I don't have a problem with people enjoying 5e. Heck, I play 4e sometimes, not as an rpg mind you, but I can enjoy games my favorite.
But the mindset of 5e is quickly becoming a "one true wayism" and that is a bad thing. Sure there are a number of indie systems out there, but both Paizo and WotC are building on the same same mindset and trying to get into anything else is increasingly difficult and increasingly niche.
Try finding a group to play Kobolds Ate My Baby.
Compare that to music, or movies. No single type of music or movie has such a hold on popularity that it is difficult to find alternatives nor people with alternative favorites, heck there straight up is not a dominant type at all for either.
But in rpgs, there is a very clear dominant type, that encouraged by 5e and PF2. And as time goes on, they grow more dominant, not less. Find a game of PTU at a local game shop, I haven't.
I'm making my system to counter that dominance, not to destroy what already exists.
As for Orcs and strength, it isn't about the sterotype, it is about the ability to communicate via the mechanics. If you are making a Christmas themed rpg and want elves to be little, well a possible way to communicate that is with a size mechanic and then you say "elves are size X." That would be using a mechanic to communicate something about your world. It doesn't have to be the same old trope, but it can be.
Likewise, in 3.5 you can make alterations to the orcs of your world and give them a strength penalty instead, but call them large. That communicates that orcs look big but are really much weaker than they appear. You can do that in 3.x. The mechanics being a tool to commincate.
5e2024 removing racial bonuses to ability scores is not an issue of stereotypes, it is an issue of removing a channel of communication. Maybe you want sterotypes in your game, or maybe not, either way, the lack of ability score modifiers from race or species or whatever term you care to use means you can't communicate via the modifiers anymore.
How does this support my position? Because it is a further separation of mechanics from world milieu. In 3.x, if I change the world, I change mechanics to reflect the world, because the mechanics are descriptive of the world. There is a link there. Part of the utility if the mechanics is using the mechanics to communicate.
But with 5e removing that link, it further drives people to make mechanical choices based on mechanics, then dress up their choice with narrative. In 3.x, people are expected to make a choice narratively and at useful times use the mechanics as shorthand to communicate that choice.
Literally, a 3.x player can put a 14 in their strength as a way of saying they are literally as strong as an orc (in a world that follows the stereotype of strong orcs of course). This is using mechanics as a tool, not a shackle.
But the mindset of 5e is quickly becoming a "one true wayism" and that is a bad thing.
I don't mean to be reductive, but this seems to be the crux of your argument.
It would seem that many other people don't see 5e that way (which implies there isn't "one true way" but at least 2 different sets of experiences). Personally, I think, by being comparitively rules-light, 5e supports a greater flexibility of playstyles.
Xalthu - "I really agree with cunningsmile. 3.x was all about rules, 5e has as its design philosophy, rulings not rules. I’ve been playing since 1e, and I really enjoy this edition just for that reason."
3.x is not about rules. It is all about rulings, but it gives tools to aid in making those rulings instead of just throwing you into the deep with no guidance.
This is especially handy given the use of mechanics as a form of description. DC 40 is meant to be something we consider borderline impossible in the real world. If you have a player making a long jump, where should you use DC 40? How far of a jump should be as difficult as breaking the world record of long jumps?
1) as a DM you can certainly go through the work of looking up the world record jump distances, and then figure out how to scale that to DCs. But 3.x did that for you already.
1b) why does this matter? Because of consistency and "believability." I know roughly the world record. If you told me it was only DC 30 to jump a 50' canyon when DC 40 is supposed to be the limit of real world achievement, then I'm going to have a really negative moment, because I know this is a load of horsepoop. But you as the DM may not know that. And among those who don't know the world records, the limit of what strains belief will vary. But with 3.x putting the numbers in the book, it means you don't gave to look it up and fit it to the system, and it means everyone is on the same page.
2) Consistency. With 3.x, if you need to set the DC for jumping a 20' gap one day, then 3 sessions later ypu need a DC for jumping a 25' gap, well some players are going to remember the DC you used the first time, and they'll be a bit miffed if you called for a lower DC the second time because you didn't bother remembering what DC you used the first time, especially if they failed that check and now another player with a lower bonus is getting an easier time to jump farther.
But if you do remember what DC you used the first time and try to maintain some consistency in your rulings, then you are basically doing what 3.x already did for you.
Do you see how in the above the mechanics are not be used as shackles, but instead are being used as guidelines, tools to aid the DM?
And yes, not everyone will care about consistency nor about believability. In fact, there are basically two types of people in the world, understanding first people, and emotion first people. Drama is largely an emotion thing, so emotion first people can thoroughly enjoy drama without any consistency or believability whatsoever. However, the understanding first people, like myself, feel emotions based on their understanding of things, so when inconsistencies and similar problems with believability show up, they interfere with the enjoyment of the drama.
So yea, emotion first people won't care, but honestly they'd be happier with pbta style rulesets (even if they don't know that just yet, and wotc really doesn't want them to find out).
Now understanding first people, they don't need things to be believable relative to the real world. Chess for example, certainly does not map to the real world. But the rules of Chess are not a description, they are prescriptive, a definition of how things work in Chess. Understanding first people can apply a similar mindset to a rpg, looking at the mechanics as a definition instead of guidelines and reference. When they do, the rpg is played more like a boardgame with story than a freeform rpg with game aids.
There are a lot of problems with this post - including laughably spurious psychology, contradictions and inconsistencies with your prior posting, and using an example of "not enough rules for things in 5e" that... has explicit rules. While I would consider responding in more detail, at this point it looks like CunningSmile hit the nail on the head--you are new to 5e, do not really understand 5e, have decided you do not like 5e, and are now grasping at straws to try and convince others to join you in disliking the most popular version of D&D in the game's history. Not really sure there is much utility in trying to show you a different perspective or that some of your fundamental assumptions about the rules are wrong since you have made it very clear you have no intention of listening to anything that does not support your existing worldview--and since your most recent post has devolved into pseudo-psychological nonsense clearly designed to allow you to dismiss anyone who you think falls in the "wrong" (in your mind) group.
Now, there is nothing wrong with disliking 5e - even its fans will happily acknowledge that there are other editions of the game that do other things better. In fact, almost every post on this thread has essentially been "I like 5e because, while it does not do everything I want, it checks the most boxes for the most number of people, and therefore offers a fun experience to everyone at the table, regardless of their playstyle preference."
But I do think you should evaluate why you are posting on a 5e forum. Are you here to have others show you why they like 5e so you can better understand the game and perhaps realize it has something to offer you? If so, maybe you should be more open-minded in reading what people write, instead of writing long, often disorganized, junk-science posts that typically fail to address the points you think you are responding to.
Or are you only here to push the narrative that 5e is not as good as 3.5? I will say, considering you have eight posts on this forum, seven of which are long-winded ramblings on why you like 3.X more than 5e (and the other is you telling someone they are playing the game wrong--so, not really a good look)... well, I do not want to ascribe any malice to your being on a 5e forum, but I will note, we do have a number of folks who are only active on the D&D Beyond forums because they hate the modern game, the people who play it, and they come here just to create problems. So, as I said, maybe think about why you are here and what you are looking to do with this thread, lest you get lumped in with the less savory elements of this forum's community.
I'm sure you're on the right track, but there is a disconnect here.
Few people are looking at 3.x mechanics and seeing tools, not even as tools they don't want. They see those mechanics as binding boundaries. They have trouble playing with mechanics that are not precisely followed.
That's a big reason why there are so many questions about how certain rules interact or raw vs rai. Every single one of those questions is inherently treating the rules as a solid, immutable in play, law.
Homebrew is never a one off unique thing for a single character, it's always a new law available for all or applied to all. And this is absolutely contradictory to how I 3.x is intended to be used. This is the fundamental problem I want to address in my system.
The mechanics are not laws. There is no breaking them, there is only where you are relative to them.
Going back to orc ability scores, PCs might not be average, but there two very important connections here.
First, how does your PC compare to the norm for their own kind. This is actually important for understanding what your character's standing in the world is, and for any sense of growth. Without any reference to "normal" player's only sense of growth is relative to their past selves, which will in practice be only to their recent past. It's a similar issue to why you should face weak encounters regularly. Those 5 goblins the nearly killed you at early levels now die too easily, giving you a sense of growth much more visceral than simply growing numbers. Similarly, when build a character with ability score bonuses, that is communicating where your character stands relative to humans and relative to what's normal for your race. If you play an orc with 12 strength, you know that you are weak as far as orcs go, but still strong compared to humans.
Second, mechanics for PCs vs mechanics for everyone else. In 3.x, the mechanics are unified, the same mechanics for everybody, which means it does a way better job of using mechanics to communicate general principles and stereotypes of the world. In a split system, the mechanics for building PCs are different which means they convey nothing to the players about their race in general. Worse, the NPCs rarely get a general set of mechanics, meaning the only way to mechanically get the idea that orcs are stronger is to review the various orc stat blocks and various human stat blocks and analyze. No handy racial build rules. But even if there were handy race build rules, you'd have to learn two sets, those for PCs and those for NPCs, double the effort and you still have a more vague notion of PCs vs NPCs.
Thus removing things like racial ability score modifiers is building a gap between the narrative and the mechanics. Which means the mechanics no longer aid anything on the narrative side. At which point the question becomes, "why are you using mechanics at all?" The answer to that is "to play the mechanics."
It is worth noting, in my way of thinking, that 5e -- the current edition, as it transitions to the 2024 rules for that edition -- in not merely the most popular version of D&D ever.
The popularity of 5th Edition is greater than that of all prior versionscombined. Not just any single edition. yes, it built on that, and yes, population growthand time and scale have all helped, but it is still essentially true at its core that it has achieved that.
The challenge, especially for those of us coming to the game from prior editions, is that in becoming that version that appeals to the greatest number of people, the unique visions of those who started it have been rather "watered down" in a lot of ways.
The removal of a statistic from all the Species, as well as the shift from Race to Species, is a reflection of what is wanted by the greatest number of people in the most default basis for and simplest structure of the game.
But, just like every edition of D&D, 5e is merely the starting point.
I don't disagree that there are trending aspects that function to limit the creative approach to game play -- you go to some locations online where folks have discussion about D&D (such as r/dnd), and you will find the primacy of Rules As Written and strong punitive action taken against folks who express a distaste for adherence to strict rules.
But that RAW concept was derived from the 3.x era.
Suggest to people that there are other worlds, or that a setting might not have any of the official races and Species and they will tell you that you are not playing D&D -- straight up. But that's reactive, and ultimately only as true as you allow it to be: the vast majority of players still do not use published worlds, creating their own instead, and developing out so much homebrew that this site alone (which functions to limit homebrew creativity by requiring strict systems) has a repository that's competing with something like an infamously bad one, and with just as much crud as there are gems.
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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 don't have a problem with people enjoying 5e. Heck, I play 4e sometimes, not as an rpg mind you, but I can enjoy games my favorite.
But the mindset of 5e is quickly becoming a "one true wayism" and that is a bad thing. Sure there are a number of indie systems out there, but both Paizo and WotC are building on the same same mindset and trying to get into anything else is increasingly difficult and increasingly niche.
Try finding a group to play Kobolds Ate My Baby.
Compare that to music, or movies. No single type of music or movie has such a hold on popularity that it is difficult to find alternatives nor people with alternative favorites, heck there straight up is not a dominant type at all for either.
But in rpgs, there is a very clear dominant type, that encouraged by 5e and PF2. And as time goes on, they grow more dominant, not less. Find a game of PTU at a local game shop, I haven't.
I'm making my system to counter that dominance, not to destroy what already exists.
As for Orcs and strength, it isn't about the sterotype, it is about the ability to communicate via the mechanics. If you are making a Christmas themed rpg and want elves to be little, well a possible way to communicate that is with a size mechanic and then you say "elves are size X." That would be using a mechanic to communicate something about your world. It doesn't have to be the same old trope, but it can be.
Likewise, in 3.5 you can make alterations to the orcs of your world and give them a strength penalty instead, but call them large. That communicates that orcs look big but are really much weaker than they appear. You can do that in 3.x. The mechanics being a tool to commincate.
5e2024 removing racial bonuses to ability scores is not an issue of stereotypes, it is an issue of removing a channel of communication. Maybe you want sterotypes in your game, or maybe not, either way, the lack of ability score modifiers from race or species or whatever term you care to use means you can't communicate via the modifiers anymore.
How does this support my position? Because it is a further separation of mechanics from world milieu. In 3.x, if I change the world, I change mechanics to reflect the world, because the mechanics are descriptive of the world. There is a link there. Part of the utility if the mechanics is using the mechanics to communicate.
But with 5e removing that link, it further drives people to make mechanical choices based on mechanics, then dress up their choice with narrative. In 3.x, people are expected to make a choice narratively and at useful times use the mechanics as shorthand to communicate that choice.
Literally, a 3.x player can put a 14 in their strength as a way of saying they are literally as strong as an orc (in a world that follows the stereotype of strong orcs of course). This is using mechanics as a tool, not a shackle.
Hard disagree. While D&D is the leading brand in TTRPGs, the field as a whole is flourishing. People still play older editions of D&D as well as Pathfinder and other D20-based systems. Non-D20 system games are flourishing as well. This is a rare example of the aphorism "a rising tide lifts all boats" being true. The popularity of D&D has led to more awareness and popularity for other TTRPGs as well.
I typically suggest not using metaphors for making an argument like your statements about other media. People complain about Taylor Swift having an outsized presence in the music industry. Others complain about the preponderance of superhero movies and TV shows. Others complain about the popularity of romance novel series by Maas and Yarros. Same as you're complaining about the popularity of D&D 5E. And despite the complaints, competition thrives in all these media segments. Your own metaphor undermines your argument.
Again, the problem seems to be that you're too focused on arguing that people are enjoying 5E wrong. Overall your argument is just too contradictory and inconsistent.
The orc thing you're just too hung up on. Why is it even important to say someone is as strong as an orc? Oxen exist in D&D, and the phrase "strong as an ox" is a thing. Meanwhile, the numbers that make up a character's stats are invisible to the characters in-world. Nobody knows you have 14 STR or what the average STR score is for any group of people. So even if you're banking on common people in the setting assuming orcs are strong, a non-orc performing a feat of strength can still elicit an exclamation of "wow, they're as strong as an orc."
Homebrew is never a one off unique thing for a single character, it's always a new law available for all or applied to all.
That's not strictly true. Homebrew can, indeed, be something very specific to a specific character. That's been true since 0e.
... removing things like racial ability score modifiers is building a gap between the narrative and the mechanics.
Racial scores were based in a racist concept and the game as a whole has moved away from them, especially over the last six years. They were, factually, harming th game as a whole, and causing problems for it as a brand and thus affecting profits.
Thus, they were removed, because there really is no reason to have them as a mechanical structure. They are directly related tot he kind of thinking that led one of the major contributors to the original game to declare that woman PCs should not have a Charisma score, and instead should have a Beauty score, and that said score involved magical capabilities to seduce that required saving throws.
So, they removed racial scores from everyone. Yes, that means there is no direct relation from the "flavor" of "orcs being stronger" (which, I note, is a bit of lare, and may not hold true across all the published worlds in the game, le alone the majority of worlds that people create, and therefore not really useful information that functions as a limiting effect on creativity, as if there was somehow one true way to run orcs and they all should be stronger) and the mechanics of being an orc.
The weakest orc should not inherently be stronger than the weakest human, in effect, is the new standard mechanic.
That said, since mechanics are readily altered and changed by individual DMs for their settings and their games, you can, in fact, have your own racial ability score modifiers. If you want them to have it.
But those modifiers are substantively less popular, and less well liked, and considered bad, and so they are not included in the base game.
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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
Having played las much AD&D 1E/2E as 5E at least a decade each, as well as playing Basic, 3.X and 4E, i must say i really like 5E complexity yet simplicity at the same time, as well as it's aesthetic. One of the thing i like best about 5E is movement rules, ithis fluidity is one of my favorite improvement, where you can move before and after taking an action, and even between extra atatcks, whereas in previous editions you had to move and or act in order.
My group is huge and diverse. 53 people, ages 12 to 60, mostly Women, LGBTQ+, PoC. THe heart of it is seven folks who started playing together in 1980. Blah blah blah -- we do things together, w vote, we have the whole spiel going on. There are 7 DMs, and I am one. I am the only one who only DMs, and I have been a DM since 1980 myself. We stayed with 2e for the entire 3.x/4e period, and we only grudgingly shifted over 5e.
We do not like how they did classes in 5e. As several folks here already know. But one of the coolest things about 5e is that you can create, from scratch, your own classes. It is easier to do in 5e than it was in 2e or 1e.
Just before 4e was released, we collectively grew tired of the whole Vancian spell system, and we did snag the spell slot stuff and tried it out for a while, but even that annoyed us, so we created our own magic system and basis for it. It is a spell point system that uses the same spells. W playtested it over several years, tweaked it, and said cool, we like this, it works for us.
5e basically allowed us to slot that in from the second campaign we played in it.
We are world first creators. That is, the settings that each of the DMs (7 regular, 3 part time) create are entirely original, derived from the things that our players want to see, and we have entire sessions of just the DM listening to what the Players want to have in a new world. One of our biggest complaints about 5e 2014 was that they burned a lot of lore into the books. It was pretty infuriating, as it meant we had to trim out that lore. But, a funny thing happened as we did that -- we realized that was an awesome way to introduce lore without doing lore dumps, and so a lot of us have done the exact same thing in our worlds.
Combat is simplified. This makes it easier to drop in our own table rules as DMs around it. The way they structured the subsystems means we can aso adapt and adjust the assorted damage types, conditions, and related functions to our needs, without having to disrupt the overall way that combat functions.
5e is Light. It lacks a lot of tables, a lot of charts. The rules for things are there, but some of them in the 2014 rules are just kinda empty (the 2024 rules add more to them, giving them more value and use). Like the combat stuff, this means that all our other systems can drop right in without disruption.
5e looked to 2e and 1e for a lot of things and solutions and then adjusted those elements for 5e. This fits really well with a bunch of folks who played 1e and 2. We prefer the rulings over rules playstyle -- one of our tertiary hates about 3.5 is that it was rules over rulings.
5e has an enormous gap in the entire Exploration side of things. Wilderness was a later add on and not a very key one -- they even noted that they were understaffed, underfunded, and rushed 5e 2014 out the door. Vehicles, detailed travel, survival, these things all dropped out -- and that harmed the one class that was realloy built around those elements -- a harm that has not been recovered from yet.
on the other hand, we had all that stuff from 2e. Where 5e has 3 options, we have 5 or 7. So, again, our stuff just dropped in and was beautiful.
That was all really important to us -- we had stayed away from the community as a whole, because we didn't like the way the community turned. But 5e was welcoming, inviting, and they kept working on the things that were hurtful (not offensive, but hurtful) to us. So we branched out, and that's why all you poor folks have to put up with me here these days.
Sorry.
So, overall, 5e is better for us because it allows us to keep playing the game we love -- in a manner that makes it easier for new folks to join us, for us to stay abreast of the latest, and for us to become part of the larger community again.
There's still a lot of stuff we don't like, but that isn't about 5e, and more about the state of the industry.
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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 am a player from the old grognard era. Sort of. I got into playing when 3e first came out, but my original group started in the 80s, and my first DM, started in the 70s, among the first ever players.
So I got introduced with a very different mindset towards the game.
That said, I quickly joined a second group, while still playing with the first, and immediately dropped the second group.
The second group was almost antithetical to the first. They used the same rules though. This brought to light something for me. The rules are not the game. 4e proved that rules still matter though.
Thus, ever since my introduction to the game, I've been particularly aware of *how* the game is being played, outside the specific rules. Which brings to light things that the rules support or hinder that are usually missed by the community at large.
One thing that absolutely agree with Gygax about, there is playing the game, and then there is playing the mechanics, and they are NOT the same thing.
I still prefer 3.x, and am even making my own system inspired by 3.x, but the reason I like 3.x, is because it is not a system to be played on it's own. It is a system that is more like a play aid, a tool to aid in the interaction with the narrative world.
5e to me, seems much more designed for playing the mechanics. The thought behind things like the economics, demographics, how the common person in the fantasy world lives, etc, are inadequate by a large degree. Sure that means the GM is free to do what they want, but it also means they A) don't have any tools to do it with, and B) where the rules do touch on these aspects, such as the cost of things like potions, end up feeling even more like immutable constraints.
So, why do you like 5e? Have you ever played 3.x?
Fun fact, in the 3.x era, a GP was 1/25 an ounce of gold, and worth around $100 dollars in today's money. A potion costs 50gp, which for the fantasy world is very much like us paying $5000 dollars today. Commoners didn't exactly get to have Cure Light Wounds whenever they get injured.
For me it's about player retention and value at the table. While I fully agree with you (and by association with Gygax) that the game of D&D is not the same as the rules of D&D, by and large you need rules to run an RPG to some extent. It's a game of conflict and resolution, largely focused on combat. The more those rules are easy to remember and use at the table, the easier it is to introduce players to the game, prepare games for the tabletop, work with different player groups and work with the design space for creating custom content.
If there is a sales pitch for 5e, it is that, it is one of the most consensus-driven and easiest systems in practical terms devised since 1e B/X, yet its rules coverage is pretty complete where 1e B/X really left you hanging in a lot of places. There is no scenario you could create where if you asked 100 5e DM's how they would handle it that wouldn't result in a 80-90% consensus. There is just a cohesion to the game, a certain way that it functions that when applied, most free-thinking DM's are ultimatetly going to come to the same conclusions on how to execute it. That is a sign of a really well-designed architecture.
5e is the modern version of 1e B/X in every way that matters. It's a game that you can hand an Players Handbook to a player and say, this is the game we are playing and when you sit down at the table, there won't be any confusion about what the rules are. Certainly its more complex than 1e, but that complexity comes in the form of options, not the rules. It terms of actual rules, 5e is as simple as 1e B/X and its probably why in the same way B/X is adopted as THE system in the OSR, 5e is adopted as THE system in modern D&D fantasy.
In the end, we have sort of come full circle and while there is always going to be those players who want mechanical depth and complexity, at your average RPG table, the key is always simplicity and 5e ... well its about as simple as you can get so far as RPG's go.
But the mindset of 5e is quickly becoming a "one true wayism" and that is a bad thing.
I don't mean to be reductive, but this seems to be the crux of your argument.
It would seem that many other people don't see 5e that way (which implies there isn't "one true way" but at least 2 different sets of experiences). Personally, I think, by being comparitively rules-light, 5e supports a greater flexibility of playstyles.
I understand why it seems that way, but that is only superficially true.
Consider how genres are split. You have a sci-fi genre and a murder mystery genre. How do you classify whether is book is in one or the other. It is rather natural that might first feel like a book must be in only one, but imagine a murder mystery story taking place in star trek. That would be both sci fi and a murder mystery, it fall under both genres, because what makes a particular genre is not something exclusive of all other genres. Anime is another good example, it is distinct in a way, yet can still fit in every other genre there is from horror to fantasy to contemporary.
Similarly, the distinction I am talking about here does not interfere with all kinds of flexibility. It's not like it prevents you from playing a horror campaign.
Think of it like this. If I give you a pencil, you can make a sketch of all kinds of things. Or I can give you paints in a dozen colors. Which has more flexibility? Which is simpler? The pencil is simpler, and you can focus all effort on the object of your sketch. Paints however, give you color to work with and you have a lot more to consider in using the paints and paints need different brushes and you need to wait for each layer to dry before adding another layer and other considerations, but yet you have a lot more flexibility in terms of how you portray the object you paint.
3.5 is like the paints, 5e is like the pencil. The lack of color removes an entire dimension of consideration that might distract you from the thing you are trying to sketch, allow you focus all your attention on the thing you are sketching, but that is not greater flexibility at all. In this metaphor, 3.5 being the paints, many used the paints like a pencil. They picked a single color and acted like you could not mix colors in a single picture, thus limiting themselves greatly in the picture they paint yet still paying the cost of using paints over pencil.
I use colored pencils pretty frequently, and paints never, so I understand the metaphor a little more exactly, perhaps, but the assertion is still that there is more color, more capability in 3.5 than there is 5e, and that the reason it is there is because it have a rule for everything.
It is an argument that the "one true way" is 3.5, with its paints (the true medium of art), and that those pencils are just child's play -- dismissive and rude. It's elitist, as ewell, but that's a separate issue.
The catch, though is that there is nothing you can do in 3.5 that you cannot do in 5e -- and if you are creative in the "wrong" way, then the effort to do it is the same: you still have to make up all the rules for it. All of which comes back to the point raised earlier: 5e is popular because it doesn't have a ton of rules.
My games are routinely cross genre -- as I said, I came from 2e, where genere crossing was common and ordinary, so we brought that with us when we hit 5e. My current setting is an entire solar system. Space colonies, space stations, asteroid outposts, ships that sail the solar winds -- all of that's there. The main planet, well, you get a vehicle up high enough (including a flying carpet for a broom) and if you can dress warm enough, you can head to space.
There's one rule set for that whole shift. Same rules that apply on the ground apply in space. That matters because there's a plan for that -- and I didn't need to invent new rules to make that happen -- just use the rules already present.
Those rules are the same rules used for all the travel in environments.
Now, if you want to say "believability" or "immersion" or "realism", well, go right ahead. truly. Because this is a Fantasy Setting. It is not a "heroic", or "Low" or "sword and sandal" or "urban" or " modern" or "ancient" version of that genre -- it is just a Fantasy setting. Like Greyhawk. Like Eberron. Like Forgotten Realms. Like most worlds.
I place a dividing line between Realism and Realistic -- and you can toss the first one our the door. There's even a bunch of science that goes into my description of the above (actual science), but it is there to serve to the fantasy, not to be a "realism simulation" and trust me, most current D&D players do not want a simulation.
I already had my go around there, lol. Pretty sure OSR was there, too.
it is true that one can throw out all the rules that one isn't going to use. I would throw out pretty much all of the ones that 3.5 has that don't match 5e -- and if you look hard, you'll see that's all still very much there under the hood. Because I don't like those rules. They are, to me, as an individual, poorly done and error filled.
So, yay, now I am playing 3.5 using the rules you seem to want to be used, and...
It would still be 5e to anyone who looked at it, because I don't use book classes or species, and so the only thing they would recognize is the core mechanics -- which are simplified, because if you tear a bunch of 3.5 rules out, you have to fix all the bleeding holes in them since they were all very interconnected and interdependent in the name of the great myth of b-a-l-a-n-c-e.
But that wouldn't work for your argument, because that would mean that 5e is just a simpler version of 3.5 -- and it is that.
The issue is that you do not appear to want that simplicity. You seem to want more crunch, more complexity, which, again, is not something that works to the benefit of the game as a whole. And Hasbro is not going to add more complexity to a game that is succeeding because it lacks it -- that's unwise, and bad for business.
that's an argument you won't win, and even if you had a bunch of supporters (and you do -- a whole company of them, run by someone who worked for Wizards once upon a time -- as well as an entire company of dedicated folks who just, wait, let me look...
... created a simplified version of their 3.5 rules.).
So now I have to wonder what the goal here is. Perhaps it is getting enough folks interested in an old version of the game to play it. Except, as I will pointedly remind you, the website you are on does not support any old versions of the game. And the new players -- who outnumber all the players of all the older versions combined -- only want stuff that is supported here.
Hell, most of them don't know you can buy all the old editions of the game on DMs Guild. They don't care.
What they will care about is someone telling them they aren't using the right medium for their grand visions when what they have is working wonderfully.
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
You still seem to be under the impression that lots of rules in the book requires you to use them all. That is false. You can play 3.5 using fewer of the rules than 5e has in it's book. 3.x just has more available should you desire to use them, already designed and ready to fit with the base mechanics. 80% or more of the core rules in 3.x are optional reference.
And yet despite that, you equate using 3.5 as inherently needing to use more rules than 5e. Which is entirely false. You can't see that, therefore you claim that 3.5 is crunchier. But in actuality, 3.5 sees all the mechanics as inherently optional, and those it explicitly calls out as alternatives are declared as such solely because they are not the assumption of the other still optional rules and so might require additional considerations and adjustments if used, or the designers just wanted to make of note of considerations.
3.5 can easily be used without all the reference material. It'd be just as easy if not easier than 5e. And it would still retain traits that 5e does not have.
I am not trying to get any of you specifically to change your view or like 3.x or anything. I am trying to build a bridge of understanding from my view to yours, so when you, or people like you, come take a gander at my game, you will actually understand my intent instead of getting entirely the wrong idea based on the superficial and find it broken or terrible for the simple reason that you are not understanding it's design intent.
Let me use an easier to understand example of people getting the wrong idea.
In 3.x, the core DMG says that a good spread of encounters should come in many different difficulties. The first few adventures designed for 3.0 before even 3.5 came out, the adventures followed the recommendation of the DMG and had a wide spread of difficulties for the encounters. But the entire community bashed wotc over adventures that were "poorly balanced." Note that they did not bash wotc for designing a game that expects a wide variety of encounter difficulties, no, they didn't do that. No one complained about 3.0 telling DMs to use a wide variety of encounter difficulties. Nope. They complained about the adventures having a wide variety of encounter difficulties instead.
Do you understand what that says about the community? It tells us that the community never understood that the mechanics of 3.0 expect a wide variety of encounter difficulties. The community did not understand that. Thus they failed to understand anything built on that expectation.
Same with gold as xp rules. Getting xp for getting gold was never some ridiculous notion of leveling up from picking up gold, it was leveling up from everything you went through to get that gold, without encouraging any one method in particular. You could kill for the gold, trade for the gold, or steal the gold. It didn't matter, so you could take whatever route you wanted. But many hated it because all they saw was the ridiculous notion that picking up gold somehow made you stronger.
These are just a couple examples of how a mechanical design is simply not understood by the general community, and therefore gets reputation that is ill-deserved.
I am trying to figure how to avoid running into the same problem.
For me it's about player retention and value at the table. While I fully agree with you (and by association with Gygax) that the game of D&D is not the same as the rules of D&D, by and large you need rules to run an RPG to some extent. It's a game of conflict and resolution, largely focused on combat. The more those rules are easy to remember and use at the table, the easier it is to introduce players to the game, prepare games for the tabletop, work with different player groups and work with the design space for creating custom content.
If there is a sales pitch for 5e, it is that, it is one of the most consensus-driven and easiest systems in practical terms devised since 1e B/X, yet its rules coverage is pretty complete where 1e B/X really left you hanging in a lot of places. There is no scenario you could create where if you asked 100 5e DM's how they would handle it that wouldn't result in a 80-90% consensus. There is just a cohesion to the game, a certain way that it functions that when applied, most free-thinking DM's are ultimatetly going to come to the same conclusions on how to execute it. That is a sign of a really well-designed architecture.
5e is the modern version of 1e B/X in every way that matters. It's a game that you can hand an Players Handbook to a player and say, this is the game we are playing and when you sit down at the table, there won't be any confusion about what the rules are. Certainly its more complex than 1e, but that complexity comes in the form of options, not the rules. It terms of actual rules, 5e is as simple as 1e B/X and its probably why in the same way B/X is adopted as THE system in the OSR, 5e is adopted as THE system in modern D&D fantasy.
In the end, we have sort of come full circle and while there is always going to be those players who want mechanical depth and complexity, at your average RPG table, the key is always simplicity and 5e ... well its about as simple as you can get so far as RPG's go.
Honestly, I like this answer best.
However, it still kinda misses the point. But I think I can use this for getting at my point.
Do you know what other games have a high consistency in how various people play them? Board games. Card games. Just about any game really. Even sports. Old school gaming didn't have such consistency because it included something key in it's gaming. That key element meant the DM was more like the author of a book, an artist if you will.
Do you think 100 authors would take a story idea, or even a detailed scene prompt, and come up with 80% agreement on the final result? Of course not. Pretty sure most people would think it an absurd idea. Do you understand why? What is the difference between games and books? What is the element that writing has that makes all authors so different, that games lack that allows games to have such consistency in how they are run?
For me it's about player retention and value at the table. While I fully agree with you (and by association with Gygax) that the game of D&D is not the same as the rules of D&D, by and large you need rules to run an RPG to some extent. It's a game of conflict and resolution, largely focused on combat. The more those rules are easy to remember and use at the table, the easier it is to introduce players to the game, prepare games for the tabletop, work with different player groups and work with the design space for creating custom content.
If there is a sales pitch for 5e, it is that, it is one of the most consensus-driven and easiest systems in practical terms devised since 1e B/X, yet its rules coverage is pretty complete where 1e B/X really left you hanging in a lot of places. There is no scenario you could create where if you asked 100 5e DM's how they would handle it that wouldn't result in a 80-90% consensus. There is just a cohesion to the game, a certain way that it functions that when applied, most free-thinking DM's are ultimatetly going to come to the same conclusions on how to execute it. That is a sign of a really well-designed architecture.
5e is the modern version of 1e B/X in every way that matters. It's a game that you can hand an Players Handbook to a player and say, this is the game we are playing and when you sit down at the table, there won't be any confusion about what the rules are. Certainly its more complex than 1e, but that complexity comes in the form of options, not the rules. It terms of actual rules, 5e is as simple as 1e B/X and its probably why in the same way B/X is adopted as THE system in the OSR, 5e is adopted as THE system in modern D&D fantasy.
In the end, we have sort of come full circle and while there is always going to be those players who want mechanical depth and complexity, at your average RPG table, the key is always simplicity and 5e ... well its about as simple as you can get so far as RPG's go.
Honestly, I like this answer best.
However, it still kinda misses the point. But I think I can use this for getting at my point.
Do you know what other games have a high consistency in how various people play them? Board games. Card games. Just about any game really. Even sports. Old school gaming didn't have such consistency because it included something key in it's gaming. That key element meant the DM was more like the author of a book, an artist if you will.
Do you think 100 authors would take a story idea, or even a detailed scene prompt, and come up with 80% agreement on the final result? Of course not. Pretty sure most people would think it an absurd idea. Do you understand why? What is the difference between games and books? What is the element that writing has that makes all authors so different, that games lack that allows games to have such consistency in how they are run?
Sorry, this seems unfinished, like you lost your train of thought. You're describing the way DMing works, but that's how it's worked for every edition of D&D including 5E (not to mention Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, Blades in the Dark, and a host of other TTRPGs).
1 -- You still seem to be under the impression that lots of rules in the book requires you to use them all. That is false.
2 -- And yet despite that, you equate using 3.5 as inherently needing to use more rules than 5e. Which is entirely false. You can't see that, therefore you claim that 3.5 is crunchier.
---//---
Do you understand what that says about the community? It tells us that the community never understood that the mechanics of 3.0 expect a wide variety of encounter difficulties. The community did not understand that. Thus they failed to understand anything built on that expectation.
Same with gold as xp rules. Getting xp for getting gold was never some ridiculous notion of leveling up from picking up gold, it was leveling up from everything you went through to get that gold, without encouraging any one method in particular. You could kill for the gold, trade for the gold, or steal the gold. It didn't matter, so you could take whatever route you wanted. But many hated it because all they saw was the ridiculous notion that picking up gold somehow made you stronger.
These are just a couple examples of how a mechanical design is simply not understood by the general community, and therefore gets reputation that is ill-deserved.
I am trying to figure how to avoid running into the same problem.
1: I've acknowledged three separate times that precise point of yours, even bolded it the last time. So I very overtly do not seem to be under that impression. It is also not about the use of the rules, it is about the number of them, and how that number of them is undesirable.
2: You and I have very different perspectives on 3.5, and, based on that statement, a different idea of what crunchiness is.
So, that taken care of, let's get to the meat of your meal.
The Community doesn't understand that the rules expected a wide variety of encounters.
The Community never understood that gold wasn't the basis for xp, it was merely a measure of experience.
The Community does not understand how mechanical design works, and so those designs get a bad rep, and I want to avoid getting a bad rep from the community as a result of their failure to understand the systems in use.
Well, first off, the community is made up of people who range from 8 year olds up to 88 year olds (and probably some to either side of that as well). [Redacted]
I've worked in the biz. Hell, I still do occasional contract jobs. What you want is a way to educate the community on how game design works in a manner that you enjoy and for the explicit purpose of making the Community (as a whole) understand why you chose certain things.
That is an unreasonable objective. [Redacted]
Did you know that in 5e, experience points can still be drawn out of gold? It's still a 1:1 conversion. There are many in the community who still do that. The community as a whole prefers to use a milestone system -- but you cannot escape XP in designing encounters because it relies on that and the Community doesn't understand how CR works.
And that brings us to the wide variety of encounters thing. In 5e, the rules still expect a wide variety of encounters, not all of them built to be perfectly balanced. There's a whole line repeated many, many times a day here on DDB that there is an expectation of 6 to 8 encounters per day. Some of us have tried in the past to argue with that, but it is a fixed expectation of The COmmunity, and trying to point out that it is wrong gets you yelled at.
Hell, one of the first things they talk about when they guide you to creating encounters is that there should be three things planned for -- and by and large the Community plans for 1 thing. Specifically:
An encounter has one of three possible outcomes: the characters succeed, the characters partly succeed, or the characters fail. The encounter needs to account for all three possibilities, and the outcome needs to have consequences so that the players feel like their successes and failures matter.
There's a ton of information in those two lines.
When was the last time someone talking in 5e spoke about Thresholds? XP Thresholds by Character Level. Or Multipart Encounters?
Multipart Encounters
Sometimes an encounter features multiple enemies that the party doesn’t face all at once. For example, monsters might come at the party in waves. For such encounters, treat each discrete part or wave as a separate encounter for the purpose of determining its difficulty.
Now, do you know why people think there are 6 to 8 encounters per day? Because the book says so -- but this is disconnected from the concept of a "day" and they will say "two short rests in a day" so folks think of it as lunch and dinner and then that's a day. So 2 in the morning, 2 in the afternoon, and 2 in the evening.
That's how the rules for encounters explain it -- but they are missing the whole point about "day" not being tied to time -- because a "day" is whatever period exists between Long Rests. If you only get one long rest a week, that's a whole freaking Adventuring Day. But you have to understand the Rest system to really pick up on that -- and you only really understand the rest system if you ever read the DMG, and I don't know if you are aware of this but, um...
The Community has mostly not read the books. Any of them. Not the PHB. Not the DMG (hell, there are DMs who've never cracked the DMG at all, but most have at least flipped through it). They have read the stuff for their Species, Background, Class, Feats, and their Spells. One of those youtube people did a survey of their viewers, and apparently that triggered others to do similar surveys, and turns out that maybe 10 to 20% of all the players have read the books cover to cover and understood what was in them.
Oh, and if you want to be less misunderstood, get a youtuber to explain it for you. That seems to make everything go better for some reason?
The threshold is where you get a budget from, and that budget is for whatever the period between two long rests is. All of those encounters should be a mix of easy, medium, hard and deadly encounters over the course of a whole day, and you are supposed to use that threshold to make all of the encounters that happen in that period between long rests. So if you have a bunch of encounters that are low level, you can have more than 8, and if you have a bunch of deadly ones you can have fewer than 6.
And tthat's all in the DMG -- but people will quote you the 6 to 8 per adventuring day and say that it means exactly that -- one day. Not one week, even if you are using a one week long rest cycle.
The Community does that.
Now, don't get me wrong -- I'm not ragging on you without empathy or sympathy; I created a setting for people to have fun in that uses an original spell point based magic system, has none of the official Classes or Species in it, has a much more involved background system, solves a bunch of problems that the Community finds to be annoying (crafting, vehicles, downtime, exploration, wilderness, etc), and is wholly original with a very different take on the genre as a whole.
I totally get what you are saying about wanting to avoid falling into the trap of "you are doing it wrong" -- but that's not going to happen. People are going to be people -- fractious, divided, opinionated, entitled, and interpretive. They are going to see what they want to see in the rules no matter what you say or I say.
But that isn't a factor of 5e. Fifth Edition is a reflection of the people who play it -- they aren't just doing whatever they want, they spent months getting feedback and measuring popularity and getting a set of subclasses that all had above 80% of The Community approving them -- and those are what showed up in the 2024 PHB.
That is, the 2024 PHB is what The Community -- at least 80% of it -- thought were the best choices. For classes. All the complaints about the new classes? Those are from the 20%. You know who else is in the 20%?
Folks who play older versions or customized of the games. We are outliers. We are never going to speak to the Community.
However...
We are not alone. It isn't The Community you need to sway, it is Your Community you need to find. And a funny thing happened along the way to 5e become so popular that there are more people who play it than all the prior editions combined: a lot of small communities formed. The entire OSR movement is one. THe folks like me who see the game as a launchpad for our own unique visions that blend old and new are others.
Your Community is out there. You just need to find it. I have no doubt that parts of it are here, in the DDB forums. Lord knows it has all the other communities, lol.
And it will be large than you might think. You are dealing with 3.5. There is an entire community of folks who refuse to play anything else but 3.5 on Reddit, and at least three discords like that.
But.. [Redacted]
Folks here play 5e right now -- versioning tbd. In a year, it will be pretty much all 2024. And that will be because that's what the Character builder works with. That will be because of the rules and the reference and the ability to store PCs and make them and whip up a quick little homebrew item and all the other things -- for 5e. WHichit will not do all of (because it still doesn't support most options from the 2014 books).
If there was anything that is kind of forcing a "one right way" it is that -- the VTTs, the digital tools. Not just here, either -- the others that are out there are the same way. And worse, they force you to play the way they think you should play.
go to an LFG and if you don't have the ability to have a character sheet that does the math for you, you will get ignored. Old school style pen and paper groups have their players, aren't looking for new folks.
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 love the fact that it is considered the definitive edition that resists the need to change rules every few years, prioritises the fanbase and brings together communities!!!!
For me it's about player retention and value at the table. While I fully agree with you (and by association with Gygax) that the game of D&D is not the same as the rules of D&D, by and large you need rules to run an RPG to some extent. It's a game of conflict and resolution, largely focused on combat. The more those rules are easy to remember and use at the table, the easier it is to introduce players to the game, prepare games for the tabletop, work with different player groups and work with the design space for creating custom content.
If there is a sales pitch for 5e, it is that, it is one of the most consensus-driven and easiest systems in practical terms devised since 1e B/X, yet its rules coverage is pretty complete where 1e B/X really left you hanging in a lot of places. There is no scenario you could create where if you asked 100 5e DM's how they would handle it that wouldn't result in a 80-90% consensus. There is just a cohesion to the game, a certain way that it functions that when applied, most free-thinking DM's are ultimatetly going to come to the same conclusions on how to execute it. That is a sign of a really well-designed architecture.
5e is the modern version of 1e B/X in every way that matters. It's a game that you can hand an Players Handbook to a player and say, this is the game we are playing and when you sit down at the table, there won't be any confusion about what the rules are. Certainly its more complex than 1e, but that complexity comes in the form of options, not the rules. It terms of actual rules, 5e is as simple as 1e B/X and its probably why in the same way B/X is adopted as THE system in the OSR, 5e is adopted as THE system in modern D&D fantasy.
In the end, we have sort of come full circle and while there is always going to be those players who want mechanical depth and complexity, at your average RPG table, the key is always simplicity and 5e ... well its about as simple as you can get so far as RPG's go.
Honestly, I like this answer best.
However, it still kinda misses the point. But I think I can use this for getting at my point.
Do you know what other games have a high consistency in how various people play them? Board games. Card games. Just about any game really. Even sports. Old school gaming didn't have such consistency because it included something key in it's gaming. That key element meant the DM was more like the author of a book, an artist if you will.
Do you think 100 authors would take a story idea, or even a detailed scene prompt, and come up with 80% agreement on the final result? Of course not. Pretty sure most people would think it an absurd idea. Do you understand why? What is the difference between games and books? What is the element that writing has that makes all authors so different, that games lack that allows games to have such consistency in how they are run?
Sorry, this seems unfinished, like you lost your train of thought. You're describing the way DMing works, but that's how it's worked for every edition of D&D including 5E (not to mention Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, Blades in the Dark, and a host of other TTRPGs).
Yeah I tend to agree. There is a difference between the rules of the game and what you do as a story component within the confines of those rules. I do think and I do agree that in classic D&D the rules themselves got the same treatment as the story, meaning every DM had their own custom "this is my game" rules and that definitely is one way old school gaming differs but even old school gaming had a foundation on which the game was built and in the OSR that foundation is important. In fact, you will rarely find a more stringent group of gamers than OSR gamers on how the rules "should" be interpreted and what RAW actually is. Go on the Dragonfoot forums and you will find people arguing about the realistic weight of Daggers and stuff like that. The assumption that old school gamers were "hand wavers" of rules is one of the oldest myth there ever was... the debates are more about the intention and interpretation of the rules, but everyone is trying to figure out what RAW actually is in games like 1st edition AD&D for example.
Its also important to note that the reason the rules were so commonly altered and customized, especially in 1st, 2nd and 3rd edition is that they were often either unclear, or interpretable. No one in the history of gaming has ever played 1st edition AD&D RAW because Gygaxian is so unclear and so interpretable that its effectively like trying to decipher fact or fiction from reading of the bible.
In any case, the point I think is that there is a clear distinction between rules and story. Story writing, the idea of authoring and DMing a game is quite different from being a designer of rules. In 5e the rules are crystal clear 99% of the time, their is no interpretation, rules work as written and their is a clear assignment to every activity a player could do toa rule on how that is handled, so players are super clear about how the "world works" and there really is very little GM fiat in the governance of rules. Story .... well that is an entirely different thing.. every DM is different and that is as true running 1e as it is running 5e.
You could argue that there are too many rules, or the rules are not balanced or even that the rules are insufficient, but you can't argue they are not clear. I have never seen a rulebook as crystal clear as the 2024 PHB. In old school games, in 90% of the games, its actually entirely unclear what the rules actually are and there are huge, albeit intentional gaps, in the rules, with the specific instruction that simply say "do what you want". That is not particularly helpful when you are trying to play a game, it assumes a lot of responsibility and experience on the part of the DM. Perfectly fine for guys like me who have been running RPG's since 85 for a group of players that have been playing since 85... not great for new players or DM's trying to understand how to play taking their first steps into the larger world of RPGs.
And frankly even as an experienced long time DM, its tiresome to constantly have to defend your "personal rule system" that you devised based on some relic mechanic that you have interpreted. Its much easier to just play a game that everyone can read, learn and execute with crystal clear rules. It makes storytelling a lot easier on the DM.
I love my old school games, but I really don't like playing them with anyone except old school gamers used to the traditions and practices of old school gaming. With modern gamers, its a nightmare because they are accustomed to playing a game with clear rules and you just don't have that with old school games.
Yeah I tend to agree. There is a difference between the rules of the game and what you do as a story component within the confines of those rules. I do think and I do agree that in classic D&D the rules themselves got the same treatment as the story, meaning every DM had their own custom "this is my game" rules and that definitely is one way old school gaming differs but even old school gaming had a foundation on which the game was built and in the OSR that foundation is important. In fact, you will rarely find a more stringent group of gamers than OSR gamers on how the rules "should" be interpreted and what RAW actually is. Go on the Dragonfoot forums and you will find people arguing about the realistic weight of Daggers and stuff like that. The assumption that old school gamers were "hand wavers" of rules is one of the oldest myth there ever was... the debates are more about the intention and interpretation of the rules, but everyone is trying to figure out what RAW actually is in games like 1st edition AD&D for example.
Its also important to note that the reason the rules were so commonly altered and customized, especially in 1st, 2nd and 3rd edition is that they were often either unclear, or interpretable. No one in the history of gaming has ever played 1st edition AD&D RAW because Gygaxian is so unclear and so interpretable that its effectively like trying to decipher fact or fiction from reading of the bible.
In any case, the point I think is that there is a clear distinction between rules and story. Story writing, the idea of authoring and DMing a game is quite different from being a designer of rules. In 5e the rules are crystal clear 99% of the time, their is no interpretation, rules work as written and their is a clear assignment to every activity a player could do toa rule on how that is handled, so players are super clear about how the "world works" and there really is very little GM fiat in the governance of rules. Story .... well that is an entirely different thing.. every DM is different and that is as true running 1e as it is running 5e.
You could argue that there are too many rules, or the rules are not balanced or even that the rules are insufficient, but you can't argue they are not clear. I have never seen a rulebook as crystal clear as the 2024 PHB. In old school games, in 90% of the games, its actually entirely unclear what the rules actually are and there are huge, albeit intentional gaps, in the rules, with the specific instruction that simply say "do what you want". That is not particularly helpful when you are trying to play a game, it assumes a lot of responsibility and experience on the part of the DM. Perfectly fine for guys like me who have been running RPG's since 85 for a group of players that have been playing since 85... not great for new players or DM's trying to understand how to play taking their first steps into the larger world of RPGs.
And frankly even as an experienced long time DM, its tiresome to constantly have to defend your "personal rule system" that you devised based on some relic mechanic that you have interpreted. Its much easier to just play a game that everyone can read, learn and execute with crystal clear rules. It makes storytelling a lot easier on the DM.
I love my old school games, but I really don't like playing them with anyone except old school gamers used to the traditions and practices of old school gaming. With modern gamers, its a nightmare because they are accustomed to playing a game with clear rules and you just don't have that with old school games.
Do you not see the difference in an argument over the weight of a dagger, vs whether subclasses should only be at level 3? The argument over the weight of a dagger is not a mechanics argument, it is a milieu argument, an argument over something tangible to the characters that also happens to be tangible to real world people, even if they are using mechanics as a tool to argue their point. The subclass issue is purely mechanical, that is not a tangible thing. Can you identify when you got a subclass in the real world? Of course not.
And yea, as a game there will always some elements that are purely meta, but 3.x minimized that. The mechanics were intended to be reflective of the world, an inextricable connection, the sort of thing where if you changed a mechanic, it was to better reflect the narrative milieu. Hence arguments over the weight of daggers.
Then you get a push to make all classes get their subclasses at level three. Why? It has nothing to do with the narrative milieu. It is a pure meta issue, a thing about making the rules more rule-like, driven by considerations of mechanical balance, mechanical cleanliness, no narrative world arguments at all. Do you not see how that is clearly a "play the mechanics" mindset that would even care about when subclasses are gained?
This is why old school rules are so interpretable, because the interpretation depends a lot on the real world knowledge and experience that informs one's decisions and opinions on the matter. For example, many people think swords were heavy and that 4 pounds for a longsword is too light, but they think that because they lack actual knowledge on the subject and derive their opinion from what unrelated things they do know which misleads them greatly.
The only way to prevent the issue of mechanics being so widely interpretable is to eliminate everything outside the mechanics from influencing the mechanics. Which in terms of how old school play goes, requires eliminating every fundamental purpose of the mechanics.
3.x was designed to be guidelines, it was not designed for "crystal clear interpretation" because playing the game means that crystal clear interpretation is basically impossible. I mean sure we can all agree the sky is blue, but even then you have the people who mention that the sky isn't always blue. In that style of play, you are not supposed to rely on the mechanics in any kind of way that requires crystal clear interpretation. It was unnecessary, pointlessly limiting, and actively working against the design to try and make rules that every DM would always interpret the same way.
I love the fact that it is considered the definitive edition that resists the need to change rules every few years, prioritises the fanbase and brings together communities!!!!
:)
On the one hand, all very good thing sounding things, and actually yea, bringing together communities and prioritizing the fanbase are great things (though I disagree that wotc, or at least hasbro, prioritize the fans). However, having a definitive edition, is not actually as great as it sounds. That is kinda like having the definition genre of movie which resists change and pushes all other genres of film to sidelines so all you see is slight variations of the same film with new characters. That said, being the definitive edition certainly makes finding players easier.
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ApplePaladin
I don't have a problem with people enjoying 5e. Heck, I play 4e sometimes, not as an rpg mind you, but I can enjoy games my favorite.
But the mindset of 5e is quickly becoming a "one true wayism" and that is a bad thing. Sure there are a number of indie systems out there, but both Paizo and WotC are building on the same same mindset and trying to get into anything else is increasingly difficult and increasingly niche.
Try finding a group to play Kobolds Ate My Baby.
Compare that to music, or movies. No single type of music or movie has such a hold on popularity that it is difficult to find alternatives nor people with alternative favorites, heck there straight up is not a dominant type at all for either.
But in rpgs, there is a very clear dominant type, that encouraged by 5e and PF2. And as time goes on, they grow more dominant, not less. Find a game of PTU at a local game shop, I haven't.
I'm making my system to counter that dominance, not to destroy what already exists.
As for Orcs and strength, it isn't about the sterotype, it is about the ability to communicate via the mechanics. If you are making a Christmas themed rpg and want elves to be little, well a possible way to communicate that is with a size mechanic and then you say "elves are size X." That would be using a mechanic to communicate something about your world. It doesn't have to be the same old trope, but it can be.
Likewise, in 3.5 you can make alterations to the orcs of your world and give them a strength penalty instead, but call them large. That communicates that orcs look big but are really much weaker than they appear. You can do that in 3.x. The mechanics being a tool to commincate.
5e2024 removing racial bonuses to ability scores is not an issue of stereotypes, it is an issue of removing a channel of communication. Maybe you want sterotypes in your game, or maybe not, either way, the lack of ability score modifiers from race or species or whatever term you care to use means you can't communicate via the modifiers anymore.
How does this support my position? Because it is a further separation of mechanics from world milieu. In 3.x, if I change the world, I change mechanics to reflect the world, because the mechanics are descriptive of the world. There is a link there. Part of the utility if the mechanics is using the mechanics to communicate.
But with 5e removing that link, it further drives people to make mechanical choices based on mechanics, then dress up their choice with narrative. In 3.x, people are expected to make a choice narratively and at useful times use the mechanics as shorthand to communicate that choice.
Literally, a 3.x player can put a 14 in their strength as a way of saying they are literally as strong as an orc (in a world that follows the stereotype of strong orcs of course). This is using mechanics as a tool, not a shackle.
I don't mean to be reductive, but this seems to be the crux of your argument.
It would seem that many other people don't see 5e that way (which implies there isn't "one true way" but at least 2 different sets of experiences). Personally, I think, by being comparitively rules-light, 5e supports a greater flexibility of playstyles.
There are a lot of problems with this post - including laughably spurious psychology, contradictions and inconsistencies with your prior posting, and using an example of "not enough rules for things in 5e" that... has explicit rules. While I would consider responding in more detail, at this point it looks like CunningSmile hit the nail on the head--you are new to 5e, do not really understand 5e, have decided you do not like 5e, and are now grasping at straws to try and convince others to join you in disliking the most popular version of D&D in the game's history. Not really sure there is much utility in trying to show you a different perspective or that some of your fundamental assumptions about the rules are wrong since you have made it very clear you have no intention of listening to anything that does not support your existing worldview--and since your most recent post has devolved into pseudo-psychological nonsense clearly designed to allow you to dismiss anyone who you think falls in the "wrong" (in your mind) group.
Now, there is nothing wrong with disliking 5e - even its fans will happily acknowledge that there are other editions of the game that do other things better. In fact, almost every post on this thread has essentially been "I like 5e because, while it does not do everything I want, it checks the most boxes for the most number of people, and therefore offers a fun experience to everyone at the table, regardless of their playstyle preference."
But I do think you should evaluate why you are posting on a 5e forum. Are you here to have others show you why they like 5e so you can better understand the game and perhaps realize it has something to offer you? If so, maybe you should be more open-minded in reading what people write, instead of writing long, often disorganized, junk-science posts that typically fail to address the points you think you are responding to.
Or are you only here to push the narrative that 5e is not as good as 3.5? I will say, considering you have eight posts on this forum, seven of which are long-winded ramblings on why you like 3.X more than 5e (and the other is you telling someone they are playing the game wrong--so, not really a good look)... well, I do not want to ascribe any malice to your being on a 5e forum, but I will note, we do have a number of folks who are only active on the D&D Beyond forums because they hate the modern game, the people who play it, and they come here just to create problems. So, as I said, maybe think about why you are here and what you are looking to do with this thread, lest you get lumped in with the less savory elements of this forum's community.
Sabine76
I'm sure you're on the right track, but there is a disconnect here.
Few people are looking at 3.x mechanics and seeing tools, not even as tools they don't want. They see those mechanics as binding boundaries. They have trouble playing with mechanics that are not precisely followed.
That's a big reason why there are so many questions about how certain rules interact or raw vs rai. Every single one of those questions is inherently treating the rules as a solid, immutable in play, law.
Homebrew is never a one off unique thing for a single character, it's always a new law available for all or applied to all. And this is absolutely contradictory to how I 3.x is intended to be used. This is the fundamental problem I want to address in my system.
The mechanics are not laws. There is no breaking them, there is only where you are relative to them.
Going back to orc ability scores, PCs might not be average, but there two very important connections here.
First, how does your PC compare to the norm for their own kind. This is actually important for understanding what your character's standing in the world is, and for any sense of growth. Without any reference to "normal" player's only sense of growth is relative to their past selves, which will in practice be only to their recent past. It's a similar issue to why you should face weak encounters regularly. Those 5 goblins the nearly killed you at early levels now die too easily, giving you a sense of growth much more visceral than simply growing numbers. Similarly, when build a character with ability score bonuses, that is communicating where your character stands relative to humans and relative to what's normal for your race. If you play an orc with 12 strength, you know that you are weak as far as orcs go, but still strong compared to humans.
Second, mechanics for PCs vs mechanics for everyone else. In 3.x, the mechanics are unified, the same mechanics for everybody, which means it does a way better job of using mechanics to communicate general principles and stereotypes of the world. In a split system, the mechanics for building PCs are different which means they convey nothing to the players about their race in general. Worse, the NPCs rarely get a general set of mechanics, meaning the only way to mechanically get the idea that orcs are stronger is to review the various orc stat blocks and various human stat blocks and analyze. No handy racial build rules. But even if there were handy race build rules, you'd have to learn two sets, those for PCs and those for NPCs, double the effort and you still have a more vague notion of PCs vs NPCs.
Thus removing things like racial ability score modifiers is building a gap between the narrative and the mechanics. Which means the mechanics no longer aid anything on the narrative side. At which point the question becomes, "why are you using mechanics at all?" The answer to that is "to play the mechanics."
It is worth noting, in my way of thinking, that 5e -- the current edition, as it transitions to the 2024 rules for that edition -- in not merely the most popular version of D&D ever.
The popularity of 5th Edition is greater than that of all prior versions combined. Not just any single edition. yes, it built on that, and yes, population growthand time and scale have all helped, but it is still essentially true at its core that it has achieved that.
The challenge, especially for those of us coming to the game from prior editions, is that in becoming that version that appeals to the greatest number of people, the unique visions of those who started it have been rather "watered down" in a lot of ways.
The removal of a statistic from all the Species, as well as the shift from Race to Species, is a reflection of what is wanted by the greatest number of people in the most default basis for and simplest structure of the game.
But, just like every edition of D&D, 5e is merely the starting point.
I don't disagree that there are trending aspects that function to limit the creative approach to game play -- you go to some locations online where folks have discussion about D&D (such as r/dnd), and you will find the primacy of Rules As Written and strong punitive action taken against folks who express a distaste for adherence to strict rules.
But that RAW concept was derived from the 3.x era.
Suggest to people that there are other worlds, or that a setting might not have any of the official races and Species and they will tell you that you are not playing D&D -- straight up. But that's reactive, and ultimately only as true as you allow it to be: the vast majority of players still do not use published worlds, creating their own instead, and developing out so much homebrew that this site alone (which functions to limit homebrew creativity by requiring strict systems) has a repository that's competing with something like an infamously bad one, and with just as much crud as there are gems.
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
Hard disagree. While D&D is the leading brand in TTRPGs, the field as a whole is flourishing. People still play older editions of D&D as well as Pathfinder and other D20-based systems. Non-D20 system games are flourishing as well. This is a rare example of the aphorism "a rising tide lifts all boats" being true. The popularity of D&D has led to more awareness and popularity for other TTRPGs as well.
I typically suggest not using metaphors for making an argument like your statements about other media. People complain about Taylor Swift having an outsized presence in the music industry. Others complain about the preponderance of superhero movies and TV shows. Others complain about the popularity of romance novel series by Maas and Yarros. Same as you're complaining about the popularity of D&D 5E. And despite the complaints, competition thrives in all these media segments. Your own metaphor undermines your argument.
Again, the problem seems to be that you're too focused on arguing that people are enjoying 5E wrong. Overall your argument is just too contradictory and inconsistent.
The orc thing you're just too hung up on. Why is it even important to say someone is as strong as an orc? Oxen exist in D&D, and the phrase "strong as an ox" is a thing. Meanwhile, the numbers that make up a character's stats are invisible to the characters in-world. Nobody knows you have 14 STR or what the average STR score is for any group of people. So even if you're banking on common people in the setting assuming orcs are strong, a non-orc performing a feat of strength can still elicit an exclamation of "wow, they're as strong as an orc."
That's not strictly true. Homebrew can, indeed, be something very specific to a specific character. That's been true since 0e.
Racial scores were based in a racist concept and the game as a whole has moved away from them, especially over the last six years. They were, factually, harming th game as a whole, and causing problems for it as a brand and thus affecting profits.
Thus, they were removed, because there really is no reason to have them as a mechanical structure. They are directly related tot he kind of thinking that led one of the major contributors to the original game to declare that woman PCs should not have a Charisma score, and instead should have a Beauty score, and that said score involved magical capabilities to seduce that required saving throws.
So, they removed racial scores from everyone. Yes, that means there is no direct relation from the "flavor" of "orcs being stronger" (which, I note, is a bit of lare, and may not hold true across all the published worlds in the game, le alone the majority of worlds that people create, and therefore not really useful information that functions as a limiting effect on creativity, as if there was somehow one true way to run orcs and they all should be stronger) and the mechanics of being an orc.
The weakest orc should not inherently be stronger than the weakest human, in effect, is the new standard mechanic.
That said, since mechanics are readily altered and changed by individual DMs for their settings and their games, you can, in fact, have your own racial ability score modifiers. If you want them to have it.
But those modifiers are substantively less popular, and less well liked, and considered bad, and so they are not included in the base game.
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
Having played las much AD&D 1E/2E as 5E at least a decade each, as well as playing Basic, 3.X and 4E, i must say i really like 5E complexity yet simplicity at the same time, as well as it's aesthetic. One of the thing i like best about 5E is movement rules, ithis fluidity is one of my favorite improvement, where you can move before and after taking an action, and even between extra atatcks, whereas in previous editions you had to move and or act in order.
So, more detail on why I like 5e.
My group is huge and diverse. 53 people, ages 12 to 60, mostly Women, LGBTQ+, PoC. THe heart of it is seven folks who started playing together in 1980. Blah blah blah -- we do things together, w vote, we have the whole spiel going on. There are 7 DMs, and I am one. I am the only one who only DMs, and I have been a DM since 1980 myself. We stayed with 2e for the entire 3.x/4e period, and we only grudgingly shifted over 5e.
We do not like how they did classes in 5e. As several folks here already know. But one of the coolest things about 5e is that you can create, from scratch, your own classes. It is easier to do in 5e than it was in 2e or 1e.
Just before 4e was released, we collectively grew tired of the whole Vancian spell system, and we did snag the spell slot stuff and tried it out for a while, but even that annoyed us, so we created our own magic system and basis for it. It is a spell point system that uses the same spells. W playtested it over several years, tweaked it, and said cool, we like this, it works for us.
5e basically allowed us to slot that in from the second campaign we played in it.
We are world first creators. That is, the settings that each of the DMs (7 regular, 3 part time) create are entirely original, derived from the things that our players want to see, and we have entire sessions of just the DM listening to what the Players want to have in a new world. One of our biggest complaints about 5e 2014 was that they burned a lot of lore into the books. It was pretty infuriating, as it meant we had to trim out that lore. But, a funny thing happened as we did that -- we realized that was an awesome way to introduce lore without doing lore dumps, and so a lot of us have done the exact same thing in our worlds.
Combat is simplified. This makes it easier to drop in our own table rules as DMs around it. The way they structured the subsystems means we can aso adapt and adjust the assorted damage types, conditions, and related functions to our needs, without having to disrupt the overall way that combat functions.
5e is Light. It lacks a lot of tables, a lot of charts. The rules for things are there, but some of them in the 2014 rules are just kinda empty (the 2024 rules add more to them, giving them more value and use). Like the combat stuff, this means that all our other systems can drop right in without disruption.
5e looked to 2e and 1e for a lot of things and solutions and then adjusted those elements for 5e. This fits really well with a bunch of folks who played 1e and 2. We prefer the rulings over rules playstyle -- one of our tertiary hates about 3.5 is that it was rules over rulings.
5e has an enormous gap in the entire Exploration side of things. Wilderness was a later add on and not a very key one -- they even noted that they were understaffed, underfunded, and rushed 5e 2014 out the door. Vehicles, detailed travel, survival, these things all dropped out -- and that harmed the one class that was realloy built around those elements -- a harm that has not been recovered from yet.
on the other hand, we had all that stuff from 2e. Where 5e has 3 options, we have 5 or 7. So, again, our stuff just dropped in and was beautiful.
That was all really important to us -- we had stayed away from the community as a whole, because we didn't like the way the community turned. But 5e was welcoming, inviting, and they kept working on the things that were hurtful (not offensive, but hurtful) to us. So we branched out, and that's why all you poor folks have to put up with me here these days.
Sorry.
So, overall, 5e is better for us because it allows us to keep playing the game we love -- in a manner that makes it easier for new folks to join us, for us to stay abreast of the latest, and for us to become part of the larger community again.
There's still a lot of stuff we don't like, but that isn't about 5e, and more about the state of the industry.
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
For me it's about player retention and value at the table. While I fully agree with you (and by association with Gygax) that the game of D&D is not the same as the rules of D&D, by and large you need rules to run an RPG to some extent. It's a game of conflict and resolution, largely focused on combat. The more those rules are easy to remember and use at the table, the easier it is to introduce players to the game, prepare games for the tabletop, work with different player groups and work with the design space for creating custom content.
If there is a sales pitch for 5e, it is that, it is one of the most consensus-driven and easiest systems in practical terms devised since 1e B/X, yet its rules coverage is pretty complete where 1e B/X really left you hanging in a lot of places. There is no scenario you could create where if you asked 100 5e DM's how they would handle it that wouldn't result in a 80-90% consensus. There is just a cohesion to the game, a certain way that it functions that when applied, most free-thinking DM's are ultimatetly going to come to the same conclusions on how to execute it. That is a sign of a really well-designed architecture.
5e is the modern version of 1e B/X in every way that matters. It's a game that you can hand an Players Handbook to a player and say, this is the game we are playing and when you sit down at the table, there won't be any confusion about what the rules are. Certainly its more complex than 1e, but that complexity comes in the form of options, not the rules. It terms of actual rules, 5e is as simple as 1e B/X and its probably why in the same way B/X is adopted as THE system in the OSR, 5e is adopted as THE system in modern D&D fantasy.
In the end, we have sort of come full circle and while there is always going to be those players who want mechanical depth and complexity, at your average RPG table, the key is always simplicity and 5e ... well its about as simple as you can get so far as RPG's go.
I understand why it seems that way, but that is only superficially true.
Consider how genres are split. You have a sci-fi genre and a murder mystery genre. How do you classify whether is book is in one or the other. It is rather natural that might first feel like a book must be in only one, but imagine a murder mystery story taking place in star trek. That would be both sci fi and a murder mystery, it fall under both genres, because what makes a particular genre is not something exclusive of all other genres. Anime is another good example, it is distinct in a way, yet can still fit in every other genre there is from horror to fantasy to contemporary.
Similarly, the distinction I am talking about here does not interfere with all kinds of flexibility. It's not like it prevents you from playing a horror campaign.
Think of it like this. If I give you a pencil, you can make a sketch of all kinds of things. Or I can give you paints in a dozen colors. Which has more flexibility? Which is simpler? The pencil is simpler, and you can focus all effort on the object of your sketch. Paints however, give you color to work with and you have a lot more to consider in using the paints and paints need different brushes and you need to wait for each layer to dry before adding another layer and other considerations, but yet you have a lot more flexibility in terms of how you portray the object you paint.
3.5 is like the paints, 5e is like the pencil. The lack of color removes an entire dimension of consideration that might distract you from the thing you are trying to sketch, allow you focus all your attention on the thing you are sketching, but that is not greater flexibility at all. In this metaphor, 3.5 being the paints, many used the paints like a pencil. They picked a single color and acted like you could not mix colors in a single picture, thus limiting themselves greatly in the picture they paint yet still paying the cost of using paints over pencil.
That metaphor doesn't fly, either.
I use colored pencils pretty frequently, and paints never, so I understand the metaphor a little more exactly, perhaps, but the assertion is still that there is more color, more capability in 3.5 than there is 5e, and that the reason it is there is because it have a rule for everything.
It is an argument that the "one true way" is 3.5, with its paints (the true medium of art), and that those pencils are just child's play -- dismissive and rude. It's elitist, as ewell, but that's a separate issue.
The catch, though is that there is nothing you can do in 3.5 that you cannot do in 5e -- and if you are creative in the "wrong" way, then the effort to do it is the same: you still have to make up all the rules for it. All of which comes back to the point raised earlier: 5e is popular because it doesn't have a ton of rules.
My games are routinely cross genre -- as I said, I came from 2e, where genere crossing was common and ordinary, so we brought that with us when we hit 5e. My current setting is an entire solar system. Space colonies, space stations, asteroid outposts, ships that sail the solar winds -- all of that's there. The main planet, well, you get a vehicle up high enough (including a flying carpet for a broom) and if you can dress warm enough, you can head to space.
There's one rule set for that whole shift. Same rules that apply on the ground apply in space. That matters because there's a plan for that -- and I didn't need to invent new rules to make that happen -- just use the rules already present.
Those rules are the same rules used for all the travel in environments.
Now, if you want to say "believability" or "immersion" or "realism", well, go right ahead. truly. Because this is a Fantasy Setting. It is not a "heroic", or "Low" or "sword and sandal" or "urban" or " modern" or "ancient" version of that genre -- it is just a Fantasy setting. Like Greyhawk. Like Eberron. Like Forgotten Realms. Like most worlds.
I place a dividing line between Realism and Realistic -- and you can toss the first one our the door. There's even a bunch of science that goes into my description of the above (actual science), but it is there to serve to the fantasy, not to be a "realism simulation" and trust me, most current D&D players do not want a simulation.
I already had my go around there, lol. Pretty sure OSR was there, too.
it is true that one can throw out all the rules that one isn't going to use. I would throw out pretty much all of the ones that 3.5 has that don't match 5e -- and if you look hard, you'll see that's all still very much there under the hood. Because I don't like those rules. They are, to me, as an individual, poorly done and error filled.
So, yay, now I am playing 3.5 using the rules you seem to want to be used, and...
It would still be 5e to anyone who looked at it, because I don't use book classes or species, and so the only thing they would recognize is the core mechanics -- which are simplified, because if you tear a bunch of 3.5 rules out, you have to fix all the bleeding holes in them since they were all very interconnected and interdependent in the name of the great myth of b-a-l-a-n-c-e.
But that wouldn't work for your argument, because that would mean that 5e is just a simpler version of 3.5 -- and it is that.
The issue is that you do not appear to want that simplicity. You seem to want more crunch, more complexity, which, again, is not something that works to the benefit of the game as a whole. And Hasbro is not going to add more complexity to a game that is succeeding because it lacks it -- that's unwise, and bad for business.
that's an argument you won't win, and even if you had a bunch of supporters (and you do -- a whole company of them, run by someone who worked for Wizards once upon a time -- as well as an entire company of dedicated folks who just, wait, let me look...
... created a simplified version of their 3.5 rules.).
So now I have to wonder what the goal here is. Perhaps it is getting enough folks interested in an old version of the game to play it. Except, as I will pointedly remind you, the website you are on does not support any old versions of the game. And the new players -- who outnumber all the players of all the older versions combined -- only want stuff that is supported here.
Hell, most of them don't know you can buy all the old editions of the game on DMs Guild. They don't care.
What they will care about is someone telling them they aren't using the right medium for their grand visions when what they have is working wonderfully.
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
AEDorsay:
You still seem to be under the impression that lots of rules in the book requires you to use them all. That is false. You can play 3.5 using fewer of the rules than 5e has in it's book. 3.x just has more available should you desire to use them, already designed and ready to fit with the base mechanics. 80% or more of the core rules in 3.x are optional reference.
And yet despite that, you equate using 3.5 as inherently needing to use more rules than 5e. Which is entirely false. You can't see that, therefore you claim that 3.5 is crunchier. But in actuality, 3.5 sees all the mechanics as inherently optional, and those it explicitly calls out as alternatives are declared as such solely because they are not the assumption of the other still optional rules and so might require additional considerations and adjustments if used, or the designers just wanted to make of note of considerations.
3.5 can easily be used without all the reference material. It'd be just as easy if not easier than 5e. And it would still retain traits that 5e does not have.
I am not trying to get any of you specifically to change your view or like 3.x or anything. I am trying to build a bridge of understanding from my view to yours, so when you, or people like you, come take a gander at my game, you will actually understand my intent instead of getting entirely the wrong idea based on the superficial and find it broken or terrible for the simple reason that you are not understanding it's design intent.
Let me use an easier to understand example of people getting the wrong idea.
In 3.x, the core DMG says that a good spread of encounters should come in many different difficulties. The first few adventures designed for 3.0 before even 3.5 came out, the adventures followed the recommendation of the DMG and had a wide spread of difficulties for the encounters. But the entire community bashed wotc over adventures that were "poorly balanced." Note that they did not bash wotc for designing a game that expects a wide variety of encounter difficulties, no, they didn't do that. No one complained about 3.0 telling DMs to use a wide variety of encounter difficulties. Nope. They complained about the adventures having a wide variety of encounter difficulties instead.
Do you understand what that says about the community? It tells us that the community never understood that the mechanics of 3.0 expect a wide variety of encounter difficulties. The community did not understand that. Thus they failed to understand anything built on that expectation.
Same with gold as xp rules. Getting xp for getting gold was never some ridiculous notion of leveling up from picking up gold, it was leveling up from everything you went through to get that gold, without encouraging any one method in particular. You could kill for the gold, trade for the gold, or steal the gold. It didn't matter, so you could take whatever route you wanted. But many hated it because all they saw was the ridiculous notion that picking up gold somehow made you stronger.
These are just a couple examples of how a mechanical design is simply not understood by the general community, and therefore gets reputation that is ill-deserved.
I am trying to figure how to avoid running into the same problem.
Honestly, I like this answer best.
However, it still kinda misses the point. But I think I can use this for getting at my point.
Do you know what other games have a high consistency in how various people play them? Board games. Card games. Just about any game really. Even sports. Old school gaming didn't have such consistency because it included something key in it's gaming. That key element meant the DM was more like the author of a book, an artist if you will.
Do you think 100 authors would take a story idea, or even a detailed scene prompt, and come up with 80% agreement on the final result? Of course not. Pretty sure most people would think it an absurd idea. Do you understand why? What is the difference between games and books? What is the element that writing has that makes all authors so different, that games lack that allows games to have such consistency in how they are run?
Sorry, this seems unfinished, like you lost your train of thought. You're describing the way DMing works, but that's how it's worked for every edition of D&D including 5E (not to mention Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, Blades in the Dark, and a host of other TTRPGs).
1: I've acknowledged three separate times that precise point of yours, even bolded it the last time. So I very overtly do not seem to be under that impression. It is also not about the use of the rules, it is about the number of them, and how that number of them is undesirable.
2: You and I have very different perspectives on 3.5, and, based on that statement, a different idea of what crunchiness is.
So, that taken care of, let's get to the meat of your meal.
Well, first off, the community is made up of people who range from 8 year olds up to 88 year olds (and probably some to either side of that as well). [Redacted]
I've worked in the biz. Hell, I still do occasional contract jobs. What you want is a way to educate the community on how game design works in a manner that you enjoy and for the explicit purpose of making the Community (as a whole) understand why you chose certain things.
That is an unreasonable objective.
[Redacted]
Did you know that in 5e, experience points can still be drawn out of gold? It's still a 1:1 conversion. There are many in the community who still do that. The community as a whole prefers to use a milestone system -- but you cannot escape XP in designing encounters because it relies on that and the Community doesn't understand how CR works.
And that brings us to the wide variety of encounters thing. In 5e, the rules still expect a wide variety of encounters, not all of them built to be perfectly balanced. There's a whole line repeated many, many times a day here on DDB that there is an expectation of 6 to 8 encounters per day. Some of us have tried in the past to argue with that, but it is a fixed expectation of The COmmunity, and trying to point out that it is wrong gets you yelled at.
Hell, one of the first things they talk about when they guide you to creating encounters is that there should be three things planned for -- and by and large the Community plans for 1 thing. Specifically:
There's a ton of information in those two lines.
When was the last time someone talking in 5e spoke about Thresholds? XP Thresholds by Character Level. Or Multipart Encounters?
Now, do you know why people think there are 6 to 8 encounters per day? Because the book says so -- but this is disconnected from the concept of a "day" and they will say "two short rests in a day" so folks think of it as lunch and dinner and then that's a day. So 2 in the morning, 2 in the afternoon, and 2 in the evening.
That's how the rules for encounters explain it -- but they are missing the whole point about "day" not being tied to time -- because a "day" is whatever period exists between Long Rests. If you only get one long rest a week, that's a whole freaking Adventuring Day. But you have to understand the Rest system to really pick up on that -- and you only really understand the rest system if you ever read the DMG, and I don't know if you are aware of this but, um...
The Community has mostly not read the books. Any of them. Not the PHB. Not the DMG (hell, there are DMs who've never cracked the DMG at all, but most have at least flipped through it). They have read the stuff for their Species, Background, Class, Feats, and their Spells. One of those youtube people did a survey of their viewers, and apparently that triggered others to do similar surveys, and turns out that maybe 10 to 20% of all the players have read the books cover to cover and understood what was in them.
Oh, and if you want to be less misunderstood, get a youtuber to explain it for you. That seems to make everything go better for some reason?
The threshold is where you get a budget from, and that budget is for whatever the period between two long rests is. All of those encounters should be a mix of easy, medium, hard and deadly encounters over the course of a whole day, and you are supposed to use that threshold to make all of the encounters that happen in that period between long rests. So if you have a bunch of encounters that are low level, you can have more than 8, and if you have a bunch of deadly ones you can have fewer than 6.
And tthat's all in the DMG -- but people will quote you the 6 to 8 per adventuring day and say that it means exactly that -- one day. Not one week, even if you are using a one week long rest cycle.
The Community does that.
Now, don't get me wrong -- I'm not ragging on you without empathy or sympathy; I created a setting for people to have fun in that uses an original spell point based magic system, has none of the official Classes or Species in it, has a much more involved background system, solves a bunch of problems that the Community finds to be annoying (crafting, vehicles, downtime, exploration, wilderness, etc), and is wholly original with a very different take on the genre as a whole.
I totally get what you are saying about wanting to avoid falling into the trap of "you are doing it wrong" -- but that's not going to happen. People are going to be people -- fractious, divided, opinionated, entitled, and interpretive. They are going to see what they want to see in the rules no matter what you say or I say.
But that isn't a factor of 5e. Fifth Edition is a reflection of the people who play it -- they aren't just doing whatever they want, they spent months getting feedback and measuring popularity and getting a set of subclasses that all had above 80% of The Community approving them -- and those are what showed up in the 2024 PHB.
That is, the 2024 PHB is what The Community -- at least 80% of it -- thought were the best choices. For classes. All the complaints about the new classes? Those are from the 20%. You know who else is in the 20%?
Folks who play older versions or customized of the games. We are outliers. We are never going to speak to the Community.
However...
We are not alone. It isn't The Community you need to sway, it is Your Community you need to find. And a funny thing happened along the way to 5e become so popular that there are more people who play it than all the prior editions combined: a lot of small communities formed. The entire OSR movement is one. THe folks like me who see the game as a launchpad for our own unique visions that blend old and new are others.
Your Community is out there. You just need to find it. I have no doubt that parts of it are here, in the DDB forums. Lord knows it has all the other communities, lol.
And it will be large than you might think. You are dealing with 3.5. There is an entire community of folks who refuse to play anything else but 3.5 on Reddit, and at least three discords like that.
But..
[Redacted]
Folks here play 5e right now -- versioning tbd. In a year, it will be pretty much all 2024. And that will be because that's what the Character builder works with. That will be because of the rules and the reference and the ability to store PCs and make them and whip up a quick little homebrew item and all the other things -- for 5e. WHichit will not do all of (because it still doesn't support most options from the 2014 books).
If there was anything that is kind of forcing a "one right way" it is that -- the VTTs, the digital tools. Not just here, either -- the others that are out there are the same way. And worse, they force you to play the way they think you should play.
go to an LFG and if you don't have the ability to have a character sheet that does the math for you, you will get ignored. Old school style pen and paper groups have their players, aren't looking for new folks.
[Redacted]
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
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I love the fact that it is considered the definitive edition that resists the need to change rules every few years, prioritises the fanbase and brings together communities!!!!
:)
Yeah I tend to agree. There is a difference between the rules of the game and what you do as a story component within the confines of those rules. I do think and I do agree that in classic D&D the rules themselves got the same treatment as the story, meaning every DM had their own custom "this is my game" rules and that definitely is one way old school gaming differs but even old school gaming had a foundation on which the game was built and in the OSR that foundation is important. In fact, you will rarely find a more stringent group of gamers than OSR gamers on how the rules "should" be interpreted and what RAW actually is. Go on the Dragonfoot forums and you will find people arguing about the realistic weight of Daggers and stuff like that. The assumption that old school gamers were "hand wavers" of rules is one of the oldest myth there ever was... the debates are more about the intention and interpretation of the rules, but everyone is trying to figure out what RAW actually is in games like 1st edition AD&D for example.
Its also important to note that the reason the rules were so commonly altered and customized, especially in 1st, 2nd and 3rd edition is that they were often either unclear, or interpretable. No one in the history of gaming has ever played 1st edition AD&D RAW because Gygaxian is so unclear and so interpretable that its effectively like trying to decipher fact or fiction from reading of the bible.
In any case, the point I think is that there is a clear distinction between rules and story. Story writing, the idea of authoring and DMing a game is quite different from being a designer of rules. In 5e the rules are crystal clear 99% of the time, their is no interpretation, rules work as written and their is a clear assignment to every activity a player could do toa rule on how that is handled, so players are super clear about how the "world works" and there really is very little GM fiat in the governance of rules. Story .... well that is an entirely different thing.. every DM is different and that is as true running 1e as it is running 5e.
You could argue that there are too many rules, or the rules are not balanced or even that the rules are insufficient, but you can't argue they are not clear. I have never seen a rulebook as crystal clear as the 2024 PHB. In old school games, in 90% of the games, its actually entirely unclear what the rules actually are and there are huge, albeit intentional gaps, in the rules, with the specific instruction that simply say "do what you want". That is not particularly helpful when you are trying to play a game, it assumes a lot of responsibility and experience on the part of the DM. Perfectly fine for guys like me who have been running RPG's since 85 for a group of players that have been playing since 85... not great for new players or DM's trying to understand how to play taking their first steps into the larger world of RPGs.
And frankly even as an experienced long time DM, its tiresome to constantly have to defend your "personal rule system" that you devised based on some relic mechanic that you have interpreted. Its much easier to just play a game that everyone can read, learn and execute with crystal clear rules. It makes storytelling a lot easier on the DM.
I love my old school games, but I really don't like playing them with anyone except old school gamers used to the traditions and practices of old school gaming. With modern gamers, its a nightmare because they are accustomed to playing a game with clear rules and you just don't have that with old school games.
Do you not see the difference in an argument over the weight of a dagger, vs whether subclasses should only be at level 3? The argument over the weight of a dagger is not a mechanics argument, it is a milieu argument, an argument over something tangible to the characters that also happens to be tangible to real world people, even if they are using mechanics as a tool to argue their point. The subclass issue is purely mechanical, that is not a tangible thing. Can you identify when you got a subclass in the real world? Of course not.
And yea, as a game there will always some elements that are purely meta, but 3.x minimized that. The mechanics were intended to be reflective of the world, an inextricable connection, the sort of thing where if you changed a mechanic, it was to better reflect the narrative milieu. Hence arguments over the weight of daggers.
Then you get a push to make all classes get their subclasses at level three. Why? It has nothing to do with the narrative milieu. It is a pure meta issue, a thing about making the rules more rule-like, driven by considerations of mechanical balance, mechanical cleanliness, no narrative world arguments at all. Do you not see how that is clearly a "play the mechanics" mindset that would even care about when subclasses are gained?
This is why old school rules are so interpretable, because the interpretation depends a lot on the real world knowledge and experience that informs one's decisions and opinions on the matter. For example, many people think swords were heavy and that 4 pounds for a longsword is too light, but they think that because they lack actual knowledge on the subject and derive their opinion from what unrelated things they do know which misleads them greatly.
The only way to prevent the issue of mechanics being so widely interpretable is to eliminate everything outside the mechanics from influencing the mechanics. Which in terms of how old school play goes, requires eliminating every fundamental purpose of the mechanics.
3.x was designed to be guidelines, it was not designed for "crystal clear interpretation" because playing the game means that crystal clear interpretation is basically impossible. I mean sure we can all agree the sky is blue, but even then you have the people who mention that the sky isn't always blue. In that style of play, you are not supposed to rely on the mechanics in any kind of way that requires crystal clear interpretation. It was unnecessary, pointlessly limiting, and actively working against the design to try and make rules that every DM would always interpret the same way.
On the one hand, all very good thing sounding things, and actually yea, bringing together communities and prioritizing the fanbase are great things (though I disagree that wotc, or at least hasbro, prioritize the fans). However, having a definitive edition, is not actually as great as it sounds. That is kinda like having the definition genre of movie which resists change and pushes all other genres of film to sidelines so all you see is slight variations of the same film with new characters. That said, being the definitive edition certainly makes finding players easier.