What do you hate about D&D 5e?

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Go0gleplex
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Re: What do you hate about D&D 5e?

Post by Go0gleplex »

The large part of things is that many of the above rule sets are all, in some way, trying to emulate video games or to quantify all aspects of game play by some sort of rule or what-not when originally D&D was intended as more of a choose-your-own-path for the heroes and such from the Chainmail Armies. Or to be a bit more accurately descriptive; D&D is supposed to be impromptu theater that both players and DMs make up as they go with the dice serving as impartial arbiters of success at attempted actions. PF, 3e, 4e, and 5e have really gone away from that as they try to plug the rules gaps, as you would say, that irritated many and made OD&D, 1e, and 2e so hard (cough cough chuckle cough) to run and play...when in reality all that extra rule and definition stuff has done nothing more than bog down and regimented play; a far cry from the more literary inspired free wheeling stuff that required more imaginative thinking from players and DMs both. Sure...it's all easier to run now...within the confines of those rules; depart from them and far too many suffer mental meltdown while trying to figure those undefined things out. So yeah...we have more gamers playing...on the equivalent of rule crutches, unable to stand on their own imagination.
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Captain_K
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Re: What do you hate about D&D 5e?

Post by Captain_K »

I am not going to go into exactly because I do not play 5E enough, Its been so long since I played 1E and 2E by the book etc. but the feel of CnC is so like 1E and 2E I recall that I like it. I started to not like 3.5 and 4.0 so just killed me. I must assume that 5E made an attempt to return to the origins as the Trolls and many others simply state "its close and conversions are easy". So, its a general statement based on a general gut feel. sorry no crunchy math to support this opinion.
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anvil242
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Re: What do you hate about D&D 5e?

Post by anvil242 »

I was playing some C&C this weekend (my son ran a game for Father's Day), and a couple of the players were 5e players normally. I lost count of the number of times they lamented the lack of one rule or another because of the tactical advantage it gave them. "If this were 5e I would do "x" but C&C doesn't have that rule so I will climb this tree instead". All these tactical decisions they would have made, making full use of the 5e rules, but they won't play miniature games because, their not into tactics. SMH. 5e is too "game-y" for me, I picked C&C years ago while running the last Dungeon magazine adventure path because of all the homework required to run 3.5. I'm done looking.

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Grandpa
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Re: What do you hate about D&D 5e?

Post by Grandpa »

paladinn wrote:
Mon Jun 20, 2022 12:06 am
Grandpa wrote:
Sun Jun 19, 2022 2:05 pm
Captain_K wrote:
Sun Jun 19, 2022 1:58 pm
5e did swing the DnD world back to its origins a bit, so let's be thankful there.
How so exactly?
Consider where D&D was after 3e. Pathfinder went down the feat rabbit hole; PF2 is far worse. 4e mutated into a video game for the table top. 5e Definitely is more "old school" than either of them, even if you don't care for it.
Yes, in comparison to those guess so.

Neuroschmancer
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Re: What do you hate about D&D 5e?

Post by Neuroschmancer »

anvil242 wrote:
Tue Jun 21, 2022 11:03 am
I was playing some C&C this weekend (my son ran a game for Father's Day), and a couple of the players were 5e players normally. I lost count of the number of times they lamented the lack of one rule or another because of the tactical advantage it gave them. "If this were 5e I would do "x" but C&C doesn't have that rule so I will climb this tree instead". All these tactical decisions they would have made, making full use of the 5e rules, but they won't play miniature games because, their not into tactics. SMH. 5e is too "game-y" for me, I picked C&C years ago while running the last Dungeon magazine adventure path because of all the homework required to run 3.5. I'm done looking.
The beauty of the simplicity that C&C offers is that the CK can adjust the difficulty of the roll appropriately based upon the circumstances and player's choices. Other systems with explicit rules for everything can actually be more restrictive to player choice and creativity in finding different ways to approach any given problem or situation. In C&C, there is nothing stopping the CK from telling the player, "This is how it's going to work." instead of saying, "You can't do that because this isn't 5e." Thinking in terms of RAW and RAI in C&C isn't as helpful as it is in other systems, and I would argue it isn't helpful in those other system either. People would rather argue rules than consider what makes sense given the situation and the impact it has on the mechanics and actual gameplay. We aren't playing the rules; we are playing a game that uses rules as a tool to create a consistent and coherent experience that represents player action systematically.

The main thing 5e gives players over C&C are special abilities. Unfortunately, a lot of these abilities trivialize aspects the game. A twilight cleric's 300 ft darkvision(it would be bad even at 90-120). There goes torches and only being able to delve so deep before running out of resources. The spell goodberry. There goes the game's survival mechanics. The healing that is as easy as drawing water from a faucet and being able to rest all our problems away. There goes the resource economy and the challenge of playing with those limited resources.

Systems without scarcity and resource contention are trivial. Why play a game that is nearly impossible to lose? Imagine reading a story or watching a movie where the protagonist has no real obstacles and the obstacles they do have, they can casually walk right over. Unfortunately it takes some time to grow bored of a particular system that has these problems and it is difficult to realize why that system makes things so monotonous.

I do think 5e character abilities in C&C can work though, and I don't see a problem with taking abilities from a 5e player's favorite book. The abilities would just have to be modified to not break the game or trivialize combat.

If this really is just a rules problem though and not a class abilities problem, then I don't think 5e is able to handle any situation or scenario that C&C can't. It's just that C&C requires more of the CK because its influenced by the Gygax/Arneson approach to rules. You can't make rules for every situation and if you did, you would create a system that is impossible to use due to its cognitive load. So what you do is you give the CK the primitives, and they use those primitives in varying combinations by synthesis to model the world and provide for more robust and interesting character interaction. So we get emergent rules that are still consistent and systematic, but can express a wider variety of actions.

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maximus
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Re: What do you hate about D&D 5e?

Post by maximus »

paladinn wrote:
Mon Jun 20, 2022 12:06 am
Grandpa wrote:
Sun Jun 19, 2022 2:05 pm
Captain_K wrote:
Sun Jun 19, 2022 1:58 pm
5e did swing the DnD world back to its origins a bit, so let's be thankful there.
How so exactly?
Consider where D&D was after 3e. Pathfinder went down the feat rabbit hole; PF2 is far worse. 4e mutated into a video game for the table top. 5e Definitely is more "old school" than either of them, even if you don't care for it.
Is that kinda like being the tallest of the midgets?

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paladinn
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Re: What do you hate about D&D 5e?

Post by paladinn »

maximus wrote:
Thu Jun 23, 2022 12:21 pm
Is that kinda like being the tallest of the midgets?
I wouldn't go that far. 5e has made "the hobby" more popular, even if it's got things we don't prefer. At the same time, a number of their "innovations" were borrowed/adapted from C&C.

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Persimmon
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Re: What do you hate about D&D 5e?

Post by Persimmon »

Pretty much everything from the company producing it and their ridiculous virtue signalling all the way down. But the worst aspects, all of which have been mentioned already, are:

1. Long & short rests & video game style healing
2. Too many spell-casting class options
3. Multiple death saves
4. Archetype/tree/feat crap that encourages min/maxing
5. Too many character races with no class restrictions
6. Super-heroes from level one
7. Super fast character advancement
8. Advantage/disadvantage
9. Obsession with balance

But, since I pretty much stopped playing "new" versions of D&D at 2e, I don't care that much. When 5e first came out, I picked up a couple of the books because of all the hype about it being a "throwback" version of the game. That turned out to be a marketing ploy. Just made me want to throw the books back at the publisher. So I sold them for C&C stuff and haven't looked back.
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Re: What do you hate about D&D 5e?

Post by DMSamuel »

I agree hate is a strong word... there is one thing I LOVE about 5e, just to give it some kudos: it has done enough right and had the right timing and confluence of events to make it the best-selling version of D&D ever created and to bring in more new players than any previous edition... and so it has brought a TON of new people into the hobby, and even if many of those nd up leaving again, some of them will stay and carry on the hobby for the long term.

The other good thing about it is the same good thing I think about all good RPGs - it is flexible enough that I can house-rule it and it doesn't fall apart. In fact, I recently wrote a blog post about how to house-rule 5e and make it more old school: 5e D&D rules variants that give my game a more old school feel

So there are a couple of things going for it.
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serleran
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Re: What do you hate about D&D 5e?

Post by serleran »

I don't know enough about it but perhaps that it uses a system generally similar to C&C but is lauded as "innovative" whereas C&C is derided for the same. There are some differences though and I can only assume the former gets its praise because 'saves' don't feel static...

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Re: What do you hate about D&D 5e?

Post by Persimmon »

serleran wrote:
Fri Jul 01, 2022 5:35 pm
I don't know enough about it but perhaps that it uses a system generally similar to C&C but is lauded as "innovative" whereas C&C is derided for the same. There are some differences though and I can only assume the former gets its praise because 'saves' don't feel static...
The saves are a real selling point for our group now but weren't before. At first, we were kind of angry that you didn't get consistently better at saves as you leveled up because you are generally facing more powerful foes. But after going back and playing various retroclones, that scale like AD&D, we came to find that dull in the sense that both the PCs and the momsters failed few saves once they reached a certain level. So we went back to C&C and embraced the lethality. And of course the prime/not prime adds a bit of granularity and allows for some differences even within classes, which I also like. Your concept for a particular character can have legit game effects. Let's say you have the smooth talking confidence man thief with the Charisma prime compared to the classic swashbuckler who took Strength as a prime. That can have real effects in the game as opposed to all thieves being, say, good at saving versus spells & spell-like devices.
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Re: What do you hate about D&D 5e?

Post by an_th »

Neuroschmancer wrote:
Mon Jun 20, 2022 2:33 am
paladinn wrote:
Mon Jun 20, 2022 12:06 am
Grandpa wrote:
Sun Jun 19, 2022 2:05 pm
Captain_K wrote:
Sun Jun 19, 2022 1:58 pm
5e did swing the DnD world back to its origins a bit, so let's be thankful there.
How so exactly?
Consider where D&D was after 3e. Pathfinder went down the feat rabbit hole; PF2 is far worse. 4e mutated into a video game for the table top. 5e Definitely is more "old school" than either of them, even if you don't care for it.
PF2 is really bad. Look through the various social feats and other utility feats you can take that in other systems your character can just do. You shouldn't need a feat to distract someone using a social skill, or to be able to more effectively coerce an NPC because a feat on your character sheet says you can coerce the NPC in some way that is somehow different than how the skill itself is supposed to allow you to coerce the NPC. PF2 is full of these crazy feats and rules like that. It's a minefield of all these things you would think your character can do if you have the relevant skill but can't actually do because there is some feat you had to take or some incredibly rigid way the mechanics are supposed to work. PF2 even has feats to use skills in place of other skills. So forget whether or not the skill is actually relevant , you have found a creative use of a skill, or want to use ingenuity in some way... too bad there was a feat you were supposed to have taken. PF2 wants to remind you have bleeding second that you are in fact playing a game with rigid rules and mechanics. You must never be allowed to use your imagination or ingenuity in any way. The only creativity permitted is in your character build and how you use its laborious mechanics.
I have yet to play Pathfinder but your description sounds like it was written by computer programmers who weren't told they were creating an RPG.
Over all though the interpretation of all of that sounds like it is also a DM issue.
I don't mind making a lot of checks, rolling dice is fun, but I do like to have role play in there as well as much as possible.

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Re: What do you hate about D&D 5e?

Post by an_th »

Answering the original question:
I don't hate, or even really dislike 5e. I run every edition of D&D and its ilk the same way, however, so what version I am playing actually makes little difference to me. Generally I just forget about the things that either confuse or do not interest me.

Every class having access to magic is confusing to me. In some games it is fun, in others it does not make a lot of sense. Where does this magic actually come from?

I'm not a big pre-game backstory person. I recently joined a 5e game where everyone has a cool backstory. I told the DM my concept for the character, and everything else I create as I play them. I make decisions and let the character unfold as the game progresses. The DM was used to having people bring in elaborate backstories, so they instead have responded to the things I have done in game, much in the way that I am playing the character. I think this is working well.

I don't mind systems that encourage backstory and collaborative world building, but compared to other systems out there, I think that D&D kind of did it in a half-arsed way which means players tend to focus on their character only, while better systems facilitate the creation of a group narrative much better.

I wish 5e kept the 'bloodied' mechanic.

Short rest is fine. Getting all HP back after a single long rest is too generous

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Re: What do you hate about D&D 5e?

Post by serleran »

"Every class having access to magic is" a ripoff of the Earthdawn game setting.

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Re: What do you hate about D&D 5e?

Post by Grandpa »

It isn't hate. It is nonrecognition because it is isn't actually D&D. If I made a chocolate cake and called it Ice cream, it wouldn't be. It isn't the mechanics but the feel and flavor. In actual D&D (regardless of the IP name attached) clearing a dungeon room at 1st level could be a sudden death experience. Not a sudden nap experience. D&D was modeled on a certain type of fantasy. 5th completely breaks that genre. If you took away the IP it would be viewed as some distant cousin of D&D.

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