Not sure where this persecution complex is coming from. Absolutely no one is saying you're wrong for enjoying a more rules-heavy game. Nothing's stopping you from customizing 5e either; I've sure done a lot of that. If the devs didn't want you to tinker with the game there wouldn't be entire chapters in the DMG dedicated to doing so.
It's also pretty disingenous to cry foul at having your preferences relegated to optional rules when just a page ago you argued it'd be fine if a round-based initiative was the default because other people would still have the option of the simpler initiative rule.
D&D can't be everything to everybody at the same time, so it makes perfect business sense to have the core rules reflect what most people want out of the game. Adventurer's League is not the only way (or even the main way) D&D is played.
First of all, credit where it's due - that list of rules and system tweaks is excellent, very nice work. Some of that will absolutely be migrating into my own games, and I could only wish the Touch Attack rules were part of the core game (and thus easy to refit into a DDB sheet). They make so much sense, and bring a whole lot of otherwise lackluster abilities into a whole new realm of interesting and dangerous on both the player and enemy sides of the divide. Yeah, it's another reason why Dex is an overpowered superstat, but that's just endemic to the weird way the Six Classic Ability Scores work in general. Thank you for that link.
It also proves to me that you know exactly what I'm talking about, though. Heh, there are holes in 5e that bother me, immensely. There were holes that bothered you enough to make that excellent document to patch them. Okay, more complex initiative may be a brain caltrop in me more than most, but that doesn't mean that people are wrong for wanting to patch the numerous holes or weak spots that the massive oversimplification of 5e created.
It's just like modding Skyrim - Skyrim may be the most popular Elder Scrolls game by far due to being stripped of almost everything that was in previous games, but the reason it endures the way it does is because modders came in and put most of that shit right back in. You can pick what you want, but Bethesda enthusiastically supports it either way. Whereas Wizards says "yeah...you can DOOO that, but only if you're a turdbaby that doesn't like our perfect and flawless game. Go play more AL."
First of all, credit where it's due - that list of rules and system tweaks is excellent, very nice work.
Thanks.
Some of that will absolutely be migrating into my own games, and I could only wish the Touch Attack rules were part of the core game (and thus easy to refit into a DDB sheet).
Word of warning, while those rules are mostly stable at this point that's still a living document and it might change. I haven't really shared it publicly much so I don't have any versioning schemes or backwards compatibility promises at this point. Might want to download a copy now just in case. There's also some stuff concerning Way of the Four Elements, the Beast Master and Favored Enemy that I haven't had the time to add to that PDF yet.
Touch AC kinda integrates seamlessly into any official sheet because it's basically 10 + your DEX save bonus, which should already be on the sheet.
It also proves to me that you know exactly what I'm talking about, though. Heh, there are holes in 5e that bother me, immensely. There were holes that bothered you enough to make that excellent document to patch them.
Oh sure. I analyze the mechanics of every game I play. But it's really easy to find holes with the benefit of hindsight. I didn't have to do the hard work of multiple rounds of playtesting and collecting feedback from thousands of players; I just had to come up with the 5% difference that would make me happy. And it still took me years of play to find those holes, as well as years of listening to developer interviews and DDB data updates to understand why 5e is the way it is and that a lot of players don't play the game for the same reasons I do. So while I wish some things were different, I still appreciate that I'm building on top of a much more solid foundation than anything I would've been able to come up with on my own. And even with all of that head start, it still took me several dozen hours and a couple of failed experiments in actual games to refine those couple of pages worth of house rules to the point that I was happy with them.
Whereas Wizards says "yeah...you can DOOO that, but only if you're a turdbaby that doesn't like our perfect and flawless game. Go play more AL."
I still don't get where you're coming from here. It's no secret I'm a Jeremy Crawford fanboy and one of the biggest things I learned from him is to learn to break the rules to maximize the fun at my table. He's always telling DMs to "follow your bliss" and to rule generously in favor of the players. I get the distaste for Adventurer's League but the actual faces of the D&D dev team encourage homebrew and tinkering. They even hired Dan Dillon in the past year and he's done some homebrew work in addition to running a D&D podcast if I remember correctly.
Individual dev team people like Jeremy Crawford can be great guys. J-Craw, Mearls, and the rest are gaming enthusiasts and masters of their craft.
Wizards of the Coast, the faceless corporate conglomerate made up of hundreds of not-gamer people and run by people who are not dev team, and who are not in any way gaming enthusiasts, can suck the very fattest of Polish sausages. The names are good; the company has screwed me over time and time again and proven over and over and over that it cares nothing for the properties it consumes save for how many dollars it can squeeze out of a given game before abandoning that property and telling the fans they weren't loyal/profitable enough to care about.
Nevertheless.
Touch AC and touch attacks are one of the things I deeply crave (does anyone here remember when Shocking Grasp was a valid spell? Anyone at all?), but I don't think I'll be integrating that into my game just yet. It's something I'll definitely keep in mind for future games, but at this point I'm keeping my edits to the core rules on the more modest side due to the difficulty of online games and the fact that I don't have a ton of experience running campaigns myself yet. There's also the issue of DDB's homebrew system being kind of a nightmare morass of counterintuitive non-Euclidean modifier soup, which makes sweeping fixes to some of the holes in 5e much more difficult when your online game uses DDB as its primary tool. Don't get me wrong, the service is phenomenal, but it imposes some pretty heavy limits on what you can change.
Let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores...................................................................................................................................................................................................
LEMME ADD NEW FLIPPIN' ABILITY SCORES!! DX
But yeah. There's a ton of little things and a few Big Glaring Bugaboos I would love a 5.5e to fix. I'm firmly of the belief that we won't see anything like a Revised Ranger 2.0 if we don't see a 5.5e, and I feel like there's room in this framework for more than what we got. Exploration rules are severely underdeveloped, crafting/item creation is a joke, and half the spells in the game are clearly leftovers from earlier editions that just don't really work properly in 5e yet. We need a patch for the system.
Touch AC and touch attacks are one of the things I deeply crave (does anyone here remember when Shocking Grasp was a valid spell? Anyone at all?),
You don't need touch AC. A wizard has the same chance to hit a melee target with Shocking Grasp as a Fighter does with his sword. If the target is wearing metal armor, the chance increases with double the chance for a crit.
What new ability score are you talking about? If it isn't core D&D then I can see why you can't just add it. There is nothing stopping you from adding it your character notes or proficiencies.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
4th had it right with the Powers, each class had unique powers, Fighters/Barbarians/Rogues had some cool tricks other then "do a melee weapon attack".
Mike Mearls actually said this was one of the problems with 4e. It sounds good on paper but in practice it means the minimum complexity for every single character is high. There's no way to put a character together without making a bunch of choices.
Building your character piece by piece from a huge menu of options is very pleasing for a very specific kind of player, but there's at least 7 other kinds of players that don't care for that. In my opinion this is one of the important things to understand when talking about the merits of any game. At the risk of sounding preachy, a lot of people have a hard time putting themselves in the mindset of players with different priorities, and also tend to assume their own priorities are more common than they really are (because the people they play with are similar.)
I think a big part of 5e's success has been due to the devs making an effort to keep the baseline complexity low so you can give a Champion Fighter to a brand new player and they can get started right away with very little explanation. In fact the devs took special care to streamline the four free/classic classes (Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard) and ensure the free subclass packaged in the basic rules is the most straightforward one. There's a very clear divide between those four and the complexity budget they allowed themselves in other classes like the Monk or Warlock.
My wife plays a paladin and picking out her spells is a chore, not a fun exercise in self-expression or optimization. If her whole character had to be pieced together a la carte, I'm not sure she would've made it past character creation on her own.
You are correct, it was one of the problems of 4th there was just too much things to take into account when building a character, but the principel in itself was good.
The way the powers worked was good, but yeah the number of powers you had at higher lvls( and there was 30 in 4th) was just staggering, between encounter powers, daily powers and utility powers and thats just from classes alone, not counting from those you'd get for your racial traits, Feats and the different Tiers...
Once again like with 3.5 they ended bloating the everliving daylight of the thing.
Of what i recall a Wizard in 4th had like 20+ spells and that was just encounters, you can add to that at least 10 daily powers...
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Normality is but an Illusion, Whats normal to the Spider, is only madness for the Fly"
You don't need touch AC. A wizard has the same chance to hit a melee target with Shocking Grasp as a Fighter does with his sword. If the target is wearing metal armor, the chance increases with double the chance for a crit.
I agree that Shocking Grasp is an ok spell, though in my experience it's generally a bad deal compared to the alternatives. A non-Bladesinger wizard or sorcerer has no incentive to be in melee range and several big disincentives (low HP, average AC, concentration). They can't use their Shocking Grasp as an opportunity attack without a feat and can't ready it without concentrating. Some enemies resist or are immune to lightning damage; weapon users rarely have to worry about that once they get a magic weapon. Disengaging is a safer way to back away from a monster. It's also competing for cantrip slots with utility spells like Light, long-range spells that are much safer, and saving throw spells that'll bypass the high AC of enemies altogether whether they're made of metal or not. So I gave it a boost to sweeten the deal.
That was just a nice-to-have though. I was more motivated by what I saw as a gap in the basic building blocks of the game's rules: there's no good way to represent something that behaves like an attack but ignores armor like a saving throw. An attack roll fails the "ignore armor" part. A Dexterity save fails to behave like an attack. 3e and 4e had rules to cover these cases and 5e still has plenty of use cases where it would've applied.
Disintegrate is a good example. The spell was a touch attack in 3rd edition (where the concept was introduced) and an attack vs Reflex defense (the AC equivalent of a DEX save, and not the same as your regular AC) in 4e. 5e doesn't have an equivalent concept, so you get some wacky results. There's an enemy standing next to the wizard? No problem, it's technically not a ranged attack even though you're aiming a beam at someone. The wizard's restrained? Again, no problem. The wizard can't see their target? Oops, can't try to blindly shoot like you would be able to if it were an attack. The target can't see the wizard? Doesn't make hitting them any easier, being blinded doesn't affect your DEX saves. All of these situations lead to either very unsatisfying moments at the table or the DM having to constantly step out of the rules.
And yeah, Disintegrate won't come up that often in play. I just use it because it illustrated the problem well. There's lower-level examples too. It's really hard to justify a player missing with an oil flask on a very respectable roll of 15 against a super low DEX, high AC monster like a roper. Yeah, its skin is hard as a rock and that makes it hard to stab to death, but that shouldn't help it avoid a thrown flask from breaking on it.
Using ability contests for grapples and shoves has similar problems (and a whole bunch of others related to the fact that players can stack bonuses on ability checks really easily but monsters rarely have skill proficiencies and can't apply Legendary Resistance if they have it.) Grappling someone you can't see is absolutely not a problem. And then there's spells like Mordenkainen's Sword that suffered greatly in the conversion to 5e because there were no good mechanics to distinguish it from Spiritual Weapon.
The other big loss was narrative. Lots of undead with touch-type attacks have been made a lot less scary by the lack of a armor-piercing attacks. Monsters like the shadow or wraith were absolutely terrifying when you knew you couldn't rely on a high AC to save you. A 5e character with plate and a shield can engage these monsters with confidence and if they happen to have any additional AC bonuses those monsters just cease being intimidating altogether.
This is one of the rare cases where I think the streamlining went too far; a little bit more complexity would've avoided a whole lot of other problems.
Fix the weapons and armour table (see trident vs spear)
Fix sorcerers to not being generally worse wizards
Caster/Martial gap must be closed, buff low level casters and debuff high level ones Storm of vengeance has range of sight and can destroy towns on repeated casting from miles away (telescope), 5 attacks in 6 seconds can't do that. What can a martial do to compare with meteor swarm insta-seiging a castle or a cleric once per week using wish without the necrotic damage and chance to never be able to cast it again so long as it follows their deity? On a similar note what can a level 3 wizard do if a level 3 barbarian deals more than 3 damage against them?
Unrelated side note: on the talk of shadows and monsters like that my dm tossed a shadow thingy (see second entry on this link https://www.dndbeyond.com/search?q=Shadow) at 2 level 5's but these two level 5's were a cleric and paladin and after some lucky misses they scored insane radiant damage on a creature who is weak to it
Not sure where this persecution complex is coming from. Absolutely no one is saying you're wrong for enjoying a more rules-heavy game. Nothing's stopping you from customizing 5e either; I've sure done a lot of that. If the devs didn't want you to tinker with the game there wouldn't be entire chapters in the DMG dedicated to doing so.
It's also pretty disingenous to cry foul at having your preferences relegated to optional rules when just a page ago you argued it'd be fine if a round-based initiative was the default because other people would still have the option of the simpler initiative rule.
D&D can't be everything to everybody at the same time, so it makes perfect business sense to have the core rules reflect what most people want out of the game. Adventurer's League is not the only way (or even the main way) D&D is played.
The Forum Infestation (TM)
First of all, credit where it's due - that list of rules and system tweaks is excellent, very nice work. Some of that will absolutely be migrating into my own games, and I could only wish the Touch Attack rules were part of the core game (and thus easy to refit into a DDB sheet). They make so much sense, and bring a whole lot of otherwise lackluster abilities into a whole new realm of interesting and dangerous on both the player and enemy sides of the divide. Yeah, it's another reason why Dex is an overpowered superstat, but that's just endemic to the weird way the Six Classic Ability Scores work in general. Thank you for that link.
It also proves to me that you know exactly what I'm talking about, though. Heh, there are holes in 5e that bother me, immensely. There were holes that bothered you enough to make that excellent document to patch them. Okay, more complex initiative may be a brain caltrop in me more than most, but that doesn't mean that people are wrong for wanting to patch the numerous holes or weak spots that the massive oversimplification of 5e created.
It's just like modding Skyrim - Skyrim may be the most popular Elder Scrolls game by far due to being stripped of almost everything that was in previous games, but the reason it endures the way it does is because modders came in and put most of that shit right back in. You can pick what you want, but Bethesda enthusiastically supports it either way. Whereas Wizards says "yeah...you can DOOO that, but only if you're a turdbaby that doesn't like our perfect and flawless game. Go play more AL."
God I hate AL...q_q...
Please do not contact or message me.
Thanks.
Word of warning, while those rules are mostly stable at this point that's still a living document and it might change. I haven't really shared it publicly much so I don't have any versioning schemes or backwards compatibility promises at this point. Might want to download a copy now just in case. There's also some stuff concerning Way of the Four Elements, the Beast Master and Favored Enemy that I haven't had the time to add to that PDF yet.
Touch AC kinda integrates seamlessly into any official sheet because it's basically 10 + your DEX save bonus, which should already be on the sheet.
Oh sure. I analyze the mechanics of every game I play. But it's really easy to find holes with the benefit of hindsight. I didn't have to do the hard work of multiple rounds of playtesting and collecting feedback from thousands of players; I just had to come up with the 5% difference that would make me happy. And it still took me years of play to find those holes, as well as years of listening to developer interviews and DDB data updates to understand why 5e is the way it is and that a lot of players don't play the game for the same reasons I do. So while I wish some things were different, I still appreciate that I'm building on top of a much more solid foundation than anything I would've been able to come up with on my own. And even with all of that head start, it still took me several dozen hours and a couple of failed experiments in actual games to refine those couple of pages worth of house rules to the point that I was happy with them.
I still don't get where you're coming from here. It's no secret I'm a Jeremy Crawford fanboy and one of the biggest things I learned from him is to learn to break the rules to maximize the fun at my table. He's always telling DMs to "follow your bliss" and to rule generously in favor of the players. I get the distaste for Adventurer's League but the actual faces of the D&D dev team encourage homebrew and tinkering. They even hired Dan Dillon in the past year and he's done some homebrew work in addition to running a D&D podcast if I remember correctly.
The Forum Infestation (TM)
Individual dev team people like Jeremy Crawford can be great guys. J-Craw, Mearls, and the rest are gaming enthusiasts and masters of their craft.
Wizards of the Coast, the faceless corporate conglomerate made up of hundreds of not-gamer people and run by people who are not dev team, and who are not in any way gaming enthusiasts, can suck the very fattest of Polish sausages. The names are good; the company has screwed me over time and time again and proven over and over and over that it cares nothing for the properties it consumes save for how many dollars it can squeeze out of a given game before abandoning that property and telling the fans they weren't loyal/profitable enough to care about.
Nevertheless.
Touch AC and touch attacks are one of the things I deeply crave (does anyone here remember when Shocking Grasp was a valid spell? Anyone at all?), but I don't think I'll be integrating that into my game just yet. It's something I'll definitely keep in mind for future games, but at this point I'm keeping my edits to the core rules on the more modest side due to the difficulty of online games and the fact that I don't have a ton of experience running campaigns myself yet. There's also the issue of DDB's homebrew system being kind of a nightmare morass of counterintuitive non-Euclidean modifier soup, which makes sweeping fixes to some of the holes in 5e much more difficult when your online game uses DDB as its primary tool. Don't get me wrong, the service is phenomenal, but it imposes some pretty heavy limits on what you can change.
Let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores let me add new ability scores...................................................................................................................................................................................................
LEMME ADD NEW FLIPPIN' ABILITY SCORES!! DX
But yeah. There's a ton of little things and a few Big Glaring Bugaboos I would love a 5.5e to fix. I'm firmly of the belief that we won't see anything like a Revised Ranger 2.0 if we don't see a 5.5e, and I feel like there's room in this framework for more than what we got. Exploration rules are severely underdeveloped, crafting/item creation is a joke, and half the spells in the game are clearly leftovers from earlier editions that just don't really work properly in 5e yet. We need a patch for the system.
Please do not contact or message me.
You don't need touch AC. A wizard has the same chance to hit a melee target with Shocking Grasp as a Fighter does with his sword. If the target is wearing metal armor, the chance increases with double the chance for a crit.
What new ability score are you talking about? If it isn't core D&D then I can see why you can't just add it. There is nothing stopping you from adding it your character notes or proficiencies.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
You are correct, it was one of the problems of 4th there was just too much things to take into account when building a character, but the principel in itself was good.
The way the powers worked was good, but yeah the number of powers you had at higher lvls( and there was 30 in 4th) was just staggering, between encounter powers, daily powers and utility powers and thats just from classes alone, not counting from those you'd get for your racial traits, Feats and the different Tiers...
Once again like with 3.5 they ended bloating the everliving daylight of the thing.
Of what i recall a Wizard in 4th had like 20+ spells and that was just encounters, you can add to that at least 10 daily powers...
"Normality is but an Illusion, Whats normal to the Spider, is only madness for the Fly"
Kain de Frostberg- Dark Knight - (Vengeance Pal3/ Hexblade 9), Port Mourn
Kain de Draakberg-Dark Knight lvl8-Avergreen(DitA)
I agree that Shocking Grasp is an ok spell, though in my experience it's generally a bad deal compared to the alternatives. A non-Bladesinger wizard or sorcerer has no incentive to be in melee range and several big disincentives (low HP, average AC, concentration). They can't use their Shocking Grasp as an opportunity attack without a feat and can't ready it without concentrating. Some enemies resist or are immune to lightning damage; weapon users rarely have to worry about that once they get a magic weapon. Disengaging is a safer way to back away from a monster. It's also competing for cantrip slots with utility spells like Light, long-range spells that are much safer, and saving throw spells that'll bypass the high AC of enemies altogether whether they're made of metal or not. So I gave it a boost to sweeten the deal.
That was just a nice-to-have though. I was more motivated by what I saw as a gap in the basic building blocks of the game's rules: there's no good way to represent something that behaves like an attack but ignores armor like a saving throw. An attack roll fails the "ignore armor" part. A Dexterity save fails to behave like an attack. 3e and 4e had rules to cover these cases and 5e still has plenty of use cases where it would've applied.
Disintegrate is a good example. The spell was a touch attack in 3rd edition (where the concept was introduced) and an attack vs Reflex defense (the AC equivalent of a DEX save, and not the same as your regular AC) in 4e. 5e doesn't have an equivalent concept, so you get some wacky results. There's an enemy standing next to the wizard? No problem, it's technically not a ranged attack even though you're aiming a beam at someone. The wizard's restrained? Again, no problem. The wizard can't see their target? Oops, can't try to blindly shoot like you would be able to if it were an attack. The target can't see the wizard? Doesn't make hitting them any easier, being blinded doesn't affect your DEX saves. All of these situations lead to either very unsatisfying moments at the table or the DM having to constantly step out of the rules.
And yeah, Disintegrate won't come up that often in play. I just use it because it illustrated the problem well. There's lower-level examples too. It's really hard to justify a player missing with an oil flask on a very respectable roll of 15 against a super low DEX, high AC monster like a roper. Yeah, its skin is hard as a rock and that makes it hard to stab to death, but that shouldn't help it avoid a thrown flask from breaking on it.
Using ability contests for grapples and shoves has similar problems (and a whole bunch of others related to the fact that players can stack bonuses on ability checks really easily but monsters rarely have skill proficiencies and can't apply Legendary Resistance if they have it.) Grappling someone you can't see is absolutely not a problem. And then there's spells like Mordenkainen's Sword that suffered greatly in the conversion to 5e because there were no good mechanics to distinguish it from Spiritual Weapon.
The other big loss was narrative. Lots of undead with touch-type attacks have been made a lot less scary by the lack of a armor-piercing attacks. Monsters like the shadow or wraith were absolutely terrifying when you knew you couldn't rely on a high AC to save you. A 5e character with plate and a shield can engage these monsters with confidence and if they happen to have any additional AC bonuses those monsters just cease being intimidating altogether.
This is one of the rare cases where I think the streamlining went too far; a little bit more complexity would've avoided a whole lot of other problems.
The Forum Infestation (TM)
Unrelated side note: on the talk of shadows and monsters like that my dm tossed a shadow thingy (see second entry on this link https://www.dndbeyond.com/search?q=Shadow) at 2 level 5's but these two level 5's were a cleric and paladin and after some lucky misses they scored insane radiant damage on a creature who is weak to it
[roll]7d6[/roll]
Every post these dice roll increasing my chances of winning the yahtzee thread (I wish (wait not the twist the wish threa-!))
Drummer Generated Title
After having been invited to include both here, I now combine the "PM me CHEESE 🧀 and tomato into PM me "PIZZA🍕"