Everyone has to have their super special fav and it has to be mechanically different otherwise there's "no choices" (disregarding that there already are no choices due to optimization needs)
iirc 4e's biggest problem was HP bloat which made encounters take forever? (It's also not an edition I played.) People were mad about it taking too many cues from MMOs but, quite frankly, that is actually the direction I see modern D&D going.
It wasn't like.... what I want from an RPG, but I don't think the design was garbage from what I can tell. I have seen people going back to 4e to base new games on.
I feel like the current direction of modern D&D is very like... kind of esportsy. The bit about how abilities that require GM buy in are "unsatisfying" gives me that feeling.
Like, the ideally desired form of modern D&D should feel like a video game where the GM is dropping down monsters and your powers always work exactly the same in extremely clearly defined ways from table to table, and everyone's D&D stream looks consistent.
(also u know, the whole "easy for new players to grasp and not feel overhwelmed so the game can widen its grip" and "rewards deep system mastery so that the hardcore players remain engaged and keep buying books and don't move on" sides of the scale are difficult to balance with one another)
learning that the whole "Oh, yeah, we put in worse choices for builds so that they'd suck if you built them wrong" gig was on purpose really killed some of the nostalgic fondness I had for 3.x era D&D
It's not supposed to make things feel extremely samey, but it does for me. I don't know if this is because my last group already did treat it a lot like an MMO.
Races and Classes are the fun little things people get to pick immediately, so there is big demand for a lot of them and they are financially rewarded for making a lot of them. But in order to do so without breaking the game, they all have to boil down to being pretty samey.
I don't think I want to complain about diversity, but apart from "no race is inherently evil anymore" (a good change!)... what D&D has been doing doesn't feel like that. It feels like marketing.
There actually is a lot of unreasonable "mother may I" that comes in with knowledge checks... when it's obscure, arcane stuff, sure, but I feel like in 5th I've had to do them a lot for stuff that my character should know just from living in the world for 25-30 years.
(Apparently as of an article that is hot off the presses they're going to start using "species" instead which.... is the solution I would've proposed if someone had asked me fifteen years ago)
This stumbles into other issues when you're trying to kind of respect human diversity in a game sold to and played by humans, who may want to play an elf or a dwarf or whatever, with... a firbolg or whatever. But game companies stumble into other issues when they're trying to do human cultures, so idk.
I feel like D&D's problems with portraying fantasy people as monocultures is 1) because d&d was originally a game that was much more about the adventuring than about the people doing it and 2) not a problem that wizards has come anywhere near solving and I don't expect them to because of what parts of the game they've loaded onto this area.
I like the idea of 5e D&D style fantasy adventure in theory but every time I approach D&D for what people claim it's good for, I have to tap out because of how many things in it annoy me.
What if they make a product that is designed to easily onboard new/young players that's not as overwhelming? They could call this line Basic. But also they could maintain mechanics for a deeper, more detailed ruleset with more tinkery options for more hardcore players? They could... They could call it...
𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙 𝖕𝖗𝖔𝖕𝖊𝖗!
: I don't think you were around when I first went on my "D&D 5e's problem is it wants to be all things to all people and is trying to make directly contradictory play styles work at the same table" rant but.... I always come back to it every time
Some people want that very cartoony Tumblr-style art with exaggerated freckles etc, some people want relatively elaborate realistic classic fantasy art. It says something about the different audiences the game is attracting and who WotC is trying to appease or appeal to.
There's room for that! But sometimes they just pander, esp because new supplements = staying in business, making more money, and that's where things start to feel very diluted and messy.
D&D 5e was a panic edition built to try to draw back all the players they lost to Pathfinder and the OSR during the unpopular 4e years, with bonus puffery about being easy for new players to pick up. (Which, yes, it's easier than 3.5, but the bar is not.... high... to be easier to get into than 3.5)
It was fun! I didn't follow all the dungeon procedures to the letter and fudged some things around but we had fun? It was pretty uncomplicated and my friends would really like to play more of it if I could get myself together to run games ever again.
They were really excited about the prospect of getting to basically build a town together because iirc, at the level we had to build characters to for the adventure i ran, it felt like a realistic near-future prospect.
And actually having an endgame that wasn't "Your character fights threats to the entire universe now, or even bigger ones, and can punch a god in the face."
(Granted, AD&D and Basic had rules for becoming a god, but it was very difficult to attain and most people wouldn't end up reaching that level in a campaign anyway.)
i'm about to play ad&d for the first time in a while, and having refreshed my memory on it, people saying 5e is a return to it make me laugh like a hyena
My other favorite pet peeves: - The idea that 5e is the "easiest" d&d edition to pick up when you could have some old editions rolling in maybe 5 minutes. - The way 5e teaches people new to rpgs that getting into playing rpgs requires a lot of effort to learn a lot of rules, and requires buying multiple glossy full-color hardcovers.
people saw that 5e was greatly simplified from 3.x (nobody counts 4e) and that they switched back to calling skills "proficiencies" again and decided that meant it was a return! to ad&d!
despite the fact ad&d is entirely about different classes having different roles in the party and requiring extensive planning and preparation to not die
And you know that's how Wizards wanted those specific fans to see it. They played around with what things were called in order to make fans of older editions feel catered to as part of the compromise edition.
Hell, I don't like classes leveling at different rates because I don't like keeping track of things, but it makes sense based on the mechanical differences between classes.
(I also find the whole race as class/racial class thing from the oldest of D&Ds to be clunky as hell but that's why I found an alternate rule that lets you just go "okay everyone gets a cookie let's move on" and then you don't have to keep track of that)
Mmm where is my OSE... I want to refresh my memory on how it does it. (Basically the end result is that if you let players choose race/class separately the character is more powerful, but if you let everyone do it they all get a cookie together and it pretty much evens out.)
One thing I can say about our last stab at 5e was like... we fell into a situation where we used the same skills over and over per character. The drow was constantly using her starry archer form. The bard (me) constantly just used a damage-dealing cantrip and gave out inspiration, and negotiated prices.
One of my (unpopular) opinions about 5E is that cantrips shouldn't be useful on the level that they are in current editions. Like, they should be useful, minor things, but being able to do up to 1d10 damage, or 1d6 AoE damage, and being able to cast it every round? It's too much.
ad&d you can't do that because you're sharply limited in how often you can use any particular power so you have to occasionally think your way out of things
I don't think I did! I will check it out. Im definitely not as deeply knowledgeable about mechanics as the rest of you but even someone who has some experience (may not understand the math as well) (me) can pick up on these problems w design
5E starts off magic users with daggers, darts, slings, quarterstaffs, and light crossbows. That's 1d4-1d8 damage, depending on the weapon and bonuses. That's honestly fairly respectable.
It's a short piece where Monte Cook (one of 3e's designers) talked about how 3e was written to intentionally not explain how to build good characters/make good choices in order to "reward game mastery"
5e is just holding onto the "in order for there to be meaningful choices in a game some choices have to be worse, but also if you make the game about finding those choices you're going to make a lot of people who just wanted to sit down and have fun without theorycrafting homework unhappy" bull for dear life and I'm just waiting for it to gore them again.
I think you're right: one game for the power users (who otherwise are just gonna go play old versions instead) and one game for the beginners (not just a beginners box)
(My problem I end up having with 5e is I want to make a character that is effective, but I don't want to be trapped into the lore implications of all the "most effective" options and then just wind up feeling like I really don't have any choices.)
like, it's a lot more acceptable to fumble your way through having a character who is kind of shitty mechanically because it's a game about getting into stupid problems involving each other more than it is a team sport where if your output is worse, you're dragging everyone else down.
The campaigns I've played in in the last decade, I ultimately always felt like I was chasing the game. I'd made the wrong character for the campaign. Character 1 would have been better in campaign 2 (not in Rise of the Runelords), character 2 in campaign 3 (not Tyranny of Dragons), character 3 probably better in Rise. Tiresome.
OH an ad&d thing that nobody actually does anymore (and afaik never did in the past either) was roll attributes -> choose class instead of the other way around
I've made 5e characters a couple times for games that ultimately never panned out for various reasons, and I always began the process excited to come at it in good faith and ended the process feeling frustrated. Every time.
look you're not gonna be judged here, two of my best tabletop friends are vampire larpers of old and a couple of my other good buddies are current werewolf larpers
But yeah I think the D&D stats thing is because people usually roll in with a preconceived idea of what they want their D&D character to maybe be like before the dice hit the table, and it sucks to roll up stats that can't be the class you want to play.
One of my earliest vampire experiences was popping open a splat book about vampires in... Vancouver? Maybe? Might've been some other city, and running across an image where someone had been sexually assaulted and the blood resulting from that was flowing into a drain where it was explained in the text that it would be collected for drinks.
(There's something about the "let the dice fall and see what happens" style of play that still really appeals to me in theory but I'll never get to play that and don't know if I could)
Going back to my whining about cantrips, honestly, like. There was a take on them in Dragon Magazine, I believe it was for the 1st Edition version of cantrips. 1E's idea was that they existed, but most magic-users ignored them once they got their hands on real spells. They did basically 1 damage at most, and were mostly household chore stuff.
So a later Dragon Magazine article went "Y'know what? By 5th level, a magic-user has mastered their art so much that they can cast cantrips as many times a day as they like." which made it a lot more feasible in my mind? Also gave a neat flavor of, like.
So, like, I don't have a problem with 0th level spells being able to be cast endlessly. What I do have a problem with is the power of the current generation of 0-level spells.
I think they made a lot more sense if you viewed them as apprentice spells that they came up with or learned to make chores easier while also mastering the fundamentals of magic.
Need to hit someone at range? 5E wizards can use a light crossbow, a dart, a dagger, or a sling. Need to hit someone close up? 5E wizards can use a quarterstaff or a dagger.
Second, to 'balance' caster classes by limiting their damage output... except that fails because they can just use cantrips to do more damage than martials anyway.
I spent some time, years ago, saying that martials should become more superhuman as they leveled, but everyone always seems to think that means they should become spellcasters.
(disregarding that there already are no choices due to optimization needs)
People were mad about it taking too many cues from MMOs but, quite frankly, that is actually the direction I see modern D&D going.
but the constantly drawing in even more things to be to sell books is pretty transparent
But also they could maintain mechanics for a deeper, more detailed ruleset with more tinkery options for more hardcore players?
They could... They could call it...
- The idea that 5e is the "easiest" d&d edition to pick up when you could have some old editions rolling in maybe 5 minutes.
- The way 5e teaches people new to rpgs that getting into playing rpgs requires a lot of effort to learn a lot of rules, and requires buying multiple glossy full-color hardcovers.
Players rate things that are more powerful for them as more satisfying.