D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[tom.zunder]

I see the "complex" and "complicated" axis very clearly in systems design. Complexity from simple components is modular and scaleable, complicated tends to be monolithic or disconnected and difficult to scale.
5e seems to me to achieve a high degree of complexity with less complication than 4e and 3e, but compared to other RPGs, D&D is a complex and complicated family of game systems. Which is not a criticism, just an asssessment.

 

[Tony Vargas]

"Complex" and "complicated" are synonyms, both meaning "consisting of many interconnecting parts or elements."

I see the "complex" and "complicated" axis very clearly in systems design. Complexity from simple components is modular and scaleable, complicated tends to be monolithic or disconnected and difficult to scale.
D&D is a complex and complicated family of game systems. Which is not a criticism, just an asssessment.

Nod. While, say, 3.x has many more interconnecting elements than 1e, AD&D had more disconnected sub-systems. 3.x was more complex in an absolute sense, 1e was more complicated to use (as written, which is potentially moot if you didn't run 1e 'RAW,' anyway).

No you decided to tell me how 5e got rid of these great 4e features (as if this was relevant to the discussion)...

5e took at least some bits from each edition. Generally speaking, it selected those bits not for simplicity or balance or playability, but for familiarity, for being 'really D&D.' I think, on balance, it did an excellent job. The result isn't "rules lite" (something D&D has arguably never been, and, if it ever was, it was only back in the B/X days), but it /is/ very much D&D, and that familiarity lets many of us enjoy an experience with it that is as carefree as we might get from a less complex (even genuinely-rules-lite), but entirely unfamiliar game.

 

[Uchawi]

5e took at least some bits from each edition. Generally speaking, it selected those bits not for simplicity or balance or playability, but for familiarity, for being 'really D&D.' I think, on balance, it did an excellent job. The result isn't "rules lite" (something D&D has arguably never been, and, if it ever was, it was only back in the B/X days), but it /is/ very much D&D, and that familiarity lets many of us enjoy an experience with it that is as carefree as we might get from a less complex (even genuinely-rules-lite), but entirely unfamiliar game.

In addition, I would not confuse complexity with content or what others call bloat. With all things being equal, if you do a comparison of every edition with a comparable amount of skills, backgrounds, spells, feats, classes, etc. available then which one is the most complex. I would argue the one with the most sub-systems and least amount of consistency would be a front runner.

 

[Tony Vargas]

In addition, I would not confuse complexity with content or what others call bloat. With all things being equal, if you do a comparison of every edition with a comparable amount of skills, backgrounds, spells, feats, classes, etc. available then which one is the most complex. I would argue the one with the most sub-systems and least amount of consistency would be a front runner.

'Bloat' is a legitimate source of complexity. It makes sense to compare systems at similar points in their development for that reason. Compare 5e to other eds when they were 'just' the 3 core books, for instance. It's pretty close. Consider that 5e isn't on track to bloat as quickly as the 3 prior editions, OTOH...

 

[Hussar]

Well, as was said, I certainly wouldn't call 5e a rules light system. No version of D&D is rules light. Anything with hundred page manuals isn't rules light.

OTOH, 5e is considerably lighter than any other WOTC version of the game and for me, the evidence is in play. For the first time since I started playing 3e, so, about fifteen years, our current 5e group can get through 5 combats in a three hour session. On a virtual tabletop. That's much, much less complex. Or, compare the levelling up steps between editions - 5e is again, pretty simple. Roll HD, choose 1 or 2 spells if you're a caster, write down whatever power your level gives you and you're pretty much done. Oh, and a feat or stat bonus every 4 levels. Compared to the number of choices you had to make in earlier editions, it's a much simpler game.

Heck, compare subsystems. Nothing in 5e comes close to 3e grapple rules or 4e skill challenges.

 

[pemerton]

I actually think this highlights my problems with considering D&D a story game. The only way I can conceive to measure "impact on the fiction" at the table is through the use of such "metagame" (still hate that term, they're "abstract" or "metafictional", not "metagame") mechanics. That is to say, what is worth 1 unit of fictional importance varies between fictional situations. The only way to deal with that is by using the human participants as a metric/gatekeeper for what's worth spending the points on. No edition of D&D does a terribly good job of this, IMO.

I'm not really sure what the criteria are for something being a "story game" - it's a term I'm rather wary of.

I think that D&D can be used for what I would call narrativist or story now play. In AD&D, this requires pushing against some elements of the system - for instance, AD&D's combat mechanics don't naturally generate story in the moment of play, and nor do its encumbrance rules. I don't think it's an accident that it was with Oriental Adventures that I stumbled into story-now-style play - OA combat has more story in the moment (ki powers, martial arts manoeuvres, etc, which let the players make choices that reflect their view of the fictional weight of the situation), and more support (via the GM-side story elements it provides, as well as the player-side background generation) for non-dungeon-crawling adventures.

The "points" you refer to are, in 4e, primarily powers (combat and non-combat). The players get to decide when to spend them, and thereby to decide how much importance they want to place on some particular bit of fiction. And 4e has probably the least amount of non-story record-keeping of any version of D&D (very low importance given to encumbrance, healing across scenes, etc). Of course if you don't enjoy combat as a site of story most of 4e's mechanics will be wasted on you, but I think that's orthogonal.

As well as spending points, the other way that players "impact the fiction" in a story-now sort of game is via action declaration. AD&D is very inflexible in its action declaration rules (not much outside combat and dungeon exploration) - or, looked at in another way, any action declaration outside a rather narrow range immediately invokes GM fiat. 4e is, in my view, much stronger in this respect - its mechanics support quite a wide range of action declarations (the flexibility of "subjective DCs" and their relationship to the fiction has been discussed extensively upthread), and the GM has the tools to resolve them, and the system doesn't have things like encumbrance, wandering monster rules etc that tend to undermine scene-focused resolution in favour of continuous time world exploration.

That's not to say that 4e will support any story/genre that a group wants. Even within my rather narrow band of taste for fantasy RPGing, my Burning Wheel game is pretty different from my 4e one. But both rely primarily on GM-side scene-framing plus player-side freedom of action declaration to make things hum along.

I think we as a community often fail to differentiate between "complex" and "tedious".

Agreed. Encumbrance, and tracking of natural healing, often aren't complex but are tedious.

That said, I don't agree that 3E was less complex than AD&D. Its notionally uniform resolution mechanic involves dozens of modifiers, DCs, etc. Whether or not its more tedious (I don't have enough experience to judge) I think it's more complex. To elaborate just a bit: my mental arithmetic is very strong and I don't mind keeping track of running totals of modifiers; but knowing the triggering conditions for modifiers falls on your complexity side rather than your tedium side, and 3E and 4e both have a lot of that.

 

[Hussar]

From my 4e experience, in play, 4e could become, very quickly, incredibly complex. And quite arguably pretty tedious as well. By the end of the first round of combat, it wasn't unusual for an enemy to have between 6-9 status effects on it. That's insane. But, we had a somewhat large group (7 PC's) and we were in low double digit levels. Every character could impose status effects and sometimes multiple ones.

I think it's a testament to complexity that our same group (well, to be perfectly honest, less one player) can blitz though so many encounters so quickly in a single 3 hour session. We have far, far few status effects to track, and few status effects total to worry about. The mental load for 5e is considerably (ahem) lighter than it was for 4e, for our group anyway.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Because it's complex. It may be only a fraction of the game's overall complexity, but it's a fraction that is noticeable in play, and a fraction that 5e reduced noticeably, particularly relative to 3e, via the Combat Advantage mechanic.

I wasn't trying to say 4e lacks complexity; I totally agree that it's a complex game. I just don't understand why "I have to remember to add a handful of temporary bonuses/penalties" is the reason people call 4e a complex game. "Exception-based mechanics," that I could understand. Even "heavy emphasis on positioning" or "powers with well-defined keywords."

Hundreds of pages is an exaggeration, 5e only has hundreds of spells, I don't think they even take up a whole hundred pages, not much more than a third or so of the PH. But, yes, that's a ton of complexity.

Well, first, I'll note I said "hundred+," not "hundreds"--perhaps that came across as "one or more hundreds," but I meant it as "at least 100 pages." Further, when I said that, I was considering all the spells that have been added from the adventures, as well as those found in the PHB, though I admit I may have been exaggerating the effect there. The PHB alone is 78 pages (from page 211 to 289); I'd thought it was more. "Hundred+" is certainly an exaggeration if you consider only the PHB, but the fact is, the PHB spends more pages on spells than it spends on all character classes combined (page 45 to page 119), and that's with nearly a full-page image at the start of each class entry and ignoring all pages that aren't specifically and only about the spells themselves (ignoring all rules-pages about casting spells, spell areas, spell lists, etc.)

 

[Celtavian]

From my 4e experience, in play, 4e could become, very quickly, incredibly complex. And quite arguably pretty tedious as well. By the end of the first round of combat, it wasn't unusual for an enemy to have between 6-9 status effects on it. That's insane. But, we had a somewhat large group (7 PC's) and we were in low double digit levels. Every character could impose status effects and sometimes multiple ones.

I think it's a testament to complexity that our same group (well, to be perfectly honest, less one player) can blitz though so many encounters so quickly in a single 3 hour session. We have far, far few status effects to track, and few status effects total to worry about. The mental load for 5e is considerably (ahem) lighter than it was for 4e, for our group anyway.

We found this to be the case as well. Marking was an especially cumbersome mechanic compared to previous editions where no such mechanic existed or seemed necessary. We were surprised at how cumbersome combat became in 4E when the game was sold as a much simpler game that would play faster than 3E. We were finding no real speed increase in actual play past the first few levels.

 

[MerricB]

We found this to be the case as well. Marking was an especially cumbersome mechanic compared to previous editions where no such mechanic existed or seemed necessary. We were surprised at how cumbersome combat became in 4E when the game was sold as a much simpler game that would play faster than 3E. We were finding no real speed increase in actual play past the first few levels.

The speed increase was at higher levels. 4E took about an hour at all levels for combat. 3E took several hours to resolve high-level combats.