What Content Would Make 5e Good

[Dean]

What content would make 5th edition a game you would be much more excited about playing? Imagine that a competent design team was in place at wizards but had to fix 5th edition using content. So no simply saying “Rebalance minionmancers” because that’s not an option, it's not a video game patch. The best you could do would make to make more class options that more people had access to that were in line with the current minionmancers, or possibly create abilities people could get that would make them better at dealing with large numbers of minions.

So what should be done to make the best fixes to the system you could under the rules that it has to be by content creation and not restriction or houseruling. A couple right off the bat...

Improving Monsters: 5e monsters are big fat stacks of hp with almost no abilities. They’re all just orcs with some orcs drawn all covered in fire and called Demon Lords. You could create a bunch more monsters with interesting abilities but that doesn’t really solve the problem that 5e’s coolest monsters are already in the MM and they suck and they don’t do what they say on the tin. The Storm Giants fluff says they are distant prophetic god kings and powerful oracles who can tell the future and are worshipped for their incredible divinatory abilities and that motherfucker only has 2 powers which are “lightning” and “axe”.
As a result I think the actual solution is templates. Some things you could slot onto the monsters in the 5eMM to actually make them what they’re supposed to be. If you can bolt a set of powerful seer abilities or powerful fire mage abilities or powerful necromantic abilities onto a monster then the storm giant listed in the MM can be concieved as your basic storm giant NPC, and the distant prophetic god king can still exist quickly as something you add on to the basic model. In this same way the stock Pit Fiend might still kinda suck but a necromantically powerful Pit Fiend could serve Orcus and be able to match your skeleton army and death magics with his own.

A real skill system: You could publish a chapter long “Variant” skill system like it’s back in the AD&D Players Options days. Have DC values for the sort of skill checks people could be expected to accomplish. To backport this onto 5e’s existing tool proficiency system I think you could create two higher mastery levels then “Proficient” which could give you bonuses to using that skill. So someone could be Proficient, a Journeyman, or a Master with Healing Kits and each one of those levels could give you a +5 bonus to Healing Kit uses which could be things like curing magical diseases and doing life saving surgery to revivify the recently dead at the higher DC levels. By adding some hefty number boosts in the form of these +5 skill bonuses you could make it so that things high level PC's could do actually wouldn't be within the range of a random commoner rolling well.

[Dogbert]

The never-delivered Pillars thing, so people who want to stick to the current, farsical "dirt farmer heroes" can do so while the rest can scrap bounded accuracy, add an extra module, and play some actual d&d.

[Chamomile]

The proposed overhaul to the skill system doesn't even need to be that janky or involve that many new rules. Just give everyone expertise, and then the Bard and Rogue class features just give them expertise in more skills.

Monsters is significantly more tricky. If you want a more interesting bestiary, you need a bestiary with more interesting abilities, and players need to be able to counter those more interesting abilities, which means you're committing yourself to significant overhauls of not only the entire Monster Manual, but also most, if not all, character classes in order to keep up with the overhauled Monster Manual. At that point, you are basically making a new game.

[CapnTthePirateG]

Some actual non boring and shitty PC abilities: This is a big one. You need something for people to do at levels 1-3 without the game turning into a boring slog of smashing numbers together and waiting an hour for the predetermined outcome to occur. Even classes that do get abilities get shitty and boring ones that don't influence combat such as magic missile or Tasha's (thanks to the swinginess of the RNG this won't usually do much).

Feats AND ASIs, not both[/i]: Maybe this is another "variant" rule, but this was a bad idea when Mearls announced it and is a bad idea now.

[Username17]

I don't think 5e is really fixable with content. I've written a lot of content for 3rd edition and I acknowledge that there's some underlying issues that I cannot really do anything about by just making more content. But there isn't anything about 5th edition that makes it a better starting point on any metric than 3e. The rules for 3rd edition had some flawed assumptions, but someone did put a lot of thought into them. Really low level stuff just works surprisingly well. Carrying capacities are surprisingly realistic, the critical threat mechanic makes for some nice and fair weapon tradeoffs, the movement and threatened areas system is in a sweet spot for tactical depth. And for 5th edition, none of that is true. All of the rules are lazy as fuck, with bad design such that everything is more complicated than it needs to be while also outputting results that are too vague to be remotely adequate for anything.

People have asked K and I whether we'd do a TOME style content drop for 5th edition. And both of us have just said "Why fucking bother?"

Mearls produced a lazy asspull edition and he was a total asshole about it. There's nothing to salvage. The problem isn't that everything doesn't have enough content, the problem is that the core rules are a mess of hot garbage.

-Username17

[Dean]

Mearls produced a lazy asspull edition and he was a total asshole about it. There's nothing to salvage. The problem isn't that everything doesn't have enough content, the problem is that the core rules are a mess of hot garbage.

I can recognize that and still want to tackle this as a design problem for how I could most improve fifth edition. I even think there are some interesting areas in 5e's largely shitty ruleset that could create surprising solutions to some of its other problems. For instance high level Fighters getting no consequential abilities is a problem and the incredible power of minions is a problem but if we go kinda old school and reintroduce the AD&D thing where the Fighter starts attracting an army at ~10th level then those two shitty parts of the system can make a Lord feel very threatening.

There's just neat areas of this design problem stemming from 5e's unique weaknesses so I want to tackle them and see how I could make content that would improve 5e and what it should be.

The proposed overhaul to the skill system doesn't even need to be that janky or involve that many new rules. Just give everyone expertise, and then the Bard and Rogue class features just give them expertise in more skills.

I love how smooth that is. I would still be interested in creating DC lists for skills and now, in the same way that some skill uses were "Trained Only" you could make a number of advanced skill options "Expert Only" where only someone with expertise in that skill/tool could use those options.

Some actual non boring and shitty PC abilities

I agree, I've been thinking a lot about this. I have a lot of ideas for ways to add interesting things to do in the mid to high level range but before level 3 there's basically no toggles I can think of to work with. I'm interested to hear your ideas.

Maybe we could make a generic maneuver list, like an extremely distilled version of the Tome of Battle. The Conan d20 system had a generic maneuver list that anyone could try to use things from and while it wasn't a huge success I think there's something to making a list of special attacks that anyone with hands is capable of trying. Like I said though I'm not sure what you think would work. Getting things into the game as levels go on gets easier as you could build things into new archetypes or create prestige classes but getting things into the game from level 1 will take creativity.

[Whiysper]

More feats, more feat picks. 5 minute short rest. Actually fucking write the Exploration and Interaction pillars.

But even then, just back-port the good bits of 5e into 3e and don't tell the players. I really can't think of anything good enough in 5e to hold my attention long enough to do the sort of re-writes and updates that it'd need to manage being a pale shadow!

[Cervantes]

The proposed overhaul to the skill system doesn't even need to be that janky or involve that many new rules. Just give everyone expertise, and then the Bard and Rogue class features just give them expertise in more skills.

If you don't want to stretch out the DCs, you can make Expertise into Luck (reroll or advantage).

[Iduno]

What content would make 5th edition a game you would be much more excited about playing? Imagine that a competent design team was in place at wizards but had to fix 5th edition using content. So no simply saying “Rebalance minionmancers” because that’s not an option,

"What content would make shitty mechanics and boring classes not shitty/boring. You can't change the bad parts."

[WiserOdin032402]

So, I've actually been...I'm gonna call it installing mods. Because I hate to say it, 5e doesn't have the meat to do anything else. You just take a bunch of high-quality rules that the 5uckers put together and you voltron it all together to make something that functions. It's not quite like 3e, but a lot of them aren't going to be something crazy that could break the game by accident.

Which reflects poorly on the 5e design team that their fans produce infinitely better and more inventive content using 5e as a base. I've got no less than seven of these rulebooks on tap, which makes me more than disappointed in myself.

[Cervantes]

yo link that shit tho

[CapnTthePirateG]

The entire point of playing 5e isn't to fix the game, its so you can identify as a nerd and roll with your nerd associates.

[Cervantes]

it's improv theater/freeform roleplaying

[MGuy]

A friend of mine is playing in some sort of shared universe thing on discord and described to me some of what he was doing. He apparently ended up being a necromancer because he heard me talking about what I heard about 5th edition. He didn't build it optimally and apparently was still able to an inconclusive fight with the rest of his party apparently midway through an adventure at the drop of a hat. Note that in this fight he spent most of it, himself, off the battlefield because he didn't really want to fight them. No one thought this was at all odd in his group. He didn't even consider it a big deal outside of it being annoying because he had to go collect 'more material'. My guess is that people who play 5E don't really care about the rules or how they work.

[CapnTthePirateG]

I gave up on adventurer's league after realizing I needed to spend an hour arguing with the DM over whether my skeletons could equip the longbows I had on a mule.

5e provides quality gameplay folks!

[OgreBattle]

A lvl 1-6 super dungeon that you can’t leave (dimensional pocket, underground ruins, Planet, mega ship, etc) and have to scavenge neat artifacts so most of the player ability comes from paced exploration content and not class abilities.

[Cervantes]

I gave up on adventurer's league after realizing I needed to spend an hour arguing with the DM over whether my skeletons could equip the longbows I had on a mule.

5e provides quality gameplay folks!

you obviously can lol, they just might not be proficient

[CapnTthePirateG]

you obviously can lol, they just might not be proficient

There's a Mearls tweet that they are. This is covered nowhere in the rules, nor what the hell the new attack bonus is if I order them to open fire and they're not proficient (IIRC monsters don't have a proficiency bonus at all). I can argue about how they should just get dex or whatever, but it's again like how in 4e no one knew what happened when you gave a medusa a bow.

Echoing the sentiments from earlier in this thread, just don't bother salvaging 5e. There's nothing to salvage.

[Cervantes]

"Assume that a creature is proficient with its armor, weapons, and tools. If you swap them out, you decide whether the creature is proficient with its new equipment." - Monster Manual

So yeah, no idea if they're proficient.

They have proficiency bonuses but they're not printed so you have to "reverse engineer" them from their stats. Like, an Owl has +1 Wis but +3 Perception so you can assume they're proficient in Perception with a +2 bonus. it's annoying.

[Grek]

Honestly? A book full of equipment and revised item proficiency training rules.

You can fix the minonmancy/peasant milita issue by handing out magic items that give DR Yes/+1 at level 5, DR Yes/+2 at level 10 and DR Yes/+3 at level 15 and then give out +X weapons and +X implements at the appropriate levels.

You can fix the "levels 1-3 are boring as fuck" problem by introducing a couple dozen new items and giving every character three more item proficiencies at level one, so that everyone starts out with extra options from the word go. "Your character is proficient in dynamite and has 10 sticks of the stuff, good luck." will definitely liven up the first few levels.

5e will still be bad but it will be considerably less stupid if you make those two changes.

[WiserOdin032402]

Okay, so I forgot a disclaimer when I was talking about the homebrew shit. When you use more homebrew documents made by fans than actual books made by the developers, you are either playing the Mind's Eye Society Vampire the Masquerade(Which is pretty fucking rad all things considered) or you're playing a game that has failed so utterly on every level of design that a bunch of people on reddit can outdo your entire professional company.

[Dean]

In order to make monsters more interesting I think the solution is templates you can stack onto monsters. I've made a few and I think you would write something like this:

Specialist Templates

The Monster Manual lists the most common form of an encountered monster but some troops are trained to fight in a particular martial or magical style. The basic creature is more generically tough but these specialists have trained to master a unique set of combat abilities. In order to represent this you can apply a specialist template to a monster. Monsters given a specialist template have half their listed hp but gain the abilities listed in the template. Some templates also have CR minimums which means the template works best with creatures of that CR or higher, applying the template to a creature below the CR minimum raises its CR to that number.

Example Templates

Archer
A monster with this template gains a Longbow or Longbow equivalent for their size that they are proficient in.
Cunning Action: The monster can take a bonus action on each turn to use the Dash, Disengage, or Hide action
Mark: As a bonus action the monster may mark a target gaining advantage on any Perception checks against them and dealing +1d6 damage to them with any ranged attacks. The monster may only have one creature marked at a time.
1/Short Rest the monster may use Cordon of Arrows

Berserker
Bloodlust: The monster gains resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage any round it does not make any attacks
Fast Attack: The monster may make one melee attack as a bonus action each turn.
Parry: As a reaction the monster may add 3 to its AC against one melee attack that would hit it. To do so the monster must be able to see the attacker.
Deathless: The first time the monster would go to 0hp it instead goes to 1hp. This effect resets if the monster takes a short rest.

Fire Mage (Minimum CR 5)
A monster with this template gains the Fire Bolt Cantrip which it may cast, at will, counting it's CR as its level for the purposes of the spell. It also gains Innate Spellcasting allowing it to cast any of the following spells.
3/day Fireball, Haste, Hellish Rebuke, Wall of Fire

Stormcaller (Minimum CR 5)
A monster with this template gains the Eldritch Blast cantrip which it may cast at will, counting its CR as its level for the purposes of the spell. It also gains Innate Spellcasting allowing it to cast any of the following spells.
3/day Blink, Call Lightning, Dispel Magic, Lightning Bolt

So lets look at these applied to some monsters to see how they add a little more variety to combat and the Monster Manual. A Centaur Archer is literally a horse archer and it plays like one. It's faster than you, is shooting you, and can punish you with a fair amount of damage if you just try to march into melee so don't do that and tell your Ranger to handle him. A Minotaur Berserker is a quintessential closet troll. He can plausibly hit for 50 damage a round in his opening round of attacks but he has less than 40hp so it should be made the immediate priority target because of it's high damage and low hp, especially for magic attacks as he has no real defenses against them. A Fire Giant Fire Mage can either haste another Fire Giant or keep up a wall of fire to split the party. He can also drop AOE's so just bringing a bunch of skeletons doesn't make him die helplessly. The easiest way to deal with him is definitely just having Counterspell prepared but maybe you don't have an arcane caster in which case he's probably gonna be a big help to the rest of the Fire Giant party. Finally a Vrock Stormcaller is basically a puzzle monster. He can Call Lightning and fly around and drop 4d10 lightning bolts on you all day. A party where half the group wasn't idiots who don't have bows can handle him but if you didn't bring range or Dispel Magic he can just kind of declare an area off limits.

All of those monsters would play differently and create a different battlefield and in the original Monster Manual 3 out of 4 of them are virtually identical melee beatstick monsters.

[Dogbert]

When you use more homebrew documents made by fans than actual books made by the developers...

As a rule of thumb, I won't pay for any game that requires more houserules than I have fingers in one hand to be enjoyable.

[Bihlbo]

I ran a 5e game set in the world of Skyrim, the video game. Different races, a mostly faithful alchemy system, and some house rules for other things (just ignore the tool system except for "crafting stations" where it makes sense). Aside from the deity differences, mostly the classes stayed the same. It worked really well. Yes, the same old problems were still there, but for the most part we just didn't interact with them. I never threw a dozen mooks at them and they didn't have minions. The biggest problem we had was that the fighter was just too good, regularly dropping the biggest things the group faced in one or two rounds.

One of the things I did was I built a bandit generator, the content of which was based on the Skyrim mod Organized Bandits in Skyrim. I made about a dozen bandit types, each with leveled, predictable abilities, and the generator created a random race and ability scores, then applied a random bandit type to a level input. They faced lots of other critters, though for the most part they weren't much more interesting than a bear. Your chaurus spits acid, a sabertooth pounces, draugr are armed zombie-like undead, etc. Had to re-write the werewolf to be not terrible, but the fight was really fun. The bandits ended up being the most fun I had, because they were all just people, but with abilities the players couldn't anticipate until they'd fought some and learned what to look for. The fat guy with the cleaver is resistant to damage, and the bandit who uses a reach weapon can also set you on fire, that sort of thing. I had a huge writeup for vampires too, but never used them.

Here's the thing I learned: You have to re-write the MM to make monsters fun. For the most part, they all challenge players if you throw big numbers of them at the PCs. But for a 4 vs 4 fight or a boss battle, it's going to be a slugfest without anything interesting going on, and you can't challenge them with 4 foes who are anywhere near as weak as what the book says you should use. So, scrap it all and start over.

The game ended because it was too much work to come up with monsters wholecloth every week. I could have finished it, made a nice spiffy book to share with others, if I had any incentive to do the work. But 4-10 hours of prep every week for the game just wasn't my bag. Maybe I'm too lazy to DM.

[CapnTthePirateG]

When you use more homebrew documents made by fans than actual books made by the developers

That is literally what 5e empowering DMs means - it means that they're going to charge you $150 for the privilege of doing their jobs.

I stand by my assertion made at the end of my PHB review - there is literally nothing salvageable from that book.