"Balance" between players is more commonly what is discussed, IME. Because all the players want to feel like they are contributing to the party. The major problem with player-player balance is that the game seems to be evolving into a hack-and-slash, and if you game only contains combat encounters then there are a only a few different roles available to be filled. So it a large group, it is inevitable that some characters will feel like they aren't contributing as much as the others.
The fundamental problem is that balance of any kind in a game with strong mechanical differentiation between PCs is impossible at any scope greater than a single table. It requires making assumptions about how the game will be played that can't hold universally. 4e is the closest we're ever likely to see, and they did it by both reducing the mechanical differentiation, and by limiting the scope of the game.
Also, "evolving into a hack-and-slash"? That's D&D's natural environment. At the baseline (nobody optimizing) level of play, all the classes and subclasses are good enough that players can reasonably feel like they're contributing. (Until the casters take over at high levels.) I'm playing a four elements monk in one game, and I don't think I'm much less effective in combat than the gloomstalker ranger, and I understand how crap four elements monk is.
This is made worse by the proliferation of "gish" characters than can "do it all". If one character can heal, deal AoE damage, and deal sustained single-target damage then they can basically solo most combat encounters.
They can't do it all at once, and they do it worse than the more specialized characters. The typical party role for jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none characters is backstop -- they do what needs support in the moment. Aside perhaps for some optimized-to-hell-and-back build in a party of normals, they can't dominate everywhere.
I would argue that every rule is optional. If you can make it work and it is balanced how you guys like to play do it. If you play with it for a while and you don't like how it works. Change it. This goes with feats, multi classing anything. only allowing ASi instead of feats SHOULD balance to be pretty much the same as feats. Thats the idea. If you don't feel it does change it
I would argue that every rule is optional. If you can make it work and it is balanced how you guys like to play do it. If you play with it for a while and you don't like how it works. Change it. This goes with feats, multi classing anything. only allowing ASi instead of feats SHOULD balance to be pretty much the same as feats. Thats the idea. If you don't feel it does change it
I think the one issue you might have is the human fighter, who if you only do ASI, depending on how you determine ability scores could easily get significantly higher than everyone else. You would need to decide what to do with the human's extra origin feat.
Also, "evolving into a hack-and-slash"? That's D&D's natural environment.
No it isn't. Just look at the old rules, character levelling up was based on treasure recovered not "XP" from fighting monsters, and many were as fragile as paper so combat was routinely a deathly threat best avoided if possible. Or try some of the old-school dungeons updated in 5e in Tales of the Yawning Portal. Combat isn't a major feature of them, and is often avoidable if you play smart.
Hack-and-slash is what a lot of current players want sure, because they're coming from the digital RPG world where the vast majority of the game is fighting mooks. But it's definitely not the "natural" state of D&D.
Aside perhaps for some optimized-to-hell-and-back build in a party of normals, they can't dominate everywhere.
They definitely can, I've seen them do it because of the poor design of spells such that 3rd level spells remain viable even into tier 4. Pure Hexblade isn't so bad since the Warlock spellcasting is much more limited, but most multiclassed Gishes absolutely dominate in a way that is unfun for everyone else who isn't also doing it.
I would argue that every rule is optional. If you can make it work and it is balanced how you guys like to play do it. If you play with it for a while and you don't like how it works. Change it. This goes with feats, multi classing anything. only allowing ASi instead of feats SHOULD balance to be pretty much the same as feats. Thats the idea. If you don't feel it does change it
I would like this to be true about D&D and in fact, 5th edition design was very much geared towards modularity so that DM's could customize the game to suit their playstyle. In a sense, the hope for 5e was that it would be designed in a way that would make every type of playstyle possible and easy to implement, but it simply has not been the case at all.
In fact, many of us hoped to see Wizards of the Coast address different playstyles in splat books to facilitate this because 5e design space is not easy to work with and let's face it, most DM's are not great designers and though we know what we want aesthetically, it's not always as easy as you suggest to just change/add and remove rules without breaking the game. Wizards of the Coast designers, at least the old guard, all know what these different playstyles are because they have been around D&D for decades and they could have done a lot more to support them.
None of that happened and while I will agree that you can theoretically alter, add and remove any rules, because 5e is a complex design space and the impact of rules alterations, especially heavier ones that would be required to make certain playstyles work is a lot more difficult than you would think, at least for me personally I found it impossible to work with. I never managed to alter 5e and shape it into the playstyle I prefer and I ultimately went back to older systems for my D&D games.
It was only much later in 5e's lifespan when proper 3rd party designers took up the torch and showed us how to twist 5e into alternative playstyles. We were quite fortunate we have the OSR and companies like MCDM. I think people who complain about 5e often forget this, that there is a world of 3rd party supplements and after 10 years of 5e, while Wizards of the Coast never put out anything official, most if not all playstyle have been addressed by 3rd party supplements.
You want Dungeon Crawler and Survival, you have Shadowdark.
You want faster, lighter rules for 5e, you have Nimble
You want kingdom dominion and mass combat, you have Kingdoms and Warfare
etc.. etc.. So yeah, I don't think its quite as simple as you describe but at this point, the work has been done by the community and 3rd party publishers. I think you would be pretty hard-pressed to name a playstyle you like, which hasn't been fully explored and covered by 5e at this point with 3rd party supplements.
No it isn't. Just look at the old rules, character levelling up was based on treasure recovered not "XP" from fighting monsters, and many were as fragile as paper so combat was routinely a deathly threat best avoided if possible. Or try some of the old-school dungeons updated in 5e in Tales of the Yawning Portal. Combat isn't a major feature of them, and is often avoidable if you play smart.
Hack-and-slash is what a lot of current players want sure, because they're coming from the digital RPG world where the vast majority of the game is fighting mooks. But it's definitely not the "natural" state of D&D.
Yeah I sort of agee and disagree with this. I suppose it depends on your definition of "Hack and Slash" and perspective on the game and what era of D&D you are referring to. Clasic B/X and 1st edition AD&D era gaming was very much about Dungeon Crawling and Survival, that was the core game and fighting monsters was very natural part of the practical execution of the game. You are right that fighting was a bad idea and you certainly avoided it, in fact you spend a lot of time preparing for, planning and thinking about how not to fight, but to suggest that the game was something "grander" than a simple Dungeon Crawler and Survival game would be an incredibly false statement. We certainly took it more seriously and we "played out" the game far more than people do today.
That is the thing that was very different, the definition of role-playing. I mean, 1e had no skill systems, no feats systems...your character was some ability scores, basic character attributes and maybe some spells. Anything you wanted to do in the game, boiled down to a role-playing conversation. You want to search a room? There was no skill check, the DM described a room and you told him where you looked and how you looked for stuff. You want to know if someone is lying... you had to decide based on a conversation with the DM playing the NPC in character.
So the game had a much higher degree of "role-playing" in the sense that there were very few mechanics that circumvented it. This put players into a habit of thinking outside of their character sheet and its one of the main "conflicts" between modern and old-school gamers so far as definition of what role-playing is and their understanding of "how" you play the game of D&D. And so we have these weird discussions about whether or not D&D was a Hack and Slash game or a game about "fighting monsters".
Back in the 1e AD&D days you could go multiple sessions without ever getting into a fight, that was quite normal but its only because we literally played every single thing out in character. There were very few circumvented events with "mechanics" that got you out of stuff. Like, just shopping for gear in town could suck up an entire session and that was because what gear you had was of vital importance, you spent a long time planning a trip into a dungeon, doing research, buying gear, figuring out what is the safest route to get there. There was a ton of meta gaming.
But it was about going into that dungeon, getting treasure which was guarded by monsters. I mean, in practice that was the game... it didn't feel that way because of how we played it, the attention we placed on preparation and how we very actively role-played everything out... but yeah... if you skip all that and just look at "what is the game about"... it was in fact, hack n slash, it was just a very elaborate way to do it.
Quite often however because of all this planning, research and caution, you could go into a dungeon, spend days there and never fight a single thing because you produced so much useful "utility" with plans and gear. So yeah it was a very odd hack and slash game because the point of it was very specifically to avoid the hacking and slashing. The question is, would modern gamers quantify all that as "role-playing".... by modern definition, no I don't think they would.
In either case I can understand why modern gamers accuse old school D&D of being hack and slash, because it was and old school gamers denying it, because it ALSO wasn't. Essentially, both are accurate statements. Hacking and Slashing in 1e AD&D was what would happen if you failed in the planning and preparation stage and ... failing happened as often as succeeding, so wether the game was Hack and Slash was quite dependent on how well the players were doing or not.
This is also where the concept of "skilled" role-players came from. D&D players back then would sort of grade each other on how good they were at the table, how well they did this little "prep and plan" dance and how well they executed those plans. It was not uncommon for people to say "oh yeah, Bob is really good at D&D" and they weren't referring to talented "role-player" as we know people to be today, that would be a reference to actual skill at playing D&D. That skill was valued and TSR even had official competitive D&D tournaments back then where players with such skill could be tested and win awards for it.
This also came mixed in with leveled-up characters. Like I recall conversations like "Hey Bob, I have 3 new players, how about you take your 5th level Ranger and take them into the Caves of Chaos and show them how to play". That would not be a reference to teaching them "D&D rules", it was to show them how to play D&D well, how to plan, prep, how to avoid getting killed. It was a literal skill you would teach new players.
it was in fact, hack n slash, it was just a very elaborate way to do it.
I think we have different definitions of "hack n slash", what I mean by "hack and slash" is that the fun aspect of the game is combat so combat is something you want to do as a player. Thus in a dungeon the majority of rooms have monsters in it to fight and most monsters just attack the party on sight. Exploration is devalued because sneaking past monsters is considered undesirable because then you don't get to fight them. Similarly, the over world is chock full of monsters that will fight to the death rather than run away because again the game treat fighting as something the players want to do, so those wolves running away after you hit them once, which is totally realistic, is undesirable because it is considered less fun.
Going into dungeons is not required nor sufficient for a game to be hack-and-slash. For instance the Witcher 3 is pretty hack & slash-y despite it having very few dungeons in it, because preparation is largely unnecessary, and basically anywhere you go there are monsters to kill, even in towns there are fist-fights you can engage in, monsters to find & fight, and sometimes random thieves/bandits that attack you. You'd have to try really hard to play it for more than 30 minutes without engaging in some kind of combat.
In contrast Zelda Breath of the Wild is less hack & slash-y and has more exploration focus, for instance you might need to make appropriate clothes, or prepare food before journeying somewhere, often you don't want to fight all the mooks to save your weapons for the biggest enemies and alternative solutions like throwing rocks on them from above are present and rewarding to use. Though enemies constantly regenerate so there is definitely some hack & slash elements.
Skyrim is a super hack-and-slash dungeon-focused game. Almost everything will attack you - crabs, wolves, rats, walruses - enemies respawn all the time so you always have stuff to fight, and nearly every room in the dungeons have some kind of enemy to fight and most of the rooms are so small you can't just sneak past them and almost every quest you get involves killing something - even the Thieve's guild quest-line largely involves killing people. The "puzzles" are incredibly simple and pretty boring, they exist simply to give a breather between fights not to be interesting in themselves.
Baldur's Gate 3 is less so - many quests don't involve fighting or don't require fighting, enemies don't respawn so eventually there is no fighting left to do, and characters and dialogue are much more in depth than say Skyrim giving you other things to do that are fun than just fighting.
In terms of TTRPGs, Call of Cuthulu is the most anti-hack & slash you can get, combat is something you do not want to do in that game because you will just die. Combat also isn't that interesting, you get very few items or abilities designed for combat. Pathfinder 2e is moderately hack-and-slash, there's lots of mechanics for stuff other than combat, but at least in IME most of the adventure modules have a lot of combat in them and a lot of the character abilities are combat-oriented. However, combat can be much more deadly than 5e so it isn't necessarily something you just want to jump into all the time. D&D 5e 2014 was similar to Pathfinder 2e but with fewer mechanics on the DM's side when it came to non-combat encounters. Whereas D&D 5e 2024 looks to be much more hack & slash as non-combat abilities seem to be exclusively skill checks, absolutely everything else is combat-oriented. But especially the older (pre-5e) adventures don't focus that much on combat but more on puzzle solving and exploration.
Old school D&D is accused of being "hack and slash" by people who don't understand what that word really means and think there are only 2 options for games: hack & slash vs narrative focus. Which is flat out wrong, but is understandable because most digital fantasy games fall into those two categories. However, outside of fantasy RPG games there are all kinds of different types of digital games - puzzle games like Myst, strategy games like Xcom, stealth games like Dishonoured, survival games, city builder games, sim games etc... etc...
Old school D&D is accused of being "hack and slash" by people who don't understand what that word really means
I don't really think it's that people don't understand, it's that Hack n' Slash is not a word, its a term and it does not have a clear definition, even though you're basically claiming that there is. Your definition is no more or less accurate than anyone else's. But thats just semantics.
What I do know is that when people accuse old-school D&D of being Hack N' Slash, the definition they ARE using is that it was a dungeon crawler where you go into dungeons, fight monsters and take their treasure. That's the core premise of the accusation, its how that is defined in that context. Not saying that IS THE definition of Hack and Slash, its THE definition people are using.
In that context, it's pretty accurate. Kind of....
Like I said, how you play D&D differs wildly from table to table, but 1e AD&D had rules like 1 gold = 1 XP, the purpose of that rule was to be a meta abstraction. Meaning that if you wanted to advance in the game, you needed XP, if you wanted XP you need to get gold, the only place to get gold was in dungeons and dungeons were filled with monsters.
Did everyone play this way? I doubt it... but, it was the game, it was the rules, this was the design, this is a fact. Like, if your definition of hack and slash is a dungeon crawler where you fight monsters and take their treasure, that is the single most accurate way to describe 1st edition AD&D that exists. It was literally and very objectively the core rule of the game. 1 gold = 1 XP, everything else that happens in the game revolves around that one rule.
What are DM thoughts on not playing with Feats in the current (pre-2024 rulebooks) era of D&D?
I've run a diverse array of games (FATE, Blades in the Dark, PF, PF2e, Fiasco, Starfinder, Fudge, GURPS) and I've run or played in three distinct versions of D&D (5e, 3e, aD&D). Recently I wrapped up DMing a mix of Dragon of Icespire Peak and Lost Mine of Phandelver. Now those adventures I'd argue aren't designed with Feats in mind, but I allowed them anyway. I've never really thought twice about it, but I'm beginning to wonder if feats aren't the problem with D&D as it currently exists. I'm considering running a game with no feats at all (and also disallowing Variant Human for this reason), but have a few questions:
Have any other DMs done this?
Do you do this as standard?
What has your response been from players?
We all know, I'm sure, that CR doesn't really function as intended when you have a party loaded with magic items, or feats, or DM bonuses (like granting extra proficiencies or other fun stuff picked up in play). I'm sure we've also all had those really fun characters that have been built in a way that makes them just a little over the top in one way or another. In my recent 2.5 year campaign we had a character finish with like 38 in passive perception due to this stuff.
Despite how cool these characters can be I've had a few players, and I myself have felt like character classes just aren't special or unique any more. I kinda feel like the 2024 books are about to exacerbate that issue...Rangers just don't feel like they have a reason to exists in 2024. No class to me feels special or unique in any real way any more. By the time we begin to add feats...the classes feel even less special. I think this cuts to the heart of what I'm troubled with when it comes to feats. They allow immense customisation but at the loss of class speciality. Granted I'm in my late 30s and so grew up in a time when fighters were really unlikely to be casting magic so I carry some bias here. Still, thumbing through my copy of Tales of the Valiant the classes actually all feel special and a bit unique. They feel like they have a reason to exist.
All of which leads me to want to run a game that does not utilise Feats, which I'll remind people are an optional rule. I worry though that feats are now seen almost irrecoverably as a core part of the D&D 5e experience. So, I'd love some thoughts from fellow DMs...how have players responded either when you've disallowed feats or talked about disallowing feats.
Additional Context: My current groups will have adult discussion about this and will decide as a group what they want at the table. I am more thinking ahead to the next time I run a game online or in person for a group I do not know (FLGS or what have you), so the interest in the thoughts of strangers stems from this.
Feats are very ingrained in 5e. Your concerns about 5.24 is almost word for word what I said about 4.0. Early MMOs had very distinct classes, but WoW made every class feel much the same with minimal differences. D&D 4.0 was designed in the shadow of the immense popularity of WoW. 5.24 feels very similar to the 4.0 rules in several ways. It's hard to guess, but I don't think banning feats will get the job done.
Banning multi-classing will probably give you more distinction between classes as you can't just dip a class to get all the cool stuff.
Old school D&D is accused of being "hack and slash" by people who don't understand what that word really means
I don't really think it's that people don't understand, it's that Hack n' Slash is not a word, its a term and it does not have a clear definition, even though you're basically claiming that there is. Your definition is no more or less accurate than anyone else's. But thats just semantics.
What I do know is that when people accuse old-school D&D of being Hack N' Slash, the definition they ARE using is that it was a dungeon crawler where you go into dungeons, fight monsters and take their treasure. That's the core premise of the accusation, its how that is defined in that context. Not saying that IS THE definition of Hack and Slash, its THE definition people are using.
In that context, it's pretty accurate. Kind of....
Like I said, how you play D&D differs wildly from table to table, but 1e AD&D had rules like 1 gold = 1 XP, the purpose of that rule was to be a meta abstraction. Meaning that if you wanted to advance in the game, you needed XP, if you wanted XP you need to get gold, the only place to get gold was in dungeons and dungeons were filled with monsters.
Did everyone play this way? I doubt it... but, it was the game, it was the rules, this was the design, this is a fact. Like, if your definition of hack and slash is a dungeon crawler where you fight monsters and take their treasure, that is the single most accurate way to describe 1st edition AD&D that exists. It was literally and very objectively the core rule of the game. 1 gold = 1 XP, everything else that happens in the game revolves around that one rule.
Hack n Slash, basically is a way to describe a combat focused style verse a story focused game. While many modules were very much combat focused with crazy dungeons, there were also NPCs, and peaceful places to hang out. Plus the modules were mostly small short adventures with levels in between that provided ample opportunity for story telling. Plus some of the modules were very focused on the story aspect, as well as NPC interaction. Mysteries were common challenges as well.
Still owning many 1e modules, and looking at them side by side with some 5e modules, I'm not sure we have moved away from combat focus. While the GP for XP mechanic was flawed, it technically allowed leveling from operating a business or collecting taxes from your barony. While milestone leveling is an official option now, its not the standard rules, and many of the modules don't even mention milestone leveling.
Adding social skills like persuasion and deception provides some good mechanics for 4e style skill challenges, they also mean the players should stay silent and let the "face" PC do the talking. This doesn't exactly result in more dynamic role playing than the old system where CHA was a dump stat that didn't have official game mechanics to support the notion that high CHA PCs should be more persuasive.
Like so many things in life, we tend to assume our personal experiences are representative of the larger group, rather than trying to do a statistical study with a significant sample size. In this case I don't even know if it would be possible to get accurate results if a person was willing to invest a large sum of money into the research.
Like so many things in life, we tend to assume our personal experiences are representative of the larger group, rather than trying to do a statistical study with a significant sample size. In this case I don't even know if it would be possible to get accurate results if a person was willing to invest a large sum of money into the research.
We don't need research, if you want to know what gaming was like in the 80's and 90's, ask someone about it who doesn't have an agenda or point to make. There really isn't much dispute among gamers from that era about what D&D was, how it was played and what the experience was like. Sure we didn't have exactly the same experience but we were all using the same rule system so much like it is today, there was a foundation for the game, gaming culture and traditions and many things were simply true for the majority of people. The issue is that modern gaming culture, as well as old school gaming culture, have agendas, there are certain things that "have to be made true", otherwise the superiority of old school or modern gaming culture as the case may be is put into question and ... we can't have that.
Adding social skills like persuasion and deception provides some good mechanics for 4e style skill challenges, they also mean the players should stay silent and let the "face" PC do the talking. This doesn't exactly result in more dynamic role playing than the old system where CHA was a dump stat that didn't have official game mechanics to support the notion that high CHA PCs should be more persuasive.
Case in point, not trying to bust your chops, but this is simply objectively false.
Charisma was not a dump stat and no one who played D&D in the 80's or 90's version of the game would say that with a straight face. Charisma was actually one of the more important stats as it related to hiring henchmen and followers and their loyalty. Having a good entourage of followers and henchmen as well as experts back at base was absolutely vital to a successful adventuring party. Charisma also determined the initial reaction during encounters of opposing sides which was critical to avoiding fights during random encounters where who you met and how they felt about you was determined randomly.
Though I think the bigger point here is that one of the biggest changes between/differences in old-school D&D culture and modern-day gaming culture is the associations and levels of importance between Ability Scores and role-playing assumptions based on things like race/class.
What I mean is that in old-school D&D you would lean on the assumptions of a player character's race or class far more than you would on their ability scores. For example if a Elf Magic-User found some magical script on a wall, we would assume a lot more about what that character would know about magical scripts based on the fact that they were an Elf and a Magic-User than we would based on whatever their Intelligence or Wisdom scores where. You wouldn't bother with checks, the 18 Intelligence Fighter would be presumed to know nothing, while the 12 Intelligence Elf-Magic user would be assumed to be an expert on the subject. No one thought that was weird, that made sense in the context of the game. Archetypes and stereotypes carried far more weight than your attribute scores. A high intelligence wasn't see as this universal "I know everything because I'm so smart" stat... Who had high intelligence, meaning what race and class you were, was far more important and said a lot more about what you knew and didn't know.
All stats were treated in this manner.
This was an important element of the game because there were no skills or skill checks. This was not an oversight, but a very intentional design. The goal of the game was to resolve scenes with role-playing conversations, not through mechanical dice results.
Even when non-skill proficiencies were introduced, it didn't really change the gaming culture. The way NWP's were described, these weren't really skills, they were more like backgrounds. If you had Cooking skill, it wasn't because we would roll to see how good you can cook or how good the food was. The point of the cooking skill was to say something about your characters background and history prior to becoming an adventure and giving them some role-playing flavor and you would lean on that far more than you would lean on cooking skill checks. Meaning, DM's would make a lot of assumptions about your character just for having the cooking NWP and that was the point of it.
Modern gaming has gotten away from this "approach", but more than that, modern gaming objects to this approach and the logic is, as you describe, that people view the stats and skills on their character sheet and believe that this MUST be associated to the character definitions. They give virtually no weight to the story elements of a players race or class, those are just the sources of powers and abilities.. .but for some reason if you have a 10 Intelligence score the DM insists that you act dumb at the table, because "that's in character" and if you have an 18, it doesn't matter that your a Half-Orc Barbarian, you are "a genius".
The point I'm making is that, the only way you can understand this perspective is you experienced it and I think a lot of people talk about old school gaming and old school gaming definitions without that experience and these conversations get silly fast.
For example, no one back then would have thought of a game session that involved crawling through a dungeon and fight monsters as "Hack and Slash"... but that is because the act of dungeon crawling (which I described earlier) was way more involved than just rolling dice and slicing through monsters. There was so much more to it than that, but of course modern gamers need to have superiority here so we ignore all that.
Classic Modules were not "combat-focused", it only appears that way if you read the modules and ignore everything else about how the game was actually played and make assumptions about how you would do it in the context of modern gaming.
Hack n Slash, basically is a way to describe a combat focused style verse a story focused game. While many modules were very much combat focused with crazy dungeons, there were also NPCs, and peaceful places to hang out.
The fact that this is dichotomy is assumed to be the only ways to play D&D is part of the problem with modern D&D. If you look at for example the Tomb of Horrors (even the updated 5e version) it is focused neither on combat nor story, it is basically a puzzle game. Sure there is combat in it but most of that combat is trivial for characters of appropriate level and most can be avoided if you play smart & careful; the story is for the players to create, there's basically none built into the dungeon. The choices aren't "combat focused" vs "story focused", you could have a fantasy TTPRG that is "puzzle focused", "exploration/travel focused", "faction/keep-building focused", "survival focused", or "intrigue/mystery focused". For example, if we took the Curse of Strad module and significantly up the power of the enemies so that the players have very little chance to defeat them in direct combat then it would make a good exploration + survival + intrigue game, one where the party must find and recruit the right allies and infiltrate and sabotage enemies without drawing the attention of Strad. Tyranny of Dragons could have been a faction/keep-building game where the party must first build a city able to defend itself from dragons, then build a faction to rival the cult of the dragon.
Hack n Slash, basically is a way to describe a combat focused style verse a story focused game. While many modules were very much combat focused with crazy dungeons, there were also NPCs, and peaceful places to hang out.
The fact that this is dichotomy is assumed to be the only ways to play D&D is part of the problem with modern D&D. If you look at for example the Tomb of Horrors (even the updated 5e version) it is focused neither on combat nor story, it is basically a puzzle game. Sure there is combat in it but most of that combat is trivial for characters of appropriate level and most can be avoided if you play smart & careful; the story is for the players to create, there's basically none built into the dungeon. The choices aren't "combat focused" vs "story focused", you could have a fantasy TTPRG that is "puzzle focused", "exploration/travel focused", "faction/keep-building focused", "survival focused", or "intrigue/mystery focused". For example, if we took the Curse of Strad module and significantly up the power of the enemies so that the players have very little chance to defeat them in direct combat then it would make a good exploration + survival + intrigue game, one where the party must find and recruit the right allies and infiltrate and sabotage enemies without drawing the attention of Strad. Tyranny of Dragons could have been a faction/keep-building game where the party must first build a city able to defend itself from dragons, then build a faction to rival the cult of the dragon.
Fully agree. Modern gamers look at old modules like Keep on the Borderland or Temple of Elemental Evil and they don't understand how these modules make every top 10 modules of all time list you can find. After all, they are just Dungeon Crawls right?
I honestly sometimes run out of ways to try to explain it to people but... yeah, it's about everything except that. Context of how you play matters so much and modern gamers, especially those who have only ever played 5e, can't imagine a game about Dungeon Crawling that is not about combat.
Feats are very ingrained in 5e. Your concerns about 5.24 is almost word for word what I said about 4.0. Early MMOs had very distinct classes, but WoW made every class feel much the same with minimal differences. D&D 4.0 was designed in the shadow of the immense popularity of WoW. 5.24 feels very similar to the 4.0 rules in several ways. It's hard to guess, but I don't think banning feats will get the job done.
Banning multi-classing will probably give you more distinction between classes as you can't just dip a class to get all the cool stuff.
Here's the thing, feats weren't ingrained in my early 5e experience. In fact it wasn't until I was forced to shift format due to the events of 2020, that I first saw how essential players seemed to see feats. Now granted it's been a LONG time since I played 4e, but 5.24 really doesn't feel similar to 4e in my opinion. The ranger for one hadn't been diluted by the Druid, nor had the fighter been diluted with magics. In 4e, if you wanted an out and out martial...you could have one because the fighter hadn't been split with the Monk, rather the Monk was a subclass effectively with Kensei Paragon. If you wanted a half martial, half nature spellcaster - you had the ranger.
Now, yes 4e had feats, but nowhere near as poorly designed as 5e which effectively decimates the purpose of classes. From memory, most of the feats that diluted classes were locked behind pre-requisites that made them more of a real choice. 5e shot instead down the path of giving players the ability to undermine the whole point of the classes in the game. Maybe I'm misremembering or looking with rose-coloured glasses but I don't see 4e reflected in 5.5e.
And for the record feats aren't inherently a bad thing. Pathfinder 2e absolutely smashes it out of the park with their feats. So much so it makes the rules team at WotC look like clowns for how badly they've treated game balance with the feats and suchlike.
Feats are very ingrained in 5e. Your concerns about 5.24 is almost word for word what I said about 4.0. Early MMOs had very distinct classes, but WoW made every class feel much the same with minimal differences. D&D 4.0 was designed in the shadow of the immense popularity of WoW. 5.24 feels very similar to the 4.0 rules in several ways. It's hard to guess, but I don't think banning feats will get the job done.
Banning multi-classing will probably give you more distinction between classes as you can't just dip a class to get all the cool stuff.
Here's the thing, feats weren't ingrained in my early 5e experience. In fact it wasn't until I was forced to shift format due to the events of 2020, that I first saw how essential players seemed to see feats. Now granted it's been a LONG time since I played 4e, but 5.24 really doesn't feel similar to 4e in my opinion. The ranger for one hadn't been diluted by the Druid, nor had the fighter been diluted with magics. In 4e, if you wanted an out and out martial...you could have one because the fighter hadn't been split with the Monk, rather the Monk was a subclass effectively with Kensei Paragon. If you wanted a half martial, half nature spellcaster - you had the ranger.
Now, yes 4e had feats, but nowhere near as poorly designed as 5e which effectively decimates the purpose of classes. From memory, most of the feats that diluted classes were locked behind pre-requisites that made them more of a real choice. 5e shot instead down the path of giving players the ability to undermine the whole point of the classes in the game. Maybe I'm misremembering or looking with rose-coloured glasses but I don't see 4e reflected in 5.5e.
And for the record feats aren't inherently a bad thing. Pathfinder 2e absolutely smashes it out of the park with their feats. So much so it makes the rules team at WotC look like clowns for how badly they've treated game balance with the feats and suchlike.
Just curious but what is it about feats that you feel is so poorly designed? Like, can you offer an example? Not trying to bust your chops, honestly just curious.
Feats in 5e are by no means ingrained, at least in the 2014 rules -- yes, the ones people actually take are quite potent, but they're also very expensive so frequently not taking them is a sensible option. They're also very different from 4e feats, because the feats in 2014 that people actually take do big important things, whereas feats in 4e provided small static bonuses -- you could probably remove feats entirely from 4e and, other than high level characters being a bit weaker, gameplay would not be appreciably changed. 3e feats were more significant than 4e feats but less so than 5e feats.
On the OPs point: I doubt it will make any difference. Feats let you optimize your characters for specific use cases, but they're additive with classes, if rangers feel like they don't have a reason for existence it's probably because the base class is badly designed, not because of feats.
The fundamental issues and the reason feats are being re-implemented into Revised 5e, after being removed in original is to compensate for the fact that the traditional roles related to traditional D&D activities no longer exist. It was the same reason feats were added in 3e.
Feats are basically trying to make up for the fact that in a class system, like D&D 5e, in which the classes serve no purpose in the game, distract players from that fact.
A good example already brought up is the Ranger. Why has the Ranger been worthless since 3rd edition? Because tracking, wilderness survival, nature lore, and all the things associated with being a Ranger have been functionally removed from the game as a worthy pursuit or activity. Meaning... anyone can do it, you don't need to be a Ranger. As such the Ranger serves this weird quasi-alternative to a fighter, but there is no reason for anyone to say at any point "oh we are going in the forest, we need to find a Ranger". The Ranger can literally help in no way while in a Forest... He has no special skills, abilities or anything that would make him any more important than a Wizard. In fact, Wizard spells can do everything the traditional Ranger could do with magic... much much more efficiently.
People don't like Archetypes, but I think its because they don't understand that fundamentally, without them, most of the classes are kind of useless. You pick the one that does the most damage, this is the only thing in modern D&D that has any value at all. Finding, Disabling Traps, Healing, Tracking, Knowledge of various types of lores.... not of these things have anything to do with classes or archetypes. You can make a Fighter and know about disabling traps as good as a Rogue. Thats the way the game is designed now and its why there is this endless cycle of debates and various ways the game tries to distract you in the absence of a sensible meta design, like feats.
So no, you don't need feats for anything, you won't "break" the game in any way if you remove them, but what are you going to offer the players to distract from the fact that all of their character choices like race and class are a completely meaningless aesthetic? How are you going to keep them from doing the DPS math to figure out which class are Tier 1 and which are Tier 4?
Feats at least offer some cosmetic choices that make the players feel like "hey, I'm a character with a purpose, not just a death machine". Feats in a way bring back some archetypical duties to the game as you can become "better" than everyone else at one thing and that one thing might sort of become an archetypical principle for you in that adventuring party. Maybe... I think it would depend on the feat.
The fundamental problem is that balance of any kind in a game with strong mechanical differentiation between PCs is impossible at any scope greater than a single table. It requires making assumptions about how the game will be played that can't hold universally. 4e is the closest we're ever likely to see, and they did it by both reducing the mechanical differentiation, and by limiting the scope of the game.
Also, "evolving into a hack-and-slash"? That's D&D's natural environment. At the baseline (nobody optimizing) level of play, all the classes and subclasses are good enough that players can reasonably feel like they're contributing. (Until the casters take over at high levels.) I'm playing a four elements monk in one game, and I don't think I'm much less effective in combat than the gloomstalker ranger, and I understand how crap four elements monk is.
They can't do it all at once, and they do it worse than the more specialized characters. The typical party role for jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none characters is backstop -- they do what needs support in the moment. Aside perhaps for some optimized-to-hell-and-back build in a party of normals, they can't dominate everywhere.
I would argue that every rule is optional. If you can make it work and it is balanced how you guys like to play do it. If you play with it for a while and you don't like how it works. Change it. This goes with feats, multi classing anything. only allowing ASi instead of feats SHOULD balance to be pretty much the same as feats. Thats the idea. If you don't feel it does change it
I think the one issue you might have is the human fighter, who if you only do ASI, depending on how you determine ability scores could easily get significantly higher than everyone else. You would need to decide what to do with the human's extra origin feat.
No it isn't. Just look at the old rules, character levelling up was based on treasure recovered not "XP" from fighting monsters, and many were as fragile as paper so combat was routinely a deathly threat best avoided if possible. Or try some of the old-school dungeons updated in 5e in Tales of the Yawning Portal. Combat isn't a major feature of them, and is often avoidable if you play smart.
Hack-and-slash is what a lot of current players want sure, because they're coming from the digital RPG world where the vast majority of the game is fighting mooks. But it's definitely not the "natural" state of D&D.
They definitely can, I've seen them do it because of the poor design of spells such that 3rd level spells remain viable even into tier 4. Pure Hexblade isn't so bad since the Warlock spellcasting is much more limited, but most multiclassed Gishes absolutely dominate in a way that is unfun for everyone else who isn't also doing it.
I would like this to be true about D&D and in fact, 5th edition design was very much geared towards modularity so that DM's could customize the game to suit their playstyle. In a sense, the hope for 5e was that it would be designed in a way that would make every type of playstyle possible and easy to implement, but it simply has not been the case at all.
In fact, many of us hoped to see Wizards of the Coast address different playstyles in splat books to facilitate this because 5e design space is not easy to work with and let's face it, most DM's are not great designers and though we know what we want aesthetically, it's not always as easy as you suggest to just change/add and remove rules without breaking the game. Wizards of the Coast designers, at least the old guard, all know what these different playstyles are because they have been around D&D for decades and they could have done a lot more to support them.
None of that happened and while I will agree that you can theoretically alter, add and remove any rules, because 5e is a complex design space and the impact of rules alterations, especially heavier ones that would be required to make certain playstyles work is a lot more difficult than you would think, at least for me personally I found it impossible to work with. I never managed to alter 5e and shape it into the playstyle I prefer and I ultimately went back to older systems for my D&D games.
It was only much later in 5e's lifespan when proper 3rd party designers took up the torch and showed us how to twist 5e into alternative playstyles. We were quite fortunate we have the OSR and companies like MCDM. I think people who complain about 5e often forget this, that there is a world of 3rd party supplements and after 10 years of 5e, while Wizards of the Coast never put out anything official, most if not all playstyle have been addressed by 3rd party supplements.
You want Dungeon Crawler and Survival, you have Shadowdark.
You want faster, lighter rules for 5e, you have Nimble
You want kingdom dominion and mass combat, you have Kingdoms and Warfare
etc.. etc.. So yeah, I don't think its quite as simple as you describe but at this point, the work has been done by the community and 3rd party publishers. I think you would be pretty hard-pressed to name a playstyle you like, which hasn't been fully explored and covered by 5e at this point with 3rd party supplements.
Yeah I sort of agee and disagree with this. I suppose it depends on your definition of "Hack and Slash" and perspective on the game and what era of D&D you are referring to. Clasic B/X and 1st edition AD&D era gaming was very much about Dungeon Crawling and Survival, that was the core game and fighting monsters was very natural part of the practical execution of the game. You are right that fighting was a bad idea and you certainly avoided it, in fact you spend a lot of time preparing for, planning and thinking about how not to fight, but to suggest that the game was something "grander" than a simple Dungeon Crawler and Survival game would be an incredibly false statement. We certainly took it more seriously and we "played out" the game far more than people do today.
That is the thing that was very different, the definition of role-playing. I mean, 1e had no skill systems, no feats systems...your character was some ability scores, basic character attributes and maybe some spells. Anything you wanted to do in the game, boiled down to a role-playing conversation. You want to search a room? There was no skill check, the DM described a room and you told him where you looked and how you looked for stuff. You want to know if someone is lying... you had to decide based on a conversation with the DM playing the NPC in character.
So the game had a much higher degree of "role-playing" in the sense that there were very few mechanics that circumvented it. This put players into a habit of thinking outside of their character sheet and its one of the main "conflicts" between modern and old-school gamers so far as definition of what role-playing is and their understanding of "how" you play the game of D&D. And so we have these weird discussions about whether or not D&D was a Hack and Slash game or a game about "fighting monsters".
Back in the 1e AD&D days you could go multiple sessions without ever getting into a fight, that was quite normal but its only because we literally played every single thing out in character. There were very few circumvented events with "mechanics" that got you out of stuff. Like, just shopping for gear in town could suck up an entire session and that was because what gear you had was of vital importance, you spent a long time planning a trip into a dungeon, doing research, buying gear, figuring out what is the safest route to get there. There was a ton of meta gaming.
But it was about going into that dungeon, getting treasure which was guarded by monsters. I mean, in practice that was the game... it didn't feel that way because of how we played it, the attention we placed on preparation and how we very actively role-played everything out... but yeah... if you skip all that and just look at "what is the game about"... it was in fact, hack n slash, it was just a very elaborate way to do it.
Quite often however because of all this planning, research and caution, you could go into a dungeon, spend days there and never fight a single thing because you produced so much useful "utility" with plans and gear. So yeah it was a very odd hack and slash game because the point of it was very specifically to avoid the hacking and slashing. The question is, would modern gamers quantify all that as "role-playing".... by modern definition, no I don't think they would.
In either case I can understand why modern gamers accuse old school D&D of being hack and slash, because it was and old school gamers denying it, because it ALSO wasn't. Essentially, both are accurate statements. Hacking and Slashing in 1e AD&D was what would happen if you failed in the planning and preparation stage and ... failing happened as often as succeeding, so wether the game was Hack and Slash was quite dependent on how well the players were doing or not.
This is also where the concept of "skilled" role-players came from. D&D players back then would sort of grade each other on how good they were at the table, how well they did this little "prep and plan" dance and how well they executed those plans. It was not uncommon for people to say "oh yeah, Bob is really good at D&D" and they weren't referring to talented "role-player" as we know people to be today, that would be a reference to actual skill at playing D&D. That skill was valued and TSR even had official competitive D&D tournaments back then where players with such skill could be tested and win awards for it.
This also came mixed in with leveled-up characters. Like I recall conversations like "Hey Bob, I have 3 new players, how about you take your 5th level Ranger and take them into the Caves of Chaos and show them how to play". That would not be a reference to teaching them "D&D rules", it was to show them how to play D&D well, how to plan, prep, how to avoid getting killed. It was a literal skill you would teach new players.
I think we have different definitions of "hack n slash", what I mean by "hack and slash" is that the fun aspect of the game is combat so combat is something you want to do as a player. Thus in a dungeon the majority of rooms have monsters in it to fight and most monsters just attack the party on sight. Exploration is devalued because sneaking past monsters is considered undesirable because then you don't get to fight them. Similarly, the over world is chock full of monsters that will fight to the death rather than run away because again the game treat fighting as something the players want to do, so those wolves running away after you hit them once, which is totally realistic, is undesirable because it is considered less fun.
Going into dungeons is not required nor sufficient for a game to be hack-and-slash. For instance the Witcher 3 is pretty hack & slash-y despite it having very few dungeons in it, because preparation is largely unnecessary, and basically anywhere you go there are monsters to kill, even in towns there are fist-fights you can engage in, monsters to find & fight, and sometimes random thieves/bandits that attack you. You'd have to try really hard to play it for more than 30 minutes without engaging in some kind of combat.
In contrast Zelda Breath of the Wild is less hack & slash-y and has more exploration focus, for instance you might need to make appropriate clothes, or prepare food before journeying somewhere, often you don't want to fight all the mooks to save your weapons for the biggest enemies and alternative solutions like throwing rocks on them from above are present and rewarding to use. Though enemies constantly regenerate so there is definitely some hack & slash elements.
Skyrim is a super hack-and-slash dungeon-focused game. Almost everything will attack you - crabs, wolves, rats, walruses - enemies respawn all the time so you always have stuff to fight, and nearly every room in the dungeons have some kind of enemy to fight and most of the rooms are so small you can't just sneak past them and almost every quest you get involves killing something - even the Thieve's guild quest-line largely involves killing people. The "puzzles" are incredibly simple and pretty boring, they exist simply to give a breather between fights not to be interesting in themselves.
Baldur's Gate 3 is less so - many quests don't involve fighting or don't require fighting, enemies don't respawn so eventually there is no fighting left to do, and characters and dialogue are much more in depth than say Skyrim giving you other things to do that are fun than just fighting.
In terms of TTRPGs, Call of Cuthulu is the most anti-hack & slash you can get, combat is something you do not want to do in that game because you will just die. Combat also isn't that interesting, you get very few items or abilities designed for combat. Pathfinder 2e is moderately hack-and-slash, there's lots of mechanics for stuff other than combat, but at least in IME most of the adventure modules have a lot of combat in them and a lot of the character abilities are combat-oriented. However, combat can be much more deadly than 5e so it isn't necessarily something you just want to jump into all the time. D&D 5e 2014 was similar to Pathfinder 2e but with fewer mechanics on the DM's side when it came to non-combat encounters. Whereas D&D 5e 2024 looks to be much more hack & slash as non-combat abilities seem to be exclusively skill checks, absolutely everything else is combat-oriented. But especially the older (pre-5e) adventures don't focus that much on combat but more on puzzle solving and exploration.
Old school D&D is accused of being "hack and slash" by people who don't understand what that word really means and think there are only 2 options for games: hack & slash vs narrative focus. Which is flat out wrong, but is understandable because most digital fantasy games fall into those two categories. However, outside of fantasy RPG games there are all kinds of different types of digital games - puzzle games like Myst, strategy games like Xcom, stealth games like Dishonoured, survival games, city builder games, sim games etc... etc...
I don't really think it's that people don't understand, it's that Hack n' Slash is not a word, its a term and it does not have a clear definition, even though you're basically claiming that there is. Your definition is no more or less accurate than anyone else's. But thats just semantics.
What I do know is that when people accuse old-school D&D of being Hack N' Slash, the definition they ARE using is that it was a dungeon crawler where you go into dungeons, fight monsters and take their treasure. That's the core premise of the accusation, its how that is defined in that context. Not saying that IS THE definition of Hack and Slash, its THE definition people are using.
In that context, it's pretty accurate. Kind of....
Like I said, how you play D&D differs wildly from table to table, but 1e AD&D had rules like 1 gold = 1 XP, the purpose of that rule was to be a meta abstraction. Meaning that if you wanted to advance in the game, you needed XP, if you wanted XP you need to get gold, the only place to get gold was in dungeons and dungeons were filled with monsters.
Did everyone play this way? I doubt it... but, it was the game, it was the rules, this was the design, this is a fact. Like, if your definition of hack and slash is a dungeon crawler where you fight monsters and take their treasure, that is the single most accurate way to describe 1st edition AD&D that exists. It was literally and very objectively the core rule of the game. 1 gold = 1 XP, everything else that happens in the game revolves around that one rule.
Feats are very ingrained in 5e. Your concerns about 5.24 is almost word for word what I said about 4.0. Early MMOs had very distinct classes, but WoW made every class feel much the same with minimal differences. D&D 4.0 was designed in the shadow of the immense popularity of WoW. 5.24 feels very similar to the 4.0 rules in several ways. It's hard to guess, but I don't think banning feats will get the job done.
Banning multi-classing will probably give you more distinction between classes as you can't just dip a class to get all the cool stuff.
Hack n Slash, basically is a way to describe a combat focused style verse a story focused game. While many modules were very much combat focused with crazy dungeons, there were also NPCs, and peaceful places to hang out. Plus the modules were mostly small short adventures with levels in between that provided ample opportunity for story telling. Plus some of the modules were very focused on the story aspect, as well as NPC interaction. Mysteries were common challenges as well.
Still owning many 1e modules, and looking at them side by side with some 5e modules, I'm not sure we have moved away from combat focus. While the GP for XP mechanic was flawed, it technically allowed leveling from operating a business or collecting taxes from your barony. While milestone leveling is an official option now, its not the standard rules, and many of the modules don't even mention milestone leveling.
Adding social skills like persuasion and deception provides some good mechanics for 4e style skill challenges, they also mean the players should stay silent and let the "face" PC do the talking. This doesn't exactly result in more dynamic role playing than the old system where CHA was a dump stat that didn't have official game mechanics to support the notion that high CHA PCs should be more persuasive.
Like so many things in life, we tend to assume our personal experiences are representative of the larger group, rather than trying to do a statistical study with a significant sample size. In this case I don't even know if it would be possible to get accurate results if a person was willing to invest a large sum of money into the research.
We don't need research, if you want to know what gaming was like in the 80's and 90's, ask someone about it who doesn't have an agenda or point to make. There really isn't much dispute among gamers from that era about what D&D was, how it was played and what the experience was like. Sure we didn't have exactly the same experience but we were all using the same rule system so much like it is today, there was a foundation for the game, gaming culture and traditions and many things were simply true for the majority of people. The issue is that modern gaming culture, as well as old school gaming culture, have agendas, there are certain things that "have to be made true", otherwise the superiority of old school or modern gaming culture as the case may be is put into question and ... we can't have that.
Case in point, not trying to bust your chops, but this is simply objectively false.
Charisma was not a dump stat and no one who played D&D in the 80's or 90's version of the game would say that with a straight face. Charisma was actually one of the more important stats as it related to hiring henchmen and followers and their loyalty. Having a good entourage of followers and henchmen as well as experts back at base was absolutely vital to a successful adventuring party. Charisma also determined the initial reaction during encounters of opposing sides which was critical to avoiding fights during random encounters where who you met and how they felt about you was determined randomly.
Though I think the bigger point here is that one of the biggest changes between/differences in old-school D&D culture and modern-day gaming culture is the associations and levels of importance between Ability Scores and role-playing assumptions based on things like race/class.
What I mean is that in old-school D&D you would lean on the assumptions of a player character's race or class far more than you would on their ability scores. For example if a Elf Magic-User found some magical script on a wall, we would assume a lot more about what that character would know about magical scripts based on the fact that they were an Elf and a Magic-User than we would based on whatever their Intelligence or Wisdom scores where. You wouldn't bother with checks, the 18 Intelligence Fighter would be presumed to know nothing, while the 12 Intelligence Elf-Magic user would be assumed to be an expert on the subject. No one thought that was weird, that made sense in the context of the game. Archetypes and stereotypes carried far more weight than your attribute scores. A high intelligence wasn't see as this universal "I know everything because I'm so smart" stat... Who had high intelligence, meaning what race and class you were, was far more important and said a lot more about what you knew and didn't know.
All stats were treated in this manner.
This was an important element of the game because there were no skills or skill checks. This was not an oversight, but a very intentional design. The goal of the game was to resolve scenes with role-playing conversations, not through mechanical dice results.
Even when non-skill proficiencies were introduced, it didn't really change the gaming culture. The way NWP's were described, these weren't really skills, they were more like backgrounds. If you had Cooking skill, it wasn't because we would roll to see how good you can cook or how good the food was. The point of the cooking skill was to say something about your characters background and history prior to becoming an adventure and giving them some role-playing flavor and you would lean on that far more than you would lean on cooking skill checks. Meaning, DM's would make a lot of assumptions about your character just for having the cooking NWP and that was the point of it.
Modern gaming has gotten away from this "approach", but more than that, modern gaming objects to this approach and the logic is, as you describe, that people view the stats and skills on their character sheet and believe that this MUST be associated to the character definitions. They give virtually no weight to the story elements of a players race or class, those are just the sources of powers and abilities.. .but for some reason if you have a 10 Intelligence score the DM insists that you act dumb at the table, because "that's in character" and if you have an 18, it doesn't matter that your a Half-Orc Barbarian, you are "a genius".
The point I'm making is that, the only way you can understand this perspective is you experienced it and I think a lot of people talk about old school gaming and old school gaming definitions without that experience and these conversations get silly fast.
For example, no one back then would have thought of a game session that involved crawling through a dungeon and fight monsters as "Hack and Slash"... but that is because the act of dungeon crawling (which I described earlier) was way more involved than just rolling dice and slicing through monsters. There was so much more to it than that, but of course modern gamers need to have superiority here so we ignore all that.
Classic Modules were not "combat-focused", it only appears that way if you read the modules and ignore everything else about how the game was actually played and make assumptions about how you would do it in the context of modern gaming.
The fact that this is dichotomy is assumed to be the only ways to play D&D is part of the problem with modern D&D. If you look at for example the Tomb of Horrors (even the updated 5e version) it is focused neither on combat nor story, it is basically a puzzle game. Sure there is combat in it but most of that combat is trivial for characters of appropriate level and most can be avoided if you play smart & careful; the story is for the players to create, there's basically none built into the dungeon. The choices aren't "combat focused" vs "story focused", you could have a fantasy TTPRG that is "puzzle focused", "exploration/travel focused", "faction/keep-building focused", "survival focused", or "intrigue/mystery focused". For example, if we took the Curse of Strad module and significantly up the power of the enemies so that the players have very little chance to defeat them in direct combat then it would make a good exploration + survival + intrigue game, one where the party must find and recruit the right allies and infiltrate and sabotage enemies without drawing the attention of Strad. Tyranny of Dragons could have been a faction/keep-building game where the party must first build a city able to defend itself from dragons, then build a faction to rival the cult of the dragon.
Fully agree. Modern gamers look at old modules like Keep on the Borderland or Temple of Elemental Evil and they don't understand how these modules make every top 10 modules of all time list you can find. After all, they are just Dungeon Crawls right?
I honestly sometimes run out of ways to try to explain it to people but... yeah, it's about everything except that. Context of how you play matters so much and modern gamers, especially those who have only ever played 5e, can't imagine a game about Dungeon Crawling that is not about combat.
Here's the thing, feats weren't ingrained in my early 5e experience. In fact it wasn't until I was forced to shift format due to the events of 2020, that I first saw how essential players seemed to see feats. Now granted it's been a LONG time since I played 4e, but 5.24 really doesn't feel similar to 4e in my opinion. The ranger for one hadn't been diluted by the Druid, nor had the fighter been diluted with magics. In 4e, if you wanted an out and out martial...you could have one because the fighter hadn't been split with the Monk, rather the Monk was a subclass effectively with Kensei Paragon. If you wanted a half martial, half nature spellcaster - you had the ranger.
Now, yes 4e had feats, but nowhere near as poorly designed as 5e which effectively decimates the purpose of classes. From memory, most of the feats that diluted classes were locked behind pre-requisites that made them more of a real choice. 5e shot instead down the path of giving players the ability to undermine the whole point of the classes in the game. Maybe I'm misremembering or looking with rose-coloured glasses but I don't see 4e reflected in 5.5e.
And for the record feats aren't inherently a bad thing. Pathfinder 2e absolutely smashes it out of the park with their feats. So much so it makes the rules team at WotC look like clowns for how badly they've treated game balance with the feats and suchlike.
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Just curious but what is it about feats that you feel is so poorly designed? Like, can you offer an example? Not trying to bust your chops, honestly just curious.
Feats in 5e are by no means ingrained, at least in the 2014 rules -- yes, the ones people actually take are quite potent, but they're also very expensive so frequently not taking them is a sensible option. They're also very different from 4e feats, because the feats in 2014 that people actually take do big important things, whereas feats in 4e provided small static bonuses -- you could probably remove feats entirely from 4e and, other than high level characters being a bit weaker, gameplay would not be appreciably changed. 3e feats were more significant than 4e feats but less so than 5e feats.
On the OPs point: I doubt it will make any difference. Feats let you optimize your characters for specific use cases, but they're additive with classes, if rangers feel like they don't have a reason for existence it's probably because the base class is badly designed, not because of feats.
The fundamental issues and the reason feats are being re-implemented into Revised 5e, after being removed in original is to compensate for the fact that the traditional roles related to traditional D&D activities no longer exist. It was the same reason feats were added in 3e.
Feats are basically trying to make up for the fact that in a class system, like D&D 5e, in which the classes serve no purpose in the game, distract players from that fact.
A good example already brought up is the Ranger. Why has the Ranger been worthless since 3rd edition? Because tracking, wilderness survival, nature lore, and all the things associated with being a Ranger have been functionally removed from the game as a worthy pursuit or activity. Meaning... anyone can do it, you don't need to be a Ranger. As such the Ranger serves this weird quasi-alternative to a fighter, but there is no reason for anyone to say at any point "oh we are going in the forest, we need to find a Ranger". The Ranger can literally help in no way while in a Forest... He has no special skills, abilities or anything that would make him any more important than a Wizard. In fact, Wizard spells can do everything the traditional Ranger could do with magic... much much more efficiently.
People don't like Archetypes, but I think its because they don't understand that fundamentally, without them, most of the classes are kind of useless. You pick the one that does the most damage, this is the only thing in modern D&D that has any value at all. Finding, Disabling Traps, Healing, Tracking, Knowledge of various types of lores.... not of these things have anything to do with classes or archetypes. You can make a Fighter and know about disabling traps as good as a Rogue. Thats the way the game is designed now and its why there is this endless cycle of debates and various ways the game tries to distract you in the absence of a sensible meta design, like feats.
So no, you don't need feats for anything, you won't "break" the game in any way if you remove them, but what are you going to offer the players to distract from the fact that all of their character choices like race and class are a completely meaningless aesthetic? How are you going to keep them from doing the DPS math to figure out which class are Tier 1 and which are Tier 4?
Feats at least offer some cosmetic choices that make the players feel like "hey, I'm a character with a purpose, not just a death machine". Feats in a way bring back some archetypical duties to the game as you can become "better" than everyone else at one thing and that one thing might sort of become an archetypical principle for you in that adventuring party. Maybe... I think it would depend on the feat.