[5e] Thorough explanation of why it's terrible?

[ColorBlindNinja61]

SCAG has dumb things like player character options that can fly forever from level 1

So, with the Aarakocra, is that two sources of level 1 flight?

EDIT:

you could justify a party of three of the flying bastards (Hexblade, Celestial, your choice of caster [Probably fiend]) and simply kite everything to death with the combat solving cantrip.

Yeah, that particular tactic does crack 5e wide open, doesn't it?

[WiserOdin032402]

So, with the Aarakocra, is that two sources of level 1 flight?

Yep. And Aarakocra just so happens to synergize okay with an archer based Fighter build, meaning you can have four short-rest based classes with the average DPR of a Fighter, Warlocks with their higher base damage and the Fighter with their higher accuracy due to Archery style.

Yeah, that particular tactic does crack 5e wide open, doesn't it?

This tactic busts open just about every edition of D&D ever based on your level. It's just at its most obviously bad in 5e because it's now occurring on the player end, not just on the monster end, and as it turns out most monsters in 5e have no ability to deal with flying enemies that can reliably damage them and don't fall when poked with one ranged attack.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

So, with the Aarakocra, is that two sources of level 1 flight?

Yep. And Aarakocra just so happens to synergize okay with an archer based Fighter build, meaning you can have four short-rest based classes with the average DPR of a Fighter, Warlocks with their higher base damage and the Fighter with their higher accuracy due to Archery style.

Yeah, that particular tactic does crack 5e wide open, doesn't it?

This tactic busts open just about every edition of D&D ever based on your level.

For D&D 3.5, I think it very much depends on party composition. The range on most spells are lot larger in that edition than in 5e.

It's just at its most obviously bad in 5e because it's now occurring on the player end, not just on the monster end, and as it turns out most monsters in 5e have no ability to deal with flying enemies that can reliably damage them and don't fall when poked with one ranged attack.

The lack of 5e monster's ability to deal with flying enemies with ranged attacks is actually kind of sublime in a way. It really is hideous design.

[WiserOdin032402]

Let me break this some more.

Agonizing blast is the obvious shoe-in. Solves all damage needs forever.

Lance of Lethargy can only be used once per round on one target, reducing their speed by 10 feet...but once per round for one character. You get three warlocks with it and all of a sudden a single target is losing 30 feet of movement.

Repelling Blast is something a bit funnier, because it has no limit so when Warlocks get extra blasts they can push someone 10 feet per hit.

By level 5 you can get a third invocation so you can have all 3 and now all fights are simply a matter of pushing enemies where you want them while flying around completely untouched by them.

Did I mention those Warlocks still have spells? They do.

Did you know this is a spell that exists?

https://www.dnd-spells.com/spell/sickening-radiance

Did you know it's a Warlock spell? Did you know that Exhaustion is one of the most punishing mechanics in all of 5e?

I still find it funny to read all the old posts of people going 'oh warlock only has a few spells it's basically worthless as a class'

EDIT: Lest I forget, the Rod of the Pact Keeper is a warlock item that just...breaks 5e due to how 5e is balanced. +X to hit, +X to Warlock Spell DC, and get a warlock spell slot back as An Action 1/day on top of short rest recovery. +1 is uncommon, +2 is rare, +3 is very rare.

To top it all off, if you're not done abusing the shit out of your DM, Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica has the Illusionist's Bracers, which are Very Rare, and let you cast a Cantrip you previously cast as a bonus action.

[Krusk]

I don't disagree with odin about flight and warlocks in 5e, but I also remember the flying warlock he played in a 5e game with me that got pin-cushioned often while my shitty monk sort of just didn't.

The real path to ultimate 5e power is to hire like 10 archers to pal around with you.

Also heads up, depending on your DM its pretty common to nerf lasting flight. Its not that OP, but it is really handy.

[WiserOdin032402]

I don't disagree with odin about flight and warlocks in 5e, but I also remember the flying warlock he played in a 5e game with me that got pin-cushioned often while my shitty monk sort of just didn't.

The real path to ultimate 5e power is to hire like 10 archers to pal around with you.

Also heads up, depending on your DM its pretty common to nerf lasting flight. Its not that OP, but it is really handy.

That wasn't a flying warlock. I had two characters. I had a Yuan-Ti Warlock and a Tiefling (Feral, Winged) Ranger. My warlock died due to being slow.

[RobbyPants]

Thanks, everyone.

I'll probably get the three core books, as I'll likely get roped into DMing 5E within the next year, anyway.

Unearthed Arcana is not a book in 5e, it's a column of playtest material they put out.

Good to know. Thanks.

Unfortunately, 5e design runs to monsters being sacks of HP and attacks, you may need to get inventive w/ combat setups.

Yeah, I got that impression when I flipped through a 5E book a year or so ago in a book store. I was debating on taking the plunge. I looked at the monsters and just got disappointed.

[OgreBattle]

Den D&D3.5 content revolved around the monster design being mostly solid and interesting, the spells having variety. So it was making a few new base classes to handle said monsters and magic.

Revising monsters and spells and classes is a lot of work though. There relatively simple fixes to improve the 5e experience then? For example if hitpoint bloat is a problem then cutting hp's by half or doubling damage or both.

[...You Lost Me]

Revising monsters and spells and classes is a lot of work though. There relatively simple fixes to improve the 5e experience then? For example if hitpoint bloat is a problem then cutting hp's by half or doubling damage or both.

The choice to make monsters sacks of HP with a multiattack was a solution to the problem of monsters not posing a threat, because they died within the round (sometimes without making a single attack). You could halve HP or double damage, but all you're doing is making the fight faster. It's not a more interesting fight.

As far as I can tell, there are no simple fixes. The way you make combat interesting in 5e is by giving people tactical options. I like the example of the 3e wyvern and the 5e wyvern.

The 3e wyvern uses flyby attack to hit & run. It either attacks with its talons (to initiate a grapple) or its tail (to poison a low-Con creature). Poor maneuverability means it flies in big circles and you can force it to the ground by getting into a small room. It it gets backed into a corner by a melee character, it becomes a 6-attack closet troll so you need to kill it quickly. You can force a Wyvern to ground to fight it, or fight with AoOs and readied actions, or shoot it to death while trying not to get grappled. Wyverns also have the classic monster weakness of low flat-footed AC.

In contrast: the 5e wyvern will move within 10' of you, attack with a Bite and Stinger, and then fly away. The stinger just deals poison damage, and the wyvern attacks with both its stinger & its bite anyways, so it's not making any round-by-round decisions. The only thing a 5e Wyvern cares about is whether it should enter 5' range and replace its Bite attack with a Claw attack for +2 damage. You cannot force a Wyvern to ground by entering an enclosed area (no maneuverability rules), you cannot fight with OAs + readied actions (both require a reaction & the 5e Wyvern outranges most melee creatures), you don't care about grappling (the 5e Wyvern is awful at grappling), and you can't hit it from stealth (stealth rules don't really exist and FF AC no longer exists).

For 5e monsters to be more interesting, they need to make choices and/or force players to make choices. That's going to take a lot of case-by-case work. If you wanted to bring back the Wyvern's interesting combat patterns, you could do something like this:

• Reduce HP
• Reduce attack ranges by 5'
• Add grappling to multiattack
• Grant Athletics proficiency
• Write custom clumsy flight rules (5e has no default rules for maneuverability)
• Changed the poison to custom ability damage rules (5e has no default rules for ability damage)

But that's a lot more work than you probably want to do for every single monster in the game. I would just customize each monster by hand before you DM a session.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

Revising monsters and spells and classes is a lot of work though. There relatively simple fixes to improve the 5e experience then? For example if hitpoint bloat is a problem then cutting hp's by half or doubling damage or both.

The choice to make monsters sacks of HP with a multiattack was a solution to the problem of monsters not posing a threat, because they died within the round (sometimes without making a single attack). You could halve HP or double damage, but all you're doing is making the fight faster. It's not a more interesting fight.

As far as I can tell, there are no simple fixes. The way you make combat interesting in 5e is by giving people tactical options. I like the example of the 3e wyvern and the 5e wyvern.

For 5e monsters to be more interesting, they need to make choices and/or force players to make choices. That's going to take a lot of case-by-case work. If you wanted to bring back the Wyvern's interesting combat patterns, you could do something like this:

• Reduce HP
• Reduce attack ranges by 5'
• Add grappling to multiattack
• Grant Athletics proficiency
• Write custom clumsy flight rules (5e has no default rules for maneuverability)
• Changed the poison to custom ability damage rules (5e has no default rules for ability damage)

But that's a lot more work than you probably want to do for every single monster in the game. I would just customize each monster by hand before you DM a session.

I'm going to be honest, I don't think it's worth the effort to try to fix 5e. I'd rather just play 3.5.

[WiserOdin032402]

Honestly I think it's kind of emblematic of the kind of game 5e is that a lot of the interesting tactical options for mundane characters are locked entirely to the Battlemaster Fighter subclss.

[...You Lost Me]

I'm going to be honest, I don't think it's worth the effort to try to fix 5e. I'd rather just play 3.5.

5e has the 2 most important things of all going for it: (1) popular media uses it, and (2) onboarding is incredibly easy. It is probably for those reasons that 5e is 37 times more popular than 3e as measured by the quantity of Roll20 campaigns. If you want to play a game with people, you may well have to play 5e unless you are willing to be the one person at the table who knows the rules of the game.

But yeah, interesting 5e combat basically doesn't exist without a ridiculous amount of customization. I find that players are better off if you split between boss encounters (with lair abilities & innate spellcasting) or mook encounters (with low AC, low to-hit, low-HP). Always use multiple enemies, and try to add interesting environment effects.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Man, I was brainstorming with a friend of mine who DMs 5e and uses a ton of homebrew from top to bottom, at least half of which is lifted directly from Matt Mercer - and out of nowhere he asks me "so why do you hate 5e, anyway?" I gave him my usual answer - it's fucking boring - and then he goes "how is it boring when my game has so much cool shit going on?" I wasn't quite sure how to respond to that, especially since I really don't give a shit about 5e or think about it most of the time, but it struck me as wrong.
I would think that he needs to homebrew to have fun, but I might be projecting. I've always felt welded to some rusty rails whenever I play 5e.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

I'm going to be honest, I don't think it's worth the effort to try to fix 5e. I'd rather just play 3.5.

5e has the 2 most important things of all going for it: (1) popular media uses it, and (2) onboarding is incredibly easy. It is probably for those reasons that 5e is 37 times more popular than 3e as measured by the quantity of Roll20 campaigns. If you want to play a game with people, you may well have to play 5e unless you are willing to be the one person at the table who knows the rules of the game.

I tend to play with noobs on Discord and I've found that many new players don't really mind learning 3.5 over 5e, because it's all inscrutable to them at first.

I tend to DM, so I have no problems teaching noobs the basics.

Man, I was brainstorming with a friend of mine who DMs 5e and uses a ton of homebrew from top to bottom, at least half of which is lifted directly from Matt Mercer - and out of nowhere he asks me "so why do you hate 5e, anyway?" I gave him my usual answer - it's fucking boring - and then he goes "how is it boring when my game has so much cool shit going on?" I wasn't quite sure how to respond to that, especially since I really don't give a shit about 5e or think about it most of the time, but it struck me as wrong.
I would think that he needs to homebrew to have fun, but I might be projecting. I've always felt welded to some rusty rails whenever I play 5e.

I think the sheer lack of content is the reason homebrew is so popular in the 5e community. As both a DM and a player, lack of content is the #1 reason I don't play 5e.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Yeah, I don't think I've ever had a 5e character that didn't use either a homebrewed race or class/archetype. The ones that are in the book are just dreadfully boring and tepid. Playing 5e is like eating a bowl of cornflakes.

EDIT:

You cannot force a Wyvern to ground by entering an enclosed area (no maneuverability rules)

It's little things like this that make me sigh, open up my google doc, and write up new rules.

[Krusk]

I'm going to be honest, I don't think it's worth the effort to try to fix 5e. I'd rather just play 3.5.

Every time I work to homebrew anything for 5e, I realize I've just re-written 3e. Half of 5es mechanics rely on at least one player half-remembering 3e, and doing that instead.

[pragma]

Honestly I think it's kind of emblematic of the kind of game 5e is that a lot of the interesting tactical options for mundane characters are locked entirely to the Battlemaster Fighter subclss.

I disagree that Battlemaster options are interesting. Menacing Strike is potentially impactful, but I think you're best served by converting misses into hits with Precision Attack or getting off extra attacks with Riposte.

However, regarding making 5e tactically interesting as a whole, my experience thus far has been with complicated set-piece combats. I add some cover to dance around, ladders to climb, and traps to set off, and everyone seems satisfied with the complexity. The relative simplicity of the monsters also keeps me moving fast.

However, I find that I'm reaching deep into the Monster Manual to populate these set pieces with things like spellcasters and ranged attackers, much less anything with custom tricks.

EDIT: However, after reading the 3.5 Wyvern entry I'm reminded of why people gravitate to 5e, me included. 3.5 feels really Baroque, and that entry is overflowing with fiddly bits, including a bunch of feats I don't remember. I largely agree with the assessment of why 5e is boring, and I still felt intimidated enough reading that entry to be grateful for the 5e wyvern. I wonder what a minimal monster entry that forced interesting choices might look like?

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

"A bunch of feats you don't remember"? The 3.5 wyvern has 4 of them. And 2 of them are +2 bonuses to its Poison DC and Listen/Spot Checks, which I'm not sure whether or not are factored into its stat block. Flyby Attack and Multiattack are the only significant ones, and don't a ton of monsters have those? It could use a bit of trimming, but it seriously doesn't have that much more than the completely fucking barren 5e entry. What information should be truncated for the 3.5 wyvern?

[pragma]

That's a design challenge I had hoped to avoid tackling tonight, but I'll at least take a broad strokes stab. I think there are three things wrong (1) relying on function calls (2) extraneous information and (2) not spelling out tactics.

(1) I played 3.5 and didn't run games, so I never memorized Flyby Attack, which is pretty central to how this monster functions. There's a barrier to entry in reading this design that could be covered just by spelling out the relevant stuff in the design entry. Sure, an online SRD helps, but you could also just make all the information needed to run the monster fit on a page.
(2) Our discussion of feats reveals that either listing them is useless (already factored into stat block) or really important to dig into. I like that the designers used consistent rules to put monsters together in 3e, but that information can be pulled into a separate section or design document.
(3) You Lost Me's exegesis of how the wyvern plays is really good: I want to fight a 3e wyvern now! I wouldn't have identified the tactical choices involved at first glance, and a younger, dumber pragma would probably have been tempted by that full attack routine. By way of contrast, I find 5es stat block more suggestive because there are 1-2 abilities listed that you want to make the most of: attack skinny people to maximize poison damage, hit and run with flying and reach. It's a dumber fight, but I can see what's going on at a glance.

Taking all of these together. I think I'd like more descriptive text about behavior in the 3.5 stat block, and just fewer numbers to pick through. I'll confess that part of my reaction may just have been the dense presentation.

Or, tackling this from another angle, the 5e stat block could be rewritten such that the claw attack automatically grappled, the sting could only be used on grappled creatures, the fly speed was removed, and two abilities were added:
* Clumsy Flight -- if a wyvern moves at least 20 feet in a straight line, it gains a fly speed of 60 until the end of it's next turn.
* Grounded Fury -- a wyvern that can't fly away knows that it is in a dire position. When the wyvern is standing on the ground, It may take the Grounded Fury action, which allows it make up to six attacks: three bite actions and three sting actions. When using Grounded Fury, the sting action may target creatures within 5ft of the wyvern that are not grappled.

This power-based design starts to look a little like 4e, which I don't consider terrible. I thought the combat abilities in 4e were specific and often somewhat interesting. (This isn't an endorsement of the whole combat system, which was a terrible padded-sumo numbers treadmill, or of the whole system, which was sparse.)

[amethal]

RI like the example of the 3e wyvern and the 5e wyvern.

Huh, looks like Pathfinder has changed most of the stats of the 3.5e Wyvern (including changing its Int from 6 to 7 for some reason) but its CR remains 6.

Looking at that 2d6 Con poison (initial and secondary) in 3.5 I'm really glad Pathfinder changed the poison rules. (1d4 Con per round for 6 rounds, with 2 consecutive saves to cure, could well kill you in the end but at least it is slow enough to give you a chance to do something about it.)

Flyby Attack is a pretty good example of the fiddly nature of 3.x. The wyvern encounter plays somewhat differently depending on whether or not the GM knows that Flyby Attacks still provoke attacks of opportunity, and whether the players know they can ready their attacks.

And in Pathfinder it depends if the GM can be bothered to use the Fly skill properly or not. But at least the option is there.

[Emerald]

(1) relying on function calls

On the contrary, I'd say that relying heavily on function calls was the second greatest* innovation of the 3e monster system, for two reasons: information density and consistency.

For the former, AD&D, 4e, and 5e all showed that you simply cannot achieve acceptable levels of well-roundedness and interesting tactics if you try to shove absolutely everything in the stat block. AD&D has sleek and compact stat blocks followed by muddled overly-verbose paragraphs of flavor mixed with mechanics, while 4e and 5e have bloated stat blocks that take 100 words to say what can be said in 20, but in both cases the monsters are limited to whatever you can fit in the allotted space (with the singular exception of spells, and even then those editions avoid giving spells to too many monsters), so you either dramatically restrict monster depth and options (hello, 4e dracolich or 5e balor) or you need to give a monster an entire page or two instead of half a page to get the necessary detail (hello, 1e dragons and githyanki).

3e stat blocks, meanwhile, not only rely on function calls to spells and feats but also do things like "have standard rules for Full Attacks instead of printing a 'Multiattack' ability in every goddamn stat block ever." Seriously, having this:

Full Attack: 2 pincers +20 melee (2d8+10) and 2 claws +18 melee (1d6+5) and bite +18 melee (1d8+5)

instead of this:

Multiattack. The glabrezu makes four attacks: two with its pincers and two with its fists.

Pincer. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 10ft., one target. Hit: 16 (2d10 + 5) bludgeoning damage.

Fist. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 7 (2d4 + 2) bludgeoning damage.

...is also a function call, it just doesn't seem like one--because of course players know the rules for full attacks, right?--whereas Flyby Attack is mostly DM-facing and therefore not as familiar.

For the latter, since you never ran 3e you probably don't appreciate how radical the 3e standardized monster abilities are. Things like Incorporeality and Frightful Presence and such are allowed to be kinda complicated because they occur over and over again and have their own nice long descriptions in the DMG, allowing DMs to internalize them over time. The details are still repeated in the stat blocks so there's no more up-front effort to figure them out than there is for AD&D/4e/5e monster abilities, but once you know them, you know them and they don't change. Likewise, there are lot of feats out there, but most monsters use the monster-specific feats (like Flyby Attack) so you pick those up quickly as well.

If I, a longtime 3e DM, tell another longtime 3e DM "this monster has a Poor fly speed, Improved Grab with its claws, and Flyby Attack" or "this monster has claw/claw/bite, Darkvision, Pounce, Improved Grab, and Rend," that can actually be enough to convey its basic combat tactics because those are known quantities; for monsters that aren't as straightforward, being able to gloss over the known abilities and focus on the unique-to-that-monster thiings makes it much easier to figure things out on the fly.

(Of course, as amethal notes this requires said other DM to actually know all the rules, but knowing what Readying is and reading a feat description you're unsure of shouldn't exactly be a high bar.)

* The greatest innovation was the change to make monsters use the same rules as PCs, as you alluded to. Even if the actual monster type system wasn't the greatest and one might prefer to use different types or use monster classes or whatever, the very fact that you don't get a Divide By Cucumber error when you put a belt of giant strength on an ogre (like in AD&D) or convince an ogre to switch sides and tag along on your adventures (like in 4e) or try to build an ogre cleric (like in 5e) puts it head and shoulders above the rest.

(2) Our discussion of feats reveals that either listing them is useless (already factored into stat block) or really important to dig into. I like that the designers used consistent rules to put monsters together in 3e, but that information can be pulled into a separate section or design document
[...]
I think I'd like more descriptive text about behavior in the 3.5 stat block, and just fewer numbers to pick through. I'll confess that part of my reaction may just have been the dense presentation.

Yeah, every edition (3e included) could stand to have two stat blocks for every monster, the full-on block with everything included and all the math laid out for when advancing monsters or dealing with edge cases and a much-abbreviated block that can easily fit four to a page for use as a combat quick reference.

Whenever I use homebrewed monsters or NPCs in my games, I prep quick blocks like that, and I can usually get things down to 20% or less of the normal size. Not quite AD&D's highly compressed "Lizardfolk (3): 2 HD, sword and shield, CE" inline stats, but still pretty good.

This power-based design starts to look a little like 4e, which I don't consider terrible. I thought the combat abilities in 4e were specific and often somewhat interesting. (This isn't an endorsement of the whole combat system, which was a terrible padded-sumo numbers treadmill, or of the whole system, which was sparse.)

While the 4e philosophy of ensuring every monster had a unique schtick was good, the power formatting and information density were abysmal. As with the Multiattack example above, your sample 5e wyvern takes 91 words/numbers to say what its 3e equivalent would say in roughly 14.

Think of it this way: for every block of unnecessarily repetitive rules text that's compressed down to half a line, you can fit one or two entirely new monster abilities in the same space, making the monster even more interesting and differentiating it even more from similar monsters.

Frankly, 5e's "quasi-natural language" format is a crime against rules design, having all the repetitiveness and rigidity of 4e's heavily-keyworded system without the benefits of actually using lots of keywords and all the excessive verbosity of 1e's freeform monster abilities without the variety or immersion. The entire 5e design staff should've been slapped upside the head by a whole team of technical writers before the 5e MM went to print.

[OgreBattle]

This power-based design starts to look a little like 4e, which I don't consider terrible. I thought the combat abilities in 4e were specific and often somewhat interesting. (This isn't an endorsement of the whole combat system, which was a terrible padded-sumo numbers treadmill, or of the whole system, which was sparse.)

Having a better base combat system works.

There's already so many spells to memorize and I've remembered a surprising amount of them. Part of that design/page space can be repurposed to have a section on how push/pull/fire/electricity/freezing/friction/gravity/domination/belief of illusions and so on works.

MtG's done great with keywords. Even Pokemon tcg has 5 keywords so they don't write out how to reslve Paralysis and Slightly Different Paralysis on every electric attack.

Just have neat categories to look things up and remember, people remember things better in bundles.
Like... 40k's rapid fire, assault, heavy weapons are clustered together. How footslogging vs hovering vs high altitude flight works is remembered in a cluster. So flyby attack's "attack in the middle of a move action" can be remembered in a cluster with super slow movement and digging movement and levels of flight maneuverability.

*been reading translations of 1400's fencing texts and the poems, groupings like "The five strikes" "the four openings" "the 4 cool animals" are really helpful compared to D&D5e formatting

[Krusk]

(1) I played 3.5 and didn't run games, so I never memorized Flyby Attack, which is pretty central to how this monster functions. There's a barrier to entry in reading this design that could be covered just by spelling out the relevant stuff in the design entry. Sure, an online SRD helps, but you could also just make all the information needed to run the monster fit on a page.

So you never DMed 3.5, but opened to the DM section, and didn't immediately know how to use it. I'd recommend reading the manual before you operate the machinery. The entire feats section of the wyvrn is 8 words, and serves to save multiple sentences of explanation. That's worth it all day every day.

(2) Our discussion of feats reveals that either listing them is useless (already factored into stat block) or really important to dig into. I like that the designers used consistent rules to put monsters together in 3e, but that information can be pulled into a separate section or design document.

complaint #1 above is that it uses function calls. Your solution here is to attach a separate design document for each monster. How would one know to reference that function call I wonder? maybe some sort of call could serve that function.

The wyvern has its numbers adjusted for you, so you can ignore the feats, or it has a description of how it uses its feats.

A wyvern dives from the air, snatching the opponent with its talons and stinging it to death. A wyvern can slash with its talons only when making a flyby attack."

Oh shit, I guess I should dig deeper into that flyby attack feat and make sure I know how to use it.

You're all over the place with your criticisms. Half of them are contradictory, and the other half are just not even valid because its what they actually did.

[amethal]

Frankly, 5e's "quasi-natural language" format is a crime against rules design, having all the repetitiveness and rigidity of 4e's heavily-keyworded system without the benefits of actually using lots of keywords and all the excessive verbosity of 1e's freeform monster abilities without the variety or immersion. The entire 5e design staff should've been slapped upside the head by a whole team of technical writers before the 5e MM went to print.

I couldn't agree more. It results in crap like the following:

Damage Immunities Bludgeoning, Piercing, and Slashing From Nonmagical Attacks Not Made With Silvered Weapons

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Wait, is it immune to all physical, non-silver damage, or ONLY vulnerable to silver slashing weapons?