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

[GnomeWorks]

5e is a fucking awful game.

Would it be possible to get a more thorough examination of why this is?

I've seen arguments to this point scattered throughout several threads, it'd be nice to have a central repository of "these are the reasons it is terrible."

[pragma]

I have fewer gripes with 5e than much of the board, but my personal objections are:
* The skill system is weak and the stealth system is nonsense. These cause real problems and lead to a lot of 'mother may I' sort of moments.
* Advantage and disadvantage don't have a lot of resolution: blind and poisoned are both cancelled by, eg, a barbarian's reckless strike. This lack of resolution hasn't come up at my tables, but it feels mathematically inelegant.
* Your ability to jury rig a magical solution to something really depends on how many spellcasters you have because concentration sharply limits your abilities.
* Non-spellcasting classes have very few real out of combat options.
* Some spells are way outside the power curve.
* Fights can be pretty lackluster. The game is bruiser heavy and advantage in the action economy carries a ton of weight. However, I've mostly run games at low levels and my players seem to get a kick out of solving the "lots of guys with bows" problem.

[MGuy]

My gripe is simple. There's no reason to use it. There's nothing that makes 5e better at all than sticking with 3e/PF and is legit worse and more boring in a number of ways. Anything you might like about playing in 5e can be done in 3rd and probably better.

[deaddmwalking]

My gripe is simple. There's no reason to use it. There's nothing that makes 5e better at all than sticking with 3e/PF and is legit worse and more boring in a number of ways. Anything you might like about playing in 5e can be done in 3rd and probably better.

I agree, but there is a certain desire to 'pare back' the options. 3.x w/ the PHB might be comparable, but add in every splat and 3rd party supplement and there's option paralysis.

The fact that 5E doesn't offer meaningful options is a relief for a number of people.

[infected slut princess]

> The monster are super lame.

> The math is really bad.

> Power levels are out of whack (mobs of chaff are too powerful).

> Maybe i'm just old and jaded, but reading the books is boring and fails to give my imagination a boner.

[Krusk]

They didnt finish it. It doesnt have skill dcs, Npc generation, or any form of a working economy.

Then obvious math things that dont work like bonded accuracy just make it worse

[Username17]

The basic issue is one of emptiness. You can focus in at any level of the game and find that the design basically isn't there. It's written like a rules-lite except that it's structed like a rules heavy game.

So let's look at the Halfling Rogue sample character from Here. Let's look at him at 7th fucking level. That's high enough level that you'd think he'd be able to do... something. I mean, it's not 1st fucking level, it's not a fucking tutorial. Characters are supposed to have abilities. So what Rogue Features are there for this character? Not fucking much.

First of all, he has the ability to take a bonus action to hide or disarm a trap each turn. Those are function calls to the hiding rules that don't exist and the rules for how long it takes to disarm a trap... that also don't exist. That's not a great start. Second he gets to take zero damage from attacks that allow dexterity saves for half damage. What allows those saves? Not very much actually. It's almost exclusively fire blasts. Because things like tremors allow Dexterity Saves but don't half damage on a successful save (you don't fall down if you make your save), so the ability doesn't do anything. Then the character can climb faster, but climbing difficulties are undefined. Then there's the defined abilities: you can get bonus damage on one hit each turn if you meet some trivially easy criteria and you can spend your reaction each turn to take less damage from one attack per turn. And that's it.

Now obviously, fucking none of that is particularly relevant if your opponent for the moment is "eight Orcs" or something similar. And secondly, other than a meaningful bonus to doing damage to and taking damage from a single opponent, none of those abilities really do anything. And this is a 7th level fucking character!

Basically, having a vaguely defined narrative ability that doesn't have firmly defined mechanics and doesn't plug directly into relevant challenges or opposing abilities is totally OK if your game is a 64 page rules-lite. But if your player's handbook is 317 pages long and has 4 level nested function calls of circularly referential page citations, it better fucking add up. Defensive abilities should reference the offensive abilities and the offensive abilities should reference the defensive abilities. Because fucking obviously. 5th edition doesn't do that. It's all declarative statements that don't actually reference or plug into actual rules all the way down.

5th edition is a Potemkin Village.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

To quote a University of Iowa history professor:

It's PoTEEempkin.

[FatR]

I wouldn't say that 5E is, strictly speaking, terrible. If given choice between not playing/running anything and 5E, I'd choose 5E, while the reverse is true for 4E. It just does not offer anything that would make me prefer it over 3.X iterations of DnD, while being plagued by a good deal of stupid design decisions, some of which make me question why I shouldn't play some low fantasy game without level growth instead, and some are just stupid. Also, rules for anything but squad combat may as well be nonexistent.

[OgreBattle]

It doesn't tell a story I can't tell better with FATE

[Ignimortis]

1) There is no actual progression. Fighters are the same at level 1 and level 20, the only major difference is that level 20 is 20 times beefier and hits 4 times per turn instead of 1. There's nothing actually NEW they learned to do during those 20 levels. There are also incredibly low numbers that basically say "your Fighter can still miss an AC 15 target at level 20".

2) There are almost zero special non-combat abilities available to non-casters. As in, they still didn't fix this shit they had since 3e - the Fighter class only gets abilities that revolve around fighting. Barbarians can get high jumps and talking to animals, rogues can get inferior Disguise Self, Mpnks get free Invisibility and Dimension Door if they pick the best subclass in the game.

3) All martial classes are designed to be "simple", as in "you can attack or not attack, but attacking is about the only useful thing you do". There are very few options you can take with a Barbarian, a Fighter or a Rogue, unless your DM plays favourites to you and throws in something like a chandelier that only you can reach and swing on, etc.

4) Conversely, all the caster classes are designed to be "complex", as in "actually have options and are fun to play". The only "simple" caster class is the Warlock, and it sucks balls due to inane casting (basically 1 spell per combat per adventuring day guidelines) and half the power being baked into Eldritch Blast which is a permanent Magic Longbow+1.

5) 5e is only a RAW working system if you homebrew half of it. Skills, out-of-combat interactions, etc. Combat sort of works, which means that 5e is basically a half-arsed dungeon crawling simulator that expects anything out of combat to be handled by the DM.

[Iduno]

They managed to make the thickest rulebook with the fewest rules. Also, no abilities or anything else you'd give half a shit about. They took all of the bad parts of base AD&D (non-existent rules, no options), added in all of the generic-ness of 4th edition, and shat it out.

[Mord]

So let's look at the Halfling Rogue sample character from Here. Let's look at him at 7th fucking level. That's high enough level that you'd think he'd be able to do... something. I mean, it's not 1st fucking level, it's not a fucking tutorial. Characters are supposed to have abilities. So what Rogue Features are there for this character? Not fucking much.

Is this really much worse off than the 3e Rogue? At 7th level, that hearty fellow has sneak attack +4d6, trapfinding, evasion, trap sense +2, and uncanny dodge. If your MC isn't liberal with traps, what you've got is sneak attack and 2 bonus feats. That's very much in "whoop de fucking doo" territory.

The more compelling argument is that in 3e, all those skill points you get as a Rogue actually do something because they work with an actual existent skill system. Additionally, in 3e by 7th level you have 3 Feat choices and an ASI, whereas in 5e you get either 2 ASI or 2 Feats. But none of this has to do with the Rogue per se in either system.

[Ignimortis]

Is this really much worse off than the 3e Rogue? At 7th level, that hearty fellow has sneak attack +4d6, trapfinding, evasion, trap sense +2, and uncanny dodge. If your MC isn't liberal with traps, what you've got is sneak attack and 2 bonus feats. That's very much in "whoop de fucking doo" territory.

The more compelling argument is that in 3e, all those skill points you get as a Rogue actually do something because they work with an actual existent skill system. Additionally, in 3e by 7th level you have 3 Feat choices and an ASI, whereas in 5e you get either 2 ASI or 2 Feats. But none of this has to do with the Rogue per se in either system.

Yes. Because your 3.5 rogue has 3 feats and probably enough WBL for some nifty magic shit. Plus 8+Int skillpoints per level. which means that your rogue can actually have a result of 20 on 8+Int skills without rolling. Uncanny Dodge and Evasion are rather good "feats" as 3.5 non-caster feats go.

While skills in 3.5 don't matter as much as they should, they're miles and miles ahead of what 5e "skills" do.

But on that note...In 3.5, you can choose to NOT be a rogue even if someone needs a Trapfinding specialist. There's Scout (simple, okayish gimmick), Factotum (ridiculous fluff, but does anything except damage), or a Beguiler and get casting from a good list plus skills for days. Meanwhile in 5e, you have to be a double-digit level rogue to even approach being passably good at any skill.

[Whipstitch]

The only good thing about 5e is that grappling is an ability check and while that change is shit it does mean you can make a bard with Enlarge Person who uses Cutting Words to cut promos on people, debuff their skill check and give them the stunner. It's not a great plan, but it's good for a laugh the first time and the 37th time it does a good job of properly expressing your disdain for the campaign.

[Jefepato]

I like how large monsters are no longer totally unbeatable in a grapple, and bards being proper full casters, but that's about it.

Also, I still don't know which skill is used to find traps. Is it Perception or Investigation? The rulebooks don't seem consistent on this point. Trapfinding is traditionally a major role of the thief/rogue/whatever, and a significant part of dungeon crawling, so you'd think they'd have a solid idea of how it works? I guess not.

[Username17]

Also, I still don't know which skill is used to find traps. Is it Perception or Investigation? The rulebooks don't seem consistent on this point. Trapfinding is traditionally a major role of the thief/rogue/whatever, and a significant part of dungeon crawling, so you'd think they'd have a solid idea of how it works? I guess not.

The issue where it is not clear what skills do or how they would do what they do is pretty real. The DMG has three paragraphs about using various skills to find traps. And um... what the actual fuck? You're supposed to ask the DM to use your skills, but how do you do that when the skill is rolling to see if you know about a secret danger? I mean actually what the fuck? There's no passive Arcana as far as I know, meaning that the entire process of using Arcana to find magic traps is just gibberish. You ask the DM if you can roll the dice to find a thing you don't know about in or out of character.

Which is a microcosm of the issue where even getting that information is in the DMG - the PHB Arcana description does not mention that it can find magical traps. So player characters are supposed to use information they aren't supposed to have read to ask the DM if they can use a skill to detect a challenge that they don't know about. It's like you're playing Paranoia, but it's serious.

And that doesn't even get to the underlying issue where even if any of these rules actually pointed to fucking anything and the player could figure out what they were supposed to roll and when, that the numbers are actually bullshit.

-Username17

[CapnTthePirateG]

Keep in mind skills can just randomly change attributes for reasons when the DM feels like changing it up. So not only do you not know what you can climb with your +7 athletics, but it might randomly run off int and become lower!

5e has just enough rules so that you are forced to mind caulk and think it's good and makes sense.

[Chamomile]

Keep in mind skills can just randomly change attributes for reasons when the DM feels like changing it up. So not only do you not know what you can climb with your +7 athletics, but it might randomly run off int and become lower!

I will defend this. After Sundown does it, and it is a good idea. Now, granted, it's held back in this case by the fact that the D&D six are terrible stats, so it can be unclear when Athletics should run off of STR or CON, or when Nature should run on WIS or CHA instead of INT. Some skills have their primary attribute something that doesn't make sense. Medicine is WIS and not INT, and so far as I can tell this is just to make it easier to make Clerics who are also mundane doctors, so God only knows which checks your GM will ask you to use INT for.

But generally speaking, it is to a system's benefit to be able to sensibly handle a character climbing straight up a wall with Athletics + STR or parkouring up the side with Athletics + DEX. Shitty GMs can use this to require people to roll their bad stats, but non-awful GMs are going to use this to allow people to roll their good stats. Of course, that gets us into the fact that the difference between your best and worst stat is like 4 points on a 20-point RNG, but I'm really only defending the specific decision to allow different stats to be associated with a skill check based on context, not the surrounding machinery, which is broken when it's not absent.

[nockermensch]

Keep in mind skills can just randomly change attributes for reasons when the DM feels like changing it up. So not only do you not know what you can climb with your +7 athletics, but it might randomly run off int and become lower!

5e has just enough rules so that you are forced to mind caulk and think it's good and makes sense.

The thing where a player could roll Int + Athletics as a kind of "Athletics Lore", as if the party is investigating a crime and the barbarian wants to know if it's possible for someone to climb or swim to a particular location is intriguing. Sadly, this isn't what 5e does. What it does is to tease that some DMs could maybe do something interesting based on the bad and incomplete rules they put in the books. The Oberoni Fallacy is just WotC's official policy at this point.

I know 5e is Nostalgia Edition, but feeling nostalgic for the times you (or your parents) spent parsing gygaxian bullshit to achieve something barely playable is bad, and people enabling 5e should feel bad.

[Emerald]

I like how large monsters are no longer totally unbeatable in a grapple, and bards being proper full casters, but that's about it.

I'm not a fan of bards being full casters, actually. I liked how in 3e bards were skilled melee arcanists with a pinch of divine casting and then you could take different PrCs to specialize in a different direction--Sublime Chord or Lyric Thaumaturge for more wizard-ness, Warrior Skald or Battle Howler of Gruumsh for more fighter-ness, Paragnostic Apostle (with Bardic Knack) or Evangelist for more rogue-ness, Divine Prankster or Rainbow Servant for more cleric-ness, and Seeker of the Song or Virtuoso to be the bardiest bard that ever did bard, to name just two examples apiece. I've run multiple "five man band" campaigns with parties of five bards, each specializing into the role of fighter/wizard/rogue/cleric/bard, and every time it's been a blast.

The mandatory subclassing in 5e would have made it easy to have the base bard start off a relatively even hybrid and choose a specialty via subclass. But having the bard be yet another arcane full caster in addition to the sorcerer, wizard, and warlock (which also lost its unique character in favor of being blandified into just another sorcerer or wizard variant with slightly different special snowflake mechanics) really isn't necessary, and College of Lore letting it pick spells off the other arcane lists makes it even more homogenized.

The thing where a player could roll Int + Athletics as a kind of "Athletics Lore", as if the party is investigating a crime and the barbarian wants to know if it's possible for someone to climb or swim to a particular location is intriguing. Sadly, this isn't what 5e does.

Yeah. The bit about stat-swapping at the DM's option was in a sidebar in 3e already, and was probably in 4e but I didn't read the DMG carefully enough to find it if so, but when early talks about the 5e playtest emphasized the stat-swappability so hard I was thinking, hey, you can really condense the skill list nicely if every skill is very broad and you have defined subskill ability score associations, that's great!

Spellcraft + Knowledge (Arcana/Planes) = Arcana (Int), Concentration = Arcana (Con)--with divine casters using Religion (Con), of course--and UMD = Arcana (Cha); Bluff + Disguise = Deception (Cha), Sleight of Hand = Deception (Dex), and Sense Motive = Deception (Wis); Search = Investigation (Int), Disable Device + Open Lock = Investigation (Dex), and Gather Information = Investigation (Cha); and other stuff like that.

Set it up so every skill covers at least three or four stats' worth of 3e skills, give examples of how the other stats might be used with it, fold the Craft/Knowledge/Profession/Perform stuff into appropriate skills, and that could really be an improvement on 3e's solid system with too low of a skill-points-to-skills ratio and 4e's condensed skills but with several holes in the list.

And then the initial playtest packets talked Int (Arcana) checks instead of Arcana (Int) checks and they put a bulleted list of "other stuff" for each ability score instead of giving them full headings or putting them as specific examples under existing skills, and that idea died a quick and painful death.

[Mord]

The implementation of full versus half casters was kind of shitty to begin with even in 3e. Either you have level-appropriate spells or you don't.

[tussock]

The more compelling argument is that in 3e, all those skill points you get as a Rogue actually do something because they work with an actual existent skill system. Additionally, in 3e by 7th level you have 3 Feat choices and an ASI, whereas in 5e you get either 2 ASI or 2 Feats. But none of this has to do with the Rogue per se in either system.

Some 3e skills are bullshit treadmills, almost every monster has Spot and Listen maxed out for instance, but you're at least +14 Tumble at level 7 and that is obviously a class feature where you don't take AoO for movement because that is DC 15 forever.

Use Magic Device is also a thing, and obviously a class feature in 3e. It literally replaces a bunch of mid-high level Thief features from AD&D and lets you use a few level-appropriate spells. That is a very powerful thing, at least sometimes. In 5e it's hidden in an archetype you might not want, and hopefully the DM gives you anything to use it on before the campaign ends.

3e Trapfinding means when you use Search as a skill, it doesn't cause you to stumble into traps, ever, which is a time saving at least. Spot being a class skill is nice, because you suffer less closet troll encounters. There's just more random damage and other problems hitting parties that lack a Rogue or equivalent. Search in 5e you don't even know what you're going to be rolling, it's all "ask the DM".

There's also stuff like how in 3e you can just buy a Ring of Blink, and a mass of acid vials, and spam rapid shot touch sneak attacks at +8/+8 vs (usually) AC 10, against things that have much less hit points than in 5th edition. A few more classical or neo-classical ways also exist to hit things most of the time with a 3e Rogue, instead of not doing that with a 5e Rogue.

Because 3e has very solid rules, and PC numbers that go up against target numbers that often don't, characters improve at things, become reliable at things, and with experience can mix abilities in ways that just always succeed at quite a lot of things that are functionally class features. At least where your class gives you sufficient slots to buy them. As a player you get to choose what actions will just work for your character by building toward that.

--

The problem with 5e? You can't really do any of that, and they didn't replace any of that with anything else you can do instead, certainly not at 7th level. Well, you did get +1 to hoping the DM lets you do stuff when you ask nicely since 1st level, but then it tells DMs to mostly ignore that and do what feels good instead.

The designers have had this "sweet spot" idea for 10 years now and they are so bad at it, first the treadmill of 4e and now the go nowhere of 5e.

There's good arguments to be made that 3e is a bit complicated for the payoffs you get with a lot of the classes, and too much of the design space doesn't have any competitive payoffs at all for dredging through it, and even the higher level rocket tag where the rockets are not equitably distributed. I don't believe the answer to any of that is 400 pages of "Mother, may I?".

[CapnTthePirateG]

I am told by 5e defenders that determinism is bad because it means people can't make hail mary bullshit attempts.

I think I will let that statement speak for itself.

[Jefepato]

I'm not a fan of bards being full casters, actually. I liked how in 3e bards were skilled melee arcanists with a pinch of divine casting and then you could take different PrCs to specialize in a different direction--Sublime Chord or Lyric Thaumaturge for more wizard-ness, Warrior Skald or Battle Howler of Gruumsh for more fighter-ness, Paragnostic Apostle (with Bardic Knack) or Evangelist for more rogue-ness, Divine Prankster or Rainbow Servant for more cleric-ness, and Seeker of the Song or Virtuoso to be the bardiest bard that ever did bard, to name just two examples apiece. I've run multiple "five man band" campaigns with parties of five bards, each specializing into the role of fighter/wizard/rogue/cleric/bard, and every time it's been a blast.

The mandatory subclassing in 5e would have made it easy to have the base bard start off a relatively even hybrid and choose a specialty via subclass. But having the bard be yet another arcane full caster in addition to the sorcerer, wizard, and warlock (which also lost its unique character in favor of being blandified into just another sorcerer or wizard variant with slightly different special snowflake mechanics) really isn't necessary, and College of Lore letting it pick spells off the other arcane lists makes it even more homogenized.

It seemed to me that 3e bards were stuck as awkward masters-of-none. Their spells were their most powerful ability, but still weren't level-appropriate, so what are they supposed to actually do (at least, using the corebook and not a ton of PrC options)? It's fun to be the guy with social skills (and glibness) sometimes, but D&D parties tend to spend a lot of time in encounters you can't talk your way out of.

...The five-bard team sounds like a lot of fun, though.

The mandatory 5e subclassing is something I actually sort of like, at least as a general concept. (Although it's pretty obviously designed to make it easy for WotC to shit out books like Xanathar's Guide full of new subclass options. Which makes it doubly surprising how slow they've been to publish new stuff.) Too bad there are so many trap options.