D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[manw1th0utfear]

3.5/PF haters really trying to keep this thread going aren't they?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

"Martials have Powers!" And another of the major complaints. Martial characters now have an ability which used to be solely associated with magic, their player can say to the GM that this is what the <Thing> does. Outrageous, when they're supposed to have to negotiate a solution that a sensible GM will restrict to what seems reasonable to someone who probably isn't an expert in martial arts. Worse, some of those non-magical abilities were as good as magical powers. Outrage. Magic is supposed to be special, and special things are magical, and special things are better than non-special things, and if a non-magical effect is as good as a magical effect that means the magical effect isn't special after all - if it was, it would certainly be better than the non-magical/non-special thing. "I've got mine, and if you get yours then that'll ruin my fun by not letting me feel superior enough."

So, yes. Caster entitlement isn't an inherent part of D&D, or wasn't when it started out. And since that's the way the game has decided to go, good luck to WotC. But they'll never satisfy the entitlement complex of the caster players as well as 3e and PF do.

You're assuming that character advocacy is the driving factor behind system criticisms: as if the only reason anyone would ever want magic to be special is for the sake of particular PCs that they're playing. Some people just find aesthetically offensive the idea that magic is just a cosmetic label on a free-standing effect.

Some people actually care about the logic of the game world, and not just "who has the most powerful character." Some of those people also like and enjoy fighters and are happy that 5E fighter is fun and effective.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The nice thing about 5E is you can make casters of varying power and versatility in all areas. Or martials of varying power along the caster-martial curve. It's very versatile, even more so than 3E.

Huh? I see nothing in 5e, neither in core nor optional rules that would tend to allow casters to be weakened. The main optional rule is feats, which has very little in it for casters (there are a couple of feats, but they're not really anything compelling for a full caster). So AFAICT the main option is to weaken martial characters.

I mean, you could obviously lard the game with wonderful items that are only useful to non-casters. You could force the casters to do all their own spell research to get every spell beyond the freebies, and you could deliberately cripple them by stealing their spell books all the time. I would call most of that 'picking on certain characters' rather than 'options to weaken casters'.

And you could certainly have given casters a break in 4e if you really wanted to. Dropping all the best level+5 items as just the right implement. Giving them extra cash to use for consumables, filling their ritual books by plot device, etc would all have that effect. As would doing a few things like saying "Gosh, on this extra-magical spot you get a +10 DC to your Arcana checks!" insuring maximally effective strategic ritual use for instance. Plenty of ways to make the casters the center of things ala AD&D higher levels.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Where does 5E say DCs are based on objective reality?

Surely if DCs in 4e are, at least partly, driven by dramatic considerations by virtue of their being 'subjective' then just as surely DCs are, at least partly, driven by simulationist considerations in 5e by virtue of their being 'objective'.

Think of it this way, you need SOME criterion for a given DC. In 4e it might well be "well, these are paragon PCs, so climbing the mountain in the blizzard is DC 28. In 5e how do you decide the corresponding DC? If its based purely on the basis of a pre-determined fiction, one not generated on-the-fly to appeal to level 12 PCs, then presumably that DC is determined by objectively examining what the real-world difficulty of climbing a mountain in a blizzard is.

The alternative is to assume that you in fact don't care about the world-centered DC concept in the first place and you aught to be using PC-centered DCs. If that's the case then why is there any advantage to the system that sets DCs with reference to the world?

 

[BryonD]

Think of it this way, you need SOME criterion for a given DC. In 4e it might well be "well, these are paragon PCs, so climbing the mountain in the blizzard is DC 28. In 5e how do you decide the corresponding DC? If its based purely on the basis of a pre-determined fiction, one not generated on-the-fly to appeal to level 12 PCs, then presumably that DC is determined by objectively examining what the real-world difficulty of climbing a mountain in a blizzard is.

"Objectively examining what the real-world difficulty of climbing a mountain in a blizzard is" will have some non-zero element of consideration (as it would in 4E). But establishing a consistent difficulty where commoners would assuredly die and then letting the party see where they match up works quite nicely. And putting more emphasis on how difficult it would be for Aragorn or Conan would also weigh more in the analysis than "real-world".

But either way, the idea that you are saying "well, these are paragon PCs, so..." is a major non-starter.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Not in 2nd edition, it's not. Polymorphing a 1 HD Orc into a White Dragon is the canonical example of Polymorph Other usage. It's right there in the spell text, and because the target creature has more HD than the original creature the odds are good that the orc (or mouse) will lose its mind and become a white dragon (gold dragon) in truth, immediately. The only thing you have to worry about is a system shock roll.

The 5E wizard can fly for very short periods of time. Compare 10 minutes in 5E to 10 minutes per level plus 1d6 * 10 minutes in 5E. He can Polymorph himself into an animal, losing his Intelligence in the process, for one hour at a time whereas the 2nd edition wizard could Polymorph himself for 20 minutes per level into any creature in the right size range (hippo to wren) that isn't incorporeal, and he could shift freely between those forms at will. In 5E that takes a 9th level spell and doesn't even last as long.

Just about the only wizard spell in 5E that's better than it was in 2nd edition is Clone.

RE: "AND he can cast his lower level spells with slots right up to a 9th level slot," that's not really an advantage because you almost never want to do this because it's a terrible waste of a 9th level spell. About the only spells that benefit sufficiently from the scaling are the non-combat, strategic spells like Bestow Curse (becomes permanent) and Planar Binding (lasts for a year). I played with a guy who loved to blow his 9th level 5E spell slot on Chromatic Orb, in the first combat of every day. The memory still makes me wince. In any case, the 2nd edition wizard would have far more spells available to him including IIRC 2 9th level spells, 3 8th level spells, and 3 7th level spells compared to 5E's 1/1/2. Flexibility is nice but it's hard to make up for that raw power deficit, especially when 4th and 5th level spells in 2nd edition are as good as 5E's 9th level spells, and 5E RAW has no true equivalent at all for 2nd edition's best 9th level spells. Chain Contingency? Nope, doesn't exist in 5E. Shapechange? Nerfed, more comparable to Polymorph Self. Time Stop? Don't make me laugh. Prismatic Sphere? Extremely short duration, about half to one third as effective as the 2nd edition version (bear in mind that 1 HP in second edition ~= 3 HP in 5E, so it does about 2/3 as much damage, 175 vs. an effective 270, and has only 2 save-or-die effects instead of four).

The claim that 5E wizards are not just more versatile but actually stronger than 2nd edition wizards is laughable.

Sure, in 2e you can polymorph an orc into a dragon, and then be eaten by the result! Nobody that isn't utterly desperate would ever attempt such a gamble.

I think its also a bit telling that you only really want to compare uttermost highest level spellcasters. Some of the AD&D 8th and 9th (and some even of the 5th-7th) level spells could be a little out there in the right situation, but first of all I think a lot of those uses weren't intended, many of them required specific reading of the spell and a friendly DM, and you neglect the very high costs, limitations, and often permanent negative effects of a lot of high level spell use. Almost all of that is gone in 5e. Heck, all those spells you cite in 2e were LONG casting time spells for the most part, and subject to all the serious limitations of spell-casting. Smart wizards got around those limitations, but they still had to spend resources to do that.

And the truth is you barely ever would cast more than one 9th level spell, or even 7th level spell, in one sitting. The problem was memorizing the correct one. This is substantially mitigated in 5e. Maybe you have only 2/1/1 slots for top level, but that means you can cast either of your level 7 spells up to 4 times, a very nice increase in flexibility.

Maybe casting Chromatic Orb as a level 9 spell is a bit silly, but I cast it the other day as a level 3 spell, to devastating effect too! Fireball just wasn't appropriate, but one of the big reasons I could afford to memorize Fireball was that I knew I could just cast Chromatic Orb instead if I needed to! I am MUCH more likely to be free to select some of the less commonly used utilities or specialized attack spells simply because I am not stuck HAVING to use them or else be left with a dead slot. I can recall a very large number of times in AD&D when I was running around with half my spell load and they were all useless because things weren't exactly as predicted. This never happens in 5e.

So maybe invisibly flying over the orc army and polymorphing one of the BBEG's orc bodyguards into a red dragon isn't really feasible anymore. I am hardly going to shed a tear. Frankly I think this kind of thing was a gimme, it hardly required any sort of cleverness anyhow. The 5e wizard, played with REAL cleverness, still gets the job done quite well, and meanwhile he's steadily contributing to every encounter, something his AD&D brethren very often couldn't do.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Sure, in 2e you can polymorph an orc into a dragon, and then be eaten by the result! Nobody that isn't utterly desperate would ever attempt such a gamble.

I said gold dragon, remember. Gold dragons are lawful good and highly intelligent. It could theoretically eat you but the whole reason you create it is as a powerful potential ally. If you don't want to bother with diplomacy you could just create a Tarrasque for you to possess with Magic Jar, that works too.

I think its also a bit telling that you only really want to compare uttermost highest level spellcasters. Some of the AD&D 8th and 9th (and some even of the 5th-7th) level spells could be a little out there in the right situation, but first of all I think a lot of those uses weren't intended, many of them required specific reading of the spell and a friendly DM, and you neglect the very high costs, limitations, and often permanent negative effects of a lot of high level spell use.

The above is false. I've spent most of my time talking about how 7th through 9th level AD&D spellcasters are as powerful as 20th level 5E casters. When I've discussed 9th level AD&D spells it was only to refute the idea that 9th level 5E spells are on par with AD&D spells.

It is not controversial that 5E wizards are more versatile than AD&D wizards. What is laughable is the claim that they are more powerful. AD&D wizards had more need to pick the right spells for the day, but when they did they could do things that 5E wizards can only dream of. I gave examples in post #122 which I will repeat here:

I grant you, SOME of the spells are more limited in certain ways, but overall a 5e wizard IMHO is mostly a pretty nice power boost from a 2e wizard, which was already kinda game-breaking.

Maybe it's been too long since you played AD&D 2nd edition, but let me rattle off a few tactics and see if they jog your memory:

1.) Magic Jar the Tarrasque at 9th level
2.) Polymorph a mouse into a Gold Dragon at 7th level
3.) Animate Dead unlimited numbers of monstrous corpses at 9th level (5th for clerics)
4.) Create an army of almost-permanently dominated slaves with Dominate at 9th level.
5.) Emplace multiple Fire Traps in the same location to kill anyone who you can trick into going there at 5th level.
6.) All-day invisibility at 3rd level.
7.) Teleport Without Error at interplanetary/interstellar distances at 14th level.

None of these capabilities exist for 5E wizards at any level. The 5E wizard has more flexibility but far less raw power. A 20th level 5E wizard has a scope somewhat similar to an 7th to 9th level AD&D wizard, but more depth within that scope. I.e. he can do fewer and less powerful kinds of things, more times per day.

That's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, but it is certainly a true thing.

So maybe invisibly flying over the orc army and polymorphing one of the BBEG's orc bodyguards into a red dragon isn't really feasible anymore. I am hardly going to shed a tear. Frankly I think this kind of thing was a gimme, it hardly required any sort of cleverness anyhow. The 5e wizard, played with REAL cleverness, still gets the job done quite well, and meanwhile he's steadily contributing to every encounter, something his AD&D brethren very often couldn't do.

I didn't say you had to shed a tear. Arguably it makes for a better game, and at any rate it's a different game. The key claim I've refuted is that 5E is a "nice power boost from a 2e wizard, which was already kinda game-breaking." It's not, it's just a versatility boost, designed for the casual gamer. No longer do you have to do lots of heavy opposition research and intelligence gathering in order to memorize the right spells. Well actually, you do still have to do opposition research and prep the right spells because you only get 26 of them, but you can get away more easily with skimping, because 5E is designed for casual gamers who have busy non-RPG lives.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Did it ever occur to anyone that a huge part of the D&D player base that enjoyed playing casters like magic being this way? A larger percentage than WotC anticipated? A larger percentage than cared about the caster-martial disparity? WotC fell into the classic trap of the silent, satisfied customer that likes how things are versus the vocal customer that finds cause to complain.

What makes you the spokesman, or think you have an understanding of, these people? In our current group there are 7 people. Without even speculating I know that 2 of them have positively never heard of Enworld. 2 others have positively never posted online about D&D and may or may not know it exists, and have certainly never read it. 2 others conceivably might, they play some other RPGs like DW, but I'm pretty sure I've never run into them online. That leaves 2, including myself, that I know positively post about D&D, and one of those has never posted to any WotC forum and thus has had little impact on 5e.

None of the people that agreed to play in my 4e games every expressed any deep criticism of 4e on this point. Many times we discussed characters and what they could do, etc.

So, you really cannot say that there was some 'silent majority' that agreed with you, that's really wishful thinking and unsupported by any observation. The only thing I observed was people who were turned off by listening to some die-hard who insisted it was all crap for some reasons that most players IME didn't agree with when they actually played.

The caster-martial disparity complaints and WotC's design response to those complaints in 4E was a classic example of this phenomenon. They had a bunch of folks unhappy about wizards and other casting classes overshadowing martials. They had a large silent group of caster players happy with magic as it was.

Again, you have no idea that this is true. In fact the degree of complaining about 3e casters was pretty high. The same GM who now runs our 5e game refused to run anything but E6 in 3.5 due to these issues. I know that group abandoned SEVERAL campaigns and started over at low levels before settling on E6 for exactly the reason that the options available to spell casters simply made the game unappealing after a certain point (around 9th level). This is such a common complaint that a whole cottage industry of 'fixes' grew up around it.

They decided to attempt to appease the people complaining about casters and boom the silent customers suddenly became the ones complaining. That other half of their customer base that sat silent in the caster discussions suddenly went, "What the hell did you do? This is absolutely intolerable." With another game that kept casting as they liked available they migrated in herds to the new game probably shocking the crap out of WotC after hearing about the caster-martial disparity for so long. It wasn't until the mistake was made they realized they just pissed off the caster portion of their player base.

Again, IME that just isn't what happened. 99% of those people just went on playing what was on offer and were perfectly happy. A certain very vociferous and bitter segment of really active players that post a lot didn't like the changes and went rampant all over the boards. 5 of the 7 people in our group never even heard of those debates, could care less, and 4 of those 7 (plus 2 others that played 4e with me) would be perfectly happy to play in a 4e game. I have exactly one holdout, a guy that has never even read one bit of 4e, hasn't played it for even 5 minutes, and doesn't read or post anywhere. Heck, he doesn't even like 5e, but since he's married to the DM he's pretty much stuck there.

I still wonder to this day if anyone at WotC that was part of the 4E design team said, "If we do this to the magic system, won't we alienate the caster player base?"

I think they did a lot of research into what ORDINARY players wanted, but they failed to understand that they really needed a cadre of thought leaders, that those were highly critical people to have onboard, and they simply never considered how to do that.

The 5E wizard is somewhere between the 2E wizard and the 4E wizard. Less powerful than 2E due to spell design, legendary resistance, and concentration, but more powerful than 4E by quite a wide margin because of spell versatility. The 2E and 5E wizard are not comparable at similar level.

We will just have to agree to disagree. 5e casters are MUCH more flexible in what they can cast. My 5e wizard has 9 spell slots, and he just about uses every one of them in each adventure, unless its an exceptionally easy day or most of the session happens to be centered around something like buying supplies or research, etc. Even then he's likely to cast several of them. My old 2e wizard at level 5 would have had only 6 slots, no cantrips, no specialist feature, and no access to ritual magic. He would need to keep at least half those slots, one of each level, for the best combat spell of each level, and thus would have 2 level 1 and a level 2 slot for utilities, unless it was a truly unusual day where he could guarantee he was safe. The 5e wizard will select 2-3 combat spells still on those days, but he can cast other things instead with those slots, charms, alter self, invisibility, comp lang, etc.

I did like 4E's ritual system. I'm glad they kept a little bit of it for 5E. Ritual magic was both conceptually and mechanically interesting. I liked that 4E addition, though I had seen it in other game systems. It was nice to finally see it in D&D.

And yet 5e's ritual system achieves none of the color of 4e's in that it only allows for the casting of a few existing known spells, and anything created as a ritual has to work as a regular spell, severely limiting the system's flexibility. Given the much greater utility full casters get out of it there's much less reason for non-casters to participate. In 4e you could make up cool and thematic rituals, even ones that were tailored to classes that normally don't cast spells. 5e's system really just boils down to a concession to wizards so that they don't have to memorize such things as Detect Magic, Identify, and Find Familiar. Its not BAD, but it further imbalances the playing field instead of equalizing it more.

My group would have probably played 4E if they had not done what they did to the casting system. I actually found a lot of what they did with martials interesting. I liked martials having other interesting options that tried to replicate fictional powers of martials. But what they did to casting was something I did not feel like playing. My entire enjoyment of casting classes was spell versatility used to devise interesting strategies for victory. I loved this aspect of D&D. 4E completely robbed me of an aspect of the game I had enjoyed for a few decades. I tried to enjoy the new wizards and casters, but it was so limited in scope I couldn't enjoy it. I felt nothing like this amazing mystical master when playing a 4E wizard.

The problem I had with it is it completely overshadowed any other form of cleverness. No matter which player in the game came up with an idea in our 2e group, it was my wizard or the other guy's cleric that actually put it into action. I didn't find many of these things really all that clever either. In fact after the first year or two of playing and hearing about various spell exploits it was mostly just mentally traversing the catalog of known ways to exploit one or another spell (with most 'DM creativity' engaged in making up ways to thwart it). The rest of the game withered away as you gained levels. All the henchmen, hirelings, and followers of the mighty 12th level fighter were of practically zero import compared to the mighty 6th and 7th level spells of Questioner of All Things.

Regardless of whether caster players speak up or not, they're looking for a particular experience. That experience isn't necessarily power in terms of raw power to kill something. They're looking for the power to manipulate, to strategize, to overcome puzzles with magic in the same way a scientist uses science to overcome something. This aspect of spell versatility is extremely important to caster players. Any magic system that doesn't allow a caster player to spend extensive time thinking up an interesting spell strategy is going to fail to satisfy an extremely large number of caster players. In all my years of playing D&D, caster players are the guys that spend the most time reading the book poring over spell lists dreaming up spell strategies to unleash. Spell text is extremely important to them. Spell strategy is their fun. Any edition of D&D that takes that way from caster players will never be popular amongst the large number of caster players in the game.

I think very many of those players fully recognized the reasons why a less open-ended magic system was a good thing. Some of them, like you simply refused to accept it. Many of them, like myself, were quite happy with it. I can say with some reliability that VAST numbers of DMs were quite pleased that they no longer had to play the silly "oops, you wrecked the whole story arc with one clever spell" game anymore.

I think there's a bunch of lazy players out there that got their crutch taken away and didn't like it. Meanwhile my 5e wizard is totally running the show and the DM is making noises about some sort of E6 again...

 

[BryonD]

What makes you the spokesman, or think you have an understanding of, these people? In our current group there are 7 people. Without even speculating I know that 2 of them have positively never heard of Enworld. 2 others have positively never posted online about D&D and may or may not know it exists, and have certainly never read it. 2 others conceivably might, they play some other RPGs like DW, but I'm pretty sure I've never run into them online. That leaves 2, including myself, that I know positively post about D&D, and one of those has never posted to any WotC forum and thus has had little impact on 5e.

None of the people that agreed to play in my 4e games every expressed any deep criticism of 4e on this point. Many times we discussed characters and what they could do, etc.

So, you really cannot say that there was some 'silent majority' that agreed with you, that's really wishful thinking and unsupported by any observation. The only thing I observed was people who were turned off by listening to some die-hard who insisted it was all crap for some reasons that most players IME didn't agree with when they actually played.

I think the market results speak louder than your anecdote.
What makes you the spokesman for the people you claim were turned off?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@AbdulAlhazred and @bert1000: here is a link[/ul] to a four-year old thread where issues around fiction and mechanics were discussed.

You'll see that I explain my GMing reasoning in some detail, including how DCs were set and action resolution declarations accepted and adjudicated by me, and some very sceptical responses.

The fact that the DCs and fiction correlated was not relevant to many posters - what concerned them was that I worked out (for example) how hard it is for a sorcerer to intimidate a bear by wreathing himself in lighting by looking up the DC-by-level chart, rather than inferring from the "objective" ingame truths about bears (whatever exactly those are supposed to be). Look, for instance, at posts 2, 21 (and my reply at 25), 26+31 (and my reply at 33), 27, 47 (and my reply at 67) and 48. Also look at my posts 72 and 80.

Some people certainly think that there is a big difference between "subjective" and "objective" DCs (and associated approaches to adjudication), even though both involve DCs correlated to fiction.

And again, a lot of the grousing in that thread seemed to me to be basically a cloaked example of caster entitlement. "Hey, why is your Diplomat bored, just because the wizard snapped his fingers and solved the major challenge of the day, you'll still get to convince the shop keeper to give us more bread." That's basically how I read a lot of that (IE if the difficulty doesn't resolve around what the means are of solving the challenge, then it implies that the 'superior means', which is ALWAYS casting a spell in these debates, isn't automatically extra-special).