D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[Celtavian]

That's like saying "We found that 4e played fine when everyone played a Leader". Sure, you can play that way. Your party is dysfunctional WRT the expected capabilities for a group of its level. Without a cleric in 5e you have drastically reduced survivability, and you could use any and all of the methods you list, but adding a cleric to that is still a quantum leap in resiliency.

We haven't found this to be the case. In fact, this is the first edition we've been able to play without a cleric. Even in 4E our group due to our play-style required a cleric. The warlord did not heal near as well on a consistent basis. None of the "Leaders" did. The cleric was the best healer in the core rulebooks. Maybe expansion changed this. Our foray into 4E almost always included a cleric. We tried the warlord. He just didn't work very well for healing. We play a vicious game.

In 5E we've found both the bard and druid are viable healers. The druid brings so much to the table he can often mitigate damage preventing the need for healing.

You still need a healer in 5E. That part I agree with. You now have the option of bard, druid, or cleric. The only cleric that is clearly the best is the Life cleric. One level of life cleric can turn the druid into an amazing healer. One level of life cleric turns goodberry into an amazing spell.

We were all surprised this is the first edition of D&D that we could play without a cleric healer. In 3E/Pathfinder channel energy was king at low levels. In 4E the cleric has better healing powers in the core book. In 5E the cleric is a relative equal to the druid or the bard.

 

[Imaro]

Why not? Just because it's not an entirely original description doesn't have to make it dull. And as for spells, if you find it hard coming up with descriptions for things that happen in 4e combat, well spells also happen in 4e combat, so I assume they're part of the problem. And there's a lot less existing vocabulary to describe those.

Well how about this, you send me a list of pre-determined descriptions for 4e and I'll read them out loud after various actions... assuming I don't fall asleep after a round or two of shuffling power cards and players contemplating what their next movement, bonus action and regular action is.

EDIT: Or you could accept as I have that 4e's long drawn out combats made me loose interest in combats at a certan point and that was the real issue with how the mechanics caused problems with the fiction for me.

 

[Erechel]

That's like saying "We found that 4e played fine when everyone played a Leader". Sure, you can play that way. Your party is dysfunctional WRT the expected capabilities for a group of its level. Without a cleric in 5e you have drastically reduced survivability, and you could use any and all of the methods you list, but adding a cleric to that is still a quantum leap in resiliency.

That is a pretty high bet. That has not been my experience at all. I played for near 15 years now, and neither in AD&D nor D&D 5th Edition the survavility was dictated by a cleric in the group. Ever. And me and my players have encountered several out-of-our-league CR monsters, and the fact that my homebrew world is animistic is due to the lack of clerics in my parties. And the healing potions were always scarce and unreliable. We use a lot of non-magical healing, planification and what not. Vampire Touch is one of the favourite "healing" magics, so... no. And between Lay of Hands, DR, Hit Dice, Medicine and the Healer feat we are sufficiently "patched"... and we use optional, slow healing and Healer's Kit dependancy. And an optional rule where, if you drop to 0 hp and go back, you are in harsh pain.

That in no way was a detriment to fast, brutal fights. Exploration has a heavy say in survavility, much, much more than healing. My players have a say "Attack first, attack twice".*

*Also, you can always kill the cleric first. That is an expectation on many tables, so many players do not put their trust on a single character. That would be borderline stupid in my table, given the crossbowmen firing squads.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Beyond that, nothing stops you from building a full up 4e PC and using it as an NPC. Its not the ideal way to make opponents, but it should work if you insist, and certainly for an allied NPC the only issue is who has to run this more complex character.

The complexity of a PC made it impractical to run for NPCs, especially if you try to apply it to every NPC, which is what you'd need to do to get things back to the established parity of 3E. Furthermore, running a combat of four PCs against four PC-built NPCs became unwieldy after a point. The game just isn't designed for it.

In truth WotC did advertise 4e as a departure from existing D&D. They didn't say "you're not welcome here", but everyone was fairly told that it wouldn't be AD&D revisited. In fact I think to some extent many people who were happy with 3e DID actually complain that they weren't welcome. I recall many screaming fits about the 'gnomish monster' for instance.

The problem is that their claims didn't line up with the magnitude of their changes. It's entirely possible to change all of the underlying mechanics, without jumping the shark into such an extreme "NPCs are different" mode.

When 4E came out, I was already familiar with a dozen different RPGs, and none of them were anything like what 4E became. It was literally unthinkable to me, that they would try do such a thing while still claiming to be an RPG.

 

[pemerton]

Well, 1-in-400 is nothing more than rolling a natural 20 twice in a row. There have been optional rules in D&D for special things happening on such occasions, but they aren't usually automatic fight-enders.

I think 2nd ed AD&D, at least in some iterations, emphasised this sort of thing more, yes. My AD&D intuitions tend to default to 1st ed.

Backstab x5 by a Half-Orc Assassin with an appropriate magical weapon -- a Staff of Striking, perhaps?

I hadn't thought of assassinating the balrog!

Yep, that would do it - 1d12+4(magic)+2(STR) can get you to 18, x5 will kill a balrog or a high level warrior.

I had in mind more Boromir/Aragorn/Glorfindel-type approaches!

The "mind-reading via possession" would be handled at my table my reading the spell text ("no, Magic Jar says that won't work") but the Fire Horn issue would be handled basically the way you handled things in 4E: by handwaving.

<snip>

Honestly I don't think being around a simple dead Fire Drake is enough to convince me that any item ought to become magical.

Thanks for the reply.

Putting to one side the question of what is cool vs what is silly at a given table, I can see two points of system difference at work here.

One is the approach to spells and what they can do. I think 5e is not as loose in this respect: the spell descriptions carry a lot of weight in the fiction, I think (they're the sorts of things one finds in spellbooks, on scrolls, used by enemy liches, etc) as well as mechanical frameworks for hanging action resolution on.

The other, which I hadn't mentioned upthread as a possibility, is the lack of magic item economy. 4e's fairly tight item economy, and its downplaying of magic items as discovery/reward in the mechanical (as opposed to fictional) sense, means that letting players (and PCs) play fast-and-loose with magic item acquisition is much lower stakes than it would be in more traditional D&D.

I was thinking about this discussion overnight, and it occurred to me that in AD&D a perfectly rational response to a challenging situation is to research a spell. Eg want to learn the password? Research a mind-reading spell. This is not really an aspect of 4e at all, at least as I've played it and interpreted it, because spell research fits with that tighter, mechanics+fiction interpretation of spells that is more traditional for D&D and that 4e tended to depart from.

Is spell research a big factor in 5e?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I don't know that I agree with this. D&D has always stated flat out that PCs are special.

PCs were special because they had levels, but everyone with levels worked the same way. An NPC might be a third level wizard, and there's no explanation of that beyond the PC rules, because the idea that a wizard NPC was a mechanically distinct entity was ludicrous! If an NPC had special treatment, then it was because of unique circumstances within the game world, and a PC in that same situation would be identical.

The whole notion of 'objective reality has to be codified by only one specific mechanic' is daft. No game designer should be or really is restricted to that.

And yet, it held for decades. There were no two different-yet-equal ways to stat up a particular ogre. It only possibly had one stat block, regardless of who was looking at it. Any game that rejects the notion of an objective reality is going to be highly controversial, and unappealing to a significant portion of the potential player base.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

All that being said, what's wrong with the technique? The rules serve the game, and the fiction is more central than any given rule. You can use any rules in any way you see fit to project the fictive reality of the game world that the PCs inhabit..

The rules of the game reflect the reality of the game world. If you change the rules, then you change the reality. It is literally impossible to use changing mechanics to represent a consistent world.

If you look at something like the Forgotten Realms, being one of the longest-running and most-detailed accounts of a living world, the reality changes to reflect the rules of the changing editions. To do otherwise would be to create inconsistencies within the fiction.

 

[Nifft]

I was thinking about this discussion overnight, and it occurred to me that in AD&D a perfectly rational response to a challenging situation is to research a spell. Eg want to learn the password? Research a mind-reading spell. This is not really an aspect of 4e at all, at least as I've played it and interpreted it, because spell research fits with that tighter, mechanics+fiction interpretation of spells that is more traditional for D&D and that 4e tended to depart from.

Ritual research was a thing we sometimes did in 4e. Not spells per se, but the same basic idea.

That could apply to 5e, too -- or perhaps magic item research, since those might be usable by any arbitrary class.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I was thinking about this discussion overnight, and it occurred to me that in AD&D a perfectly rational response to a challenging situation is to research a spell. Eg want to learn the password? Research a mind-reading spell. This is not really an aspect of 4e at all, at least as I've played it and interpreted it, because spell research fits with that tighter, mechanics+fiction interpretation of spells that is more traditional for D&D and that 4e tended to depart from.

Is spell research a big factor in 5e?

In vanilla 5E? No. This is one of those unfortunate gaps in 5E. There are really no spell research rules worth mentioning. Everything at my table has been imported from AD&D.

At my table, it has not been a huge factor for my PCs so far, in the same way that gathering intelligence has not. But I've encouraged it and my players have all shown an interest in spell research (especially after I pointed them at the Book of Lost Spells as inspiration and explained my rules for spell research). They just haven't actually completed much due to time constraints, and only having a level 3 research library.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The PC /are/ different, because the DM isn't controlling them. They're different because it's a game. You shouldn't ask a game to completely deny it's nature, as a game.

Role-playing games aren't like other games. For one thing, there's no winner. For another, there's no defined ending. Clearly, the traditional rules of being a game do not all apply.

The only universal rule that need necessarily apply to all games, including role-playing games, would be that it must be playable. In RPGs, that means it's okay to make concessions in the name of playability. That's why it's okay to have simplified NPCs. It doesn't mean that it's okay to wholesale re-define all of the math and abilities for an NPC, unless the alternative would make the game unplayable.

Fourth Edition was in a unique place where PCs were so complex that even simplified NPCs would be unplayable, so they had to work out a completely separate system for them. It's not something that most other games have ever had to do. Most games just avoid the problem on the front end, by not making PCs that are so complicated.