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

[pragma]

There are only 33 vulnerabilities in the game, 13 of which are to fire and 10 of which are to bludgeoning.

[Emerald]

How many have you run through 5e? Because I run both regularly, including for new players, and this has been very much the opposite of my experience. Granted, some of the 3e games are actually PF1, which seemed to consider complexity to be a goal to be strived for, but even in 3.5 games it is far more common for people to forget their bonuses, not realize they have a class feature or how their class feature works for multiple sessions, and to not know how things like touch AC and flat-footed AC work (despite monsters making regular use of both).

I have had the literal opposite experience with this. On average, most IRL people I game with have trouble keeping track of spells and ability DCs. Asking them to track multiple statblocks simultaneously, or to juggle the short-hands for common grappling, flight, or poison tactics is a hell of a lot.

I've run three totally new groups through 5e and...elevenish? through 3e, where "totally new" means all newbies except for occasionally having one player who'd done a bit of AD&D or 4e previously. In each group, there's been a broad spread of skill levels from "picked it up immediately" to "can't figure out how anything works after 5+ sessions," and a broad spread of proactive-ness when it comes to learning the rules, and that's largely my point.

While 3e does have more complexity than 5e, the supposed vast gulf between 3e's impenetrable walls of rules and 5e's welcome cuddliness that's always used as a selling point for 5e has much more to do with the players than the systems. Anyone can pick up any edition of D&D at 1st level, especially when playing under a DM who already knows the system, which is the case 90+% of the time.

The abovementioned druid spent the first few sessions being largely ineffective in combat--he didn't want to send any summons or his animal companion into melee, because he was worried sick about them getting hurt at all and not liking him anymore, and he saved most of his spell slots for healing and defense--but he picked up all the actual rules just fine and I never had to explain touch AC or save DCs or anything to him a second time. Once his wolf toughened up and could take a few hits safely and I explained that summons were more projections than "real" creatures and so wouldn't mind "dying" for him, he easily transitioned to being a combat monster.

Meanwhile, the single worst player I've ever had in terms of rules knowledge was someone in my 5e group who played a stereotypical Dwarf Champion Fighter from 1st to 13th and was still asking what she was supposed to roll to attack and what her weapon's damage dice were more than 3/4 of the way through the campaign. And no, she wasn't some player's girlfriend dragged along to spend time together or something, and thus unmotivated to learn anything (we did have a "player's girlfriend" in the group, but she was playing an Evoker to the hilt and kicking ass and taking names), she wanted to be there and liked roleplaying an ale-swigging dwarf but just couldn't grok the mechanics at all.

I don't think there's any words that you can put in a book that will convince GMs to do things like use the giant eagle at CR3 so you're ready for the wyvern at CR6, unless that book is an adventure path where telling you which monsters to use for what encounters is the whole point, although I would only be slightly surprised if the round-by-round tactics got paid more attention to as compared to the natural language overview you get from the wyvern. That would still leave GMs looking up a lot of stuff for monsters whose lower-CR predecessors they happened to skip, but at least it stands a decent chance of communicating that you should be looking this stuff up.

Yes, it's certainly possible that a given DM might run a party through the Dungeon of Endless Goblins and do nothing but throw increasing numbers of goblins and hobgoblins at them until, surprise!, the dungeon boss is a wyvern, but that's pretty unlikely. It's more likely that they'll pick out monsters that look cool and try to switch things up, and if they do that you don't really need to mandate any specific monster "path" to take.

Of the CR 3 monsters in the MM, just under 40% (27 out of 71) are flyers, and that covers everything from big animals to elementals to dragons to fiends. A party is astronomically unlikely to not run into any of those on their way from 1st to 6th at 10 to 15 encounters per level, let alone any flyers at CR 2/4/5..and if the DM is going out of their way to avoid flyers, well, chances are they'll ignore the wyvern too.

Using the books we actually got, though, most starting 3.5e GMs use each and every monster as a giant sack of hit points with a full attack attached, even when the book unambiguously states that the monster fights using other tactics.

And that's different from most starting 5e DMs how? The 5e MM doesn't even give suggested tactics for any monsters and those monsters have fewer and less-useful interesting abilities than their 3e counterparts. If "the DM is dumb and doesn't read the rules and follow the books' advice" is a criticism of 3e, then it applies triply so to 5e where there are just a bunch of gaping holes where the rules and advice should be.

Heck, I just opened my 5e MM randomly and landed on the Troglodyte entry, and comparing it to the 3e version I note that (A) the 3e trog's Stench ability has a 30-foot radius while the 5e one's ability has a 5-foot radius, requiring better tactics on a 5e DM's part to bring Stench into play at all, and (B) the suggested tactics for the 3e trog are "Half of a group of troglodytes are armed only with claws and teeth; the rest carry one or two javelins and clubs. They normally conceal themselves, launch a volley of javelins, then close to attack. If the battle goes against them, they retreat and attempt to hide" while the 5e trog doesn't have javelins in its stat block or mention them in its flavor at all!

Coincidentally and amusingly, the 3e trog's suggested tactics paragraph takes up 47 words, while the 5e trog's Actions block takes up 51 words.

That is a ton going on for one standard action. In prose, it sounds great, but modeling each of those steps turns it into a slog unless everyone is really on the ball.
[...]
High-op/digital tables will roll damage with attacks and hopefully track all the extras as they roll, but most meatspace tables I've played at will drag out each of those 8 rolls and remember at least one bonus after the fact. You are rolling 6-8 different things to model what boils down to two attacks, one of which makes you then recalculate a number of your statistics at the table. Repeat every round.
[...]
That's a lot of squeeze for the little juice of just grabbing someone, dealing a bit of damage, and maybe poisoning them.

Yes, it's a lot of rolls, but it's not difficult, it just involves reading the rules and following the steps, and there's no qualitative difference there between 3e and 5e. 5e has AoOs, buffs and debuffs, situational abilities, and multiple attacks per round as well--and most importantly, it also has players who remember their +2 to AC and +4 on Fort saves/advantage on Con saves against poison two rounds later.

And I would point out that "talon attack -> talon damage -> grapple -> sting attack -> sting damage -> poison save -> poison damage" in 3e is not significantly more complex than "claws attack -> claws damage, sting attack -> sting damage -> poison save -> poison damage" in 5e, being just a single roll longer (the grapple check), and the 3e Improved Grab entry actually spells things out nicely in "if X, Y; if Y, Z" order where 5e has a weird "make two attacks but substitute one of the two while flying" phrasing. The wyvern is a complexity edge case for a dumb flying skirmisher in both editions, but wherever you compare like monsters to like they come out pretty similar.

Like, that meets the low bar of "you can in fact get through it all without running into divide-by-zero errors," but if that is working out fine, then I don't know what level of complexity you would ever say is crossing the line.

I mean, maybe I'm being elitist, but I don't think it's a high bar to expect people to be able to read and apply a step-by-step list of actions, to remember what they used or did one in-game round and ten out-of-game minutes ago, and (considering the focus of the discussion is 3e's full attacks vs. 5e's multiattacks) to remember how to perform the attack routine that every damn fighter does every damn round of every damn combat ever.

[Stubbazubba]

The 5e Wyvern is 2 rolls less, because the grapple check in 3.5 is an opposed roll.

Don't mistake my argument to mean I think 5e's Wyvern is good. It's not. We've all said as much. In fact, I don't think anyone has praised 5e's monster design. This is less about monster design than it is about the presentation of information.

The 3.5 Wyvern first talks about talons and sting, then tells you it can only use talons in a flyby attack. OK, so a flyby attack with talons, wait, what's the talon attack and damage again? Let's look back up at the block, OK, +10 and 2d6+4, now where was I? Right, Improved Grab, this triggers on a successful talon attack, oh I get it, this ties to the flyby attack, OK, make a grapple check, look back up, it's +15, back down, and if it wins then it stings, OK, look up at the block for the sting's to-hit and damage, it's +10 and 1d6+4 and, oh, poison? What's its poison? Back down to the bottom, OK, there's the poison info.

I'm not saying that's undoable. Not by any means. And once you're used to the format you just get used to going up and down and piecing together the information. But if the instructions actually presented you all the information you needed where you need it, that'd be better. That is reference book writing 101. Like, we take the piss out of every RPG for every fiddly issue here, but I can't say I wish I didn't have to keep bobbing my head up and down to thread together this single standard action with four parts? It doesn't have to break it out like 5e, just say:

A wyvern dives from the air, snatching the opponent with its talons and stinging it to death. The Wyvern makes a flyby attack with its talons (+10 melee, 2d6+4 slashing). If the talons hit then make an opposed grapple check (+15) as a free action without provoking an attack of opportunity. If that succeeds then the target is grappled and the Wyvern makes a sting attack (+10 melee, 1d6+4 piercing). If the sting hits then the target must make a DC 17 Fortitude save or take 2d6 Con damage from the Wyvern's poison. Repeat the poison save and effect after 1 minute. The poison save DC is Constitution-based.

I still think that's a lot of if-then statements all squeezed into one standard action, but I don't have to look anywhere else but those 6 sentences to run that whole attack sequence. That is what you want step-by-step instructions to look like, and it's what I want to have in front of me running that monster for the first time.

[Chamomile]

Anyone can pick up any edition of D&D at 1st level, especially when playing under a DM who already knows the system, which is the case 90+% of the time.

Are you suggesting that 5e's explosive growth over 4e and PF1 came because it was converting DMs from 3.X? That Critical Role's big boon to the hobby was not in convincing people who'd never played D&D before to try it out, but to convince people who'd stopped playing to pick it up again? Or that all or even most groups of new players happened to have exactly one experienced DM in their personal circle to get the campaign started? This isn't impossible, in theory you could quintuple the audience for D&D if every existing player DMs and happen to be evenly dispersed amongst new players such that each one can find a party. It's not really what you'd expect, though. You'd expect that all the new players brought in by Critical Role are mainly figuring out who's going to DM amongst themselves, and that probably a decent chunk of brand new people want to be the DM because they think Matt Mercer is cool. The entire (accidental) key to 5e's success has been replacing your older cousin who ran D&D for you at a family reunion when you were nine with a YouTube channel that can sell millions of people on the game with each new episode, and that only works when the system is simple enough that starter DMs can get it right.

Of the CR 3 monsters in the MM, just under 40% (27 out of 71) are flyers, and that covers everything from big animals to elementals to dragons to fiends. A party is astronomically unlikely to not run into any of those on their way from 1st to 6th at 10 to 15 encounters per level, let alone any flyers at CR 2/4/5..and if the DM is going out of their way to avoid flyers, well, chances are they'll ignore the wyvern too.

You're assuming the only two options are "completely random walk through the Monster Manual" and "DM intentionally avoids all flyers." Most DMs are going to theme their adventures rather than sticking a totally random grab-bag of monsters in (especially starting DMs trying to minimize the number of rules they have to memorize), such that the entire first level may well encounter literally nothing but goblins, and even if they run an elemental-themed adventure for level 3, that dungeon might be underground where the air elemental never benefits from flying and thus never does so.

You're also assuming that one encounter run seven sessions ago adequately prepares a DM to run a second encounter that builds on that information. If someone were to attempt to write a 3.5e tutorial AP and thought they had adequately prepared a DM for the CR6 wyvern encounter by having a giant eagle encounter three levels earlier, that person is terrible at writing tutorials and should be smacked upside the head. If you want that information to stick, what you need to do is build an intro encounter in which the flying creatures are encountered alone and there's no other new information to focus on except how flying creatures move and attack, a reminder encounter later on that does the same thing, and then a third encounter that puts some kind of twist on it, usually by combining it with some other monster that it combos with. This is tutorials 101: Introduction, repetition, challenge. And this needs to happen in the same adventure, preferably the same session, not each one coming a month apart from one another. The only way flying attacks actually get ingrained enough to be built upon 2-3 months later is if the DM runs an entire giant eagle-themed adventure. This is unlikely.

Using the books we actually got, though, most starting 3.5e GMs use each and every monster as a giant sack of hit points with a full attack attached, even when the book unambiguously states that the monster fights using other tactics.

And that's different from most starting 5e DMs how?

Starting 5e DMs are, as you go on to point out, already using the 5e MM to its maximum potential without house rules. Expecting a 3.5e DM to actually make use of all its complexity is not realistic. Like, come on, outside of communities like this one that specifically prize RAW and explicit house rules to keep everyone on the same page and empower players, do you really expect even half of all DMs to be using the rules from the book? Would you be surprised to see a DM on the Paizo forums or Reddit or wherever who runs flyby attacks completely wrong, has no idea, and will transition smoothly from claiming they totally are running it by the book to claiming you're trying to impose your way of running the game on them when you cite the rules that prove they're not using the flyby attack as written?

3.5e's grapple rules are infamously complex despite actually being a pretty straightforward checklist that relies on information you use in regular "hit it until it dies" combat all the time, because they are used extremely rarely, which means no one can remember the checklist, which means whenever anyone has to look it up it grinds the combat to a halt while they flip through the combat chapter to look up the checklist again. Like, I don't know why you launch into a long explanation of how 3e's complexity results in depth, as though that were a thing I'd ever contested. The post from me that immediately precedes your response is me criticizing 5e's MM for lacking tactical depth in comparison to games intended for ten year olds. Who are you talking to, with these paragraphs establishing 5e's lack of depth?

Yes, it's a lot of rolls, but it's not difficult, it just involves reading the rules and following the steps, and there's no qualitative difference there between 3e and 5e.

5e writes out the steps for you directly into the monster entry. 3e asks you to flip from the monster entry to the feats section to the combat rules. Unless it has spells (which 5e for some reason uses full Vancian casting for despite having already sacrificed monster/player rules symmetry by having its monsters be totally incompatible with class levels), a 5e monster can be run directly out of the MM. A 3.5e monster requires you to cross-reference multiple different chapters. It doesn't matter if the information is easy to grasp when you have it in front of you. It's not in front of you, which is why, just like how grappling's four-step checklist that gets to its most complex when it asks for an opposed roll, it gets treated as a massive headache.

This is, after all, what the actual conversation is about: Presentation of information. No one ever said 3e's multiattacks were too complex to keep track of. People said it was hard to interpret. 3.5e killed usability, especially for new players, in exchange for space efficiency. 5e has huge sprawling stat blocks that do almost nothing, but you can pull a monster out of the Monster Manual and run it on the spot, with no prep, because its rules are all right in front of you.

[...You Lost Me]

While 3e does have more complexity than 5e, the supposed vast gulf between 3e's impenetrable walls of rules and 5e's welcome cuddliness that's always used as a selling point for 5e has much more to do with the players than the systems. Anyone can pick up any edition of D&D at 1st level, especially when playing under a DM who already knows the system, which is the case 90+% of the time.

I think this is the core of your argument, and the other stuff is basically derived from this idea: (1) You can trust that DMs are experienced with any edition of D&D, and (2) Experienced DMs can shoulder the burden of a 3e's complexity, therefore the difference in complexity is unimportant. Please correct me if I'm wrong on that.

I don't want to waste your time on (1) because I think Cham responded to it well enough. I agree with them.

On (2), I don't think you should assume that any given DM can handle a game's complexity. Games with high comprehension complexity (like 3e) have that because they are full of tiny little rules hidden in weird places like Flyby Attack being a feat or the Wyvern's base attack having 3 possibilities but only 1 of them being good. Even experienced DMs are going to struggle with 3e's conventions, because so much important information is squirreled away.

I think it's also worth noting that it's totally possible for 3e to be significantly more complex than 5e and for experienced DMs to act as a kind of "safety valve" for complexity. You or I could run a 3e game with new players and it would be more or less fine, because we could grok monsters quickly and we could abstract most of the annoying complexities away for our players. But you and I have 10+ years of D&D experience apiece. I don't think we should consider ourselves the benchmarks for the median starting DM.

The 5e Wyvern is 2 rolls less, because the grapple check in 3.5 is an opposed roll.

Worth noting that 5e grapple is also an opposed roll. You roll Strength (Athletics) of the attacker versus Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) of the defender.

[Stubbazubba]

The 5e Wyvern is 2 rolls less, because the grapple check in 3.5 is an opposed roll.

Worth noting that 5e grapple is also an opposed roll. You roll Strength (Athletics) of the attacker versus Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) of the defender.

I know, but there is no grapple in the 5e Wyvern. I was pointing out that his flowchart didn't account for the other side of the grapple check.

[...You Lost Me]

I know, but there is no grapple in the 5e Wyvern. I was pointing out that his flowchart didn't account for the other side of the grapple check.

Gotcha, my bad.

[MGuy]

We can't know why 5e or really even 3e is as popular as they are. The fact that where are youtube channels that have gotten into showing off the game could've happened before with the same explosion of people playing the game. Nerd culture has been slipping more into the mainstream over the last couple of decades. We're in a time where book properties that were familiar to book readers have become commonplace among movie goers. I got into DnD because of an episode of Dexter's Lab, and everyone I ran for back then in highschool then got into the game, to varying degrees, because of me.

I agree with Emerald that there isn't a big gulf between the complexity of running low level 3e versus 5e especially when you consider that people don't actually play RAI anyway. There was a time when 4e was pretty close to the only game in town. There are simpler games than 5e. We should all be able to recognize that the 'brand' is probably what's keeping 5e afloat more than anything else.At least that seems to be the most likely factor. DnD, the brand, is in a privileged position and I suspect that position is what has sustained it.

I personally am uninterested in 'improving' 5e because what would I be trying to improve it for? If the selling point is simplicity then adding more engaging rules doesn't matter because no one is there to be engaged. If the selling point is that it's popular then that's got nothing to do with the quality of the game so it can remain shitty because people are satisfied with its particular brand of shit and why improve it then? We are not talking about a large population of discerning consumers that sometimes people imagine exist.

I am going to go way out on a limb and claim that most people do not care about the system itself and just enjoy the experience of being at the table. If we're speculating on why DnD is where it is I'd say it is far more likely that it is because of the legacy behind it (DnD is considered the standard ttrpg) and luck. I don't see the difference between 3e and 5e being factoring much in what people are willing to play as much as nostalgia and popularity seem to be driving factors. The people who care about mechanics more than what other people are willing to play are not playing 5e.

[Pseudo Stupidity]

I think Critical Role, Stranger Things, and the rising popularity of D&D podcasts is the entire explanation of 5e being successful. The game is threadbare, it's just an excuse to get together with friends. All the 5e players I know are new D&D players who got into it through that shit, and while I have converted several of them to Pathfinder with the game I run I have yet to meet a D&D vet (even a 4e vet!) who prefers 5th. Do we even have one on the Den?

5e makes me miss how interesting 4e combats could be once you applied the math fix.

[pragma]

I play 5e preferentially because it's easy to pick up and run with, but I'm acutely aware that I'm a whisker away from playing a rules lite most of the time. I respect 3e, it is game in places that 5e is a hollow shell, but I don't run it because of its relative complexity. I ran a lot of 4e and got bored with it because the combats became samey in spite of my best efforts and the game actively minimizes players' ability to engage with world-building and non-combat bullshitting.

My choice of simplicity over a more robust game is probably influenced a lot by my life situation relative to 3e's heyday: while I was playing 3e I also had the spare time to run an SR3 campaign and (to my lasting chagrin) to memorize the submarine combat rules in Rigger 3. I have less spare time now, and the consensus among my peer group (who also all made the switch from 3 to 5) is that 5e is "adult friendly" because of its simplicity.

I think there's significant room for improvement in 5e because it is so sparse. For instance, Interesting monsters or a functional vision and targeting system would be a good start. The Den's typical question of "why not just play 3e" haunts me a bit, but I guess the idea of adding a little complexity where I want it seems easier than brushing up on a big system. It also seems more likely to get accepted by other players or D&D designers: 5e is here whether we like it or not, and the best way to influence the D&D of the future is to make stuff for 5e.

I should run a 3e campaign sometime as an experiment, but glancing at the character sheet makes me recoil: there's just a lot of stuff on it. I have that reaction even though I agree with other posters that nothing in 3e is especially complicated; I roughly remember what everything on the sheet does and could figure the game out with a bit of thought or by rereading books. However, (1) the presentation of 3e stuff is intimidating and (2) 5e's advantage is precisely that I don't have to think a lot to make it happen.

I wholeheartedly accept the thesis that people play 5e because of the brand and some fortunate advertising, but I think 5e capitalized on that press because it is designed to provide a smooth on ramp for newbies and a soft landing place for grognards and OSR types.

[RobbyPants]

"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?

Three of those would be factored into the stat block already. Altertness and Ability Focus would have the +2s written in, and Multiattck reduces the penalties on secondary natural attacks from -5 to -2, which would be factored into the Full Attack line.

Flyby Attack would require the DM to remember that the monster can take a standard action in the middle of its flight, which is spelled out in the end of the MM. I'm going to assume your average DM has very little grasp on how those feats work without looking them up each time.

In general, any 3.5 feat that grants a static bonus is factored into the stat line. Even optional ones like Power Attack are factored into the attack line (always with a -5/+5 trade) and explicitly called out in the description. Now, I know they do this as of Libris Mortis and later, but I'm not sure about the earliest 3.5 books.


Edit: The big thing with 3E is that there are very explicit rules for how to create a monster. Sure, choices like "how many HD?" are arbitrary, but once you've picked HD, a monster type, size, and ability scores, the rest of it fills in procedurally. You have to pick all the feats and other random abilities you want to give it, which will drastically affect the CR.

I just got my 5E books last week (and haven't even cracked open the MM), so I don't know if there are any rules on how to build monsters from scratch. Looking at the 5E entries I've seen in the past, I can tell you what it feels like is that everything is just arbitrarily decided. I'm sure they had some vague benchmarks for damage output and HP by level, but I feel like I'm reading an entirely different language when I look at the stat blocks.

Still, I get why people new to the hobby really appreciate the simplicity. So long as the DM doesn't consistently fuck them over with RULINGS NOT RULES!, they'll probably have a good time and not waste a lot of time looking shit up.

[RobbyPants]

I mean, this is pretty consistent with the basic philosophies of 3.5 vs. 5e: 3.5 has a lot of depth, but only if you and everyone else at the table have internalized a lot of the rules, whereas 5e is "Baby's First D&D" which only does 1 thing and attempts to walk you through that with its confusing language that really relies on you already knowing how they want things to work.

I've been reading through the PHB bit by bit over the last week. I'm wondering how much any of this would have made sense to me if I hadn't already been playing 2E and 3.x for a combined total of 26 years.

[...You Lost Me]

I just got my 5E books last week (and haven't even cracked open the MM), so I don't know if there are any rules on how to build monsters from scratch. Looking at the 5E entries I've seen in the past, I can tell you what it feels like is that everything is just arbitrarily decided. I'm sure they had some vague benchmarks for damage output and HP by level, but I feel like I'm reading an entirely different language when I look at the stat blocks.

The rules are in the DMG. Couldn't tell you why, other than I guess they needed to pad out the DMG?

If I recall right, you get a table of defense & DPR that you should use for all monsters of a given CR, but there are some paragraphs about adding special abilities and spells that may raise or lower CR by some unspecified amount. The formula for altering monsters was just modifying +X% DPR and -X% defense. If that's how all the MM monsters were designed, I can see why they're such a slog.

[pragma]

This is the best breakdown I've found of how 5e monsters actually work: http://blogofholding.com/?p=7338

It still has no concept of level appropriate abilities and any given CR can yield wildly different combats, but the post does have a decent set of descriptive formulas that capture what's in the MM.

[GnomeWorks]

I have yet to meet a D&D vet (even a 4e vet!) who prefers 5th. Do we even have one on the Den?

I might qualify, at this point.

But I'm running PF APs in 5e using a bunch of homebrew converted from my 3.X setting, and using a 5e homebrewed monster design paradigm that is basically a port of 4e.

I like the conceptual approach to class design, I suppose? That and I think that bounded accuracy - while it has problems - helps resolve some of the 3.X issues of people falling off the RNG. I appreciate that concentration helps solve some of the madness of the 3.X era, and while I think magic items are overall presently weakly in 5e I like the notion that they're not required by the math (so no number treadmill I have to contend with, in terms of planning out magic items I drop on my players).

Overall though I don't know if I would count as being a 5e DM because while the base system I'm running is 5e, I've already homebrewed the shit out of it and actively try to carry over parts of earlier editions that fill in the gaps.

[Pseudo Stupidity]

I think it's interesting the two people who have said they prefer 5e (I'm counting you Gnome even though you're basically just doing homebrew) are both DMs. Pragma and Gnome, if you were on the other side of the screen would you prefer a different system? I've only played as a PC in 5e games and my big complaint is because there are no rules you can't actually do anything except beg the DM to at least allow a roll (which your character sucks at).

[GnomeWorks]

Gnome, if you were on the other side of the screen would you prefer a different system?

I'm not sure how much I actually like being on the other side of the screen, at this point, but that's less about system and more about... general approach to gaming, I think.

I'm currently in a PF game, being run online with my old group that I left maybe 6 years ago. 3.X and PF are rife with trap options, so I don't think the additional complexity is worth it. All told, building my character probably took around 10 hours of actual effort, spread out over a week, to make a PF level 16 melee bruiser. By comparison, one of my players had never touched TTRPGs before, and we had her 5e level 3 rogue built in... 15 minutes, I think?

My big takeaway from the PF game I'm in, though, is that the notion that 3.X games engendered player agency is ultimately a myth. It's about the DM's attitude, and nothing else. 3.X gives a DM the tools to put them on the path of understanding what player agency is and why it's important, but not every DM is going to recognize that, and there are some who have the attitude that the players shouldn't get to have nice things or have their moments to shine. I've lost track of the number of times one of us has said something to the effect of "that's not how $EFFECT works" and the DM has responded with "well this one is special" or some other horseshit. Which would be fine if it were occasional or not obviously him trying to cover his ass: I've given monsters and NPCs weird shit before, too, so I get the appeal, but you have to earn the trust of your players before you do that, and he has not done that in the least. That and the constant "no I'm not going to allow that" or "no that's not how I interpret those rules" makes for a less-than-stellar experience.

As I mentioned awhile back in this thread, I had been in a short-lived 5e game with a completely new DM. I'm not sure 5e as written gave him the tools to succeed - but I'm not sure that 3e would have, either, because he struggled with the mechanical "depth" of 5e.

I've only played as a PC in 5e games and my big complaint is because there are no rules you can't actually do anything except beg the DM to at least allow a roll (which your character sucks at).

One of the big issues I have with 5e is that the DC scales given are misaligned with the reality of the math.

In six months of running 5e, I think I have thrown a skill check with a DC of 20 or higher at my players exactly once, the success of which would have resulted in them getting some okay optional loot. I've had to recalibrate, myself, because I'm used to the absurdity of 3e's numbers; this guide has proven pretty successful so far, but I may need to continue tweaking the numbers. It's not quite intuitive, yet.

I've also tried to figure out a way to do non-combat minigames. So for instance, the rigger was trying to repair a damaged airship they'd salvaged. Every day, he could pick one element of the ship that was busted, and make a skill check; depending on the check, he made progress. Essentially I was trying to find a way to make it more engaging than the 4e skill challenge failure. The concept needs some tweaking, I think, but overall it seemed okay. In my mind this helps mitigate some of the "we can't do anything" feeling: by making it a subsystem or minigame, with possible tactics or other options you can bring into it, that maybe reduces the sense that you can't succeed because your numbers are insufficient.

My players thus far seem quite happy with how things are going, but like I said, I homebrew a lot, and my approach to DMing at this point is that while I won't give players a free lunch, I'm also regularly on the lookout for opportunities to give each of them a moment to shine. If they ever feel like they have to fight with me or argue with me about the rules to let them do something that's absolutely within their idiom, I feel like I've failed in doing my job.

[OgreBattle]

So how is Attack Bonus, AC, Saves, HP suppose to scale in D&D5e? As mentioned before D&D3e's anchoring point was the monster manual, 4e's was listed in charts.

Also how useful is INT, WIS, CHA if it's not your primary caster stat or if you're not a caster, does one of them stand out as more useful than the rest?

[pragma]

I'm also uncomfortable playing at this point because I mostly don't trust other GMs. I spend a lot of time trying to guess what game is actually being played, the "figure out how to avoid dice rolls game" seems to a be a particularly popular one.

I swap the hot seat with one of my buddies for a yearly reunion one-shot, and my experience playing a rogue in 5e was so bad that I immediately rerolled as a wizard trying to be the best thief in the world. Throwing spell effects around in 5e is fine, throwing skills around is not.

Combat is a tougher middle ground. I've never been a player in a fight that wasn't solved by the recipe "cast Hypnotic Pattern then focus fire." Moreover, most classes reduce to an attack routine every round (sometimes with a simple choice about whether to use a buff in a given fight). However, my players haven't complained about combat. I'll ask the more tactically minded of my groups what they think of the fights compared the 3e. My guess is that they are going to voice appreciation for it moving quickly. I also suspect that good set pieces go a long way towards making fights fun, which amounts to rolling up your own rules.

(Aside: I think Gloomhaven or any other board game built for the purpose is always going to do straight fights better than D&D. Fight adjacent bullshit is where TTRPGs shine.)

Gnome, I agree that non-combat minigames are way underexplored in the RPG space, and I've been mulling a long essay describing the probabilistic outcomes of different games. Most of them map easily onto common distributions.

Ogre, CHA is way overrepresented in 5e because of the availability of easy multiclassing between CHA casters. In particular, paladin and sorcerer go together like peanut butter and jelly. Common wisdom is that WIS is valuable for Perception and most common mental saving throws, CHA comes up a lot if you like to be a ham at the table (and forums seem full of those types), and INT is a very common dump stat. INT only comes back to bite you, quite literally, with Intellect Devourers and Mind Flayers.

For monster scaling, see the Blog of Holding post I linked in my last post. Player HP scales linearly with level as either ~10-90 for squishies or ~20-220 for beefies, player saves scale from +5-+11 for good saves or stay at a flat -1-+2 range for bad saves, attack bonus scales from +5-+11, AC doesn't move much, starting at ~14 for squishies and ~18 for beefies, and moving to ~20 for beefies later in the game. Because of the limited range anything that adds to AC or die rolls is super powerful.

[OgreBattle]

Thanks. Yeah CHA multiclassing looks fun for big damage.

Battlemaster fighter, their standout feature is tripping airborne targets with ranged attacks yeah? I think paladins deal more melee damage and having spell utility, though paladin/sorcerer seems strictly better and lets you be a Dragon Quest Hero

[Stubbazubba]

I haven't played 3.5 in several years at this point. I would probably be faster to join or DM a 5e game than a 3.5 one, simply because making a 3.5 character would take re-familiarizing with a bunch of stuff and remembering that two-weapon fighting never gets satisfying. In 5e, I can be a fully-realized 2WF at level 1. That's just a particular preference I happen to be crazy about, so having the option is nice. If my particular preference were god-wizard instead, 5e obviously wouldn't work for that. I usually prefer to play martials, and 5e is nicer to martials than 3.5. Even a DMF can be a Battlemaster to do something more interesting than full attack every round.

I miss 3.5 monsters (except their statblocks), but as has been said, you can prep the monsters you need for each session. Matt Colville talked about a way to spice up monsters in a 5e framework, it's a step up from default monster design, though he is clearly embracing the loosey-goosey rulings-not-rules approach. You could add more rigor to that approach, but as a hot-fix you prep on a session-by-session basis, it's a good place to start.

[Krusk]

So how is Attack Bonus, AC, Saves, HP suppose to scale in D&D5e? As mentioned before D&D3e's anchoring point was the monster manual, 4e's was listed in charts.

Also how useful is INT, WIS, CHA if it's not your primary caster stat or if you're not a caster, does one of them stand out as more useful than the rest?

Scaling basically doesn't happen. Its designed not to, that was the point of bonded accuracy. In practice, your proficiency bonus grows from +2 to +6 over 20 levels, and that's about it. You may get some stat increases as well, or a +1 magic bonus, but you may not. HP Does continue to grow, and damage does to a lesser extent. This means things your Ancient White Dragon at CR 20 has an AC of 20, and 333 hit points. Level 1 PCs can hit him, but they need a ton of hits to bother him. Because of the weird non-scaling AC, I find PCs hit and get hit more at higher levels than lower.

Theres a tipping point where you can have AC [crits only] and attacks of [barely ever miss] but its usually a decent challenge to get there.

Int/Wis/Cha aren't particularly useful outside saves. I'd pick wis over the others because int/cha saves rarely come up but wis do. (each stat has saving throws, but its basically dex/con/wis that are used, like in 3e)

[...You Lost Me]

I have yet to meet a D&D vet (even a 4e vet!) who prefers 5th. Do we even have one on the Den?

I am not one of them, but I know of 3. All 3e vets, who didn't take to 4e or PF, but moved to 5e when it came out and love it. 5e has a very strong grip on the people who don't care for rules and just want to tell their stories in a fantasy world. When I asked why they aren't playing *World or one of the other myriad rules lite fantasy games, the answer has been that it doesn't feel appropriately fantasy enough. So there's some intersection between wanting some quantity of rules, but wanting those rules to be minimal enough that you can handwave them whenever necessary.

This is the same group of people who enjoyed Dragonquest, funnily enough. I assume it gives them a similar benefit in a different way -- rather than flexibility due to a lack of rules, you get flexibility because there are so many obscure and poorly-written rules that no one bothers to look things up.

[OgreBattle]

So D&D5e wrote the champion for grognards and the Battlemaster for 3e 4e fans... making such archtype kits for monsters fits the philosophy of the edition.

It really can be as simple as some monsters have stuff that happens on criticals, and some monsters have Combat Superiority Dice to snatch and grapple you in an Action Surged flyby attack. The Battlemaster Maneuvers list is pretty thorough by 2020:

http://dnd5e.wikidot.com/fighter:battle ... :maneuvers

Giving a monster 3-5 uses of trip in melee and ranged, riposte on your turn, and withdrawing without reactions is already an explosion of tactical possibility for a 5e monster entry

[ColorBlindNinja61]

My big takeaway from the PF game I'm in, though, is that the notion that 3.X games engendered player agency is ultimately a myth. It's about the DM's attitude, and nothing else. 3.X gives a DM the tools to put them on the path of understanding what player agency is and why it's important, but not every DM is going to recognize that, and there are some who have the attitude that the players shouldn't get to have nice things or have their moments to shine. I've lost track of the number of times one of us has said something to the effect of "that's not how $EFFECT works" and the DM has responded with "well this one is special" or some other horseshit. Which would be fine if it were occasional or not obviously him trying to cover his ass: I've given monsters and NPCs weird shit before, too, so I get the appeal, but you have to earn the trust of your players before you do that, and he has not done that in the least. That and the constant "no I'm not going to allow that" or "no that's not how I interpret those rules" makes for a less-than-stellar experience.

While I get what you're saying, I do think 3.X is still miles ahead of 5e because it actually has rules to cover things like skills. A lot of DMs can be persuaded if you show them a quote from a rulebook.