D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[pemerton]

On the topic of contrafactual or latency: I think we can see that there are simply people who's exposure to different concepts in RPGs is not wide. I suspect that a lot of people have pretty much stuck to a few similar games that they were exposed to around the time they started playing, and the very thought of other RPG constructs is just hard for them to contemplate.

This seems plausible for some posters, yes.

I remember sitting around (over 20 years ago) with fellow Rolemaster players and making fun of T&T's ultra-abstract and very swingy mechanics, but it never occurred to use to denounce it as an RPG!

What is true is that, at the time, I probably didn't have a good sense of how T&T might be approached as a somewhat light-hearted but still worthwhile play experience, because my suite of GMing techniques wasn't as developed then as it is now.

When I read posts saying that 4e is a treadmill with no sense of accomplishment because the gameword is all "meta" and "wizard's curtain" and "GMing skill", I wonder what those posters would make of HeroWars/Quest - where everything is resolved by contested d20 rolls and the difference between attacking someone with a fireball and pleading for a favour from them is all down to the GM's adjudication of the interaction between free descriptors (it makes Marvel Heroic look tight in its connecting of fiction to mechanics). But I think Robin Laws knows a thing or two about what a good RPG might look like!

 

[pemerton]

I was responding to pemerton's hypothetical on what effect fixed DCs would have on play. In particular, to his speculation that the lack of fixed DCs suggests that high-level adventurers stick to boring, non-fantastic locations and problems.

Just a point of clarification - I don't think I said boring and didn't intend to imply it. (I did say non-fantastical/magical, though.)

See also my post not far upthread of this one - you're quoted in it - where I explain why I think "objective" DCs tend to lead to a somewhat technical or mechanistic/disenchanted world rather than a magical/fate/luck-vibed world.

Moving from speculation about design to some personal taste - this is why I like RM and Burning Wheel, and can enjoy RQ (though find it almost too austere), and also 4e and (in a different but not radically different genre) Marvel Heroic, but find 3E and a certain sort of approach to AD&D hard to handle.

The first category of games (RM, BW, RQ) tend to produce the mechanistic world. This favours modernist fantasy (eg Conan-esque sword-and-sorcery - REH's imagined world I find very disenchanted, despite the presence of magic, although Hour of the Dragon has hints to the contrary). I did eventually work out how to run RM so as to produce a different sort of vibe, but it is not easy and, because it pushes quite a bit against elements of the system, requires deft handling.

These games don't mean boredom, though.

4e and MHRP are at the other end of the spectrum - very fantastical worlds.

My issue with 3E, and a certain style of AD&D, is that the hit point system (and in AD&D the saving throw system too) point towards fantasticality, but 3E's skill and combat manoeuvre system tends to point towards a mechanistic, disenchanted world. (And AD&D can be pushed in this sort of direction too.) I find it a bit oil-and-water.

 

[BryonD]

When I read posts saying that 4e is a treadmill with no sense of accomplishment because the gameword is all "meta" and "wizard's curtain" and "GMing skill",

I recognize you are responding to others, and I do not embrace everything being stated from any quarter here.

But do you find this highly ironic? When 4E first rolled out it was vastly praised as the game for newbie GMs and everything was made foolproof for a brand new player to jump in as DM. This was hailed as the cornerstone of the soon to be vastly expanded player base. What happened to that?

I wonder what those posters would make of HeroWars/Quest - where everything is resolved by contested d20 rolls and the difference between attacking someone with a fireball and pleading for a favour from them is all down to the GM's adjudication of the interaction between free descriptors (it makes Marvel Heroic look tight in its connecting of fiction to mechanics). But I think Robin Laws knows a thing or two about what a good RPG might look like!

I love GURPs. Recently Tony made some comment about the lack of GURPs taking over showing that customizable systems aren't all that. (paraphrasing very much from off the cuff memory)
I don't think these games made nearly the dent in the industry that GURPs made. But I readily acknowledge that they were quite popular. But a lot of people never tried them and a lot of people just didn't care for them.
It doesn't really resolve anything. And if anything you seem to be piling on to a conceit being offered by Lovecraft's alter-ego here that failure to enjoy 4E stems from lack of sophisticated appreciation of the hobby.

I don't buy that.

 

[pemerton]

I only know the 4E Core books somewhat. In that version we tried to play our lethal version of D&D without a cleric healer, didn't work out. Burned through healing surges too quickly. Cleric had some of the better abilities that healed without a Healing Surge. Sure, you could build a warrior cleric. Our play-style pushed us to have a cleric healer.

<snip>

Experiences differ in this area. I can't tell if it was the 4E system or the way we play.

An anecdote on the same issue:

When we started 4e the party didn't have a leader - warlock (replaced by sorcerer at 3rd level), archer ranger, fighter, paladin and wizard (rebuilt as invoker at 16th level).

There was a bit of cleric/warlord multi-classing, though, and the fighter was a dwarf (second wind as minor action) and of course a paladin can lay on hands.

At 6th level the ranger was rebuilt as a hybrid cleric (1x/enc Healing Word). Other players at that point retrained out some of the healing abilities on their PCs.

In the end (now at 30th) the party has 1x/enc Healing Word (affects two targets, via feat), 1x/enc Word of Vigour (a cleric AoE power that allows HS expenditure), an encounter AoE on the fighter and one on the ranger/cleric that allow HS expenditure, plus the paladin's LoH, and two daily heals from multi-classing. And a daily Mass Cure Serious Wounds (two surges worth of surgeless healing) from the ranger-cleric. Plus one or two items that allow healing (eg Dwarven Armour).

The fighter is still a dwarf (able to second wind twice per encounter as a free action, via feats), and the paladin's Paragon Path allows Second Wind as a free action when bloodied. Plus most of the PCs can come back from death once per day.

Generally that is plenty of healing. The party just reached 30th by winning a level+8 combat, and not all that healing was used.

A fully dedicated healing cleric would be excessive, I think. The ranger-cleric hybrid provides a nice balance between support and offence. (The character uses off-turn ranger attacks to deliver quarry damage when the standard action is a cleric power.)

I guess if the party was stuck with only standard action second winds, and had no healer multi-class feats, a more dedicated healer might be required. But even then 3 healing words (or equivalent) would probably be enough, maybe with the Mass Cure Serious as well and perhaps some items or another daily power in reserve. A PC dedicated solely to healing would seem a bit excessive, and might make combat drag a bit (too much patching up, not enough damage infliction).

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

On the topic of contrafactual or latency: I think we can see that there are simply people who's exposure to different concepts in RPGs is not wide. I suspect that a lot of people have pretty much stuck to a few similar games that they were exposed to around the time they started playing, and the very thought of other RPG constructs is just hard for them to contemplate.

Consider AC as an example. AC in 5e is just as abstract a thing as it is in any other D&D. Most of your AC is just some sort of inherent attribute of your character, you start with 10 points of it, and even if your character is restrained (and thus certainly cannot dodge, parry, etc) you STILL have that 10 points of AC. What does it represent? It has to be much like hit points, largely luck, skill, etc. Yet there is a sort of fiction about the mechanics that says that 'plate armor is AC 16, that's a physically modeled realistic thing.' But then why isn't it 6 if you're restrained? Why, if 2/3 of that value is really some sort of abstraction is it that one would feel a requirement to have every single creature in 5e that is clad in plate armor be AC 16? I mean even in terms of the qualities of armor itself there's a huge difference between a 2mm thick 13th Century plate breastplate and a 16th Century 8mm thick high quality steel one. Its simply a convention, and IMHO its the conventionality that is desirable to some people. They want everything to conform to a pattern that is familiar. The qualities of the pattern are irrelevant, although many of them will vociferously object and attribute 'objective' qualities to AC, etc. It really has nothing to do with game design per-se in a technical sense.

*raised eyebrows* On the one hand you suggest that people who disagree with you are ignorant buffoons. (I don't know why you even bring this up. Pemerton has a good point about actuals vs. counterfactuals, but the only relevance breadth of game experience has on counterfactuals is that broad experience allows you to more easily see counterfactuals, which the same as seeing actuals in advance.)

On the other hand you struggle to find an example of an RPG mechanic that could have been implemented in a different way. I don't know if that's because you're limiting yourself in an attempt to condescend to the hoi polloi, or because you genuinely can't think of a better example, but just for fun here are four alternate ways to implement armor:

1.) PD (GURPS 3e). Makes it easier for your opponent to succeed on their opposed roll to parry/dodge your blow. Mechanically different from the (A)D&D concept of AC in that it relies on the opposed roll, so PD on a guy who's doing an All Out Attack is useless, because there is no opposed roll. Likewise, its utility degrades against multiple attackers because of penalties.

2.) DR (Shadowrun, GURPS 4e, Dominions, 5E*). Reduces the damage you take from an attack by a flat or rolled value. Mechanically different from AC in that it functions better against smaller weapons, and rewards enemies for busting out the "can opener." Tends to lead to armor becoming irrelevant in high-powered play, although the tendency is not absolute.

3.) Flat miss percentage (Bang!). An attack normally always hits, but each piece of armor gives a small chance (25%) for the attack to miss. Mechanically different from AC in that AC functions better against less-skilled opponents and therefore rewards high-level enemies for skill. Flat misses can happen in an AC-based system (Mirror Image spell) and they're useful against high-powered enemies like demons and krakens for that reason.

4.) Extra HP. (Don't know of a system which uses this.) Putting on armor simply increases your effective HP by a fixed value or percentage. Mechanically simplistic, encourages Conan tropes wherein high-powered protagonists run around bare-chested to show how tough they are. (Contrast with D&D 5E wherein a 20th level fighter would be loathe to doff his armor even for a good reason, like swimming a river, before entering a fight. The fighter's AC is a three- or four-fold force multiplier, not a mere +10% or +20% HP.)

I'm sure those who have played more systems like FATE, Burning Wheel, White Wolf, can add more examples.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Hmmmm, they didn't in the previous edition? I was so pleased when we first played 4e, the players created a human cleric, a half-elf rogue, a dwarf fighter, and a half-elf warlock IIRC. I guess there was an Eladrin Wizard too. Very classic. Yet the Cleric rarely healed, was a STR cleric, and was pretty much a beatdown specialist that would cripplingly debuff each melee opponent one after another, after which the fighter or rogue would chew them up and spit them out. She did get rather classic when it came to undead (being a cleric of light, go figure) but even that level of divergence from the 2e tropes I was used to was pretty refreshing. I hear Hemlock asserting that clerics are extraneous in 5e. Its at variance with my experience, and sounds like it somewhat rests on a tricky bard build (I'm skeptical our DM would pass on that) but I certainly do hope that its at least possible to break that limitation.

Naw. You hear Hemlock contesting AbdulAlhazred's assertion that clerics are mandatory, or at least universally optimal.

And do note that my players don't actually have an Aura of Vitality bard among them. I've played them at other tables and they are quite good, but the fact that clerical healing is inefficient is subsidiary to the point about there being other ways to play. Minionmancy, mobility and bearbarian[1] resistance have all featured prominently in key victories at my table. I dare say they would have been TPKed on at least two occasions if not for the Silver Horn of Valhalla which they stole from the Enkidu. (It was originally on loan but they never gave it back.)

It sounds like you need to learn more about the alternatives before judging the relative efficacy of clerics. Also, playstyle matters a lot--maybe there's something specific about how your DM runs the game that makes healing mandatory for you.

[1] Whoops, I got caught up in the fun of the word "bearbarian". The barbarian at my table is actually a wolf barbarian, so has resistance only to non-magical weapon attacks and not to everything. Still, his amazing tankability + damage output has been key in some large fights, in particular one at Deadly x10 against a neogi deathspider stuffed with 26 umber hulks.

 

[tyrlaan]

Google me. You will find long detailed explanations on these forums.

I'm not going to rehash now pointless minutia regarding 4E.
But it is worth responding when the same old arguments of "but you just don't understand 4E" are pulled out.
I do understand. A lot of people understand. Posting a longwinded lecture on the finer points with the conceit that others are simply failing to appreciate 4E through their own ignorance is worth disputing now as much as it was then. Getting into the details of every issue, not at all worth as much now as it was then.

Hmm. Finer points. Lecture. Telling word choices.

Honestly, this in no way seems to explain why you would post at all then. If you don't want to talk about it then why hint at talking about it? Just seems passive aggressive to me.

But if you consider a more robust reply to be best described as a lecture, by all means feel free to keep your thoughts to yourself in that case. I'm good; I can live comfortably not understanding your allusions.

 

[Manbearcat]

1.) I don't really understand the first paragraph, especially the part in bold.

I may have misunderstood what you were contending. I read your post as effectively saying that subjective DCs (that is to say, non-world-physics-centered DCs) tend to push toward a play dynamic whereby your tactical > operational > strategic progression (my continuum) and "variations of the same old threat" are mutually exclusive. That is what that first bit was about. If I was wrong about what you were saying, I'd be happy to be corrected.

2.) Your game sounds fun. I agree, mixing different scopes of problems is more fun than sticking strictly to one kind. I never meant to suggest otherwise.

Thanks. We enjoy ourselves. That group isn't the group that I GM old-school dungeon crawls for or run Cthulu for. But they like me to run Dread, Dogs, Cortex +, PBtA, a smattering of 13th Age and Sorcerer, and 4e for them.

On your second part, I didn't think you meant to suggest otherwise. I definitely thought you felt that different scopes were more fun. I just thought you were positing that subjective DCs make the effort to do so prohibitive (or outright impossible). I may have had you wrong there.

3.) I'll take your word for it on the last paragraph. I wasn't talking about specific editions, I was responding to pemerton's hypothetical on what effect fixed DCs would have on play. In particular, to his speculation that the lack of fixed DCs suggests that high-level adventurers stick to boring, non-fantastic locations and problems. Since this whole thread recently has been about the contention that you can have fixed DCs in 4E too, any conclusions about the effect of fixed DCs naturally would apply to 4E, no? We're talking about game design at this point, not about specific games.

Yup. Agreed. We're talking about system. That is what I enjoy doing and typically try to provoke the nuance of such conversation when I involve myself in threads.

On the subject of fixed DCs in 4e, yes they do exist. However, they exist for the very small part of play that is zoomed-in, and task resolution based. 4e is an odd duck in that it has a few toggles:

1) higher resolution zoom on combat where the task resolution component (eg I want to jump from this 25 ft square space to that 25 square space) of the tactical combat engine must be precise (not abstracted) in order for it to maintain its balance and harmony when interfacing with its other component parts (action economy, et al). These are your objective DCs.

2) improvised action system that is predicated upon genre fidelity while still being calibrated to cohere, for balance, with the rest of the combat engine's parts. These "genre fidelity" DCs are subjective DCs.

3) abstract conflict resolution that are meant to capture genre tropes and accomplish the dramatic arc: exposition > rising action > climax > falling action > denouement. Because it is an RPG, fallout is then tallied from that emergent story and the game snowballs. These DCs are subjective DCs.

This "toggle" nature of 4e is problematic ("jarring" is often the descriptor used) for some folks in the same way that minions, swarms comprised of multiple participants (etc) is problematic ("jarring") for some folks.

 

[BryonD]

Hmm. Finer points. Lecture. Telling word choices.

Honestly, this in no way seems to explain why you would post at all then. If you don't want to talk about it then why hint at talking about it? Just seems passive aggressive to me.

But if you consider a more robust reply to be best described as a lecture, by all means feel free to keep your thoughts to yourself in that case. I'm good; I can live comfortably not understanding your allusions.

Maybe it is simply the brevity of your reply (which is cool) but you seem to have taken the idea that I'm saying I would "lecture" on "finer points". (And I certainly have in the past, again , Google away if you want).
But just for clarity, I'm responding because that these things, not to offer them.

Beyond that, excellent. I fully endorse your response.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The following is a long way of saying "I agree, and..."

That being said, I still don't understand the outcry against 5e (by 5e advocates) that there is nothing to use money for (eg gold is useless). The system's mechanical infrastructure (primarily Ad/Disad) elegantly allows for PCs to buy favors or to hire hirelings. If I was running 5e, that is precisely what I would be using that "extra gold" for.

It works even better if you buy actual hirelings and not just advantage.

The second time I played a 5E adventure we (8th level group) ran up against a group of hobgoblins whom my companions immediately attacked. My immediate reaction after the battle, "Wow! those guys hit really hard! Instead of fighting them, we should have hired them." My early 5E theory crafting therefore centered on poring through the books looking at spells like Sending and Transport Via Plants, looking for ways to drop a hobgoblin bomb on a drow war party for the price of two transport spells, ten minutes of team, and half of the spoils. (If I were a hobgoblin squad leader, I'd accept that deal!)

I've since found other ways than minions to destroy higher-CR foes, but that early impression of the strength of minions has stayed with me and continues to inform my PCs' approach. One reason my players' PCs have advanced rapidly in level is that I have no fear of throwing gigantic challenges at them because I know from my own experience that 5E characters have the tools to overcome gigantic challenges. Wealth is one of those tools.

Wealth in 5E is extremely useful in many ways.