Quote from: Mistwell;1072165Getting rid of bonus actions and simply making them an additional thing you can do on your turn for some cost.

Yeah. Bonus actions were a weird, kludgy bandaid to replace Swift / Minor actions... that didn't really do that and just made things more muddled.

Quote from: Haffrung;1072250The D&D Next playtest, and the surveys that went with it, was the largest in RPG history. By far. If WotC received data showing domain play and army-scale combat rules had a sizeable audience, they would have included it in 5E. I'd be surprised if even 10 per cent of people who have played D&D expect that stuff in their game.

5E cast a wide net. But it couldn't be everything to everybody.

The lack of popularity of those items may be true, but if so the playtest didn't prove it.  Those surveys were couched to direct people into particular areas that they had already decided they wanted to go.  And some of the surveys, perhaps all, were not something that a professional data collector would have considered worth 2 cents.

Options for a low-magic game.  Adventures in Middle Earth does this, but I don't always want to play in middle earth.

List the spells by spell level!

They... do? In the tables at the front?

What do you mean by this? You mean rather than alphabetical, you'd rather have the spells broken up by level and then alphabetical?

I am starting to wonder if Halfrung read the books.  It is really not that hard. Like any class with spells their is a chart and they even give an example of telling you how many you can cast on the SRD. INT 16 gives a 3 as a modifier plus third level equals six spells. Unless Halfrung is confusing what spells are in the spellbook vs what one can cast. Even then imo not that hard to figure out.

http://www.5esrd.com/classes/wizard/

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1072229I think he means like oD&D and Braunstien. Chainmail does not have certain things like domain rules or the out-of-battle rules for fielding an army (ongoing costs, etc.). It certainly doesn't have rules for sandbox style D&D play.

Those are relatively simple things that could have been added to 5e with 2-12 pages, and would have gone a long way towards making the edition realize the supposed role it was seeking as a common ground for all editions and playstyles. It's absence is as striking as the 4e people not getting their marshal class analogue.

Yes, I would have included support for the characters growing from five first level adventurers joined at the hip, to leading a small entourage of loyal henchmen, to leading a mercenary army, to leading a polity, with the goal of becoming significant forces in the campaign world.  I consider striving toward that goal the interesting part of the game, so I can't say I understand the decision to leave it out. I also don't see the appeal of most of what's billed as fantasy adventure, which strikes me as over-curated and more focused on going through the motions of "adventuring" than on actually achieving anything interesting, kind of like your boss's Christmas party. So frankly I'm baffled by the continued fixation on the least interesting aspects of this hobby.
TL;DR: I'd want something like the mechanics in An Echo, Resounding or ACKS. The former probably has more popular appeal than the latter, but that's neither here nor there.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1072229But we're in agreement in the 'vague mealy-mouthed crap to one sentence of actual English' bit--that's just pointless insults with no actual argument behind them.

Pardon my rhetorical hyperbole, but I think WotC's prose is verbose and all around bad. If you want an example of what I'm talking about, look at p. 8 of the 5e PHB, the spiel that begins "THE THREE PILLARS OF ADVENTURE ..." [cut for brevity], all of which is to say, "You can explore the imaginary world. Sometimes you meet people. Sometimes you talk to them, sometimes you fight them."

Quote from: Crusader X;1072132Getting rid of the ham-fisted SJW propaganda from the rule books and adventures would make 5e much better.

cull the fanatics that insist shit like this be put in the books as well

Don't know if this is mentioned, but I wish healing magic actually harms the undead and necromatic damage heals the undead.  Don't know why 5e changed that as it doesn't make sense.

Quote from: Tanin Wulf;1073238They... do? In the tables at the front?

What do you mean by this? You mean rather than alphabetical, you'd rather have the spells broken up by level and then alphabetical?

Yep. If you don't play the game, then listing it all alphabetically is fine but...if you play, grouping them by level saves so much misery. "Oh look, I get a level 2 spell...guess it's time to flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, my way to figuring out what I want." It's annoying, even if I understand how corporate could have made the decision not to organize it the way the older books did.

Quote from: Doom;1073455Yep. If you don't play the game, then listing it all alphabetically is fine but...if you play, grouping them by level saves so much misery. "Oh look, I get a level 2 spell...guess it's time to flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, my way to figuring out what I want." It's annoying, even if I understand how corporate could have made the decision not to organize it the way the older books did.

Are there still spells that are different levels for different classes? In the olden days, a spell might be level 4 Cleric, level 5 Wizard (or Mage or Magic-User), level 6 Druid or something similar. I haven't looked closely to see if that's still the case, but if it is, it's one strike against listing them by level.

Quote from: Doom;1073455Yep. If you don't play the game, then listing it all alphabetically is fine but...if you play, grouping them by level saves so much misery. "Oh look, I get a level 2 spell...guess it's time to flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, my way to figuring out what I want." It's annoying, even if I understand how corporate could have made the decision not to organize it the way the older books did.

But during play I really appreciate the alphabetical list, as it makes it much faster to look up a spell that is being cast by one of the players.

Quote from: RoyR;1073463But during play I really appreciate the alphabetical list, as it makes it much faster to look up a spell that is being cast by one of the players.

Me too. Players often don't know what their spell does, requiring me as GM to find it quickly.

The spell list is one of those cases where WotC not having a clue on electronic media really bites.  Sometimes you want the list by alpha, sometimes by level, sometimes by who can cast it, sometimes by "school".

Quote from: Tanin Wulf;1073238They... do? In the tables at the front?

What do you mean by this? You mean rather than alphabetical, you'd rather have the spells broken up by level and then alphabetical?

Speaking of the tables at the front, a little notation of some sort indicating if the spell could be cast as a ritual would be really useful.  Currently the only way to know is to flip though the whole spell section and look at each spell entry to see if (ritual) is there.