D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?

[Hussar]

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.

I have always maintained that 4e was the RPGA edition. I think that it was in the RPGA that you would most often see the whole caster-martial disparity thing because it would be absolutely more pronounced there. There's no table negotiations going on to make sure that everyone is happy. So, you have three guys coming to an RPGA event with non-casters that they paid to play in, and they get to ride the pines while the druid and the wizard players mop up the entire adventure. You can bet dollars to donuts that there's going to be some very loud complaining going on.

I would add the number of spell nerfs for 3e that originated in the RPGA as well - polymorph and others leap to mind. Things that did kinda-sorta find their way into core D&D with things like PHB2, but, were law at RPGA tables.

And, let's not forget that RPGA tables saw a LOT more high level play than home games would. It's not exactly a secret that home games usually ended around 12th level (by and large, there are of course exceptions) while RPGA campaigns always went into the high teens. For the hundred thousand or so RPGA players, this was a major issue.

And, considering that 4e was based around the idea that you would have RPGA style play at home games, it's not surprising to see RPGA style fixes in 4e.

 

[pemerton]

I also maintained that it was the obligation of WotC and the 4E fanbase to try to understand WHY people felt that way.

What is the source and nature of this obligation?

 

[Celtavian]

I think this is a point where 5e is trying to straddle approaches and avoid prescription.

Hence some posters in this thread (eg [MENTION=6784868]Erechel[/MENTION]) can insist that 5e uses objective DCs, while others (eg [MENTION=5834]Celtavian[/MENTION]) can argue that it uses subjective DCs pretty similarly to 4e (but without the handy guidelines for level-appropriateness).

This is the correct viewpoint. I have read both the DMG and PHB. Neither requires the use of objective nor subjective DCs. The DC system is open-ended and the DM is highly encouraged to tailor it to his needs and wants using the loose guidelines provided. I fail to see why a DM couldn't write up a bunch of interesting things a player can accomplish with skills.

 

[Celtavian]

I have always maintained that 4e was the RPGA edition. I think that it was in the RPGA that you would most often see the whole caster-martial disparity thing because it would be absolutely more pronounced there. There's no table negotiations going on to make sure that everyone is happy. So, you have three guys coming to an RPGA event with non-casters that they paid to play in, and they get to ride the pines while the druid and the wizard players mop up the entire adventure. You can bet dollars to donuts that there's going to be some very loud complaining going on.

I would add the number of spell nerfs for 3e that originated in the RPGA as well - polymorph and others leap to mind. Things that did kinda-sorta find their way into core D&D with things like PHB2, but, were law at RPGA tables.

And, let's not forget that RPGA tables saw a LOT more high level play than home games would. It's not exactly a secret that home games usually ended around 12th level (by and large, there are of course exceptions) while RPGA campaigns always went into the high teens. For the hundred thousand or so RPGA players, this was a major issue.

And, considering that 4e was based around the idea that you would have RPGA style play at home games, it's not surprising to see RPGA style fixes in 4e.

You might be right. RAW was most prevalent in organized play. Even Pathfinder created errata specifically from feedback from organized play. Whereas around a friendly table, the DM tries to make sure everyone has fun regardless of capabilities.

 

[Jessica]

To respond to the opening question, I actually have a friend (my room mate specifically)who I have been trying to get into D&D. She is a big video gamer but she also sometimes enjoys RPing(like freeform on forums and stuff). I tried my darndest to get her into 5th edition D&D. We went to Adventurers League together for a bit and I even DMed a HotDQ for a few weeks(before life stressed me out too much to continue DMing). After an initial session where she had a great time and really enjoyed her introduction to TTRPGs, she steadily started becoming less enthusiastic over time. She got bored from the lack of mechanical complexity to 5e(which I share with her at times). It felt like a lot of combats devolved into "I attack" "I attack" "I attack" style gameplay. 5e seems to have a kind of scale of complexity for classes and I tried to sell her on playing a full caster, but she absolutely loves playing archer characters in fantasy games and was absolutely deadset on always playing a Ranger. Although this might be a bit of conjecture suggesting she may have done it on purpose, when her fiance demanded more of her time she completely gave up D&D in exchange for still being able to raid. She told me about her problems with D&D and I took that opportunity to tell her the good news of 4th edition. She told me she is never going to touch 5e again and wants to play 4e the next time she plays D&D.

I wouldn't go so far as to answer the question "why does 5e suck?" since 5e having problems in my opinion doesn't make it "suck". However, I have a lot of problems with 5e as it exists currently.
1) Vast differences in class complexity. There are classes I won't even touch in 5e because of lack of combat options. I mean normally I'm a caster player in D&D so even in 4e I played a caster most of the time, but where as in 4e that choice was made because I preferred the controller playstyle and often preferred the imagery and aesthetics and fluff of flashy robe wearing types in 5e that decision is made because full casters are the only characters that don't bore me to death. At least in 4e I would sometimes play non-casters/non-psion types.
2) Strong and clear connections between fluff and mechanics. One of the few things that caused my heart to sink in my chest when I first got my copy of my 5e PHB was three letters: V, S, and M. Where as before the fluff wasn't concrete and I had a lot of freedom to interpret what it looked like when my Wizard cast a spell, I was now absolutely 100% forced by mechanics to have jazz hands and jibber jabber(and bat guano) as part of my character even if I think finger waggling and chanting magic words and throwing around bat is the absolutely dumbest thing ever and hurts my image of my character in my mind. Not to mention actual forms for Druids getting actual hard mechanical rules instead of having a nebulous concept of an animal form and you getting to fluff what it is within certain restrictions hurts my ability to play Druids. Hell, I used the 4e Druid class to play a vampire with reflavoring with out hurting my roleplaying experience. Now if I wanted to do the same thing in 5e, it would break down as soon as wolf type creatures started being eclipsed by higher CR creatures.
3) Overlapping of mechanics. It's funny how many different characters of different classes I can make in 5e where almost all of my 1st level spell slots are used to cast Sleep for the first couple of levels of the game before they graduate into Hold Person as their primary thing.
4) Lack of classes/races. I don't expect every class ever made ever in a previous edition to be available at release, but two of my absolute favorite classes(i.e. Psion and Vampire) were not only not in core materials but (due to the incredibly secretive release schedule) may not even be available in the near future. You wonder out loud if your favorite classes are going to be updated and suddenly people come out of the woodwork to cry about "rules bloat".
5) Super Oberoni Simulator 5000. I don't know how many times I've seen one of those phonies in the Facebook groups tell someone just to house rule something even when it's not exactly an appropriate response to the situation. That stuff really kills me. How about WotC actually gives us some more materials to work with and then people who don't like the materials choose not to use them instead of expecting us to finish building the goddarn game for them? That kills me. It really does.

 

[Celtavian]

That people believed it when Forgotten Realms and 2nd edition and 3rd edition told them casters were supposed to be at the top of the pile didn't like it when 4e came along and flattened the pile out so everyone was more equal is perfectly plausible. Still, what were people complaining about then?

And Greyhawk where wizards like Bigby, Tenser, and Leomund were amongst the most powerful in the world? Or Raistlin in Dragonlance? Forgotten Realms merely took it up another notch, but the paradigm was already in place in D&D.

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.

Casters that were more powerful than martials certainly was a part of D&D from the earliest edition because magic has been and should always be more powerful than mundane capabilities. Magic is power. That is the motivation for its study in fiction. Why would D&D not seek to mirror that part of fantasy fiction?

 

[BryonD]

Well, I don't know. I'm not sure FANS had any huge obligation to go in and analyze anything.

I think I already said that. But you wanted 4E to last longer then maybe you had a self-imposed obligation.
If not then you have nothing to complain about.

WotC might have had some INTEREST in doing so, and in fact I would argue they did exactly that. I'm not the greatest fan of their response, but clearly they did respond. First they incorporated elements that were requested into 4e, then they published a 'spin' of 4e that was clearly intended to address many of those criticisms (at least the more coherent ones that COULD be addressed), and then they released 5e.

IMO only the last one came anywhere close to fitting the bill.

The problem for us, as fans and advocates, was that a lot of the commentary was unaddressable in any productive way.

Whatever. I think you are embracing some heavy double standards.
4E alienated a very large number of people from day 1 and it was not going to be fixed with tweaks. So you need to either accept that either "productive" means big changes that may not all be things you like, or accept that WotC and the 4E fanbase CHOOSE to turn their backs on a lot of people and the bad will and the sooner than later end of 4E resulted.

I've never espoused those views, or used the same rhetoric. Really I don't know what things you said exactly, which is why I didn't make statements that you said X or Y. Nor do I think that it was a situation where only one side ever said inflammatory or derogatory things. One problem is that in a sense WotC, in its utter stupidity, threw the first brick, and all of us got blamed for that, so there was a rather heavy amount of being told I was bad simply because I liked the game and someone made up a joke ad that promoted said game at the expense of the one they played. I didn't do that either. I'm just saying, you got hit in the crossfire in something very heated. At this point I don't know the details, so I can't say if you really asked for it or not. Many did, some didn't.

Again with the double standards, my statement here was in response to you saying ". OTOH you have to ask yourself with whom you sided in those debates." Why do I need to ask myself this while you are free to ignore who you sided with?

Oh, I spent endless hours convincing people to play. Many many hours advocating for styles of play and techniques that would improve play experience, etc. There was a lot of that on Enworld, which was at least good about squashing the worst trolling.

If you say so. This specific conversation started with you saying there was no effort to reach out. I called BS then and I still do now.
Again, maybe rather then trying to convince people to play a game they didn't like you would have better served to try to encourage the adaptation of a game that they *wanted* to play and still worked for you.

 

[BryonD]

Because you play chess as an RPG? Tell me more.

Nope, I'm just going to say that you are bad person for saying it doesn't work without even trying.

 

[BryonD]

What is the source and nature of this obligation?

The desire to have their game played by enough people that it would continue to be supported.


Obviously there is no intrinsic obligation and if you read the various other statements I made around this you would see I clearly said that.
But any 4E fan that is bitter about how things worked out only has their own community to blame.

 

[tyrlaan]

It was broken enough that I would bet money it was number two reason the D&D player base was splintered with the number one reason being the OGL. As I've stated many times, I would not release another OGL if I were WotC. It opens to many doors. I would instead create a friendly licensing agreement with particular companies to focus on aspects of the game like adventure design that a smaller company can do well and that encourages the sale of your core rules.

I'd love to see how many players fled D&D solely because of the magic system. If that number is high, that is a system that failed to attract a huge part of their customer base. I get it. There is a loud minority that wanted to see casters taken down. Even I admit they needed to be taken down some from their insane 3E heights, but not as low as 4E took them. Magic is powerful. It's users should exceed the power of mundane weapon use or martial maneuvering, even if you have two demigods: one a martial, one a caster, the caster demigod should have more breadth of power even if not greater killing power. That is a major part of the fantasy genre. .

This doesn't argue that it was broken. It just backs up that you felt it was broken because it didn't meet your tastes, basically by being willing to "bet money" that others did too. I wouldn't even try to disagree with you that other people didn't like the 4e magic system, but not liking it still does not equal broken.