What is something you wish 5e did better.

[Lupine]

This thread is inspired by two threads, the one about errata, and the one speculating about a possible 5.5e.

I'm not talking about errata, because it's not one thing that would have to be changed, but a fundemental change to 5e you would like.

For me, it's monster types: they're so whishy-washy, and don't mean anything anyway except for a few certain spells. I really wish 5e had ironclad monster types, where each type of monster actually meant something. Likewise, certain things need better categorization. For example, I think that Owlbears should be beasts, but it doesn't matter if they are or are not: neither one effects the monster at all.

[Trask]

I wish the spell list wasnt so bloated and was more thematically tight.

[LudicSavant]

Basically every single form of summoning from Conjure Woodland Creatures to Beastmaster.

Mounted rules.

Encumbrance & lift/push/drag weights.

Speed of creatures (horses are slower than real life humans in 5e).

That stupid unenforceable rule about spell components where VSM is sometimes easier than VS.

Noncombat options for martials.

High level stuff for martials.

Things interacting with the world with a little more... narrative consistency ("Oh, the acid breath can only damage creatures, not objects" "...")

Races being able to fit really well into any class, rather than playing match-the-attributes (it can be done, other games do it).

Magic item system.

[heavyfuel]

That stupid unenforceable rule about spell components where VSM is sometimes easier than VS.

Is this really a thing? What rule is this?

[OldTrees1]

Is this really a thing? What rule is this?

Yes, if you have a spell focus it can replace "M,S" and "M" but not "S".

I wish the 5E skill system was better. That alone is my biggest gripe. Which we should not get into too much because it has derailed threads like this in the past. However one innovation I really miss was skill points which allowed the player to customize their PCs and have them grow into new skills.

[LudicSavant]

Is this really a thing? What rule is this?

The Worst Component Rule: Somatic+Material is Sometimes Easier to Cast Than Somatic

What’s the amount of interaction needed to use a spellcasting focus? Does it have to be included in the somatic component?

If a spell has a material component, you need to handle that component when you cast the spell (PH, 203). The same rule applies if you’re using a spellcasting focus as the material component.

If a spell has a somatic component, you can use the hand that performs the somatic component to also handle the material component. For example, a wizard who uses an orb as a spellcasting focus could hold a quarterstaff in one hand and the orb in the other, and he could cast lightning bolt by using the orb as the spell’s material component and the orb hand to perform the spell’s somatic component.

Another example: a cleric’s holy symbol is emblazoned on her shield. She likes to wade into melee combat with a mace in one hand and a shield in the other. She uses the holy symbol as her spellcasting focus, so she needs to have the shield in hand when she casts a cleric spell that has a material component. If the spell, such as aid, also has a somatic component, she can perform that component with the shield hand and keep holding the mace in the other.

If the same cleric casts cure wounds, she needs to put the mace or the shield away, because that spell doesn’t have a material component but does have a somatic component. She’s going to need a free hand to make the spell’s gestures. If she had the War Caster feat, she could ignore this restriction.

In order to actually enforce this rule, the player (and DM, as arbiter) need to either know by memory what the components of each and every spell are, or start going through their notes or, worse, stopping the game to flip through books. Well, maybe it's just a few spells that we have to remember, let's take a loo--

239 spells have S and M
174 spells have S, but no M
There does not seem to be any discernible pattern to determine which are which without actually checking.

I can memorize a lot but damn. This is impossible. Who thought this rule was a good idea? Did they just want to make 5e the most needlessly complex edition? I can memorize pretty much everything in 3.5e but not this.

It's needlessly confusing to new players, annoying to veterans, and does nothing of particular value for the game IMHO. I suggest murdering the rule with an axe. If you don't own an axe, a hammer will suffice.

(By contrast,all I need to know for adjudicating stealth components is...
26 spells have no Verbal component, and I don't even need to remember all of them because some give you away anyways (like Thunderclap or Primal Savagery). The main ones to remember are just the Shape Element cantrips, Minor Illusion, Catapult, Hypnotic Pattern, Counterspell, and Mind Spike. That's not hard to remember.

And all I need to know for adjudicating people being bound but not gagged is...
57 spells have no Somatic or Material component, the most relevant ones being "basically all the teleports." And frankly this is almost never relevant in combat and is a pretty niche thing so checking a book in an edge case is at least tolerable)

[Asisreo1]

I would appreciate easier to read rules.

I'll always facepalm looking at the stealth/hiding rules.

I mostly understand the rules but introducing them to new players is like helping an 8th grader with calculus 102.

[Dork_Forge]

I wish feats were better integrated into the system and divided into major (mechanically significant like PAM, GWM, Warcaster etc.) and minor (Keen Mind, Actor etc. without the half bump) with minor feats given at certain character levels so no matter what you're playing you get to add in some fun roleplay crunch.

It'd also be nice if it felt a little deadlier, whether that be altering hp progression, how it handles dropping to 0 or rez magic.

[Sparky McDibben]

Teaching DMs how to run a dungeon crawl

Teaching DMs how to run other kinds of scenarios than dungeon-crawls

[Warwick]

Provided better guidance and tools for interesting encounter design. Too many monsters are bland meatsacks, the difficulty guidelines are somewhere between unhelpful and and actively harmful, and there's little help on adding texture to make encounters more than a white room exercise with a coat of paint.

Provided better guidance and tools for exploration as a major game activity. Whether it is in a wilderness or a dungeon, this ought to be a major part of gameplay, but it isn't because there's no support for it.

(I actually have a very long list, but I don't want to belabor it too much)

[WaroftheCrans]

Write everything in clear and consistent language. It's pretty terrible how ambiguous 5e is. They can't even stick with a single meaning when they discuss cover, for instance.

I want the rules to read as if WotC had a programmer write the rules, had an english major translate them, (without using a thesaurus/synonyms) and then finally had a powergamer, a story teller, and a lawyer proofread and play test.

[Nifft]

Teaching DMs how to run a dungeon crawl

Teaching DMs how to run other kinds of scenarios than dungeon-crawls

DMs should crawl before they run.

[Dienekes]

Martial combat is the big one. Mounted needing a bit more work in general.

Skills and allowing them to be used in combat more effectively without having Expertise break the game.

Willingness to try different refresh mechanics rather than At-Will, Short Rest, Long Rest.

[EggKookoo]

I wish the spell list wasnt so bloated and was more thematically tight.

Agreed. There was an opportunity missed to unify the spells. Especially since upcasting became so prominent, we could get away with one "shoots fire from hands" spell that just got more powerful as you gained higher level slots.

[Millstone85]

The "creature" class. There seems to be quite the competition for themes between the sorcerer and warlock classes. Where are the fey and fiendish origins? Where is the draconic patron? I think the sorcerer should have eaten the warlock, gaining its invocations as well as its boons of the blade, the chain, and the tome. Let the player decide if their character made a pact or was born with the power.

Power loss. Either there shouldn't have been rules for a paladin breaking their oath, or there should also have been rules for a cleric losing the favor of their god, a druid their attunement to nature, a warlock the support of their patron, etc.

Spell lists. I might be alone on this, but I think it would be much more flavorful if there were only three spell lists: arcane, divine, and primal. It doesn't feel right to me how certain spells are accessible, say, to a bard but not to a sorcerer or a wizard.

They can't even stick with a single meaning when they discuss cover, for instance.

I haven't noticed that in the books. Readers, yes, they certainly confuse cover with obscurement. A transparent force field would provide cover but not obscurement, while smoke would provide obscurement but not cover. Cover can be half, three-quarters or total, while obscurement can be light or heavy.

[HappyDaze]

I'm not a fan of the skill system and the near-constant "oh, and I'll help so you get Advantage (or can negate Disadvantage)" on almost every check.

[WaroftheCrans]

I'm not a fan of the skill system and the near-constant "oh, and I'll help so you get Advantage (or can negate Disadvantage)" on almost every check.

Haha, it does get a bit repetitive, and doesn't make a ton of sense when you have the sorcerer helping the cleric make a perception check, or the barbarian helping the wizard with a history check. Some of these things just shouldn't work.

[Fryy]

The Worst Component Rule: Somatic+Material is Sometimes Easier to Cast Than Somatic

Agree.

Wish List & Opinions
1. See above. Somehow spells with more spell components should be harder to cast than spells with less components. Otherwise, it's counter-intuitive. The rule explanations seem contrived to me because the result is counter-intuitive.
2. More Feats/ASI's - Need the combined total to be just a few higher over 20 levels... and some levels Feat-only and some levels ASI only... it would be nice and every character would have at least one feat.
3. Make Short-Rests per Long-Rest more of a predictable resource - Don't have a 'suggested' # of short rests per day... just set a maximum # of short rests per day and reduce the duration from one hour to 10 minutes or 1 minute so that short rests are as manageable and predictable a resource as long rests. Perhaps recovering HP would still take 1 hour, but not any other features.
4. Fix Bladesingers - Mechanically, they should be somehow more like Valor/Sword Bards where the sub-class abilities scale (i.e. level 14) with a larger class investment. Bladesong is too front loaded, too short-rest dependent, too 'on/off', and perhaps too powerful when 'on'.
5. Attunement slots should scale with proficiency - a level 20 character should have a few more attunement slots than a level 1 character. Perhaps set # of attunement slots to 'proficiency minus 1'.
6. Make alignment more of a thing mechanically - examples 'good clerics/paladins/druids could turn evil clerics/paladins/druids and vice versa... chaotic could turn lawful and vice versa... it would be entertaining.

[Ignimortis]

1. Better HP/resistances/damage scaling. Yes, bounded accuracy, yadda, yadda. Nevertheless, it should not be possible to hit an adult dragon at level 1 and deal meaningful damage. Damage Resistance needs to make a comeback (something like DR 10 on a dragon would work wonders), and damage should correspond to this. However, it works both ways hitting a CR5 enemy with all of your martial's attacks at level 15 should kill them with significant overkill, not bring them to half health. You can retain the dangerousness of low-level creatures without making them sacks of HP - more glass cannon and neat tricks, less padded sumo and raw HP damage.
2. Less long rest/short rest reliant resources and mechanics. Those mechanics work fine in a dungeon crawl, but I've yet to see anyone who plays 5e like a pure or almost pure dungeon crawl instead of a campaign in which dungeons sometimes appear. 3.5 had the right idea - short round-based cooldowns, refreshes, at-wills that could be cool, not just X/day.
3. Caster balancing. I've always maintained that the key to caster balance is the reverse of what 5e did - whereas WotC went with "wide access, but less power", I consider "narrow access, greater power" to be much better in all situations. Wizards are, obviously, the most contentious class here, to which I say - make them half-casters with focus on rituals, if they want to retain the archmage fantasy. Full casters should have very narrow thematic lists. Also, bards should be half-casters - I have no idea who thought that giving bards both martial abilties and full casting was a good idea.
4. Martial balancing. Nobody besides Monk and Totem Barb gains anything good out of combat or even just interesting in a fantastical way past level 7 or so. Martials stop scaling narratively and just keep gaining damage and HP. I see no reason why almost everything cool outside of Monk/Barb has to be A) magic B) limited by rests.

[KyleG]

Time. I mean in the overworld how likely do you face more than 1 wild encounter in a day. So SR and LR recharge abilities should factor that in more. Kinda like gritty. I run LR and SR both as nighttime sleep cycles. 2 nights (SR rest) and the third night if the first two nights were uninterrupted for anything then you get the benefits of a LR. Still not quite right.
And speaking of time the 30 second battles just feels weird...i fudge this saying that the combat we actually rolled was more like a highlight real. Most combats took at least a few minutes and up to 1/2hr time passing thus far.

And then there is healing...i dont have a fix...i just dont like it. As a player i try to RP using a steel on my weapon and cleaning it etc. My armor should be dinged and damaged, so too my weapon overtime. But HP remains odd...its almost like a portion should be attributed to armour and someone to actual health. Tying HP to class i also dont particularily like and am playing with the idea that 1/5/10/15/20th HP gains are of the physical flesh kind. The rest are improvements to skills and armor etc.

[Yora]

Teaching DMs how to run a dungeon crawl

Teaching DMs how to run other kinds of scenarios than dungeon-crawls

Teaching GMs.

The only edition that ever tried teaching the game was BECMI in 1983. All other editions are "here are the mechanics, you figure out what to do with them".
I always had a suspicion that most D&D rulebook creators don't actually know much about the reality of preparing and running adventures.

[Eldan]

Things interacting with the world with a little more... narrative consistency ("Oh, the acid breath can only damage creatures, not objects" "...")

Honestly, this is the big one for me. That, and the excesses of bounded accuracy.

Yes, I know I can houserule it when I want the acid breath to melt through a door. But I shouldn't have to.

Sometimes, I get annoyed how many times I just have to say "Yes, the rules say this, but come on we know a colossal dragon can break down a wooden pallisade".

[HappyDaze]

Honestly, this is the big one for me. That, and the excesses of bounded accuracy.

Yes, I know I can houserule it when I want the acid breath to melt through a door. But I shouldn't have to.

Sometimes, I get annoyed how many times I just have to say "Yes, the rules say this, but come on we know a colossal dragon can break down a wooden pallisade".

Oh yes. We all found it weird that our Druid could not ignite a pile of dried kindling with produce flame and in another weird instance, discovered that create bonfire sheds no light.

[EggKookoo]

Oh yes. We all found it weird that our Druid could not ignite a pile of dried kindling with produce flame and in another weird instance, discovered that create bonfire sheds no light.

What's the justification for create bonfire not shedding light?

[LudicSavant]

What's the justification for create bonfire not shedding light?

It's from the people who argue that spells only do what they explicitly say they do in their spell description, and that since it doesn't explicitly mention a light radius, they conclude it does not have one. Ergh...

[EggKookoo]

It's from the people who argue that spells only do what they say they do in their spell description, and that since it doesn't mention a light radius, they conclude it does not have one. Ergh...

Ok, thanks, I was wondering if there was some blanket rule about fire produced by magic not shedding light.

Haha, it does get a bit repetitive, and doesn't make a ton of sense when you have the sorcerer helping the cleric make a perception check, or the barbarian helping the wizard with a history check. Some of these things just shouldn't work.

The real problem is that the rules should specify that the DM is free to disallow helping if the helper wouldn't normally be able to perform the action solo, or if the helper's assistance would be so minimal it doesn't confer any bonus. I think the rules do say something about that regarding proficiency and helping with tool use, but I can't recall.

I would not allow anyone to help a PC make a history check unless it made sense within context, or if the helper was either unusually high-Int or was proficient in history. I mean, the rules don't specify that you must be non-incapacitated and mobile to make a strength check to bash down a door, but I wouldn't allow a PC that's out cold to provide help to do that. It's only common sense (I know, I know...).

[MoiMagnus]

The only edition that ever tried teaching the game was BECMI in 1983. All other editions are "here are the mechanics, you figure out what to do with them".

I think 4e qualify as an editions that tried to teach DMs, especially with its second DMG. Whether it succeeded or not is much more arguable... (Especially since it pushed DMs toward a very formal sequence of encounters). But the DMG2 still had an entire chapter on story building, and how to balance branching story-structures with player inputs. And it really felt to me that the author tried to teach DMs.

[ZRN]

I wish 5e had more "magic" outside the spell/spellcasting system.

Monks are an example of what I'm talking about: they can do lots of supernatural stuff without ever making you look up the nitty-gritty rules about spell slots, casting time, material components, and so on, much less forcing you to dip into the dreaded Spells chapter. (And even monks still force you to look up spellcasting rules for SOME of their class abilities.)

The current spellcasting system has its historical roots, but taken ahistorically it would seem basically like a system for wizards (nerdy bookworms) that was then lazily reverse-engineered into something that's supposed to work for EVERY non-mundane effect in the game. Like, really, the elder dragon has to mumble fake Latin and lob a ball of bat guano to cast Fireball? Same for the paladin blessing his companions in battle, the sorcerer haunted by a dark bloodline, etc?

As for the Spells chapter - it's a hundred plus pages of rules exceptions, PLUS you have to cross-reference at least couple different tables and lists to figure out which spells you even have access to at a given time (much less how many you can cast and how often). Like, if I'm a new player reading through the rulebook, how do I think, say, a level 10 warlock plays? The only way to figure it out is to read the entire multi-page class description (to understand how its spell slots work), AND the available spells list, AND any supplemental subclass spells list, and THEN go through that huge alphabetical list of spells, one by one, to see which of them are any good. ("Hmm, at 10th level I can, uh, Hold Monster and Dream? Is this a weird romance novel?") That's not to understand the nitty-gritty of what the best mechanical options are - that's just to understand the basic question of "what does this class do?" Now let me flip to the monk or the barbarian or the fighter, and whoah, there we go, I understand 90% of what makes the class special just from reading the two-page list of Class Abilities.

There's absolutely no mechanical reason that the game doesn't include a class like the 3.5e warlock that can do a bunch of cool magical stuff (shoot fire, fly around, etc) without "Casting Spells." It's a real missed opportunity that they didn't include more options to let you play a range of characters even if you're the type of person who doesn't have the time or inclination to read and keep track of the huge, complex spell system.

[Skylivedk]

I wish feats were better integrated into the system and divided into major (mechanically significant like PAM, GWM, Warcaster etc.) and minor (Keen Mind, Actor etc. without the half bump) with minor feats given at certain character levels so no matter what you're playing you get to add in some fun roleplay crunch.

It'd also be nice if it felt a little deadlier, whether that be altering hp progression, how it handles dropping to 0 or rez magic.

+1

More viable actions and complex decision making trees for martials as well please. Especially out of combat

Also: an actual exploration pillar and a good way of doing heists

[KorvinStarmast]

I wish the spell list wasnt so bloated and was more thematically tight.

Likewise. There's some overlap for sure.

Mounted rules.
Speed of creatures
Races being able to fit really well into any class, rather than playing match-the-attributes (it can be done, other games do it).

WIth you on all of these.

I would appreciate easier to read rules. I'll always facepalm looking at the stealth/hiding rules. I mostly understand the rules but introducing them to new players is like helping an 8th grader with calculus 102.

Surprise and stealth and hiding were written while trying to avoid leaving a loophole.

Write everything in clear and consistent language. It's pretty terrible how ambiguous 5e is. They can't even stick with a single meaning when they discuss cover, for instance. I want the rules to read as if WotC had a programmer write the rules, had an english major translate them, (without using a thesaurus/synonyms) and then finally had a powergamer, a story teller, and a lawyer proofread and play test.

Yeah, the more I read the text the less I like the prose style.

DMs should crawl before they run.

Nice.

Teaching GMs.
The only edition that ever tried teaching the game was BECMI in 1983.

The Into the Unknown module (B1) had a whole 'how to DM section'
Sadly, it wasn't even in all printings of the Basic game ...

As to "minor and major" feats, disagree. I also do not find racial feats to be a good idea, at all.
If some feats are just too lame, improve them. A feat costs an ASI. Make sure that it adds value to the character.