D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[Manbearcat]

Want to do a post about this thread's drift toward complex vs non-complex. However, as usual, I don't see how I can abstract this into something pithy. So I'll just have at it and see where my mind takes me.

Disclosure purposes:

[sblock]I'm coming at this from a lifelong athlete. Played baseball through college. Football through high school. Still play basketball competitively. I've played pretty much everything under the sun, most of it competitively.

However, I have never refereed nor managed a game from a coaching perspective. It is basically the inverse of my position in running RPGs. I've always run the games while only playing in a couple of one-off sessions here and there (Dread, Cthulu primarily and a game of Dogs).

This likely colors my analysis some, but I think I've got a pretty fair glimpse into the nuance of refereeing/managing and the implications of rules design and their complexity.[/sblock]

With that out of the way, I want to compare TTRPG design to spectator sports. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to focus on American Football.

We've got four different parties at work here:

1) The referees - Gm role.

2) The players - Player role..

3) The managers/coaches - Primarily a GM role, but also a player role to a certain degree.

4) The spectators - For our RPG analogue purposes, these will be the people who are potentially interested in engaging with the game


American Football is at the uppermost level of complexity with respect to sports. Accordingly, the barrier for entry (group 4) is extremely high when compared to something like soccer/normal football. This is one of the primary reasons (there are others) that American Football is rabidly followed/adored by its relatively niche American fanbase while soccer is the "world's sport" (and not by a small margin).

The referees have an enormous amount of responsibility and impact on play, and this has only increased over the last 16 years (starting in 1999). They are responsible for managing a litany of mundane clerical items (line of scrimmage, line to gain for 1st down, various clocks and stoppages, etc). Also, they are responsible for a large number extremely nuanced calls that must take place at the speed of the game (which is frighteningly fast and in close-quarters). That nuance has only increased over the last 16 years and ever encroaching interpretation and subjectivity have been embedded into a massively impactful set of rules. A few examples are:

a) interpreting when a QB is tucking the football versus when he is actually throwing it (therefore when the ball is "live" should it come out of his hand).

b) interpreting when possession is established on a forward pass by a receiver. This one is truly a rabbit hole that has morphed and waxed and waned over the last 15 years. You can have multiple specialists view the same play and they will disagree, sometimes vociferously, on the outcome (eg what "a football move is" in the first place and if one was made...if the ball touched the ground/shifted before posession, inbounds, was established, etc etc)

c) interpreting if a QB is "in the pocket"

d) interpreting if defender impact upon a receiver was made with the "crown of the helmet" or with the "forehead/face" and where this impact was made with respect to the head/chin > shoulder > chest interface....and where on the field this occured. Also interpreting when (with respect to the time from the beginning of the catch to the defender's impact on the offender) this occurred and if "the receiver was defenseless".

There are dozens more, but a - d are sufficient for our purposes. The rules language that create determinants for adjudication is not terribly precise. It aimed to be sensible and helpful, but in practice it doesn't work out as such. This has a pretty severe effect on groups 2 - 4 above.

2) Players: Players have an enormouse number of vectors to consider both during the lead-up to the game (gameplanning and practice), pre-snap, and during the play. They must understand not only the general rules of the game but they also have to understand the nuance of the very specific subset of rules that govern play at their position and how those rules interface with the other rules. They have to understand their own playbook. They have to have ingested the other teams tendencies and system during the week's gameplanning. They have to understand their game-specific (which will change subtley from week to week) responsibilies and "read their keys" (information that will guide them through their personal OODA Loop during play). It is an enormous amount to digest creating a situation where each player's mental overhead is VAST.

Finally, they have to deal with the "human element" and the growing subjectivity embedded into the rules. Resultantly, they try to develop relationships with officials to potentially affect outcomes. They have to try to understand a particular official's tendency to interpret that rules nuance and/or "see" it manifest on the field and throw a flag (call a penalty). This can be utterly maddening because you can be sure that you were within the rules (and you may very well have been), but the official interpreted it differently or "saw something that wasn't there" and suddenly you have a huge game-changing penalty where you have made the correct play (perhaps even a play that should be game-changing in your favor) but you and your team are now punished.

You could call it a "loss of agency" to use familiar RPG terminology.

3) Managers/coaches: They suffer from a lot of the same issues as players except their "agency" has some not so subtle differences. Game-planning, play-calling, and in-game management (clock, adjustments, crucial decisions) are central to their role. These things are all dynamically affected by the complexity of the rule system and by the (increasingly) interpretive nature of some of the rules.

They have a different sort of "information juggling" and "mental overhead" as individual players do, but it is no less severe. Further, they're subjected as much (not on an individual level as the penalties arent' being called on them) by complex rules (especially where the concrete rules interface with the interpretive rules and the utter punitive fallout when a call is either missed or made incorrectly).

4) The spectators (or prospective participants): As one can surmise, the entry to being a fan/participant of American Football is very, very, very steep. The cognitive workload is daunting. One must ingest an enormous amount of rules information, one must deal with an enormous amount of responsibility (play-in and play-out) that must be within those rules, and, finally, you're subjected to the "human element" of interpretive rules language which can utterly change a game (not just from neutral to bad but possiblly from good to bad), demoralizing you and your team.

This is made doubly maddening when you consider that a healthy part of the success of American Football is predicated upon spectator gambling!

---

Contrast all of the above with soccer. There are a jillion less rules (both concrete and interpretive), therefore a jillion less rules intersections, a jillion less cognitive workload by all of the participants (therefore much more shallow entry), and where the rules are interpretive it is not very significant (nor very interpretive) such that player agency isn't potentially subverted (therefore leading to frustration, disinterest, or demoralization). Yes, you'll get the stray situation where something should or shouldn't have been a card or you'll get the VERY, VERY stray foul or bad touch (hand) on the perimiter of the box. That is about it.

 

[Imaro]

You have to be careful with this 'bloat' terminology. 4e gained almost nothing in complexity across all the supplements that were published, certainly all the pre-Essentials ones. That's because it is a HIGHLY regular system. Every element fits within an overall powers, feats, skills, unified resolution mechanic. If you add 1000 more powers, so what? 2e shows the contrast, every single time something was added to it there was yet another different way to do something, and very soon it was almost an unplayable mess, you had to wade through it all, or do what we did, and just ban everything outside the core books.

4e gained power points which was a new system... more classes which all have their own special abilities and features... feats which were each a separate rule exception...hybrids which were different from original multi-classing, themes were added, Backgrounds with different scope and so on...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It also depends on how good the DM is. I have a very good memory. I was able to commit quite a bit of 3E/Pathfinder to memory including the PCs. This allowed me to run all by the largest of combats very quickly. If you don't have a great memory and a DM willing to commit the information to memory, it would slow 3E combat down substantially. Whereas 4E was short duration effects which the DM had to memorize round to round rather than for the duration of a combat. Made it harder to keep track of.

I really never found it to be much of an issue. I've followed the same process for decades, every combat I get out a piece of scratch paper from my pad. I do this ahead of time. On one edge I make an initiative track, and next to it a timeline (indicating when things happen such as expiration of durations, etc). Then I have a block of space for each monster, hit points, AC F/R/W and any conditions will be noted there. This works perfectly well, and I make the players track the expiration of any effects that are on them. Having a good memory I don't have issues with keeping it all sorted.

The problem with past editions was that everything was inconsistent. You had to sort out how many minutes ago the buff spell was cast, keep track of charges on items, and a jillion other things. 4e had a lot of tracking but it was SIMPLE tracking. 5e has less, perhaps, but it isn't as simple, and given the wide variances in spell effects and such what we've found is that casting is a real time suck. You've got to practically look up every single spell every single time you want to cast it, and even having written up a 'card' for each one I have only helps somewhat since I've already got 30 spells in my book.

Seems like pretty much of a toss-up to me. Our 5e fights are not appreciably shorter than the 4e ones were. A simple fight still takes 1/2 hour in either system.

 

[Hussar]

Heck, as far as handling math goes, I play on VTT. There is no math. It's all handled by whatever game table you care to use. For us, things like "when does this effect end" or "what bonuses apply now" never mattered because it was all automated.

What would drag our 3e games down was the aforementioned action economy - summonings, someone trying to do something that wasn't done all the time like grappling, weird rules interactions, that sort of thing. Our 4e games just got bogged down in the sheer amount of crap going on at any one time. Not that any particular thing was that complicated, but, it just proliferated.

That and later era 4e interupt powers that really needed to die in a fire. DM takes an action. DM starts next action and then is interrupted by a players saying, "Oh, crap, wait, I forgot I could do this..." roll roll roll resolve. Start moving on to the next bit and someone else chimes in, "Oh, hey wait.." GRRRRRRR. We had a couple of characters in the mix (and I forget the classes now) that were just brutal for this. Every single action by the DM, it seemed, would trigger someone's reaction.

That's one thing I'm very glad 5e did away with.

 

[Tony Vargas]

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."

The complexity of 4e is mostly in the sheer amount of material it presents, yes. Managing temporary modifiers was significantly easier in 4e, since durations were greatly simplified relative to 3e (and 2e & 5e, for that matter), and a number of rules and modifiers were consolidated into Combat Advantage, which 5e continued with Advantage/Disadvantage.

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.)

Yes, spells are a big chunk of the game, which maybe explains why ever class leverages that list to a greater or lesser extent.

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.

My group did find combats going faster with 4e than they had in 3e - initially. If the fighter's or DM's turn took a few seconds longer due to marking - which was a very simple, intuitive mechanic, that generally resulted in the fighter getting attacked by whatever he marked - it didn't substantially eat into the huge time savings that came in choosing to cast & resolving spells/tracking spell effects, not to mention the much less baroque grappling and charging rules. One reason, though, was that our primary DM had put a tremendous amount of effort into his 3e encounters. They were rarely just some lone CR=level monster, but were larger, more challenging combats often in difficult, or at least detailed, environments - 4e handled those encounters much more smoothly than 3e, if we'd leaned more towards the common 'rocket tag' style of play in 3e, there's no doubt 4e combats, even if approached in the same style, would've taken longer.

But, like I said, 4e combats were only faster, initially. As the group discovered the tactical depth available to all the characters, they slowed down a little.

Ah. So 4E kept combat at a similar pace at all levels. You are very correct about high level 3E/Pathfinder combat. .... Main reason we moved to 5E was how long it took to play at high level.

One of the more legitimate but less-often heard complaints about 4e was that the Tiers didn't 'feel' different enough, because, between the treadmill, and the fairly robust encounter balance, the 'sweet spot' had expanded to encompass prettymuch all levels. The DM had to make an effort to adjust the scope of the campaign as you moved through the Tiers, to make the progression more obvious.

I think the problem might have been that, at least according to WotC's own data, very few people play to high levels in 3e...

Or in any prior edition, for that matter. It'd been going on for so long, it was a chicken-or-egg conundrum. Did campaigns rarely go to high level, because high level play was so bad? Or was high level play sketchy because there was no point refining the game at levels people didn't play, anyway.

You have to be careful with this 'bloat' terminology. 4e gained almost nothing in complexity across all the supplements that were published, certainly all the pre-Essentials ones.

A system that tolerates massive complexity is not the same as a system that lacks massive complexity. 2e, 3.x, & 4e were all pretty bloated and enormously complex. In it's short run, 4e gained all the following, for instance:

power points which was a new system... more classes which all have their own special abilities and features... feats which were each a separate rule exception... ...hybrids which were different from original multi-classing, Themes, Backgrounds and so on...

And, yes, let's not forget 'exception based design.' While it makes resolving one use of one (or a few) rule(s) simpler, because you just go by the specific rule as presented you don't have to check to see if there's some general rule that overrides it, it does make the overall system that much more complex, because each rule can be a separate entity in that sense.

That's because it is a HIGHLY regular system. Every element fits within an overall powers, feats, skills, unified resolution mechanic. If you add 1000 more powers, so what? 2e shows the contrast, every single time something was added to it there was yet another different way to do something, and very soon it was almost an unplayable mess, you had to wade through it all, or do what we did, and just ban everything outside the core books.

But, yes, 4e managed that complexity in the ways noted, but that doesn't eliminated it, nor even paper it over. The complexity is all there, and all quite visible, it's just easier to work with than it might otherwise be.
Similarly, in 3e, complexity was a veritable feature as it contributed to the rewards available for sufficient system mastery.

The complexity of classic D&D was more haphazard, yes. 5e, in going for such a strong classic feel could be in danger of having the same issues.... except:

Now, PERSONALLY, I think 5e is much more like 3e. If they published 10 supplements, it would be a giant mess too.

Maybe you're not the only one who realizes that...

I do think the main reasons for the relative lack or slow pace of splatbooks in 5e are practical business reasons, but while that restraint lasts 5e will at least be spared the challenges of a bloating system.

Seems like pretty much of a toss-up to me. Our 5e fights are not appreciably shorter than the 4e ones were. A simple fight still takes 1/2 hour in either system.

That's probably not representative, since relatively few folks have run 4e and 5e combats at the same level of, er, well, 'complexity.' You say a 'simple' fight takes 1/2 an hour in each system, and I don't doubt you. But I expect what you mean by a 'simple fight' is simpler than what most folks think of when they consider 4e combats - and more complex than might be expected of a 5e encounter.

Even so, 5e is tuned to give you less involved combats. Attacks hit more often, damage is higher relative to hps, numbers tell heavily so the number of combatants is fewer, encounter guidelines are less robust & combats swingier, so 'easy' needs to be /really/ easy & it's prudent to pick less challenging combats, most DMs can't handle as complex terrain/movement/placement in TotM so set-ups tend to be simpler or details glossed over... I'm sure there's lots more. 'Classic feel' may have been 5e's top priority, but 'fast combat' seems to have been a major consideration, and any design choice that made a difference to combat length seems to have taken that into account. (Well, almost every: spells could have been simpler to resolve. That's one instance of 'classic feel' winning out. I'm sure there were others.)

That and later era 4e interupt powers that really needed to die in a fire. DM takes an action. DM starts next action and then is interrupted by a players saying, "Oh, crap, wait, I forgot I could do this..." roll roll roll resolve. Start moving on to the next bit and someone else chimes in, "Oh, hey wait.." GRRRRRRR. We had a couple of characters in the mix (and I forget the classes now) that were just brutal for this. Every single action by the DM, it seemed, would trigger someone's reaction.

The biggest problem with that phenomenon was the player who would declare his interrupt late, and ask to re-wind too much that had already been resolved, or, who chimed in with an interrupt, but after much hemming & hawing, realized he couldn't use it or didn't want to expend it.

One of the changes from Heroic to Paragon seemed to be more off-turn actions, so it became evident later, when, in theory, your group would have gotten the rest of the action economy down (and it's not like they were that different from 3e, either).

I didn't have a problem with it, personally. I found that off-turn actions were very high-value to the players and dramatic, so it was worth the overhead. Other DM's I know weren't so sanguine and put limits on immediate actions. The most severe was that declaring the use of an immediate action expended the action, and the use of the power, whether it turned out it actually could be used or not. Combats at her table got a lot simpler.

That's one thing I'm very glad 5e did away with.

Ironically, I'm pleased that 5e didn't do away with Reactions, AoOs, and other off-turn actions, just consolidated them.

 

[Jester David]

Yesterday, I read the book Thank You Bear to my son.
Read on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/fyh6Ds-XArc

The responses of the animals reminded me of this thread...

 

[Ratskinner]

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.

hmm....you're wary of "Story Game" but okay with "Narrativist" and "Story Now".

If it matters, a "Story Game" to me is a game where the objective or result of play is the creation of a (non-degenerate in the mathematical sense) story. To be clear, many games and sports, D&D included produce a series of events which humans can cast into a story. We do that. The distinction is that a story game does it on purpose.

WRT D&D and "Story Now" play, I actually think (in a general sense) that the best way to facilitate that is through the XP system (see the Sweet20 XP system).

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.

I don't think I would mechanically equate something like Fate/Hero/Story points with a spread of specific spendable actions like 4e has for two reasons:
1) They aren't abstract or completely meta-fictional. That is to say, your power is your power, it can't be used to mean anything that strikes your fancy (even if your DM is liberal with your application rules). There is also (within 4e at least) a bit of a grey area regarding whether the characters are cognizant of what powers they have. Some classes seem narratively aware of them by necessity, while others aren't.
2) Tactical confoundment. As you note, the powers are rather loaded towards the combat arena of play. Which is fine, but introducing the tactical element into the mix also distracts from "Story Now" usage of those points. A player might find himself using a nominally more important power in a fight he cares little about, simply because he knows he'll have time to recharge before it becomes important for his storyline. That's sorta the opposite of how you'd expect a Story Point system to work. (Alternatively, this cast doubt on the entire weight of level as a mechanical concept in 4e.)
(Neither of which makes them a poor mechanic, BTW, for anyone who cares.)

However, this is one of the reasons I don't like "Narrativist" and "Story Now" (and the GNS model) as much as I once might have. Many groups have historically used similar mechanics for very different GNS ends and it can become quite murky and unclear when such play is or isn't occuring. Narrativist play goals, IME, seems to lend itself most easily to leveraging mechanics for its use by a willing group.

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.

My experience with 4e is rather limited, but I think most of those non-combat gains were made during the 3e era (even if rather clumsily at points). Although I would give 4e credit for pushing the idea of framing scenes (introduced quietly in 2e and quickly forgotten.)

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.

I only call it less complex that way in that there are fewer distinct subsystems to recall. This allows a DM more confidence to spontaneously rule on unusual situations. That is, its easier to declare that "I'll say <weird thing> will give you a +2 to your roll" when you know it will be a D20 roll and not having to first reference whether that roll will be D20, 2d6, d%, etc. and a lookup table. IIRC, 3.0 relied on this a decent amount while 3.5 actually removed a lot of this kind of ruling by adding official modifier charts to almost every skill. In the end, I actually think D20 had a higher load at-table, but mostly that was through the modifier accounting, not having to stop and check on what dice and table to roll for event X or Y in play. My limited experience with 4e agrees with yours that 3e and 4e did little to reduce that accounting load during play.

In any case, work is calling again.

 

[pemerton]

you're wary of "Story Game" but okay with "Narrativist" and "Story Now".

The latter is generally used, on these boards, by certain players to describe certain of the games they play/run; whereas the former I mostly see used on these boards to describe other people's games in the course of explaining why they are not RPGs.

I don't think I would mechanically equate something like Fate/Hero/Story points with a spread of specific spendable actions like 4e has for two reasons:
1) They aren't abstract or completely meta-fictional. That is to say, your power is your power, it can't be used to mean anything that strikes your fancy (even if your DM is liberal with your application rules).

Fate points can't be used to mean anything that strikes your fancy either. The descriptors on your PC, or the scene descriptors, are a source of constraint/channelling of play.

powers are rather loaded towards the combat arena of play. Which is fine, but introducing the tactical element into the mix also distracts from "Story Now" usage of those points. A player might find himself using a nominally more important power in a fight he cares little about, simply because he knows he'll have time to recharge before it becomes important for his storyline.

A couple of responses.

First, if there is a fight that a player cares little about, something has already gone wrong from the Story Now perspective.

Second, tactical usage doesn't distract from Story Now provided that the tactical and the story/fictional incentives are aligned. This is what 4e aspires to, and achieves to a significant extent.

Many groups have historically used similar mechanics for very different GNS ends and it can become quite murky and unclear when such play is or isn't occuring. Narrativist play goals, IME, seems to lend itself most easily to leveraging mechanics for its use by a willing group.

Yes. There is no reason to think that narrativist/story now play depends upon funky mechanics. Ron Edwards pointed this out in his essays over 10 years ago. I know it from my own experience which runs over more than 20 years.

In my view, much more important than bells-and-whistles is getting rid of certain mechanical and scene-management/pacing techniques that push away from story now play. (In D&D this includes encumbrance, healing recovery, movement rules, conventions around wandering monsters, etc.)

My experience with 4e is rather limited, but I think most of those non-combat gains were made during the 3e era (even if rather clumsily at points).

3E doesn't have "subjective" DCs. And it doesn't have closed scene resolution (skill challenges).

 

[TBeholder]

3e sucks. Not even starting on the whole blatant meaningless padding thing, just the game itself. With its blatantly Hack&Slash / MMO grinding oriented nature (starting with creature XP only, and what it did to cantrips), skill system so ludicrous that most attempts to fix threw out as irredeemable, feat system outrageously clunky and looking like it was glued on the side as an afterthought (and with "newbie trap" options, too), the blatantly half-assed design of parts that could be good if done well - item creation system lazily dropped halfway ("Summon Creature I" thing) and creation of a new compartmentalized haystack of class features while failing to encapsulate classes all the way ("+1 to existing spellcasting class")...
4e sucks. Not even starting on the whole switcheroo and false pretences thing, just the game itself. Quite often looking like it was made on mushrooms or something - Bear Lore, Bloody Path ("Durr...clang!"), etc.
But 5e? 5e does not suck. It kind of... creates a mild draft in its direction. That's just sad.

 

[Matrix Sorcica]

Epic necromantic rant!