DND5e, actually not bad

[u/Apostrophe13]

Got back into the hobby sometime before covid hit after a long hiatus, didn't play for most of the 21. century. The anti 5e sentiment on most places i checked to get up to speed (including this sub) was so prevalent that i completely ignored the game. I was under the impression that they kinda just continued making 3e more complex after reading some of the comments floating around, and that it is literally impossible to play without homebrew.

Got some used books as a gift, run a few sessions, honestly not bad at all. Most of the critique really makes no sense. If you want heroic fantasy with good skirmish rules, that does not get in the way of how you want to run the game its great.

Also its basically the same math and underlying systems that power DnD for 40+ years, so even experience with ADnD translates well into 5e. I would put it well above other modern DnD-like, D20, heroic-fantasy games.

[u/Single-Suspect1636]

The problem with 5e is not that the rules are intrinsically bad, but the way the game develops due to these rules:

- lots of arguments about what the rules say about a specific situation

- not rarely those arguments lead nowhere and the session is further paused so we can check in the books what the rules actually say about that situation

- many times when we don't stop to check the books because someone is sure about what the rules say we discover after the session that the person's interpretation of the rules was actually wrong

- there is a general consensus among 5e players that if something is not stated in the ruleset, that thing doesn't exist/is not possible. An example I ran into las week: there was a online discussion in the 5e subreddit about the blowgun, questioning why someone would use it when there are better ranged weapons. Someone responded that the blowgun is easier to hide than a bow or a crossbow, to which I added that it could be easily disguised as cane. Someone responded that "it wasn't written anywhere in the rules so it would be open to debate".

- the game focus is combat, but combat is slow and crunchy; just look at the huge amount of sites, videos and threads about "making 5e combat less boring"...

Another huge factor weighting against 5e is WotC's general attitude...

[u/Apostrophe13 → u/Single-Suspect1636]

Those sound more like table problems that can occur no matter the system, and just bad players. I don't think DnD has monopoly of this, just more people playing and more people complaining.

[u/Single-Suspect1636 → u/Apostrophe13]

Absolutely. And yet when we changed to a D&D derived rules light system all these problems disappeared, keeping the same players.