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What is "broken" in 5e?
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<blockquote data-quote="knasser" data-source="post: 6998062" data-attributes="member: 65151"><p>There are plenty of things that are not to people's tastes. But that's true of any game - I would not use the term "broken" to describe the goal of the system not lining up with a GM's goals. It's just a difference. For me to describe something as "broken" I'd say it has to do one of three things:</p><p></p><p></p><ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Poorly achieve what is plainly the intended goal. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Introduce a constraint without benefit / unnecessarily. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Have a serious deleterious effect on some other aspect for no good reason. </li> </ul><p></p><p>Those should all be relatively self-explanatory. And they are all <strong>objective</strong> ways you can conclude something is broken. If you say dwarves cannot be magic users, that is a constraint with a benefit. It's a fluffy benefit (atmosphere); it's one that is maybe only a benefit to a subset of people who like their setting that way, but it has a definable "upside". Conversely if you say that 5e is designed only to handle well a set and narrow range of encounters per day (5-6) and starts to break mechanically if you say do one encounter per day, then that is a constraint without a benefit IF it is possible to design the system in such a way that it would function fine without that being necessary allowing GMs to have more flexibility. Someone could argue that it isn't possible to change that without making the game less suitable for GMs who <em>do</em> want 5-6 encounters per day, but they would have to focus on trying to show that it wasn't possible. Otherwise it stands as an objective criticism of the system.</p><p></p><p>So anyway, after defining my terms, I would say the fact that D&D 5e breaks significantly if you have few encounters per day. Other game systems manage a widely-variable number of encounters just fine. 5e does not. Combat becomes unbalanced and swingy if players aren't carefully nursing their resources.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="knasser, post: 6998062, member: 65151"] There are plenty of things that are not to people's tastes. But that's true of any game - I would not use the term "broken" to describe the goal of the system not lining up with a GM's goals. It's just a difference. For me to describe something as "broken" I'd say it has to do one of three things: [LIST] [*]Poorly achieve what is plainly the intended goal. [*]Introduce a constraint without benefit / unnecessarily. [*]Have a serious deleterious effect on some other aspect for no good reason. [/LIST] Those should all be relatively self-explanatory. And they are all [B]objective[/B] ways you can conclude something is broken. If you say dwarves cannot be magic users, that is a constraint with a benefit. It's a fluffy benefit (atmosphere); it's one that is maybe only a benefit to a subset of people who like their setting that way, but it has a definable "upside". Conversely if you say that 5e is designed only to handle well a set and narrow range of encounters per day (5-6) and starts to break mechanically if you say do one encounter per day, then that is a constraint without a benefit IF it is possible to design the system in such a way that it would function fine without that being necessary allowing GMs to have more flexibility. Someone could argue that it isn't possible to change that without making the game less suitable for GMs who [I]do[/I] want 5-6 encounters per day, but they would have to focus on trying to show that it wasn't possible. Otherwise it stands as an objective criticism of the system. So anyway, after defining my terms, I would say the fact that D&D 5e breaks significantly if you have few encounters per day. Other game systems manage a widely-variable number of encounters just fine. 5e does not. Combat becomes unbalanced and swingy if players aren't carefully nursing their resources. [/QUOTE]
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