I don't agree its just old timers that have issue with 5e, I have personally never met a single person anywhere who runs 5e D&D that couldn't make a list of problems with the game so long, you can't help but ask the basic question, why the hell are you running it then? Like, this forum is littered with DM's that have countless problems with the game, yet refuse to consider that perhaps adjusting it is more work, than simply finding a system that does the work for them.
The thing is, you can say that about any engine. I've yet to play one that I haven't had to modify before even playing. Sometimes it's really annoying because it can be really obvious stuff that is obviously just phoned in and easily improved...and they didn't bother to just put it in. I've yet to meet anyone that hasn't put in house rules into their game (they may claim to be running it RAW, but if I have knowledge of RAW, it never takes long in a discussion to find something they've actually house-ruled - even if they didn't realise that's what they were doing.
I've yet to meet an engine than did work ideally out of the box. 5e gets more criticism because it's the most popular and so gets discussed more. A lot of the criticisms that were mentioned are also made by homebrewers, and aren't problems with the engine. I'd have sympathy for people who run published adventures, because those should work out of the box and if the difficulty is not to their liking...I see that. I shouldn't have to go through CoS and adjust numbers of vampires etc. Not everyone will agree on how difficult it should be, but there's at least discussion to be had. In a homebrew adventure? If it's too easy, add more monsters. Use higher CR monsters. Combine different types so their abilities synergise. The DM literally controls how hard an encounter is. Same with how easy it is to find traps or survive them - the DM literally sets the DCs and damage for traps. Just up them to the level of challenge desired. The only challenge comes really when you get to high level and you can't just up the CR (short of home-brewing the monsters...which is fair enough if you don't want to do that).
They'd be valid criticisms of adventures, but the criticisms are rarely levelled at published adventures, but at the engine. It's not the engine, it's the adventures. And when most people who are critical of those things are homebrewers... who's responsible for the adventures?
I don't think 5e is perfect by any means. I have my criticisms. I do get a bit frustrated that things don't work as well as they should, given they come from a billion dollar business. I'm not really impressed by response to criticisms being "just homebrew it". I shouldn't have to homebrew, that's what I paid hundreds of my hard earned cash to WotC and Hasbro to do for me. However, a lot of the complaints about 5e are like people complaining their TV isn't loud enough...with the volume perpetually set on 10. Not because there is a default for 10 and it annoyingly resets there every time you turn the TV off, but because they set it to 10 and not 20.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I suppose it comes down to pressure points and how heavy the alterations you must make in order to get what you want, though I disagree that this is an issue with adventures, I think it is core design.
Just as one of many examples I could come up with
Monsters Design: Monsters in 5e are really just boring bags of hit points, there is not much in the way of interesting or clever mechanics, its just X Hit Points, Y Damage which describes 90% of the monsters in the manual. The result is that combat in 5e is just really boring, which would be fine if it was narratively focused and quick like early D&D, but instead is tactical and slow which drags the whole thing out. So you have neither an interesting extended tactical mini-game ala Pathfinder 2e nor a narrative quick and dirty combat ala 1st/2nd edition.
You could adapt each monster, homebrewing different elements, adding abilities adjusting them to make them more interesting or you could re-write the entire combat system, but those are major efforts. Much easier is to find someone who has already done this, aka, Flee Mortals which fixes monsters, use Pathfinder 2e if you want in-depth but interesting tactical combat. Like those are much better options than fussing about with 5e and trying to fix it yourself.
I don't see how adventure adjustments, encounter design or the DM is to blame for this. Its clearly a core problem with 5e game design, its an issue at the heart of the game. People complain about it to nauseam.
A lot of this thread is feeling a lot less like criticisms of 5e and more like advertisements for other systems.
Yeah, it's kind of the point.
When you consider that so many 5e DM's are having such a wide array of problems and what can only be described as a catastrophically low amount of people picking up the DM mantle in modern D&D communities to such a degree that we are now talking DM AI's and paid DMing it's gotten so bad, I think its fair to say that things are not "easy" for DM's under 5e.
There are many systems and modular solutions available that can make running D&D fun for DM's, perhaps enough to get more people to volunteer for the job but right now, under 5e, the community is in free fall. I don't think there is anything wrong with having those discussions and offering alternative solutions to spending 5 years re-designing the game to get it to do what you want as illustrated by one of the posters.
Point is there are options available, 5e is not the only answer. You tell me what you want out of a game and I will give you 10 solutions that are going to be better than fumbling about with 5e to try to get it to cooperate.
A lot of this thread is feeling a lot less like criticisms of 5e and more like advertisements for other systems.
Yeah, it's kind of the point.
When you consider that so many 5e DM's are having such a wide array of problems and what can only be described as a catastrophically low amount of people picking up the DM mantle in modern D&D communities to such a degree that we are now talking DM AI's and paid DMing it's gotten so bad, I think its fair to say that things are not "easy" for DM's under 5e.
There are many systems and modular solutions available that can make running D&D fun for DM's, perhaps enough to get more people to volunteer for the job but right now, under 5e, the community is in free fall. I don't think there is anything wrong with having those discussions and offering alternative solutions to spending 5 years re-designing the game to get it to do what you want as illustrated by one of the posters.
Point is there are options available, 5e is not the only answer. You tell me what you want out of a game and I will give you 10 solutions that are going to be better than fumbling about with 5e to try to get it to cooperate.
I don't disagree with this.
The game's history is......... Interesting.
Starts out as a streamlined-ish way to do a bunch of things in game, but it's contradictory and unbalanced, So homebrew - Homebrew becomes canon, and then the overwhelming weight of the "new stuff" creates a need for a new version, which as they revise and coallate, becomes so burgeoning that it requires a new edition.... and so on.
They say it's to address a core issue, but, as I said elsewhere, by the time they release spelljammer, you know a new edition is pretty much the next thing, each time they rerelease.
The core problem is that it collects rules and collects additional material and snowballs until the snowball is so big it breaks apart, then they start over again, and they often reuse all the materials from previous versions. The core rules and mechanics may vary as they try to work toward balance or towards crunch or towards clarity or towards simplicity, but rather than something where it really is "plug and play" rather than snowballs of having to have EVERYTHING in a game....
Up late, last gasp before I head to bed and sleep.
So, there is something that needs to be noted given some of the recent responses…
Ask us “old” people if we complained about 1e and 2e. I will say that anyone who says they didn’t is a liar, lol. I mean, I know people who played for decade so still complain about THAC0, lol.
Especially given how different that was from 1e. Yes, it worked Bette,r but it annoyed the hell out of so many people…
But there is something really critical to remember — and this is for my fellow old timers as well as the young whippersnappers: WhileD&D is the most popular and has the largest market share and all the rest, it is still D&D. COmments about other systems are the norm because D&D is the default, it is the Numero Uno, it is the Vanilla and the super popular movie that folks are sayign they will never see or they hate because blah blah.
It is the baseline, the thing to which all the other systems are compared because it is the one that is the most important out of all of them.There are 43 search engines that I know of, but what does everyone call search — so ubiquitous it has become synonymous, and that’s google.
D&D is the google of role playing.
And while we are talking about all these other games, remember that what is being said is always in reference to D&D — and how to make it more enjoyable and more exciting for that player. For that tale. For that group, that session. There is someone who has posted three threads about bringing real world physics into D&D to do some a-plus stuff that all the folks are poo-pooping. You think they’re satisfied with 5e?
Rule -1: No game system will please everyone. So pick the one you want to play and make it work for you.
Everyone here wants to play D&D. They have incredible spells, a huge list of monsters, and all that, so it gets a lot easier. It is “soft” — and that makes it ideal for adding crunch because the whole thing is wide open. 5e, excepting classes, is barebones. It is *more barebones* than AD&D was, and I also need to point out that OSR is talking about the B/X stuff — the “Basic and Expert” sets of D&D, which is a VERY different game than 5e and a VERy different game than AD&D was when they were side by side on the shelves making you choose between a box and a bunch of books.
The B/X are not part of the 1e series — this is 5e because it traces back to 1e, which is AD&D. B/X got their update in the Mentzer BECMI stuff, and *WOW* you all should have heard the howling when that came out, lol.
That is two very different perspectives on D&D. B/X was also “soft” in comparison to AD&D’s Crunch. Pathfinder exists entirely because of changes late in 3.5’s lifecycle and how poorly received 4e was. In another thread I mentioned Car Wars — a game about building a super combat car and driving it around and blasting everyone else. Hot Wheels as a TTG — role playing wasn’t a big focus at the time for it.
Tunnels and Trolls was big for a while. So, yes, ther are a lot of competitors and they sell themselves as “improvements on” and “better X than” and it is always to D&D that they compare themselves.
Me, I play D&D. I play 5e D&D. Yes, I am pretty much rewriting half the game, but it is still 5e. I get grief because I don’t think RAW and RAI are worth a flying fig since the truth is the rules of D&D have always allowed you to change every damn thing about it.
D&D can never be a Ship of Theseus. It is RAW that each DM gets to do whatever. I could just as easily tell all the RAW and RAI folks to go find a different game like a lot of folks suggest I do…
… but I don’t because they want to play D&D, like I do. Sure, I have different crafting rules and vehicles rules and classes and I am playing around like mad with some of the mechanics…
… but it is still D&D, so I don’t need to go get a different game. I have it.
But between jobs, other kinds of entertainment, energy levels (I am “old”, y’know), and all the rest, I don’t have a ton of time. So it has taken me five years to create a world. Only about 2 to work out the rules, and I am still doing that point because I am bending the rules to fit the world the same way the devs bend them to fit FR. I have no world tree, and there isn’t a wa to add one because I started with the cosmology and among the first things I did was make all the PIE derived gods farming powerless vestiges. And that *includes* the world tree, which is growing in a very specific place and will kill anyone with less than 140 hp that gets within about 90 feet of it.
Not kidding or exaggerating. I also don’t have barbarians. I can’t have barbarians — there’s no barbarous place for them to live. Could I have a pocket of people who have been separated from the rest for hundreds of years? yes, I could, and I do. But all the PC races are descended from the same three groups of 4321 families, 120 families, or 1012 families. Oh, and they are also all descended from humans.
So how would I do those suggestions? That’s the level I know this world at. And before you say “well, that’s just lazy” keep in mind I had to make Mortal Kombat fit in with robot maids, gunslingers, witches, Jedi, Tritons, kemonomimi, a secret society of Illuminati, 200 guilds, magical girls, seven cities that think they are the best and talk about two counties that live a nomadic lifestyle “savage” (and still are not barbarians), elves that are close to psycho from generational ptsd, and more.
I have distinct cultures for all of them.
Tell me that I should change my world to fit some subclass? No. THe game changes to fit the world. Always. And if the game resists that change, if the players resist that change, then the game isn’t a creative endeavor anymore.
Not for a world builder. Not for someone whose joy in the game comes from building that world and letting players romp around in it. I built an open world and so I had to put all te things into an open world that I could find, and a world tree barbarian ain’t gonna fit in there in some lost valley when the mountains are all 25k feet tall and those lost valleys are taken up by Colonies (for Monks) and ruins of a world that was literally remade 1500 years ago.
But I don’t have to. I have taken the time to develop all new classes — and in the process I have “fixed” that super hero thing us “old people” complain about. It is still D&D.
Now, look at the price for that: I can’t use DDB. I can’t use VTTs. I couldn’t use them before I even started changing rules because I decided to use optional rules that they don’t support. That means that a huge bunch of potential new players aren’t available to me — even if they would love to play in my world under these rules.
And the way some of the responses here, the industry as a whole, and definitely work are going, this kind of work is going to be erased in another 10 years, and while you all can say that “homebrew is fine and alive and well” I will tell you that it isn’t, because it is all copies of what already exists (even the instructions for using homebrew here limit people to what is already there).
Where’s the Shukenja? Where’s the Yoruba pantheon? Cannot build them in this system, not and stay true to their cultural basis. You have a god of everything that does not have *any* domains and is the only god in the place. What Clerics can you play? What if your gods arent a pantheon or aren’t personifications of different concepts?
The game is limiting creative, outside the box thinking. THAT is design, not DM. Because “just use the stuff they offer” isn’t an answer and none of the above can be blamed on the DM, who I just showed can in fact, do anything — except change the game’s design unless they are really good at creative game mechanics, and then they can’t do a damn thing with it because the game shuts them out.
Don’t blame DMs for the failings of the designers.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
I do think however at the core of the design issue with 5e is that it's uncommitted to any specific thing, it tries to be all things to all people, but such a design has the foundational problem of not doing any specific thing well nor being totally clear about any specific execution of mechanics. There is no definable playstyle in D&D beyond being a high-powered fantasy adventure game, yet take any specific playstyle that actually exists and try to apply it to the game and it can't be done without heavy alteration. The default answer for 5e is "homebrew it" to pretty much any question...which would be fine, but it's a design space that starts out borked and unbalanced. Anyone who has ever tried to alter 5e knows that you spend most of your time plugging holes on a sinking ship, I don't think even the most staunch defenders of the system could deny that.
In the end, the only people who the game is "simple" for is players. For DM's, 5e is a pretty challenging game to run, it's definitely not newbie-friendly which explains the shortage of DM's supporting the system. The forum posts here on DNDBeyond are effectively a 50-50-50 split between players complaining about their DM's, DM's trying to figure out how to fix the game and acting as a DM refuge for confused and failed DMs looking for solace in their recovery from their last campaign disaster. 90% of the posts here fall into one of these categories the most common of which is some variation of "my game has gone belly up, please help" and the answers these DM's get if paraphrased is "just homebrew" as if this is some sort of natural state of the game that, whatever rules are in the book, don't ever actually work and to play 5e you must fix it yourself.
The constant splash books and alterations to the rules wouldn't be needed if the game was designed well. Castles and Crusades for example was released in 2004, its currently in its 8th printing and very little has changed since 1st edition. The new books are largely just printed out of tradition. You can play C&C with one guy holding a 1e book and another holding an 8e book and you are playing the same game. How is this possible? Design a good game and you don't need to keep rebuilding it every few years.
There is nothing to do about it, the new VTT and digital push is by design meant to kill off what is left of the creativity and art of being a good DM and regulate the premise to DM's being referees who act as DM AI's until WotC figures out how to replace them entirely.
When you consider that so many 5e DM's are having such a wide array of problems and what can only be described as a catastrophically low amount of people picking up the DM mantle in modern D&D communities to such a degree that we are now talking DM AI's and paid DMing it's gotten so bad, I think its fair to say that things are not "easy" for DM's under 5e.
This statement is not accurate—though it is a common misconception, so I do not think there is any fault on your part. 5e has a DMing problem, but so did every single edition.
Since D&D was released, approximately 20% of players were willing to DM, according to data collected by both Wizards and TSR. Both companies did their best to change that number - increased tools for DMs, various outreach mechanisms, etc., but the number stayed static at about 20%, regardless of what edition was chosen.
This shows the DMing shortage is not a 5e problem - if 5e were particularly hard to DM as compared to other issues, you would see a drop in that percentage.
What you are seeing: 80% of a game with millions more members than prior editions means a louder number of players who cannot find a DM—but that is just how percentages work and not a reflection on the system’s difficulty. You are seeing increased ability to complain publicly with the internet, giving the DMless a global voice they previously did not have. You are seeing new technology that did not previously exist to make up for the age-old DM shortage. You are seeing social media and the success of paid DMing encourage DMs to give that a shot (note that paid DMing has been around the whole time the game has been).
So, yes, it does look like the DMing problem is getting worse—it hasn’t. It has remained about the same as always. We’re just in an edition which has millions more players than any other, and hundreds of thousands of more DMs.
1. It is the Google of TTRPG, and that's a valid point.
2. We all want the game because it's the Google.
3. There's nothing wrong with it being everything for anyone to play. My problem is that it tries to make sure every game has to play everything.
It's difficult to excise or snip bits out without it feeling like a betrayal to your players for telling them that something simply does not fit. Plus players are used to options. You try and run restrictive, and some will be amiable, but it's always a question of what you lose.
It's bulky too. For the world I want, I don't want to take the approach Dorsay does. I think her world is so over articulated and specialized that it's also just.......heavy. and a burden I don't want to carry.
But I do want to tweak the spell list to start. I stole a few spreadsheets of the official material from 4-ish sources, and there's 500 goddamned spells. That's UNIQUE spells. Not even counting homebrewed, the DDB database has a lot of double or triple entries for legacy or version in a supplement.
Thankfully I don't want to go crazy with changes but it's a headache and a half deciding what needs revision, where do I reallocate, and how do I keep this easy for my players to know and understand. This is in itself a bit of a can of worms.
I want truly unique classes where sorcerers FEEL like they can do anything with magic and have a robust spell manipulation mechanic rather than an up casting mechanic for certain spells, dropping somatic and verbal, which some other classes can do with traits as well, and...an extra resource to manage??
And that's just ONE class to edit, but there's so much....bulk.
Because d&d snowballs rather than staying modular. You can't run just basic rules, you need Tasha's errata, which means all Tasha's now, and although Xanathar's is technically optional, there's things in it that are must haves for getting this one damned subclass that fixes basic, and now all the races have been errata-ed for mordenkeinen's and....
You get my point... every setting in D&D is the forgotten prealms because if you try to pick up another, it carries over all the rest of FR.
But this is just one problem and that is that the 5e is not designed to pace out leveling and skill progression. It's not designed for analog "ehhhh.. you don't succeed but..." or "well, you succeed but...." decisions. It's pass/fail with no fudging, no retries partially due to its implied language and partially due to it's mechanics. (And yes, part of that is DM responsibility, but it's also part mechanics, and a lot is how you instruct new DM's to handle rolling. How many times do new DM's complain about being stuck because they put something important behind a save or suck roll???)
...I do think however at the core of the design issue with 5e is that it's uncommitted to any specific thing, it tries to be all things to all people, but such a design has the foundational problem of not doing any specific thing well nor being totally clear about any specific execution of mechanics. There is no definable playstyle in D&D beyond being a high-powered fantasy adventure game, yet take any specific playstyle that actually exists and try to apply it to the game and it can't be done without heavy alteration. The default answer for 5e is "homebrew it" to pretty much any question...which would be fine, but it's a design space that starts out borked and unbalanced....
5e is the most accessible that DND has ever been - player count is higher with this edition than ever. This edition attempted (and mostly succeeded) in making the game streamlined enough to be simple to run, while also crunchy enough that players enjoy the experience of choosing progression. I get that there are some problems - there are always problems to be found in rigid rules systems, but this one gives the opportunity to change the rules as we see fit. It makes those changes a feature, rather than off-limits.
You're viewing that accessibility as a weakness, since it doesn't cater to specific communities of players as much. I prefer to look at it as a strength, because of how many new players it has brought in that are legitimately excited to play. Even in my own life, I've had friends approach me over the past 6 or 7 years (knowing me as the "DND guy") asking how to play, or to see if I can run a one-shot for them.
The DM problem has never been something specific to 5e; and has been said before, is only more noticable because of the vast amount of players now participating in the game. IMO it's not a system problem.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I know what you're thinking: "In that flurry of blows, did he use all his ki points, or save one?" Well, are ya feeling lucky, punk?
When you consider that so many 5e DM's are having such a wide array of problems and what can only be described as a catastrophically low amount of people picking up the DM mantle in modern D&D communities to such a degree that we are now talking DM AI's and paid DMing it's gotten so bad, I think its fair to say that things are not "easy" for DM's under 5e.
This statement is not accurate—though it is a common misconception, so I do not think there is any fault on your part. 5e has a DMing problem, but so did every single edition.
Since D&D was released, approximately 20% of players were willing to DM, according to data collected by both Wizards and TSR. Both companies did their best to change that number - increased tools for DMs, various outreach mechanisms, etc., but the number stayed static at about 20%, regardless of what edition was chosen.
This shows the DMing shortage is not a 5e problem - if 5e were particularly hard to DM as compared to other issues, you would see a drop in that percentage.
What you are seeing: 80% of a game with millions more members than prior editions means a louder number of players who cannot find a DM—but that is just how percentages work and not a reflection on the system’s difficulty. You are seeing increased ability to complain publicly with the internet, giving the DMless a global voice they previously did not have. You are seeing new technology that did not previously exist to make up for the age-old DM shortage. You are seeing social media and the success of paid DMing encourage DMs to give that a shot (note that paid DMing has been around the whole time the game has been).
So, yes, it does look like the DMing problem is getting worse—it hasn’t. It has remained about the same as always. We’re just in an edition which has millions more players than any other, and hundreds of thousands of more DMs.
There's some truth to the dm situation and some fiction.
20% DM's sounds about right. 1 DM and 4 players per table.
A lot of the DM problem is the same issue in other avenues of life.
Players are having unrealistic expectations, but our expectations EVERYWHERE are unrealistic, (and yet somehow so mundane, uncreative and pedestrian).
Go to any restaurant and you're sure to see something on the menu that talks about either being a vegan option, Paleo friendly, locally sourced, ethically harvested, or SOMETHING like that. 15 years ago you would have been looked at quite strangely for asking for any of that. (I had vegan friends. I know...) take a look at eBay and Etsy and what people offer and do now compared to when they first started. The push to do something extra turned into expectations, and when reviews were attached to it, the extras went into overdrive. Buy a bar of soap, and get tracking for free, it comes very precisely wrapped, there's free samples, a sticker or two, a business card with a reminder to give the highest review (which in itself is an issue as it degrades the reviewing process and indicated that the competition is so great anything less than 5 stars is trash), along with a follow-up email a week later asking you how your experience was and.... Well, you see what I mean...
You now have to pay for DM's or DM's looking for money..(let me introduce you to YouTube. Or "influencers" or only fans. Or patreon and Kickstarter and the 30 million other forms of e-begging) and most of the time the pay for being a DM sucks (ok, then, let's take a look at Uber and Lyft and GrubHub and....).
So of course we need to turn to AI (like everywhere on the internet anymore as actual writers simply do not exist, and every industry since the pandemic who have decided now is the time to implement the robots) and virtual tabletops (just like zoom is the answer for all meetings now) to solve these "problems"...
The DM problems and the discouragement is real. It's just a societal issue and not a d&d issue.
...I do think however at the core of the design issue with 5e is that it's uncommitted to any specific thing, it tries to be all things to all people, but such a design has the foundational problem of not doing any specific thing well nor being totally clear about any specific execution of mechanics. There is no definable playstyle in D&D beyond being a high-powered fantasy adventure game, yet take any specific playstyle that actually exists and try to apply it to the game and it can't be done without heavy alteration. The default answer for 5e is "homebrew it" to pretty much any question...which would be fine, but it's a design space that starts out borked and unbalanced....
5e is the most accessible that DND has ever been - player count is higher with this edition than ever. This edition attempted (and mostly succeeded) in making the game streamlined enough to be simple to run, while also crunchy enough that players enjoy the experience of choosing progression. I get that there are some problems - there are always problems to be found in rigid rules systems, but this one gives the opportunity to change the rules as we see fit. It makes those changes a feature, rather than off-limits.
You're viewing that accessibility as a weakness, since it doesn't cater to specific communities of players as much. I prefer to look at it as a strength, because of how many new players it has brought in that are legitimately excited to play. Even in my own life, I've had friends approach me over the past 6 or 7 years (knowing me as the "DND guy") asking how to play, or to see if I can run a one-shot for them.
The DM problem has never been something specific to 5e; and has been said before, is only more noticable because of the vast amount of players now participating in the game. IMO it's not a system problem.
I think you're making a lot of assumptions about the game based on its success and popularity. By that standard McDonalds is the best food in the world, Bud Light the best beer in the world and Lucifer season 5 the best TV show ever made.
Popularity is not quality, nor does it suggest good design, quality work or even represent people's preferences.
5e is to RPG's what McDonalds is to food, the fact that its popular, doesn't really say much about its quality, but it does say a lot about its audience.
The DM problems and the discouragement is real. It's just a societal issue and not a d&d issue.
This statement is not true in a meaningful way—and it appears to suffer the same flaw of looking at the loudest, platformed members of the internet rather than the actual data. If society was a major problem, the DMing percentages would change. They are not changing in a significant way.
That could mean one of two things. The most likely situation is that which we already know from decades of data—no matter how one might try to change the DMing percent, it does not actually change, because it seems innate to how players play the game.
The other possible situation is that there exists a problem—but there exists an equal force bringing the percentage back to that 20%, such as greater availability of example games and how to videos. This, however, would be an unlikely circumstance - not only would it ignore the longstanding data showing outreach doesn’t really increase the DM percentage, it also relies on a weird coincidence where two factors give both a +X% and a -X% in the same numbers.
When you consider that so many 5e DM's are having such a wide array of problems and what can only be described as a catastrophically low amount of people picking up the DM mantle in modern D&D communities to such a degree that we are now talking DM AI's and paid DMing it's gotten so bad, I think its fair to say that things are not "easy" for DM's under 5e.
This statement is not accurate—though it is a common misconception, so I do not think there is any fault on your part. 5e has a DMing problem, but so did every single edition.
Since D&D was released, approximately 20% of players were willing to DM, according to data collected by both Wizards and TSR. Both companies did their best to change that number - increased tools for DMs, various outreach mechanisms, etc., but the number stayed static at about 20%, regardless of what edition was chosen.
This shows the DMing shortage is not a 5e problem - if 5e were particularly hard to DM as compared to other issues, you would see a drop in that percentage.
What you are seeing: 80% of a game with millions more members than prior editions means a louder number of players who cannot find a DM—but that is just how percentages work and not a reflection on the system’s difficulty. You are seeing increased ability to complain publicly with the internet, giving the DMless a global voice they previously did not have. You are seeing new technology that did not previously exist to make up for the age-old DM shortage. You are seeing social media and the success of paid DMing encourage DMs to give that a shot (note that paid DMing has been around the whole time the game has been).
So, yes, it does look like the DMing problem is getting worse—it hasn’t. It has remained about the same as always. We’re just in an edition which has millions more players than any other, and hundreds of thousands of more DMs.
This could be more perception, than reality, but my personal experience has been that no one wants to run 5e. Like I haven't heard or seen a 5e game in my parts for several years. Grant it, I may have played a role in creating that situation by simply offering my game which is not 5e that created converts, but still, if 5e was as popular as its sales suggest, you would expect in a gaming hub like my local area there would be 5e games all over the place and there are... well none really.
In either case, I definitely don't agree that 5e is streamlined and easy to run by any stretch of the imagination. I have been a DM for 30+ years and have run countless games over the years. Compared to the sort of games being released today in particular, 5e is a 4 or 5 out of 5 on the complexity scale, even Pathfinder 2e is a simpler game to run and it has a 650+ page rulebook.
This statement is not true in a meaningful way—and it appears to suffer the same flaw of looking at the loudest, platformed members of the internet rather than the actual data. If society was a major problem, the DMing percentages would change. They are not changing in a significant way.
That could mean one of two things. The most likely situation is that which we already know from decades of data—no matter how one might try to change the DMing percent, it does not actually change, because it seems innate to how players play the game.
The other possible situation is that there exists a problem—but there exists an equal force bringing the percentage back to that 20%, such as greater availability of example games and how to videos. This, however, would be an unlikely circumstance - not only would it ignore the longstanding data showing outreach doesn’t really increase the DM percentage, it also relies on a weird coincidence where two factors give both a +X% and a -X% in the same numbers.
Maybe my wording is off. I mean the challenges and hurdles we face in running the games echo the same complaints outside in real life, and those hurdles are the same reasons you hear over and over again when asked about dm burnout, "why nobody wants to work, I mean DM, no more??? They're too busy on their computers and vtt's and don't want to do an honest homebrew for a stale donut anymore... lazy and entitled I call it!"
On the DM / player shortage- more players have more resources to find games, but TTRPGs were really designed with a 'group first' mentality. Get a group of friends together and play a game. But COVID and social media have made more people more isolated than ever. So you have lots of lonely gamers looking for a game for themselves and not their group. Add in countless threads of DM horror stories, and fewer people willing to DM for strangers because of the drama potential. When I run Adventurer's League, I hear that people want to be in a campaign but they don't know anyone else. Well, how do you meet new people if you don't leave your house and go to where the games are? If you don't take a risk? That is a societal problem. On 5e Design- Everything being generic is a problem. I've never run a pre-generated module without significant changes and improv. Monsters seem just a big bag of HP. True. 5e could have used a 'tactics' session for each monster. But much of these issues can be reduced with decent DM preparation. Many of the newer sourcebooks have excellent tips on solving these issues as well. Van Richten's Guide has a section on Darklords that should be a must-read for anyone creating a homebrew villian. On player engagement- One problem is that DMs allow players to replace dead characters with a new one at the same level. This is a Save-game mentality from video games, and a huge mistake. It should be spelled out early and agreed to by the group that there is a penalty for dying. My recommendation is Average level of team -1 as new starting point. And for XP levelling, that means exactly 1 XP over whatever that level is. That way, there is a loss for the player AND a loss for the group as a whole. Second, 5e counts on session 0 to tie the characters to the plot far more than previous editions. Rewards can be finding your parents' killer, or the lost treasure stolen from you, or that one secret spell no one else knows. But the DM has to plan these in advance. It is poorly stated in the DMG, but critical to player engagement. Third, and hardest, is balance. If players are getting 1 combat per long rest, it better be lethal and way above the listed CR. A second combat right after a big fight will go a long way to making short rests seem valuable. Chases and group skill explorations to keep players using resources out of combat are good as well. Keeps the 'monster zoo' concept down. If players are not using their non-combat skills, then certain classes will feel less engaged. Bards need to bard, rogues need to rogue, Druids need to feel one with nature.
In either case, I definitely don't agree that 5e is streamlined and easy to run by any stretch of the imagination. I have been a DM for 30 years and have run countless games over the years. Compared to the sort of games being released today, 5e is a 5 out of 5 on the complexity scale, even Pathfinder 2e is a simpler game to run and it has a 650+ page rulebook.
Can you at least give some examples of what makes you feel 5e is so complex for you?
The complexity isn't in using 5e rules as written, its in the complexity of fixing all the things broken in the game mechanic to make the game actually fun and challenging to play.
How about I give you the top 3, save me some digital ink
* Class balance is always broken, simply put the classes range wildly from being borderline useless to being gods that don't require the rest of the party. This creates all manner of issues with players feeling useless to encounters having to be specifically designed to counter the insane powers of individual characters. This is made doubly bad when some players become proficient in class builds, creating insane combos that you now as a DM must assess and either disallow or alter to balance them. If you just leave it and run the game as it, it becomes a crap game no one at the table is happy with and that burden falls exclusively on the DM to solve.
* Magic Item rules are complete crap and everyone at the table knows it and is unhappy with them. Every DM as a result must either just accept it and let the players complain or restructure the entire balance and economy of the game to make magic items actually fun. Tons of work!
* Monster design is catastrophically bad, easily the worst monster design of any version of D&D to date by a margin so huge, its hard to even know where to start complaining about it. The end result is that RAW makes 5e combat the absolute most boring thing to ever be put into an RPG and its exhausting to hear players complain about how long and boring fights are. The solution of course is design and adaptation, more homebrewing to fix it. Tons of effort here.. thank god for Flee Mortals, honestly, I don't know how anyone has managed to suffer through the trash that is the 5th edition monster book to this point.
Those are just the tip of the iceberg. It all boils down to endless homebrewing. I literally can't think of a single thing in 5e that actually works right out of the box without needing a heavy-handed dose of homebrewing.
On the DM / player shortage- more players have more resources to find games, but TTRPGs were really designed with a 'group first' mentality. Get a group of friends together and play a game. But COVID and social media have made more people more isolated than ever. So you have lots of lonely gamers looking for a game for themselves and not their group. Add in countless threads of DM horror stories, and fewer people willing to DM for strangers because of the drama potential. When I run Adventurer's League, I hear that people want to be in a campaign but they don't know anyone else. Well, how do you meet new people if you don't leave your house and go to where the games are? If you don't take a risk? That is a societal problem. On 5e Design- Everything being generic is a problem. I've never run a pre-generated module without significant changes and improv. Monsters seem just a big bag of HP. True. 5e could have used a 'tactics' session for each monster. But much of these issues can be reduced with decent DM preparation. Many of the newer sourcebooks have excellent tips on solving these issues as well. Van Richten's Guide has a section on Darklords that should be a must-read for anyone creating a homebrew villian. On player engagement- One problem is that DMs allow players to replace dead characters with a new one at the same level. This is a Save-game mentality from video games, and a huge mistake. It should be spelled out early and agreed to by the group that there is a penalty for dying. My recommendation is Average level of team -1 as new starting point. And for XP levelling, that means exactly 1 XP over whatever that level is. That way, there is a loss for the player AND a loss for the group as a whole. Second, 5e counts on session 0 to tie the characters to the plot far more than previous editions. Rewards can be finding your parents' killer, or the lost treasure stolen from you, or that one secret spell no one else knows. But the DM has to plan these in advance. It is poorly stated in the DMG, but critical to player engagement. Third, and hardest, is balance. If players are getting 1 combat per long rest, it better be lethal and way above the listed CR. A second combat right after a big fight will go a long way to making short rests seem valuable. Chases and group skill explorations to keep players using resources out of combat are good as well. Keeps the 'monster zoo' concept down. If players are not using their non-combat skills, then certain classes will feel less engaged. Bards need to bard, rogues need to rogue, Druids need to feel one with nature.
You understand the problem right, I don't disagree with you on anything you said, but all of these elements of the game are a burden to the DM not the players. The players are completely uninvolved in any of it, they just show up to the session and complain when things aren't running right These are all solutions the DM must design, implement, test and so on.
The shoulder shrug "just fix it yourself" is the motto of 5e and most of the books that are created for players, each one adding more burden on the DM to fix. Hey here is a new book with races and classes, all of which are broken... player response "yay!"... DM response? You get the idea.
And I know someone is going to step up and say, well we had those problems in old school D&D as well and the answer is, yes of course we did.. But we fixed those problems in the OSR. OSR games, they don't have that problem. The OSR evolved the old-school game into modern, well-edited, well-defined, clear systems and structures to ensure the games are easy to run.
Im just wondering at what point modern D&D will evolve out of this outdated methodology of producing a broken game and then asking DM's to fix it, cause I can tell you that 6e is probably going to be the first edition I will not even bother buying, because I don't see these issues even being addressed in unearthed arcana.. They are just making it worse right now.
...I do think however at the core of the design issue with 5e is that it's uncommitted to any specific thing, it tries to be all things to all people, but such a design has the foundational problem of not doing any specific thing well nor being totally clear about any specific execution of mechanics. There is no definable playstyle in D&D beyond being a high-powered fantasy adventure game, yet take any specific playstyle that actually exists and try to apply it to the game and it can't be done without heavy alteration. The default answer for 5e is "homebrew it" to pretty much any question...which would be fine, but it's a design space that starts out borked and unbalanced....
5e is the most accessible that DND has ever been - player count is higher with this edition than ever. This edition attempted (and mostly succeeded) in making the game streamlined enough to be simple to run, while also crunchy enough that players enjoy the experience of choosing progression. I get that there are some problems - there are always problems to be found in rigid rules systems, but this one gives the opportunity to change the rules as we see fit. It makes those changes a feature, rather than off-limits.
You're viewing that accessibility as a weakness, since it doesn't cater to specific communities of players as much. I prefer to look at it as a strength, because of how many new players it has brought in that are legitimately excited to play. Even in my own life, I've had friends approach me over the past 6 or 7 years (knowing me as the "DND guy") asking how to play, or to see if I can run a one-shot for them.
The DM problem has never been something specific to 5e; and has been said before, is only more noticable because of the vast amount of players now participating in the game. IMO it's not a system problem.
I think you're making a lot of assumptions about the game based on its success and popularity. By that standard McDonalds is the best food in the world, Bud Light the best beer in the world and Lucifer season 5 the best TV show ever made.
Popularity is not quality, nor does it suggest good design, quality work or even represent people's preferences.
5e is to RPG's what McDonalds is to food, the fact that its popular, doesn't really say much about its quality, but it does say a lot about its audience.
But if it is so lousy, why, exactly, is it so popular? People, in general, seem to feel McDonalds worth eating. Or Bud Light worth drinking. It is not like these are the only options they have. It is not like they have never tasted other foods and it is likely they have had other beers.
People wanting entertainment do not all go to deeply meaningful art films. Academy award winners are not always the top grossing or even necessarily the most meaningful films.
This whole thread is essentially like wandering into a restaurant and complaining it is a McDonalds and not the five star restaurant the person wanted to eat at... and then being told "Sir, this is a Wendy's."
If it were a Wendy's employee survey. You're forgetting that this is a question for DM's.
They're popular because they hit all the points in a satisfactory way. There's nothing wrong with that. And maybe some of the people here would be better served by other games, but you may want a handcrafted microbrew, but if all your local pubs serve bud lite.... you drink bud lite and wish that at least the bud lite tasted a little better...
This could be more perception, than reality, but my personal experience has been that no one wants to run 5e. Like I haven't heard or seen a 5e game in my parts for several years. Grant it, I may have played a role in creating that situation by simply offering my game which is not 5e that created converts, but still, if 5e was as popular as its sales suggest, you would expect in a gaming hub like my local area there would be 5e games all over the place and there are... well none really.
Given how successful D&D 5 is, while it's possible your circles are just that unusual, it's at least as likely that there's plenty of 5e going on that you just don't hear about. Can't imagine why. Maybe people are just well aware that you're not interested.
It's certainly an atypical situation. In my circles, there's plenty of D&D 5, and also plenty of other things. I could probably get a D&D 4 game going if I were willing to deal with the lack of tooling, and I've heard about Cthulhu, Genesys, Good Society, and a number of other games whose names I'm blanking on at the moment. And that's just what I know about. I know quite a number of gamers where I have no idea what they're playing, because it just doesn't come up much.
In either case, I definitely don't agree that 5e is streamlined and easy to run by any stretch of the imagination. I have been a DM for 30+ years and have run countless games over the years. Compared to the sort of games being released today in particular, 5e is a 4 or 5 out of 5 on the complexity scale, even Pathfinder 2e is a simpler game to run and it has a 650+ page rulebook.
I mean, there's never been and likely never will be a D&D that's truly easy to run. It's the nature of the beast -- there's too much stuff going on. But, as D&Ds go, 5th is pretty good, and it's certainly no GURPS.
But DMing is hard, and it's always going to be hard. The games that make it easier do so through some combination of constraining what the game can be, and by offloading more of the narrative work to the players.
This started with a comparison with the Avengers. The Avengers include a literal god (Thor), a man made god (Hulk), a modern god-like mortal (Iron Man)... but also Hawkeye and Black Widow, with Cap somewhere in the mid range on the power scale.
And yet that disparity in raw power has never slowed down writers. Nor has the raw firepower of a mid to high level wizard ever slowed down DM's in prior editions. I cited examples in an earlier post how that was a far greater disparity in earlier editions.
Now if you go over to DC, there are stories written for Superman or the Flash, massively more powerful than any of the Avengers except possibly the Hulk.
* Magic Item rules are complete crap and everyone at the table knows it and is unhappy with them. Every DM as a result must either just accept it and let the players complain or restructure the entire balance and economy of the game to make magic items actually fun. Tons of work!
They are conservative and often a bit boring, but 'complete crap?' More importantly, how many are you handing out that dealing with magic items is a ton of work?
* Monster design is catastrophically bad, easily the worst monster design of any version of D&D to date by a margin so huge, its hard to even know where to start complaining about it. The end result is that RAW makes 5e combat the absolute most boring thing to ever be put into an RPG and its exhausting to hear players complain about how long and boring fights are. The solution of course is design and adaptation, more homebrewing to fix it. Tons of effort here.. thank god for Flee Mortals, honestly, I don't know how anyone has managed to suffer through the trash that is the 5th edition monster book to this point.
Those are just the tip of the iceberg. It all boils down to endless homebrewing. I literally can't think of a single thing in 5e that actually works right out of the box without needing a heavy-handed dose of homebrewing.
Again, plenty of dramatic works out there with only humans and the occasional animal. Movies have cinematic fight scenes, but they are not narrated. Narrated or described scenes do not normally have such blow by blow detail. If fights are too long, then either both sides have too many hps or too little damage. Neither sounds like 'Party of gods for whom everything is super easy' material. Combat should be more about what is being fought for/over than the actual blow by blow. That is where the real drama should come from.
An experienced DM should get a sense pretty quick of how much damage the party typically does and how much damage the party can take and thus be able to scale enemy hps and damage accordingly. Might take a couple battles to get a sense of it but it should become second nature. The DM is not bound by the rules, nor does anything you do have to be written up to anything beyond rough notes level. Plot elements sometimes in more detail but monsters? No one is policing you to check the numbers.
I don't disagree with any of that, but as you point out, which is my point, it all needs fixing, the burden of fixing it is on the DM and I'm just wondering at what point WotC will make a game of D&D that simply works as written?
Sure I can write plots to make the absurdity of the power levels make sense, I can re-write monsters and balance encounters by assessing the players and then adjusting monsters accordingly, you are absolutely right that I can alter and re-design the game, I can do all those things, but I have the luxary of 30+ years of experience which tells me both that I shouldn't have to and I don't actually have to because simply put, there are much better systems available and when someone has a problem with 5e, that is always going to be my recommendation rather than telling them "just fix it". I find it strange that somehow, the argument is "you shouldn't talk about other systems,5e is the best"... when clearly, it is not... all these changes and burdens on a DM take time and effort which to me is wasted on correcting a problem that shouldn't be there to begin with.
It's no wonder why DM's are struggling to run good D&D games using 5e and they are, the evidence to support that is overwhelming, you can't take a step in this community without tripping over a DM who's campaign is failing. The burden on the 5e DM is stretched to ridiculous proportions and I don't think having this elitist attitude by slipping in subtle insults to struggling DM like "experienced DM's have no problems" is of particular comfort to the disastrous numbers of DM struggling to make their game work.
I guess what I'm saying is that "you can fix it yourself" is an absolute trash excuse, especially for a multi-billion dollar company in charge of the highest-grossing franchise in the RPG business. TSR gets a pass because they invented the entire genre and worked in a time when there was nothing to base these game, no experience to draw from. What is Wizards of the Coasts excuse? They have unlimited money, access to talent on a global scale and decades of experience and they still can't make a bloody RPG that's balanced and works out of the box.
Come on m8, are you really going to give that BS a pass?
The thing is, you can say that about any engine. I've yet to play one that I haven't had to modify before even playing. Sometimes it's really annoying because it can be really obvious stuff that is obviously just phoned in and easily improved...and they didn't bother to just put it in. I've yet to meet anyone that hasn't put in house rules into their game (they may claim to be running it RAW, but if I have knowledge of RAW, it never takes long in a discussion to find something they've actually house-ruled - even if they didn't realise that's what they were doing.
I've yet to meet an engine than did work ideally out of the box. 5e gets more criticism because it's the most popular and so gets discussed more. A lot of the criticisms that were mentioned are also made by homebrewers, and aren't problems with the engine. I'd have sympathy for people who run published adventures, because those should work out of the box and if the difficulty is not to their liking...I see that. I shouldn't have to go through CoS and adjust numbers of vampires etc. Not everyone will agree on how difficult it should be, but there's at least discussion to be had. In a homebrew adventure? If it's too easy, add more monsters. Use higher CR monsters. Combine different types so their abilities synergise. The DM literally controls how hard an encounter is. Same with how easy it is to find traps or survive them - the DM literally sets the DCs and damage for traps. Just up them to the level of challenge desired. The only challenge comes really when you get to high level and you can't just up the CR (short of home-brewing the monsters...which is fair enough if you don't want to do that).
They'd be valid criticisms of adventures, but the criticisms are rarely levelled at published adventures, but at the engine. It's not the engine, it's the adventures. And when most people who are critical of those things are homebrewers... who's responsible for the adventures?
I don't think 5e is perfect by any means. I have my criticisms. I do get a bit frustrated that things don't work as well as they should, given they come from a billion dollar business. I'm not really impressed by response to criticisms being "just homebrew it". I shouldn't have to homebrew, that's what I paid hundreds of my hard earned cash to WotC and Hasbro to do for me. However, a lot of the complaints about 5e are like people complaining their TV isn't loud enough...with the volume perpetually set on 10. Not because there is a default for 10 and it annoyingly resets there every time you turn the TV off, but because they set it to 10 and not 20.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I suppose it comes down to pressure points and how heavy the alterations you must make in order to get what you want, though I disagree that this is an issue with adventures, I think it is core design.
Just as one of many examples I could come up with
Monsters Design: Monsters in 5e are really just boring bags of hit points, there is not much in the way of interesting or clever mechanics, its just X Hit Points, Y Damage which describes 90% of the monsters in the manual. The result is that combat in 5e is just really boring, which would be fine if it was narratively focused and quick like early D&D, but instead is tactical and slow which drags the whole thing out. So you have neither an interesting extended tactical mini-game ala Pathfinder 2e nor a narrative quick and dirty combat ala 1st/2nd edition.
You could adapt each monster, homebrewing different elements, adding abilities adjusting them to make them more interesting or you could re-write the entire combat system, but those are major efforts. Much easier is to find someone who has already done this, aka, Flee Mortals which fixes monsters, use Pathfinder 2e if you want in-depth but interesting tactical combat. Like those are much better options than fussing about with 5e and trying to fix it yourself.
I don't see how adventure adjustments, encounter design or the DM is to blame for this. Its clearly a core problem with 5e game design, its an issue at the heart of the game. People complain about it to nauseam.
Yeah, it's kind of the point.
When you consider that so many 5e DM's are having such a wide array of problems and what can only be described as a catastrophically low amount of people picking up the DM mantle in modern D&D communities to such a degree that we are now talking DM AI's and paid DMing it's gotten so bad, I think its fair to say that things are not "easy" for DM's under 5e.
There are many systems and modular solutions available that can make running D&D fun for DM's, perhaps enough to get more people to volunteer for the job but right now, under 5e, the community is in free fall. I don't think there is anything wrong with having those discussions and offering alternative solutions to spending 5 years re-designing the game to get it to do what you want as illustrated by one of the posters.
Point is there are options available, 5e is not the only answer. You tell me what you want out of a game and I will give you 10 solutions that are going to be better than fumbling about with 5e to try to get it to cooperate.
I don't disagree with this.
The game's history is......... Interesting.
Starts out as a streamlined-ish way to do a bunch of things in game, but it's contradictory and unbalanced, So homebrew - Homebrew becomes canon, and then the overwhelming weight of the "new stuff" creates a need for a new version, which as they revise and coallate, becomes so burgeoning that it requires a new edition.... and so on.
They say it's to address a core issue, but, as I said elsewhere, by the time they release spelljammer, you know a new edition is pretty much the next thing, each time they rerelease.
The core problem is that it collects rules and collects additional material and snowballs until the snowball is so big it breaks apart, then they start over again, and they often reuse all the materials from previous versions. The core rules and mechanics may vary as they try to work toward balance or towards crunch or towards clarity or towards simplicity, but rather than something where it really is "plug and play" rather than snowballs of having to have EVERYTHING in a game....
Up late, last gasp before I head to bed and sleep.
So, there is something that needs to be noted given some of the recent responses…
Ask us “old” people if we complained about 1e and 2e. I will say that anyone who says they didn’t is a liar, lol. I mean, I know people who played for decade so still complain about THAC0, lol.
Especially given how different that was from 1e. Yes, it worked Bette,r but it annoyed the hell out of so many people…
But there is something really critical to remember — and this is for my fellow old timers as well as the young whippersnappers: WhileD&D is the most popular and has the largest market share and all the rest, it is still D&D. COmments about other systems are the norm because D&D is the default, it is the Numero Uno, it is the Vanilla and the super popular movie that folks are sayign they will never see or they hate because blah blah.
It is the baseline, the thing to which all the other systems are compared because it is the one that is the most important out of all of them.There are 43 search engines that I know of, but what does everyone call search — so ubiquitous it has become synonymous, and that’s google.
D&D is the google of role playing.
And while we are talking about all these other games, remember that what is being said is always in reference to D&D — and how to make it more enjoyable and more exciting for that player. For that tale. For that group, that session. There is someone who has posted three threads about bringing real world physics into D&D to do some a-plus stuff that all the folks are poo-pooping. You think they’re satisfied with 5e?
Rule -1: No game system will please everyone. So pick the one you want to play and make it work for you.
Everyone here wants to play D&D. They have incredible spells, a huge list of monsters, and all that, so it gets a lot easier. It is “soft” — and that makes it ideal for adding crunch because the whole thing is wide open. 5e, excepting classes, is barebones. It is *more barebones* than AD&D was, and I also need to point out that OSR is talking about the B/X stuff — the “Basic and Expert” sets of D&D, which is a VERY different game than 5e and a VERy different game than AD&D was when they were side by side on the shelves making you choose between a box and a bunch of books.
The B/X are not part of the 1e series — this is 5e because it traces back to 1e, which is AD&D. B/X got their update in the Mentzer BECMI stuff, and *WOW* you all should have heard the howling when that came out, lol.
That is two very different perspectives on D&D. B/X was also “soft” in comparison to AD&D’s Crunch. Pathfinder exists entirely because of changes late in 3.5’s lifecycle and how poorly received 4e was. In another thread I mentioned Car Wars — a game about building a super combat car and driving it around and blasting everyone else. Hot Wheels as a TTG — role playing wasn’t a big focus at the time for it.
Tunnels and Trolls was big for a while. So, yes, ther are a lot of competitors and they sell themselves as “improvements on” and “better X than” and it is always to D&D that they compare themselves.
Me, I play D&D. I play 5e D&D. Yes, I am pretty much rewriting half the game, but it is still 5e. I get grief because I don’t think RAW and RAI are worth a flying fig since the truth is the rules of D&D have always allowed you to change every damn thing about it.
D&D can never be a Ship of Theseus. It is RAW that each DM gets to do whatever. I could just as easily tell all the RAW and RAI folks to go find a different game like a lot of folks suggest I do…
… but I don’t because they want to play D&D, like I do. Sure, I have different crafting rules and vehicles rules and classes and I am playing around like mad with some of the mechanics…
… but it is still D&D, so I don’t need to go get a different game. I have it.
But between jobs, other kinds of entertainment, energy levels (I am “old”, y’know), and all the rest, I don’t have a ton of time. So it has taken me five years to create a world. Only about 2 to work out the rules, and I am still doing that point because I am bending the rules to fit the world the same way the devs bend them to fit FR. I have no world tree, and there isn’t a wa to add one because I started with the cosmology and among the first things I did was make all the PIE derived gods farming powerless vestiges. And that *includes* the world tree, which is growing in a very specific place and will kill anyone with less than 140 hp that gets within about 90 feet of it.
Not kidding or exaggerating. I also don’t have barbarians. I can’t have barbarians — there’s no barbarous place for them to live. Could I have a pocket of people who have been separated from the rest for hundreds of years? yes, I could, and I do. But all the PC races are descended from the same three groups of 4321 families, 120 families, or 1012 families. Oh, and they are also all descended from humans.
So how would I do those suggestions? That’s the level I know this world at. And before you say “well, that’s just lazy” keep in mind I had to make Mortal Kombat fit in with robot maids, gunslingers, witches, Jedi, Tritons, kemonomimi, a secret society of Illuminati, 200 guilds, magical girls, seven cities that think they are the best and talk about two counties that live a nomadic lifestyle “savage” (and still are not barbarians), elves that are close to psycho from generational ptsd, and more.
I have distinct cultures for all of them.
Tell me that I should change my world to fit some subclass? No. THe game changes to fit the world. Always. And if the game resists that change, if the players resist that change, then the game isn’t a creative endeavor anymore.
Not for a world builder. Not for someone whose joy in the game comes from building that world and letting players romp around in it. I built an open world and so I had to put all te things into an open world that I could find, and a world tree barbarian ain’t gonna fit in there in some lost valley when the mountains are all 25k feet tall and those lost valleys are taken up by Colonies (for Monks) and ruins of a world that was literally remade 1500 years ago.
But I don’t have to. I have taken the time to develop all new classes — and in the process I have “fixed” that super hero thing us “old people” complain about. It is still D&D.
Now, look at the price for that: I can’t use DDB. I can’t use VTTs. I couldn’t use them before I even started changing rules because I decided to use optional rules that they don’t support. That means that a huge bunch of potential new players aren’t available to me — even if they would love to play in my world under these rules.
And the way some of the responses here, the industry as a whole, and definitely work are going, this kind of work is going to be erased in another 10 years, and while you all can say that “homebrew is fine and alive and well” I will tell you that it isn’t, because it is all copies of what already exists (even the instructions for using homebrew here limit people to what is already there).
Where’s the Shukenja? Where’s the Yoruba pantheon? Cannot build them in this system, not and stay true to their cultural basis. You have a god of everything that does not have *any* domains and is the only god in the place. What Clerics can you play? What if your gods arent a pantheon or aren’t personifications of different concepts?
The game is limiting creative, outside the box thinking. THAT is design, not DM. Because “just use the stuff they offer” isn’t an answer and none of the above can be blamed on the DM, who I just showed can in fact, do anything — except change the game’s design unless they are really good at creative game mechanics, and then they can’t do a damn thing with it because the game shuts them out.
Don’t blame DMs for the failings of the designers.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
I tend to agree and I get what you are saying.
I do think however at the core of the design issue with 5e is that it's uncommitted to any specific thing, it tries to be all things to all people, but such a design has the foundational problem of not doing any specific thing well nor being totally clear about any specific execution of mechanics. There is no definable playstyle in D&D beyond being a high-powered fantasy adventure game, yet take any specific playstyle that actually exists and try to apply it to the game and it can't be done without heavy alteration. The default answer for 5e is "homebrew it" to pretty much any question...which would be fine, but it's a design space that starts out borked and unbalanced. Anyone who has ever tried to alter 5e knows that you spend most of your time plugging holes on a sinking ship, I don't think even the most staunch defenders of the system could deny that.
In the end, the only people who the game is "simple" for is players. For DM's, 5e is a pretty challenging game to run, it's definitely not newbie-friendly which explains the shortage of DM's supporting the system. The forum posts here on DNDBeyond are effectively a 50-50-50 split between players complaining about their DM's, DM's trying to figure out how to fix the game and acting as a DM refuge for confused and failed DMs looking for solace in their recovery from their last campaign disaster. 90% of the posts here fall into one of these categories the most common of which is some variation of "my game has gone belly up, please help" and the answers these DM's get if paraphrased is "just homebrew" as if this is some sort of natural state of the game that, whatever rules are in the book, don't ever actually work and to play 5e you must fix it yourself.
The constant splash books and alterations to the rules wouldn't be needed if the game was designed well. Castles and Crusades for example was released in 2004, its currently in its 8th printing and very little has changed since 1st edition. The new books are largely just printed out of tradition. You can play C&C with one guy holding a 1e book and another holding an 8e book and you are playing the same game. How is this possible? Design a good game and you don't need to keep rebuilding it every few years.
There is nothing to do about it, the new VTT and digital push is by design meant to kill off what is left of the creativity and art of being a good DM and regulate the premise to DM's being referees who act as DM AI's until WotC figures out how to replace them entirely.
This statement is not accurate—though it is a common misconception, so I do not think there is any fault on your part. 5e has a DMing problem, but so did every single edition.
Since D&D was released, approximately 20% of players were willing to DM, according to data collected by both Wizards and TSR. Both companies did their best to change that number - increased tools for DMs, various outreach mechanisms, etc., but the number stayed static at about 20%, regardless of what edition was chosen.
This shows the DMing shortage is not a 5e problem - if 5e were particularly hard to DM as compared to other issues, you would see a drop in that percentage.
What you are seeing: 80% of a game with millions more members than prior editions means a louder number of players who cannot find a DM—but that is just how percentages work and not a reflection on the system’s difficulty. You are seeing increased ability to complain publicly with the internet, giving the DMless a global voice they previously did not have. You are seeing new technology that did not previously exist to make up for the age-old DM shortage. You are seeing social media and the success of paid DMing encourage DMs to give that a shot (note that paid DMing has been around the whole time the game has been).
So, yes, it does look like the DMing problem is getting worse—it hasn’t. It has remained about the same as always. We’re just in an edition which has millions more players than any other, and hundreds of thousands of more DMs.
1. It is the Google of TTRPG, and that's a valid point.
2. We all want the game because it's the Google.
3. There's nothing wrong with it being everything for anyone to play. My problem is that it tries to make sure every game has to play everything.
It's difficult to excise or snip bits out without it feeling like a betrayal to your players for telling them that something simply does not fit. Plus players are used to options. You try and run restrictive, and some will be amiable, but it's always a question of what you lose.
It's bulky too. For the world I want, I don't want to take the approach Dorsay does. I think her world is so over articulated and specialized that it's also just.......heavy. and a burden I don't want to carry.
But I do want to tweak the spell list to start. I stole a few spreadsheets of the official material from 4-ish sources, and there's 500 goddamned spells. That's UNIQUE spells. Not even counting homebrewed, the DDB database has a lot of double or triple entries for legacy or version in a supplement.
Thankfully I don't want to go crazy with changes but it's a headache and a half deciding what needs revision, where do I reallocate, and how do I keep this easy for my players to know and understand. This is in itself a bit of a can of worms.
I want truly unique classes where sorcerers FEEL like they can do anything with magic and have a robust spell manipulation mechanic rather than an up casting mechanic for certain spells, dropping somatic and verbal, which some other classes can do with traits as well, and...an extra resource to manage??
And that's just ONE class to edit, but there's so much....bulk.
Because d&d snowballs rather than staying modular. You can't run just basic rules, you need Tasha's errata, which means all Tasha's now, and although Xanathar's is technically optional, there's things in it that are must haves for getting this one damned subclass that fixes basic, and now all the races have been errata-ed for mordenkeinen's and....
You get my point... every setting in D&D is the forgotten prealms because if you try to pick up another, it carries over all the rest of FR.
But this is just one problem and that is that the 5e is not designed to pace out leveling and skill progression. It's not designed for analog "ehhhh.. you don't succeed but..." or "well, you succeed but...." decisions. It's pass/fail with no fudging, no retries partially due to its implied language and partially due to it's mechanics. (And yes, part of that is DM responsibility, but it's also part mechanics, and a lot is how you instruct new DM's to handle rolling. How many times do new DM's complain about being stuck because they put something important behind a save or suck roll???)
These are my problems.
5e is the most accessible that DND has ever been - player count is higher with this edition than ever. This edition attempted (and mostly succeeded) in making the game streamlined enough to be simple to run, while also crunchy enough that players enjoy the experience of choosing progression. I get that there are some problems - there are always problems to be found in rigid rules systems, but this one gives the opportunity to change the rules as we see fit. It makes those changes a feature, rather than off-limits.
You're viewing that accessibility as a weakness, since it doesn't cater to specific communities of players as much. I prefer to look at it as a strength, because of how many new players it has brought in that are legitimately excited to play. Even in my own life, I've had friends approach me over the past 6 or 7 years (knowing me as the "DND guy") asking how to play, or to see if I can run a one-shot for them.
The DM problem has never been something specific to 5e; and has been said before, is only more noticable because of the vast amount of players now participating in the game. IMO it's not a system problem.
I know what you're thinking: "In that flurry of blows, did he use all his ki points, or save one?" Well, are ya feeling lucky, punk?
There's some truth to the dm situation and some fiction.
20% DM's sounds about right. 1 DM and 4 players per table.
A lot of the DM problem is the same issue in other avenues of life.
Players are having unrealistic expectations, but our expectations EVERYWHERE are unrealistic, (and yet somehow so mundane, uncreative and pedestrian).
Go to any restaurant and you're sure to see something on the menu that talks about either being a vegan option, Paleo friendly, locally sourced, ethically harvested, or SOMETHING like that. 15 years ago you would have been looked at quite strangely for asking for any of that. (I had vegan friends. I know...) take a look at eBay and Etsy and what people offer and do now compared to when they first started. The push to do something extra turned into expectations, and when reviews were attached to it, the extras went into overdrive. Buy a bar of soap, and get tracking for free, it comes very precisely wrapped, there's free samples, a sticker or two, a business card with a reminder to give the highest review (which in itself is an issue as it degrades the reviewing process and indicated that the competition is so great anything less than 5 stars is trash), along with a follow-up email a week later asking you how your experience was and.... Well, you see what I mean...
You now have to pay for DM's or DM's looking for money..(let me introduce you to YouTube. Or "influencers" or only fans. Or patreon and Kickstarter and the 30 million other forms of e-begging) and most of the time the pay for being a DM sucks (ok, then, let's take a look at Uber and Lyft and GrubHub and....).
So of course we need to turn to AI (like everywhere on the internet anymore as actual writers simply do not exist, and every industry since the pandemic who have decided now is the time to implement the robots) and virtual tabletops (just like zoom is the answer for all meetings now) to solve these "problems"...
The DM problems and the discouragement is real. It's just a societal issue and not a d&d issue.
I think you're making a lot of assumptions about the game based on its success and popularity. By that standard McDonalds is the best food in the world, Bud Light the best beer in the world and Lucifer season 5 the best TV show ever made.
Popularity is not quality, nor does it suggest good design, quality work or even represent people's preferences.
5e is to RPG's what McDonalds is to food, the fact that its popular, doesn't really say much about its quality, but it does say a lot about its audience.
This statement is not true in a meaningful way—and it appears to suffer the same flaw of looking at the loudest, platformed members of the internet rather than the actual data. If society was a major problem, the DMing percentages would change. They are not changing in a significant way.
That could mean one of two things. The most likely situation is that which we already know from decades of data—no matter how one might try to change the DMing percent, it does not actually change, because it seems innate to how players play the game.
The other possible situation is that there exists a problem—but there exists an equal force bringing the percentage back to that 20%, such as greater availability of example games and how to videos. This, however, would be an unlikely circumstance - not only would it ignore the longstanding data showing outreach doesn’t really increase the DM percentage, it also relies on a weird coincidence where two factors give both a +X% and a -X% in the same numbers.
This could be more perception, than reality, but my personal experience has been that no one wants to run 5e. Like I haven't heard or seen a 5e game in my parts for several years. Grant it, I may have played a role in creating that situation by simply offering my game which is not 5e that created converts, but still, if 5e was as popular as its sales suggest, you would expect in a gaming hub like my local area there would be 5e games all over the place and there are... well none really.
In either case, I definitely don't agree that 5e is streamlined and easy to run by any stretch of the imagination. I have been a DM for 30+ years and have run countless games over the years. Compared to the sort of games being released today in particular, 5e is a 4 or 5 out of 5 on the complexity scale, even Pathfinder 2e is a simpler game to run and it has a 650+ page rulebook.
Maybe my wording is off. I mean the challenges and hurdles we face in running the games echo the same complaints outside in real life, and those hurdles are the same reasons you hear over and over again when asked about dm burnout, "why nobody wants to work, I mean DM, no more??? They're too busy on their computers and vtt's and don't want to do an honest homebrew for a stale donut anymore... lazy and entitled I call it!"
On the DM / player shortage- more players have more resources to find games, but TTRPGs were really designed with a 'group first' mentality. Get a group of friends together and play a game. But COVID and social media have made more people more isolated than ever. So you have lots of lonely gamers looking for a game for themselves and not their group. Add in countless threads of DM horror stories, and fewer people willing to DM for strangers because of the drama potential. When I run Adventurer's League, I hear that people want to be in a campaign but they don't know anyone else. Well, how do you meet new people if you don't leave your house and go to where the games are? If you don't take a risk? That is a societal problem.
On 5e Design- Everything being generic is a problem. I've never run a pre-generated module without significant changes and improv. Monsters seem just a big bag of HP. True. 5e could have used a 'tactics' session for each monster. But much of these issues can be reduced with decent DM preparation. Many of the newer sourcebooks have excellent tips on solving these issues as well. Van Richten's Guide has a section on Darklords that should be a must-read for anyone creating a homebrew villian.
On player engagement- One problem is that DMs allow players to replace dead characters with a new one at the same level. This is a Save-game mentality from video games, and a huge mistake. It should be spelled out early and agreed to by the group that there is a penalty for dying. My recommendation is Average level of team -1 as new starting point. And for XP levelling, that means exactly 1 XP over whatever that level is. That way, there is a loss for the player AND a loss for the group as a whole.
Second, 5e counts on session 0 to tie the characters to the plot far more than previous editions. Rewards can be finding your parents' killer, or the lost treasure stolen from you, or that one secret spell no one else knows. But the DM has to plan these in advance. It is poorly stated in the DMG, but critical to player engagement.
Third, and hardest, is balance. If players are getting 1 combat per long rest, it better be lethal and way above the listed CR. A second combat right after a big fight will go a long way to making short rests seem valuable. Chases and group skill explorations to keep players using resources out of combat are good as well. Keeps the 'monster zoo' concept down. If players are not using their non-combat skills, then certain classes will feel less engaged. Bards need to bard, rogues need to rogue, Druids need to feel one with nature.
The complexity isn't in using 5e rules as written, its in the complexity of fixing all the things broken in the game mechanic to make the game actually fun and challenging to play.
How about I give you the top 3, save me some digital ink
* Class balance is always broken, simply put the classes range wildly from being borderline useless to being gods that don't require the rest of the party. This creates all manner of issues with players feeling useless to encounters having to be specifically designed to counter the insane powers of individual characters. This is made doubly bad when some players become proficient in class builds, creating insane combos that you now as a DM must assess and either disallow or alter to balance them. If you just leave it and run the game as it, it becomes a crap game no one at the table is happy with and that burden falls exclusively on the DM to solve.
* Magic Item rules are complete crap and everyone at the table knows it and is unhappy with them. Every DM as a result must either just accept it and let the players complain or restructure the entire balance and economy of the game to make magic items actually fun. Tons of work!
* Monster design is catastrophically bad, easily the worst monster design of any version of D&D to date by a margin so huge, its hard to even know where to start complaining about it. The end result is that RAW makes 5e combat the absolute most boring thing to ever be put into an RPG and its exhausting to hear players complain about how long and boring fights are. The solution of course is design and adaptation, more homebrewing to fix it. Tons of effort here.. thank god for Flee Mortals, honestly, I don't know how anyone has managed to suffer through the trash that is the 5th edition monster book to this point.
Those are just the tip of the iceberg. It all boils down to endless homebrewing. I literally can't think of a single thing in 5e that actually works right out of the box without needing a heavy-handed dose of homebrewing.
You understand the problem right, I don't disagree with you on anything you said, but all of these elements of the game are a burden to the DM not the players. The players are completely uninvolved in any of it, they just show up to the session and complain when things aren't running right These are all solutions the DM must design, implement, test and so on.
The shoulder shrug "just fix it yourself" is the motto of 5e and most of the books that are created for players, each one adding more burden on the DM to fix. Hey here is a new book with races and classes, all of which are broken... player response "yay!"... DM response? You get the idea.
And I know someone is going to step up and say, well we had those problems in old school D&D as well and the answer is, yes of course we did.. But we fixed those problems in the OSR. OSR games, they don't have that problem. The OSR evolved the old-school game into modern, well-edited, well-defined, clear systems and structures to ensure the games are easy to run.
Im just wondering at what point modern D&D will evolve out of this outdated methodology of producing a broken game and then asking DM's to fix it, cause I can tell you that 6e is probably going to be the first edition I will not even bother buying, because I don't see these issues even being addressed in unearthed arcana.. They are just making it worse right now.
If it were a Wendy's employee survey. You're forgetting that this is a question for DM's.
They're popular because they hit all the points in a satisfactory way. There's nothing wrong with that. And maybe some of the people here would be better served by other games, but you may want a handcrafted microbrew, but if all your local pubs serve bud lite.... you drink bud lite and wish that at least the bud lite tasted a little better...
Given how successful D&D 5 is, while it's possible your circles are just that unusual, it's at least as likely that there's plenty of 5e going on that you just don't hear about. Can't imagine why. Maybe people are just well aware that you're not interested.
It's certainly an atypical situation. In my circles, there's plenty of D&D 5, and also plenty of other things. I could probably get a D&D 4 game going if I were willing to deal with the lack of tooling, and I've heard about Cthulhu, Genesys, Good Society, and a number of other games whose names I'm blanking on at the moment. And that's just what I know about. I know quite a number of gamers where I have no idea what they're playing, because it just doesn't come up much.
I mean, there's never been and likely never will be a D&D that's truly easy to run. It's the nature of the beast -- there's too much stuff going on. But, as D&Ds go, 5th is pretty good, and it's certainly no GURPS.
But DMing is hard, and it's always going to be hard. The games that make it easier do so through some combination of constraining what the game can be, and by offloading more of the narrative work to the players.
I don't disagree with any of that, but as you point out, which is my point, it all needs fixing, the burden of fixing it is on the DM and I'm just wondering at what point WotC will make a game of D&D that simply works as written?
Sure I can write plots to make the absurdity of the power levels make sense, I can re-write monsters and balance encounters by assessing the players and then adjusting monsters accordingly, you are absolutely right that I can alter and re-design the game, I can do all those things, but I have the luxary of 30+ years of experience which tells me both that I shouldn't have to and I don't actually have to because simply put, there are much better systems available and when someone has a problem with 5e, that is always going to be my recommendation rather than telling them "just fix it". I find it strange that somehow, the argument is "you shouldn't talk about other systems,5e is the best"... when clearly, it is not... all these changes and burdens on a DM take time and effort which to me is wasted on correcting a problem that shouldn't be there to begin with.
It's no wonder why DM's are struggling to run good D&D games using 5e and they are, the evidence to support that is overwhelming, you can't take a step in this community without tripping over a DM who's campaign is failing. The burden on the 5e DM is stretched to ridiculous proportions and I don't think having this elitist attitude by slipping in subtle insults to struggling DM like "experienced DM's have no problems" is of particular comfort to the disastrous numbers of DM struggling to make their game work.
I guess what I'm saying is that "you can fix it yourself" is an absolute trash excuse, especially for a multi-billion dollar company in charge of the highest-grossing franchise in the RPG business. TSR gets a pass because they invented the entire genre and worked in a time when there was nothing to base these game, no experience to draw from. What is Wizards of the Coasts excuse? They have unlimited money, access to talent on a global scale and decades of experience and they still can't make a bloody RPG that's balanced and works out of the box.
Come on m8, are you really going to give that BS a pass?