D&D 5E (2014) Why does 5E SUCK?

[pemerton]

I can roleplay chess.

I don't see how. Chess has no rules for generating fiction out of players' moves, and no rules for any fiction constraining action declaration or affecting its adjudication.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The only thing I didn't really like about 4e minions was just the sheer prevalence of auto-damage. It made them rather less interesting as time went on.

Blame the change to Magic Missile. An always-hitting (but never hitting) always-damaging (but not missing) power was a real monkeywrench. That was a bit of 'design space' that could have been left closed.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Congratulations, you fell for the 'excluded middle.' Saelorn claims that the majority of gamers agree with him, and backs it up with the reasoning that he can't be the only one. Between 1 and 51% is the vast excluded middle where the truth probably can be found. Frankly, it's probably a lot closer to just him, but I offer no fallacious reasoning for that, it's JMHO.

That's not what the Law of the Excluded Middle is, Tony. Nor is 51% the figure that Saelorn claimed or that has been empirically proven. What was doubted by Abdul and was subsequently proven (unless I'm a sock puppet) is Saelorn's claim that it's likely greater than 0%.

In other words, you're attacking a straw man. Saelorn never claimed what you say he claimed.

 

[The_Gneech]

Thoughts?

Only that it was a thorough and cogent analysis. Well done!

-The Gneech

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Without wanting to just project myself onto you, I feel that "wasting play time" is connected enough to broader pacing issues that it at least has a hint of "story" to it. I'll summon [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] to get another opinion.

I think I get what you're saying: if you take the account of players at the table as the story unfolding, then spending two hours to pick out provisions in town is virtually equivalent to spending two hours in watching a movie about people picking out provisions in town.

It's an interesting idea. I can't say that it's untrue, but I don't think that necessarily means that any rule to speed up game play is always a story/pacing rule.

While something that makes for boring play might also make for a boring story (usually), it's also possible to have something that would lead to a boring story and have it be loads of fun around the table. Rules that address the pacing of the story won't necessarily be helpful or welcome in those types of situations.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

This criticism was typical of 4e criticisms in that it required a very facile understanding of the system. Anyone who actually spent a bit of time could certainly make a "pure healer" cleric in 4e.

We had the PHB and... I think it was the Forgotten Realms book ? The point is, we were early adopters. For my first character, I went to make a healer, because I enjoy playing healers.

And I saw that I had an at-will power to grant temporary HP, which was really neat! But my hopes were immediately dashed when I realized that there was nothing I could do without making an attack roll.

That things worked out better at high levels, or later on in the edition cycle, was irrelevant to me at the time. Everyone else had shiny new toys to play with. Even the fighter, who never had powers before. Even the wizard, who was previously limited to a meager handful of spells per day, and could now throw Magic Missiles and Thunderwaves at-will. The healer seemed like the only one left out of the fun.

This isn't rhetoric. This was genuine disappointment. I mean, it was short-lived disappointment, and there were plenty of other things to explore besides just being a healer, but that doesn't make it any less genuine.

 

[Celtavian]

Observation: if you're balancing DPR potentials, then no wonder a dedicated healer is so valuable! He reduces enemy DPR by virtue of not having a high DPR himself, and he boosts party survivability through his healing capabilities. He's actually better at his job than a healer with potentially high DPR output[1] would be.

[1] Unusable due to opportunity cost in lost healing.

DPR output was obscene in high level 3E/Pathfinder. The game wasn't built for high level play. It completely collapses with the stupid level of powerful options for high level players.

DPR potential is only one concern of the many concerns during encounter design. My encounter design process is very tailored.

Healing damage is only one aspect of being a great healer. The more important aspect is effect removal.

Generally, when creating a healer we looked for the following:

1. Group healing to reduce downtime.

2. Effect countering. Not being able to counter effects such as not having invisibility purge or dispel magic created huge problems.

3. Survivability. If the healer can annihilated, that is a problem.

4. Ability to heal burst damage. I had a cleric that could take a player from -10 or so to 300 hit points in one round. She could quicken the heal spell as a 6th level spell. A nasty round of critical hits could be countered by powerful healing.

The group healer mitigated many problems the enemy created. When you lack the ability to eliminate those problems, you really feel it. If the cleric is spending time DPRing, he misses out on countering effects that debilitate the party. That's what I never understood when all the folks were telling us they didn't need a healer to survive. We kept trying it, but an enemy played well can usually rip a PC party apart and vice versa. The better tactic was the ability to counter their tactics rather than try to DPR race them. If we tried to DPR race them, we might win. But often half the party or more was down or dead. Once we started using a dedicated healer/effect remover, we usually ended with no one down or dead.

 

[Celtavian]

Did I say "failed"? I probably did somewhere along the way, but context is important. It failed at being competitive with other options for my play style. It failed at being something WotC elected to stick with. It failed to revolutionize the number of people playing TTRPGs through bringing waves of fans from other media. It failed at avoiding a meaningful degree of fanbase burnout.

The biggest fail was not maintaining the D&D market share. That is what motivated the change to 5E. 4E coupled with the OGL allowed Pathfinder to succeed at taking a huge chunk of the D&D market share. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in those meetings. If I were Hasbro and I had purchased this dominant TTRPG that had no real competition for a decade, and suddenly my customer based is splintered and a competitor just stole half my market, I would have been pissed beyond recognition.

 

[Manbearcat]

So I'm on the fence about Hemlock's conjecture. But I do agree with you (a fourth point of agreement, I think) that subjective DCs don't force towards the sort of lazy design that Hemlock commented on. They may not even push towards it - being amenable to isn't (either in semantics or in the real world) equivalent to pushes towards.

This is a very key point, one that I've made over and over and over again about several things with 4e. My only caveat here being that I do agree with @AbdulAlhazred about 4e messaging being a bit more vacillating in some areas than I would have liked it to have been (and it wasn't all that vacillating...just more than I would have liked). You've seen me make posts about that before I'm sure.

4e was often raked over the coals for the perception of language that was meant to exclude playstyles, "skip the guards and get to the fun" being the most infamous. However, I don't feel that, sum total, 4e was nearly as divisive in its messaging than is claimed. In a lot of ways, it felt like it bent over backwards to caveat any strong messaging or exclusive language by embracing and explaining alternative approaches/player archetypes. In fact, my surmise is that Heinsoo would have liked to have had a much more focused, non-vacillating, and transparent instruction in the core books as he and Wyatt put out in 13th Age. My guess is that he met a lot of resistance internally and "too many cooks in the editor kitchen" made the core books have fantastic instruction but mixed messaging in certain key places. And beyond that, some of the decisions for language was just weird. It was like they were trying to "de-indify" some (obviously indie-inspired) things to make it more accessible (I guess) to some D&D players or to make it less controversial to grogs who hate indie games/The Forge (if this was the impetus for it, it wouldn't surprise me at all!). I mean, why in the world would you say "skip the guards and get to the fun" when Vincent Baker already established the clear, instructive, and less incendiary indie principle of "at every moment, push play towards conflict."

The DMG2 and Neverwinter (and several other books including Worlds and Monsters and tons of the online articles) suffered no such mixed messaging. In my estimation, they were as focused and as insightful as to the design impetus, play procedures, and play goals of 4e as one could have asked for.

 

[BryonD]

I don't see how. Chess has no rules for generating fiction out of players' moves, and no rules for any fiction constraining action declaration or affecting its adjudication.

OMG, you just said a game I love isn't an RPG. I'm deeply offended.