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.
Magic Drives Me Crazy
- Everyone is a spellcaster, everything is spellcasting. Remember in early D&D, when there was literally just a class called "Magic-User?" Spellcasting is a whole complex resource management minigame, which is only going to appeal to a small subset of the people interested in D&D. You know. Nerds. Thus, there were a couple designated nerd classes available for those players to opt into.
Skip ahead 40 years and it's a whole different story. Out of the 12 core classes, 8 of them are spellcasters. Of the remaining, two have spellcaster subclasses. When they added a 13th class, it was also a spellcaster. Almost every single player has no choice but to contend with the magic subsystem, by far the most complex and demanding part of the game.
In Part 1, I linked the 5E post-mortem talk by Mike Mearls and Rodney Thompson. I think the most interesting parts are whenever they reveal some designer bias they had, some way in which their perspective was totally at odds with the consensus of the player base. For a lot of them, I totally understand the dev team's assumptions, however out-of-touch it may have been. But the most damning one of all was when they said they were confused to learn that most players regard the wizard as one of the most complex classes to play.
"What could be complicated? You just pick a spell, spend the slot, and follow the instructions."
So I want to take an aside here to talk about how we evaluate a class's complexity. The first metric is to simply count the number of total class features they get. But the second, trickier metric is to categorize those features according to how much strain they put on your brain. For this demonstration, I'm going to use three loose and fuzzy categories:
1) Passive features, which are something you can just add to a number on your sheet or something you'll be doing so routinely you won't even think about it.
2) Situational features, which are something you gotta actually learn how they work, but there'll be a specific trigger in the game that lets you know when it's time to remember the rules and apply them.
3) Active features, which you have to not just understand how they work, but also when and why. You must carefully judge the best moment to employ the mechanic, especially because these usually have a limited number of uses (although not always!).
Based on this, we can analyze a few classes. Let's first look at the Fighter, assuming their subclass is the Champion.
22 features in total (based on how I chose to count them). Let's compare that now to the Rogue, subclass Thief.
23 features instead, and of greater levels of mental strain in general. So it would be reasonable to call the Rogue a slightly more complex class than the Fighter, right? Not by a huge amount, but just a little. So if we do the same with the Wizard, subclass of Evocation, here's how it might look:
Only 14 features! Why, that looks nearly as simple as a class from B/X D&D! You can see where the team at WotC may have gotten their impression from. But it's missing something pretty important:
Ooooooof. Yeah. See, here's the thing. Every single spell you get is functionally an entirely new class feature for you. It doesn't matter that they're nested within the single class feature of "spellcasting." Almost every spell in the game is just as intricate as the Fighter's action surge or the Rogue's sneak attack or the Barbarian's rage. Just remembering all the spells at your disposal can be a nightmare for many players. Then you have to consider how and when to use each one, and on top of that you have the extra challenge of weighing each of them against each other! That's right, can't forget that spell slot management minigame you've opted into!
If there were just one or two classes that have to deal with this, it wouldn't bother me that much. There are plenty of nerds eager to embrace this. But the designers treat it as the backbone of the entire game. I don't know why they're so confident in the strength of the 5E spellcasting system. It honestly seems like they unknowingly sorta-reinvented powers from 4E. Especially as the edition has gone on, they keep adding and revising content that only leans into spellcasting even harder."Oh cool, new subclasses! What kind of features do they get?"
Again and again and again. The Paladin's smite ability? Reworked into a spellcasting thing. Hey, Tasha is here, you want some optional class features? "You can transmute X class feature into more spell slots." Oh look, the 2024 PHB is here. How did they tackle the Ranger? Everything is a spell. Their signature ability? They can cast a specific spell. I'm surprised they didn't turn rage, sneak attack, and flurry of blows into spells at this point.
"You can cast the XYZ spell without using a spell slot or material components. Once you use this feature, you can't use it again until you finish a long rest."
If it were me calling the shots, the Ranger and the Paladin wouldn't have even been spellcasters at all! They would each maybe get a magical subclass, not unlike the Arcane Trickster and the Eldritch Knight. But there's no reason why anyone wanting to play as Aragorn should have to functionally play as Gandalf. - Spell descriptions. Something I've given 5E a lot of credit for is how often it found a "sweet spot" of crunchiness. This is somehow the opposite. Go onto any 5E forum online, everyone is complaining about how vague and imprecise spell descriptions are. Go onto any non-5E forum online where people are talking about 5E, everyone is complaining about how specific and detailed spell descriptions are. What's the deal?
I think there's truth to both criticisms. 5E fans complain about how many "mother may I?" spells there are, or about the lack of consistent keywords and templating. Everyone else complains about how the text arbitrarily distinguishes between targeting creatures vs targeting objects, or about how there's a distinction between a "melee weapon attack" and an "attack with a melee weapon."
They have just enough legalese to annoy most sane people but not enough to ever satisfy the RAW-purists who are obsessed with an experience driven purely by immaculately-conceived crunch. You know where I fall on that debate, of course. I don't think there's any amount of clarifications you could add to an RPG's mechanics that'll make it immune to ambiguity and the need for common sense rulings. That's what makes it different from a video game. If you're choosing to play an open-ended imagination game, it's better to just embrace the strengths of natural language design.
But alas, 5E's magic rules have just enough bullshit in them to make the "rulings over rules" playstyle really difficult to achieve. And I'm not even talking about the really arcane stuff, either. A lot of it just comes from stuff that seems reasonable enough to include. The spell's range, duration, components, concentration, etc. Of course you need answers for those questions, right?
And yet, their function in actual gameplay seems only to cause moments of "oh shit wait, I didn't notice that, fuck, never mind alright I guess that idea doesn't work." I cannot tell you how often one of those little specific limitations has screwed me out of a clever idea. Not a game-breaking exploit or anything, just a fairly reasonable application of the tools I have at my disposable. And to top it off, navigating all of this just serves to slow down gameplay even more.
Returning to point 1, this is made worse by the fact that you get tons and tons of spells. If you instead had only a handful, then it wouldn't be such a problem for each spell to be so complex and involved. If you only had 8 spells you could cast, then you'd learn them inside and out pretty quickly, the same way a Monk player knows exactly how their qi point system functions or how a Druid knows exactly how their wildshaping works.
But if you're making a game where players get dozens of spells at their disposal, then they really should be extremely simple. It's not hard to make a lot of these variables uniform, if not across the whole system then at least for a single character. Look at this paragraph from Brave, slightly modified from Knave:
Ta-da! Literally dozens of hours of gameplay have been saved from the jaws of "oh wait hmmm looks like I can't reach that square without another 5 feet of movement, unless I do the diagonal with... wait alright I think that should work... actually no, the spell says..." - Counterspell and spell resistance. Don't you just love when things don't happen? Boy oh boy, I sure can't wait for stuff to not happen. Nothing makes for a better story afterwards than recounting all the crazy spells that didn't take effect.
Once you get to around 10th level, the entire game revolves around this one fucking spell. It becomes a lynchpin mechanic, a constant factor to consider in every single situation. The party needs at least two spellcasters ready to drop a counterspell at all times, and the DM should be regularly using it against the players as well. And it's exhausting and boring and lame and not at all what I'm looking for in my D&D fantasy.
But I would never recommend a 5E DM ban or nerf counterspell. Among the community, there's pretty much a consensus that the DM shouldn't try to keep the players from using it, that they should let the players use the tools they have and enjoy the victories they've earned. I agree with that on principle, but I also feel like it's probably necessary just for, like, balance reasons.
Returning once again to point 1, players get so many spells, of such an absurd caliber, that you simply cannot allow them to cast all of those spells without further limitation. Any group of mid-level adventurers has accumulated so much magical firepower that they could level a city, wipe out an army, usurp a kingdom. It isn't helped by the fact that you get back 100% of your magical power each and every 24-hour day of your life.
The game would fall apart if every spellcaster, PC or NPC, were able to actually cast every single spell they have at their disposal. Thus, the game's balance seems to assume that a huge chunk of your spell slots will be lost to counterspelling and spell resistance as a matter of necessity. It's kind of like how a nuclear defense system can wipe out 99% of incoming missiles, meaning you have to stockpile at least 100 missiles just to benefit from the use of only 1 nuke. Except if the cause and effect were reversed. The designers chose to arm players with 100 nukes, creating the problem that counterspell is meant to solve.
Meanwhile, I'm over here thinking, "surely it would be easier and better to just design a game where players don't get so much magical power." So they don't need to be muzzled by a minimum amount of negation effects just to keep the game playable.
It wouldn't bother me so much if counterspell were at least interesting to use. Other games have spiced it up a bit. Like if instead of simple negation, you could redirect a spell, or absorb it, or something else like that. Or if there weren't a single spell for all "counterspell" purposes, but rather that you could cancel out a spell by casting the same spell back. Or maybe something more broad, like by casting a spell of the same level or of the same school or something. Basically anything at all to make it not the most boring mechanic of all time.
Combat Drives Me Crazy
- Everything becomes combat. "Becomes" being the operative word. I said in Part 2 that D&D being an action game isn't a deal breaker for me. I enjoy combat! But I want D&D to be more than just that. When 5E first came out, it received a lot of praise for de-emphasizing combat compared to 3E and 4E. And I agree with that praise... but I've also discovered its limits.
1) As you get higher and higher in level, the game's focus shifts more and more towards combat.
2) As the edition has gone on, WotC's focus has shifted more and more towards combat.
At some point, I felt like I had been tricked into playing 3E again.
Let's talk about the "three pillars." It's one of the first ideas explained in the opening pages of the Player's Handbook. "D&D is a game built on three pillars of gameplay: combat, social interaction, and exploring the world." This is another one of those ideas that was inspired by the dev team's experiment playing every previous edition. I think it's an admiral attempt to capture the fundamentals of what makes D&D true to itself, and that a healthy balance of these three elements makes for the quintessential D&D experience.
A subtle strength of the three pillars idea is that it's not a description of mechanics. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that, because gameplay is ostensibly divided evenly between these three categories, that the crunch would be divided evenly between these three categories. And that the lack of crunch for social interaction and exploration was evident of the model's failure. "If the game were really 1/3rd social interaction, then why isn't there a highly gamified, convoluted, and sterile 'social combat' minigame used to resolve all talking-based situations? Checkmate, moron."
But reality clearly tells a different story. 5E players fucking love social interaction. Ask almost any 5E group on the planet, they'll tell you that they spend a ton of table time just talking to each other and NPCs. A weirdly high number of groups only do in-character dialogue and nothing else. By and large, people don't need many mechanics for social gameplay. The answer isn't always crunch.
Mike Mearls attributed this to the power of framing. That by just literally telling the players "you'll spend at least as much time talking to NPCs as you will fighting them" it became true. Even though the rules are overall pretty similar to 3E, players play the game differently because the text sets different expectations.
I don't disagree with Mr. Mearls, but I do think there's more to it than that. A little bit of crunch goes a long way. They made sure that each class would have at least one or two features tying into each pillar, even if they still skewed towards combat. But even more importantly, there's other elements in the game which contribute. While it's true that D&D doesn't have a complex social interaction procedure, players are given traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws, along with alignment and a fluffy background feature. All of those things feed into social gameplay, even if they aren't mechanical in nature.
But I'm sure you're now thinking, "okay okay sure, social pillar, blablabla. But what about the exploration pillar?" Not as successful, unfortunately. It's kind of broadly defined to be "everything that isn't combat or talking to NPCs," so I guess that does mean it sees plenty of table time. But I think it isn't controversial to say that most of the player base finds that part of the game a little bit lacking. The framing didn't sell it enough on its own, and the crunch doesn't do quite enough to support it, either. Another argument in favor of exploration procedures, by the way. So maybe, over the next ten years, WotC would try to shore up that particular pillar a bit, right?
Eeeehhhhhh. Sounds kinda hard. Would you like more combat stuff? We have lots of it. Look at each subclass released after the 2014 PHB. They get more and more combat-centric with each book. The few times they try to offer a social or exploration mechanic, it's just "you can cast this spell for free." Spells that tend to simply bypass those pillars of gameplay, I should mention.
Look no further than the poor Ranger class. It got its first revision as an Unearthed Arcana, then Tasha's Cauldron gave another alternative version, and now the 2024 PHB has a totally new version. And while they indeed succeed at the goal of making the class stronger, they also make it almost exclusively combat-oriented, throwing away almost everything that made it, y'know, a Ranger. It's basically just an alternate Fighter now.
I'll try to be fair and give credit to the non-combat content they've tried introducing over time. Xanathar expanded on downtime gameplay, which I think is cool but evidently didn't seem to take. Literally no one has ever read its chapter on traps. But all the non-combat feats added over time have been pretty solid! And my own group has gotten a lot of use out of Xanathar's chapter elaborating on tools and tool proficiency. Maybe the new "Bastion" material in the 2024 books has potential. But I guess for me, it's too little, too late. None of that has kept the game from inevitably devolving into a tactical skirmish simulator first and foremost. - Encounter building. Remember that thing about how "5E doesn't do enough to support the DM?" This is another big part of that problem. It is well-known that the Challenge Rating system is not very reliable, and that the encounter-building guidelines are kind of a pain. The fact that countless people have created online tools to help you use these guidelines does not reflect well. Even worse, just learning that the monsters in the Monster Manual aren't even built using the DMG's monster-creation rules is a radicalizing experience.
But where others have demanded a better, more mathematically-rigorous system to use, I find myself yearning for a different kind of support entirely. It doesn't matter if the numbers are all "correct" if the situation is just boring anyway. A lot of new Dungeon Masters don't actually know how to concoct a fight scene that has any sauce. That leaves it to bloggers like me (and I suppose some other luminaries) to fill the void.
It seems like it should be obvious that throwing your players against 5 regular goblins in a blank, flat room with no secondary goals or complications is a recipe for a boring slog of a fight, right? And yet, it's such a common mistake that the DMG clearly needs to address it somehow.
Clicking through those links, you'll see that there are many, many, many ideas for how to better support this part of DMing. But to make it easy on WotC, I recommend they return to the solution that they themselves already used in 4E: having multiple different stat blocks for each monster, each with unique mechanics designed to fill specific combat roles. A savvy DM can learn and understand how to use each monster and what to pair them with. And the rest of us dummies? The entry literally just spells out the monster's favorite tactics, and also offers pre-made encounter groups.
I'm sure it took a lot of work for the design team, but what else are they there to do? This is exactly the kind of material that's worth the time, the cost, and the page-space to include. Game designers, please, I will pay you money to do this work for me.
Contrast this with 5E, where the stat blocks often feel like a formality. Here's an example, with the identifying details redacted. Can you guess what monster this is at a glance?
If you couldn't do that just by reading the creature's stats and abilities, I consider that a poorly-designed monster.* This is exactly why the advice "Just Use Bears" exists and is so popular. But an important corollary to "Just Use Bears" is that: if you're using a monster that could be adequately substituted with a bear, then maybe you shouldn't even have that monster at all. In a sense, you shouldn't be following that advice, not because it's bad, but because you're using monsters interesting enough that the advice isn't applicable.*It's a grick. I like them, but they're not interesting as gameplay objects.
Despite being an old-school feller, I am actually a big supporter of having a Challenge-Rating system of some kind. I think it can actually add a lot of good into the game. And if you don't care for it, it's easy to ignore. But I will admit that, by its inclusion and prominence in the DMG, it contributes to a serious problem. So many first-time DMs get so caught up on fine-tuning their fights to be balanced that they don't learn the far more valuable lesson: their fights should be good. - Fights are either epic and exhausting or they're a waste of time. Apologies for again repeating myself, but some points I make sprawl into many diverse problems. The "adventuring day" is not a bad idea, but it's undermined by the pacing being so wildly off. The resource cycle is way too short compared to the pace of challenge that adventurers face. They're given enough juice to stretch across a good 6-8 fights, but they always get their juicy fully refilled after every 1-2 fights. So you pretty much always have to deal with a party that's either at full strength or nearly-full strength.
So how do you cope with that? How do you provide them a challenge? One way is to simply force the 6-8 fights, tormenting the players with a long, brutal marathon of non-stop combats all squeezed into one day. Personally, not a huge fan of that solution. But the other way is to instead only ever run boss fights.
The way my group plays, we only have one combat every two or three sessions. But when we do, the fight takes nearly the entire session. Usually upwards of 3 hours. That's because my DM (like myself, way back when) just doesn't bother running medium-difficulty fights anymore. He goes straight for the hard-to-deadly range. A medium-difficulty fight still takes the better part of an hour to play through, but it's little more than a nuisance. What's the good of having 2 or 3 of those every session when each one is barely a challenge at all? Better to just have one big fight that he puts a lot more thought and energy into making exciting and thrilling.
And yet, that too is kind of exhausting. One of the reasons we only do that once every two or three sessions is because those sessions are taxing on us as players. The "ideal session" contains a nice ebb and flow of stress and relaxation, a back-and-forth of problem solving and playful banter. But I just don't know how to achieve that with 5E after around 5th level. You'll still get a good mix of those things, but it's going to have to be spread across the campaign as a whole, not the individual sessions. "Last week you got 3+ hours of relaxation and banter, so this week you get 3+ hours of stress and problem solving."
Yet another thing this can be blamed on is plain old HP bloat. The rate at which PC health inflates is fucking nuts. Damage output also increases over time, but no one could claim that it keeps up with HP. So combats of all difficulties get longer and longer and longer the further into the campaign you get. After around 10th level, even a medium-difficulty encounter takes 2-3 hours merely because of HP bloat. This only further encourages our "boss fights only" adaptation. If you're going to spend hours on a single fight, it better be really stimulating, right? Something with major dramatic stakes and lots of puzzling complications to contend with.
- Combat becomes a bigger and bigger focus over time.
- Each combat encounter gets longer and longer over time.
- The game doesn't do much to help the DM develop the skill of creating interesting encounters, so those combats are highly likely to be kinda boring.
- Nearly everyone at the table has to spend most of their brain-energy navigating a complex spellcasting minigame full of technicalities and layers of tradeoffs.
- Spellcasting gets more and more prominent over time, eventually becoming the central focus of all combat.
I will confess: my group had a session fairly recently that I did not enjoy. It was a one-off, and was pretty much just one long fight. And nearly every minute of that session was just crunch talk. Almost every word uttered from beginning to end was discussion and debate about system interactions. Temporary HP, resistance stacking, "creature" vs "object," forced movement versus voluntary movement, how poisoned interacts with sneak attack, critical hit rules, and on and on and on.
It made me sad. It made me think, "this isn't what I play D&D for." I suppose I should lay some of the blame on my friends, who chose to play the game in that way. Who know that the option is always there to simply not pick up the rulebook during the session, to just make a ruling and move on, to keep things flowing. And if I really want to enforce that playstyle, I suppose I could always go back to DMing the game myself.
But I also know that my friends and I have played tons and tons and tons of RPGs together, and none of the others have made them act that way.
But I also know that my friends and I have played tons and tons and tons of RPGs together, and none of the others have made them act that way.
So What?
I'm sure a lot of people think it's silly of me to care this much. Why am I so invested in this? Why does it bother me if "5.5E" disappoints? Most other people who are this deep into the hobby are happy to dislike D&D.
A big part of it is the pain of knowing there's a road that'll never be taken.
See, like, when you get this thing that's full of flaws, but you love it anyway, you don't want to throw it out. You want to see it fixed. Improved. You want to see its potential fulfilled.
See, like, when you get this thing that's full of flaws, but you love it anyway, you don't want to throw it out. You want to see it fixed. Improved. You want to see its potential fulfilled.
I think it's clear that I can think of a whole lotta ways to improve 5E. And for the better part of 10 years, I could hope that maybe those improvements would one day arrive. 6th edition will be announced and WotC will say, "We've heard you! We know what you want! We'll chill out on all the magic stuff this time!" But now I know I'll never see that happen. 6E (or something like it) is already here and it's clear that the game is moving on in a different direction.
And I know you're going to hate me for saying this, but I've got to be honest. That indie game you love instead? The one that's obviously leagues better than D&D, which blows it out of the water, which makes it comical to even continue talking about D&D just knowing that this exists? I'm not 100% satisfied with that game, either. I looked at it, I was impressed, and I also thought, "I would love to see more development on this. Refine its best ideas, drop the weak stuff." Sorry, I'm a picky eater.
The main difference between your indie fave and D&D is that I know D&D will always have another edition, whereas I have no such guarantees for whatever alternative game you're endorsing. I know D&D will always have a community tinkering with it, adding onto it, making content for it. I know D&D will always be benefiting from iterative design. I know that if I have issues with it, there's always a chance that they'll be fixed at some point.
The main difference between your indie fave and D&D is that I know D&D will always have another edition, whereas I have no such guarantees for whatever alternative game you're endorsing. I know D&D will always have a community tinkering with it, adding onto it, making content for it. I know D&D will always be benefiting from iterative design. I know that if I have issues with it, there's always a chance that they'll be fixed at some point.
Of course, some previous versions of the game managed to iterate in multiple directions. If you were a fan of 3E but were disappointed by 4E, then there was faithful Pathfinder continuing along the other road. If you were a fan of Basic D&D but were disappointed by Advanced D&D or WotC D&D, you got the entire OSR as an alternative. Will there be other games that continue what 2014 5E started and improve on it further?
I guess there's always Shadow of the Demon Lord, although it doesn't seem to fit my wishlist much. Tales of the Valiant is a very faithful retroclone of 5E, but surely it'll eventually get a second edition that may change things further. Marcia has been chipping away at Cinco, which is kind of her personal take on all that is good and pure in the 5E design ethos. We've actually been designing along parallel lines for awhile now, but each of our projects have diverged further and further from both 2014 5E and from one another.
On a less personal note, I also think that caring about the state of D&D makes sense because it concerns the whole hobby. It has always been the entry point for the majority of us who play RPGs, and likely will stay that way for quite a while. Everything D&D does sets the standards for every else, creates the examples that everyone new to the industry first learns from. Whenever D&D improves, RPGs improve. We're right now living in an unprecedented golden age of popular interest in RPGs, and we have 2014's Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition to thank for that.
-Dwiz
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