Quote from: Christopher Brady;1016876Pretty much.  That 'high level' usually varies, but it's always there.

IME 3e/PF totally breaks at high level, and is unique in that regard. Very high level 4e gets drearily slow and favours the PCs, but is not truly broken the way 3e/PF is.

Pre-3e and 5e have a few issues at high level, but remain perfectly playable. With high level 5e I particularly love how I can start all new PCs at 8th level and they can adventure alongside 13th & 17th level veterans, and still contribute. I think it's the only edition where that is really true.

Quote from: danskmacabre;1016888I don't really like feats much, which is partly because of Pathfinder and the horrendous amount of horrible and broken feats.
Still, there's not many feats in 5e, so I can live with it.

If you're GMing and dislike feats, I strongly recommend you not use that option. I use feats in tabletop game but not in online game, and both approaches work fine.

Quote from: Voros;1016869I'd be interested in trying 5e with the Feats stripped out to see how it plays.

I've done this, and it's fine. The biggest difference is you don't have casters with nearly unstoppable concentration due to grabbing War Caster and possibly Resilient. In retrospect the caster-focused feats have the biggest impact on the game, so I'm only allowing a small selection of feats than in my experience don't really swing things much (mostly weapon & armor mastery).

Quote from: Doom;10168725e does have some serious issues, particularly some not well thought-out spells and abilities, and the RAW it's just about impossible to kill characters past 7th level or so unless you go super overboard with massive area of effect abilities.

I've found the fights get pretty swingy at high levels (not as bad as 3.x). I recently nearly TPK'd a 14th-level party with an adult dragon. 3 of the 4 were down (1 dead outright), and the warlock was down to 6 hp...then landed 3 successive eldritch blasts, one a critical hit, which was barely enough to kill the dragon. It was a real adrenaline-pumping experience for the players.

However, I've significantly changed the way I DM based on the OSR. I make very little attempt to "balance" encounters, having come to the conclusion that the DMG encounter guidelines are specifically intended not to seriously threaten the party. I populate things with monsters that more or less seem kind of reasonable and let the players just have at it, and fighting isn't the only solution.  I've also stopped trying to play "fair" wth the monsters and just have them try to kick the shit out of the players. If you get surrounded by goblin archers, first guy they're going to shoot is that skinny, bearded dude in the bathrobe, so you'd better think fast.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1016863As for myself, I rather like 5e.  It takes bits and pieces I like from all the editions I've played and mixes them up in a cohesive mulch.  Even better, I can houserule this little wench to the gills.  She just giggles and likes it!

Yeah, the system really isn't very fragile. I've added Reaction & Morale tables, hireling rules, follower rules, gold for xp, domain management, and other stuff that I rip straight out of 1e and the Rules Cyclopedia, and it works great.

We finished off our D&D playtest campaign and waited for the MM and DMG release before we started 5E.  So only now hitting the 3 year mark.  I've since started a second group with it.  Both campaigns are leisurely affairs, with people missing sessions frequently.  In the first, we'll have some characters hit 9th level next time we meet.

Pros:  

- "Bounded Accuracy" does what it was designed to do, and does it cleanly and clearly.  That's about 90% of what you can ask out of such an underlying piece of a system.  
- The sharp limits, slow acquisition, and generally toned down nature of magic items may have been done as part of bounded accuracy, but I like it for its own sake, too.  It was my one repeated comment on the playtest packets that magic should be so limited.  Not least because it means you can ignore it if you want, which in turn means you can include whatever wacky flavor items you want with minimal disruption.
- Multi-classing appears to work well enough, but I can't say for sure.  Because it's also very unnecessary due to the way the backgrounds and class paths work.  I've yet to see a mutli-class character in play--or even have a player want to do something that requires it.  
- Backgrounds and paths are both great on their own, but it's the way they integrate together and the rest of the system that makes them shine.
- You don't need anything but the core rules to run multiple campaigns for hundreds of hours.  I got the starter set for the adventure, and was glad I did.  I got "Tome of Beasts" as 3rd party expansion, also very happy with it.  Just got ye old beholder's guide for Christmas.  Jury still out on that.
- The mechanics are complex enough to hide some of the system machinery from casual players, but not so dense that they drive the GM up the wall (usually, see below).  Bottom line - I enjoy the preparation for 5E in ways that I haven't since running Basic/Expert.
- Advantage/Disadvantage works well (but see below).
- First really great bard class.  Wizard finally hit a sweet spot between glass cannon and uber guy.  Fighters aren't perfect, but unlike 3E, I've noticed players having fun with them again.  Rogues also seemed to have hit a sweet spot where they are just deadly enough to tempt them into situations that reveal their weaknesses.  Clerics are a more mixed bag, but have enough variety the player that wants one can usually find something that will work for them.

Cons:

- Lack of domain rules, other uses of money, henchmen/hirelings, etc.  Yeah, I know, easy enough to do yourself.  But backgrounds would have been too.  You can tack them on easily, but integrating them into the whole system takes more work.  Basically, they punted on "economy", and it shows.
- Lack of real exploration rules.  They tried several things in the playtest, and the common limiting factor in all the attempts and the final product seemed to be "fear of going too far."  Or maybe fear of going back to what worked about 10 minute turns.  I don't understand this, because with how modular 5E is, it would have been easy to make a robust, optional system for operational play.  As opposed to nods and vestiges that don't really do much for anyone that enjoys operational play, and annoy everyone else.  
- Skill system is barely adequate.  The good things about it are bounded accuracy, common proficiency bonus, and advantage/disadvantage.  That's it.  D&D has been tinkering with skill systems since 2E and RC at least, and I'm sure there are some old Dragon issues before that that tried as well.  They have yet to include a designer in a new edition (TSR or WotC) that has thought deeply about what skills are or where their place might be in D&D.  OTOH, the effort in 4E and then more in 5E seems to have been "bring skills back under control".  So maybe in a hopefully distant 6E, they'll be ready to really tackle the problem at a fundamental system level.
- Problems with the ranger, monk, and sorcerer (and maybe a few others I'm less sure about) reflect problems in the system as a whole.  That should have told them something.  I'll give them a pass on those, though, for running out of time.
- WotC "frustrated novelist" bloat, that first reared its head for me in Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, which is practically useless because of it.  I got that book when it came out.  I read it through.  I haven't opened it since.  There isn't a single thing in it that is relevant or useful even to my campaign using Phandelver.  I didn't expect high concentration of useful, but I did expect to have a few minor gems.  

Meh:

- Hit point bloat.  There are some good reasons for it, and I like some of those reasons--especially how it works with bounded accuracy to handle scaling of challenges while keeping the fodder a threat in large numbers--but no one would call it elegant.  
- Threat of dying.  With no options, don't think I would care for it.  I've run it somewhat tougher since launch.  There is still one hole, though.  Individual deaths are relatively unlikely, but a TPK is correspondingly more likely.  The characters have so many ways to mitigate threats, but when they start to run out of hit points and resources, you can easily get a chain reaction.  That's naturally true of any bad situation that could turn into a rout.  So it's not all bad.  But more than anything else, this is how 5E is most like a MMORPG.  It's not just the chain reaction, but the speed at which it can happen.  That's a very odd note of realism on the wipe out that is at odds with the tone of the rest of the game.
- Monster creation is unnecessarily complicated for what it gives.  Once you understand what they are trying to do, the GM can easily shortcut the process by eyeballing the numbers, same as we did in AD&D or BECMI.  They tried for 75/25 science/art on monster creation, but it is inherently more like 50/50, if even that much "science".  
- Most WotC adventures are not aimed at me, either in content or format.  I'm beginning to have a negative Pavlovian reaction to the terms "Organized Play" and "Adventure Path".

I own a grand total of zero official 5e adventures. Would any of them be worth buying for the individual dungeons? However, I own a ton of AD&D PDFs from DMs Guild. This doesn't come up much, but I think one of the best things about 5e is not the rule set per se, but the business direction that spawned it. By openly embracing the past of D&D rather than trying to revolutionize the rule set yet again, they've created a rule set that is reasonably backward compatible and provided an enormous back catalog. I think a number of people running 5e haven't appreciated how easy it is to go grab something like The Lost City and just run it, or how those 2e boxed sets were mostly fluff that will work with any system.

Agreed on the exploration rules. They're basically useless. I use some hex crawling rules I bought off DM's guild instead. Overall, it seems like Mearls & Co. belong to the school that finds resource management and survival extremely boring and wants to get to the stabbing part already. It's too bad they didn't overhaul that, because tracking inventory in pounds is indeed cumbersome. There's also nothing helpful about tracking time.

Quote- Problems with the ranger, monk, and sorcerer (and maybe a few others I'm less sure about) reflect problems in the system as a whole. That should have told them something. I'll give them a pass on those, though, for running out of time.

I think those problems are more with the individual classes than the system as a whole. The biggest problem with the Ranger is they tried to design it using a fundamentally different mnemonic than other classes. Everyone else had some major core features and few "ribbons;" they tried to design the Ranger almost entirely out of ribbons, and it just falls flat. I have a house-ruled Ranger I'd be happy to share that has been working out quite well (IMO the UA Ranger is quite overpowered).

Sorcerer doesn't have much reason to exist now that everyone is basically a spontaneous caster, but I don't really see the class itself as a problem (and I think complaints about the monk are highly overblown). If anything, the problem with 5e now is that CHA is the dominant force of magic in the world instead of INT. It subtly changes the tone of the game for nearly every magic-user to have a strong personality, but not very sharp wits, and it's something I didn't notice for about a year.

By the way, I wrote a short Google doc I use to convert AD&D to 5e, and I'll share it with anyone who wants it. I tweak it fairly regularly, so it's playtested.

I got into the Next playtest early, as a friend of mine has WotC connections and got some rules and stuff ahead of the general release. I have to say that I disliked Next/5E at first because (compared to OD&D or AD&D) there are a lot of buttons to push and dials to turn in order to put a character together, but I knew early on that I liked it a lot better than the 3E/4E rules sets.

As time has passed I have become more and more of a fan, as my philosophy of RPGs seems to have changed somewhat with exposure to 5E. I started out as a "roll everything" guy but now have bought into character build for stats and equations for hit points. And I think that as the character creation process has become more complex, I'm okay with the notion that characters are harder to kill. When I first started playing in the 1970's, if a character died the player would scurry off and quickly roll up another in order to rejoin the adventure. Maybe even the same battle, if he was fast enough. 5E players invest a lot more time with character concept, stats, background, and all of the stuff that goes with the character and it is a lot more painful to lose that character. In 5E we still lose characters occasionally, and have had several near-TPK situations in play. (True, at the end almost no one died. We had battles where most of the characters were "down" and it took some lucky rolls to win the encounter. Then the downed characters were brought back.)

I'm really happy with the advantage/disadvantage system. Simple and easy to work into play without having lots of extra charts to consult.

I like the fact that wizards have cantrips. Fighters can continue to swing a sword the whole day, but old school wizards get a couple of shots and then they have to sit and watch. Cantrips are equivalent to shooting a bow or throwing a dagger (what my old wizards used to do to stay active in combat) but with a style and flair that "speaks" magic.

I like the fact that any race can be any class. Again, this is a huge shift for me since OD&D/AD&D are more restrictive, and I was very much against a friend's son trying a dwarven wizard when we first started playing 5E because it didn't seem fair that he could use lots of weapons and wear armor and still be a wizard. As I understood the system better I realized that good stuff tends to be balanced by not-good stuff, and that the dwarven wizard wasn't as good a wizard as some other races would have been.

I like the balance and options of the Player's Handbook, overall. I think the Barbarian's rage is too powerful, and I think that high level wizards have more spells than they have rounds in which to cast them, but overall the game is pretty well put together. I'm glad that WotC hasn't quite taken the "splatbook" route, but I feel like there is a slow power creep happening when you start to include info from the Sword Coast and Xanathar's Guilde books. Too many swashbuckler and sun-monk characters, which tells me that they are too cool compared to the originals. Most of my play is through Adventurer's League nowadays, so I can't just disallow those books because they are AL legal. Same with races, as they move away from the base "human, elf, dwarf" model and I see fewer common races being run anymore. I get that everyone wants a cool character, but the classics just aren't cool anymore compared to the new options.

One more thing I dislike, but it's an AL thing and not specifically a 5E thing: GM XP. When I first started GM'ing 5E in the game store I got to "earn" a couple hundred XP per adventure that I ran, and the rationale was that I wasn't able to play if I was running a game, and I'm okay with that. Nowadays the rules are such that GMs get their pick of magic items, get large bunches of XP, and it seems like folks are running games just to get the goodies instead of running games because they enjoy being a DM. The result is that guys bank thousands of XP, build high-level characters from scratch, then show up to games and get the magic items because these 5th level players have no magical items. It's just a run-away train with no end in sight.

So, I guess overall I'd say that after three years or so of play 5E is my second favorite version of D&D next to the '74 OD&D rules. It's a fun game, gives a lot of player options, and can be played with minimal or all-out rules choices in order to make the rules pretty much what you want them to be, which is a good thing in my book.

Just my two coppers.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1016952I own a grand total of zero official 5e adventures. Would any of them be worth buying for the individual dungeons?

I think Curse of Strahd, Out of the Abyss and the recent Tomb of Annihilation are all good sandboxy adventures with strong NPCs and dungeons that could be repurposed elsewhere. I've ran CoS for newbies and it went very well. I also like Tales of the Yawning Portal but most of those are classics that as you mention are easy to convert yourself, although it does include a huge dungeon complex that looks interesting but I've yet to run.

Quote from: Voros;1016967I think Curse of Strahd, Out of the Abyss and the recent Tomb of Annihilation are all good sandboxy adventures with strong NPCs and dungeons that could be repurposed elsewhere. I've ran CoS for newbies and it went very well. I also like Tales of the Yawning Portal but most of those are classics that as you mention are easy to convert yourself, although it does include a huge dungeon complex that looks interesting but I've yet to run.

For me, Out of the Abyss, Storm Kings Thunder and if you cut out most of the latter half of the adventure, Tomb of Annihiliation.  All three have uses outside of their adventures, SKT for example, has more detail on the Sword Coast's local like Luskan and Mirabar, and some of the adventure hooks WITH the Giants are actually useful by their own merit.  Out of The Abyss' 20 page chapter 2, with it's 'Build your own Underdark' is equally useful in my experience.  And ToA on the other hand, most of it's good, except that the traps in the later dungeons are pure 'Gotchas', with no warnings and no way to prevent them.

I didn't want to get into why I think some of the classes, such as the ranger, are not very well done, because my post was already too long.  For the ranger, what I mean by the problems with the class reveals flaws in the underlying system, is directly related to the lack of good exploration rules.  If the system had them, the ranger would be easier to do well.  That they struggle this much with the ranger is thus a sign of a bigger, underlying problem.

They probably could do a better ranger with the system as it is, but my contention is that's playing around the edges instead of working on the real problem.  

I'd make a similar argument for sorcerer and monk and to a lesser extent some of the other holes in the class design, though those arguments are a lot less clear-cut. They are vague enough that I wouldn't have even noticed had it not been for the ranger/exploration connection.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1016997For me, Out of the Abyss, Storm Kings Thunder and if you cut out most of the latter half of the adventure, Tomb of Annihiliation.  All three have uses outside of their adventures, SKT for example, has more detail on the Sword Coast's local like Luskan and Mirabar, and some of the adventure hooks WITH the Giants are actually useful by their own merit.  Out of The Abyss' 20 page chapter 2, with it's 'Build your own Underdark' is equally useful in my experience.  And ToA on the other hand, most of it's good, except that the traps in the later dungeons are pure 'Gotchas', with no warnings and no way to prevent them.

True about the gotcha dungeon but I do like the city of yuan-ti above it.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1016932- Most WotC adventures are not aimed at me, either in content or format.  I'm beginning to have a negative Pavlovian reaction to the terms "Organized Play" and "Adventure Path".

I'm liking 5E, which is surprising after my initial reluctance to spend any more money on WotC products. The above quote is the biggest takeaway that I am getting from 5E, though. I know that Organized Play satisfies a gaming niche for people, but I'm watching it suck all of the air out of the rooms. Every game and comic book store within 50 miles of my city has a branch of the Adventurer's League and the Pathfinder Society - they are saturating the field and there is an almost cult-like recruitment drive associated with them. I think that they have just about reached the point of negative returns for the hobby and as advertisement for particular companies in the industry.

What exactly is the issue, that organized play is linear?

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1016860Oh, huh, somebody on therpgsite completely ignored the OP and the title to write a few paragraphs about how much they love the OSR instead. That doesn't happen around here much.

I'm hardly anti-OSR, but I'm curious about what people think about 5e after 3 years' worth of experience, not what somebody who played it a handful of times thinks about the OSR.

Only reason Pundit didn't drop in with "It's shit" is because his pseudonym is in it.

Quote from: Voros;1017071What exactly is the issue, that organized play is linear?

I can't answer for Jeff, but I can give you some of my negatives (and my earlier post went into detail on some, too).

It doesn't bother me that organized play is linear, otherwise we'd have total chaos and different games would be totally different from one another. I am bothered some by the fact that Adventurer's League has to use sanctioned modules, so you can't earn XP by playing the Goodman "Fifth Edition Fantasy" product line, C7's "Adventures in Middle-earth" product line, or other great products out there. WotC has a monopoly on what counts for AL, but some of what counts are obscure adventures from conventions that most of us can't/don't attend so many of us can't/don't get certain goodies.

I think that the biggest negative is that AL has evolved into the "haves" versus the "have nots." Some folks seem to work the system, getting GM XP and lots of magic items and doing the min/max thing to optimize character builds. Other players are just out to have fun and play an enjoyable character. The result is that a bunch of players at the table are Superman while others are Clark Kent. As a Clark Kent type player, I find the Superman types really kill the fun of the game. I suppose you could say that it's my fault for not doing the race-class min/max all the time, but I don't think I ought to have to do this stuff in order to have a character that doesn't suck compared to others. I mean, they go out of their way to remove dice rolls from attributes and hit points but can't find a way to level the field for AL.

Just my experiences in organized play.

Quote from: Voros;1017071What exactly is the issue, that organized play is linear?

No, I fully understand that for time-limited events like convention games a linear module has its very appropriate place. That doesn't bother me.

What has gotten on my nerves is the elitist attitude that gets promoted by Organized Play members, it rapidly becomes a members only club where if you are not a part of it or not interested in that type of gameplay - you are branded as inferior. There have lately been times where I have been asked to run games at charity events and when I arrive learn that my games were not advertised or even mentioned in the flyers because it was organized by Adventurer's League top members - so nobody outside of those I had personally talked to knew of the game, which makes for shitty money being raised for that charity. I've run games at pubs and FLGS where during the game Adventurer's League and Pathfinder Society organizing members have come on over to my table and tried to recruit my players for their Organized Play game right in the middle of my own game being run, those moments of rudeness were loudly addressed when they happened - but they haven't stopped happening.

There are a shitload of games being played outside of Organized Play, but Organized Play members do not want RPG enthusiasts to know about them because they fear that it takes away from the potential pool of Organized Play members.