RedStone Orc wrote:It helps to have a fuck off huge damning list to tell people why you won't play a system.
You know what, fuck it, let's go into detail. A lot of this is probably gonna be reiterating stuff I pointed out in my Angry Review of the 5e PHB, but I cannot overstate how much of a failure this game is because Mearls and co literally had 2 years of nothing else to do, and they came out with a book which is pretty much "lol we didn't do the jobs we were paid to do". But let's start.
Ok, seriously, what did you expect?
Look at the names on the game. We have Mike "Skill Challenge" Mearls as the head designer for this shit, so right away we know that any math is gonna be wrong (see: Frank's takedown of the stealth rules, bounded accuracy). Zak "rules can't be the same for everyone" S. We have the RPGPundit and the OSR crowd. Note the complete absence of anyone new who could have injected any innovative ideas into this game, and the puzzling decision to cater to the OSR - are kids who grew up with 3e and 4e going to enjoy random, bullshit inconsistent rules?
But ignoring the noted incompetence of the people who put their names on this, look at the playtests. Half the shit in the playtest didn't have rules. For 2 or 3 packets the skill rules were literally "The DM decides whether you succeeded or failed
after the die roll." Bounded accuracy math was ripped apart and stayed largely the same. The big ideas were "not having rules" and...actually that's about it.
A Failure of Vision
Let's start this session with a little exercise. What are the biggest problems with 3e and 4e D&D?
Now turn around, how many problems have been fixed in 5e?
The answer is "none of them".
-Characters are still imbalanced, necromancer wizards > you thanks to the miracle of bounded accuracy. Being a spellcaster allows you to put out more DPS then a fighter, planar bind minions, and steal enemy abilities. Being a fighter means you get to stab them, or something. This is further exacerbated by the main mundane noncombat ability - skills - having no actual rules and thus leaving the mundanes with no predictable capabilities. Can the rogue climb a brick wall? I don't know. You don't know. Not because we're stupid, but because the answer quantumly changes based on whatever the hell the DM decides at the time. By contrast, the spellcasters can cast levitate and fly and ignore all walls forever.
-In a shocking twist of events, it is still possible to min-max the fuck out of the game, mostly by stacking bonuses until you explode bounded accuracy.
-Monsters are still have stupid amounts of hitpoints, so your 1/day fireball at fifth level will only do 1/3 the health of a CR 5 air elemental on average. Weirdly, Mearls called this out in a reddit AMA as something they'd taken care to fix, proving once again that he has no clue what the hell he's talking about.
-Spellcasters have armies of geased/planar bound/undead minions, teleports, divinations, simulacrums, save or dies, and transmutation that lets you steal monster abilities. There is no way the high level game doesn't turn into a clusterfuck. Weirdly, no one seems to be playing 5e at higher levels that I can discern.
These are all known problems. They've been known for 15+ years. I don't understand why you cannot get some actual people with math skills to hammer out some new and innovative solutions - even some new attempts that might not succeed - in the two years you have to fix this game.
Mearls and co threw their hands in the air, decided to shift the burden to the consumer, and charged that consumer $150.
They didn't even try...
Alright, Frank gave us a list of fake rules. I'm just gonna bring up a few that defenders of the system seem to always go back to. Let's go with the skill system.
Let's take a look at the social interaction pillar, shall we? Remember, this is one-third of the game. An entire "pillar of interaction".
The rules are
-The DM can call for an ability check. It doesn't have to be Charisma or even a social skill. It does, um, something. The takeaway is that you can argue for any skill check you want, and that might make people vaguely helpful.
Or you could just cast a damn spell and be guaranteed the most favorable result.
-Magical Tea Party this shit!
You will notice that none of the above is worth paying money for.
This is a theme that recurs throughout the rules. The background abilities literally do nothing and are full of ways the DM can arbitrarily negate it, yet waste an entire chapter of the book. No one can figure out what the stealth rules do, because they are contradictory and spread across several chapters.
...but when they tried it was bad.
There are no good mechanics in 5e that are unique to 5e, but all the rules they do lay out are a puzzling storm of bad. Take the concentration system. This is a pathfinder-esque spell nerf of letting the caster maintain one "concentration" duration spell at a time, the idea being that wizards no longer can stack buffs, have 5 summons out, etc.
Naturally, they fucked this up by marking only specific spells with the concentration descriptor. Animate dead and Create Undead don't have it, but they give you enough minions to laugh at bounded accuracy. Magic jar doesn't have it, and you can use it to get weapon immunity by possessing a werewolf. Contagion doesn't have it, and it stunlocks bad guys forever while they get shot by skeletons. Finger of Death adds one peasant to your zombie army every day for no cost whatsoever, so you can take a year off or something stupid and have a massive gamebreaking army. Geas gets you permanent minions. The only change this makes to the system is that you have no incentive to use the legacy spells like flesh to stone or web because they ate a stupid nerf under this system, but wizards still own because they have clearly defined yet poorly thought out rules. Much like every other edition of D&D.
Or take multiclassing, which is a rather intriguing combination of failure. Between bizarre caster level mechanics, the fact that every class needs to spell out which class features a multiclass inherits (and call out exceptional class features which don't stack)...the system is a poorly thought out mess. It's even labeled "optional" which in D&D developer land usually means poorly thought out bullshit, like gestalt rules or 2e wild talents.
There's more to say on this topic - ripping off Pathfinder, cargo cult game design - but I think I've made my point.
