest AC and best save without any gold investment, go first, hit more often and deal more damage than any other stat options in both ranged and melee or that there is basically a single "right" way to arrange your stats and choose your weapons if you want to be more effective and anything else in the game is just a trap that will set you possibly the equivalent of an entire level behind in effectiveness than if you choose the "right"option.

None of that is fixable by adopting some other actin economy or adding more bloat to the game. All additional subclass options are either broken or so subpar that literally no one ever uses them and the paper they are printed on is just wasted.

Now maybe one can fix quite a lot of it with a 5.5 Edition instead of a 6 Edition. Maybe.
One would have to rewrite the Ranger from nearly scratch, particularly the Beastmaster, and rewrite basically all the races from Volo's and make several tweaks even to the PHB ones. But, sure-- that could be a 5.5.

But I don't see one fixing the insane brokenness of the Dexterity or the uselessness of Intelligence while it would still be 5E. One would have to reassign Intiative and Ranged Attacks to other attributes, remove the rapier from the weapons table, and spread out which save various attacks target so they are more evenly distributed. And similarly give Intelligence literally any other function than a bunch of skills that amount to "ask the DM for more information because you don't know what you are supposed to be doing."

 

[dave2008]

I don’t see how it would be a major rewrite. It wasn’t a major rewrite changing the action economy in 3e to the action economy of 3.5. It seems more a simplification

I've already looked into adding it to my 5e games and it affects every class in multiple ways. Along with reassigning all move and bonus actions, standard actions (multiattack?), and reactions you have to consider all spells and many class features. Then, ideally, like PF2e there are features and abilities that take advantage of this new action economy. Not to mention legendary actions and other odd balls. You could simply mash into the current system, but that would not be doing the concept justice.

 

[snickersnax]

I want:

1) Mechanics that allow for some BBEGs to be viable solitary opponents.

2) Easy variant options for low-magic world building.

3) Easy variant options for hard mode.

4) A consistency editing pass so that when I read the fluff and compare the mechanics I'm not scratching my head and wondering WTF. A second pass for making ability names actually do what they sound like they do.

5) An index that doesn't self reference.

6) Fix bad ideas: hit point bloat, intelligence dump stat, whack-a-mole healing

 

[Arnwolf666]

1/3 casters don't have nearly enough resources to count as being daily powers. Getting 2nd level spells at level 7 and 3rd level spells at level 13 is absurdly slow.

And having played a Champion level 1-19, calling anything they get before level 18 an "at-will power" is really stretching that definition. No, I never felt weak, but without the minimal amount of decision making required to use GWM, I would never have made it past level 5 with that class. Playing a champion, you feel like you have two choices to make and that's it: when to Second Wind (yay ) and when to Action Surge. Since Action Surge is best early on (best defense is a good offense) you run into the problem that if you make a mistake, you're stuck until the next long rest.



You're missing my point. It's been an issue, yes, but it's not been one which has caused party conflict. It's never worked at cross-purposes. It's been an artifact of the game, but not a flaw of design. It hasn't been a problem that caused issues in game play. Well, excepting the "5 minute work day" that irritates DMs, but if that was an issue in 4e then that's basically impossible to avoid.

In 1e/2e/3e/4e, when the Fighter wanted to stop because they were out of hp, you stopped because nobody else wants the Fighter's role of high AC, high hp, and consistent damage. The "meat shield" idiom is not an unwarranted one. When the spellcasters want to stop, the Fighter does because not only does he wants the Wizard's big guns, he wants the Clerics fast healing and combat healing. Not only do the requirements to rest dovetail into what each class does for the others, nobody is really arguing about how long to rest, either. [Excepting 1e's extremely slow spell recovery, but I don't think I ever played in a campaign that didn't use 100% daily spell slot recovery.]

In 5e, you can run into situations where the Fighter/Warlock/Monk wants to stop because their active resources need replenishing, but the Barbarian/Bard/Cleric/Druid/Rogue/Paladin/Wizard/etc. don't want to stop because not only are they mostly full on resources, but the role that a Fighter/Warlock/Monk is expected to fill int the party -- tank, blaster, or skirmisher -- isn't significantly impaired. The worst part is that they'll be more likely to be bored and they player might feel less in the spotlight. It doesn't make your character worse, it just makes playing your character feel worse. Unfortunately, that actually worse from a design perspective.



It's somewhat ironic because, in my observation, the number one recommendation that DMs seem to get when they ask, "How do I run 6-8 encounters a day when my party keeps stopping after 2-4," is, "Use time pressure to force them to keep going." Nearly any time pressure that is urgent enough to prevent them from long resting is also going to prevent them from short resting every other encounter!



It would be less of an issue if there were more classes that relied on short rests for most of their interesting, active abilities. The problem is that, with only 3 classes with the issue, many groups will have 1 short rest class and 3-4 long rest classes (or the one at-will class, Rogue). So the short rest player is always out-voted.

There's a third problem with short rests, and this one relates to Hit Dice.

One of the last concessions made at the end of playtesting was to dial back the number of Hit Dice recovered with a long rest. Originally, you recovered all of them with a long rest. They switched it to only recovering half with a long rest to appease players who wanted slower recovery.

That was also a design mistake. The consequence is that, over the long term, filling your day with short rests to recover hit points and continue adventuring carries diminishing returns.

Say you're a 10th level whatever. You short rest and expend 5 Hit Dice to recover your hp. Later, you rest again and spend another 4 Hit Dice to recover hp, and you keep going. Later you long rest. Great! This is what the game wanted you to do! Except, wait. You only recover 5 HD overnight. You'll only have 6 HD tomorrow, but adventuring today and recovering with short rests cost 9 HD. Assuming the next day is equally difficult, I should expect to be unable to continue adventuring tomorrow at my second rest opportunity (i.e., short, long) even though I had three rest opportunities today (i.e., short, short, long).

Now, I agree that this is very realistic. Getting worn down over time is thematic, flavorful, and challenging. Indeed, I would even agree that this is an overall good design... except when your game includes classes that rely on short rests.

Reduced HD recovery discourages short resting day after day after day. Short resting is now not as sustainable. You'll either need to go more encounters between rests, or else just have fewer encounters per day even if they have the same difficulty. If you do the former, then short rest classes have fewer chances to recover resources over the same number of encounters. That is, they have fewer ability uses each day. If you do the latter, long rest characters will have the same amount of resources to use over fewer encounters. That is, they have fewer ability targets each day.

With the availability of healing in this edition I don’t find this an issue.

 

[Don Durito]

The 5 minute Work day is not impossible to resolve. 13th Age does it easily. You just make the reset indepedent of actual time and dependent on the number of encounters that take place, with the GM adjusting as needed.

Now whether you'd prefer the 5 minute work day (In order to clutch desperately at some last fragments of real world plausibility) to that solution is another issue. But the problem has been solved.

 

[Arnwolf666]

The 5 minute Work day is not impossible to resolve. 13th Age does it easily. You just make the reset indepedent of actual time and dependent on the number of encounters that take place, with the GM adjusting as needed.

Now whether you'd prefer the 5 minute work day (In order to clutch desperately at some last fragments of real world plausibility) to that solution is another issue. But the problem has been solved.

That’s one solution that works. I wonder about people that have been writing adventures 20+ years. I never had a problem with any edition. It was all a matter of constructing the encounters and adventures. And really wasn’t that hard with practice. Is this a phenomenon of people that play prepublished adventures?

 

[Don Durito]

That’s one solution that works. I wonder about people that have been writing adventures 20+ years. I never had a problem with any edition. It was all a matter of construction the encounters and adventures. And really wasn’t that hard with practice. Is this a phenomenon of people that play prepublished adventures?

My experience as a player (I won't run 5E - I've got far better options) is that GMs just don't grok the importance of spacing out rests for the at-will short rest characters. It's common in my experience to have encounters during travel, where there are two or three full nights before the next one and the rest variant isn't used. Players quickly learn that they can get away with being awesome. And unless you're doing dedicated dungeon delving it's very easy for combats to drop down to one or two a day (In an urban or wilderness adventure you might get in 4 combats in a session but they won't necessarily be on the same day in game time).

The full hour for the short rest is an annoying amount of time to factor in. If you're trying to make time urgent to keep players from taking a long rest - you need to make it not so urgent that PCs can't also stop and sit around for an hour.

And even if you get it right you're still going to have players (quite reasonably) constantly asking or weighing up whether they have time for a rest, and how long that rest can be. This alone is annoying enough to just go to the 13th Age solution.