Quote from: HappyDaze;1107258I'm glad for the last few posts telling me what "pugging" is because I thought it was crossing over to the BDSM thread (and I'm glad it's not).

HAHAHAHAHAH!! Woo! that made it uncomfortable.

PUG - Pick Up Group.

I have gotten a few d20 & OSR rule sets in the past year as I want to run a mini old school style D&D campaign after my starwars game is up, and I am system hunting. (Going to be hardcore: roll abilities 3d6 in order, roll for starting HP, dice fall where they lay kind of game that will not last past level 5 or 6. TPK's expected.)

So while I am familiar with how d20 systems work, I have not played any actual D&D since I was a youngster playing B/X. Although I do know that high level B/X being was NOT my cup of tea at all. I did not like the effects of hit point bloat and have avoided zero-to hero style class / level games in the intervening years.

  But it has been awhile, and with one game night deciding to play the 5e waterdeep heist, I thought it would be a good experience for me to buy the 5e rules and play official fucking D&D.

A few clicks on Amazon and a few weeks later...

My impressions after a read through and several sessions of play:

The 5e rules are a total design by committee, and it shows. I find the books overproduced, and filled with lots of illustrations and an overly high volume of descriptive fluff to actual system stuff. Coffee table book or rules books? You decide, because evidently WOTC couldn't.

Nothing wrong with the underlying d20 mechanics...

The skill system: Feels like a tacked on subsystem that someone wants to integrate into the basic rules set. I see what they want to do, but D&D d20 isn't a skill based game system at it's core. It's not RQ , SW, CoD or Gurps. I can't shake the impression that a 'background' style skill system as seen in barbarians of Lemuria or 13 age would be a far better fit for the type of heroic play 5e seems to want to portray.

The races are very star trek. Humans with makeup prosthetics. Elves and dwarves with mechanically different cultures and classes? Nope. Just a paragraph of (Insert race here) act like x. and you can be a wood elf paladin, dwarf paladin, gnome paladin, tiefling paladin, human paladin, Halfling paladin, dragon born paladin. Paladin for everyone! We're all the same!

A cosmology that was put together by people that don't know how religions actually work, a weapons list put together by people who believed everything they heard at a renn-fair. Not really complaining about realism per se, more about the lack of consistency. And other posters above have pointed out the inconsistent mechanical choices in odd places. I could list even more, especially some of the odd choices in character generation. Most of this has to be due to the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing with such a long list of book authors.

No problem with class abilities / feats /proficiencies, but the official character sheet is not really set up to list them systematically – which is odd seeing as how they are so central to playing your PC.

The spell system, so, you have blank slots now that can fill at will – why not just embrace that you have hit points for everyone – and you can also have Magic points for the spell casters… Oh and Clerics are just another spell caster. Their religion is just their mage college. And don't get me started on the universal spell list. Because everyone has to have access to the useful spells. Heaven forbid a clerics and wizards don't have a magic light source each. Someone might feel left out.

But, the system is "good enough" for D&D and people love it.

So take my comments with a grain of salt: I am NOT the target audience for the default D&D: Kitchen sink renn-fair Fantasy setting, zero to superhero style of play. It is just not my preference. At all.

Our game works, because our group works, and I can still enjoy role playing around the system quirks. Which is mostly due to the fact that the module we are playing through is low level; 1-5, and we will not run into the knock on effects that hit point bloat will eventually induce.

Quote from: estar;1107263It about the situation depicted by the adventure. Scourge of the Demon works, want I ran this Monday wouldn't. Both reflect how I run things in my campaign but it just happens Scourge is self-contained enough that with OD&D I can run it within a four hour time block without undue time pressure. With 5th edition I need about 5 hours or I face severe time crunch.

Not the difference between 5e and OD&D is not just a Scourge thing, it has happened on several adventures, I ran.

Yep I hear you.

And I know we're drifting here - but I don't look at 5e as "best for one-shot" gaming. I don't *think* you're saying that (neither am I) but I find that this line of discussion is more of a sub-point about the expectations of the modern playerbase that flocks around 5e.

Unless of course you *are* saying 5e is that... I personally don't see it. As you pointed out, OD&D/5e/any other RPG is perfectly fine for Con-play.

Quote from: estar;1107263Random Con Players take Scourge just as "seriously" as my home table did when I ran it for them. As well as the other con adventures that I am playtesting and haven't published.

Again I found that some adventures and situations work good for a con and other don't. I keep a log of all sessions I run, (most of them are just a date so it not that special) and maybe out the ten years I been logging stuff ten sessions produced something I used later in a con. Which is OK because I go to Cons once or twice a year so I don't need that much material.

The caveat here is YOU are GMing. You're setting the standard of what transpires and presumably since you wrote the adventure (like I wrote mine when I did my tours of duty in the LA Con-scene for years) I suspect you wouldn't have used 5e if you believed it didn't work.

Since I've drifted away from running one-shots at cons, I've found 5e isn't really for me and what I want to achieve in my games. I think it's a good system, better than many others. Just not better than the ones I use for what I want.

Since 5e IS the hotness right now... I don't blame anyone for playing/designing/running it. But due to the point of this thread - I'm not going to say it's the best version of D&D ever either (but it could be with some "fixes")

Quote from: tenbones;1107257So another facet to this discussion - what *is* that level of play you're shooting for? It's one of the reasons I stopped running adventures at conventions - it felt too "one note" to me. I simply want a more in-depth and expansive experience than I can typically get in a one-shot. Especially in the environment of a convention.

By far the best experience I had a convention was when it replicated more the at home environment.  Specifically, I had a 4 hour slot starting at 2:00 PM.  There were relatively few scheduled games after dinner, but open tables.  We have six players playing something written for my home campaign.  At the end, five of the players asked if I'd run another adventure for them with the same characters.  When the sixth guy dropped out, another player called a friend to pick up the sixth pregen.  I had my complete set of home game notes with me, because I'd planned to work on during dead time.  We played two more adventures with the same characters, and even managed to give it a bit of a mini-campaign ending, stopping in the wee hours of the morning.  

If I hadn't been completely overworked in my day job, I'd have picked up a whole new gaming group that day.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1107270By far the best experience I had a convention was when it replicated more the at home environment.  Specifically, I had a 4 hour slot starting at 2:00 PM.  There were relatively few scheduled games after dinner, but open tables.  We have six players playing something written for my home campaign.  At the end, five of the players asked if I'd run another adventure for them with the same characters.  When the sixth guy dropped out, another player called a friend to pick up the sixth pregen.  I had my complete set of home game notes with me, because I'd planned to work on during dead time.  We played two more adventures with the same characters, and even managed to give it a bit of a mini-campaign ending, stopping in the wee hours of the morning.  

If I hadn't been completely overworked in my day job, I'd have picked up a whole new gaming group that day.

I had a similar experience - I wrote an 80-page Cyberpunk2020 adventure to run over two days, in three 4-hr sessions. The goal being on day three - we'd have the survivors of both groups team up for the final session.

Well the first group got completely wasted TPK right at the end of the session using pre-gens. The second group rolled in and they asked if they could use their own characters from their home campaign. I warned them this adventure was super dangerous and "high-level". I looked their characters over, and they were around maybe slightly less powerful than my pre-gens, but obviously very veteran-level PC's. So I told them sure. Their GM - who was playing then told them - "this adventure is canon for our game", which caused me to raise my eyebrows in appreciation.

Anyhow the game was *phenomenal*. They worked like a well-oiled killing machine. They caught literally *every* single sub-plot, every single machination by talking it through with themselves and executing. I was really pleasantly dumbfounded. They made it to the very end and won, took two casualties - and it broke everyone's hearts. But they loved the adventure. They found me later at the bar and gave me the best ego-strokes(and drinks) and wanted to take me away with them back to AZ where they were from.

But see - that's the thing - those are the kinds of games I want *every* session, which I can't quite squeeze out of long-term play in 5e. Which might be the real issue... scalability.

Quote from: tenbones;1107272But see - that's the thing - those are the kinds of games I want *every* session, which I can't quite squeeze out of long-term play in 5e. Which might be the real issue... scalability.

Yeah, you had two PC deaths. That probably doesn't work for every session in a campaign. If you want players to play longer with the same characters, the average risk must decrease - but then the sense of challenge will probably also drop for your players.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1107276Yeah, you had two PC deaths. That probably doesn't work for every session in a campaign. If you want players to play longer with the same characters, the average risk must decrease - but then the sense of challenge will probably also drop for your players.

Well in fairness - if this were a D&D module it would have been like a 17th level adventure - ala Bloodstone Pass. For me, if I'm writing an adventure for a Con... I had pre-gens, so I felt nothing about going hard. And you know... CP2020... death is everywhere.

My D&D games - certainly my Con adventure D&D games were not designed to be that lethal - but probably more lethal than most people today assume.

But your point stands.

I'm used to playing with the younger crowd, so pick-up-groups and friends-of-a-friend drop-ins are common. Eventually they go through a wacky, razzing, youngster phase and cannot cooperate for shit. And then they want to give GMing a try which often devolves into tears and frustration. But those growing pains are common, and I don't mind helping 'birth' new GMs and Players.

So I prefer to have a new hotness, simplified compromise as an RPG option in my repertoir. Don't prefer it as my main choice, but helps keep things going as individuals and groups mature. And it being WotC trying its hardest to rip out the 3e and 4e out of its new D&D, it is well appreciated by me. (Doesn't go far enough for my tastes, but is passable for what I need to cross the age gap. )

Quote from: Aglondir;1106950What are the main issues?

It's dickless....by design. The concept was "an edition everyone can tolerate" and thus, its 1e+4e or 2e+3e depending on your viewpoint and it does its job of being the compromise edition.

Except I don't need compromises. There are 100s of RPGs on the market and I'd rather a bold and flawed game over a corporate compromise any day of the week.

I always compare fantasy RPGs to Palladium Fantasy 1e. That book gives off sparks. Sometimes because the system is short circuiting, but mostly because Crazy Kevin's energy and love of fantasy is infectious and leaps off the page.

5e doesn't spark. No crackle. No pop.

Quote from: Rhedyn;11070131. The skill system is bad. So bad, that no skill system would work better. People will defend this system forever.

2. The monster manual is full of boring sacks of HP. You'll start to feel it at higher levels, but the HP boat is why I consider 5e so much like 4e, but without all the robust mechanics that made 4e it's own thing.

3. DMG magic items include tons of broken ones that will let PCs stomp way higher CR creatures.

4. Class features are overtuned.

5. A lot of spells are really vague and have mechanical details fleshed out in other editions.

The skill system is pretty weak...you could look at this as a feature. Trying to list all possible skills all possible characters have an all possible ways is hopeless, so WotC's tossing of their arms in the air and putting a minimal system (laughable so, compared to the mostly busted 3e) is understandable. I'm not sure "no skill system" would work better, because you could just ignore the very minimal system easy enough.

2) Big time. These monsters come from 2E-land, and have no idea of the kinds of abilities PCs have. Essentially no monster can deal with the Rogue's free disengage ability, for example, and that's not exactly a high level ability. Bottom line, these monsters were decent when "I attack" was basically all most characters could do, but are woefully underpowered against PCs of 5e, and this becomes very noticeable at mid-levels and up.

3) Perhaps, although the intense overpowering power of magic (as others have noted) make this something of a non-issue. Much as Skyrim snaps in half in a dozen different ways if you want to, so pointing out that one way is broken means nothing, it's about the same here. And it's not like other editions of D&D (and possibly 4e) didn't have broken items...

4) I'm  not sure what "overtuned" means, but there are too many features. When I have a player who hasn't spent a decade playing D&D play, he/she gets overwhelmed by all the buttons a character can press after a few levels.

5) A lot of spells are flat out stupid-good, to the point that they're "Must-Haves".


But...you can work around much of this (although snipping class features is admittedly way too hard to do in anything resembling a fair way).

Overall, the weakest parts of 5e are the overwhelming magic/spells, and the multitudinous character abilities--most noticeable with primary spellcaster classes.

Quote from: Doom;11073305) A lot of spells are flat out stupid-good, to the point that they're "Must-Haves".

Which ones should I look out for, as a GM?

Quote from: Aglondir;1107337Which ones should I look out for, as a GM?

It's not until you hit the higher levels (character level 7+) that breakers pop up like Wizard Eye or (to a lesser extent) Polymorph.

It's the bonus action/reaction spells that are really overbearing. Healing Word (a level 1 ranged bonus healing spell) causes the "Weebles" effect where players get knocked to 0 round after round with no real harm done. Shield allows wizards to "tank" with surprising effectiveness (always combined with Mage Armor, of course), Counterspell is stupid-good, Misty Step is a bonus free-escape action...these are all "utility" spells, but their "narrow" use is greatly offset by the infinite use cantrips, which means many spellcasters won't need to worry about taking damaging spells. That's the big issue, is spellcasters just get so much power...they get all the bonus abilities every other class gets as levels are gained, in addition getting their choicest picks from the spell lists, in addition to the same BAB as fighters, in addition the ability to cast more spells at the same level compared to previous editions, in addition to few ways (none reliable) for non-spellcasters to do much about it--the latter really shows up with the monsters' utter lack of real abilities (Tome of Beasts helps a little, though). Oh, and there are also infinite use rituals also.

In 2e and prior editions, the monsters had abilities the characters couldn't match, only put up with...it's flipped in 5e, most monsters will be pretty helpless against many player abilities. Even golems are extremely vulnerable to spellcasters who even try a little to be effective, as "spell resistance" gets nerfed down to "advantage on saving throws," useless against the many spells which have no save.s

Quote from: Doom;1107338It's not until you hit the higher levels (character level 7+) that breakers pop up like Wizard Eye or (to a lesser extent) Polymorph.

It's the bonus action/reaction spells that are really overbearing. Healing Word (a level 1 ranged bonus healing spell) causes the "Weebles" effect where players get knocked to 0 round after round with no real harm done. Shield allows wizards to "tank" with surprising effectiveness (always combined with Mage Armor, of course), Counterspell is stupid-good, Misty Step is a bonus free-escape action...these are all "utility" spells, but their "narrow" use is greatly offset by the infinite use cantrips, which means many spellcasters won't need to worry about taking damaging spells. That's the big issue, is spellcasters just get so much power...they get all the bonus abilities every other class gets as levels are gained, in addition getting their choicest picks from the spell lists, in addition to the same BAB as fighters, in addition the ability to cast more spells at the same level compared to previous editions, in addition to few ways (none reliable) for non-spellcasters to do much about it--the latter really shows up with the monsters' utter lack of real abilities (Tome of Beasts helps a little, though). Oh, and there are also infinite use rituals also.

In 2e and prior editions, the monsters had abilities the characters couldn't match, only put up with...it's flipped in 5e, most monsters will be pretty helpless against many player abilities. Even golems are extremely vulnerable to spellcasters who even try a little to be effective, as "spell resistance" gets nerfed down to "advantage on saving throws," useless against the many spells which have no save.s

Thanks for the analysis.

Why don't the fighters have a better BAB progression than the casters?

Quote from: Aglondir;1107341Thanks for the analysis.

Why don't the fighters have a better BAB progression than the casters?

Your base attack to hit is "proficiency." It starts at +2, and goes up incrementally, based on your character level (not class, so everyone at the same level has the same proficiency).

Added to this is the appropriate ability score. So, a level 1 fighter with 16 strength adds 3 if he uses a strength based weapon. He'd be adding +5 to his attacks.

A wizard also starts with +2 proficiency, of course, and could just as easily have a 16 IQ. So the wizard will be adding +5 to his attacks, also.

All attacks are made against AC (there's no "touch" per se outside of arguable exceptions, nor are there three types of defenses). The wizard has infinite cantrips, and while they generally do less damage, they are ranged attacks (and often have bonus effects, eg, fire damage, or slowing--overall, this is better, especially at low levels where the spellcaster can really exploit his innate "magical" weapon against certain resistant creatures).

Now, there are certain feats or class abilities that might give an additional mighty +1 to hit with certain weapons or whatever...but I assure you the spellcaster-appropriate feats/abilities are every bit as good as +1 to hit.

Granted, the fighter will get extra attacks at higher levels, but in my opinion, an extra attack doesn't quite match the often unstoppable reality-bending affects of spells at higher levels (and cantrips do more damage at higher levels, so always at least a little useful even if the spellcaster doesn't use a feat or ability to make them more useful). What's really interesting here is the fighter gets that extra attack as a class ability, while the cantrips auto-upgrade damage AND the spellcaster will get a class ability.

Yeah, capping the gameplay experience of D&D to 6~10 levels in general, and then you play a Named Level Domain Game, seems to be the sweet spot across editions. But that makes sense as nothing scales well forever -- and if it does then it is a treadmill of "always fighting orcs." D&D is not alone in this; it's a play-expectations issue.

That said, waaaaay too many widgets accrue too fast. Everything has a feature. The "No Dead Levels! :mad:" whinge from nu-skool leads to a rapid bookkeeping hell that devolves the game closer to a combat sim than a complex world with time for other 'pillar options'.That's been there since WotC's first crack at the bat, and some people prefer this outcome. I vehemently oppose it, to the point I won't play crunchy games anymore (I have adult coloring to do! ).

And yes, spells are definitely a case by case basis. Some early issue ones are common complaints: Guidance, Healing Word, Shield, Find Familiar, Goodberry, Healing Spirit, Leomund's Tiny Hut, Find Steed, etc. The weakest of these just heal or offer perfect 3/4 cover until next turn, others do power projection economy or end whole pillars of strategic play outright. :rolleyes: Yeah, it's a problem. They need to be vetted before play to one's campaign playstyle.

The big issue I also see, that Doom also mentioned, is the dearth of monster defenses. It was quite glaring when I've been doing my MtG to D&D 5e monster conversions, how exposed to magic everything is. There's 13 damage types: three for physical attacks, TEN for magic... it is literally over three times the physical vectors to penetrate a monster's defenses! And yet the most Dmg Resistance or Immunities is for those 3 physical ones. It's patently stupid oversight. :rolleyes: If you ever create your own monster be sure to sprinkle 3+ Magical Dmg Resist/Immune (or Condition Immune) values before you run it. Easiest fix to a glaring oversight.