Sell me on 5e

[Zaq]

So I'm taking a look at the 5e ruleset. In short, I'm debating whether it's worth buying the books and familiarizing myself with it enough to possibly end up in a game. (I haven't been invited to a game or anything, but that's not to say I couldn't organize one or find one, you know?) I'm not super impressed so far, but I'm willing to be persuaded by people who've got some actual game experience.

So far I'm looking at the free books (the "basic rules" and the OGL/SRD stuff). I understand that this is skewing my perspective, since I know that I'm not looking at the whole thing. Let me repeat that. I understand that I do not have the whole picture here. Which is one reason why I'm willing to be persuaded about this whole matter.

As far as my D&D background goes? Let's spoiler that for length, though it'll probably be relevant.

I cut my teeth on 3.5, which I love to pieces despite its (many, many, many) flaws. I love the endless customization and the clever combos and the deep hidden potential. I consider myself pretty active in the Iron Chef Optimization Challenge on this board, if that tells you anything. The problem with 3.5 is that I basically can't actually play it anymore. No one I game with (including me) is willing to GM it anymore, since it takes so much damned effort on the part of the GM to keep things cohesive. (You've gotta prevent the party being brokenly strong or brokenly weak, you've gotta basically painstakingly hand-craft each encounter since the CR system is beyond worthless, the item economy is beyond screwed up, and you've gotta be on the lookout for a whole bunch of things that can accidentally ruin someone's fun, which of course is counter to the whole purpose of playing a game.)

I'm also a big fan of 4e. I like the fact that customization still exists in 4e despite taking very different forms than it did in 3.5 (and I categorically reject the notion that "all the classes feel the same," because they just plain don't). I like the fact that, with a few exceptions, most classes can be made at least marginally competent, and I like that everyone generally gets to feel cooler as they level up (which was . . . spotty at best in 3.5, what with dead levels and Linear Warriors Quadratic Wizards and all that junk). I'm also a fan of the fact that just about every character has multiple actions that matter, including off-turn actions. (Some people dislike 4e's emphasis on off-turn actions and feel like it makes things confusing, but I think it makes things exciting.) Most of all, I like the fact that it's really, really easy to GM to 4e. Monster building is a snap (CR actually means something, and the whole MM3 On A Business Card is a godsend), there's enough defined effects in the rules to be able to design really weird encounters and terrain effects without completely breaking things, and since the power spread is tighter (yeah, a Vampire and a Ranger are worlds apart, but they're not the universes apart that the 3.5 Monk and the 3.5 Druid were), you have a better idea of what the party can and can't handle. The problem with 4e is that WotC is making it really hard to actually get access to 4e material now—the DDI web resources are basically garbage that are getting harder and harder to access, and I understand that you can't buy new subscriptions to it (you can only renew an existing sub, which is grating because it forces you to pay for something you aren't using when you don't have an active 4e game), and even if I were to track down copies of most/all of the paper books, so much of 4e's content was from Dungeon and/or Dragon that WotC is basically making playing the game a struggle. (Also, my last two campaigns were 4e, and there's rumblings that people are getting a little bored with it, but that's not insurmountable.)

As far as spin-offs go, I'm a huge fan of Legend as a concept, but I've never actually gotten a chance to play an actual game of it (mostly because there's no Monster Manual or equivalent), and the system/community looks like it's lost basically all its momentum, so I'm not going to dwell on that because it'll just make me sad. I've never really looked into Pathfinder, as I imagine it'll have much the same issues as 3.5.

Anyway. 5e. I'm willing to be sold on the concept, but right now, I'm not super impressed. I understand that we're going for a flatter power curve in terms of the numbers treadmill, which isn't a bad design goal (though I'm skeptical that WotC would be able to maintain it over the entire game). I'm okay with that. I feel like the whole "simplified action economy" is fundamentally disingenuous—you've still got The Big Action Where You Do Things ("action," which 4e would call a standard action), The Helper Action ("bonus action," which 4e would call a minor action, though I understand that bonus actions are more limited in scope), and The Part Of Your Turn Where You Move (your "movement non-action," which is basically a 4e move action that you happen to be able to split up but somehow doesn't qualify as an action), plus Your Off-Turn Action ("reaction," which 4e would call an immediate, though I understand that there's no equivalent to an opportunity action). I mean, since it's basically the 4e action set with a couple tweaks, it's not like I can't work with it, but I still feel like it's pretending to be simpler than it is. Advantage and Disadvantage make fundamental sense (even if they do make the math a bit harder to do in your head). Splitting up saves feels weird (almost TOO granular), but not so weird that I couldn't get used to it. Proficiency with skills and tools makes sense. I like the Concentration mechanic, so that's cool.

In terms of building and playing characters, though? I don't feel like I get what would be fun about it. You seem to make very, very few choices as far as building the character goes. You pick your race, your class, and your background to start, and you generally have a couple sub-choices with that (sub-races, skills off a list, whatever). So far so good. Your character class generally has a couple branching paths that you pick early on (yes, I know that I can't see all of those paths in the SRD book I'm working with, but I do understand that they exist), and if you get spells, you pick new spells at appropriate levels. But then that's it. That seems to be about all you get in terms of customization. You don't pick feats. You don't pick magic items. Your ability scores increase, but since you generally know what abilities you need to focus on, that's not really an exciting choice. Multiclassing exists (and it's nominally closer to 3.5 multiclassing than to 4e multiclassing, which doesn't bother me one bit), but it feels kind of limited? (The whole Multiclass Spellcasting Table thing is kind of hard for me to wrap my head around. Like, I understand it, but I don't get why they chose to do it that way.) Some classes get choices at certain levels, but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Everything feels like it's on rails.

I also don't understand how mid-level characters are supposed to be much stronger than low-level characters. I understand that the numerical treadmill has intentionally been flattened as far as d20 rolls go, but I don't get how you're supposed to keep up with the non-d20 numbers game. HP seems to scale much faster than damage does, and I don't see the optimization tools necessary to overcome that enough to make combat not drag. Like, I do see damage slightly increasing, but it doesn't look like the majority of classes are going to have a smooth enough increase to actually reliably end equal-CR encounters for a good chunk of the game.

Also, magic seems to be all over the map in terms of usefulness. Casters don't seem to have anything even remotely close to enough spells to get through a standard day with 3-4 encounters in it—yes, I do understand that cantrips are at-will (and I do understand that they slightly scale), so you're not really being expected to cast a high-level spell every round, but it still feels like casters are often going to be frustrated by being unable to bring appropriate spell effects to bear. Many (not all) spells feel like they exacerbate the 3.5 "all or nothing" paradigm for magic—there's a handful of save-or-lose spells (which I don't like from a design perspective to begin with), and damaging spells might be level-appropriate exactly when you first get access to them, but everything else (including damaging spells more than a level or two old, even if you use a higher-level slot) seems to have a really small effect on the encounter relative to how incredibly few of them you get per day, no matter what kind of caster you are. (I do understand not wanting casters to just dominate every encounter ever, and I respect wanting to curb their out-of-combat capabilities, but it feels like this just went way too far in the other direction.) I'm not saying that every single spell is useless (far from it), but I am saying that I really don't feel like casters have a smooth and appropriate power curve (level by level or round by round), based on what I've been able to read so far.

There's also the fact that we seem to have gotten back to the bad parts of 3.5 in terms of non-casters doing the same damn thing every round. Again, I know that I don't have all the material, but in the material I DO have, it looks like most martial types (for lack of a better term) will just be making attacks every round without doing anything, y'know, interesting or different. Sure, the Rogue will be trying to get Sneak Attack, and the Monk might be able to spend limited ki points to do extra effects, but it generally looks like you don't have a lot of options from round to round more often than not, which really doesn't seem like a compelling and exciting game. Even casters are likely to just be spamming the same cantrips every turn (since they have so bloody few spells per day, and since combat seems set up to take so many rounds), which makes them pretty much as bad as the Fighter et al.

I also feel like everything seems set up to be on kind of a weirdly extended time scale. Healing seems ridiculously prolonged unless you have a dedicated healbot (you reroll hit dice to get small bits of healing, and you only get half of them back per day, and it takes an hour to use them at all?). And of course, with the fact that you can't buy (and therefore can't plan for or expect) magic items, you can't just delegate the "HP refiller" role to a wand or a few Healing Belts. 4e made everyone capable of healing out of combat (just spend surges after a short rest, and you get your surges back after an extended rest), and 3.5 granted enough access to magic items that it really wasn't an issue, but 5e seems hell-bent on making healing really annoyingly hard unless you have a dedicated healer. I don't really see what design goal that's hitting or what type of player that's making happy. Also, the fact that "short rests" take an hour seems odd. On the one hand, I can understand that the designers were clearly trying to give some classes a pool of resources on a recharge timer of "longer than an encounter, shorter than a day," but without reading the full DMG and the RAW guidelines for how often the GM should allow/encourage a short rest, I'm not sure I trust how smoothly that will actually work in practice. (Some GMs will let you rest an hour after nearly every encounter. Some GMs will punish you with interruptions and random encounters every time you try to take a break and basically will never allow a short rest in the middle of the day. I know that the rules can't prevent GMs from being jerks, but I feel like an hour is a sufficiently awkwardly long period of time that you really do have to rely on your GM working with you.) The crafting rules seem unusably slow. There's the "training rules" for gaining new proficiencies, but they cost 250 days? Seems basically unworkable.

There's also the fact that there doesn't seem to be much material. I'm not talking about the fact that I only have access to the free stuff right now—I'm talking about the fact that it doesn't look like WotC has actually published much stuff (despite the system being what, a year and a half old, maybe more?). To be honest, that seems worrisome to me—one major reason I like D&D as a whole is because it offers me lots and lots of different options, but I'm not sure that that's going to happen with 5e. This might change, of course, but I feel like new 3.5 content and new 4e content came out way faster at this point in their respective life cycles.

I dunno. Like I said, I'm willing to be convinced. I wouldn't go to the effort of making this thread if I didn't want to have fun with the game. But I need to hear from people who've actually played the game to tell me how accurate my assessments are and how completely off base I am. As I keep saying, I understand that I don't have all the material and that I'm therefore working with an incomplete picture. I'm absolutely certain that not all of my initial impressions are correct. (That is, after all, kind of the entire point of this discussion—I want to know what I'm wrong about and what the real situation is.) Is character building as limited as it really appears? Do combats take as long as they seem to? Is casting as messed up as it looks? Are Fighters and other attacky-types as boring as they were back in the 3.5 era? How easy or hard is it to GM 5e (from balancing party capabilities to designing fair encounters to putting in appropriate challenges and rewards), particularly in comparison to 3.5 and 4e? In short, is it worth my time and my money to buy the full versions of the books and look deeper, or does it sound like I want things from my RPGs that 5e isn't set up to deliver?

[KorvinStarmast]

Anyway. 5e. I'm willing to be sold on the concept, but right now, I'm not super impressed. I understand that we're going for a flatter power curve in terms of the numbers treadmill, which isn't a bad design goal (though I'm skeptical that WotC would be able to maintain it over the entire game). I feel like the whole "simplified action economy" is fundamentally disingenuous—you've still got The Big Action Where You Do Things ("action," which 4e would call a standard action), The Helper Action ("bonus action," which 4e would call a minor action, though I understand that bonus actions are more limited in scope), and The Part Of Your Turn Where You Move (your "movement non-action," which is basically a 4e move action that you happen to be able to split up but somehow doesn't qualify as an action), plus Your Off-Turn Action ("reaction," which 4e would call an immediate, though I understand that there's no equivalent to an opportunity action).
Disingenuous? No. It's what it says on the wrapper. Less complicated, but you and your group do need to get used to how the flow works.

True for ours as well. I cut my teeth on OD&D/1e. (Gawd, I remember how we tried to make the segments thing work ... it could get very clunky). This edition brought me back to the game, even though it is quite different from the older editions and AD&D in particular.

It folds in a lot of the evolution of the game over a few decades. I'd say that's a strength.

I mean, since it's basically the 4e action set with a couple tweaks, it's not like I can't work with it, but I still feel like it's pretending to be simpler than it is. I think you are overanalyzing this. No surprise, you said that you really like 3.5. :smallbiggrin:

Advantage and Disadvantage make fundamental sense (even if they do make the math a bit harder to do in your head).
It works just fine. Helps to speed up play as well.

Splitting up saves feels weird (almost TOO granular), but not so weird that I couldn't get used to it. Proficiency with skills and tools makes sense. I like the Concentration mechanic, so that's cool.
Splitting saves makes immense sense to me. Granted, if you go to the book you will find that the number of saves based on Str, Dex, Con, Wis, etc are not equal. (Someone did an analysis on that). But at least some effort was made to make each attribute point have a chance to influence play. (Again, if you go back to OD&D and AD&D the efforts on that score were mixed at best). I find the concentration mechanic to be annoying as a spell caster, me cleric at the moment, but I think that is one of the places where they tried to balance out caster versus martial choice making and balance. A different way to make possible the interruption of a spell. It also acts as a nerf/damper on some spells of longer duration.

In terms of building and playing characters, though? I don't feel like I get what would be fun about it. You seem to make very, very few choices as far as building the character goes. Shakespeare once said "the play's the thing" even though I am quoting him out of context.

Maybe you could look at this as I do: this game is about playing. The build is part of the play, but the "go out and do it" is the far more important part to the whole experience. You can also multiclass, but you do have opportunity costs to accept in so doing.

I also don't understand how mid-level characters are supposed to be much stronger than low-level characters.
They are, due to skill and spell progression. But they are also vulnerable to hordes, per "bounded accuracy."

There's also the fact that we seem to have gotten back to the bad parts of 3.5 in terms of non-casters doing the same damn thing every round. Depending on what group you play with and what you bring to the table, that will vary, but there are a plethora of threads on this very forum where the arguments about martials versus casters rage. I also suggest that you take a closer look at the feats. (Oh, that means buying the PHB. Feats do increase flexibility).

There's also the fact that there doesn't seem to be much material That will change over time. By the way, for those of us who started in the 70's, we didn't need all that mountain of material in order to play and have fun. Still don't. I believe that you can have plenty of fun with this edition. Lots of it.

5e is why I came back to the game. (That, and our old group getting together again, over the internet, for D&D sessions on Roll20). Had the guy running this game told me it was 3.5, which books I took to half priced books for a few dollars, I'd not have played. Tastes vary, but I will say that this edition tries to fuse the best parts of previous editions into it, less the bloat.

[Ninja_Prawn]

Honestly, I think you need to play it and find out.

You may well find that a lot of the problems you think you're seeing in the rulebooks disappear when you actually sit down and play. 5e is a stripped-down game that runs best at a fast pace where you focus on playing a character rather than doing the maths and worrying about rules.

If it's options you want, take a look at the feats, and keep in mind that every class has subclasses, with more added in books like the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide. Also it's really easy to homebrew new races and subcalsses (base classes are harder); check out the homebrew subforum and you'll find more options than you could ever hope to use.

Oh, and combat doesn't take a lot of rounds. Most are decided within the first 3 rounds, and the longest I've ever run went to 11 rounds - and that involved three separate waves of enemies, each of which was a medium or hard encounter in its own right. That one started to drag a bit towards the end (especially after the paladin's Sacred Weapon wore off), but overall it was still fun.

[CaptAl]

If you love 3.5 for the fiddly rules and the mountains of bonuses/penalties to every action, then 5e won't appeal much to you. With 13 classes and at least 2 archetypes per class and low cost multiclassing, though, 5e has a ton of meaningful choices to make.

The designers made a conscious decision to limit the bloat that exacerbated the issues in 3.5 and 4e. I started with AD&D 2nd and quit playing during 3.5 bc the numbers seem pointless after a while. 5D20 plus 35 is no different mathematically than D20 plus 7. The number squish just makes it easier for people to play without needing a calculator every round.

Feats are a huge part of the game, and represent meaningful choices. Do you take that +2 to intelligence for the save DC bonus, or do you take warcaster for the advantage on concentration checks so your tank doesn't lose haste when a mook puts an arrow in your knee?

It's still possible to power game in 5e, the difference lies in the better overall balance. It's tough to make a broken character, whether too strong or weak. It's easier as a DM to adjudicate, challenge, and still enjoy the game in this edition.

Also, dedicated healers are not needed. Hit Dice healing works just like surges, but regenerate slower. That's easy enough to houserule if you like. One variant I've used was 5 minute short rests, 1 hour long rests for a heroic campaign. Or make it grittier with full day short rests and week long long rests.

I'd recommend hitting up your FLGS and try an Adventure League game. Try it out without investing a couple hundred bucks first. If you like it, great. If not pump your persuasion and convince someone to DM 3.5 for you.

[eastmabl]

So I'm taking a look at the 5e ruleset. In short, I'm debating whether it's worth buying the books and familiarizing myself with it enough to possibly end up in a game. (I haven't been invited to a game or anything, but that's not to say I couldn't organize one or find one, you know?) I'm not super impressed so far, but I'm willing to be persuaded by people who've got some actual game experience.

So far I'm looking at the free books (the "basic rules" and the OGL/SRD stuff). I understand that this is skewing my perspective, since I know that I'm not looking at the whole thing. Let me repeat that. I understand that I do not have the whole picture here. Which is one reason why I'm willing to be persuaded about this whole matter.

As far as my D&D background goes? Let's spoiler that for length, though it'll probably be relevant.

I cut my teeth on 3.5, which I love to pieces despite its (many, many, many) flaws. I love the endless customization and the clever combos and the deep hidden potential. I consider myself pretty active in the Iron Chef Optimization Challenge on this board, if that tells you anything. The problem with 3.5 is that I basically can't actually play it anymore. No one I game with (including me) is willing to GM it anymore, since it takes so much damned effort on the part of the GM to keep things cohesive. (You've gotta prevent the party being brokenly strong or brokenly weak, you've gotta basically painstakingly hand-craft each encounter since the CR system is beyond worthless, the item economy is beyond screwed up, and you've gotta be on the lookout for a whole bunch of things that can accidentally ruin someone's fun, which of course is counter to the whole purpose of playing a game.)

Not many things are broken or trap options. There are fewer choices, which makes charop easier. All in all, I much prefer it to 3.x, where you had to monitor party progression to ensure that no one went off the deep end either way.


I'm also a big fan of 4e. I like the fact that customization still exists in 4e despite taking very different forms than it did in 3.5 (and I categorically reject the notion that "all the classes feel the same," because they just plain don't). I like the fact that, with a few exceptions, most classes can be made at least marginally competent, and I like that everyone generally gets to feel cooler as they level up (which was . . . spotty at best in 3.5, what with dead levels and Linear Warriors Quadratic Wizards and all that junk). I'm also a fan of the fact that just about every character has multiple actions that matter, including off-turn actions. (Some people dislike 4e's emphasis on off-turn actions and feel like it makes things confusing, but I think it makes things exciting.) Most of all, I like the fact that it's really, really easy to GM to 4e. Monster building is a snap (CR actually means something, and the whole MM3 On A Business Card is a godsend), there's enough defined effects in the rules to be able to design really weird encounters and terrain effects without completely breaking things, and since the power spread is tighter (yeah, a Vampire and a Ranger are worlds apart, but they're not the universes apart that the 3.5 Monk and the 3.5 Druid were), you have a better idea of what the party can and can't handle. The problem with 4e is that WotC is making it really hard to actually get access to 4e material now—the DDI web resources are basically garbage that are getting harder and harder to access, and I understand that you can't buy new subscriptions to it (you can only renew an existing sub, which is grating because it forces you to pay for something you aren't using when you don't have an active 4e game), and even if I were to track down copies of most/all of the paper books, so much of 4e's content was from Dungeon and/or Dragon that WotC is basically making playing the game a struggle. (Also, my last two campaigns were 4e, and there's rumblings that people are getting a little bored with it, but that's not insurmountable.)

If you like 3.5 and 4e, have you checked out 13th Age? If you haven't, I'd strongly advise doing so. Most material is free on the SRD at this point.

If you don't come back, I'm assuming that you much prefer that system.


As far as spin-offs go, I'm a huge fan of Legend as a concept, but I've never actually gotten a chance to play an actual game of it (mostly because there's no Monster Manual or equivalent), and the system/community looks like it's lost basically all its momentum, so I'm not going to dwell on that because it'll just make me sad. I've never really looked into Pathfinder, as I imagine it'll have much the same issues as 3.5.

My experience with PF is that it's 3.5 turned up to 11. There's a whole lot of work with from a charop stand point though.


Anyway. 5e. I'm willing to be sold on the concept, but right now, I'm not super impressed. I understand that we're going for a flatter power curve in terms of the numbers treadmill, which isn't a bad design goal (though I'm skeptical that WotC would be able to maintain it over the entire game). I'm okay with that. I feel like the whole "simplified action economy" is fundamentally disingenuous—you've still got The Big Action Where You Do Things ("action," which 4e would call a standard action), The Helper Action ("bonus action," which 4e would call a minor action, though I understand that bonus actions are more limited in scope), and The Part Of Your Turn Where You Move (your "movement non-action," which is basically a 4e move action that you happen to be able to split up but somehow doesn't qualify as an action), plus Your Off-Turn Action ("reaction," which 4e would call an immediate, though I understand that there's no equivalent to an opportunity action). I mean, since it's basically the 4e action set with a couple tweaks, it's not like I can't work with it, but I still feel like it's pretending to be simpler than it is. Advantage and Disadvantage make fundamental sense (even if they do make the math a bit harder to do in your head). Splitting up saves feels weird (almost TOO granular), but not so weird that I couldn't get used to it. Proficiency with skills and tools makes sense. I like the Concentration mechanic, so that's cool.

I didn't spend much time in 4e, so I'll plead ignorance about that action economy. Compared to 3.5, it feels a lot like a simplified action economy.


In terms of building and playing characters, though? I don't feel like I get what would be fun about it. You seem to make very, very few choices as far as building the character goes. You pick your race, your class, and your background to start, and you generally have a couple sub-choices with that (sub-races, skills off a list, whatever). So far so good. Your character class generally has a couple branching paths that you pick early on (yes, I know that I can't see all of those paths in the SRD book I'm working with, but I do understand that they exist), and if you get spells, you pick new spells at appropriate levels. But then that's it. That seems to be about all you get in terms of customization. You don't pick feats. You don't pick magic items. Your ability scores increase, but since you generally know what abilities you need to focus on, that's not really an exciting choice. Multiclassing exists (and it's nominally closer to 3.5 multiclassing than to 4e multiclassing, which doesn't bother me one bit), but it feels kind of limited? (The whole Multiclass Spellcasting Table thing is kind of hard for me to wrap my head around. Like, I understand it, but I don't get why they chose to do it that way.) Some classes get choices at certain levels, but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Everything feels like it's on rails.[quote]

Feats are an optional rule that almost everyone seems to play with. Whenever you would get an Ability Score Increase, you can choose to take a feat. This is something that having the PHB would make much clearer.

But yes - as a default, you don't pick magic items or craft magic items. Magic items drop as loot, or in the rare case that you can buy one. (Healing potions are easy to get).

However, on the plus side of things, it's been my experience that you don't need a lot of magic items to play at most levels. With the exception of monsters that are have resistance (half damage) or immunity to non-magical damage, you can handle most encounters just fine without magic items. It was actually quite refreshing, having come from a 3.5 magic item treadmill mindset.

[quote]I also don't understand how mid-level characters are supposed to be much stronger than low-level characters. I understand that the numerical treadmill has intentionally been flattened as far as d20 rolls go, but I don't get how you're supposed to keep up with the non-d20 numbers game. HP seems to scale much faster than damage does, and I don't see the optimization tools necessary to overcome that enough to make combat not drag. Like, I do see damage slightly increasing, but it doesn't look like the majority of classes are going to have a smooth enough increase to actually reliably end equal-CR encounters for a good chunk of the game.

If you're looking at encounters as one big monster encounter, you are right that spells/damage don't keep pace. However, it's recommended in the DMG that you have encounters with multiple support monsters. A well-rounded encounter with multiple lower CR monsters supporting a bigger monster goes quite quickly.


Also, magic seems to be all over the map in terms of usefulness. Casters don't seem to have anything even remotely close to enough spells to get through a standard day with 3-4 encounters in it—yes, I do understand that cantrips are at-will (and I do understand that they slightly scale), so you're not really being expected to cast a high-level spell every round, but it still feels like casters are often going to be frustrated by being unable to bring appropriate spell effects to bear. Many (not all) spells feel like they exacerbate the 3.5 "all or nothing" paradigm for magic—there's a handful of save-or-lose spells (which I don't like from a design perspective to begin with), and damaging spells might be level-appropriate exactly when you first get access to them, but everything else (including damaging spells more than a level or two old, even if you use a higher-level slot) seems to have a really small effect on the encounter relative to how incredibly few of them you get per day, no matter what kind of caster you are. (I do understand not wanting casters to just dominate every encounter ever, and I respect wanting to curb their out-of-combat capabilities, but it feels like this just went way too far in the other direction.) I'm not saying that every single spell is useless (far from it), but I am saying that I really don't feel like casters have a smooth and appropriate power curve (level by level or round by round), based on what I've been able to read so far.

The standard adventuring day is 6-8 easy to medium encounters, not 3-4. Combat goes much quicker than you think in the CR system.


There's also the fact that we seem to have gotten back to the bad parts of 3.5 in terms of non-casters doing the same damn thing every round. Again, I know that I don't have all the material, but in the material I DO have, it looks like most martial types (for lack of a better term) will just be making attacks every round without doing anything, y'know, interesting or different. Sure, the Rogue will be trying to get Sneak Attack, and the Monk might be able to spend limited ki points to do extra effects, but it generally looks like you don't have a lot of options from round to round more often than not, which really doesn't seem like a compelling and exciting game. Even casters are likely to just be spamming the same cantrips every turn (since they have so bloody few spells per day, and since combat seems set up to take so many rounds), which makes them pretty much as bad as the Fighter et al.

If you're looking at the Basic Rules/SRD, the fighter and rogue archetypes are the barebones "I hit it with my sword" fighter and "I pick her pocket" rogue. There are more options in the PHB.


I also feel like everything seems set up to be on kind of a weirdly extended time scale. Healing seems ridiculously prolonged unless you have a dedicated healbot (you reroll hit dice to get small bits of healing, and you only get half of them back per day, and it takes an hour to use them at all?). And of course, with the fact that you can't buy (and therefore can't plan for or expect) magic items, you can't just delegate the "HP refiller" role to a wand or a few Healing Belts. 4e made everyone capable of healing out of combat (just spend surges after a short rest, and you get your surges back after an extended rest), and 3.5 granted enough access to magic items that it really wasn't an issue, but 5e seems hell-bent on making healing really annoyingly hard unless you have a dedicated healer. I don't really see what design goal that's hitting or what type of player that's making happy. Also, the fact that "short rests" take an hour seems odd. On the one hand, I can understand that the designers were clearly trying to give some classes a pool of resources on a recharge timer of "longer than an encounter, shorter than a day," but without reading the full DMG and the RAW guidelines for how often the GM should allow/encourage a short rest, I'm not sure I trust how smoothly that will actually work in practice. (Some GMs will let you rest an hour after nearly every encounter. Some GMs will punish you with interruptions and random encounters every time you try to take a break and basically will never allow a short rest in the middle of the day. I know that the rules can't prevent GMs from being jerks, but I feel like an hour is a sufficiently awkwardly long period of time that you really do have to rely on your GM working with you.) The crafting rules seem unusably slow. There's the "training rules" for gaining new proficiencies, but they cost 250 days? Seems basically unworkable.

The short rest and extended rest mechanics are a lot like 4e, but with a tip of the hat to healing in AD&D.

I've run a lot of D&D modules at cons, and a dedicated healer is by no means required. With access to short rests and DMs who are specifically instructed to give a certain number of short rests per adventuring day, most players can cruise through a mod without a dedicated healer. (Of course, you can't John Rambo your way through the mod either).

Crafting is time spent not adventuring, and the game is about adventuring --- not downtime. New proficiencies are also time spent not adventuring, and allow you to get a leg up on everyone else. Not everyone holds all skill, tool or language proficiencies to the 250 day requirement, but it's something that focuses the players on playing the game.


There's also the fact that there doesn't seem to be much material. I'm not talking about the fact that I only have access to the free stuff right now—I'm talking about the fact that it doesn't look like WotC has actually published much stuff (despite the system being what, a year and a half old, maybe more?). To be honest, that seems worrisome to me—one major reason I like D&D as a whole is because it offers me lots and lots of different options, but I'm not sure that that's going to happen with 5e. This might change, of course, but I feel like new 3.5 content and new 4e content came out way faster at this point in their respective life cycles.

In the Player Surveys, players didn't want the book of the month club, and Wizards wants to make supplements valuable to players. Chris Perkins has said that the old feel was that 10% of the players used 5% of any given supplements, and they want 90% of players to use 75% of the books they create. (Those values aren't exact, but the intent is still there).


I dunno. Like I said, I'm willing to be convinced. I wouldn't go to the effort of making this thread if I didn't want to have fun with the game. But I need to hear from people who've actually played the game to tell me how accurate my assessments are and how completely off base I am. As I keep saying, I understand that I don't have all the material and that I'm therefore working with an incomplete picture. I'm absolutely certain that not all of my initial impressions are correct. (That is, after all, kind of the entire point of this discussion—I want to know what I'm wrong about and what the real situation is.) Is character building as limited as it really appears? Do combats take as long as they seem to? Is casting as messed up as it looks? Are Fighters and other attacky-types as boring as they were back in the 3.5 era? How easy or hard is it to GM 5e (from balancing party capabilities to designing fair encounters to putting in appropriate challenges and rewards), particularly in comparison to 3.5 and 4e? In short, is it worth my time and my money to buy the full versions of the books and look deeper, or does it sound like I want things from my RPGs that 5e isn't set up to deliver?

Try playing 5e with the Basic Rules or using the SRD. I think that you'll find that the game is enjoyable even without the charop challenges.

Otherwise, try out 13th Age. It suffers from some lack of player options, but it might be what you want as a 3.5/4e hybrid.

[bid]

I also don't understand how mid-level characters are supposed to be much stronger than low-level characters. I understand that the numerical treadmill has intentionally been flattened as far as d20 rolls go, but I don't get how you're supposed to keep up with the non-d20 numbers game. HP seems to scale much faster than damage does, and I don't see the optimization tools necessary to overcome that enough to make combat not drag. Like, I do see damage slightly increasing, but it doesn't look like the majority of classes are going to have a smooth enough increase to actually reliably end equal-CR encounters for a good chunk of the game.
Kryx worksheet, starts around 10 DPR and ends 40-60 DPR for non-caster.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1d-9xDdath8kX_v7Rpts9JFIJwIG3X0-dDUtfax14NT0/edit#gid=655309186

There's about 70 sub-classes, SRD only cantains the boring ones. You can replace your 5-7 ASI with a choice of 40 feats. There are many useful dip to mix and match class features. Skim the guides for more.
http://zenithgames.blogspot.ca/2014/08/5e-guide-to-guides.html

Caster level: a wizard 10 / cleric 10 will have slots of a caster 20, but will have to upcast their 4th wizard or 4th cleric to use their 9th slot. Ranger 6 counts for 3 caster level.

Concentration spells can last the whole encounter and more. At level 6 you already have 10 spells, that's 1-2 per encounter.

Short-rest has HD "surge". You should get 2 per day for 6-8 encounters.


If you want complex combos/traps, you won't find them in 5e. Almost anything works well enough: mountain dwarf wizard is a good thing, rogue tank is fine.

[Malifice]

In terms of building and playing characters, though? I don't feel like I get what would be fun about it. You seem to make very, very few choices as far as building the character goes. You pick your race, your class, and your background to start, and you generally have a couple sub-choices with that (sub-races, skills off a list, whatever). So far so good. Your character class generally has a couple branching paths that you pick early on (yes, I know that I can't see all of those paths in the SRD book I'm working with, but I do understand that they exist), and if you get spells, you pick new spells at appropriate levels. But then that's it. That seems to be about all you get in terms of customization. You don't pick feats. You don't pick magic items. Your ability scores increase, but since you generally know what abilities you need to focus on, that's not really an exciting choice. Multiclassing exists (and it's nominally closer to 3.5 multiclassing than to 4e multiclassing, which doesn't bother me one bit), but it feels kind of limited? (The whole Multiclass Spellcasting Table thing is kind of hard for me to wrap my head around. Like, I understand it, but I don't get why they chose to do it that way.) Some classes get choices at certain levels, but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Everything feels like it's on rails.

You have 12 classes with around 3 archetypes each (many of which create some pretty fundamentally different classes). Add in a splash of feats, various backgrounds, multiclassing and the removal of alignment restrictions on classes, and you have vastly more options in the PHB alone than in any other PHB released to date.

The great thing about the classes is there are no trap options. Every one of them works right out of the box. Some might require a touch more system mastery that others to do well, but you would struggle to create a dud character in 5E. You really have to try to create something that sucks.


I also don't understand how mid-level characters are supposed to be much stronger than low-level characters. I understand that the numerical treadmill has intentionally been flattened as far as d20 rolls go, but I don't get how you're supposed to keep up with the non-d20 numbers game. HP seems to scale much faster than damage does, and I don't see the optimization tools necessary to overcome that enough to make combat not drag. Like, I do see damage slightly increasing, but it doesn't look like the majority of classes are going to have a smooth enough increase to actually reliably end equal-CR encounters for a good chunk of the game.

A 1st level 'featless' greatsword fighter swings at +5 dealing 2d6+3 damage (re-rolling 1's and 2's)

At 5th level (assuming battlemaster) he swings twice at +7, dealing 2d6+4 damage (re-rolling 1's and 2's), knocking his target prone on a hit (and dealing an extra +1d8 damage) for advantage on his next attack. 1/ short rest he swings 4 times (and can add +1d8 to every single attack if he wants to nova).

Damage scales just fine. Due to the lower AC's (they remain in the 12-17 range for most monsters) you hit more often thus dealing more DPR.

5E combats are over inside of 5 rounds on average.


Also, magic seems to be all over the map in terms of usefulness. Casters don't seem to have anything even remotely close to enough spells to get through a standard day with 3-4 encounters in it—yes, I do understand that cantrips are at-will (and I do understand that they slightly scale), so you're not really being expected to cast a high-level spell every round, but it still feels like casters are often going to be frustrated by being unable to bring appropriate spell effects to bear.

A standard adventuring day in 5E is actually 6-8 encounters [featuring 2 short rests]. The DMG explicity states that 'long rest' resources [like spell slots] are expected to last this long.

A 1st level Wizard or Warlock has enough 'oomph' to drop 1 spell every 2nd encounter. 1st level spells are much more powerful in this edition; Sleep offers no save and is almost an auto-win for non immune targets, and even magic missile spams something like 3d6 damage. For the rest of the day he is resorting to (quite useful at low levels) cantrips (firebolt and eldritch blast deals 1d10 damage, with evokers and warlocks adding stat mod to this).

Come 5th level and your Wizard has 4/3/2 [plus an additional 3rd level slot from arcane recovery]. Thats enough for 10 spells over 6-8 encounters [with 3rd level spells usually enough to end or turn the tide of one encounter on its own each]. Once they run out, cantrips at this level are dealing 2d10 damage.

Dont forget - in addition to your spell slots, you also have 'at will' cantrips and' at will' rituals so your spellcasting power is not limited by your number of spell slots. Spellcasters never have to do anything other than cast spells if they dont want to.

Spells in 5E are more potent than in 3.5 [aside from SoS spells and arguably conjuration spells]. Dropping a spell of the highest level you know into an encounter dramatically changes that encounter, and most casters have enough 'oomph' to be able to do this for a few encounters per day.

TL;DR - spells give you a big spike of power. Martials might chug along at a consistent 7/10 combat output, while caster default to a combat output of 5/10 (with cantrips). But a few times per day, your caster can turn an encoutner on its head at 10/10 potency.


Many (not all) spells feel like they exacerbate the 3.5 "all or nothing" paradigm for magic—there's a handful of save-or-lose spells (which I don't like from a design perspective to begin with), and damaging spells might be level-appropriate exactly when you first get access to them, but everything else (including damaging spells more than a level or two old, even if you use a higher-level slot) seems to have a really small effect on the encounter relative to how incredibly few of them you get per day, no matter what kind of caster you are. (I do understand not wanting casters to just dominate every encounter ever, and I respect wanting to curb their out-of-combat capabilities, but it feels like this just went way too far in the other direction.) I'm not saying that every single spell is useless (far from it), but I am saying that I really don't feel like casters have a smooth and appropriate power curve (level by level or round by round), based on what I've been able to read so far.

Its quite the opposite. At 1st level spells like sleep, and then scorching ray or invisibility at 2nd, fireball and fly at 3rd etc are game changers when used.


There's also the fact that we seem to have gotten back to the bad parts of 3.5 in terms of non-casters doing the same damn thing every round. Again, I know that I don't have all the material, but in the material I DO have, it looks like most martial types (for lack of a better term) will just be making attacks every round without doing anything, y'know, interesting or different. Sure, the Rogue will be trying to get Sneak Attack, and the Monk might be able to spend limited ki points to do extra effects, but it generally looks like you don't have a lot of options from round to round more often than not, which really doesn't seem like a compelling and exciting game. Even casters are likely to just be spamming the same cantrips every turn (since they have so bloody few spells per day, and since combat seems set up to take so many rounds), which makes them pretty much as bad as the Fighter et al.

Theyve actually made it easier to do stuff other than attack. 3.5s 'combat manouvers' [grapple, disarm, bull rush, sunder etc] are all basically opposed athletics checks [one roll] with no AoO attached, and only costing you a single one of your attacks for the round.

Players are encouraged to be creative with such checks also. If you want to throw sand in the goblins face, swing from a chandelier, push a creature to the ground or whatever, roll a d20 and off you go.


I also feel like everything seems set up to be on kind of a weirdly extended time scale. Healing seems ridiculously prolonged unless you have a dedicated healbot (you reroll hit dice to get small bits of healing, and you only get half of them back per day, and it takes an hour to use them at all?).

Huh? No, you expend hit dice on a 'short rest' [youre expected to get 2 short rests per day]. You roll them [adding your con] and heal that much damage. At the end of the day you take a 'long rest' and fully heal all damage taken AND recover half those spent hit dice. Additionally most classes have some kind of healing mechanism built in on top of this.

5E is the most healing and HP friendly edition yet.


There's also the fact that there doesn't seem to be much material. I'm not talking about the fact that I only have access to the free stuff right now—I'm talking about the fact that it doesn't look like WotC has actually published much stuff (despite the system being what, a year and a half old, maybe more?). To be honest, that seems worrisome to me—one major reason I like D&D as a whole is because it offers me lots and lots of different options, but I'm not sure that that's going to happen with 5e. This might change, of course, but I feel like new 3.5 content and new 4e content came out way faster at this point in their respective life cycles.

The slow release schedule is an intentional choice to delay power creep.

On the plus side, we do see a lot of play test stuff in the form of Unearthed Arcana articles reeased monthly for free. New archetypes, new classes, the works.

Gives the devs some time to release something for playtest, and see what works and what doesnt before releasing it in an official sourcebook.


Is character building as limited as it really appears?

No. Quicker yes, but certainly not limited.


Do combats take as long as they seem to?

Combat in 5E is the quickest in any edition ever. Most battles are over inside of 5 rounds of game time, and around 15 minutes of real time.


Is casting as messed up as it looks?

No.


Are Fighters and other attacky-types as boring as they were back in the 3.5 era?

Nope. With action surge, superiority dice, second wind healing, extra feats [all of which grant extra options] and combat manouvers only limited by imagination, theyre more than just 'attack bots'.

Champion fighter exists for those that want that style of play however.


How easy or hard is it to GM 5e (from balancing party capabilities to designing fair encounters to putting in appropriate challenges and rewards), particularly in comparison to 3.5 and 4e?

Much easier, but you need to be prepared to 'make a ruling and get on with the game'. 5E is much more DM friendly than 3.5, but that comes with the same pros and cons as always.

With a good DM the game is great - heck its the best edition yet; with a crap DM [or one that doesnt get the underlying 6-8 encounter/ 2 short rest paradigm, doesnt understand the maths behind the game, railroads creativity or is just a jerk] it can suffer.


In short, is it worth my time and my money to buy the full versions of the books and look deeper, or does it sound like I want things from my RPGs that 5e isn't set up to deliver?

Ive been playing since 1E and BECMI, and its the best edition yet by a mile. They lost me at 4E. This brought me back.

[AstralFire]

I haven't really been able to work the 6-8 encounter paradigm in all that often and I don't feel the game suffers for it terribly, honestly. I usually run 1 to 3 combat encounters, 2 to 3 non per day and it still holds up much better than 3rd edition low-encounter days.

[Malifice]

I haven't really been able to work the 6-8 encounter paradigm in all that often and I don't feel the game suffers for it terribly, honestly. I usually run 1 to 3 combat encounters, 2 to 3 non per day and it still holds up much better than 3rd edition low-encounter days.

Any reason why you havent been able to work 6-8 encounters in before allowing a long rest?

Just curious. Is it a choice thing?

I find it often comes down to DMs wanting to time long rests to conincide with the end of days play in the game session, and cramming 6-8 encounters in a single session is too much.

[Tehnar]

Any reason why you havent been able to work 6-8 encounters in before allowing a long rest?

Just curious. Is it a choice thing?

I find it often comes down to DMs wanting to time long rests to conincide with the end of days play in the game session, and cramming 6-8 encounters in a single session is too much.

That is a very gamist approach. You could theoretically do 3 encounters, have a month of downtime, and not be able to regain long rest resources because you didn't finish 6 to 8 encounters. I don't understand why designers cant base a game against one encounter per day, it would make things so much simpler.


To the OP: 5e's biggest fault (or feature as some would put it) is that for everything that is not explicitly spelled out you have to consult with your DM to see how they work. This includes all skills, ability checks, many class features (for a example see Wild Sorceror Tides of Chaos) and most backgrounds. Anything other then combat actions ( I attack, I move, I push and I cast a spell) requires a hefty dose of DM intervention.

[Ninja_Prawn]

To the OP: 5e's biggest fault (or feature as some would put it) is that for everything that is not explicitly spelled out you have to consult with your DM to see how they work. This includes all skills, ability checks, many class features (for a example see Wild Sorceror Tides of Chaos) and most backgrounds. Anything other then combat actions ( I attack, I move, I push and I cast a spell) requires a hefty dose of DM intervention.

I definitely see that as a feature - it gives the power back to the DM and lets them actually run the game rather than just administer it. We already have computerised games; tabletop games need to offer something different or no one will want to play them.

[AstralFire]

Any reason why you havent been able to work 6-8 encounters in before allowing a long rest?

Just curious. Is it a choice thing?

I find it often comes down to DMs wanting to time long rests to conincide with the end of days play in the game session, and cramming 6-8 encounters in a single session is too much.

Two reasons:

- I run online, which slows combat down a bit. I have an experienced, fast group, and an inexperienced group that I'm teaching how to play quickly online. The former can have more encounters in a plotline before they get a little bored at hack and slash because we can actually resolve combats in a reasonable timeframe (30-40 usually). The latter has played for six games and they're amazed at my "lightning quick" two hour combats. This will also improve as they learn 5E more, as basically all of them are recent 3E converts (though they're loving the system).
- When you're not in a dungeon, a chase quest, or a battlefield, there simply aren't 6 to 8 places to fight in a day in many situations, if you ask me. And I do those situations -- my players still talk about a huge dungeoncrawl I made from scratch two years ago -- but I only do them when I feel they make sense. My most recent 5E session had a ship battle, but I just couldn't (even if it was my fast group) justify 6 to 8 combats on the ship that day -- it was a passing encounter with privateers, and my world isn't chock-full of so many monsters that it'd be a serious impediment to shipping.


I definitely see that as a feature - it gives the power back to the DM and lets them actually run the game rather than just administer it. We already have computerised games; tabletop games need to offer something different or no one will want to play them.

It's worth noting that the viewpoint you're responding to frequently originates from 3E, where "DM choice" was a bad thing because the DM already had so many rules to obey that anything they chose to make optional would be something they didn't use much at all -- it might simply be too much to remember, or it may break a delicate balance the GM's put together (or at least they fear it will) (speaking from personal experience). With a more balanced and lighter system, I do find it quite liberating.

[Ninja_Prawn]

It's worth noting that the viewpoint you're responding to frequently originates from 3E, where "DM choice" was a bad thing...

I'm sure it does (disclaimer: I never played 3e or 4e).

I've heard it said that one of the good things about 4e was that it was "easy to run", but as far as I can see, it was easy to run in the sense that MTG is easy to run - the players had all the rules they need on little cards. With a module, you almost don't need a DM at all.

5e cribs enough 4e concepts to make it easy to run (and balance), but has enough simplicity and freedom that the DM is the heart of the game rather than some kind of judge/jury/executioner. I really like it.

[Zalabim]

So I'm taking a look at the 5e ruleset. In short, I'm debating whether it's worth buying the books and familiarizing myself with it enough to possibly end up in a game. (I haven't been invited to a game or anything, but that's not to say I couldn't organize one or find one, you know?) I'm not super impressed so far, but I'm willing to be persuaded by people who've got some actual game experience.

I'll start with my immediate response. My concluding advice should be it is not worth spending money on it. If you find an opportunity to join a game, you should be able to share a book with a more dedicated player. It's easy enough for a new player to get familiar with the system, make a character, and be able to play rather quickly. That's a major pro in its favor, for me. If you find it provides something you enjoy, then by all means invest in it as you feel appropriate. To be ready to just play, you should read Chapter 1 (page 1-15), your chosen race and class pages in Chapter 2 and 3(Elf gets pages 21-24, Wizard gets 112-120), Chapter 4 to choose your background (page 121-125, the rest up to 142 is examples), Chapter 5 for the equipment in the starting package (143-161), and Chapter 7, 8 and 9 (173-198), as well as Chapter 10 if you cast spells (201-206), and enough of Chapter 11 to pick your spells. That's about 70-90 pages, including all the tables and pictures.



So far I'm looking at the free books (the "basic rules" and the OGL/SRD stuff). I understand that this is skewing my perspective, since I know that I'm not looking at the whole thing. Let me repeat that. I understand that I do not have the whole picture here. Which is one reason why I'm willing to be persuaded about this whole matter.

As far as my D&D background goes? Let's spoiler that for length, though it'll probably be relevant.

I cut my teeth on 3.5, which I love to pieces despite its (many, many, many) flaws. I love the endless customization and the clever combos and the deep hidden potential. I consider myself pretty active in the Iron Chef Optimization Challenge on this board, if that tells you anything. The problem with 3.5 is that I basically can't actually play it anymore. No one I game with (including me) is willing to GM it anymore, since it takes so much damned effort on the part of the GM to keep things cohesive. (You've gotta prevent the party being brokenly strong or brokenly weak, you've gotta basically painstakingly hand-craft each encounter since the CR system is beyond worthless, the item economy is beyond screwed up, and you've gotta be on the lookout for a whole bunch of things that can accidentally ruin someone's fun, which of course is counter to the whole purpose of playing a game.)

I'm also a big fan of 4e. I like the fact that customization still exists in 4e despite taking very different forms than it did in 3.5 (and I categorically reject the notion that "all the classes feel the same," because they just plain don't). I like the fact that, with a few exceptions, most classes can be made at least marginally competent, and I like that everyone generally gets to feel cooler as they level up (which was . . . spotty at best in 3.5, what with dead levels and Linear Warriors Quadratic Wizards and all that junk). I'm also a fan of the fact that just about every character has multiple actions that matter, including off-turn actions. (Some people dislike 4e's emphasis on off-turn actions and feel like it makes things confusing, but I think it makes things exciting.) Most of all, I like the fact that it's really, really easy to GM to 4e. Monster building is a snap (CR actually means something, and the whole MM3 On A Business Card is a godsend), there's enough defined effects in the rules to be able to design really weird encounters and terrain effects without completely breaking things, and since the power spread is tighter (yeah, a Vampire and a Ranger are worlds apart, but they're not the universes apart that the 3.5 Monk and the 3.5 Druid were), you have a better idea of what the party can and can't handle. The problem with 4e is that WotC is making it really hard to actually get access to 4e material now—the DDI web resources are basically garbage that are getting harder and harder to access, and I understand that you can't buy new subscriptions to it (you can only renew an existing sub, which is grating because it forces you to pay for something you aren't using when you don't have an active 4e game), and even if I were to track down copies of most/all of the paper books, so much of 4e's content was from Dungeon and/or Dragon that WotC is basically making playing the game a struggle. (Also, my last two campaigns were 4e, and there's rumblings that people are getting a little bored with it, but that's not insurmountable.)

As far as spin-offs go, I'm a huge fan of Legend as a concept, but I've never actually gotten a chance to play an actual game of it (mostly because there's no Monster Manual or equivalent), and the system/community looks like it's lost basically all its momentum, so I'm not going to dwell on that because it'll just make me sad. I've never really looked into Pathfinder, as I imagine it'll have much the same issues as 3.5.

5E does something very different than 4E does. It's not as good at what 4E does, but it does it's thing much better than 3.5 or 4E do it. That thing is the combination of:

flatter power curve, particularly hit/miss and pass/fail DCs,
simpler character building, intentionally lower entry requirements for a player,
few round to round, turn to turn, and attack to attack changes in number calculation,
reduced importance of numbers changing magic items,
better design and balance of 4Essentials-style class structure where each class keeps its own play style and has a different mix of long rest, short rest, and unlimited use options(Barbarians, Rangers, Wizards, and Sorcerers rely a lot on long rest resources in different ways. Paladins, Clerics, Druids, and bards rely on primarily long rest resources with a mix of powerful short rest options. Monks and Warlocks rely on short rest resources. Fighters and Rogues get to choose whether to have long rest resources. Fighters have strong short rest options. Rogues care about encounter setup more, and have no resource limitations otherwise.)
Also I just really like the greater freedom of movement in combat.





Anyway. 5e. I'm willing to be sold on the concept, but right now, I'm not super impressed. I understand that we're going for a flatter power curve in terms of the numbers treadmill, which isn't a bad design goal (though I'm skeptical that WotC would be able to maintain it over the entire game). I'm okay with that. I feel like the whole "simplified action economy" is fundamentally disingenuous—you've still got The Big Action Where You Do Things ("action," which 4e would call a standard action), The Helper Action ("bonus action," which 4e would call a minor action, though I understand that bonus actions are more limited in scope), and The Part Of Your Turn Where You Move (your "movement non-action," which is basically a 4e move action that you happen to be able to split up but somehow doesn't qualify as an action), plus Your Off-Turn Action ("reaction," which 4e would call an immediate, though I understand that there's no equivalent to an opportunity action). I mean, since it's basically the 4e action set with a couple tweaks, it's not like I can't work with it, but I still feel like it's pretending to be simpler than it is. Advantage and Disadvantage make fundamental sense (even if they do make the math a bit harder to do in your head). Splitting up saves feels weird (almost TOO granular), but not so weird that I couldn't get used to it. Proficiency with skills and tools makes sense. I like the Concentration mechanic, so that's cool.

It's easy to keep the flatter numbers treadmill. Just keep using the same numbers.

The action economy is simplified by no move-action, no opportunity action, and less focus on immediate (reactions) actions. Movement not being a separate action ties in with the narrower rules on provoking an OA to open up smaller repositioning on a battlefield, and takes away one decision point as movement is only spent to move, not an attack. It's common to have a use for a Bonus Action every round, but hard to guarantee a use for a reaction every round. It's also quick to resolve most reactions, like Uncanny Dodge or a single normal attack. So in comparison, you have two actions to spend per round instead of 3 or 4, and the Action is often more impactful than a Standard action, while rules around Bonus Actions prevent them from making your turn much more complicated like quickened spells could.

There's few enough common results with advantage/disadvantage that it's easy to eventually memorize the common ones. Plus, half of them are simple squares.

The more granular saving throws results in most of the party being very vulnerable to some kind of save-based effect, especially by high levels. No one is actually safe from everything, though Paladins and Monks still show stronger saves later on. Everyone is going to have to rely on help from allies sometimes.


In terms of building and playing characters, though? I don't feel like I get what would be fun about it. You seem to make very, very few choices as far as building the character goes. You pick your race, your class, and your background to start, and you generally have a couple sub-choices with that (sub-races, skills off a list, whatever). So far so good. Your character class generally has a couple branching paths that you pick early on (yes, I know that I can't see all of those paths in the SRD book I'm working with, but I do understand that they exist), and if you get spells, you pick new spells at appropriate levels. But then that's it. That seems to be about all you get in terms of customization. You don't pick feats. You don't pick magic items. Your ability scores increase, but since you generally know what abilities you need to focus on, that's not really an exciting choice. Multiclassing exists (and it's nominally closer to 3.5 multiclassing than to 4e multiclassing, which doesn't bother me one bit), but it feels kind of limited? (The whole Multiclass Spellcasting Table thing is kind of hard for me to wrap my head around. Like, I understand it, but I don't get why they chose to do it that way.) Some classes get choices at certain levels, but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Everything feels like it's on rails.

Some classes make a lot of choices, and some classes make few or no choices. It varies. I also expect to someday see alternate class features broaden this scope for all classes and levels when the system is more mature, content-wise.


I also don't understand how mid-level characters are supposed to be much stronger than low-level characters. I understand that the numerical treadmill has intentionally been flattened as far as d20 rolls go, but I don't get how you're supposed to keep up with the non-d20 numbers game. HP seems to scale much faster than damage does, and I don't see the optimization tools necessary to overcome that enough to make combat not drag. Like, I do see damage slightly increasing, but it doesn't look like the majority of classes are going to have a smooth enough increase to actually reliably end equal-CR encounters for a good chunk of the game.

My quick example. A level 1 fighter does ~7.8 damage per round with a greatsword against AC 13, round after round, all day long. This fighter has 12 max HP, second winds for 6.5 hp, and has one Hit Die to spend for 7.5 more hp. A level 10 fighter does ~18.2 damage per round with that greatsword against AC 17 all day long. This fighter could instead deal up to 69 average damage in one round if he's up against the same AC 13, ~31.15 average damage per round averaged over 20 rounds with two short rests, and ~23.5 without breaking a sweat against that AC 13. This fighter has 84 max HP, second winds for 15.5, and has 10 Hit Dice to spend totally 75 more hp. Putting each fighter in the same gear, and through similar 20 round and two short rests paces, the level 10 fighter has 5.26 times the available HP, and does 3.99 times the damage. Of course the fighter is one of the tougher classes. Unused are the powerful combat feats, which the fighter has more access to than any other class.



Also, magic seems to be all over the map in terms of usefulness. Casters don't seem to have anything even remotely close to enough spells to get through a standard day with 3-4 encounters in it—yes, I do understand that cantrips are at-will (and I do understand that they slightly scale), so you're not really being expected to cast a high-level spell every round, but it still feels like casters are often going to be frustrated by being unable to bring appropriate spell effects to bear. Many (not all) spells feel like they exacerbate the 3.5 "all or nothing" paradigm for magic—there's a handful of save-or-lose spells (which I don't like from a design perspective to begin with), and damaging spells might be level-appropriate exactly when you first get access to them, but everything else (including damaging spells more than a level or two old, even if you use a higher-level slot) seems to have a really small effect on the encounter relative to how incredibly few of them you get per day, no matter what kind of caster you are. (I do understand not wanting casters to just dominate every encounter ever, and I respect wanting to curb their out-of-combat capabilities, but it feels like this just went way too far in the other direction.) I'm not saying that every single spell is useless (far from it), but I am saying that I really don't feel like casters have a smooth and appropriate power curve (level by level or round by round), based on what I've been able to read so far.

A standard day looks more like 4-6 encounters. Casters are expected to use all their spell slots and wish they had more. The spell levels for appropriate spell effects is also much broader than it was in 3.5. Web is always a great spell, and 1st level slots find plenty of use for the whole game. There's a big jump in offensive spell power at 3rd level spells, but otherwise the next noticeable jump is at 9th level. Scaling on damage spells is much smoother. All spells benefit from always using the same DC. A fireball dealing 8d6 instead of 10d6 is actually a smaller loss than Banishment having 1 target instead of 2. There's a lot of all or nothing spells again, though most of the suck isn't of the game-over variety. Instead, they're crowd control that delays the targets, making the rest of the encounter far easier. There's also still a selection of spells that will work no matter the save, if they're used in the right place. These create walls, creatures, difficult terrain, or block line of sight.

On the downside, you will see some stinkers in the spell section that are hardly ever (and thus not often enough) good, or never good. Like Witchbolt.


There's also the fact that we seem to have gotten back to the bad parts of 3.5 in terms of non-casters doing the same damn thing every round. Again, I know that I don't have all the material, but in the material I DO have, it looks like most martial types (for lack of a better term) will just be making attacks every round without doing anything, y'know, interesting or different. Sure, the Rogue will be trying to get Sneak Attack, and the Monk might be able to spend limited ki points to do extra effects, but it generally looks like you don't have a lot of options from round to round more often than not, which really doesn't seem like a compelling and exciting game. Even casters are likely to just be spamming the same cantrips every turn (since they have so bloody few spells per day, and since combat seems set up to take so many rounds), which makes them pretty much as bad as the Fighter et al.

Some suffer this more than others. Using combat maneuvers is a lot easier in 5E though, since they don't suffer the feat requirements of 3.5 or the scaling issues of 4E. It can make a huge practical difference in a battle. The feats that do exist can instead make doing the same thing over and over again hugely effective, so there's push-and-pull on how diverse a non-casters actions are in combat. Grappling and shoving can apply debuffs to a creature in melee, and be used to take advantage of dangerous environment, or prevent an enemy from taking advantage of the environment. There's also more optional combat moves in the DMG with narrower uses, but since it doesn't take any extra resource to use them well, it's always there. There's also class feature based options, like the battle master's maneuvers, the monk's ki, and the arcane trickster's spells.

The length of combat itself is able to vary a lot. Against a single tough opponent, it should only take 3 or 4 rounds depending on difficulty and tactics. Against a challenge of a group, it can take many more rounds, or far fewer if they can be killed all at once by fireballs.


I also feel like everything seems set up to be on kind of a weirdly extended time scale. Healing seems ridiculously prolonged unless you have a dedicated healbot (you reroll hit dice to get small bits of healing, and you only get half of them back per day, and it takes an hour to use them at all?). And of course, with the fact that you can't buy (and therefore can't plan for or expect) magic items, you can't just delegate the "HP refiller" role to a wand or a few Healing Belts. 4e made everyone capable of healing out of combat (just spend surges after a short rest, and you get your surges back after an extended rest), and 3.5 granted enough access to magic items that it really wasn't an issue, but 5e seems hell-bent on making healing really annoyingly hard unless you have a dedicated healer. I don't really see what design goal that's hitting or what type of player that's making happy. Also, the fact that "short rests" take an hour seems odd. On the one hand, I can understand that the designers were clearly trying to give some classes a pool of resources on a recharge timer of "longer than an encounter, shorter than a day," but without reading the full DMG and the RAW guidelines for how often the GM should allow/encourage a short rest, I'm not sure I trust how smoothly that will actually work in practice. (Some GMs will let you rest an hour after nearly every encounter. Some GMs will punish you with interruptions and random encounters every time you try to take a break and basically will never allow a short rest in the middle of the day. I know that the rules can't prevent GMs from being jerks, but I feel like an hour is a sufficiently awkwardly long period of time that you really do have to rely on your GM working with you.) The crafting rules seem unusably slow. There's the "training rules" for gaining new proficiencies, but they cost 250 days? Seems basically unworkable.

The length of time is longer than 4E, and compared to 3.5 the practical length of time is longer, but the potential length of time for healing is shorter. As to needing an actual healer, it still avoids that. Another example, a 10th level druid has only so many spell slots. Using them all on Cure Wounds spells would heal about 260 HP. A party of four (fighter, rogue, this druid, and wizard) with 12 or 14 Con each has 272 Max Hp, and total hit dice worth 240 HP. So using everything they have for healing only gives the party 50% more HP in one day. Now, there are better healers (life cleric), and better healing spells (mostly not on the druid list), but there's also far better uses for those spell slots than healing Xd8+5 hp.

5E definitely tries to run on a slower, longer, scale. Some would say more grounded. It's a very different setting assumption by default than 4E, though there's variants. You can play with how long rest time is, as well as how effective.


There's also the fact that there doesn't seem to be much material. I'm not talking about the fact that I only have access to the free stuff right now—I'm talking about the fact that it doesn't look like WotC has actually published much stuff (despite the system being what, a year and a half old, maybe more?). To be honest, that seems worrisome to me—one major reason I like D&D as a whole is because it offers me lots and lots of different options, but I'm not sure that that's going to happen with 5e. This might change, of course, but I feel like new 3.5 content and new 4e content came out way faster at this point in their respective life cycles.

There is less content, though online articles with playtest material is released monthly, and there is going to continue to be a slower release of content. Content will also probably not take the same form as previous crunch-filled splatbooks. This is intentional. It presents a lower cost of entry for a new player. Imagine if you had to ask whether to buy core 3, core 3 series 1-3 (9), every player handbook and splat (11), or every book (10-21, depending on schedule) instead of 3 or 4. Imagine asking the same question a year from now. There's a similar effect on the cost in time, even if you can use a group member's book.


I dunno. Like I said, I'm willing to be convinced. I wouldn't go to the effort of making this thread if I didn't want to have fun with the game. But I need to hear from people who've actually played the game to tell me how accurate my assessments are and how completely off base I am. As I keep saying, I understand that I don't have all the material and that I'm therefore working with an incomplete picture. I'm absolutely certain that not all of my initial impressions are correct. (That is, after all, kind of the entire point of this discussion—I want to know what I'm wrong about and what the real situation is.) Is character building as limited as it really appears? Do combats take as long as they seem to? Is casting as messed up as it looks? Are Fighters and other attacky-types as boring as they were back in the 3.5 era? How easy or hard is it to GM 5e (from balancing party capabilities to designing fair encounters to putting in appropriate challenges and rewards), particularly in comparison to 3.5 and 4e? In short, is it worth my time and my money to buy the full versions of the books and look deeper, or does it sound like I want things from my RPGs that 5e isn't set up to deliver?

Mostly limited character building, but they play easily in the field. Combats not so long. Casting is less messed up than 3.5, and works pretty well overall. Attacking is more boring than 4e, but much less boring than 3.5, and it's a greater variety of boredom. Harder to GM than 4e, much easier to GM than 3.5. Not really hard to GM, but clearly harder than 4E. Party capabilities remain easy to balance, monsters are harder to make up, treasure is easier to make up and handle, appropriate challenges are harder to create, but it's also harder to create inappropriate challenges. It's amazing what a party can survive. I'm actually not clear on whether it offers what you want. I just hope I was clear on what it does offer. I do think it's worth the time to play or GM if it's in your style. It has enough value in concepts for that. I just don't think it has enough value in written material for me to recommend someone buy it first.

[Theodoxus]

Any reason why you havent been able to work 6-8 encounters in before allowing a long rest?

Just curious. Is it a choice thing?

I find it often comes down to DMs wanting to time long rests to conincide with the end of days play in the game session, and cramming 6-8 encounters in a single session is too much.

My group had this discussion last weekend. One guy brought up these forums as an example of groups that play the 6-8 encounters per long rest day. None of us can imagine how that would possibly work. Malifice, I think you might want to post up a workshop or something - you're a big proponent for this. I even mentioned that one day, I would love to play in a group that used this - I honestly can't imagine how it would work. I've run LMoP 5 times now, by the end of the first goblin cave - that's 5 pretty easy encounters, every group has long rested. I've played in an updated RHoD; we never had more than 2 encounters per day. I'm in a OotA game - same thing, I actually ended up creating an encounter by robbing gnome merchants - but even then, we found a spot that was secluded to rest up. Long rests are just too easy to get in a sandboxy gameworld.

Something like HotDQ, with the opening scenario, I could see, as it's timed and there are a ton of wandering encounters you could find - but outside of that, or a dungeon crawl (which half my group refuse to participate in) - I just don't see it.

[DanyBallon]

6-8 encounters a day works very well in a dungeon crawl, but is often less applicable in a sandbox or when you need to do a lot of travel. One thing I'd like to try is to mix both the regular and longer rest variant. Anytime overland travel is implied the longer rest variant would be used (you gain bebefits of a short rest once a day and a long rest once per week) and when moving into a dungeon switch to the regular rest variant.

[ad_hoc]

I think the issue here is that you are comparing it to 3.5.

It doesn't have the same goals and it does not play in the same way. It is much closer to 2e than 3.x.

I used to play 3.5, never again.

[Petrocorus]

One big good point of the 5E for me, is that it is much simpler, to DM and to play. This as become the game i use to initiate beginners to RPG. But this is also rich enough so i can run a big campaign up to high level.
Yes, i'd like some more content. I'd like to have the psionics yet, and i'd like an Eberron Campaign Setting. But there is still much more than enough to play with as it is yet.



To the OP: 5e's biggest fault (or feature as some would put it) is that for everything that is not explicitly spelled out you have to consult with your DM to see how they work. This includes all skills, ability checks, many class features (for a example see Wild Sorceror Tides of Chaos) and most backgrounds. Anything other then combat actions ( I attack, I move, I push and I cast a spell) requires a hefty dose of DM intervention.

This is actually one of my biggest complaint about 5E. As a DM, i'd like to have more explicit rules about crafting (can you make it quicker, do you need a check, etc.), building stuffs, magic item prices if you want a setting where magic is more common like, say, Eberron. I don't want to have to make up for everything.

The other complaint is that the game is balanced over 5-7 encounters a day with two short rest a day. But in most situations except dungeon crawls, you won't have that many encounters. And in dungeon crawl, getting a short rest is not that easy. 1 hour is long and NPC can realistically be expected to look for and attack troublemakers resting in a room they just cleaned. And since the classes are balanced over this, that means that some classes are disadvantaged if you only have 2 - 3 encounters per day.

[Ninja_Prawn]

This is actually one of my biggest complaint about 5E. As a DM, i'd like to have more explicit rules about crafting (can you make it quicker, do you need a check, etc.), building stuffs, magic item prices if you want a setting where magic is more common like, say, Eberron. I don't want to have to make up for everything.

Perhaps you'd be interested in my Advanced Crafting Rulebook (https://www.dropbox.com/s/fxshenxuvv6ystn/Advanced%20Crafting%20Rules.pdf?dl=0) and DM's Guide (https://www.dropbox.com/s/qjnfaxsuwupwdvr/Advanced%20Crafting%20Rules%20-%20DM%20Reference.pdf?dl=0) (other books pending)? I'd love to have it playtested a little!

[eastmabl]

6-8 encounters a day works very well in a dungeon crawl, but is often less applicable in a sandbox or when you need to do a lot of travel. One thing I'd like to try is to mix both the regular and longer rest variant. Anytime overland travel is implied the longer rest variant would be used (you gain bebefits of a short rest once a day and a long rest once per week) and when moving into a dungeon switch to the regular rest variant.

Generally, I'm somewhere closer to 4 medium encounters with 1 hard to deadly encounter, along with the chance to take 1-2 short rests. Most of my DMing for 5e is through Greyhawk Reborn, so I'm looking to fit five encounters and roleplaying into a four hour session, so I can't hit the 6-8/day.

But, a DM could say that you don't gain the benefit of a long rest until the conclusion of an adventuring day. It's just heavy-fisted.

[Typewriter]

I began with 3.5, migrated to 4E for about 3 sessions and hated it, then switched to Pathfinder. I've been on 5E since release and it's been the most enjoyable experience I've had so far. One thing I'll mention, before getting into it, is that what drove me from 3.5 is the same thing that drove me from PF - bloat. Too many options, too many 'upgrades', too much trash. This is coming from someone who enjoys character creation options - I like to customize my characters and make changes that define them. But 3.5 eventually got to be too much of a numbers game - go across 100 books looking for the optimal race, weapon, template, feats, etc. etc. And PF just started to let power creep took over. Right around the time I bailed there was a class that came out that I simply referred to as 'the better rogue' because it basically seemed to simply be everything the Rogue was, but better.

Anyways...



Anyway. 5e. I'm willing to be sold on the concept, but right now, I'm not super impressed. I understand that we're going for a flatter power curve in terms of the numbers treadmill, which isn't a bad design goal (though I'm skeptical that WotC would be able to maintain it over the entire game). I'm okay with that. I feel like the whole "simplified action economy" is fundamentally disingenuous—you've still got The Big Action Where You Do Things ("action," which 4e would call a standard action), The Helper Action ("bonus action," which 4e would call a minor action, though I understand that bonus actions are more limited in scope), and The Part Of Your Turn Where You Move (your "movement non-action," which is basically a 4e move action that you happen to be able to split up but somehow doesn't qualify as an action), plus Your Off-Turn Action ("reaction," which 4e would call an immediate, though I understand that there's no equivalent to an opportunity action). I mean, since it's basically the 4e action set with a couple tweaks, it's not like I can't work with it, but I still feel like it's pretending to be simpler than it is. Advantage and Disadvantage make fundamental sense (even if they do make the math a bit harder to do in your head). Splitting up saves feels weird (almost TOO granular), but not so weird that I couldn't get used to it. Proficiency with skills and tools makes sense. I like the Concentration mechanic, so that's cool.


The action economy is drastically simplified and the way they did this is be segregating things properly. In 3.5 you had attacks, attack actions, full round attacks, actions that involved attack rolls, etc. etc. Everything was 'different' but tried to fit in with these narrowly defined rules - as an example, a charge isn't a move and an attack, it's a full round action. What's a full round action? It's something you can do instead of a move and an attack. What does charge do? You move and attack.

In 5E everything is designed around mechanical consistency. You can attack multiple times because of a feature - that feature will specifically tell you what type of action it is. You have a feat that grants you an attack with a second weapon - it specifies that it's a bonus action. This is very similar to 3.5 but the difference here is the consistency of it.

Do you ever read comics? Marvel comics was originally this giant pile of bloat - years of authors had all touched everything and made their own marks and it was never consistent. DC comics had a character accidentally brought back to life at one point because one author didn't know he had been dead for ~10 years. Then, at one point, Marvel did a variant reboot called the 'Ultimate Universe'. I haven't followed it for a few years now but for a long time the comics were amazingly consistent. Because they laid the foundations with plans and intentions and they kept things simple.

That's how I feel 3.5 is different from 5E in regards to action economy - 3.5 was built on a faulty framework that they then spent YEARS tweaking and filling the system with bloat. 5E is designed with specific goals in mind and is trying to remain internally consistent.



In terms of building and playing characters, though? I don't feel like I get what would be fun about it. You seem to make very, very few choices as far as building the character goes. You pick your race, your class, and your background to start, and you generally have a couple sub-choices with that (sub-races, skills off a list, whatever). So far so good. Your character class generally has a couple branching paths that you pick early on (yes, I know that I can't see all of those paths in the SRD book I'm working with, but I do understand that they exist), and if you get spells, you pick new spells at appropriate levels. But then that's it. That seems to be about all you get in terms of customization. You don't pick feats. You don't pick magic items. Your ability scores increase, but since you generally know what abilities you need to focus on, that's not really an exciting choice. Multiclassing exists (and it's nominally closer to 3.5 multiclassing than to 4e multiclassing, which doesn't bother me one bit), but it feels kind of limited? (The whole Multiclass Spellcasting Table thing is kind of hard for me to wrap my head around. Like, I understand it, but I don't get why they chose to do it that way.) Some classes get choices at certain levels, but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Everything feels like it's on rails.

Other people have touched on this but the inclusion of feats changes things up a bit. I would complain that there's not enough feats to pick from, but the ones that do exist are generally good options and also have a lot of potential for modifying how people play the game. Many people, myself included, have a house rule that lets players pick a feat at character creation - I feel like without this the lack of customization hurts a bit. Aside from that - I have no complaints with the system. Your race is no longer a binary choice, now it has a sub choice to grant further customization. Each choice you make (race, class, background) gives you different proficiencies and those change what your character can do. I wish that skill points were a thing rather than binary proficiency but that's my personal preference.

Basically, instead of having 100 options, 90 of which are worthless or pointless, you have 50 options and most have a direct impact on how you play the game.



I also don't understand how mid-level characters are supposed to be much stronger than low-level characters. I understand that the numerical treadmill has intentionally been flattened as far as d20 rolls go, but I don't get how you're supposed to keep up with the non-d20 numbers game. HP seems to scale much faster than damage does, and I don't see the optimization tools necessary to overcome that enough to make combat not drag. Like, I do see damage slightly increasing, but it doesn't look like the majority of classes are going to have a smooth enough increase to actually reliably end equal-CR encounters for a good chunk of the game.


The game is structured differently than what you're probably familiar with so it's harder to see in some places. The game assumes that your rogue will be able to get SA most of the time - it doesn't make it a chore that you have to work towards and accomplish. Fighters get extra attacks AND extra turns and you normally won't have to worry about things like moving and attacking - you simply move and attack. Or if there's lots of weaker enemies (which the system supports very well) then you attack and move, attack and move, attack and move - all in one turn.

In 3.5 it was 'hard' to accomplish certain things, but when you pulled them off they were very powerful. 5E makes those things easier to accomplish but makes them slightly less powerful. It balances amazingly well in my opinion.



Also, magic seems to be all over the map in terms of usefulness. Casters don't seem to have anything even remotely close to enough spells to get through a standard day with 3-4 encounters in it—yes, I do understand that cantrips are at-will (and I do understand that they slightly scale), so you're not really being expected to cast a high-level spell every round, but it still feels like casters are often going to be frustrated by being unable to bring appropriate spell effects to bear. Many (not all) spells feel like they exacerbate the 3.5 "all or nothing" paradigm for magic—there's a handful of save-or-lose spells (which I don't like from a design perspective to begin with), and damaging spells might be level-appropriate exactly when you first get access to them, but everything else (including damaging spells more than a level or two old, even if you use a higher-level slot) seems to have a really small effect on the encounter relative to how incredibly few of them you get per day, no matter what kind of caster you are. (I do understand not wanting casters to just dominate every encounter ever, and I respect wanting to curb their out-of-combat capabilities, but it feels like this just went way too far in the other direction.) I'm not saying that every single spell is useless (far from it), but I am saying that I really don't feel like casters have a smooth and appropriate power curve (level by level or round by round), based on what I've been able to read so far.


Spellcasters have more options that just spells though. Cantrips are more reliable, lots of races provide potential actions, feats grant actions, school specializations grant certain benefits. But that being said - spellcaster are powerful and are designed to stretch their power over the day gaining fewer benefits from short rests than martial characters. On the opposite end of this - martial characters have less than spellcasters but get more back from a short rest. There's give and take there.

Also of note is that the arcane caster classes are all designed slightly differently to provide options for different styles. Warlocks are distinctly different than bards, wizards, or sorcerer - more choices you're supposed to make to define your character.



There's also the fact that we seem to have gotten back to the bad parts of 3.5 in terms of non-casters doing the same damn thing every round. Again, I know that I don't have all the material, but in the material I DO have, it looks like most martial types (for lack of a better term) will just be making attacks every round without doing anything, y'know, interesting or different. Sure, the Rogue will be trying to get Sneak Attack, and the Monk might be able to spend limited ki points to do extra effects, but it generally looks like you don't have a lot of options from round to round more often than not, which really doesn't seem like a compelling and exciting game. Even casters are likely to just be spamming the same cantrips every turn (since they have so bloody few spells per day, and since combat seems set up to take so many rounds), which makes them pretty much as bad as the Fighter et al.


Melee classes generally have build options that open up more versatility, that being said - stuff like this is as fun as the player and the DM make it. The system is a lot more free-form this time around than 3.5 with skills being vague with (Athletics lets you do athletic stuff) as opposed to clearly defined and limited (Roll 20 on your athletics to jump 5 feet). One of my players recently said he wanted to slide down a greased hallway, then twist and jump up, kick off the wall and attack an enemy in an adjacent hallway. I had him roll athletics and he did something really cool and I gave him advantage for it.

But here's the thing - 3.5 and 4e were designed in such a way that I (personally) always felt limited by certain rules. RAW is LAW - the rules say you can do something so that's all you can do with it. 5E is designed around the DM and players working together to make things interesting. RAW is less important in this system (opinion), with more of a focus on imagination and interpretation.



I also feel like everything seems set up to be on kind of a weirdly extended time scale. Healing seems ridiculously prolonged unless you have a dedicated healbot (you reroll hit dice to get small bits of healing, and you only get half of them back per day, and it takes an hour to use them at all?). And of course, with the fact that you can't buy (and therefore can't plan for or expect) magic items, you can't just delegate the "HP refiller" role to a wand or a few Healing Belts. 4e made everyone capable of healing out of combat (just spend surges after a short rest, and you get your surges back after an extended rest), and 3.5 granted enough access to magic items that it really wasn't an issue, but 5e seems hell-bent on making healing really annoyingly hard unless you have a dedicated healer. I don't really see what design goal that's hitting or what type of player that's making happy. Also, the fact that "short rests" take an hour seems odd. On the one hand, I can understand that the designers were clearly trying to give some classes a pool of resources on a recharge timer of "longer than an encounter, shorter than a day," but without reading the full DMG and the RAW guidelines for how often the GM should allow/encourage a short rest, I'm not sure I trust how smoothly that will actually work in practice. (Some GMs will let you rest an hour after nearly every encounter. Some GMs will punish you with interruptions and random encounters every time you try to take a break and basically will never allow a short rest in the middle of the day. I know that the rules can't prevent GMs from being jerks, but I feel like an hour is a sufficiently awkwardly long period of time that you really do have to rely on your GM working with you.) The crafting rules seem unusably slow. There's the "training rules" for gaining new proficiencies, but they cost 250 days? Seems basically unworkable.


Personally I despised the 'magic mart' mentality of 3.5 and love the fact that 5e puts magic items back into rarer categories. That being said if your table wants to be able to reliably buy wands then talk to the DM about it and work something out. That being said - the short/long rest mechanics are pretty simple and straight forward. They don't really require any effort or time, the party just takes their rests and moves on. I'm not sure what you feel is 'annoyingly hard' about any of it. I will say that the timing is a bit odd (1 hour each time) so my group uses a staggered rests. First short rest of the day is 5 minutes, second is 15 minutes, and third is an hour.



There's also the fact that there doesn't seem to be much material. I'm not talking about the fact that I only have access to the free stuff right now—I'm talking about the fact that it doesn't look like WotC has actually published much stuff (despite the system being what, a year and a half old, maybe more?). To be honest, that seems worrisome to me—one major reason I like D&D as a whole is because it offers me lots and lots of different options, but I'm not sure that that's going to happen with 5e. This might change, of course, but I feel like new 3.5 content and new 4e content came out way faster at this point in their respective life cycles.


I personally couldn't be happier with this. I hated the bloat that was PF and 3.5 eventually got so convoluted that building a good character required way too much time. I wish there were more feats, but I feel like I can do just about everything I want with the core classes, their variants, and multi-classing.



I dunno. Like I said, I'm willing to be convinced. I wouldn't go to the effort of making this thread if I didn't want to have fun with the game. But I need to hear from people who've actually played the game to tell me how accurate my assessments are and how completely off base I am. As I keep saying, I understand that I don't have all the material and that I'm therefore working with an incomplete picture. I'm absolutely certain that not all of my initial impressions are correct. (That is, after all, kind of the entire point of this discussion—I want to know what I'm wrong about and what the real situation is.) Is character building as limited as it really appears? Do combats take as long as they seem to? Is casting as messed up as it looks? Are Fighters and other attacky-types as boring as they were back in the 3.5 era? How easy or hard is it to GM 5e (from balancing party capabilities to designing fair encounters to putting in appropriate challenges and rewards), particularly in comparison to 3.5 and 4e? In short, is it worth my time and my money to buy the full versions of the books and look deeper, or does it sound like I want things from my RPGs that 5e isn't set up to deliver?

The mentality behind 3.5 was, in my opinion, designed to clearly define options and rules. 4E took this to an extreme that I despised. What these systems did, however, was allow for players to gauge the abilities of a character they built against a black and white curtain of mechanical prowess. 5E is designed in such a way that players build a character they want to have fun with, then play the game.

In 3.5 if I said I wanted to play a rogue everyone is going to tell me how I *have* to build my character to be worthwhile. I have more options, but those options are a joke. I *have* to be able to buy certain items for my build to work so my *DM* has to put a magic mart into the world with clearly enforced Wealth by level so that I can purchase what I need when I need.

Building and playing a Rogue
Picking a race:
3.5 - I need something with high DEX because my BAB is medium and the AC of enemies scales in such a way that I need every bonus I can get.
5E - I want to play a Half-Orc because that race fits my character concept

Picking a class:
3.5 - Rogue isn't a very good Rogue, I'll pick a variant or completely unrelated class and re-flavor it to Rogue
5E - ROGUE!!!

Picking a feat:
3.5 - Well, I have 1,000 feats across 100 books to choose from but in order to 'keep up' I should consult a guide (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?156350-3-5-The-Rogue-Handbook-A-Fistful-of-d6). and pick one of the recommended options.
5E - Tavern Brawler sounds pretty cool, it'll let me grapple and punch things a bit

Playing the game:
3.5 - I followed all these guides and still pale in comparison to our Batman wizard and charge focused book of nine swords murder-bot
5E - I'm part of the team!

Getting magical equipment:
3.5 - Another +1 rapier? Lame, I can't wait to get to town so I can sell it and buy a wand of grease so that I can get SA more often
5E - Holy cow, a +1 rapier? This is a really rare and cool item. I'm going to call it "Deathpoint" and describe it, and it's amazing!

I know I'm being a bit unfair to 3.5 here, and don't get me wrong - I loved that system. But now that I've moved on to 5E I don't think I could ever go back. It's a lot closer to the game I want to play, a lot closer to the game I want to DM.

[Dimers]

The good:
The magic system works fine in practice, including for multiclass characters if you have a sense for optimization. Martials have considerably more options which are actually effective than in 3.X, if not much to compare to 4E. Ease of character creation, playing and DMing all seem pretty high. Boss monsters have built-in advantages that make them superior to 4E's solos or any single bigbad in 3.X (a boss fight will really get the blood pumping). Healing sans healbot is not a problem in practice, and anybody can take the quite effective Healer feat by 4th level for mundane curing if they feel the party is fragile. Following DMG guidelines, you graduate from 1st to 3rd level with few encounters necessary. Every class has two good saves, one in an important category (Con/Dex/Wis) and one in a less frequent stat (Str/Int/Cha), for tidy balance. Combat takes more rounds to end but less real time to play through.

The "eh":
The character creation system is broader than you feel right now, but it's still shallower than what you're used to ... I dug in for a couple happy months, then discovered that I seem to have tried everything once already. I expect you'd find the same to be true for combat choices (you have more things to try than it looks like but after four or five levels there's nothing really new for the remainder of the game). The numbers situation is not an overall improvement because, while you can't completely suck at anything, you also can't really excel at anything, limiting a great many character concepts. There's no practical difference in action structure, nor in PC action economy, from what you've seen. Multiclassing beyond a dip is generally suboptimal, but to balance that out, there aren't a lot of dead levels in any given class ... you're always getting something valuable Right Now as long as you stay in-class, but if you step off the path, you're on your own. 5E Backgrounds are less engaging than 4E Themes but drastically superior to 3.X's diddlysquat; they're the most adaptable part of the game-as-written for representing character concepts mechanically.

The bad:
WotC is very consciously not putting out much new material, no. You haven't seen the different playtestable class options (and sometimes classes) in the articles, and that certainly expands the range significantly, but they're not frequently considered for play because they're not 'official'. There's no more support for roleplay than in any other edition, and maybe a little less than 3.X and 4E due to preset gains and general lack of granularity. Some classes rely on short rests to thrive, others on long rests, and quite frankly the number of expected rests/encounters per day is nutballs, frequently causing balance problems between those two class categories.

[Zaq]

My goodness, quite a few replies! Just what I was hoping for, though. I'll reply to as much as I can, though I miss an individual point or two in the shuffle.

I'm glad to hear the consensus that 5e combat is relatively quick. The rules I have access to right now don't seem like you could actually resolve the encounter very quickly most of the time (each action, sure, but the encounter as a whole, less so), but that's exactly why I want input from people with actual play experience.

I'm also glad to hear that feats exist and matter. When I see that they've been downgraded to "variant rule" status, it indicates to me that there aren't going to be many feats to choose from (and the game isn't going to be balanced with them in mind), and of course there's the fact that not every GM will allow variant rules. (Since I don't have a GM in mind for any putative 5e game I end up in, I don't want to rely on the GM making good decisions as far as character-building rules go. None of the people I routinely play D&D with would even blink at allowing feats, but you never know.) Of course, them being a variant rule makes it less likely that future supplements will actually have useful feats in them, which worries me somewhat, but I'm glad to hear that most people treat them as being important. That at least means you've got choices at level-up beyond 3rd level, which wasn't at all apparent from the SRD rules.

6-8 medium encounters as a standard adventuring day seems absolutely crazy to me. I guess I have a skewed idea of what a "medium encounter" will entail (both in terms of play time and in terms of daily resources expended), but I have to say I'm skeptical that an average GM could make that actually be entertaining. (A great GM can make damn near anything entertaining, of course, but let's set a baseline first.) Most characters don't seem to have enough uses of per-short-rest resources and per-long-rest resources to do something interesting in the majority of most rounds for 6-8 encounters. Again, I understand that cantrips exist and that there's no barrier to making a "full attack" with whatever action you've got handy, but based on the resources I have access to, your standard at-will options (normal attacks or cantrips or whatever) don't seem to actually be that interesting. Not every turn has to be a jaw-dropping display of power for me to have fun with it, of course, but 5e's fallback options seem much less interesting than many of 4e's at-will powers, and if we're going to have a whole bunch of combat rounds each day that consist of nothing but those fallback options, I remain skeptical that things will be that interesting unless the GM takes it upon themselves to make it interesting. (We don't want to end up like the old "I full attack. Again." Fighter from 3.5, after all.) I do understand that the non-SRD rules probably have more interesting options available, so that's encouraging.

I'm glad to hear that the consensus is that healing isn't that hard. Basically what worries me is that HD heal significantly less than healing surges do (at least past the very lowest levels), you don't get them all back every day, and it's harder to actually spend them (as has been stated, it's not the assumption that there will be a 1 hour rest after most combats). After all, most 4e characters (there are outliers at both ends) get about 6-9 healing surges per day (representing a total of 150%-225% of their max HP every day), they can spend them easily with just a couple minutes of downtime, and they all come back every day (so there's no day-to-day attrition); in contrast, your HD aren't even guaranteed to get you up to full unless you roll well (so they barely represent 100% of your max HP unless you have great luck, and my luck isn't good enough to rely on that), and there's no guarantee that you'll have all of them if you've been having a hard few days. Combine that with the fact that you can't outsource your healing to easily available magic items, and you can see where I might be concerned that a party without a dedicated healer is a party that might have trouble keeping up their HP totals. I had managed to miss the line saying that a long rest restores all your HP as well as half of your HD (I thought you just got the HD back without healing missing HP), so at least you're going to be relatively fresh each day (even if you don't have as much long-term stamina by way of missing HD).

I'm still skeptical about the fact that there's been so very little material produced so far. As might be gathered from the fact that I love 3.5, "bloat" doesn't really bother me as long as there still exist good options for me to find and enjoy. Yes, in a perfect world, we'd do away with the trap options and the crap that's strictly inferior to other things—in no way am I saying that every 3.5 feat/PrC or every 4e power deserves equal consideration—but I get antsy and bored if we go too far in the other direction and I end up feeling constrained in my options. I'd only play a "core only" game of 3.5 if I were desperate, but with so few books out, it seems basically impossible to play a 5e game that's NOT "core only," just because there's so little out there beyond the core books. Am I wrong?

Actually, let's put this another way: how many 5e books actually have meaningful player options? This isn't rhetorical—I seriously want to know.

I do accept that I'm likely not going to see another system with the insane flexibility of 3.5 anytime soon (barring direct spinoffs like PF). It wasn't just the fiddly bits that I loved (though I confess that I do enjoy that part most of the time, not to say all of the time)—it was also the fact that there were so many different ways of approaching the same type of character (for an extreme example, see the Iron Chef Optimization Challenge) and the fact that you could get away with characters that other systems wouldn't dream of allowing. (Not even just uber-powerful ones—I've never actually played a super-optimized caster or anything similar. But weird stuff like my Binder/Incarnate/Chameleon who completely reinvented his power set every day. I've never seen another system that would even come close to supporting a character like that.) I understand that 5e isn't going to be like that. Still, I do hope that it ends up being at least as flexible as 4e (there was a lot of depth to 4e if you went at it with an open mind, and again, there were some pretty insane characters you could concoct from the spread of options laid out for you).

I'll take your collective words for it that spells do have a big effect on encounters. The bulk of the combat spells in the free material I'm looking at seem to be either save-or-lose spells (which I'm conditioned to think of as unreliable at best, not to mention that they're often too strong to be much fun when they work) or damage spells that completely fail to scale (even spending higher level spell slots doesn't seem to get you level-appropriate damage when you're casting a spell that you learned more than a level or two ago). The key word here, of course, is seem: I understand that I don't have the whole picture, as I've stated time and again. It still worries me just how few spell slots you get (especially if they're supposed to last 6-8 encounters!), so I really do hope that spells actually make an appropriate splash when they hit the field.

I can certainly accept a system that's relatively more rules-light than I'm accustomed to if it's consistently designed with that style of play in mind. It is, of course, different to GM a rules-light system than a rules-heavy system (speaking very, very broadly, I've found that it's easier to do an okay job GMing a rules-light system compared to GMing a rules-heavy system, but it's harder to do a great job GMing one, though YMMV). My group has had some bad experiences with systems that try to be rules-light but screw it up one way or another (Better Angels was a notable example of that—skimming the book made you think that it was supposed to be very rules-light and narrative-based, but the powers and stats that it gave you really didn't deliver on the creative freedom that it promised), so I guess I'm more comfortable with a rules-heavy system in a vacuum, at least for a system that is designed with campaigns in mind (e.g., D&D) as opposed to for a system that is designed with one-shots in mind (e.g., Kobolds Ate My Baby).

It does seem that the consensus is that 5e is relatively easy to GM, which is important. Question about GMing—how easy is it to design your own CR-appropriate monsters that aren't premade? Are there good guidelines in the books (or guidelines that can be relatively easily synthesized from the source material, such as 4e's wonderful MM3 On A Business Card)? Ideally, it would be best to both have access to a wide variety of premade monsters and access to rules that make creating new monsters pretty easy, though I'll take what I can get.

Overall, I do like what I'm hearing. I'm going to have to give this some more thought (and I still very much want more input, both on the questions I asked in the OP and on the questions I asked here), but I'm leaning towards at least checking out the basic books. We shall see.

[Vogonjeltz]

That is a very gamist approach. You could theoretically do 3 encounters, have a month of downtime, and not be able to regain long rest resources because you didn't finish 6 to 8 encounters. I don't understand why designers cant base a game against one encounter per day, it would make things so much simpler.

Encounters encompasses more than just combat, it's also inclusive of puzzles, traps, etc...

Given that an encounter probably takes less than 10 minutes of our characters lives (maybe only 1 minute) it would be incredibly boring to only have one per day. Remember, encounters aren't just combat, they're also puzzles, traps, story interactions with NPCs, etc...

So, just looking at the basic set adventure, the characters have 8 encounters within the first day.


I think the issue here is that you are comparing it to 3.5.

It doesn't have the same goals and it does not play in the same way. It is much closer to 2e than 3.x.

I used to play 3.5, never again.

Yeah, I only play the older systems under duress, and having played 5th edition I'm much more inclined to improvise now when duress appears.

[AstralFire]

I'm still skeptical about the fact that there's been so very little material produced so far. As might be gathered from the fact that I love 3.5, "bloat" doesn't really bother me as long as there still exist good options for me to find and enjoy. Yes, in a perfect world, we'd do away with the trap options and the crap that's strictly inferior to other things—in no way am I saying that every 3.5 feat/PrC or every 4e power deserves equal consideration—but I get antsy and bored if we go too far in the other direction and I end up feeling constrained in my options. I'd only play a "core only" game of 3.5 if I were desperate, but with so few books out, it seems basically impossible to play a 5e game that's NOT "core only," just because there's so little out there beyond the core books. Am I wrong?

Different strokes for different folks, but while I felt this way for a long time, now that I have seriously experienced rules-medium systems that didn't depend as heavily on a long list of options as 3E and 4E have, I find it genuinely tiring to go back to that paradigm.


Actually, let's put this another way: how many 5e books actually have meaningful player options? This isn't rhetorical—I seriously want to know.

Just one that I'm aware of, and it wasn't the focus of the book at all. Player options mostly seems to be free stuff launched on the website's Unearthed Arcana, which I freely devour and am starting to tinker with as I get a better idea of where there are actual content shortcomings.


I do accept that I'm likely not going to see another system with the insane flexibility of 3.5 anytime soon (barring direct spinoffs like PF). It wasn't just the fiddly bits that I loved (though I confess that I do enjoy that part most of the time, not to say all of the time)—it was also the fact that there were so many different ways of approaching the same type of character (for an extreme example, see the Iron Chef Optimization Challenge) and the fact that you could get away with characters that other systems wouldn't dream of allowing. (Not even just uber-powerful ones—I've never actually played a super-optimized caster or anything similar. But weird stuff like my Binder/Incarnate/Chameleon who completely reinvented his power set every day. I've never seen another system that would even come close to supporting a character like that.) I understand that 5e isn't going to be like that. Still, I do hope that it ends up being at least as flexible as 4e (there was a lot of depth to 4e if you went at it with an open mind, and again, there were some pretty insane characters you could concoct from the spread of options laid out for you).

Hah, I -hated- the Incarnate and Factotum specifically because they're such meta classes that really don't make sense to me from any IC perspective. There is some flexibility in ways of approaching the same character, nevertheless.


I'll take your collective words for it that spells do have a big effect on encounters. The bulk of the combat spells in the free material I'm looking at seem to be either save-or-lose spells (which I'm conditioned to think of as unreliable at best, not to mention that they're often too strong to be much fun when they work) or damage spells that completely fail to scale (even spending higher level spell slots doesn't seem to get you level-appropriate damage when you're casting a spell that you learned more than a level or two ago). The key word here, of course, is seem: I understand that I don't have the whole picture, as I've stated time and again. It still worries me just how few spell slots you get (especially if they're supposed to last 6-8 encounters!), so I really do hope that spells actually make an appropriate splash when they hit the field.

There's not really a save-or-lose problem, but you will need to get more used to the idea that everything can fail no matter how you try, in this system. That took me a while. Blaster spells do eventually fall off a bit compared to martial damage, but that's an "eventually", when blasters should be focused on wiping out small armies, not taking out a dude one at a time. Sorcerer can still do some insane damage in a nova.


It does seem that the consensus is that 5e is relatively easy to GM, which is important. Question about GMing—how easy is it to design your own CR-appropriate monsters that aren't premade? Are there good guidelines in the books (or guidelines that can be relatively easily synthesized from the source material, such as 4e's wonderful MM3 On A Business Card)? Ideally, it would be best to both have access to a wide variety of premade monsters and access to rules that make creating new monsters pretty easy, though I'll take what I can get.

Overall, I do like what I'm hearing. I'm going to have to give this some more thought (and I still very much want more input, both on the questions I asked in the OP and on the questions I asked here), but I'm leaning towards at least checking out the basic books. We shall see.

There are decent guidelines there. I never had in-depth experience with 4E -- I admired the system, I just was uninterested in consistently putting in the prep work necessary to run incredibly grid-heavy games with lots of setpieces and environmental things as I would have liked to online -- so I can't compare to the monster creation rules there. But they're actually helpful rather than non-existent; I don't tend to create monsters very much from scratch, but I do make a lot of humanoid enemies with PC classes or a custom legendary action here or there, and the guidelines help a lot with putting those together.

[Zaq]

Different strokes for different folks, but while I felt this way for a long time, now that I have seriously experienced rules-medium systems that didn't depend as heavily on a long list of options as 3E and 4E have, I find it genuinely tiring to go back to that paradigm.



Just one that I'm aware of, and it wasn't the focus of the book at all. Player options mostly seems to be free stuff launched on the website's Unearthed Arcana, which I freely devour and am starting to tinker with as I get a better idea of where there are actual content shortcomings.

Hmm. That's worrisome, but I guess as long as Unearthed Arcana actually does contain usable material, I might be able to work with this.




Hah, I -hated- the Incarnate and Factotum specifically because they're such meta classes that really don't make sense to me from any IC perspective. There is some flexibility in ways of approaching the same character, nevertheless.

If I may quote you, different strokes, etc. etc. But I'm glad to hear that there's some flexibility. I do see that there's different archetypes and stuff, but with some classes not getting spells/powers, limited feat support, and everything else, I'm hoping that it's not just a case of "you've played one [class] with [archetype], you've played them all." And I do hope that there are multiple ways of approaching broad roles.



There's not really a save-or-lose problem, but you will need to get more used to the idea that everything can fail no matter how you try, in this system. That took me a while. Blaster spells do eventually fall off a bit compared to martial damage, but that's an "eventually", when blasters should be focused on wiping out small armies, not taking out a dude one at a time. Sorcerer can still do some insane damage in a nova.

The bolded part worries me. I tend to have rotten luck with dice (it's not just perception—I've gone long periods of writing down every relevant d20 roll I make in an attempt to get some actual data, and I tend to roll less well than my friends do, no matter which dice I'm using and whether I'm using a tower or not or whatever). So I tend to like to either optimize the hell out of my accuracy (which I understand isn't really possible with 5e's flattened numbers treadmill) or focus on options that don't have failure chances, or some combination thereof. I have played characters without lots of accuracy-boosters, but I tend to be uncomfortable with them. Hmm.




There are decent guidelines there. I never had in-depth experience with 4E -- I admired the system, I just was uninterested in consistently putting in the prep work necessary to run incredibly grid-heavy games with lots of setpieces and environmental things as I would have liked to online -- so I can't compare to the monster creation rules there. But they're actually helpful rather than non-existent; I don't tend to create monsters very much from scratch, but I do make a lot of humanoid enemies with PC classes or a custom legendary action here or there, and the guidelines help a lot with putting those together.

As long as there are usable guidelines, that's a good start. All things with practice, of course, but the easier it is to generate challenges no matter where the story goes, the easier it is to tackle that specific aspect of GMing.

[Dimers]

how easy is it to design your own CR-appropriate monsters that aren't premade?

'Bout the same as 4E, from what I've seen. You can go overboard pretty easily by, say, picking every spell each member of the Shadow Druid Circle will have prepared. But the basics are simple. The array of existing monsters is of course smaller than what you'd have to work with in 3.X or 4E. Sad to say, I've seen no viable port for transferring stats from edition to edition.

Oh, I forgot one selling point -- best single-class balance of any edition, easily. The ranger is the weak sister of the bunch and yet people who play it will pretty consistently say it works fine in comparison to any other class. If the other classes are all tier 3, ranger might be tier 3-and-a-third.

And that reminds me of another "eh" point -- there's more combat cooperation and interactivity between PCs in 5th than 3.X but less than in 4E. Less emphasis on an interesting environment than 4E too, though that's no surprise.

EDIT:
I tend to have rotten luck with dice ... I have played characters without lots of accuracy-boosters, but I tend to be uncomfortable with them.

You can make enemies make saves instead of you rolling attacks. That leaves out a massive chunk of the options, but it's something.

[Malifice]

I'm glad to hear the consensus that 5e combat is relatively quick. The rules I have access to right now don't seem like you could actually resolve the encounter very quickly most of the time (each action, sure, but the encounter as a whole, less so), but that's exactly why I want input from people with actual play experience.

Extremely quick. The easier maths and rules light nature of the game make it much quicker than 3.P of 4E. After your first few sessions you dont need to look rules and cruch up every player turn.

Combats last around 5-6 rounds on average, and a player turn is over inside of 30 seconds. ToTM means less fiddling with minis (but you can still use them if you want - I use both options, with minis getting cracked out for bigger set piece battels).

You'll struggle to have a standard 'medium-hard' combat encounter last more than 15 minutes.


I'm also glad to hear that feats exist and matter. When I see that they've been downgraded to "variant rule" status, it indicates to me that there aren't going to be many feats to choose from (and the game isn't going to be balanced with them in mind), and of course there's the fact that not every GM will allow variant rules. (Since I don't have a GM in mind for any putative 5e game I end up in, I don't want to rely on the GM making good decisions as far as character-building rules go. None of the people I routinely play D&D with would even blink at allowing feats, but you never know.) Of course, them being a variant rule makes it less likely that future supplements will actually have useful feats in them, which worries me somewhat, but I'm glad to hear that most people treat them as being important. That at least means you've got choices at level-up beyond 3rd level, which wasn't at all apparent from the SRD rules.

Your choices post character creation involve feats and usually selecting an archetype (and if desired multiclassing). In addition many classes have other choices built in (manouvers for BM fighters, spell selection, invocations etc).


6-8 medium encounters as a standard adventuring day seems absolutely crazy to me. I guess I have a skewed idea of what a "medium encounter" will entail (both in terms of play time and in terms of daily resources expended), but I have to say I'm skeptical that an average GM could make that actually be entertaining.

Remember - every 2 or so encounters the party get a 'short rest' (the game expects around 2 short rests per 6-8 encounter adventuring day) so there are pauses in the action. 'Encounters' include environmental hazards (lakes of lava, traps, locked doors etc) and social challenges in addition to combat encounters - basically anything that will drain party resources and has an XP value attached.

Even the combat encounters are over very quick. I run sessions of usually around 5-6 hours in length (an afternoon session on the weekend) and I can generally get around 5-6 encounters in over that time frame of game play (around 1 per hour) in a tightly packed 'dungeon' environment.

6-8 encounters per AD really isnt that hard to set up - it's also not a figure that you need to religiously adhere to - I stick to this number around 50 percent of the time (it's super easy in dungeon/ ruin type environments). It only becomes hard to enforce in long wilderness treks.

I find if you set an approx. 50 percent frequency of 6-8 encounter AD's, your players will conserve resources around this expectation even on the shorter AD's (they're never sure if there is another encounter around the corner).

Finally, the DMG has options to help you police the adventuring day - it has a 'longer rest' variant that makes a short rest an overnight sleep, and a long rest take a week. Use this variant if your group only ever get 1-3 encounters in a typical game day.


Most characters don't seem to have enough uses of per-short-rest resources and per-long-rest resources to do something interesting in the majority of most rounds for 6-8 encounters.

The game isnt designed for characters to spam high level spell slots and nova action surge/ superioirty dice. Over a 6 encounter/ 2 short rest AD a lowly [Battlemaster] Fighter of 3rd level has [3 second winds, 12 superiority dice/ special manouvers/ 3 action surges] as his expendable abilities - in addition to his basic attack and skills. Thats around 3 x encounter uses of a special ability [plus basic attacks and combat manouvers]. A Wizard of the same level has 3 x 1st level spells and 3 x 2nd level spells - enough to drop 1 x spell per encounter [plus unlimited cantrips and rituals].


Again, I understand that cantrips exist and that there's no barrier to making a "full attack" with whatever action you've got handy, but based on the resources I have access to, your standard at-will options (normal attacks or cantrips or whatever) don't seem to actually be that interesting. Not every turn has to be a jaw-dropping display of power for me to have fun with it, of course, but 5e's fallback options seem much less interesting than many of 4e's at-will powers, and if we're going to have a whole bunch of combat rounds each day that consist of nothing but those fallback options, I remain skeptical that things will be that interesting unless the GM takes it upon themselves to make it interesting. (We don't want to end up like the old "I full attack. Again." Fighter from 3.5, after all.) I do understand that the non-SRD rules probably have more interesting options available, so that's encouraging.

And those options exist for most classes. Look at the Fighter - it has three main archetypes - the Eldritch knight (so you have the toolkit of spells at your disposal) the Champion (which IS a basic 'point and click' fighter and the one you have seen in the SRD) and the Battlemaster (which is basically a 5E Warblade, gaining access to a pool of special manouvers as it advances in level). 5E supports different styles of play and different desires for complexity from its players.

If you want a 'point and click full attack bot' with passive abilites, play a champion. If you want a more nuanced TOB style warblade, play a battlemaster.


I'm glad to hear that the consensus is that healing isn't that hard. Basically what worries me is that HD heal significantly less than healing surges do (at least past the very lowest levels), you don't get them all back every day, and it's harder to actually spend them (as has been stated, it's not the assumption that there will be a 1 hour rest after most combats). After all, most 4e characters (there are outliers at both ends) get about 6-9 healing surges per day (representing a total of 150%-225% of their max HP every day), they can spend them easily with just a couple minutes of downtime, and they all come back every day (so there's no day-to-day attrition); in contrast, your HD aren't even guaranteed to get you up to full unless you roll well (so they barely represent 100% of your max HP unless you have great luck, and my luck isn't good enough to rely on that), and there's no guarantee that you'll have all of them if you've been having a hard few days. Combine that with the fact that you can't outsource your healing to easily available magic items, and you can see where I might be concerned that a party without a dedicated healer is a party that might have trouble keeping up their HP totals. I had managed to miss the line saying that a long rest restores all your HP as well as half of your HD (I thought you just got the HD back without healing missing HP), so at least you're going to be relatively fresh each day (even if you don't have as much long-term stamina by way of missing HD).

A 5E character has (sans any inherent healing powers, which most classes get) effectively 300 percent of their HP each day.

Assume a Fighter 5 with a Con of 14. He has 44 Hit points. He also has a pool of healing each day equal to 5d10+10 on top of this (his hit dice). Finally, at the end of the adventuring day he also heals all his hit point damage following a long rest (and recovers half his spend hit dice). Lastly, as a fighter he also has the 'second wind' class feature that lets him 1/short rest heal 1d10+5 damage as a bonus action (adding another 3d10+15 points of healing to the mix on a standard AD).

So on top of his 44 HP, he also has a pool of 8d10+25 to heal himself with over the course of the AD, and fully heals ALL HP at the end of the AD and recovers most of that pool of healing.


Actually, let's put this another way: how many 5e books actually have meaningful player options? This isn't rhetorical—I seriously want to know.

At this stage, two main books plus players guides. In addition, each of the adventure paths released by Wizards contains a 'players guide' book that contains more (the recent Elemental Evil AP contained genasi races, aaracrocka races and a bunch of elemental themed spells for example).


I'll take your collective words for it that spells do have a big effect on encounters. The bulk of the combat spells in the free material I'm looking at seem to be either save-or-lose spells (which I'm conditioned to think of as unreliable at best, not to mention that they're often too strong to be much fun when they work) or damage spells that completely fail to scale (even spending higher level spell slots doesn't seem to get you level-appropriate damage when you're casting a spell that you learned more than a level or two ago). The key word here, of course, is seem: I understand that I don't have the whole picture, as I've stated time and again. It still worries me just how few spell slots you get (especially if they're supposed to last 6-8 encounters!), so I really do hope that spells actually make an appropriate splash when they hit the field.

From play experience and DMing experience, a well placed spell can either end or definately turn an encounter on its head in favor of the spellcaster. Sleep at 1st level is a game changer against goblin and kobold hordes, and it scales well enough to remain useful over low-mid level play (when fireball comes online).

From mid level play, Wizards are dropping 2-3 spells per encounter, with cantrips taking place of the other 2-3 combat rounds of the encoutner. Its a roughly 50/50 split between [cantrips/ basic attacks] and [spells/ special abilities] if you stick to the 6-8 encounter default adventuring day.


It does seem that the consensus is that 5e is relatively easy to GM, which is important. Question about GMing—how easy is it to design your own CR-appropriate monsters that aren't premade? Are there good guidelines in the books (or guidelines that can be relatively easily synthesized from the source material, such as 4e's wonderful MM3 On A Business Card)? Ideally, it would be best to both have access to a wide variety of premade monsters and access to rules that make creating new monsters pretty easy, though I'll take what I can get.

The DMG contains very detailed rules for creating and adjusting your own monsters and assigning CRs to them. Theyre very easy to use (but remember its more of an art than a science)


Overall, I do like what I'm hearing. I'm going to have to give this some more thought (and I still very much want more input, both on the questions I asked in the OP and on the questions I asked here), but I'm leaning towards at least checking out the basic books. We shall see.

If you lived in Perth Australia I would invite you to my table for a test run. Im sure youd love it.

[EscherEnigma]

My stance on 5e was the same as my stance on 4e was the same as my stance on 3.5e.

"If there's a game, and that's what the GM is running, I'll pick it up."

Sure, there's some things to like about it. There's some things to not like about it. But if you're invited to a game, or know some people playing and ask to be invited, you probably aren't going to be able to choose the system. Similarly, I don't know any gamers who get invited to join a game and then base their decision on what system the GM wants to run.

I'm sure other people have different experiences then I do. But that's my take on it. Pick it up if there's a game to be had, or let it wait if there isn't. It's not like you won't be able to pick it up later if a game shows up where that's the chosen rules, ya know?

[Godwyn]

The lack of bloat, and lack of need for it, is part of the beauty of 5e. Lack of bloat is not the same as lack of options though. As Typewriter said, its the difference between having 100 options, 90 of which are bad, and having just 20 or so, but each one makes a meaningful difference to the character. I had played and DM'ed 3e from when it came out, to 3.5 to its death, to 4e briefly, then on to PF. I would rather use the 5e system than any of them.

I find the 5e rule set a lot more elegant. Part of earlier edition book delving was always having to find the right combination of things to make a character concept work. 5e made the rule set solid so that the base rules support more concepts off of the core chassis. Making the rules support a concept easier makes it so that you can spend more time RPing the character how you want, instead of having to figure out the combination of things to allow the concept to work.

[Corran]

In terms of building and playing characters, though? I don't feel like I get what would be fun about it. You seem to make very, very few choices as far as building the character goes.
There is some merit in this statement. After a few and very basic initial choices, you are being railroaed into playing a mechanically predetermined character. There are still choices you can make, but there are extremelly limited compared to what we had in previous editions. And I am not talkiling about limited options that will expand as new material gets released, I am talking about the whole process of making characters. No skill points, feats and prestige classes (subclasses are nice but they dont generate the versatility that prestige classes did) like in 3e, no feats and powers like in 4e.

The game is well designed, that shows. Like 4e, this edition is one that was created carefully and with style, and it must have taken a lot of effort and coordinated work, unlike what it must have been the case with editions prior to 4e (saying that while I am a massive fan of 3e myself). Unlike 4e, this edition is much closer to dnd roots, and has a magic system that is actually worth to give a crap about (unlike 4e which despite all its good points, had a terrible spell system - or rather didd not have one at all).

My thoughts are:
1) If you dont mind about playing a completely broken and unbalanced fro the very start game, whle on the same time you have all the options in the world to create another pun-pun, you already have your favourite edition, namely 3e.
2) If you like tactical combat that lasts for hours, and no one wants to play an actual spellcaster, you already have your favourite edition, namely 4e.
3) 5e is a balanced game, combat is a lot faster than in 4e, spellcasting is back and is more in balance with the rest of the game, BUT character customization took a step back since 4e, still you get to make just enough choices to create an interesting character. 5e tries to make a compromise and please everyone, while at the same time is a carefuly designed game. 5e might not be your favourite edition, but it might be the edition that both you and all your friends will enjoy the most, as it seems to be making some very important compromises and have a build in flexibility, to accomodate a lot of different expectations that players have for the game.


That's my take on it, hope it helped.

[Ninja_Prawn]

As others have said, homebrewing monsters is fairly easy, once you get your head around the rules (pages 273 to 281 of the DMG). There's a huge firewall between PC character sheets and monster stat blocks; monsters are easier to build but PCs have more interesting abilities. The numbers scale differently as well, so it's hard to convert between the two.

One thing nobody's mentioned (as far as I can see): WotC have recently brought back the prestige class concept. It's not in the core rules but it is, again, easy to use. There's plenty of room for it to grow with new releases.

[Thematthew]

The one thing I've said about 5e to people is that after trying it once it was immediately my favorite d&d system, and I've played every single one.

[djreynolds]

In the States, at least, call around for someone playing adventurers league. Just google it. Usually Wed and Sun. Using the standard array of 15/14/13/12/10/8 roll up a character with feat and ASI as you level up. Look on the web for some character maker, input the data, and print it out. It will cost you $4.00 to play. Just ask what level they are at and show up with a paladin.

A lot of apps and websites will do half the work for you as you create and then print out the character. Just remember spells that have a concentration requirement allow you to only have one up at a time.

[Ninja_Prawn]

Just ask what level they are at and show up with a paladin.

Love it.

And it makes sense. Paladins can tank, deal damage, heal and control (to some extent). I've been thinking for a while I'd like to do a campaign where the PCs are all paladins in some kind of knightly order...

[Gwendol]

The balance of the classes is a lot better in this edition, without making them all "samey". There is very little of "play X and you'll be a better Y than the Y class is" from 3.x.

This to me means that one is free to focus on the roleplay more than worry about the character building minigame. Of course, if the latter is what matters then this edition is likely not for you.

[Gwendol]

Love it.

And it makes sense. Paladins can tank, deal damage, heal and control (to some extent). I've been thinking for a while I'd like to do a campaign where the PCs are all paladins in some kind of knightly order...

I'd play in that game! :-)

[Tehnar]

I definitely see that as a feature - it gives the power back to the DM and lets them actually run the game rather than just administer it. We already have computerised games; tabletop games need to offer something different or no one will want to play them.

I don't see how having coherent rules takes away power from the DM, or reduces the DM to a administrator. Having clear rules allows the DM to spend time on actual adventure design, NPC personalities and the story and not worry how he will adjucate things his players will want to do.


Encounters encompasses more than just combat, it's also inclusive of puzzles, traps, etc...

Given that an encounter probably takes less than 10 minutes of our characters lives (maybe only 1 minute) it would be incredibly boring to only have one per day. Remember, encounters aren't just combat, they're also puzzles, traps, story interactions with NPCs, etc...

So, just looking at the basic set adventure, the characters have 8 encounters within the first day.


I would like to see a example of a non railroad adventure that has the expected 6 to 8 non trivial encounters per day. I really don't see a way that in any non railroad game you can have 8 encounters per day on average.


Basically since it looks I will be playing the devils advocate here goes:

Things wrong with 5e, Part 1.

While we will argue about rules in the later parts, the biggest failing 5e has nothing to do with actual mechanics or DnD at all. Its 2016 and its unacceptable that you don't have some sort of digital format for all your rules. While some publishers go the easy route and just have PDFs of their products available for sale, and others have completely freed their rules via various online tools WotC is behaving like its 1990 and internet is still a thing some scientists near Geneva are using. I don't have a lot of free time on my hands, so being able to read the rules during the daily commute or while traveling is essential. Not to mention having all the rules available on a digital devices frees up table clutter and makes it unnecessary to lug books around.

Having pioneered the SRD, and the fairly solid 4e character tools, I really don't see why they didn't do anything similar. Paizo proves a comprehensive SRD can work (and work well), and its a cheap and easy solution. No, the 5e SRD does not count with its extremely limited scope.

[rlc]

Oh look, this thread again.

[Typewriter]

I don't see how having coherent rules takes away power from the DM, or reduces the DM to a administrator. Having clear rules allows the DM to spend time on actual adventure design, NPC personalities and the story and not worry how he will adjucate things his players will want to do.

I'll try to throw my 2 cents in here, though it's a bit hard to explain, but I'll try. I hated the 3.5 sub-forum here. 'RAW is LAW' should be the tagline there. If someone came to the group with a problem then everyone would jump all over them telling them how to use RAW to solve their problem, and if the DM wasn't obeying all of that then the DM was nerfing the player or not playing fairly or any number of things. There was an expectation that the wealth-by-level tables were followed. There was an expectation that CRs were as defined the book. If the 'rules' said that a player could do something and a DM didn't let them then that DM was hitler. Because of this I usually wound up getting burnt out on that particular sub pretty quickly whenever I went there.

But that's the sub, not my table. Most of the time I didn't have these problems, but sometimes I did.

A player has an ability that says that if they move 10 feet in a round they get bonus damage wants to run past an enemy then turn around and strike them. I say no because the intent is clearly an empowered charge - running past someone then turning around to strike them is going to throw off your momentum. "THANKS. I GUESS MY BUILD IS WASTED".

Another player wants to use his elite 120 diplomacy skill to convince someone he's an angel of mercy - right after that individual saw him murder his buddy. No. That guy has a situational modifier to refute your claims of about +10000 - there are no words or actions short of magic that could convince him you're not a threat. "THANKS FOR WASTING MY TIME. I SPECIFICALLY WENT ONLINE TO FIND THE BEST DIPLOMANCER BUILD I COULD FIND."

I have a guy cast a custom spell, not even directed at the party - more of a plot point - and someone flips out because they know every spell in 3.5 and that one isn't in the books.

Those are a couple examples of a couple dozen over the ~10 years I DMed 3.5/PF. In some instances I could have been clearer ahead of time about my intentions (I despise WBL and the magic mart mentality of 3.5 but some people expect it because 'the rules say so') and over time I learned what sorts of things I needed to tell people ahead of time. So, it didn't affect me very much but I also didn't have any players who were the sorts of people to go onto the OotS 3.5 forum and get told what they were 'entitled' to by the posters there.

In short, the framework of 3.5 (in my opinion) designed a setting where it made players feel entitled to things because "It's in the rules", and it resulted in the DM having to defend choices or simply state, repeatedly, "Rule 0" - which is not a good way to foster a fun game environment.



I would like to see a example of a non railroad adventure that has the expected 6 to 8 non trivial encounters per day. I really don't see a way that in any non railroad game you can have 8 encounters per day on average.


I think that depends on what you mean by encounter and by railroad. My players were escaping a prison recently and on the way out they had 2 fights, one social encounter, 3 traps, and 1 locked room. That's not average, but some of that stuff sailed by so quickly that I almost forgot it when I was calculating XP. I think the average day is going to be a lot fewer, but the average 'adventurer' day could easily hit 6-8.



While we will argue about rules in the later parts, the biggest failing 5e has nothing to do with actual mechanics or DnD at all. Its 2016 and its unacceptable that you don't have some sort of digital format for all your rules. While some publishers go the easy route and just have PDFs of their products available for sale, and others have completely freed their rules via various online tools WotC is behaving like its 1990 and internet is still a thing some scientists near Geneva are using. I don't have a lot of free time on my hands, so being able to read the rules during the daily commute or while traveling is essential. Not to mention having all the rules available on a digital devices frees up table clutter and makes it unnecessary to lug books around.

Having pioneered the SRD, and the fairly solid 4e character tools, I really don't see why they didn't do anything similar. Paizo proves a comprehensive SRD can work (and work well), and its a cheap and easy solution. No, the 5e SRD does not count with its extremely limited scope.

I agree that some of that stuff would be nice but in most situations things like this come down to money. Players want something but not enough to warrant the cost of making it. It doesn't effect me too much because I'm a computer programmer so I've always just made whatever tools I needed for my games. I'm already working on a loot generator for 5E as an example. One other thing to consider is that 3.5 was built with a plethora of content - it was easy to get people hooked using the SRD who would then turn around to buy 1 or 2 more books (at least). With 5E keeping things fairly limited so far giving away the core rules would be roughly equivalent of giving away the entire ruleset.

[Ninja_Prawn]

Oh look, this thread again.

Yeah... someone should write up a comprehensive summary of 5e's pros and cons and then get it stickied to the top of this subforum, or included in the 'notable threads'. Then we could just link to it and be done.

It's not like there's any real debate as to what the pros and cons are, and there's only so many starting points the OP could be coming from.

[Malifice]

I would like to see a example of a non railroad adventure that has the expected 6 to 8 non trivial encounters per day. I really don't see a way that in any non railroad game you can have 8 encounters per day on average.

Adventure 1: An elven princess is captured. You need to free her by midnight or she will be sacrificed, summoning a demon that will destroy the town.

She's located at a nearby ancient ruin

Insert an encounter on the way, and six more in the dungeon, including one trap, the BBEG evil wizard, a minor demon, the Wizards cultist minions, two helmed horror guardians and an ooze trapped in an abandoned room.

Or 2: the party are hired to recover the magical greatsword Blaclrazor before Keraptis the arch mage completes his ritual to siphon it's power. If they can recover it intact before this happens, their employer will pay them double.

Insert a dungeon with 6-8 encounters.

Or 3: The PCs have booked a ship to (wherever). On the way the ship sails past an uncharted Island that appears on no maps and is attacked by a chimera from the island, damaging the ship. (Encounter 1). While the ship is repaired, the PCs investigate the island. There they discover a magic portal which traps them leaving them with 3 days to explore the maze within and find an escape before being marooned. Insert a cunning maze with dozens of traps and monsters.

Or 4: The players enter an arena challenge in town.

Or any one else of a million different ideas.

[Typewriter]

Adventure 1: An elven princess is captured. You need to free her by midnight or she will be sacrificed, summoning a demon that will destroy the town.

She's located at a nearby ancient ruin

Insert an encounter on the way, and six more in the dungeon, including one trap, the BBEG evil wizard, a minor demon, the Wizards cultist minions, two helmed horror guardians and an ooze trapped in an abandoned room.

Or 2: the party are hired to recover the magical greatsword Blaclrazor before Keraptis the arch mage completes his ritual to siphon it's power. If they can recover it intact before this happens, their employer will pay them double.

Insert a dungeon with 6-8 encounters.

Or 3: The PCs have booked a ship to (wherever). On the way the ship sails past an uncharted Island that appears on no maps and is attacked by a chimera from the island, damaging the ship. (Encounter 1). While the ship is repaired, the PCs investigate the island. There they discover a magic portal which traps them leaving them with 3 days to explore the maze within and find an escape before being marooned. Insert a cunning maze with dozens of traps and monsters.

Or 4: The players enter an arena challenge in town.

Or any one else of a million different ideas.

While those are all great examples, there are still some oddities to consider. If every day some sort of timed adventure crops up then you do start to sail closer to railroading. On the flip-side if you're not having adventures every day then it's not 'on average' and the mechanic of getting back half your expended HP on a long rest stops being as important.

I think the intent of the game is how you and I do things - adventures with 6-8 encounters, not 6-8 encounters per day 'on average' - that's just goofy wording.

[Theodoxus]

I agree that some of that stuff would be nice but in most situations things like this come down to money. Players want something but not enough to warrant the cost of making it. It doesn't effect me too much because I'm a computer programmer so I've always just made whatever tools I needed for my games. I'm already working on a loot generator for 5E as an example. One other thing to consider is that 3.5 was built with a plethora of content - it was easy to get people hooked using the SRD who would then turn around to buy 1 or 2 more books (at least). With 5E keeping things fairly limited so far giving away the core rules would be roughly equivalent of giving away the entire ruleset.

I think Paizo's model would suit WotC - give out the rules for "free" - i mean, some would buy them, but a quick internet search would turn up the PDFs. But then, create adventures - hardcopy (I think Paizo kinda failed there, but then I HATE using PDF adventures.. especially the APs they did, where you're looking at 2 or 3 pages, in far distant places in the same book... not an easy feat with a tablet.)

If WotC concentrated more on releasing modules (even updated rehashes of their famous IPs) and less on the guides and UA stuff... we'd be better off. They've given players all the rules needed to create, modify, cobble and refluff classes, races, skills, social interactions, etc. Any concept from 3.PF is pretty easy to convert to 5E... there's a ton of redone Rangers floating around out there... But what we don't have is good adventures that are internally balanced for 5E. And from what I've seen, most of the general public is reluctant to submit their own ideas out there.

Maybe the SRD et al will help in that regard - I don't know.

[DanyBallon]

I think Paizo's model would suit WotC - give out the rules for "free" - i mean, some would buy them, but a quick internet search would turn up the PDFs. But then, create adventures - hardcopy (I think Paizo kinda failed there, but then I HATE using PDF adventures.. especially the APs they did, where you're looking at 2 or 3 pages, in far distant places in the same book... not an easy feat with a tablet.)

If WotC concentrated more on releasing modules (even updated rehashes of their famous IPs) and less on the guides and UA stuff... we'd be better off. They've given players all the rules needed to create, modify, cobble and refluff classes, races, skills, social interactions, etc. Any concept from 3.PF is pretty easy to convert to 5E... there's a ton of redone Rangers floating around out there... But what we don't have is good adventures that are internally balanced for 5E. And from what I've seen, most of the general public is reluctant to submit their own ideas out there.

Maybe the SRD et al will help in that regard - I don't know.

The actual model of two big adventures a year is already quite similar to Paizo AP release, except that buying 12 smaller module, you buy 2 bigger adventures. And as for now the level range is quite similar to what Paizo is doing with their AP. Maybe they could insert 2 shorter stand alone adventure not tied to AL in between.

One thing to note is that the TTRPG is not the bread and butter of the company anymore. They now make more benefits form using D&D IP into videogames, board games, minis, etc.

I agree that WotC could have produce and electronic format of the PHB and MM at the very least.
But one thing for sure, the SRD is not meant for this. The actual SRD is what it should have been in 3.X By providing a full SRD like they did before, they definately lost sales, and led to competition releasing a print copy of the SRD, or let a competitor release their own core rule book. The new SRD on the other hand allow 3rd party to create new material without being able to copy what exist.

[mephnick]

Oh look, this thread again.

Please do my homework for me. I am unwilling to test the game myself and Google confuses me.

[Petrocorus]

The lack of bloat, and lack of need for it, is part of the beauty of 5e. Lack of bloat is not the same as lack of options though. As Typewriter said, its the difference between having 100 options, 90 of which are bad, and having just 20 or so, but each one makes a meaningful difference to the character.
To be fair, there are a few bad options. Keen Intellect or Weapon Master, for instance.


At this stage, two main books plus players guides. In addition, each of the adventure paths released by Wizards contains a 'players guide' book that contains more (the recent Elemental Evil AP contained genasi races, aaracrocka races and a bunch of elemental themed spells for example).
From what i saw only the Elemental Evil Player's Companion and the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide contain additional options. The other online supplements seem to just be excerpt from the PHB making the preparation of the AP easier.
Unless is miss some actual Player Guide not mentioned on the page of the AP.


There is some merit in this statement. After a few and very basic initial choices, you are being railroaed into playing a mechanically predetermined character. There are still choices you can make, but there are extremelly limited compared to what we had in previous editions. And I am not talkiling about limited options that will expand as new material gets released, I am talking about the whole process of making characters. No skill points, feats and prestige classes (subclasses are nice but they dont generate the versatility that prestige classes did) like in 3e, no feats and powers like in 4e.

But this is also what make the game easier to DM and easier to new players. And probably also what make the system more balanced.



Things wrong with 5e, Part 1.
While we will argue about rules in the later parts, the biggest failing 5e has nothing to do with actual mechanics or DnD at all. Its 2016 and its unacceptable that you don't have some sort of digital format for all your rules. While some publishers go the easy route and just have PDFs of their products available for sale, and others have completely freed their rules via various online tools WotC is behaving like its 1990 and internet is still a thing some scientists near Geneva are using. I don't have a lot of free time on my hands, so being able to read the rules during the daily commute or while traveling is essential. Not to mention having all the rules available on a digital devices frees up table clutter and makes it unnecessary to lug books around.

I more than totally concur with this. I would be glad to put money in pdf version of the books, even in English. But shipping the hardcover books where i live would cost more than the books themselves, and they won't even be really more helpful since they would not be in the language all my player understand. Because WotC unwillingness to allow foreign translations is another big hindrance for me. Granted, there are already two publisher willing to translate the SRD (oddly enough, one of them being the publisher of PF), but that will not be official translation.
Added to the fact that carrying 3 books to all my games instead of 1 book and a tablet is not something i look forward to.


Yeah... someone should write up a comprehensive summary of 5e's pros and cons and then get it stickied to the top of this subforum, or included in the 'notable threads'. Then we could just link to it and be done.

That's would be a great idea. If someone who know the game well enough would do it.


I think Paizo's model would suit WotC - give out the rules for "free" - i mean, some would buy them, but a quick internet search would turn up the PDFs. But then, create adventures - hardcopy (I think Paizo kinda failed there, but then I HATE using PDF adventures.. especially the APs they did, where you're looking at 2 or 3 pages, in far distant places in the same book... not an easy feat with a tablet.)

I'm still looking for a PDF reader on Android that would allow me to open several PDF in several tabs with the same app. That's really an hindrance when DMing and more than once i preferred go to my FLGS with my 17'' laptop.



If WotC concentrated more on releasing modules (even updated rehashes of their famous IPs)
I'm really eager to see an Eberron Campaign setting and several finished psionic classes.


Please do my homework for me. I am unwilling to test the game myself and Google confuses me.
Those thread are helpful. One of these threads, launched by someone else is what sold me the 5E. Granted, we should have one of these in the Notable Threads.

[JoeJ]

I would like to see a example of a non railroad adventure that has the expected 6 to 8 non trivial encounters per day. I really don't see a way that in any non railroad game you can have 8 encounters per day on average.

OTOH, I have a hard time coming up with dungeons that allow that few. If there aren't at least 12-15 encounters, I start to feel like it's not worth the effort to create.

[Malifice]

While those are all great examples, there are still some oddities to consider. If every day some sort of timed adventure crops up then you do start to sail closer to railroading.

You dont do it every day. Like I said, I aim for around 50 percent at which point it becomes self enforcing.

And in addition to timed quests (which are drastically underused by most DMs) you also have 'its too dangerous to rest here' and 'random' encounters.


On the flip-side if you're not having adventures every day then it's not 'on average' and the mechanic of getting back half your expended HP on a long rest stops being as important.


PCs are spending considerable time in down time. Youre not throwing this at them every day. There are weeks of travel, or in town relaxing or using the downtime rules to do stuff.

Also; its not to be enforced religiously. Occasionally throw a longer AD at them. Occasionally throw a 1 'extra deadly' single encoutner AD at them. As long as youre doing it often enough to police the rest/ resource/ class balance/ encounter difficulty paradigm, thats enough.

[Typewriter]

You dont do it every day. Like I said, I aim for around 50 percent at which point it becomes self enforcing.

And in addition to timed quests (which are drastically underused by most DMs) you also have 'its too dangerous to rest here' and 'random' encounters.



PCs are spending considerable time in down time. Youre not throwing this at them every day. There are weeks of travel, or in town relaxing or using the downtime rules to do stuff.

Also; its not to be enforced religiously. Occasionally throw a longer AD at them. Occasionally throw a 1 'extra deadly' single encoutner AD at them. As long as youre doing it often enough to police the rest/ resource/ class balance/ encounter difficulty paradigm, thats enough.

I agree but the original comment came from Tehnar who was talking about 8 per day on average. If you do that then the game would be insane. If you don't do that then certain mechanics are sort of odd/worthless - "I only get back half my expended hit dice tonight. Luckily, tomorrow night I'll get the rest. Why don't I just get them all back tonight?"

A campaign where you were literally doing this stuff every day would be very railroady so if that's what Tehnar was talking about I'd agree. If we're talking more about how games are actually run - how you and I both run things - then you're not doing lots of stuff every day on average, but every 'adventuring' day on average.

[djreynolds]

So I'm taking a look at the 5e ruleset. In short, I'm debating whether it's worth buying the books and familiarizing myself with it enough to possibly end up in a game. (I haven't been invited to a game or anything, but that's not to say I couldn't organize one or find one, you know?) I'm not super impressed so far, but I'm willing to be persuaded by people who've got some actual game experience.



You know what I like, is your saves, aside from the ones you have proficiency, do not improve. I just started a thread about crappy dice rolls, and how our rogue continually fails her wisdom, and she is 13th. Point is, unless she makes it to 15th level as a rogue or gets a particular feat, she will fail often as the enemies DC increases. Unlike 3.5 system, your saves do not increase only 2 of them do, with exceptions

It makes for characters, all mostly, having real and exploitable weaknesses and so team work is very important to ensure someone is able to make their save and help out teammates.

You are not some 3.5 Achilles anymore with one weak spot, 5E is more dangerous for PCs IMHO

We fought two glabez73218, some demon, we have no magic weapons yet, and he is resistant to elemental and non-magical weapons, AC 18 and 170 HPs, it took forever to kill them and they hit hard

[Azedenkae]

Tbh I love 4e, and even now I STILL have trouble accepting 5e. It just feels so... lackluster compared to 4e. Back in 4e, each race basically had their own progression and choices as one progresses. I felt there was just so much for flexibility with races. Now 5e races are so static. 'Yeah mate here's the exact stuff for this race you chose'. Basically. Yes I understand it's all just 'guidelines', but then the entire DND 1-5e, Pathfinder, d20 and all that are 'just guidelines'. RAW, it is kinda lackluster. Similarly with classes. And feats. And powers. Back then I used to spend quite a while on building a 4e character. And it was hella fun. Now, not so much.

But! That is the whole point of 5e. It is simpler, it is built for not complexity of stats and specs, but the simplicity of it so that we can spend more effort in immersing in the story. Or so I feel.

*Shrugs*

I probably will now go sell all my 5e books I guess. >_<

[djreynolds]

Tbh I love 4e, and even now I STILL have trouble accepting 5e. It just feels so... lackluster compared to 4e. Back in 4e, each race basically had their own progression and choices as one progresses. I felt there was just so much for flexibility with races. Now 5e races are so static. 'Yeah mate here's the exact stuff for this race you chose'. Basically. Yes I understand it's all just 'guidelines', but then the entire DND 1-5e, Pathfinder, d20 and all that are 'just guidelines'. RAW, it is kinda lackluster. Similarly with classes. And feats. And powers. Back then I used to spend quite a while on building a 4e character. And it was hella fun. Now, not so much.

But! That is the whole point of 5e. It is simpler, it is built for not complexity of stats and specs, but the simplicity of it so that we can spend more effort in immersing in the story. Or so I feel.

*Shrugs*

I probably will now go sell all my 5e books I guess. >_<

The great thing about 5E also, is that there are real no inherent weaknesses in the races. No negative stats. Aside from extreme optimization and people using the standard array, I can make any class and race combo viable with average rolls.

There's no reason a Halfling cannot use a greatsword and GWM, he just get's disadvantage. Some DM's will allow them to use a longsword as a small greatsword.

If you are looking for optimization, 5E isn't it. Because of the ability caps, 20 is the max in any stat for most of the game, it is surprising how quickly a badly designed character will catch up in terms of play with a well designed one.


Play a night at the Adventure League, its fun and just try anything. Any class combo will work with any race. Its all in the dice, and disadvantage on rolls is nothing to fear. Just roll.

The dice in 5E are very powerful, no longer is anyone the master of this or that. You can be an expert, a rogue may have +17 bonus on a skill, but can fail and a 20 is always a pass.

And for me, I find playing a wizard a huge challenge. 99% of your concentration spells are caster only and 1 at a time. So it is tough to plan a spell list out. Many times other team members are left with protection spells and failing saves is very common.

And any game is DM dependent. In fact many games play without feats or multiclassing and this also fun, forcing teamwork.

[rlc]

Yeah... someone should write up a comprehensive summary of 5e's pros and cons and then get it stickied to the top of this subforum, or included in the 'notable threads'. Then we could just link to it and be done.

It's not like there's any real debate as to what the pros and cons are, and there's only so many starting points the OP could be coming from.
And it's always, "sell me on 5e," every single time. Seriously, the thread title is pretty much always the same exact thing. seriously.

Edit: I'm more interested in being snarky and obnoxious than helpful and writing something like this myself.

[AstralFire]

Tbh I love 4e, and even now I STILL have trouble accepting 5e. It just feels so... lackluster compared to 4e. Back in 4e, each race basically had their own progression and choices as one progresses. I felt there was just so much for flexibility with races. Now 5e races are so static. 'Yeah mate here's the exact stuff for this race you chose'. Basically. Yes I understand it's all just 'guidelines', but then the entire DND 1-5e, Pathfinder, d20 and all that are 'just guidelines'. RAW, it is kinda lackluster. Similarly with classes. And feats. And powers. Back then I used to spend quite a while on building a 4e character. And it was hella fun. Now, not so much.

But! That is the whole point of 5e. It is simpler, it is built for not complexity of stats and specs, but the simplicity of it so that we can spend more effort in immersing in the story. Or so I feel.

*Shrugs*

I probably will now go sell all my 5e books I guess. >_<

My ideal would probably be 4E with a comprehensive and easy to use virtual tabletop that made it simple to add, edit, or alter monsters and terrain on the fly and more has-an-obvious-use-out-of-combat powers and abilities. But I put this in the same category as "Ideally, I would like to become a multi-millionaire with my next book." Theoretically achievable but for a lot of practical reasons probably not going to happen.

[Mara]

@OP

5e is not perfect for you. The balance is good. The combats are manageable. The improvised action system adds a lot of depth. But the downside to that is it sounds like you want fixed rules rather than experimenting at the table. Theorycraft in 5e is embarrassingly simple. There is no meaningful 5e activity in-between sessions. Builds aren't complex and the glut of mechanical customization is just not there. 5e focuses more on making your character unique in a way divorced from the mechanics. It gets out of the way of the player the DM, and the story. Hence why it wouldn't appeal perfectly to you. The rules treat themselves as in the way, when it sounds like you would rather be pulled in via the rules.

4e or Pathfinder seem better for you. You seem to have no problem with 4e aside from lack of WotC support. Pathfinder still has the manageability problem but to a far less extent than 3.5 ever was. The worst balanced book in PF is the core rulebook (3.5 with a facelift). If you play just 3/4th BAB and 6th level casting characters, the game starts having the same symmetrical style balance as 4e.

You should probably just find a way to make 4e work for you. It sounds like that is the game you want to play. 5e is for when you've given up on the game itself being engaging and want to focus solely on the unique aspects of TTRPGs without going into the choas of a truly rules light system.