Quote from: Omega;1113747You fail miserably at trolling.

Indeed. I can find thousands of pages of problems with 3.0/3.5, and no pages of problems of my fantasy heartbreaker I never published...

An aggressive fanbase that's errant about dismissing any criticism. Id says that's the worst part about 5e.

I am not feeling the new UA release which provides the core PHB content with new customization, a la MMORPG power creep "balancing" to satisfy a whinging fanbase. But given it took WotC over 5 years to reach this similar point, one could almost say "our childrens iz learning." I think the slow release is one of the best things to happen to WotC's strategic plan.

Quote from: Omega;1113747You fail miserably at trolling.

Hey now, don't you recognize true humor when you see it?

Quote from: Opaopajr;1113784I am not feeling the new UA release which provides the core PHB content with new customization, a la MMORPG power creep "balancing" to satisfy a whinging fanbase. But given it took WotC over 5 years to reach this similar point, one could almost say "our childrens iz learning." I think the slow release is one of the best things to happen to WotC's strategic plan.

I think it's good. The player base has had long enough to digest the material that some more complexity won't overload everyone.

Quote from: Doom;1113765Indeed. I can find thousands of pages of problems with 3.0/3.5, and no pages of problems of my fantasy heartbreaker I never published...

See. Your game is practically the pinnacle of perfection.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1113768An aggressive fanbase that's errant about dismissing any criticism. Id says that's the worst part about 5e.

Let us know when you find that because we've been ruthlessly bashing 5e here for several pages.

You too fail miserably at trolling.

Quote from: Opaopajr;1113784I am not feeling the new UA release which provides the core PHB content with new customization, a la MMORPG power creep "balancing" to satisfy a whinging fanbase. But given it took WotC over 5 years to reach this similar point, one could almost say "our childrens iz learning." I think the slow release is one of the best things to happen to WotC's strategic plan.

um... you missed the part where UA is not a set of expansions usually? These are mostly playtest packets. Hence the eventual review before it moves on towards whatever they plan to do with it.

As for power creep. eh. So far. Aside from the Artificer. There has not been any real power creep in 5e. Which I have honestly been expecting. They surprisingly toned down and retooled the Artificer for playtest round 2 which surprised me even more. It is still a bit too strong. But it does not now overshadow all the other classes as it did prior. Same for a few others that show up in UA.

The rest has been relatively tame. With a few notable exceptions. The Sidekick system I thought needed toning down a little. But its nearly unchanged in Essentials other than how it is formatted.

The Hexblade and Bladesinger were for a time complained about. But it seems that died down some? Sometimes it feels like the stuff that did not go through UA playtest tends to be the ones with some issues. Or at least feels a little... off.

Like the College of Whispers for the Bard. To me at least it feels a bit out of place and not very...well. Bard-ish? But Xanithar has a couple of these. Paths that feel like they should have been for a different class. Whispers feels more like a Warlock path, Arcane archer for Ranger rather than Fighter, Kensai for Fighter rather than Monk, etc.

Quote from: Omega;1113823Let us know when you find that because we've been ruthlessly bashing 5e here for several pages.

We have very different definitions of "Ruthlessly". Also trolling I suppose.
I would want to play 5e more than 4e. But I also respect 4e more than 5e. Because I felt 4e did its dunderheaded decisions with pizzaz and pride and with ambitious. While I find 5e the least ambitious edition of D&D.

Quote from: Razor 007;1113787Hey now, don't you recognize true humor when you see it?

Derp, my bad.

Honestly, if a young me were just starting RPGs today, I would just quit and do something else and never look back. 5e leaves me ice cold, just as 4e and 3e before it. I guess it works for a lot of people, but for myself and perhaps a few others like me, it just does not inspire my imagination at all. My interest grew out of an interest in history... I loved seeing the illustrations of men in realistic-looking suits of armour, the castle architecture of the dungeons, tables comparing weapon vs armour and other things. As an adult, I realize now that these are all game mechanics and more about verisimilitude rather than "realism," but at the same time they were all based heavily in research, even if it was by an amateur historian (talking specifically about Gygax's AD&D). 5e, just like 4e and 3e is all about the player-character, defining their powers and giving them a spotlight. I've never felt the need for a spotlight... I don't need to play a talking game where I talk-up my fictional deeds. With AD&D, I am far more interested in a game experience that lets me think about life and death in a pseudo-medieval society, even if that also regularly means my player-character's death.

Quote from: Theros;1113847Honestly, if a young me were just starting RPGs today, I would just quit and do something else and never look back. 5e leaves me ice cold, just as 4e and 3e before it. I guess it works for a lot of people, but for myself and perhaps a few others like me, it just does not inspire my imagination at all. My interest grew out of an interest in history... I loved seeing the illustrations of men in realistic-looking suits of armour, the castle architecture of the dungeons, tables comparing weapon vs armour and other things. As an adult, I realize now that these are all game mechanics and more about verisimilitude rather than "realism," but at the same time they were all based heavily in research, even if it was by an amateur historian (talking specifically about Gygax's AD&D). 5e, just like 4e and 3e is all about the player-character, defining their powers and giving them a spotlight. I've never felt the need for a spotlight... I don't need to play a talking game where I talk-up my fictional deeds. With AD&D, I am far more interested in a game experience that lets me think about life and death in a pseudo-medieval society, even if that also regularly means my player-character's death.

You give a lot of reasons here, but it seems to me that the core problem you have with WotC D&D is that the PCs are too powerful. They have lots of mechanics to get there and they aren't historically accurate because history didn't have hobby demi-gods taking odd jobs.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1113874You give a lot of reasons here, but it seems to me that the core problem you have with WotC D&D is that the PCs are too powerful. They have lots of mechanics to get there and they aren't historically accurate because history didn't have hobby demi-gods taking odd jobs.

High level AD&D characters are also quite powerful. A historical purist would not want the fantasy to ever play a role. I don't see myself as a purist... it's just that the 5e game itself seems to be more interested in itself as a game than in simulating anything at all. It's probably great for people who have a very well formed concept of fantasy as being something entirely distinct from history, but that is just not who I am. I started with history and added elements of fantasy to it when I discovered that world. I was reading Once and Future King and the Hornblower books as a kid and that kind of stuff remains my source of imagination.

Quote from: Theros;1113882it's just that the 5e game itself seems to be more interested in itself as a game than in simulating anything at all. It's probably great for people who have a very well formed concept of fantasy as being something entirely distinct from history

  This has been WotC's approach to D&D since they started putting their own stamp on it. See this article by Jonathan Tweet, where he states that 3E was about "D&D characters in a D&D world."

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1113886This has been WotC's approach to D&D since they started putting their own stamp on it. See this article by Jonathan Tweet, where he states that 3E was about "D&D characters in a D&D world."

Thanks, never read that, but interesting to see that it was very deliberate. Reading that, it now just seems like a corporation trying to consolidate it's new IP actually... not only in terms of narrowing down and unifying how D&D was marketed as a product, but also shaping consumer behavior in how they use that product so that even people's private home games would be "on message" with the marketing strategy (and connect the players in that game back to new products etc.) For example, they paired down the things that would distract from, or fragment the player activity from, "being morally good heroic types." So no individual awards (encourages players to seek their own goals), no strongholds (encourages players to have their own problems), no evil characters (makes players respond to campaign events too differently), no separate XP tables (makes classes advance unevenly). The party is boiled down to a sacrosanct 4 individuals who go around doing good and conquering evil. The stories that come from that formula, of course, are super narrowly conceived, but that's the point... the next splatbook or supplement or adventure module that comes out from WotC will literally slot into everyone's home campaign with little to no trouble, and if an imitator RPG comes along consumers will instantly think "Oh... so it's like D&D, then?"

By the way, this quote from the article is exactly what I am talking about:

QuoteIn 2nd Ed, the rules referred to history and to historical legends to describe the game, such as referring to Merlin to explain what a wizard was or to Hiawatha as an archetype for a fighter. But by the time we were working on 3rd Ed, D&D had had such a big impact on fantasy that we basically used D&D as its own source.

Connection to history gets expunged, D&D becomes entirely self-referential. Not my bag. At all.