I can be a pretty negative guy. It’s right in my name. But I actually do love role-playing games. I get angry about them because I’m passionate about them. You don’t get mad about things you don’t care about. And I get VERY angry about gaming. So, obviously, I care A LOT.
That said, my last couple of bulls$&% articles – settle in, by the way, because this is my monthly rambling, ranty bulls$&% article – my last couple of bulls$&% articles have been pretty negative. Particularly the two-part article I wrote picking apart all of Dungeons & Dragons’ design flaws based on Mark Rosewater’s criteria for what makes a game a game. Now, I’m not saying it wasn’t interesting. It was. And it helped me understand some of the reasons why I was feeling pretty down on D&D again lately. And it also helped me understand a perceived – and totally anecdotal – difference I’ve noticed between what players think of the current edition of D&D and what GMs think of it.
I’ve been running a personal, weekly, online D&D game for a while now. And I’m going through another spate of frustration and annoyance with the system despite my pledge to just kick back and enjoy the game and not take it too seriously. I love my players and I mostly have fun when the sessions get going, but stuff keeps coming up during my prep or during the sessions themselves to remind me that I’m really struggling to like the latest incarnation of the game I’ve been playing all my life. And that makes it really hard to actually want to put in the prep work and then show up to run games every week.
Now, I don’t think you should let your mood dictate your actions. That’s a line I stole from the brilliant Dennis Prager. Even if you don’t think you want to do something, you should do it anyway. Once you do, your attitude will follow your actions. As long as I get myself to the table and actually start running the game for my excellent players, I’ll end up having fun. It’s just that it’s getting really hard to get over that “design this week’s session and then show up to run it” hurdle. And even when I do, there’s often a “well, this is really f$&%ed up and I have to deal with it” hurdle that comes up during game sessions when I have to deal with some clunky, clumsy, stupid rule or system.
But despite all that, I don’t actually hate D&D 5E. I’m really just running it wrong. Because this edition of D&D isn’t really written for GMs. Especially not tinkering, creative, homebrewer GMs. It’s written for players to play. The GMs are just there to execute the game. Particularly, to execute published, prewritten games. And to allow the players to show off their creative visions during those published, prewritten games.
Which is the conclusion those two Rosewater articles brought me to.
None of that makes D&D a bad game though. In fact, D&D – specifically D&D 5E – is actually a pretty good game by just about any criteria you might want to use. It’s not great, mind you. I think it has some pretty big flaws. Otherwise, I’d just admit it’s not the game for me and move on instead of analyzing the s$&% out of it. Truth is, I think the design was deeply misguided. And I think the game both spent way too long in development and got rushed way too quickly to completion. Paradoxically. The presentation and product quality compared to other editions of D&D were shameful. And the game is lacking some very important things.
But the game is still a very mixed bag. There’s some things that D&D 5E does better than any previous edition of the game. And there’s some things that it does much worse than any previous edition of the game. The problem is, if you asked me where I’d rate it in comparison to the other editions of D&D, I have no idea where I’d put it on the list. I don’t think it would be very high. And compared to other games? Who the f$&% knows.
See, D&D 5E is an edition of D&D. That means I’m automatically judging it by a higher standard than I would judge any other role-playing game. Let’s be real. D&D is the most popular RPG out there. It’s the most well-known. And not by a little. By a lot. It was also the first RPG to ever exist. Which means it’s also the oldest and longest-lasting RPG on the market. Now I know many argue that success doesn’t imply quality. And some argue that success implies crap because successful things are designed to appeal to the stupid, sheep-like masses and toxic fandoms. But those are stupid things to say. Nothing enjoys the level of success that D&D has for 50 years without doing something right. And nothing stays on top of its industry for that long without doing things better than the competition. Franchises die all the time and fans only tolerate so much crap. Right Star Wars?
And if you’re a game designer – or you plan to become one – you’d be stupid to ignore D&D and pretend that there aren’t things that it does right. Even if you, personally, dislike D&D. Especially if you dislike D&D. See, it’s actually a really good exercise in critical thinking to sit down and identify the best aspects of the things you hate and the worst aspects of the things you love. It makes you better at analyzing things and helps you recognize your own biases. Because there’s a big difference between stuff you don’t like and stuff that’s actually bad or broken.
And all of that is why I’ve decided to spend this month’s bulls$&% article talking about the things I think D&D 5E does right.
Pick Up and Play
If I had to describe D&D 5E in one word – and there were children present – I’d call it approachable. 5E is not just the most approachable edition of D&D ever, it’s also one of the most approachable RPGs ever made. Though I have to qualify that by saying that I’m only talking about its approachability with regards to players. I wouldn’t call it approachable for GMs. Not by a long shot.
Approachability refers to how easy it is to understand the game’s basic mechanics and start playing. And the truth is that table-top role-playing games as a medium have a major advantage here. Because they have GMs to ease new players into the game. A GM can just hand a player a pre-generated character, give a quick speech about the basic gameplay dynamic, and then teach the game through play. But there’s still some stuff the player has to understand before they can start having fun and feeling comfortable. And there’s also a big intimidation factor. RPGs are unusual. And they seem big and complicated. Want to see that intimidation factor in action? Hand a brand-new player a D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder character sheet. While they aren’t that complicated once you know what you’re looking at and once you know that most of the blanks are just there to help you do the math, to a new player, they’re like f&$%ing tax forms.
Now I’ve been introducing new players to D&D – and all sorts of other RPGs – for thirty years. And 5E is, by far, the easiest game to bring a newbie into. Hands down. The rules are pretty simple thanks to the refined d20 mechanic, the character sheet is pretty clean and it doesn’t have a lot of extraneous crap on it, and 1st level characters start out with a manageable number of traits and abilities that are pretty easy to grasp.
On top of that, there’s actually two different starting points baked into the game. For new players or for humble-beginnings-style campaigns – my favorite – 1st level is a great starting point. For experienced players playing characters who already have some clout in the campaign world, 3rd level is basically the end of the apprenticeship. By that level, every class has its most important, signature abilities and has settled into a specific build. That’s a very clever bit of design that is only slightly marred by the fact that it isn’t called out at all in the game and you have to figure that out for yourself. But I think one of the designers said it one time at GenCon or something.
Presentation and polish aside, the approachability thing is so important that I want to call attention to some of the specific things that make 5E so approachable.
The Universal Core Mechanic
In the year 2000, D&D’s 3rd edition revolutionized the game by introducing the d20 core mechanic. Before that, D&D was a hodgepodge of different rules for different situations. If there were even rules at all. You would break down doors or search for secret doors with a d6, you’d attack with a d20, you’d roll 2d6 to determine what the NPC you encountered in the dungeon thought of you, and so on. Sometimes you wanted a high roll. Sometimes you wanted a low roll. And ability scores had only a minimal impact on these rolls. Well, some of them.
And then came the d20 system. Everything became an ability check. Roll a d20, add an ability modifier based on the most relevant ability score, add bonuses for training and whatever odd circumstances were in play, and compare the result to a target number. And that mechanic is really powerful. For the first time, there was a single rule that could be used to resolve anything anyone might want to do in the game. The GM didn’t have to make up new rules for every situation the rules didn’t already cover.
From that point on, it was all about streamlining and tweaking and perfecting that mechanic. And 5E has done an excellent job on that front. They rolled a lot of different bonuses into a single proficiency modifier and they use that same modifier for weapons, for skills, and for tools so the idea of proficiency is now universal. And they improved the balance between the impact that training and that ability modifiers have on ability checks. And they limited the number of modifiers that come up at one time. All of that makes it a lot easier to play the game and keep track of the numbers.
And while I still think going back to the ill-conceived saving throw approach that 3E used instead of the much more logical fixed defenses that 4E used, I understand why they did that. And they made the very wise decision to just use the ability scores as the saving throws instead of making them separate numbers related to certain ability scores. You don’t need to differentiate between Reflex and Dexterity anymore, you just have to know what Dexterity is.
And speaking of limiting the number of modifiers…
Advantage and Disadvantage
Click the Goblin’s Jar to Leave a Tip
D&D 5E dispensed with a lot of the circumstantial bonuses and numerical modifiers as part of the streamlining effort and replaced it with what amounts to a simple, three-tiered system. You can either roll a check, roll with advantage, or roll with disadvantage. And when you roll with advantage or disadvantage, there’s no math involved. You just roll twice and take either the better roll or the worse roll. And advantage and disadvantage are binary. You either have them or you don’t. And if you have both, they cancel each other out.
This system provides two benefits. One’s obvious. One’s less obvious. The obvious one is that it simplifies action adjudication immensely. There’s less math involved, you don’t have to keep track of a whole bunch of modifiers, and it’s easier for the GM to grant advantage or disadvantage than to assess a situation and set a specific numerical modifier.
The less obvious benefit is that the advantage system reduces modifier jockeying. You know what I mean. In the past, players tended to try to squeeze every last bonus they could out of everything. Or blow a lot of resources to stack the odds in their favor whenever they felt a die roll was particularly important. It was the die-rolling equivalent of counting squares to avoid attacks of opportunity. And it got old. In 5E, there’s no advantage to modifier jockeying. Once you have advantage, there’s no point in piling anything else on the roll. And there’s no advantage to blowing too many resources on one die roll either. So, players can conserve their resources.
Sort of.
I fully admit I’m talking idealistically here. The advantage system is a good idea and it provides some really useful benefits. But it does have its shortcomings. And I don’t think it was executed as well as it could be. There are far too many spells and character abilities that do end-runs around advantage and disadvantage by providing numerical bonuses or bonus dice. And they weaken the idea. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a smart innovation. And if it continues to evolve over several editions of D&D like the d20 mechanic has, it’ll get smoothed out.
But it’s not just the die rolls that make D&D 5E so approachable. It’s also the character roles. And by that, I mean…
Strong, Recognizable Archetypes
As a race-and-class-based role-playing game, D&D has always had strong archetypes baked into it. And D&D gets a lot of flak for that. Some of it is even fair. But the fact is that strong archetypes make it very easy to get into the game. Try to introduce someone to Shadowrun sometime and ask them to choose between a rigger and a physical adept. They’ll have no idea what you mean. Or sit someone down for a game of Starfinder and ask them if they’d rather play a vesk or an ysoki. You’ll get a blank stare. But most new players can choose between a wizard and a rogue easily enough. Or between an elf and a dwarf.
It might not be fair to give D&D 5E credit for its familiar archetypes though. Most people are familiar with most of D&D’s archetypes because, over the last 50 years, every second role-playing game, board game, book, and video game has co-opted those archetypes. Hell, even the concept of choosing a race and class has been stolen by so many other things that most people who’ve never played a TTRPG still know exactly what it means when you introduce them to D&D. And, for that matter, D&D 5E just stole the archetypes from all the previous editions.
Except that’s not quite true. D&D 5E – like every edition before it – compiled a “best of” list of D&D races and classes for the core rules. And it has one of the best mixes of core archetypes of any edition. The list of arcane spellcasters includes the wizard – from OD&D – the bard – who became core in 2E – the sorcerer – from 3E – and the warlock – who was core in 4E. That’s a really good spread. And while 5E discarded some of the more esoteric stuff from 4E – like the eladrin – it kept the dragonborn and the tiefling who were both very popular and resonated strongly with gamers despite being less traditional than elves and dwarves.
But 5E also made a big change by adding a third kind of archetype to what had always been an archetypical duumvirate in D&D circles. In addition to race and class, players also choose a background archetype to describe their character’s upbringing and personal, pre-adventuring history. Other games had done it before, sure, but D&D really needed it. As a result, characters are now a combination of three strong archetypes that are easy to grok even if you’ve never played D&D before. Most new players can understand what it means to be an elf noble wizard or a human soldier cleric.
The streamlined core mechanics, the advantage mechanic, the strong archetypes, and the clean simplicity of low-level characters make D&D 5E the easiest edition of D&D to pick up and play. It’s great for new players. As long as they have an experienced GM to help them along that is. But what does 5E do right after that newbie session is over?
Progression Through the Game
D&D 5E is a level-based, tactical RPG. And that means it has a sweet spot. They all do. All the editions of D&D and every other level-based, mechanically rigorous RPG have sweet spots. There’s a range of levels where the game just feels right. Characters have the right number of abilities and they feel just powerful enough. The success-to-failure ratio feels good. There’s just the right variety in the challenges and gameplay possibilities. 5E hits its stride at around 3rd level and it’s a pretty solid play experience through the single-digit levels and up to the preteen levels. Some folks think the sweet spot goes a little higher. Others not so high. But no one who is actually worth listening to pretends that it doesn’t exist. While D&D 5E isn’t special because it has a sweet spot, it is special because the designers leaned into the sweet spot.
The level progression in the game – the rate at which PCs gain experience and gain levels as a result – ensures that players linger not just in the sweet spot, but they linger in the best parts of the sweet spot. If you follow the rules for doling out XP as written, the characters get rushed pretty quickly through 1st and 2nd level and then the progression slows down. They spend more time at 3rd level and then even more at 4th and 5th level. And then the advancement rate picks up a little bit and evens out throughout the rest of the game. And that’s a pretty solid design.
Speaking of advancement and XP gain, I want to address something that may be seen by some as a weakness of the system. Who the f&$% am I kidding? It’s something I’ve b%&$ed and moaned about myself before. But I want to look at the positive side of it today.
Why yes, I will have another beer. Thank you.
D&D has a particular structure to it. Let’s call it an encounter-based game. Basically, the way D&D works is that the players have a quest and then they have to deal with a series of fights, traps, and other obstacles as they make their way to the goal. To win the adventure, they just have to get through all of the obstacles alive. They might be events on a timeline or rooms in a dungeon or hexes on a map, but it’s still just a string of encounters between the players and the finish line.
You can think what you want of that. Complain that it doesn’t offer enough variety. Call it limiting. Dismiss it as unimportant because D&D can be anything to anyone. Doesn’t matter. That’s the core D&D play experience right there. And it has been for 50 years. Dungeon crawling at its best.
Well, 5E leans into that too. Very effectively. The game has mostly shed everything that isn’t about dealing with obstacles and resolving single actions. And just about everything that’s still in the game gets involved with that somehow. That’s why inspiration – a role-playing mechanic – gives you advantage on ability checks. If it’s not about overcome encounters or resolving actions, it doesn’t belong in D&D. But there’s more to it than just tossing out all the stuff that doesn’t affect die rolls. All of the different resource management systems – short and long rests, hit dice, the different recharge rates on different class abilities – they all strike a really good balance between encounter-based resources and daily attrition. For the most part, the players start every encounter capable of winning the encounter. Unless they do something really crazy or stupid, they always have enough resources to pull a win out of their a$&. And as long as they survive the encounter, they win. But each character has some nice, signature resources that get used up during the day. They make encounters easier, but they aren’t necessary to win,
That means that the players are never really in serious danger. If they overextend themselves and push into an encounter when they should have gone to sleep for the night, they’ll probably be able to scrape by and then they’ll recognize that it’s time to call it a day. And that solves some complicated pacing issues in encounter-based RPGs pretty handily. Issues that make writing open-ended adventures a headache. It’s a lot to go into right now, but basically, the two big problems it helps solve are the Mega Man problem of balancing difficulty when the players can tackle challenges in any order and the boss fight problem wherein you can never be sure what state the players will be in when they hit the adventure’s most difficult encounters and climaxes.
And since I’ve brought up adventure design, that brings me around to the final major topic I want to discuss. What does D&D 5E do right for the person…
Behind the Screen
I’ve already said that I think 5E is a players’ game. It’s made for players. Mostly new players. And it also caters to a specific breed of existing players. Because of that, it gives a narrower play experience than previous editions of D&D. Well, it might be tied with 4E in that regard. The point is that 5E isn’t really made for GMs. Especially not for creative GMs who like to push the boundaries of the game and expand the play experience. That’s why D&D 5E rubs me the wrong way so much, I think. And why I really want to be done with it.
That said, there are some things that D&D 5E does better than other editions for those us who are forever stuck behind the screen running this crap.
Gaps in the Rules
More than any other edition of D&D – particularly more than any other modern edition of D&D – D&D has gaps in its rules. And they were left there on purpose. If you believe the designers, anyway.
As I mentioned, before the year 2000, D&D was kind of a mechanical pain in the a$& to run because you had to constantly invent new ways to resolve s$%&. Not a good thing or a bad thing. Just a thing. And while the d20 system changed that, something else changed about how the rules were put together at the same time. Starting with D&D 3E, there was a much greater level of detail in the rules. Things were spelled out much more precisely. If I wanted to be hyperbolic, I’d say that 3E was designed for rules lawyers and power gamers. But some of my best friends are power gamers and I don’t have a problem with them. I’ll just say the game became a lot more exploitable by nefarious rules lawyers and power gamers and leave it there.
Put simply, starting with 3rd Edition, the D&D rules became overly definitive, precise, and exacting. The designers left very little to interpretation. Or to chance. And I think that’s anathema to the open-ended nature of role-playing games. Especially given that RPGs already have an elegant mechanic to fill in all the gaps in the games’ rules. Me. The GM. And D&D 3E had just handed every GM a powerful tool that could be used to easily and quickly resolve any action anyone could imagine. Something no prior edition provided. By all rights, the 3E PHB should have been the SHORTEST core rulebook in the history of D&D, not the longest.
Well, 5E embraced the mindset that 3E should have. The 5E designers wanted to emphasize “rulings over rules.” Those are their words, not mine. I’m not that pithy. So, they left some rules – like stealth – vague so there’d be room for interpretation and adjudication. Now, I’m not sure I believe that story completely. Because I know they had to get that PHB to the printer in time for D&D’s 40th birthday. And I know there were a lot of disagreements between the designers and amongst all the playtesters about how D&D should handle a lot of things. But I do believe they did purposely scale back on the exacting level of detail that made 3E so dense and exploitable and that made 4E downright restrictive and chaffing. And I applaud that attitude.
See, by the time 5E came out, I was starting to feel like the great minds behind D&D didn’t trust me to run the game anymore. I had a rough time with 4E despite its many amazing innovations because it felt like the game didn’t want me using my brain to run the thing. It felt like it was afraid I would ruin its perfect design if it didn’t keep me on a tight leash. And that’s a problem because most GMs will not ruin games if you don’t keep them under control. But if you let them flex their creativity, most GMs will run amazing games with your system.
And speaking of making amazing games, let me finish by talking about…
Building Within the System
This last point is going to come as a big shock. At least coming from me it will. I think the monster and encounter building tools in D&D 5E are some of the strongest and most satisfying tools for making custom content that have ever existed in any edition of D&D.
Wait, what?
I know. I spent a f&$%-ton of time and effort rewriting and reorganizing and rejiggering the custom monster building and encounter building systems. How many articles have I written on them? But the thing is, all I did was clean them up. I moved some numbers around. I presented things better. And I smoothed out some of the math. The underlying systems were totally solid.
Of all the editions of D&D I’ve run, I’ve enjoyed making custom monsters for 5E the most. And organizing those monsters into encounters is also easy, fun, and satisfying. Even without the special tools I built to help me. Yeah, the math is clumsy and it takes a while to understand what the designers were driving at, but I think that’s down to bad presentation and lack of polish. The tools do work. They work well.
I said above that 5E excised everything that isn’t part of the core gameplay structure of fighting through a string of encounters on the way to a goal. And because of that, it’s really hard to build anything solid for D&D that isn’t about overcoming a bunch of encounters on the way to a goal. But if you embrace that gameplay structure – the dungeon-full-of-encounters – then D&D works really well. Even when you make your own dungeons and stock them with your own encounters and populate them with your own monsters. At the sweet-spot levels, the game balance is very reliable, though most GMs don’t see it that way because if a PC never dies they think that the players are never in danger. The thing is, it’s good for D&D to err on the side of easier encounters. A too-easy encounter leads to a half-hour of lackluster gameplay that probably won’t be noticed because the combat engine itself is just fun. Fun for the players at least. They have piles of awesome abilities to show off, after all. On the other hand, a too-hard encounter leads to a dead PC. Or a dead party. And that usually means an entire session or even an entire campaign ruined. So it’s good that the game’s custom encounter building and custom monster building tools err on the side of caution. It makes it much less likely that a new or inexperienced GM will ruin their game when all they want is the fun of making their own dungeon.
I Need a Drink
And that’s my take on the big things that D&D 5E does right. Some of them are pretty specific to D&D and to the type of game D&D 5E is trying to be. Some are more generally applicable and are the sorts of things that anyone who’s writing an RPG should pay attention to. That’s not to say everything I said above would make a good addition to any RPG. And that is also not to say that everything I said is purely good and has no downsides. Every game design decision is a tradeoff. Every decision is about trading something for something else. D&D 5E trades a lot of depth for approachability, for example. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just a thing. And any designer might choose a different tradeoff.
But now that I’ve spent almost 5,000 words complimenting the designers at Wizards of the Coast for their years of hard work and passionate dedication to the game I’ve loved for 32 years and now that I’ve shown that I’m capable of being reasonably positive – mostly – I need to go punch a kitten to restore balance to my life.
Don’t worry. I’m not talking about Biscuit. The Tiny GM would never forgive me if I punched our kitten. I’ll find some random, orphan kitten. It’ll be funnier that way.
Aprils Fools? If not, good timing for a positive article…
5e having flaws doesn’t mean it doesn’t have merit. I’m negative about 5e quite often, but I know it has a more to do with me and my expectations, and the GM that doesn’t know how 5e is intended to work than 5e itself. In fact, I know for sure it’s the GM’s fault fights are wonky in a really, really bad way, and I now never ever want to play as a player again, and 5e can’t be blamed for any of that. It’s collateral.
And I love *running* 5e, for the most part. Lack of loot to hand out aside, the monsters blocks are clean and straightforward, and I’ve never fallen into a rules-whirlpool where I have to cross reference several keywords that literally only exist in this one exact context. If I happened to miss a this, or flubbed a that, it’s never a huge deal. I can dream together a half-decent 5e session.
[[ This comment has been deleted. Despite the introduction, all it does is pile up a bunch of negative criticism of D&D 5E. Criticism everyone has already brought up before. Criticism I, myself, have brought up before. Criticisms I acknowledged in this very article while saying that they weren’t the point and that this article was specifically about looking past the criticism to find the redeeming qualities as lessons in game design and as an exercise in critical thinking. The commenter so thoroughly missed all of these points in their haste to run down here to make sure everyone knew they still hate 5E and they aren’t letting it off the hook for its flaws. I would have trashed this comment completely except for the fact that I know other people are going to want to do the same thing. So this deleted comment is here as a warning. If you’re here to do the same: stop. Don’t. Because, while I will probably agree with everything you say, you still missed the point. You aren’t thinking. You aren’t growing. You aren’t bettering yourself as a gamer or a designer. And you’re off topic. – Angry ]]
It’s refreshing to read this.
It’s also a sign of intelligence if someone can assess both positives and negatives of something. Not that I doubted your ability scores after seeing the stuff you’re putting out there, but I think it’s still good to see a more nuanced view now and then.
I also agree that designing monsters and encounters with them is a most satisfying activity.
LOL at “your ability scores”.
Nice one Rijst.
Maybe Angry has that ridiculous PF2 Barbarian feat “Acute Vision”: his perception gets better when he is raging :0)
Ha, thanks!
I have never played PF2 but that seems a bit over the top. I can’t imagine a raging barbarian during the post-fight chat saying stuff like “did you notice the colour coordination on that goblin? So daring!”
Yeah, but you also better not imagine ME saying something like that.
A fashionista that gets so enraged at poor accessorizing that they literally enter a barbarian rage! Ahahahaha!
Is there another Dennis Prager or were you sarcastically referring to the Prager U guy?
It wasn’t sarcastic. And don’t even start.
There’s a joke about a dead politician’s strawberries in here somewhere.
I don’t know that one.
yeah when I sat down and decided to explain it, I realized that this reference-chain had a step or two too many, one critical one of which is a bit of Scandinavian commedy. So yeah, feel free to delete my failure to think properly before hitting post, as I’m adding nothing of value.
But I need to know… not knowing will kill me… I give you permission to be off topic and add nothing.
Well, aside from the Scandinavian parts it loops through a TvTropes page and a corollary to Godwin’s Law. Ultimately, it was referring to a skit about how much silliness can come of deciding that everything that some person says or does is by definition bad/wrong/evil because one dislikes them and/or one or more opinions that they are vocal about and taking that to its logical conclusion.
As someone who (after most of a decade) got back into D&D after picking up 5E, a few years after it’d been released, I think you pretty much nailed most of what 5E does right. Maybe this isn’t the case for you, or maybe you disagree, but the thing that drew me in was that, after getting my head around the Proficiency thing, the game basically works the way I expect it to. The learning curve was … shockingly steep. Sure, there are surprises here and there, but they’re really rare (for me). I agree that it’s definitely more player-friendly than DM-friendly, and that it’s especially new-player-friendly, but if that’s a flaw it’s a relative one–it’s certainly going to make it easier to sell the game to new players if it’s easier for them to grok it.
Thanks for the blast of positivity right now.
I might argue that most modern RPGs have a similar universal action resolution system, also often using a d20, but just because everyone else stole it from D&D doesn’t make it not a strength of the system. And Advantage is a brilliant mechanic and tool, so much so that I tend to use it even when I’m running a different system.
Its really just a shame that 5E gets misused so often. Its ultimately structured around being more or less a dungeon crawl, but a lot of people (WotC included) like to pretend its not that, and that you can run essentially any sort of game in any sort of settings that falls broadly under ‘fantasy’ (not that I blame WotC for this, it makes perfect sense why they would want to make their game look like its the ultimate multi-tool in RPG technology.) A piece of advice I don’t see often enough is to use a different system if you need something different. I’m eternally grateful to Angry’s article on running a low-magic game in 5E for just telling me not to, and ultimately leading me to Dungeon Crawl Classics (which isn’t really low magic either). DCC is great because its so honest about what the system is for – its for old-school dungeon crawling, and it does that really well.
I guess I’d say 5E is made of good, quality materials, but it got made into a spork instead of a razor sharp knife. Oh well, its still good for eating plenty of things.
It’s this stuff, plus the love my RPG group holds for DnD, and my own lack of experience with design, that has me working on designing a hacked version of 5e. There’s enough nuggets I really like amongst the things that drive me nuts that I want to try and the good bits while basically trashing the worst of the rest of it and your articles are the only reason I really understand the difference.
Thanks for all your work Angry! If it wasn’t for you I’d still be lost and afraid of running games I didn’t know how to plan for and thinking I could solve all my problems by making a better system. Already, I’ve started running better games regardless of the system. But 5e still drives me nuts and I’m still just arrogant enough to think I can “fix” it.
You call out custom monsters specifically as being most enjoyable in this edition. What editions were your favorite for other “building within the system” customizations?
4E was great for encounter building and monster building too. But the absolute most fun I ever had building and stocking dungeons/wildernesses was BECMI.
I agree with your statements. Actually, when I restarted Gming an year ago, I played Pathfinder, but it was too complex for the kind of game I wanted: a megadungeon crawl for different parties, non regular players or beginners. I found D&D 5e edition very approachable, as you wrote, and very easy to explain and to manage as referee. I found D&D 5e edition also a good system if you want to play some classic module like Cavern of Thracia without any retroclones.
Now, I have a question about advancement and XP gain. Do you think is still important to give less xp for wandering monsters or restocked encounter in a dungeon crawl, or do you think is better to five xp as written in DMG following the natural design of D&D 5e?
The primary argument for changing the xp rewards in a mega-dungeon is that 5e assumes a more… I don’t wanna say “one-use”, and I don’t wanna say “linear”, so I’m settling on gesturing vaguely at games like Diablo and Skyrim to try and show what kind of dungeon they had in mind. And the game play reward loop for a megadungeon is dissimilar enough to that kind of dungeon that you want to add some epicycles to the game if you’re going to drift it.
5e is a great place to murderhobo, and to feed murderhobos, in fact 5e has quite a bit in common with 1e, except murderhobos live longer. Remember when you didn’t have to even worry about silly little things like “level cap”, not because there wasn’t one, just nobody lived to see it. Heck a character getting to level 12 was dang near a walking god.
What I do know, is 5e is easy on players in many ways. Players having fun makes it easier for GM’s to have fun. Players having fun with GM’s having fun means more players are willing to give GMing a go, which means the GM gets to play more as a Player. This leads to less GM burnout and more GM’s which leads to more fun and maybe more importantly, more understanding on just how much work is involved in keeping the game fun, no matter how great or flawed the system is, there is still a translation bottleneck, and that is the GM, whether they are Angry or not.
@Dario Russo I’d say do what you need to do to keep the pace you are looking for in your game. Characters advancing too quickly, reign back the xp on monsters, think they need a little boost to be able to not get ROFLStomped by the boss, give them a little bit more. There are other ways of doing it as well. Overall I’m in the camp that Random Encounters are really neither random nor encounters. Sure there is combat (usually) and most likely I did roll on some table, but overall, the “random encounter” is there to show either a living world or to get the players off their @$! and get moving at the cost of some of their resources.
Tech folks talk about “assumption debt.” When you’re building software, you have to make a lot of assumptions–what people want, how the architecture of your program will work, etc. etc.–and at some point you have to fix all the crap that’s on fire because you assumed wrong. Or your product takes off and you realize that the language you picked (coughRubycough) can’t handle millions of simultaneous users, or whatever, and so you have to migrate the whole product to something that can. Which usually involves massive, painful, boring effort that pisses off a lot of people.
5e is the first real, professional attempt to fix assumption debt going back to the 1970s. The issue is that early D&D games under Kuntz and Gygax lasted 4-10 hours, DAILY, for groups of 10-12 players. “Castle Greyhawk” will never see publication because it’s a couple boxes full of cryptic one-line descriptions, NPC names, and indecipherable maps–improv prompts, basically, which is how you “prep” a game of that scale. Apparently, this was FUN AS HELL. As someone who participated in a similar campaign in college, a game that made 5 of the 12 players fail out of school, I can tell you that yes, yes it was. (I was almost #6.)
But you can’t have a product that way, not today. Or even then: Gygax’s firing distracted from some serious negative trends with the business. Sales were down and interest appeared to be dropping. A lot of this was happening about the time that Boomers were settling down and having kids (and turning into yuppies). 1e was too much hassle.
But “how to D&D” still has a lot of assumptions from those times baked in, just as “how to program” still retains weird crap from the times when computer memory was so scarce you had to manually assign it. So Angry’s right: the freewheeling, creative, emotional, this-cant-be-done-in-a-video-game stuff is largely missing, despite the fact that 5e’s systems have been Fixed. The “I want to do more than one-shot dungeons” stuff. Much of Angry’s work seems to involve getting that stuff to fit into a simple but fairly inflexible framework. Most GMs would never even have the capacity to try.
One of the survivors of that old college campaign is now running a game for a few of us online. He recently nixed adding two more of the old crowd, since 5e can’t really handle seven. Adding #5 was tricky enough.
Maybe we should consider that there is a cost and benefit spectrum for how important/disposable characters are. And that only controlling one character at a time is itself just an old house rule that everyone now considers a real rule. What changes when characters dying doesn’t ruin much at all?
Interview with Questing Beast, questing on running games with 12 year olds:
“Are kids violent?
Oh yeah, hyper-violent. It’s all just pure murder hobo all over the place. I don’t try and restrict that at all. What I try to do is enforce logical consequences. “Yeah, you absolutely can decide to try and kill everything in this dungeon but the dungeon is not balanced for you to survive. If you do that things are gonna fight back and there are things that are tougher than you. If you die, it’s not a big deal you can just make another character, but you’re gonna start over now without your XP and have to work your way back up.” Eventually, once you have enough kids that are smart enough to gain a bunch of XP and some levels, they’re really proud of the fact that they’re at level 3 because no one else is. Then that becomes a motivating factor for everyone to start being a little bit more careful. ”
https://dreamingdragonslayer.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/ben-milton-interview-part-i-early-days-and-running-for-kids/
I think the downside of controlling multiple characters is that you need to remember all the options both characters have. Imagine running two spellcasters, brrr..
Ha, so in a dungeon of the week campaign with kids you only have to stat up a small range of monsters because the odds of anyone reaching level 5 are miniscule. Goblins every other week for an entire year, fantastic!
Funny, I run a game with college upperclassmen and they seem to have more or less the same mindset…
There’s a tricky tradeoff with lethality – in theory, not having PCs dying left and right makes players more invested and able to explore their characters, etc., except it also allows them to not take things seriously and be constantly ridiculous and reckless. At the end of the day, I guess its really mostly a matter of taste and preference; I don’t personally enjoy 5Es unkillable PCs, but some groups probably really like the feeling of security
5E is phenomenal at having combat encounters go much quicker too.
I actually quite like the saving throws mechanic, although I have never played 4E.
Would fixed defenses involve an attack roll by the caster against the target’s relevant defense number? I.e. 10 + Wis or 8 + Proficiency + Dex or something?
Doesn’t sound like a bad idea actually, it would simplify the casting system somewhat..
That was precisely how they worked. The logic was that the actor/caster/attacker should always roll the dice. You had fixed Dexterity, Constitution, and Will defenses … basically armor classes… and they were the targets for unusual attacks like spells, poison, shoves, whatever. That way, there was no weird “sometimes you roll to hit, sometimes the defender rolls to make you miss, and it is explicitly spelled out in each attack which one it is”
At first I thought that should be fairly straightforward to bring to 5E and I got excited.
But then I realised, casters’ save DCs are several points lower than attack bonuses so a straight switch would make them quite a bit more powerful than currently the case. So you’d have to reduce damage output accordingly and it becomes a nightmare.
Save DCs are 8 + proficiency + spellcasting modifier
Attacks are d20 (average 10.5) + proficiency + relevant modifier
If you just made everything an attack against a static defense (in place of a save), it’d be pretty close if your Dex “save” was just a static 10+Dex mod + proficiency (if applicable).
That’s still 2 points difference in the lower levels for non-proficient saves, a 10% increased chance to hit..
No you’re right and I’m talking nonsense. Apologies..
Rijst, you are actually right, there is a 2 point difference. But it is for proficient saves. For non-proficient saves the difference is larger.
If I’m not mistaken this is by design. The players are more likely to be submitted to saving throws than the enemies. So, the odds are slightly skewed in their favor if they have the relevant proficiency. If they don’t, it is about the same as the unarmored mage being hit by the enemy bruiser.
You will also notice that the monster’s save DCs follow the same formula of 8 + prof + modifier. Sometimes the modifier is the same he uses for his main attack (the mindflayer’s save uses intelligence), other they are based on a side ability score (a dragon’s breath uses constitution, while their bite, claw and tail attacks are strength based).
I knew I should have a coffee before posting here. Thanks!
Me and my crew of grognards have been in D&D since the mid 80’s. We have been firmly entrenched in 3.x from the day it came out. 6 months ago we tried 5e. I ran tomb of annihilation. We all liked the new race/class designs, combat was smooth. But eventually we all felt something wasn’t right. There didn’t seem to be any real danger. Without the chance of death we just didn’t enjoy the fight. Also, we like loot. So, we went back home.
P.S. we didn’t even try 4e. It looked ridiculous.
4E felt more like an MMO than a p&p rpg to me at least.
Also if you want the fear of death you just need to up the challenge level for your players. Send them against things that are higher challenges for them.
I run a 5e game for long time 3.x players and decidedly by all of us all of the encounters for the group are set towards the harder end of the spectrum.
After playing with Angry’s custom monster table it made it easier to go with high threat monsters (2-3 threat) and it made it way easier to pace things since now i can have larger groups of threatening monsters.
Its all about adjusting to your and your group’s play style.
I ran Tomb for a party of 7. I have killed 7 pc’s, though not all at once, and I did increase the danger of many situations, but they fit the adventure (plus the base adventure is not scaled for 7 pc’s). 5E can be deadly if you tweak it just a bit, and play the enemies as though they want the Pc’s dead, instead of inconvenienced.
But it does have a very different feel from 3.x stuff, I know what you mean. There is something more…risky in play in that edition. Pc’s feel less robust.
I see this sort of comment a lot, but I’ve never found 5e to be anything but as deadly as I want it to be. PCs get 3 failed death saves before they die. Any damage causes 1 failure. A critical hit causes 2. Melee against an unconscious enemy automatically crit if they hit. Thus, a goblin could attack a downed PC and cause 2 death saves. 3 goblins can basically instantly kill a PC. Add the 45% chance to fail a death save on their own turn, and it’s ridiculously easy to kill a PC.
On the other hand, if I don’t want it to be particularly deadly, my NPCs generally don’t think that way and instead focus on attacking the PCs that are still up. PCs then have an average of like 4 rounds of safety, and are more likely to survive being downed, since each save has a 55% chance of success.
Well, unless your system is “Any HP loss below 0 is death.” (B/X and earlier)
Or “Any HP loss below 0 incurs a negative score. PC dies immediately if score is -10 or less. Score goes 1 more point towards -10 with every round”
added to
“Sleeping, unconscious [as -HP bodies above] or otherwise incapacitated foes can be killed instantly in one round.” (1e/2e)
5e characters have far more hit points and far more death resistance/resilience. They heal unbelievably faster (within an old-school turn) and have basically no long-term healing aftereffects (compare to 1e’s brutal, weeks-long recovery periods).
Better rules? I dunno. I’m running 5e, with deep familiarity with B/X and 1/2e. But 5e PCs are a LOT more deathproof.
I’m not saying it’s not less deadly than the very early editions, but it’s not *not* deadly either, which was my point. There are no coup de grace rules, explicitly, but any creature with multiattack can kill a PC in one round, or any 2 creatures easily can. It literally takes 2 successful melee attacks (or 3 ranged), and the PC is dead. It’s on the GM to do that (or not), just like it’s on the GM to attack downed PCs in earlier editions.
Or, look at it this way: a PC can literally die on their own without doing anything at all, when at 0 HP, in 2 rounds. Less than 2 rounds, even. From what you’ve said, this is only true in Basic (and I’m not actually familiar enough with pre-3.x to say otherwise).
Great article, thanks!
I’m still waiting for a good d20 mechanic-based system for turning undead. I don’t think it works well within the constraints that the newer editions operate under.
Your monster design stuff is gold btw; the best material in your blog.
I’m a little confused by what you mean regarding turning undead. What are you looking for specifically? The ability as-written is already a d20 mechanic: the undead make a Wisdom save against your spell save DC. Which edition do you feel did it right, and what made it better than how it is in 5e (this being the most modern edition)?
More information would be fantastic! I read this blog because it makes me think, and your comment is too tantalizing, but too vague and I just gotta know!
Turning undead has changed dramatically in from its 1st/2nd ed table format. All of the elements – the number of attempts, the number/quality affected, the resistance to the ability – get tinkered with in every successive edition of the game (which tells me that the previous method was somehow unsatisfactory to the new designers). In 5th edition it’s essentially the same as a spell, which strikes me as bland and (wait for it) moribund.
Here is a good comparison: https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=70512
“One of the most approachable RPGs”
I’m not sure if you are trying to make a joke, I’m missing your point or you just lack experience, but that statement sticks out to me in the an otherwise excellent and nuanced article.
DND is not approachable in the slightest compared to the a number of international options. But I guess compared to most of mainstream RPGs, I can buy the argument. I assume that’s what you meant, because if not, I’d like to introduce you to a world of narrative systems that make things hella easy on the players. They do, however, make it rough for an inexperienced GM.
I’d argue that 5e is a good game for a GM. Freaking everything is listed in a rule somewhere. You don’t need to think in the slightest. Just run the system and you’ll be fine.
I would consider 5e one of the easiest systems to GM, period.
Having no experience with earlier editions of d&d, I feel like this was very easy to get into with my (also all new) players. We now have three-and-a-half campaigns under our belt and we still enjoy ourselves very much. Both as DM’s (we rotate between campaigns) and as players. The fact that this goes without any serious hickups is a testament to the accessability of the game.
Also, i really appreciate the increased interaction lately between us readers and yourself Angry.
And that’s really it. It’s a much more learnable, playable product. But I urge you to try to find truly expert GMs, probably at a convention sometime. Qualitywise, it’s the difference between 70s sitcoms and Breaking Bad. It will also give you a bucketful of ideas to make your game better, stuff that’s hard to write about but easy to understand when you experience it.
Thanks for the advice, I was planning to do that at some point. Just haven’t found the time yet. But i will! 🙂
Breaking Bad instead of a Sitcom sounds too good to skip.
Definitely love the encounter building. With the content on this site, I can almost trivially redo every monster in a campaign. Nobody has a clue what they’re going to face. I make a dozen a week and throw them in my own monster manual in roll20 in their respective themed folders. It’s actually super cool and really helps the game not get stale.
A dozen a week? I’ve gone through 5 iterations of my race of super bugs just to get the flavour right.
Then I made a dozen of them obviously, but still..
The only thing I don’t like about d20 is the flat rate between success/failure and a standard action. I love me some bell curves, give me 3d6 or give me death. And yes I do roll 11d10-10 for a random number between 1 and 100, or roll d% and use a weighted table for the result, both are fun. Big whoop you wanna fight about it?
There is actually a good reason to roll the d% normally at D&D. The percentile dice is mainly a DM resource. As such, there is no target number to hit, you just use the d% to choose from different random outcomes. And the tables usually aren’t organized in a way that makes the center values any more desirable, relevant or fun. Can’t see your game improving from it.
But, I’m talking about the random tables we find in the books and on the web. If you use your own tables, than dismiss my comment the same way you would eliminate an outlier in your bell curve. =9
I’m also partial to bell curves but I understand the benefit of keeping most rolls to a simple single die roll. I have played around with a technique to reduce the swingyness of d20 rolls though. For ability checks (not attacks or saving throws) I’ll tell the player the die and (usually) the target number (DC), as in, “roll a d8 Survival(Wisdom) check, 6 or better to succeed”. By dropping the d20 down to a d8, I reduce the number of possibilities and increase the significance of each point of ability modifier or proficiency bonus. It’s helpful when you want to accentuate the difference between the Ranger with a decent Wisdom and proficiency in Survival from the Wizard who has neither. If a PC would add enough that they succeed even on a roll on 1, they don’t roll, they just succeed. If a PC can’t succeed even rolling the maximum amount on the die, they can’t succeed, they just aren’t capable.
I’ve found it helps break players of rolling dice before I call for the roll on ability checks, since they need to listen to exactly what kind of roll I decide to call for, and negates the “I rolled a 20! Magic happens!” syndrome.
Using dice with lower numbers of sides does boost the strength of any numeric bonus like a guidance spell or bardic inspiration, but I haven’t seen that as a problem (yet). Advantage and disadvantage works fine though. I’m still testing it out. Since this technique is controlled on the DM side and doesn’t mess with any player abilities or mechanics, I can drop it at any time if it starts to fall apart and just revert to always using d20 and calibrate the DCs accordingly.
1.0 wooooo!!!!
1d10 is random, but 11d10-10 ain’t.
Do you tell people the chance of rolling a 1 or 100 is 0.0000000001%?
11d10-10 is random. It’s just that the probabilities are really skewed towards the central numbers, and there seems to be no value in using 11d10-10 as a gaming tool.
I agree with you on most things, but the system did really need your articles on monster and encounter design. Without them it just felt backwards. Like they were assumed every GM would just design monsters and encounters first, find out their CR and difficulties, and then put them in a binder and use them whenever.
I’m sorry but I don’t have time for that. With your design of CR first, find out abilities later and Tier and Encounter size first, choose monsters from a list, this makes sooo much more sense.
As a GM/player for the past 25 years I agree with most of this. I recently picked up GM’ing again with DnD 5th ed and while I played 4th ed my first interaction with 5th ed was as a GM. I found that teaching it to my 10 year old was fairly easy, even the spellcasting mechanics we’re streamlined to make it more accessible to new players. Designing adventures, especially compared to 3, 3.5 and other systems is a fraking nightmare.
I must have missed the part where I had to “convert” my NPC’s to monster stats to make them properly work in the game and not be too over or underpowered based on CR. I mean I understand that for a single enemy to be a real challenge to the players it has to have the HP to last more than 2 rounds against a Party of Five, but the double creation of things is goofy.
Plus I find the lack of adventure and enconter building completeness annoying. Basically, if it doesn’t involved fighting they provide no real guidiance on anything in terms of XP values vs. difficulty. I shouldn’t have to crack open the 3.5 book to solve a 5th ed problem. At that point it’s just easier to run 3.5 or 4th ed. Even Angry’s Slaughterhouse hacks don’t run as smooth as under 4th ed and honeslty those rules are some of the best homebrew I’ve even seen and used.
Also just from a glance it seems that once PC’s hit level 15 that combat will grind to a halt, too many choices to make in a part of the game where i feel that everything needs to move fast, so the game doesn’t grind to a halt.
So while yes we need to take the good with the bad and maybe it’s just the rust on my GM’ing muscles I think like Pathfinder 2 a lot was taken out of the system that could have made it better, or at least feel more complete.
Great job on a balaced article giving the good with the bad.
After a 15 year hiatus (read: children) I recently started a DnD group up again. Having donated all my old books, I had to purchase 5e. I found the lack of skills frustrating, some of the mechanics a but confusing, etc. Rather than gripe and try to recreate what I enjoyed about previous editions I run ran with it and just let 5e be 5e (after reading a ton of Angry’s article that helped clarify my thinking). The players (all new to ttrpgs) picked it up quickly. Everyone is having a blast, and I learning to stretch my tolerances and be a better GM.
Everyone is having a blast. So why complain?
Now I just need to learn to proofread my posts.
I agree with almost all of this. I’ve been playing 5e since the playtest, but this year I’ve become… bored? I don’t know. When I’m in the mood for simple, old fashioned d&d, Ive got a Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign, and when I’m in the mood for modern, elegantly designed, tactical RPG with a robust character building minigame, my other campaign is Pathfinder 2e. Right now, there’s no real itch for which 5e is the best scratching tool.
But I dunno, it’s so ubiquitous and there is so much content, and I feel like they’ve done a pretty good job nurturing that ecosystem, so I’m sure I’ll be back at some point. But DCC and PF2 is a pretty epic multiclass DM build.
A recent Sage advice video ( https://youtu.be/vbj_TcpuzqU ) pointed me back to backgrounds, and I still think that is some of the most elegant and well executed design in all of 5e.
They provide just enough examples in the book that you can often find a good base, and then mixing an matching can quickly get you very far. It is easy for a DM to approve a background that a player constructed, and going through the process forces players to think in terms of their characters history. Even if you don’t intend to use it all that much, being forced to pick stuff like a flaw and a bond can really nudge players into giving the character just that little bit more depth.
If nothing else, 5e also feels like it has a very solid foundation to build a next edition off of. It has a strong core of what works, and a lot of the weaker elements that need complete retooling don’t require breaking that core.