Nothing’s all good and nothing’s all bad. Not even people. Not even you. As a great dog-man once said, “you can’t divide the world into good people and Death Eaters, Harry. It’s not that simple.” And it’s not. When you break everything down into the all-the-way good and the all-the-way bad, it makes you stupid.
I don’t mean doing so sounds stupid. I don’t mean doing so is stupid. I mean it literally makes your brain work less good. Dividing the world into the purely good and the purely bad wrecks your brain.
Every time I trash talk D&D 5E — or compliment it — and every time I praise D&D 3E — or slag on it — fanbois and haters and apologists and edition warriors scream about how my criticism is unfair and my praise doesn’t count and how my opinions are wrong and stupid and how I’m stupid. And that’s notwithstanding that we’re talking about f$&%ing games here. Bits of entertainment. They’re not objectively good or objectively bad. They’re things you either enjoy or you don’t. You can try to analyze the reasons why you — personally — enjoy them or don’t — and you’ll usually get it wrong — but that still doesn’t make anything Good or Bad.
Any idiot can praise what they enjoy. Anyone can piss on what they don’t enjoy. Hell, it’s fun to praise the stuff you like and piss on the stuff you don’t. It feels good. It’s basically like taking a hit of crack cocaine right to the medial prefrontal cortex. It’s a lot harder to praise the things you don’t enjoy and to criticize the things you do.
It’s also healthier for your brain. And that’s really why I’m writing these two lists. In my last article — The Five Best and Five Worst Things in D&D 3.5 According to Angry — I claimed to always offer something useful and meaningful in return for tearing s$&% down. Well, I’ve slipped on that rule a little in the past eighteen months. But I still believe in the rule. And I still — personally — force myself to take an even-handed look at everything. To find the good in the bad and the bad in the good.
See? This isn’t opinionated, clickbait bulls$&% I wrote purely for fun. It’s got a lesson to teach.
Now, on to the opinionated clickbait bulls$&%!
More of The Good, The Bad, and the Angry
I assume you already know what to expect. This is the second time in as many weeks I’m publishing a bulls$&%, clickbait list. And my reasons for doing so haven’t changed. Go back and read last week’s list if you don’t know what’s going on.
Speaking of s$&% that hasn’t changed, the same rules apply to this week’s comment section as last week’s. If you want to add your own Bests and Worsts, fine, but you’ve got to add them in pairs: one good and one bad. If you praise with no critique or critique with no praise, I’m deleting your comment and calling a fanboi or a hater.
And if you haven’t substantially played or run the game — Dungeons and Dragons 5E — you don’t know jack s$&% about it. Don’t go repeating stuff you read in forums or spew assumptions based on your half-a$&ed, sour-faced skim of the rules. No hearsay. No assumptions.
The Five Best Things in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition
So what, in Angry’s correct opinion, are the five best things about D&D 5E? I’m so glad I rhetorically asked on your behalf.
Let’s Play a Game: Approachability
Last week, I made fun of D&D v.3.5’s character sheet for turning off new players. By contrast, the fifth edition of the world’s greatest game — how f$%&ing full of yourself do you have to be to make that your game’s tagline, by the way — by contrast, 5E is very disarming and inviting. It isn’t the most approachable edition of D&D ever, but it definitely takes second place. And that ain’t just down to the character sheet.
Character creation’s about simple choices and well-defined archetypes. Pick a race, pick a class, pick a background, maybe pick a signature style, and you’re done. Newbies can grok that easily.
Moreover — as I recently mentioned — the rulebooks use natural language and address the player directly. Or the GM. And that makes them really easy to read. RPG rulebooks are reference materials — they’re supposed to be — but that usually leads to this awful third-person, passive-voice presentation.
You know what the difference is between this…
When you attack a monster, roll an Attack Roll and compare your result to your target’s Armor Class
And this…
When one creature attacks another, the attacker rolls an Attack Roll and compares the result to the target’s Armor Class
One isn’t an exhausting f$&%ing chore to read for 300 pages.
There’s a reason I speak directly to you — my reader — in my writing. And that’s it right there.
The point is, D&D 5E does a really good job of selling itself to newbies.
The Missing Piece of the Puzzle: Backgrounds
For a game about jumping headlong into an imaginary fantasy world, D&D has always struggled to provide connections between the player-characters and the world. Whatever else your character is, they’re an adventurer first. Which is more of a game role than a world role. And it’s the sort of thing that has no backstory. In fantasy stories, adventurers are those guys and gals who show up in town one day and deal with the town’s problems.
Yes, some classes do imply world roles or backstories. Clerics, for instance, are members of the priestly caste and wizards were all apprenticed to mad-old-wizards-on-the-edges-of-towns. But that was the beginning and the end of any sort of in-game support for world roles and backstories. It worked back in the day, but given the modern focus on world and story, that s$&% doesn’t fly anymore.
Backgrounds — little chunks of half-flavor, half-worldlore supplements to class and race — filled that niche really well. While I could heavily critique their implementation in 5E, I’m not going to. I’m not going to for the same reason I let the first seasons of Farscape and Star Trek: The Next Generation off the hook. Backgrounds are a new thing. And the first try’s always a little rocky. If WotC iterates the design properly in DBox One — and they probably will — backgrounds are probably going to become a character generation genre staple.
One Bonus to Rule them All: Advantage and Disadvantage
If you want to impress all your GMing friends with your brilliance, you’ll bark out the phrase bounded accuracy and clap like a trained seal whenever someone offers you a fish. Because bounded accuracy sounds smart and the 5E designers said it that one time. Me? I ain’t as impressed. Bounded Accuracy was only necessary in one little corner of the game and it actually created more problems than it solved there.
But I’ll get to that…
But you know what is an impressive piece of design? Of course you do. The heading gave it away.
The Advantage/Disadvantage Mechanic is actually a really elegant and graceful bit of design. The mechanic provides impactful modifiers with an excellent table feel, but which don’t change the range of possible outcomes.
With Advantage, your odds of success increase drastically — way more drastically than you might think; check out this mathy video from Stand-Up Maths if you’re immune to boredom and want to know more — but you still can’t roll more than you could have without Advantage. The relationship between your total modifier — ability modifier plus proficiency bonus or whatever — and the Difficulty Class of the check doesn’t change.
But people suck at probability, so none of that mathy s$&% matters. What matters is how Advantage and Disadvantage feel at the table. Rolling two dice and taking the higher — or being forced to take the lower — feels way better — or way worse — than rolling one die and adding — or subtracting — an extra number. Moreover, the play dynamic creates all these interesting little emotional outcomes. If you have Advantage and roll two ones, that’s a f$&%ing gut punch, for example. And if you roll a one and a seventeen, it feels like Advantage saved your a$& from disaster, even if, statistically, there’s no way to know whether you’d have gotten the one or the seventeen if you’d just rolled a single die.
If you want to sound smart, you can call this effect an increase in play dynamic depth or some s$&% like that. Now bark for your codfish! Clap! Good seal!
Sometimes a Wading Pool is Deep Enough: Monster Design
When I was complimenting D&D 3E’s super-customizable DIY bestiary, I made this snarky remark about D&D 5E’s monster design being all about push-button special abilities. And given I involuntarily sneer whenever I say the words “5E” and “push-button” in the same sentence, you probably think I’m really down on 5E’s monster design. But on contraire, mein frere! I actually think monster design’s the perfect place to focus on simple, straightforward spell-like abilities instead of open-ended action resolution.
Let me explain this push-button thing. Push-Button Ability is my term for a specific and very limited action you can take in an RPG. The ability’s got a name, a mechanical effect, and it can’t do anything that it can’t do. Spells in D&D are almost all Push-Button Abilities. Press the firebolt button on your character sheet and deal 1d10 fire damage to a target within 120 feet. And maybe set it on fire.
By contrast, you can do a lot with a Strength check. You can bust down a door, win an arm-wrestling contest, lift the lid off a stone sarcophagus, anything really. That’s Open-Ended Action Resolution.
Push-Button Abilities are great for monsters. Why? Because most monsters aren’t on screen very long and very few of them put in repeat appearances. If a party encounters a hellhound, they’ll probably encounter one once for three rounds and then never again. And most monsters only exist to provide tactical challenges.
Combat’s got to be fast and exciting. That means GMs have to grok what a monster’s about and make tactical choices quickly. They can’t hold up the game. And because the monster’s only in the spotlight for a few rounds, every action the monster takes has to showcase what’s unique about the monster. Unique tactically and unique flavorfully.
The point is, a GM has four rounds tops to show the players what any given monster is all about, to provide the players the information they need to fight that monster tactically, and to make that monster feel cool and unique. Push-Button Abilities are the way to go.
And while it’s true that it was really D&D 4E that invented this approach to monster design, 5E polished the hell out of it. And 5E also added back just enough open-endedness to let GMs break out of Push-Button play when the situation demanded it. 5E hits a great balance between 3E’s open-ended monsters-as-characters approach and 4E’s push-button monsters-as-game-mobs design.
I do wish there were good customization tools. Because 5E’s ideas about monster customization boil down to “just reskin the thing” or “tear it down and rebuild it from scratch.”
You’re Dying [Save Ends]: Death and Dying Rules
Remember when I crapped all over 3E’s schizophrenic Death and Dying Mechanics? Well, guess what? 5E got them right. I love 5E’s Death and Dying Mechanic. I love it so much, I can’t really think of anything to say about it. It just feels like the perfect way to handle Death and Dying in a fantasy adventure roleplaying game.
Hell, I can’t really think of a way to improve it.
Okay, that’s not quite true. One tweak I’d make is to spell out explicitly that the GM should roll death saves behind the screen and keep them secret. That the players should have no idea who’s alive or dead until someone tries to revive an unconscious lump of PC. Not even the player playing the dying lump.
Oh! And I’d like a nice, solid killshot rule. If you’re adjacent to a dying creature, you can use a weapon attack to kill them dead. No roll needed.
Anyways, kudos to you 5E for handling PC death so well that I can’t think of a way to make it better.
Dishonorable Mention: Awful Art Direction
I’m cheating again. But it’s my list and I’m allowed to cheat. Honestly, I feel bad for including this because this is totally just about personal preference. I mean, everything on these lists is subjective, but at least I have insight and analysis for everything else. This is just…
I hate the art in 5E. Especially in the core rulebooks. I mean, I can’t speak for the art in the latest Bigby’s Bag of Bulls$&% supplement or whatever because I ain’t buying D&D 5E books anymore, but I’d probably hate it if I saw it. I hate the bland, muted colors. I hate the fact that nothing stands out. There’s nothing iconic or memorable in anything. I remember the gorgeous, full-page pieces from AD&D 2E like Emirikol the Chaotic and the blonde cleric lady healing the bleeding warrior in the snow. I remember the iconic characters from D&D 3E and D&D 3.75… I mean Pathfinder. I remember all the illustrations of all the armor and the gods’ icons in D&D 4E and the breathtaking planar landscapes all over. But all I remember from 5E is that one weird encephalitic halfling bard and I only remember him in my nightmares.
One thing I hate is that D&D 5E focuses heavily on characters. Bland, generic, adventuring everypeople. Almost all the art in the core books focuses on dudes and dudettes. There are very few images of the fantasy world to be found. And that’s the s$&% that draws me in. I want to see the f$&%ing world I’m supposed to bring to life.
The Five Worst Things in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition
So, those are the big five praiseworthy things in D&D 5E, but you don’t go to a guy with Angry in his name because you’re looking for positivity. You’re here to listen to me slag on crap you don’t like to feed your sense of smug superiority. So, here are the five worst things about D&D 5E.
Like That Fat Guy on Every Plane Who Buys Two Seats: Advantage and Disadvantage
No, you ain’t crazy. Don’t scroll up. I absolutely did say that Advantage and Disadvantage were, collectively, one of the best elements of D&D 5E’s design. The Advantage/Disadvantage thing is elegant and it’s got a great table feel. It’s a really good design. And I f$&%ing hate it.
And no, I don’t hate it because it’s so good. I hate it because it’s bad for D&D. I can imagine a lot of board games and RPGs that’d benefit from the Advantage/Disadvantage Mechanic, but D&D ain’t one of them.
The problem’s that it crowds out all the other modifiers. How? Well, first, you either have Advantage — or Disadvantage — or you don’t. Once you have either, you can’t gain more. Second, because Advantage — and Disadvantage — feel so damned impactful — for the reasons described above — every other bonus or penalty feels bland by comparison. Sure, there’s a bunch of Bonus Dice Effects — fighter expertise and the bonus from the bless spell and s$&% like that — but you can only have so many of those before you bog down the game with fistfuls of dice and extra math time for every roll. And bonus dice just don’t feel the same.
Why’s this s$&% matter? It matters because, in the open-ended action resolution system that is the d20 Core Mechanic, modifiers are the only clear, explicit, visible tools available to GMs for doling out situational bonuses and penalties. The die roll is fixed and altering DCs just isn’t something players really register. And situational modifiers are vital to engagement.
See, situational modifiers are the way you — the GM — reward players for treating the world like an actual f$&%ing world instead of a game construct. When a player pays attention to what an NPC says, notes his fierce loyalty to his clan, and then appeals to that clan loyalty to Persuade the NPC to do a thing, that player’s playing the game the best way. And that way of playing should be rewarded the most. Because that way of playing is what makes RPGs unique among tabletop gaming experiences.
Advantage and Disadvantage are so f$&%ing overbearing and so f$&%ing ubiquitous in the mechanics that I’ve got nothing to offer the players when they go beyond the rules and treat the world like a world. I love Advantage/Disadvantage as an example of a clever game-design solution to a problem, but I hate it in D&D.
And it could have been amazing. Imagine how different the game would be if Advantage and Disadvantage were things only the GM could hand out. And if he only gave it out for treating the world like a world. Imagine if the game’s mechanics only ever granted numerical bonuses or bonus dice.
And while I’m dreaming, I’d also like a pony.
You Gotta Unbind Something: HP and Damage as Level Expressions
Let’s go back to that Bounded Accuracy thing. Remember that? The 5E devs said they wanted to reign in numerical bloat in the core mechanic. Keep ability check modifiers and DCs down to reasonable, easy-to-math numbers. And that’s fair enough. Number bloat was a big thing in 3E and 4E. And it tended to crowd out the randomness of the d20 at mid-to-high levels.
Fine. But now let’s talk about the unintended consequences of that call. And the intended ones. See, the devs needed a way to differentiate low-level PCs and monsters from high-level ones. In the stats, I mean. If they kept attack modifiers and Armor Classes on a modest scale, they needed a way to make a 15th level fighter better in combat than a 1st level fighter. And a way to make a stone giant a badder threat than an orc. And they decided to use a damage progression.
This ain’t conjecture by the way. The 5E devs explained all this s$&% publicly eight years ago when they shat 5E onto store shelves.
Anyway, that’s why every class gets periodic damage increases. At-will spells have scaling damage, fighters get bonus attacks, rogues get bigger sneak attack dice, and so on. Yeah, D&D always did this s$&% to some extent, but 5E amped it up to eleven and made sure it was everywhere.
The problem is that this really f$&%s with monster design. Consider the sheer number of monsters that need Multiattack just to get their damage up. And look at the HP numbers. Not at high levels. High-level HP bloat is as much a D&D tradition as fighting over whether you can drink potions underwater. But the bloat starts at pretty low levels in 5E.
If you’re like me and you enjoy building your own custom beasties — because it ain’t like you can just customize the ones in the Monster Manual; see above and last week — if you like making your own monsters, you know what an absolute pain in the a$&% it is to find ways to get those damage numbers up. And going from hit points to hit dice leads to ridiculous results you just have to accept.
Hemophiliac Aragorn with Brittle-Bone Disease: Superheroic Low-Level PCs
You had to know this was coming after I praised D&D 3E for its humble low levels. And I think that line about playing a full-powered Aragorn with hemophilia and osteogenesis imperfecta really nailed it. So much so I’m not sure what to add.
But this ain’t as simple as saying D&D 5E PCs are overpowered. Look, I do think 5E PCs at every level just have too many amazingly powerful mechanical tricks. And I think the lack of flaws, drawbacks, constraints, limitations, penalties, and tradeoffs in character generation feeds into this s$&%. But really, I think there’s just something really… off in D&D 5E’s game balance and I can’t figure out what the hell it is.
See, I’m not saying that the game’s too easy or too hard. I think low-level 5E characters are delicate and easy to break and I like that. But, again, Hemophiliac Aragorn nails it perfectly. Low-level play is all about improbably awesome bada$&es who are one lucky hit from disaster. High-level play is all about improbably awesome bada$&es punching way below their weight class. Like Superman fighting purse-snatchers and truant teenagers.
Now, I don’t want to run a fantasy game about an improbably awesome bada$&es That’s why I have games like Champions and Mutants & Masterminds. Which I don’t run. That said, if D&D wants to be about improbably awesome bada$&es, I’m fine with that. I’ll just play something else. It just feels like D&D doesn’t actually want to be about improbably awesome bada$&es. Like it doesn’t know how to handle them.
Yeah, this is a vague, wishy-washy, feelings thing. But at least it’s more thought out than that bulls$&% I said about the art style.
We Left the World Blank So You Can Make Your Own: There’s No D&D World Left
If you thought the last thing was wishy-washy feelings bulls$&%, you’re going to love this one: I miss the world of Dungeons & Dragons.
For all the claims that D&D is a generic fantasy game, it nonetheless always managed to pull me into its particular flavor of fantasy adventure. This ain’t just about a default setting, but about all the s$&% that unifies all but the weirdest of settings into one game. One cosmos. At times, D&D 5E offers glimpses of the World of Dungeons & Dragons, but they’re inconsistent and uneven and there’s not much to see.
Races and classes get lots of background lore and fluffy flavor bulls$%&. But the authors keep tripping over themselves — especially in the core books — to reassure you that everything that’s ever existed in any flavor of D&D is totally cool as is anything else you can imagine. Everything the books give you, they take away in the next paragraph with phrases like, “…but in the world of Krynn, elves are different” or “not all paladins are religious…” or whatever.
The DMG pulls the same s$&% with the entire cosmos. And when this s$%& was revealed eight years ago, I laughed my a$& off because I thought the designers were f$%&ing with me. Then I realized they were serious. See, in 4E, the designers streamlined the entire multiplanar cosmos of D&D into a really tightly designed multiverse that had everything D&D needed from its multiverse in a very elegant package. What did they do with 5E? They took that streamlined cosmos and crammed everything in it into the bloated, messy, nightmare of a multiverse of editions passed. Talk about missing the f$&%ing point.
I also can’t figure out why the motherloving f$&% planar cosmology is so central to GMing that it fills the second chapter of the Dungeon Masters’ Guide while actually running the f$&%ing game is covered in chapter eight. But what I do know.
Then, too, there are vast wodges of D&D’s world that are just crammed into spreadsheets and glossaries. Or not mentioned at all. A third of the game’s playable core classes are divine spellcasters! I think the actual gods of the world deserve more than three different spreadsheets listing every god that’s ever existed in any version of D&D.
Most of the s$&% D&D 5E spills ink on is character crap. Because 5E is about building and portraying characters. D&D 5E is about playing Dungeons & Dragons. And, as I said, it drops the ball there with its inconsistent presentation, its give-and-take text, and no continuity between its elements. I mean, if racial cultures are as described in the PHB, why do all members of every race pick from the same list of backgrounds that are totally based on human historical society. And if the game spent a little time talking about the nature of the gods, you wouldn’t have mouthbreathers spouting nonsense like, “well, warlocks and clerics are basically the same, it’s just the details of their contracts that are different.”
The point is, D&D basically says, “f$&% the world; the world’s not important. The world is just a backdrop against which your character does awesome things.” Which is probably why the artwork is so heavily focused on the game’s characters. The generic, bland, your-face-here characters.
Just Shut Up and Run the Game: No Support for Homebrewing
Damn it, I wanted this to be a fun activity. And to show people what it looked like to find the good in what you don’t like and the bad in what you do. And I think I did so. But I’m ending this whole thing on a really sour note. And I can’t help that.
The truth is this: you can be as even-handed in your analysis as you want, it won’t make you like the things you don’t like. No amount of logical reason can do that. It ain’t how emotions work. And liking s$&% is an emotional response. At best, the analysis just helps you find value in your bad experiences, it helps you remain unbiased in your designs, and it makes you less of a shrieking internet a$&hole.
These last three Worsts — the weird imbalance between the characters and the world they inhabit, the lack of a consistent world to engage me as a GM and creator, and the vague but undeniable feeling that D&D 5E doesn’t really want me making my own content — those three elements are precisely why I don’t like running 5E.
I’m a homebrewer. And I’m at my best presenting consistent, emotionally engaging worlds that suck my players in. And D&D 5E’s got no meat for me. Oh, sure, it’ll let me create s$&%, but it ain’t going to help me, and it’s going to sit there scowling at me the entire time. “Fine, make your own world; I’ll just sit over here with the latest nostalgia-marketing crap remake of an old adventure that was already perfectly fine that you could run instead.”
D&D 5E isn’t made to tinker with. It ain’t made to homebrew. I know people disagree with me. I know they say stupid crap like, “the lack of mechanical rigor makes it easy to hack 5E” and “the lack of established worldlore makes it easy to scratch-make your own world.” Those people are morons.
I don’t want to hack a system or build everything from scratch. I paid hundreds of dollars for this game system. I shouldn’t have to recode the entire f$&%ing thing just to make anything more interesting than a dungeon crawl. And I don’t want to have to fit the weird, inconsistent foibles of every possible incarnation of every race and class and background into a world I made my own. I want to homebrew. I want tools and I want to tweak.
I mean, if I have to rewrite everything to tell my own story — why is it okay for players to tell their stories but not me — if I have to rewrite everything to tell my own story, I might as well just make my own roleplaying game and run that.
Now, that’s an idea…
I would love to read one of these about 2nd edition.
3rd edition changed the game for the better…mechanically. But I feel that a lot of the “feel” of the game began slipping in 3rd edition.
The best idea I can think of for this feeling is something that you allude to in your critiques of 5e…the game stopped being about a story, and shifted to being about the characters story. Or maybe to put it another way…as each edition came out, (not counting 4th, that had a feel all it’s own), the feel of the game has moved further and further away from being about a living world the characters are in towards a backdrop world that lets characters do cool things.
Which I guess is my big critique of 5e. It doesn’t feel right. It’s so generic. Even the crazy campaign settings like Theros are really just generic backgrounds with no real feel to them.
The biggest positive? The game is so approachable. I can go in and run a game without checking the rules once, and because the game is so flexible mechanically, most players would never know I was winging rules the whole time. As long as I stick to the basic mechanic, and have a decent understanding of DC’s, everything else can be done ad hoc with no issue.
“I don’t want to hack a system or build everything from scratch. I paid hundreds of dollars for this game system. I shouldn’t have to recode the entire f$&%ing thing just to make anything more interesting than a dungeon crawl. And I don’t want to have to fit the weird, inconsistent foibles of every possible incarnation of every race and class and background into a world I made my own. I want to homebrew. I want tools and I want to tweak.”
Exactly my feeling. Problem is, I bought heavily into 5E before I caught on, and I really can’t afford to dump that kind of money into another system, so I’m pretty well stuck with it. Which is why im here, to learn to wring the feel I want out of an uncooperative system. I haven’t figured out how to get around the early game ability overload, yet. I hadn’t yet caught on to the overuse of advantage/disadvantage, so thanks for pointing that out. I may be forced to give up on the system. Considering WoTC’s recent bid to end the OGL and squeeze third party creators for royalties (i think that might be a suicidal move, but what do i know?), that option looks better all the time.
Pathfinder, and Pathfinder 2 every single rule is online, open, and free. Come to the dark side, we have cookies.
The setting guides and adventures cost money. But every splatbook is on the Archives of Nethys web site.
Pro
Short Rests and Long Rests.
I feel like I see this stuff get a lot of crap online, but I love the distinction between resources recovered through these, and I love how some classes are built around one more than the other. It’s something that can make team building and decision making a lot more interesting in play. One character can unleash their toolkit and get out of a deadly situation knowing that another character will be able to operate normally later, not having used any valuable resources to be near their best.
Con
The books are terribly put together. One specific thing annoyed me recently. I was taking a look at the Weapons and armor table to try and make a mundane upgrade system (as well as figure out the base math behind them), and stopped at Plate Armor. It really hadn’t occurred to me that 5e made a mundane upgraded piece of equipment already. Plate armor is upgraded Heavy Armor. That’s why it’s expensive. They had the same thing for Medium Armor to a lesser extent. It’s not at all spelled out, but they could have so easily put something in the DMG about purchasing basic equipment better than your starting equipment. It would also mean that magic items wouldn’t necessarily have to be Weapons and armor. You can purchase an ordinary +1 Longsword, and then have a magic item that lets you see in the dark instead of a lightning sword. It would have been so easy.
5e is a much better product and a far worse game than earlier editions.
Everyone knows it’s designed for four players, for about four hours. But most people don’t think too much about what that *means*. On the one hand, it’s all the approachable and consistent you could want, especially if you’re playing with strangers or (other) newbs. This happens to lend itself very well to organized or in-store play, which not coincidentally does wonders for WOTC’s bottom line. On the other, 5e breaks down quickly if you want to run a deep, engaging, multi-session campaign focused on a living world. (How? Lots of ways, and that could be a post in itself, but one oft-overlooked answer is *time*. Given how quickly characters heal, even under “tough” conditions, *nothing has time to develop*. In the OSE game I’m running, it’s not unusual for the party to take a week or two off to copy spells or even just heal. This makes it possible for lots and lots of plots to progress offscreen, and they know this and have to balance the resulting tension.)
If you want to do pros and cons:
Pro: the game has actually fixed the XP and economy problems, often too tightly bound in earlier systems, allowing for rapid advancement and reasonable amounts of player wealth. This is probably 5e’s greatest achievement, because it’s a structural issue every version has had and which hasn’t been handled well. Modern players (and modern sensibilities) have moved away from the “fleshpot bender” Conan- or Lankhmar-style play; some newer players *aren’t interested in treasure*, which is kind of mind-blowing. Look to see treasure-as-XP become a back-of-the-book variant as editions continue, replaced by “milestone” or similar systems.
Con: Doesn’t support “longform” play, as I mentioned, and ultimately feels empty to a lot of DMs with significant experience, at least in my circles. Hence the mini-boom in systems like OSE, the equivalent of shaving with a straight razor. 5e’s doodad electric razor is too much and not even the best shave, but you also run zero chance of cutting your head off learning to use it.
This is something I really felt towards the end of my most recent 5E campaign. I established leveling as only taking a long rest, so the players never had any reason to slow down between adventures.
I feel like an oddity, but the edition I have run the most is 4e. I really liked the power source + party role approach to party characters. My friend group at the time were all MMORPG players. 4e made it very easy for me to pitch the game to them. Do you want to be Tank, DPS, Healer, or Crowd Control? What flavor do you want your abilities to have? The downside there is that from level 1 characters have an overwhelming number of options. Even with digital tools, I was asking my players what they wanted to play and making the character sheets for my players. I enjoyed the At-Will, Encounter, and Daily breakdown for powers. My players were video gamers first. Our table liked being more powerful right out of the gate. In older editions the majority of your abilities are on daily cooldowns. If you’re coming from WoW that feels very restrictive. The downside there is that combat becomes a headache relatively quickly. Some combats take way too long as players shift through all their abilities to decide the best move. Other combats end frustratingly quick because players optimized their powers and can bully any monsters you throw at them.
There’s actually a growing interest in 4E again and I’m considering revisiting it myself. There’s things I will probably never like about it, but I also have a feeling I was way too hard on it for unfair reasons. And, as I’ve said, it was both an extremely approachable edition and one that brought in a huge influx of younger players.
Do a list for 4e please
And thus began the next project that would consume the majority of the remainder of The Angry GM’s life. Reminds me of the meme “There are 14 competing standards” “We need a new standard that covers everything!” “There are now 15 competing standards.”
I’m seeing it now there will be an article on D&D 2e., D&D 4e., D&D 3.75e., and then one for The Angry RPG where you talk about the good things and the other places you were constrained by design. Not Fate though, we are not getting the best and worst of fate.
The Worst and Even Worse of Fate
I never played ‘Fate’, but I feel like you gave me a really good idea of what it’s like.
When I read your last point, it reminded me of how 3.5 had books like Heroes of Horror and Heroes of Battle and the various climate books (Sandstorm, Stormwrack, and Frostburn) that were all there to help the GM construct a believable world with exciting and dynamic stuff going on. Even the other books would have useful information, like the Complete Scoundrel being an absolute gem of ideas for creating schemes and secret societies.
At the same time, it probably had too many books. Some were neat, but some were just weird and unnecessary (Magic of Incarnum springs to mind).
I feel that 5e has had generally weak content all edition. It doesn’t provide as many player options nor as much GM support per book as 3.5 did, and lacked those crucial worldbuilding tools.
As a positive for 5e, I do really like how it has gradually been loosening up class and race archetypes to allow for a greater variety of character concepts to be viable.
Speaking of making your own ttrpg, is that still a thing? It’s been a while since you wrote the manifesto, “show me the die 20” (or whatever it was called).
If it’s still ‘a go’, how about a status report? Will it be called “Dungeons & Angry”? or “Angry & Dragons”? or “An Angry Wade in the Tension Pool”…
This article makes me want to do a best and worst of PF2e. In fact, here one is, just the titles, no analysis.
Best
1. Adventure days are balanced to have 1-4 encounters per long rest
2. Tactical Decisions Matter
3. Feats allow high amount of Flexibility
4. Some Classes have meaningful constraints
5. The game is incredibly balanced
Worst
1. Play breaks down if you have less than 3 or more than 5 players
2. Levels scale too quickly, so that you can’t have meaningful combat with anything with 5 or more level difference
3. PCs feel like they have no flaws at Level 1, but at high levels have too many flaws
4. A single combat feels too long
5. Dice rolls and randomness matter too much
Currently, it is called SMAFARGE! But that’s a working title and absolutely will not be a final title. And it is still very much a go.
“But that’s a working title and absolutely will not be a final title.”
That’s what they said about GURPS too 🙂
Well, with all due respect to GURPS, I’d like my game to actually SELL.
(Totally a joke: I like GURPS. It’s the second best game no one wants to play ever.)
A humble request- a status / update article would be awesome.
F$&%ing Angry Dragons….
Pro… sounds fun
Con… limits appeal
Is it too late to say that the 5E DMG is pretty awful? There is no other book in 5E that I get more frustrated reading than the DMG, aside from their adventure modules.
Speaking of adventure modules, I really wish they had chosen some other format than for almost every campaign book to be this massive, 20+ session endeavor that requires the PCs to guess what the DM wants them to do next. Aside from the republished adventures from Tales from the Yawning Portal and Ghosts of Saltmarsh, I found myself getting more and more confused by these adventures, to the point where I opted to simply homebrew the adventure itself.
One can argue that in doing so, I did not give the adventure a fair shake. But come on, if the DM can’t understand the written module, how are the players supposed to?
Advantage and Disadvantage are certainly more good than bad, but there is bad. Players always fish for advantage. Without setting clear boundaries, certain players can turn any given skill check (sorry, Ability check) into a negotiation for advantage or negating disadvantage.
Stuff I like about 5E: No need to plan character advancement, backgrounds, and optional feats. I hate feats. Haven’t used them once in playing this edition for 5+ years now. 3.5 feats were a pain, 4E feats were too numerous to really be anything special after a few levels.
Also, Inspiration: Great idea, but I almost never use it.
100% agree. DMs guide is mostly useless, it’s not REALLY for DMs who want to DM. The PH is all you need. Shouldn’t be that way. And Inspiration is basically pointless as written.
D&D 5E really does feel like a game for and about player empowerment, for better or worse. I burnt out on my enjoyment of this edition a few years back, but I continue to run and play it because it’s what my friends keep wanting to go back to. There’s one group in particular that I feel like I may need to quit gaming with, because what we want out of our tabletop experiences are just too at odds. Anything that limits player expression or power is decried and shot down, and house rules to make them stronger keep being proposed (and implemented in games I don’t run).
Pro: The streamlining of the game and flattening of numbers in general (fewer fiddly bonuses) makes it a lot easier to teach the game to new players and allows a wider range of monsters to be used.
Con: Exhaustion is at such odds with the design of the rest of the system that it is almost entirely abandoned and ignored by the majority of tables and any mechanics outside the core rule books. It’s a painful, penalizing system that’s difficult to remove in a system full of short term easily cured minor setbacks. Stands out like a sore thumb.
Regarding Advantage and hacking 5e, I think there’s some design space to be explored in “superhits,” when you roll with Advantage and Both dice would have resulted in a success, an Extra Thing happens. This is where you put “Knock target back 10 ft or Prone” or whatever status effect you like.
Maybe something like this could replace GWM and SS; on Superhit, inflict Max damage 1/round instead of the -5/+10 math
I’ve played 5e almost my whole ttrpg career. I didn’t even know it was new when I started. I just new I wanted to play “dnd,” whatever form that came in.
It’s one of those games that’s awesome at first, but you grow to hate it as you master it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself
Pros:
– Opt-in, Opt-out: While 5e may not be MEANT to hack and slash into just the parts you like, it’s how people end up playing it. One can go for YEARS without knowing they’ve been homebrewing a rule for dnd. “Game breaking changes” are very rare, especially since people get the gist of how things are suppose to feel. Even if they can’t put it into words.
– Skill List: Alright, BESIDES perception, the skill list pretty much covers everything. Even in scenarios with Athletics Vs Acrobatics, there’s seldom a battle over which skill applies when. Also, in “modern themed” campaigns, at least Arcana can be reskinned as Science.
– Measuring In Feet: I’m thankful that Dnd popularized the idea of using actual measurements for how things should look. Not because I play on maps often, because I don’t. Because now all my stupid friends understand what I mean when I give them a hypothetical without needing to say “it’s about yay big” with my hands.
– I haven’t bought their stuff since 2015, because the internet and a big juicy community of “borrowers.”
Cons:
– Opt-in, Opt-out: There are fickle DMs that change rules without knowing it, and it makes it real awkward when you THINK your character can do one thing, but the DM says they can’t.
– Everything is so DAMN HARD: I hate how involved the d20 is over my skill mods. I just want some damn assurance sometimes, and too many DMs make you roll so damn often.
– Optimizing The Fun Out: So many rounds. Too little actions. I hate deciding between doing something cool and just doing damage. We all know the correct route is just damage, and it sucks.
– Can’t play as myself. This is just me, but I like me. I want to play as myself and I can’t.
Pro: 5E is generally fun for players. Which is what the hobby needs the most to thrive. Easy(ish) to get into, lots of stuff to buy, lots of videos to watch. It’s helped make D&D into something cool (well, cooler).
Con: D&D is still too hard and time-consuming to run. A good DM is still about as common as a good piece of IKEA furniture. To REALLY help it expand, WOTC needs to give DMs some love. Introduce and encourage multiple DMs. Simplify the rules so you don’t have to have a photographic memory and spend ten minutes every ten minutes figuring out what the f$&8ng rule about sneak attack is again. People are busy. Make being a DM FUN. And for the love of all things holy, please expand the brand. The fact that there aren’t more decent mobile and console games and apps is truly baffling.
Oh, and kudos for your observations—spot on! I didn’t even realize what I didn’t like until I read your post.
Would love to read your thoughts on SWADE or Year Zero engine
How much money do I have to cough up (or how many dances do I have to do) to get my hands on the Angry GM RPG you’ve been teasing these many years?
Hopefully $50 and hopefully sometime in the next two years. But don’t take that as gospel. It’s just a rough guestimate.
“Shut up and take my money!” Seriously, I’ve enough confidence and money to pre order now… Dying for a game that gives me a sensible tool set for adventure and world building. Tired of spending more time wrestling with the system dynamics to get something that never even comes close to the feel I’m after. 5e is just…hollow. I’ve played a few games now (as a player, mind), and there is just no sense of accomplishment, no sense of **adventure**, even with a pretty fair dm that came up with cool ideas. P.C.s are just loaded up with too many abilities, hit points are easily recovered, as are spell slots and everything else. Horrifically, this is all now taken as normal and expected. I found it as exciting as a trip to the store to pick up milk. If that’s the future of the hobby, count me out….
Shh… shh… I know. I know. I promise I’ll help. But I can either do it quick or I can do it well.
I know, “Good, Fast, Cheap, Pick 2” is actually a lie. You can only have maybe 1 1/2 of those things. If youre lucky.
And I’m not saying what I mean about 5e all that well, either; it’s accurate, but not precise. Bah, I’ll just grind my teeth and wait for “Angry’s Artistic Adventures” or “Angry’s Adventure Alchemy” or whatever. 5e is way too wrapped up “cool new ‘skins’ ” for the p.c.s to wear to be an actual useful rpg system. IMHO
Posts like this are exactly why people think Pathfinder is too complex.
I’m not really sure what you mean by that. Did you see the previous post about D&D 3.5? Which is basically Pathfinder’s precursor engine? I didn’t call that too complex by a longshot. Though I did honestly assess its strengths and weaknesses. And 3.5 is what I run more of this days.
I think they mean my post. Which seems to have gotten eaten? I did a pretty exhaustive best 5 and worst 5 for PF2e, took multiple posts. Maybe I just repost it with a Google Drive link? Guess I’d want to make sure it wasn’t deleted by Angry for being too long before I do so.
It does seem like it got eaten? A lot of long examples involving complex calculations, situational modifiers, and what that means for planning encounters, which are overwhelmingly about combat. Concluding with “the 600-page rulebook might make people think it’s too complicated.” Um.
Currently suffering through such a game, which consists of leading an essentially deathproof character through a series of set piece combats. One of the players is a PF2 wikipedia, the others (including me) spend a lot of time shrugging, and indeed this is a pattern I’ve noticed among PF2e’s. It has an overwhelmingly Submission bent–the “lonely fun” of absorbing and tinkering with a crufty, overengineered system–and that drags everything else down with it. YMMV, and anyone who’s never played in a game with a truly life-changing DM may not know what I’m talking about.
What bemuses my grognard, HCI-professional self to no end is how video games–bad simulations, limited by computing limitations, of Dungeons and Dragons–are now being badly simulated by tabletop systems. Then again, maybe we need to. As Angry has frequently pointed out, best to solve the embarrassment of “the DM” by making him a dancing monkey. I don’t see D & D next, or whatever the hell they call it, helping with this.
All I will say is I figured most of Angry’s readers would not be familiar with PF2e, so I went into giving detailed examples in the name of context.
I’m going to give a condensed version of my previous and then not discuss it much further, as I’m not meaning to detract from discussing Angry’s articles.
Best 5 in no particular order:
– Degrees of Success, or the +/-10 Rule
Beating a DC by 10 results in a critical hit/success. Teamwork such as Aiding or debuffing or buffing allies matters immensely, as such.
– Player Characters Balanced Against Each Other
Proficiency scaling means niches are protected. A caster will not be able to match the accuracy or AC of a martial, and a martial can never have the versatility of a spellcaster.
– Accurate Encounter Difficulty Calculation
The difficulty ratings for encounters are built to be stand-alone. A challenging encounter is going to be challenging no matter how many fights the PCs have in a day. No more narratively-empty combats for the sake of attrition.
– 3 Actions and the Multiple Attack Penalty
You get three actions a turn that can be used to do anything you want. No specific action types makes learning the system quite intuitive for new players.
– Versatile Heritages
PF2e treats things like being an aasimar or a tiefling as an add-on to another race, lending mechanical support to all kinds of concepts, and not having to hack the system to mechanically support such characters is nice.
Worst 5 (and I recommend adjusting most of these with house rules at your table)
– Lore Skills Do Not Scale
Having to spend skill increases on the Lore skills given by your background or race to keep them relevant feels bad.
– Alchemist and Caster Accuracy
There are some level ranges where alchemists and casters have attack roll accuracy issues that even good teamwork can struggle to overcome.
– Dexterity on Martials is Niche
Full plate armor requires high Strength, no Dexterity, then gives a bonus to your Reflex saves anyway. Unless a character is the party Thievery monkey, Dexterity can be ignored on most martials.
– Static Aid DC
For a game about teamwork, the DC to Aid/Help is too high at low levels, but trivial at high levels, and that can teach the wrong lessons.
– A Bark Worse Than Its Bite
The 600 page rulebook misleads on system difficulty. It is better to have rules one ignores than it is to want a rule and find nothing. Consistency in design also makes ad-hoc rulings easy.
I e-mailed you regarding this. Please check your spam folder if you don’t see it.
5E is the McDonald’s of RPGs, and of D&Ds.
It’s not amazing food, but the fries are quite good. The restaurants are very “corporate and clean” but also not off-putting. (At least back in the 90s you’d always find a clean toilet at McDonald’s, not sure if that’s still the case)
I don’t mind the rules, or how the game plays. It’s very easy to pick up and play.
What I do mind is the presentation once you look closer. Just like a BigMac when you unwrap the paper. It looks nothing like the picture behind the counter.
It’s summed very well up in how Angry described the second chapter of the DMG.
Instead of making the DMG and the PHB at the same time as complementary books that are read as a set, that together make up the rules of the game. They wrote the PHB as the rulebook, an the DMG seems very much like a “oh we must have a DMG” afterthought. (Same with DM facing rules in their supplementary books too honestly)
5E: Easy to run and play, once you know the rules. Difficult to find the rules, with little to no explanations on why you’d want to use the rules presented.
Yeah, but, much like McDonald’s: they keep forgetting their strengths and changing the fry recipe to be try to make it into something it was never intended to be.
Pro: big enough to brew. With the core ruleset available, some amazing 3rd party worlds have come out that address that blandness: Planegea and Midgard come to mind.
Con: small enough to milk. The constant. F$&%ing. Cash-Grabs. I get some real Raid: Shadow Legends vibes from the marketing and design decisions they’re making over there. Somehow the 3.x books felt more… honest? Like they were really working toward a vision for the book: they wanted to accomplish something *for* the game.
Don’t get me wrong: companies need to make money and designers deserve to get paid. I just don’t feel like 5e’s monthly products deserve my money, because taking my money seems like their primary design goal.
1) Pro marketers and product managers are working on the line now, something that wasn’t even really true of 3.5 (although WOTC were a lot closer than TSR ever got).
2) Hasbro is a publicly-traded company with strong demands for growth. It also has an aging product portfolio of uncertain long-term value. All-in on 5e looks like the obvious play, and so it became so.
3) In terms of cash grab, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. It’s literally impossible for them to do otherwise given the market structure in play. Remember: as they drain your wallet, they’re also making it possible to admit you play D n D in public, something that was historically way not the case. In other words, the whole branded “world” around D n D is the direct result of the cash grab. If you’re playing 5e you’re about branded experience, not creator experience, and that’s not accidental.
PRO: I think D&D 5e strikes the perfect amount of customization in character creation. At least in just the core books. Coming from a modern player’s perspective, 20th century D&D’s character gen process is typically too simple: classes had linear progressions with hardly any choices, ability scores were often allocated randomly, and there were no skills to flesh out your character’s background and areas of expertise.
By contrast, as much as I enjoy 3.5 and even 4e, the character customization is insane. Characters often take hours to make, and it encourages players to make a bunch of decisions regarding feats, Skill point allocations, class features, etc. before they’ve even started playing!
5e strikes a great middle-ground, providing classes that each have a major choice, backgrounds, skills with universal proficiency bonuses rather than ranks, and optional feats and multiclassing are nice touches (although I think their implementation could be way better.) Character Creation is involved, but it takes 15-30 minutes rather than 2-4 hours.
CON: Combat is incredibly uninteresting. In contrast to the previous point, 5e strikes a middle-ground between old and new with its combat, and ends up being worse than all of them.
In the TSR days, the core rules of D&D combat often created fast-paced, tense situations where the players were never really sure if they would survive or not. It was often shallow, but it was generally over quickly, and it served its purpose for the pacing of the adventure.
By contrast, 3.5 and 4e offer really rich and involved tactical combat rules that, while a lot slower than AD&D, cause players to make interesting choices every round, and work together to overcome threats.
5e attempts to make combat faster like the older editions, but with some of the tactics of 3.5 and 4e. And it completely fails, in my opinion. 5e combat is generally rather shallow, never forcing characters to make interesting choices like 3.5 and 4e, but it isn’t deadly enough or fast enough to be tense like AD&D. Combats are just a scene to play out, where what happens is usually very predictable.
Sure, you can make an interesting 5e combat with smart encounter building. But as a DM, I feel like I have to spend like three times as much time to make an encounter just as interesting in play as a standard 3.5 random encounter.
Great points! Would be interested in ways you make combat interesting.
I’ve been on a Dungeon Crawl Classics bing for about a year now because of exactly this- the tools and support they provide to a DM to create their own worlds, rules, and such. I have a strong feeling that I can make it a good, long lasting campaign with some help from the Lankhmar supplements, but my game group likes 5e a lot. 🙁
In a list of “100 ways to have a happier life,” one was “Recognize that some people have poor taste.” That DCC/Lankhmar campaign lasted two years, produced a 100,000-word log of our adventures, and was one of the best gaming experiences of my life. Hope you can find someone with the taste to see what you see…
Angry, could the hemophiliac Aragorn feeling, could it be due to the progression through damage point you mention below, in combination with bounded accuracy?
I mean, if you look at it, from levels 1 through 20, the players don’t really get a lot more skilled. A level 1 Ranger with 16 Wisdom and proficiency in Survival gets +5 on a survival check, meaning he succeeds a DC 20 check on a 15 or higher. At level 20, if he gets 20 in Wisdom (doubtful), he has a… +11 modifier to the check, meaning he beats DC 20 on a 9 or higher!
That… really doesn’t feel epic, now does it?
Here you are, battling gods and demons and whatnot, experienced man of the wilds, but you get lost in a dense forest about 40% of the time.
(My comment didn’t work the first time, let’s try again)
There are many free systems, actually. I’ll add to James suggestions:
– Old School Hack, a quick and AWESOME game praised by His Angry Highness himself in a previous article.
– Mouseritter, a game about mice knights.
– Dungeon Crawl Classics has free Quickstart rules, allowing you to get a good gist of the game.
– Dragon warriors rpg, an old British competitor of DnD. Has a super cool fantasy Europe setting.
– Dungeon world, a game I’ll never play because I got Old School Hack.
– Tiny Dungeon 2e, a very simple D6 system with a child friendly vibe (but you can make it darker very easily).
– Star finder, aka space Pathfinder.
-Savage worlds, a system I know zilch about.
– Ironsworn, aka Vikings.
– Lamentations of the Flaming Princess, a grimdark game similar to early DnD editions. By the way, many retroclones are free, and many polish presentation and rules a bit. Also the creator supported an (alleged, by multiple people) abuser, if you care about that. The artfree version of the rules is free.
– Little fears, a horror game were you play children. VERY dark, potentially.
[Feel free to delete this last part if you want, Angry]
There is also the path of the sea brigand, which is easy to navigate just by asking around the right taverns.
Oops, meant to reply to Raymond Duke.