Sunday, December 22, 2024
Slush Pile
Thursday, December 19, 2024
Ten Years (Part 3)
You've heard the good, the messy, and the annoying. But here in our grand finale? These are the real reasons I haven't run a 5E game in years. The stuff that makes me sometimes not even want to be a player anymore. To the game's credit, none of these things really bothered me for quite a few years. It took a lot of experience with the game before these issues started really getting to me. I'm sure if I played any game long enough, there'd be some aspect of it that would eventually annoy me this much.
All the criticisms I have in this post fall under two umbrellas: magic and combat.
Wednesday, December 4, 2024
Ten Years (Part 2)
As you know, I quite like D&D 5E. Hopefully I was able to illuminate some of its positive qualities that you may have overlooked. But let's be honest. This is the moment you've all been waiting for. The bad parts. A lot of people bounce off of 5E at first or they fall out of love with it after a while. But you want to know what a person who's spent a full decade playing it has to complain about. What are the most agonizing parts of this game after all this time?
Well, like before, I have to split them up into a few categories. Because "what makes D&D bad" is not just a long list, but a nuanced one.
Tuesday, December 3, 2024
My (Moderately Tested) Theory of Fear
Friday, November 29, 2024
Ten Years (Part 1)
You've probably noticed me blogging a lot more about 5E lately. And if you've read any of that, you'll know I that I have pretty complicated feelings towards it.
It's still my main group's main game. We've been together since early 2017 and have played multiple 5E campaigns together, including one that went all the way to level 20. But I was also playing it from the day it first released, including a few long-term campaigns and a whole lotta one-shots. I wouldn't even know how to begin calculating a modest estimate of the time I've spent with it. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours.
I myself haven't run a session in 5E in years, though. I've just been too interested in exploring different possibilities. It's how I started in the hobby, and it was inevitable I'd return to that instinct.
I may never end up playing a newer version of D&D ever again. So I thought it might be fitting to write my big retrospective on this game. I hope the amount of experience I have, coupled with my experiences across the rest of the RPG world, gives my perspective some value. At least, more value than 99% of the discourse out there about 5E.