Hahaha oh your poor soul you don’t know what you risk conjuring up with a question like that.
I have to write this all out in a blog post so I can just link it one day.
The core mechanic of 1d20+stuff produces flat probability. Every outcome on the die is equally likely. That’s ridiculous. Go throw some darts at a dart board. Do you get an equal distribution around the board? Just as many hit the floor as the bullseye? No. So the underlying math is kind of trash.
The entire game is predicated on its rest cadence. You’re expected to have like 5-8 medium encounters and then take a long rest. This generates a ton of problems for pacing and balance. Chief among them, most people don’t want to play that way. Polls show people typically do like one fight per rest. Welp. Now all your long rest classes are over performing and your short rest classes suck.
Don’t even start with “not every encounter has to be a fight”. Don’t even fucking start. Most people can’t consistently come up with interesting non combat encounters in DND that tax resources the same way fights do. There are no real social conflict rules, for example, as mentioned below.
But even if you do somehow manage to do the suggested amount of encounters per rest, that severely limits the pacing of the story. There are so many hacks and variants to try to fix this. Gritty realism, sanctuary resting, heroic mode. They’re all bandaids on a poor foundation.
The magic system is trash. It’s just fucking bad. It had no real internal consistency. Every spell is bespoke. What’s the difference between a third level spell and a fourth level? Fuck if I know. Can you make your own spells? Not really. Can you be creative with spells? Ehh kind of but they tend to be very specific about what they do, with few inputs.
Also like the way magic works is boring. There’s no real flavor. You say you cast the spell and check off the box, and it happens. Maybe you need a material component. That’s about it. It’s shallow as heck. It’s also weird that rangers paladins wizards clerics arcane-tricksters all basically have magic that works the same way. You could do so much more.
The social system I would say it was trash if it existed. You meet a pack of bandits in the pass. You want to fight them. The rules have a lot to say here. Hit points, armor, saves, actions and reactions, equipment, etc. Ok wait, you want to scare them off with your words instead. Well get fucked, the book has some vague guidelines that quickly turn into “the dm decides”.
There are very few decisions to make about your character. Species and class. Maybe a feat or two depending on how long you play, but those compete with ASIs, and most games don’t even get to 8th level. Subclasses sometimes have a few things to pick, but sometimes you literally get zero choices.
The skill system is extremely basic and you can’t really specialize unless you’re a class with expertise, and even then your options are kind of limited.
Magic items also have no real internal consistency. Why is the flying broom a like uncommon item despite being extremely powerful? Who knows.
Low level combat tends to also be very “I move and attack once”. Some DMs might give you bonuses for taking advantage of the environment, but that’s not well defined. It could be. It’s not. Also making a single attack that has a like 40% chance of doing absolutely nothing sucks.
The main strengths of DND are brand recognition, and it’s shallow enough that you can’t really fuck up a character. Every human fighter is basically the same mechanically, which means your idiot 10 year old brother can play. But that also means you don’t really have much depth to explore.
Pretty much every other part of the game is bad, under baked, or not suited for general purpose RPG stuff.
If you want a dnd like experience Pathfinder is your bet, it’s got a lot more rules to it but if you read them you’ll understand why. You can read them for free on aonprd.com by the way. Pathfinder gives you far more creative freedom than 5e while still being relatively tight.
My person recommendation for newbies to the hobby is Chronicles of Darkness. It’s way cheaper than 5e too, if you stick to a single splat, think something like a race expanded out into a full game; vampires, werewolves, mages, changelings, humans who hunt monsters, mutants, things like that. The games are narrative focused but don’t neglect combat (like 5e neglects narrative).
it’s got a more free form point buy system, instead of leveling up and all your dice rolls just get better you get to put experience into whatever skill/ability you want to be better at or perk you want to have.
it’s mechanics are genuinely simple, almost everything in the game is handled with the same kind of roll; you and your dm picks a skill (let’s say crafting) and an ability (like 5e’s ability scores, let’s say intelligence) for whatever you want to do then you roll however many d10s as points you have in those scores.
it’s setting is easier to understand, it’s just modern day earth with a magical underground, that makes it way easier to know how much any given thing would cost or where you gotta go to do something. There are lots of weird things going on, but a new player doesn’t need all of those and has plenty of information to be grounded otherwise.
it gives you lots of things to work with (like bloodlines for vampires or groups to join as anything else) but also explicitly encourages you and your dm to create new things with the base stuff as guidelines.
A few other recommendations; world of darkness is my preferred game, so i gotta mention it. Gurps is the most open game I’ve ever played, you can do literally anything.
Pathfinder is the “we have both kinds of music: country and western” answer. I think pf 2nd edition is probably the best bet if you want to stay in the genre. I haven’t played it but I’ve heard good things.
One thing I didn’t touch on in my rant is genre. If you are trying to do something that isn’t a dungeon crawl, probably don’t use DND.
I personally really like Fate. It’s more in line with how I imagine RPGs should go. Very narrative, lots of creative freedom. If you want a really crunchy system with lots of rules, it’s not for you.
You know how sometimes people talking about DND will be like “ah yes my character will really come online when I hit 7th level as a monk paladin bard”? That’s kind of nonsense. In fate if you wanted to be a righteous rockstar with a mean left hook, you could just write down “Rocker on a mission from God” as your high concept. If everyone agrees that’s cool and they get it, you’re done. Character works in session 1.
DND also tends to make the players be very zoomed in on their characters. Some people like that. I prefer fate where it’s a little more zoomed out, and you’re expected to think about the scene and story. As a player you have input.
That said, blades in the dark is also pretty popular. I don’t like it for much less severe reasons than the problems I have with DND. It’s not a bad game, I don’t think, but there are some choices it made that I don’t enjoy.
1d20 + a modifier is how you eliminate flat probability, because you’re adding the modifier. DCs are set so that you nearly always succeed at a task that you’re good at.
What’s the difference between a third level spell and a fourth level spell? How many times you can feasibly use it. Or if you upcast, one die. This is probably the thing I like most about 5e compared to other systems.
Giving you a move every turn keeps combat more interesting than incentivizing you to stay still by treating it as any other action, IMO.
The economy is non-existent, actual balancing is literally impossible, you can’t make a character yours (reflavoring your eldritch blast doesn’t count), so many rules just don’t exist or are on some random designers Twitter account instead of the damn books. If you want to argue it’s a simple system; it isn’t, it’s stupidly convoluted for how little it actually offers.
Edit: look at Pathfinder (chosen because it’s the closest comparison); it actually gives DMs a rough guide to how much money a player should be expected to have at any level, a decent idea of what players should fight in an encounter (2e even tightened that math up even more), a myriad of ways to customize your character on a real mechanical level, and all the rules are easily found on the same online resource. 5e doesn’t do any of that.
I don’t know that the economy is an important part of D&D or that I see it as a fault that it isn’t. It has a list of approximately what kind of adversary should be a challenge for you at a given level, but that seems like a totally different discussion than how much money that character should have. A soldier would do better in a fight than Jeff Bezos, but Jeff’s got more money.
it’s an aggressively mediocre system that’s had years of a huge community polishing it to a mirror shine.
You can praise it for the community content, or go off-book like you can with any other system, but that’s applicable to any system with the same community size.
Whatever you look for in it it’s lacking in comparison to another system. Tactical combat? PF2e. Rules light? Worlds without number.
It’s a decent middle ground of a system only because of community hard work. But that’s only for the GM side. Players still need to deal with the poor character creation, unless they get a lot of support from their GM.
Can you explain why? It’s fast, sure, but it’s simultaneously the most important character design choice you can make and also cripplingly absent of actual choices.
Rather than front-loading decisions in character creation, you get a bunch of more interesting choices to make at each level up, including an elegant multiclass system. In other systems, I feel like the only interesting things you get at level ups are just a few points here and there, and you already made all of your most important choices in the hours you spent creating your character. In 5e, just about every time I level up, I feel like I found a new gear to shift into. As a Fighter, for instance, there are tons of interesting choices to make at level 3 just within the Battle Master subclass, let alone other subclasses. The 5e rules sure aren’t perfect, and I definitely haven’t sampled every RPG system out there, but given that they all had old D&D rules to learn from and solve problems within, I think 5e solved a ton of them in really clever ways compared to others that I’ve tried. Character creation is just one of them.
In comparison to other games I’ve played I find this the opposite. Proficiency and ability scores basically never change after creation. And level ups allow for very very little decisions and distinction other than class.
BG3 being less dnd and more larion is a major win. It’s the only reason it is when vaguely playable, imo. 5e is an absolute train wreck of a system.
This is hyperbole for sure. What could possibly be that bad about 5e?
Hahaha oh your poor soul you don’t know what you risk conjuring up with a question like that.
I have to write this all out in a blog post so I can just link it one day.
The core mechanic of 1d20+stuff produces flat probability. Every outcome on the die is equally likely. That’s ridiculous. Go throw some darts at a dart board. Do you get an equal distribution around the board? Just as many hit the floor as the bullseye? No. So the underlying math is kind of trash.
The entire game is predicated on its rest cadence. You’re expected to have like 5-8 medium encounters and then take a long rest. This generates a ton of problems for pacing and balance. Chief among them, most people don’t want to play that way. Polls show people typically do like one fight per rest. Welp. Now all your long rest classes are over performing and your short rest classes suck.
Don’t even start with “not every encounter has to be a fight”. Don’t even fucking start. Most people can’t consistently come up with interesting non combat encounters in DND that tax resources the same way fights do. There are no real social conflict rules, for example, as mentioned below.
But even if you do somehow manage to do the suggested amount of encounters per rest, that severely limits the pacing of the story. There are so many hacks and variants to try to fix this. Gritty realism, sanctuary resting, heroic mode. They’re all bandaids on a poor foundation.
The magic system is trash. It’s just fucking bad. It had no real internal consistency. Every spell is bespoke. What’s the difference between a third level spell and a fourth level? Fuck if I know. Can you make your own spells? Not really. Can you be creative with spells? Ehh kind of but they tend to be very specific about what they do, with few inputs.
Also like the way magic works is boring. There’s no real flavor. You say you cast the spell and check off the box, and it happens. Maybe you need a material component. That’s about it. It’s shallow as heck. It’s also weird that rangers paladins wizards clerics arcane-tricksters all basically have magic that works the same way. You could do so much more.
The social system I would say it was trash if it existed. You meet a pack of bandits in the pass. You want to fight them. The rules have a lot to say here. Hit points, armor, saves, actions and reactions, equipment, etc. Ok wait, you want to scare them off with your words instead. Well get fucked, the book has some vague guidelines that quickly turn into “the dm decides”.
There are very few decisions to make about your character. Species and class. Maybe a feat or two depending on how long you play, but those compete with ASIs, and most games don’t even get to 8th level. Subclasses sometimes have a few things to pick, but sometimes you literally get zero choices.
The skill system is extremely basic and you can’t really specialize unless you’re a class with expertise, and even then your options are kind of limited.
Magic items also have no real internal consistency. Why is the flying broom a like uncommon item despite being extremely powerful? Who knows.
Low level combat tends to also be very “I move and attack once”. Some DMs might give you bonuses for taking advantage of the environment, but that’s not well defined. It could be. It’s not. Also making a single attack that has a like 40% chance of doing absolutely nothing sucks.
The main strengths of DND are brand recognition, and it’s shallow enough that you can’t really fuck up a character. Every human fighter is basically the same mechanically, which means your idiot 10 year old brother can play. But that also means you don’t really have much depth to explore.
Pretty much every other part of the game is bad, under baked, or not suited for general purpose RPG stuff.
As someone who’s only ever played 5e, I ask, what would you say is a better? PF? That’s the one I hear a lot.
If you want a dnd like experience Pathfinder is your bet, it’s got a lot more rules to it but if you read them you’ll understand why. You can read them for free on aonprd.com by the way. Pathfinder gives you far more creative freedom than 5e while still being relatively tight.
My person recommendation for newbies to the hobby is Chronicles of Darkness. It’s way cheaper than 5e too, if you stick to a single splat, think something like a race expanded out into a full game; vampires, werewolves, mages, changelings, humans who hunt monsters, mutants, things like that. The games are narrative focused but don’t neglect combat (like 5e neglects narrative).
it’s got a more free form point buy system, instead of leveling up and all your dice rolls just get better you get to put experience into whatever skill/ability you want to be better at or perk you want to have.
it’s mechanics are genuinely simple, almost everything in the game is handled with the same kind of roll; you and your dm picks a skill (let’s say crafting) and an ability (like 5e’s ability scores, let’s say intelligence) for whatever you want to do then you roll however many d10s as points you have in those scores.
it’s setting is easier to understand, it’s just modern day earth with a magical underground, that makes it way easier to know how much any given thing would cost or where you gotta go to do something. There are lots of weird things going on, but a new player doesn’t need all of those and has plenty of information to be grounded otherwise.
it gives you lots of things to work with (like bloodlines for vampires or groups to join as anything else) but also explicitly encourages you and your dm to create new things with the base stuff as guidelines.
A few other recommendations; world of darkness is my preferred game, so i gotta mention it. Gurps is the most open game I’ve ever played, you can do literally anything.
Pathfinder is the “we have both kinds of music: country and western” answer. I think pf 2nd edition is probably the best bet if you want to stay in the genre. I haven’t played it but I’ve heard good things.
One thing I didn’t touch on in my rant is genre. If you are trying to do something that isn’t a dungeon crawl, probably don’t use DND.
I personally really like Fate. It’s more in line with how I imagine RPGs should go. Very narrative, lots of creative freedom. If you want a really crunchy system with lots of rules, it’s not for you.
You know how sometimes people talking about DND will be like “ah yes my character will really come online when I hit 7th level as a monk paladin bard”? That’s kind of nonsense. In fate if you wanted to be a righteous rockstar with a mean left hook, you could just write down “Rocker on a mission from God” as your high concept. If everyone agrees that’s cool and they get it, you’re done. Character works in session 1.
DND also tends to make the players be very zoomed in on their characters. Some people like that. I prefer fate where it’s a little more zoomed out, and you’re expected to think about the scene and story. As a player you have input.
That said, blades in the dark is also pretty popular. I don’t like it for much less severe reasons than the problems I have with DND. It’s not a bad game, I don’t think, but there are some choices it made that I don’t enjoy.
1d20 + a modifier is how you eliminate flat probability, because you’re adding the modifier. DCs are set so that you nearly always succeed at a task that you’re good at.
What’s the difference between a third level spell and a fourth level spell? How many times you can feasibly use it. Or if you upcast, one die. This is probably the thing I like most about 5e compared to other systems.
Giving you a move every turn keeps combat more interesting than incentivizing you to stay still by treating it as any other action, IMO.
You’re not really selling me.
The economy is non-existent, actual balancing is literally impossible, you can’t make a character yours (reflavoring your eldritch blast doesn’t count), so many rules just don’t exist or are on some random designers Twitter account instead of the damn books. If you want to argue it’s a simple system; it isn’t, it’s stupidly convoluted for how little it actually offers.
Edit: look at Pathfinder (chosen because it’s the closest comparison); it actually gives DMs a rough guide to how much money a player should be expected to have at any level, a decent idea of what players should fight in an encounter (2e even tightened that math up even more), a myriad of ways to customize your character on a real mechanical level, and all the rules are easily found on the same online resource. 5e doesn’t do any of that.
I don’t know that the economy is an important part of D&D or that I see it as a fault that it isn’t. It has a list of approximately what kind of adversary should be a challenge for you at a given level, but that seems like a totally different discussion than how much money that character should have. A soldier would do better in a fight than Jeff Bezos, but Jeff’s got more money.
Look at you giving a short answer instead of rage typing twelve paragraphs about why DND is frankly not that good.
it’s an aggressively mediocre system that’s had years of a huge community polishing it to a mirror shine.
You can praise it for the community content, or go off-book like you can with any other system, but that’s applicable to any system with the same community size.
Whatever you look for in it it’s lacking in comparison to another system. Tactical combat? PF2e. Rules light? Worlds without number.
It’s a decent middle ground of a system only because of community hard work. But that’s only for the GM side. Players still need to deal with the poor character creation, unless they get a lot of support from their GM.
I quite like the character creation compared to other systems I’ve played.
Can you explain why? It’s fast, sure, but it’s simultaneously the most important character design choice you can make and also cripplingly absent of actual choices.
Rather than front-loading decisions in character creation, you get a bunch of more interesting choices to make at each level up, including an elegant multiclass system. In other systems, I feel like the only interesting things you get at level ups are just a few points here and there, and you already made all of your most important choices in the hours you spent creating your character. In 5e, just about every time I level up, I feel like I found a new gear to shift into. As a Fighter, for instance, there are tons of interesting choices to make at level 3 just within the Battle Master subclass, let alone other subclasses. The 5e rules sure aren’t perfect, and I definitely haven’t sampled every RPG system out there, but given that they all had old D&D rules to learn from and solve problems within, I think 5e solved a ton of them in really clever ways compared to others that I’ve tried. Character creation is just one of them.
In comparison to other games I’ve played I find this the opposite. Proficiency and ability scores basically never change after creation. And level ups allow for very very little decisions and distinction other than class.
It’s D&D For Windowlickers, and that’s the highest praise it deserves.