TheRPGSite

So we've all had enough time to grok 5e and WotC's release strategy. Strengths and flaws should be pretty apparent. If you've been playing and keeping up with it since launch, how do you feel about the game so far?

Overall, I've found this to be an extremely resilient rule set. It's not riddled with loopholes and inconsistencies, is mostly pretty clearly written, and is fairly straightfoward to apply to situations not explicitly comprehended by the text. The classes are reasonably well-balanced, at least to the extent that every class serves its purpose and can be effective in the hands of a decent players. At this point, if people haven't blown massive holes in the rules, I think it's safe to say they're not going to. Remember, by this point in their last two editions, WotC was already soft-rebooting to try and save them.

A remarkable thing about this one, at least for me, is I really have almost no desire to play any older variant of AD&D (which is what this really is) now. I'd be up for some OD&D or B/X because the minimalist approach offers something that can't be replicated by 5e, but as far as 1e, 2e, and 3.x go? Nah. I'd just rather house-rule 5e to bring in any elements of those I miss (I've ported over 1e rules for hirelings and followers, for example). I've very much taken to the streamlined, simple system. I initially thought I would hate the Ad/Dis system...but after a few years, I think it's brilliant. It's a hefty modifier, and players don't have anything to haggle over. The whole "bounded accuracy" thing works fine. It's nice for hirelings to be able to hit things again without having to juice them up with class levels and feats. +3 plate armor with a +2 shield and a Ring of Protection is like, a big frikkin' deal, and I like that. It really feels the way it should. Even at high levels, the Fighter is a walking tank, and the wizard is a glass cannon who came to battle in his pajamas.

I very much appreciate the non-proliferation of splats. Endless rules expansions are the bane of my existence as a DM. I don't want to deal with thousands of pages of spells, weapons, maneuvers, and feats that will break my campaign in fun and surprising ways. I don't buy their hardback campaigns, but I'm glad other people do...keeps them away from making splats.

It's not perfect. There are bits of the classes here and there that I would change. I've never really taken to the WotC skill system, especially not Roll to Solve Mystery as opposed to using your brain to put clues together. But 5e, with its emphasis on the DM calling for skill checks at my discretion, is acceptable enough. I also don't much like the WotC ability score mod system at all. It seems to contribute heavily to HP bloat. But 5e seems to run okay.  I mean, 546 hp is a lot for an ancient red dragon. But then, things do get hit a lot more, so it mostly works out. I would have liked to see a nod to domain ruling come back in the DMG. I don't like how many things get mapped to WIS checks and saves, and I think monsters should have been given morale scores. But these are overall small issues that are fairly easy to deal with.

Overall, I think 5e is easily the best edition in at least 30 years, and hope it sticks around in some form or another for at least as long as AD&D did.

It's a good version of D+D, and I particularly appreciate the backgrounds and down time activities

Bad things: everyone has way, way too many hit points relative to average damage output per turn, and the class abilities are too 'meta' and video-game-y. Like, the new cavalier and samurai classes are pathetic - nothing remotely connected to the roles of such characters in campaigns or anything distinctive about them, just a couple more melee combat kewl pwrzzz that you get to unlock at 17th level or whatever. I really hate that shit.

Overall, while I appreciate the positive things they have done with the game, I just don't find myself wanting to play it and after experimenting some have gravitated back to 1E and related OSR stuff

D&D was never a favorite of mine.
I played in some games of 5e when it first came out. We had fun, but nothing about it stood out to have me wanting to run it or buy it or... do anything with it. Compared to B/X it's just too much more stuff... stuff I don't want. Feats, Skills, the usual wankery over new classes. Nothing I've heard about the new adventures has caught my interest either.

Meanwhile the OSR has continued to produce things that DO grab my eye and hold my interest... DCC, LotFP, odder things like The Nightmares Underneath. I find myself actually wanting to play those... more than I ever did the D&D of my youth.
Maybe it's that I enjoy the DIY attitude of the OSR stuff, the individual voices and variations and eccentricities, stuff that is less likely to squeak by whatever filters 'brand name D&D' has up.
I'm not anti-5e, but there's just so many other things I'd rather be playing/running.

Quote from: Simlasa;1016857D&D was never a favorite of mine.
I played in some games of 5e when it first came out. We had fun, but nothing about it stood out to have me wanting to run it or buy it or... do anything with it. Compared to B/X it's just too much more stuff... stuff I don't want. Feats, Skills, the usual wankery over new classes. Nothing I've heard about the new adventures has caught my interest either.

Meanwhile the OSR has continued to produce things that DO grab my eye and hold my interest... DCC, LotFP, odder things like The Nightmares Underneath. I find myself actually wanting to play those... more than I ever the D&D of my youth.
Maybe it's that I enjoy the DIY attitude of the OSR stuff, the individual voices and variations and eccentricities, stuff that is less likely to squeak by whatever filters 'brand name D&D' has up.
I'm not anti-5e, but there's just so many other things I'd rather be playing/running.

Oh, 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.

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.

Oh! Are you feeling ignored? Because I didn't give an opinion you liked?

5e was supposedly influenced by the uptick of interest in the OSR stuff... so it seems pertinent to mention that while I was drawn back to D&D by the OSR stuff, 5e fell flat for me. I didn't need to play it for 3 years to know there were things I liked better.

It's a good version of D&D, but not something i'all play again, unless it's the bare bones, free packet.

Quote from: Simlasa;1016861Oh! Are you feeling ignored? Because I didn't give an opinion you liked?

No, but I do think you came in here specifically to rain on his parade.

Quote from: Simlasa;10168615e was supposedly influenced by the uptick of interest in the OSR stuff... so it seems pertinent to mention that while I was drawn back to D&D by the OSR stuff, 5e fell flat for me. I didn't need to play it for 3 years to know there were things I liked better.

"Someone saying good things about 5e???  BLASPHEMY!  THE OSR SQUAD TO THE RESCUE!"

All we need now is the regular crew coming on how the older editions are still better and we got ourselves a wrap!


As 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!

I dig it, particularly the options presented in the DMG which really allows a variety of play accessible to those who may not be comfortable enough to houserule their own variation of the rules for a setting. Next to Basic my favourite version of D&D. I'd be interested in trying 5e with the Feats stripped out to see how it plays.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1016863No, but I do think you came in here specifically to rain on his parade.

Nonsense, he asked for experiences/opinions. I gave my experience/opinion. I'm not obligated to provide the opinion he wants.

Quote"Someone saying good things about 5e???  BLASPHEMY!  THE OSR SQUAD TO THE RESCUE!"
All we need now is the regular crew coming on how the older editions are still better and we got ourselves a wrap!

You're such a one-note crackpot.
If you'd read what I wrote you'd see that I wasn't a huge fan of older versions either. The stuff I like about the OSR is primarily, to me, new aspects of the game... whether they were there before and I'd missed them or they've been introduced by new approaches. No 'nostalgia' at all.

5e 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.

But...every version of D&D has some broken bits, and every version breaks down at high level. Overall, it's a playable system but if I go back to it (currently playing AD&D/2e after giving up on the Abyss campaign, but using Barrowmaze and reverse compat-ing the rules), I'll be houseruling many of the issues out of existence...with no guarantee no other issues pop up.

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.

That technically is just about every version of D&D I've played.  It's why all the save or suck/end fight spells are more important at higher levels.  They don't care about damage output, they just end a fight.

Quote from: Doom;1016872But...every version of D&D has some broken bits, and every version breaks down at high level.

Pretty much.  That 'high level' usually varies, but it's always there.

Overall, it's my fav edition of DnD.

It's streamlined, mostly works well and lots of people like and understand it.

Is it my favourite RPG?
No, but it's a lot of fun, easy to get players for and for those who want to play it, they most of the time have a PHB of their own, so I don't have to mess about passing my copies of the PHB about and them getting worn out.

Among some things I don't like:

I don't like how the concentration limits are put in place.
I understand WHY they did it, but I wish it wasn't so limiting.

The KIT proficiencies are a bit unclear and sort of vague how they're used.
It feels like it was added on as an afterthought.

I 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.

But overall, it's a great system that "Just works and is good enough".

I started playing D&D for the first time just this year. Fifth Edition was an easy ruleset to learn and understand. My DM's friend is 3.5e crazy, and he there is a steeper learning curve. I'm glad I didn't need an excessive amount of time learning the game.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1016860I'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.

Been GMing 5e regularly since January 2015, so yup 3 years - had a failed attempt at Lost Mine of Phandelver end of 2014, first successful use of 5e was for running Dyson's Delve January 2015. One of the PCs in that first session reached 20th a few months ago, is currently retired from active play.

I love the 5e mechanics - advantage/disadvantage is nice, and the Proficiency Bonus > Bounded Accuracy system is fantastic in play. I love how it keeps numbers in a B/X style range, so target numbers are almost always 10-20, 5-27 at the extremes - 5 for very easy, and 27 is the highest target number I've ever seen in actual play, eg AC of a Bladesinger PC with Shield spell up, AC of a demigod Empyrean using a +3 shield, or a ridiculously hard skill check DC.

However I do not love WotC's adventures, or the 3e-based adventure style. But I really love how fantastic OSR and OD&D material works in 5e. Ease of conversion is a major 5e strength.

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.

IME the death rate peaks at 4th - PCs start to think they're tough, and take on stuff that they can't handle yet, but should have waited to the big power jump at 5th level. But I've killed a fair few PCs past 7th without AoE - drained to death by Shadows, Power Word Killed by Lich, decapitated by the Headless Horseman, harpooned by pirates, are a few I can recall. Those were all perma-deaths; death followed by raising seems rare in 5e.
 I think 5e PCs are indeed pretty robust, which suits my GMing style well - I am a bit of a tough GM, I grew up with 1e AD&D where high level PCs are very hard to kill, and GMing 3e D&D as written I had far too many dead PCs for the players to enjoy the game, forcing extensive house ruling in later 3e/PF campaigns. 5e I can take my usual approach, and now only the unlucky or careless PCs die.

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.

After all these years, they still haven't figured out how to have a "tournament" style RPG where your character is independent of your table, and you don't end up with somebody showing up to a game with a character decked out like a Christmas Tree of magic items.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;1017074Only reason Pundit didn't drop in with "It's shit" is because his pseudonym is in it.

Which was brilliant

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

I don't mind at all that it exists or that people enjoy it.  I just don't want to play in it, or with the modules designed for it, or with people that expect that kind of experience.  I'm quite happy growing my own groups the same way I always have, with the basics available.  Just stating why I don't buy the modules.  

Think of it as a group of people enthusiastically consuming a food you can't stand.  You don't want any part of it.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1017151I don't mind at all that it exists or that people enjoy it.  I just don't want to play in it, or with the modules designed for it, or with people that expect that kind of experience.  I'm quite happy growing my own groups the same way I always have, with the basics available.  Just stating why I don't buy the modules.  

Think of it as a group of people enthusiastically consuming a food you can't stand.  You don't want any part of it.

That still tells me nothing about the actual content, just that you don't like it. Is it, as Voros asked, too linear? Does it have too many goblins? What?

Quote from: Warboss Squee;1017074Only reason Pundit didn't drop in with "It's shit" is because his pseudonym is in it.

:p

Happy new year, everyone.

Quote from: darthfozzywig;1017157That still tells me nothing about the actual content, just that you don't like it. Is it, as Voros asked, too linear? Does it have too many goblins? What?

Linear doesn't help, though I don't mind a little linear from time to time.  It's more the "path" part of it--the idea that even in the non-linear parts, they will be looping back around to the main plot.  I also don't care for an official list of things that are always in, with everything else out, and the GM has no say.  Ruins a lot of the reason for playing for me.  

Nearly all the campaigns I run are some kind of high or epic fantasy, with a strong dash of sword and sorcerer now and then.  But despite those similarities, each campaign is quite different within those bounds.  A big part of how it is different are the custom changes to creatures, cultures, allowed classes, etc.  As I said earlier, I have little interest in running a game with the default healing rules.  I run one campaign a lot closer to the default than the other campaign is, but if I ran the default, it wold be the exception, not the rule.  What's the point of having a modular ruleset if you only use a handful of modules?

I also dislike running published, official material in general, because it's more work for me.  I have one of those minds that has no trouble putting together the pieces the way I want, and retaining that at the table.  An adventure I put together myself has notes that I barely need to reference.  This used to be six of one, half a dozen of the other, but the older I get, the harder it becomes to absorb detailed notes in a published format and use those without changing them.  Much easier to absorb the gist of something, mix it into the setting I want to use, and run that.  That's anathema to organized play.  

I agree with much of Byrce Lynch's criticism of how many modules are put together.  In WotC's case, a big hardback book with a series of connected events is about the last thing I need.  My own notes, in contrast, are mainly disconnected locations, creatures, magic, cultures, trade groups, etc. Then on top of that, my "adventure notes" might be only one or two pages for a given adventure.  That style, of course, would be a nightmare to run in organized play.  

Now separate from my dislike of organized play and adventure paths in general, I also find myself distinctly not whelmed by the WotC tastes and sensibilities.  Though perhaps something has made it into their work that I'd like OK, if I could overcome the hurdles above enough to buy and read the product.  I suspect from what people have said that there are parts of Tyranny of Dragons that I could use in a home game.  The rest, I'm just not interested.  Of course, that's not a knock on WotC--it's rare for any product to hit my preferred sensibilities.  Most OSR product seem to be either too gonzo for me or too dark.  WotC seems to be the opposite--too pedestrian, maybe.

Quote from: jeff37923;1017109... 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..

Seriously?  That makes me angry just thinking about it.  Disproportionately angry.  Hit them with a chair type angry.  

There are laws in your state against poaching right?  I think you would have a workable defense.

Quote from: Headless;1017173Seriously?  That makes me angry just thinking about it.  Disproportionately angry.  Hit them with a chair type angry.  

Yes, but the police frown on assault cases done over a Tabletop RPG, so.....

Quote from: Headless;1017173There are laws in your state against poaching right?  I think you would have a workable defense.

There are, but I think they only apply to hunting and fishing, so no dice there either.

EDIT: Here's the thing though. I've known many of these people for years in my local gaming scene and it isn't that they are bad people overall, they have just been encouraged to engage in these rude and shitty behaviors. It was far worse when WotC came out with 4E and they were being unpaid corporate shills for that game nonstop.

Thanks, Steven. I haven't read any of WotC's published adventures in years, so that's really helpful.

Quote from: darthfozzywig;1017186Thanks, Steven. I haven't read any of WotC's published adventures in years, so that's really helpful.

Nice review of Tomb of Annihilation - http://dungeonofsigns.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/tomb-of-annihilation-review.html
He also reviewed Lost Mine of Phandelver in the starter set - http://dungeonofsigns.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/lost-mines-of-phandelver-review.html

I owned the latter and had a similar negative impression, especially the terrible "quest hub" village.

I'm not sure why WoTC are so bad at adventures - the last thing they made that I think was even moderately good was Forge of Fury in 2000, reprinted (with inferior maps) in Tales From the Yawning Portal. But 5e runs OSR etc modules fantastically well, so it's not a huge problem.

Quote from: S'mon;1016927If 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.

I mostly run dnd 5e at an open table club setting where all the core rules are used (and no more) , including feats.
There's not that many feats in dnd and not everyone chooses them anyway, o it's not a big deal for me.

Quote from: S'mon;1017223I'm not sure why WoTC are so bad at adventures - the last thing they made that I think was even moderately good was Forge of Fury in 2000, reprinted (with inferior maps) in Tales From the Yawning Portal. But 5e runs OSR etc modules fantastically well, so it's not a huge problem.

I doubt it is exhaustive, but I think two contributing factors are:

A. Writing by committee.  The "vision" of their adventures, such as it is, comes across as something put together like a corporate mission statement more than anything really felt.

B. They've got a weird mix of both adherence to formula but also refusal to use some of the tried and true things.  It is as if only the one writing the mission statement is allowed to be "creative". Then the writers are stuck with the formula assigned.  "We need to be different while keeping all the important stuff the same!"  Sure, that'll work out fine.  

I guess if you are on a team writing a big module on a certain timeline, you can't help but do some of that.  Still, I'd think it would come across better if they gave some of their writers a little more leeway, and told them to take some chances.

Quote from: jeff37923;1017181There are, but I think they only apply to hunting and fishing, so no dice there either.
.

Do the poaching laws say "hunting and fishing?" Or "fish and game?"

Quote from: danskmacabre;1017229I mostly run dnd 5e at an open table club setting where all the core rules are used (and no more) , including feats.
There's not that many feats in dnd and not everyone chooses them anyway, o it's not a big deal for me.

Feats & Multiclassing are listed as optional rules, not core rules.

It really is hard to choose between a feat and an ASI. They did a pretty good job with that. Everyone benefits from more CON, of course, most classes gain AC from more DEX, a bunch of good skills depend on WIS or CHA, and of course every class is a bit MAD in 5e.

I'm not sure why folks think that WotC's adventures are so bad. The hardbacks are clearly derivative of earlier edition stuff (Giants, Ravenloft, etc) but those earlier products are often reviewed in a positive manner and I don't think that the new versions are significantly different from the earlier ones. If you look at the hardbacks they feature dragons, elementals, giants, vampires/undead, dinosaurs, and so on. Some variety there.

What I'd like to see is something outside of the Forgotten Realms. I'd like to see some Greyhawk or Blackmoor books. Maybe even Dark Sun or even Dragonlance. They have a lot of nice older source material to adapt to 5E, or they can create something new. I think they assume that older materials would appeal more to fans that new stuff, but that's just my take on the matter.

As far as their one-shot Adventurer's League adventures go, I'm not sure how creative you can be for a single 2-4 hour time slot. Most AL adventures have a little role play followed by 3 combat encounters, but I suspect that's a function of the "tournament" style of play and not a lack of creativity.

It is not so much lack of creativity, but the peculiar decisions about where creativity is allowed to flourish and where it is restricted.  It would be unfair to say that, "There is no there, there."  I think it's fair to say that, "Whatever there is there, is somewhere else." :D

Quote from: finarvyn;1017244I'm not sure why folks think that WotC's adventures are so bad...

In my experience most of those commenting haven't actually read or played them. Admittedly the first few hardcovers were uninspired but I think they have had a few good ones as well.

Quote from: finarvyn;1017244What I'd like to see is something outside of the Forgotten Realms. I'd like to see some Greyhawk or Blackmoor books. Maybe even Dark Sun or even Dragonlance. They have a lot of nice older source material to adapt to 5E, or they can create something new. I think they assume that older materials would appeal more to fans that new stuff, but that's just my take on the matter.

As far as their one-shot Adventurer's League adventures go, I'm not sure how creative you can be for a single 2-4 hour time slot. Most AL adventures have a little role play followed by 3 combat encounters, but I suspect that's a function of the "tournament" style of play and not a lack of creativity.

From what I have seen, you will not have any published WotC adventures outside of the Forgotten Realms for a while yet. AL is set in the Forgotten Realms and WotC believes that AL is driving sales of D&D 5E since AL and social media are the primary means of advertising for WotC on D&D 5E.

You think? I remember Mearls talking about how they recognized via surveys that a lot of play is happening in home-based and homebrew campaigns.

Although I do know there's been a lot of talk about encouraging more people to take up DMing and I'm not sure AL is really doing that.

Mearls or Crawford said somewhere that other settings are on the agenda for 2018.

Quote from: Voros;1017250In my experience most of those commenting haven't actually read or played them. Admittedly the first few hardcovers were uninspired but I think they have had a few good ones as well.

Maybe, but I know that my sister keeps wanting me to run the Dragon Hoard book again because it's the "most D&D-like" of all the settings. What some call uninspired, others call classic. :-)

I played Rise of Tiamat and rather enjoyed it. We went around the world, killed some dragons, then had a battle royale in a big temple and sent an evil god back to hell. It was fairly linear, but what do you expect? If you bound the classic Against the Giants + Drow stuff into a hardback, it woudln't be much different in structure.

What I would like, though, is an actual sandbox. Not an adventure that gives you some ability to hit things out of order, but a large map with some adventure sites given, a reasonable amount of background lore, and tools to help you to fill in the open hexes. So basically an old-fashioned setting box updated for the modern era.

Quote from: S'mon;1017234Feats & Multiclassing are listed as optional rules, not core rules.

Ok yeah fair enough, but the open table rules (sort of made up when the club started) are feats are allowed, so it is what it is.
Like I said, it's no biggie really, as feats aren't the huge presence they are in RPGs like PF.

I like the chassis. :)

Running it RAW, or close enough, cemented some of my initial criticisms, and they've only strengthened over the years. But they are campaign aesthetic choices, how I like to play vs. actual system dysfunction or inflexibility. So that's where the chassis becomes important to me; less cruft to thread out, and simple good-enough systems, helps save the product in my eyes.

Adventure League was an interesting attempt to re-empower the GM and allow table variance in the margins of a Season's Campaign. It was an exercise in hope that people could set aside their adversarial competitive habits and collaborate in a shared narrative experience across the world. Unfortunately several of the modules made from the first had glaring weaknesses which only got worse with tourney mentality over the years.

Adversarial competitive habits were present in module writing, some with weird GM reward inflation, sloppy structure, micromanaged "encouter-ization," tighened time frame (2 to 4 hr ideal), narrowed depth of alternatives... It all led to a hyper-fixation on MMORPG style combat raid mentality with 'spotlight time'. It has firmly convinced me that the mere concept of Org Play is inherently toxic, and therefore unmanageable, for it only appeals to Spikes (MtG player archetype) and traveling bretheren.

The game is to be beaten, the builds are how you mitigate the game's "most lethal column," you build to defeat that column. If the module deviates making the other columns (social & exploration) more "competitive" pitch a fit and campaign to hamstring GMs and future modules further so you can retain in media res combat primacy. Mechanics is all because it is the only "non-magical tea party" segment of the game, thus grounded enough for players to metagame bludgeon into submission in the name of cross table consistently.

The well-intended AL reformating ended up sucked back into the same quagmire as before, and I think that "bug" I see might be an inherent "feature" of the campaign format. So, it cemented that I am not that style of player or GM. It is gaming of last resort for those willing to endure that sort of reigning mentality over the play environment.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1017270What I would like, though, is an actual sandbox. Not an adventure that gives you some ability to hit things out of order, but a large map with some adventure sites given, a reasonable amount of background lore, and tools to help you to fill in the open hexes. So basically an old-fashioned setting box updated for the modern era.

Sounds to me that Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annhilation fit that request.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1017270What I would like, though, is an actual sandbox. Not an adventure that gives you some ability to hit things out of order, but a large map with some adventure sites given, a reasonable amount of background lore, and tools to help you to fill in the open hexes. So basically an old-fashioned setting box updated for the modern era.

The Phandelver setting in the boxed starter set is kind of like that, but designed for low-level characters. There is a basic village and some rumors which can send you in different directions to explore and find out stuff.

Some of the Adventurer's League modules could be run that way, but I don't know which modules quite fit which situations. For example, there are a bunch of AL modules that center around the town of Molmaster, so one could gather them together and put together a list of rumors and the one that the players pick would determine which module to run them through. Still kind of linear, but kind of sandbox as well.

The AL Expeditions seasons were literally a grand tour of the Moonsea, and all its delightful "warts & villainy." IIRC Season 1 was Phlan, Season 2 was Mulmaster, Season 3 Hillsfar, etc. It's a fun place where un-PC (politically correct) power structures are the norm -- and are not going to change soon from a mere band of PCs.

It's the Baltic Sea with city states and a fatalistic Finnish mythos bent (woefully tamped down by now over the years, but was there!). Threatened from all sides and right near Zhentil's Keep, Team Good was not understood to waltz through and right 'wrongs' so much as survive, find allies, and try to thrive. Also has tie-ins with previous memorable FR properties, like Pool of Radiance, etc.

Unfortunately not a lot of quality carry over from the Season's major NPC relationships survived much beyond power-gaming, and I do blame a lot of it from the poor module writing. I hear that WotC has a rather catch-22 expectation for module writers, so it might be a self-defeating committee of expectations. I thought it was a wonderful opportunity to launch Moonsea campaigns, both in and out of AL, but was sorely gimped by seemingly strange yet consistent module parameters. I stopped paying attention after Season 3, saddened at the lost opportunity.

ToA is kind of close, but still too much detail, and there is still a "beginning" and "end." What I am imagining (and won't ever happen) is a product that emphasizes the DIY aspect much more than the "adventure" or "story." My ideal fantasy sandbox would basically be the 1e Greyhawk box plus:

-Tables/rules for filling in hexes for each country similar to Welsh Piper's.
-A bit more in-depth material for fleshing out cities.
-A decent collection of 1-sentence adventure hooks for each zone.
-Some kind of material to provide ideas for connecting adventuring sides and main villains.
-Material for the social impacts of leveling up. None of this "you're a 15th-level Fighter in a city full of 12th-level law enforcement" nonsense.
-Guides for domains, invasions, and warfare. You've been given territory in Furyondy. Iuz invades. What now?

What I'm imagining would basically contain enough material for a newbie DM to run a hex-crawl. Some of this sounds trivial to experienced DMs, it's not to newbies.  It took me quite a bit of exploring the OSR community to find this kind of material and put together a coherent understanding of adventuring that wasn't some variant of an adventure path, and I think this kind of product could satisfy a much different kind of customer than the hardback campaigns do, so it wouldn't cannibalize sales (I have almost no interest in their hardback campaigns, but would buy something like this...I can't be the only one).

What I would really like for this ain't-gonna happen product is for WotC to basically maintain two settings. I think they've got enough customers now that they wouldn't be cannibalizing. The Forgotten Realms would continue to be the setting for the big adventures. The smaller-scale stuff, like Tales From the Yawning Portal, would be Greyhawk-based, as in anything WotC publishes that wouldn't be hard to drop into any setting would also give you Greyhawk hex keys. They could keep their publishing to two hardbacks a year, with one being a Realms campaign, and the other being a collection of things to populate the Flanaess with.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1017383My ideal fantasy sandbox would basically be the 1e Greyhawk box plus:

-Tables/rules for filling in hexes for each country similar to Welsh Piper's.
-A bit more in-depth material for fleshing out cities.
-A decent collection of 1-sentence adventure hooks for each zone.
-Some kind of material to provide ideas for connecting adventuring sides and main villains.
-Material for the social impacts of leveling up. None of this "you're a 15th-level Fighter in a city full of 12th-level law enforcement" nonsense.
-Guides for domains, invasions, and warfare. You've been given territory in Furyondy. Iuz invades. What now?

What I'm imagining would basically contain enough material for a newbie DM to run a hex-crawl. Some of this sounds trivial to experienced DMs, it's not to newbies.  It took me quite a bit of exploring the OSR community to find this kind of material and put together a coherent understanding of adventuring that wasn't some variant of an adventure path, and I think this kind of product could satisfy a much different kind of customer than the hardback campaigns do, so it wouldn't cannibalize sales (I have almost no interest in their hardback campaigns, but would buy something like this...I can't be the only one).

What I would really like for this ain't-gonna happen product...

This would be a great product. Maybe label it "DM's aid" or the like. It is the opposite direction than the one they are leaning, so I would put it in the ain't happening column.

If I were them, and this was being made, I would not set it in a specific setting. Most people would use this to create their own homebrew setting anyways. I say make it smorgasbord style--references to everyone and everywhere. Disparate, modular pieces of everything all interconnectable with the DM to provide the connecting pieces. If that means lots of new DMs have Mirt the merchant sending the party through Eberron (via Spelljammer from Sigil) to consult Melf on how best to defeat Bargle, all the better.

If you took the two dragon books, and the three other books (storm kings, princes, and even out of the abyss) and the starter box, then sprinkled in some of the AL mods, and things like Murder at Baldurs Gate (which has a Baldurs Gate setting book in it) and Dead in Thay, you'd pretty much have a sandbox. Forget about the areas connecting glue and just throw it all in. Let any 'plot' make itself at the table.

Storm Kings is already a kinda of sandbox and kind of campaign book.

You wouldn't even really need to do all that much besides winging why there are certain things present and disregarding any of the books over arching story, or use it if it fits, maybe several of them are going on at once.

I've heard someone is trying this. I might even try it.

I think a printed map is important because it provides anchors for an average person of moderate creativity to build on, as well as delivering to the customer the feeling that he has purchased something far more substantial than merely an expansion of the DMG tables. I've found the Greyhawk box enormously useful in this regard, while Realms material is simply far too detailed. But the Greyhawk box is still a little too sparse, and of course doesn't always translate easily into 5e.

I think the bulk of the appeal of such a product would be the material for "coloring in" the different regions. The way I am imagining this, everyone would end up populating the kingdoms, forests, mountains, and marshes differently, and WotC products would give you interesting things to add in. There's always room in a 30-mile hex for a warren of kobolds, a black dragon's cave, a mysterious wizard tower, a breach into the underworld, a bizarre rakshasa merchant who has a very strange errand for you to run, and so on. What there isn't room for is "Gran March has been conquered by hobgoblins. The high lord has been executed, and the capital city turned into a great fortress where the hobgoblin armies now prepare to assault the Grand Duchy of Geoff." Keep that kind of stuff in the Realms.

5e is definitely my favorite edition.

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.

The deaths at that level and above that I've seen are so far all disintegrate. One factor I think is that the DM would have to play the NPCs as vicious enough to keep beating on the character who is down, because by that level it's hard for the healing and other resources that quickly save a 0 HP character to get depleted. But, if you're willing to throw a large number of non-area-effect but dangerous enemies at the party, characters can die; but the published stuff does not do this. I had substantial success against a third tier party facing a large number of yuan-ti, on the strength of the suggestion spell; the well optimized party survived by rallying around the paladin who protected all within his aura from being charmed.

Quote from: S'mon;1016926Pre-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.

I think that's one of the better aspects of 5e.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1016930I'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).

Other annoying feats: Sharpshooter; Great Weapon Master; Polearm Master + Sentinel.

QuoteYeah, 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.

Gold for XP affects advancement rates, but can be controlled by how much gold is out there anyway. I'm not sure why domain management requires much rules; I guess I would appreciate some lists for likely rates of return/investment costs, just to get a reasonably consistent scale, but what else do you need? The rest in the list above are more just "how do NPCs act"; I really don't see why rules are needed for that at all.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1016932...

Good comments.

QuoteCons:

- 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.

I still don't get why these need to be in the core rules.

Quote- 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.

What would these rules cover?

Quote- 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.

I think some of this is because there is level advancement in classes but not in anything else; skills, race and background (in general, not just the specific 5e thing) become less relevant at higher levels because the challenges met by a high level party are not something that can be solved by a lucky first level character (i.e., by skills, background, racial abilities), but lots of challenges can be defeated with specific spells or with abilities gained from class. A few racial abilities scale with level; proficiency bonus increases (and possibly ability bonus) do increase, but with bounded accuracy it won't outweigh a lucky d20 roll. I'd like more binary skills (you can do this competently if you have the skill, but not at all if you don't) or the ability/need to invest a class resource (spell slots, superiority dice, ki points, whatever) into a skill to achieve something.

Quote- 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.

I like that characters who drop can get back in the fight, often with an ally casting Healing Word as an aside (bonus action) without giving up their main action (well, except for the limit on also casting a non-cantrip); but as long as the party has healing resources then probably nobody dies (except for things like disintegrate). So a competent set of players can fend off most individual deaths until they run out of everything, and then the entire party might drop. I don't find this a negative for a cooperative game, but it is something to be aware of if you expect a fairly low death rate, or want a higher death rate without TPKs.

Quote from: finarvyn;1016955One 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.

I have seen a few AL DMs who seem to pick and choose what they run based on the magic item they could get (items that you can give to your character are usually items given in adventures you ran). It is good that DMs don't fall behind entirely, but if you start with new characters in each season and only switch off DMs then, it shouldn't be that big a problem. But I don't have a good solution for organized play that isn't campaign length; the main reward for DMing used to be that you got to create a world, and that doesn't happen if you're running published adventures.

Quote from: finarvyn;1017100I 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.

That's not such a big problem; you can generally buy any of those adventures fairly cheaply at DMs Guild (maybe with a delay in availability). Maybe it's a problem with epics, where you need a number of tables all running at once. And Fai Chen's Fantastical Faire (where you can trade magic items) is a convention thing, and that definitely cuts down on your ability to customize your set of magic items* (although various campaign books that are AL legal can give you your choice of an item of some specified rarity; Storm King's Thunder had the DM rolling for items, although I think they have abandoned that).

* or to get the screaming goat.

QuoteI 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.

I've heard the reverse complaint, where the effectiveness minded players complain about someone who is roleplaying instead of contributing to the fight. I think the solution is to find like-minded people to play with, whether it's organized play or not. Me, I'm ready to compensate for less effective players or to be a slight drag on over-optimizing players, and I always have a good time. I concur with S'mon's observation quoted above that much lower level characters can still contribute in a party.

Quote from: jeff37923;1017109What 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.

That is really awful. AL is not like that everywhere. At the game store where I play AL once a month, the AL organizer has mentioned the classic gaming group (AD&D and similar vintage) positively in his announcements; the other game store where I play once a week has only one D&D table out of four that's actually AL, and so far no drama about it.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1017114After all these years, they still haven't figured out how to have a "tournament" style RPG where your character is independent of your table, and you don't end up with somebody showing up to a game with a character decked out like a Christmas Tree of magic items.

I have this great new idea! Wealth by level! That'll solve the problem! :D

Quote from: jeff37923;1017253From what I have seen, you will not have any published WotC adventures outside of the Forgotten Realms for a while yet. AL is set in the Forgotten Realms and WotC believes that AL is driving sales of D&D 5E since AL and social media are the primary means of advertising for WotC on D&D 5E.

For Curse of Strahd, Barovia was outside the Forgotten Realms and even sidelined the Forgotten Realms factions that are significant in AL. So it's not impossible, if the setting is sufficiently different.

Quote from: Opaopajr;1017319Adventure League was an interesting attempt to re-empower the GM and allow table variance in the margins of a Season's Campaign. It was an exercise in hope that people could set aside their adversarial competitive habits and collaborate in a shared narrative experience across the world. Unfortunately several of the modules made from the first had glaring weaknesses which only got worse with tourney mentality over the years.

Adversarial competitive habits were present in module writing, some with weird GM reward inflation, sloppy structure, micromanaged "encouter-ization," tighened time frame (2 to 4 hr ideal), narrowed depth of alternatives... It all led to a hyper-fixation on MMORPG style combat raid mentality with 'spotlight time'. It has firmly convinced me that the mere concept of Org Play is inherently toxic, and therefore unmanageable, for it only appeals to Spikes (MtG player archetype) and traveling bretheren.

The game is to be beaten, the builds are how you mitigate the game's "most lethal column," you build to defeat that column. If the module deviates making the other columns (social & exploration) more "competitive" pitch a fit and campaign to hamstring GMs and future modules further so you can retain in media res combat primacy. Mechanics is all because it is the only "non-magical tea party" segment of the game, thus grounded enough for players to metagame bludgeon into submission in the name of cross table consistently.

The well-intended AL reformating ended up sucked back into the same quagmire as before, and I think that "bug" I see might be an inherent "feature" of the campaign format. So, it cemented that I am not that style of player or GM. It is gaming of last resort for those willing to endure that sort of reigning mentality over the play environment.

Quote from: Opaopajr;1017378The AL Expeditions seasons were literally a grand tour of the Moonsea, and all its delightful "warts & villainy." IIRC Season 1 was Phlan, Season 2 was Mulmaster, Season 3 Hillsfar, etc. It's a fun place where un-PC (politically correct) power structures are the norm -- and are not going to change soon from a mere band of PCs.

It's the Baltic Sea with city states and a fatalistic Finnish mythos bent (woefully tamped down by now over the years, but was there!). Threatened from all sides and right near Zhentil's Keep, Team Good was not understood to waltz through and right 'wrongs' so much as survive, find allies, and try to thrive. Also has tie-ins with previous memorable FR properties, like Pool of Radiance, etc.

Unfortunately not a lot of quality carry over from the Season's major NPC relationships survived much beyond power-gaming, and I do blame a lot of it from the poor module writing. I hear that WotC has a rather catch-22 expectation for module writers, so it might be a self-defeating committee of expectations. I thought it was a wonderful opportunity to launch Moonsea campaigns, both in and out of AL, but was sorely gimped by seemingly strange yet consistent module parameters. I stopped paying attention after Season 3, saddened at the lost opportunity.

I like AL. Obviously I am a deeply flawed player. Where do I report for the show trial and reeducation camp? :(

It could be better; the 2 hour modules seemed to follow from ending the distinction between "Encounters" and "Expeditions", although some are still too long to do in 2 hours regardless. I would like it better if the Story Awards (e.g., you impressed King Whoozit and can call in a favor later) were given as certs rather than the magic items; better still if the DM could create appropriate Story Awards that follow from the unlikely approach of a given group.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1016860I'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.

This does tend to select only for positive opinions, since if you didn't enjoy it you're hardly likely to keep playing it for 3 years solidly.

If you run a business of some kind, you do really dread the negative reviews; but they're actually more useful than many of the positive reviews, since they tell you how you can improve things. Obviously if it's 100 different things there's not much you can do, but if a bunch of people have the same issue with it, it's worth listening to.

Game companies tend to be pretty shitty at this. It's not unique to game companies, it's just that it's small business, not many people involved, and thus driven more by ego rather than professionalism.

Quote from: rawma;1017489I like AL. Obviously I am a deeply flawed player. Where do I report for the show trial and reeducation camp? :(

Why at my winter retreat table, comrade! Bring vodka. You will need it to fend off the Siberian cold. :)

Quote from: rawma;1017489It could be better; the 2 hour modules seemed to follow from ending the distinction between "Encounters" and "Expeditions", although some are still too long to do in 2 hours regardless. I would like it better if the Story Awards (e.g., you impressed King Whoozit and can call in a favor later) were given as certs rather than the magic items; better still if the DM could create appropriate Story Awards that follow from the unlikely approach of a given group.

That would be a wonderful thing! And thus wholly abused, destroyed, complained about, lead to wholesale NPC murders to counter storyline bennies other PvP weaseled to get, etc. It'd be an arms race, because anything organized with geek social fallacies built in so as to retain consistent experience across tables, will necessarily be handcuffed in its punishments by delineating unsportsmanlike conduct. The second you give letter of the law primacy over spirit of the law, literalism vs. complex judgment, you're doomed to Legalism taking over.

Org Play is where the anti-social PvP/PvE players can freely gather with limited reprisal because they can show off their virtual dominance in system mastery and abuse of metagame social systems without being told 'No'.

Being able to say 'No' to the game, and within the game, is the most powerful (and thus important) part of the game. 'No' is where resides the fulcrum of consent.

I thought AL did a decent job in trying to replicate that in its rules about behavior and disruption. But alas in practice I saw  again the rise of "that guy" and knew it's a cultural problem. Honestly, it really is about poor socialization -- and the best cure for that is removing any vestiges of perceivable power so that people can start seeing others as people again, not opponents to be conquered.

It took me watching my ideal experiment fail for me to wake up that Org Play inherently provides measurable bragging rights because of a perceived level playing field. And once the playing field is leveled so as to compare against one another you have introduced the metagame goal of power. Now all you need are those anti-social enough to seek it at the cost of others. It's not an inherent Evil, per se, but it is an inherent system to measure up against others and thus feed Pride (which can very much turn sour and even evil).

So, I gave up my fantasy of a shared experience beyond one table at a time because so far the structures create a goal feeding an urge which cannot be contained. :)

I liked 5e a lot, it's my favorite D&D edition so far but my players never made the effort of learning the rules (i.e their character's talents, powers, etc.) so I had to get back to something simpler (Sword & Wizardry White Box, Chroniques Oubliées and now Index Card RPG). So the problem didn't came from the game but from my players.

Beyond that I wasn't convinced at all by any of the campaigns released so far. I ran Tyranny of Dragons but had to change 90% of the content. The remaining books I found to be unimaginative, boring and overwritten. I guess I'm just getting old and cranky.

Quote from: Voros;1017250In my experience most of those commenting haven't actually read or played them. Admittedly the first few hardcovers were uninspired but I think they have had a few good ones as well.

I purchased and read the first couple adventure lines and I didn't like them so I stopped. Admittedly, I'm not the target audience for 5E because after 3E and 4E I just don't have the energy to really play D&D again but if they bring back BirthRight or other campaign worlds I enjoy I'd jump back in. I now only run 5E via AiMe.

A big issue I had with 5E is the production values make it difficult for me to read the books. They are too busy.

Changing advancement rates only matters if you're playing AP-style campaigns and end up with characters either vasty over-leveled or under-leveled compared to where they're supposed to be at the given chapter. For megadungeons and sandboxes, it's really not an issue.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1017547Changing advancement rates only matters if you're playing AP-style campaigns and end up with characters either vasty over-leveled or under-leveled compared to where they're supposed to be at the given chapter. For megadungeons and sandboxes, it's really not an issue.

I agree to an extent, but it is possible to out-level a sandbox - in D&D after about 10th level wilderness exploration often ceases to feel meaningful.  I don't have enough megadungeon experience yet to be sure; I am a bit concerned about over levelled party potentially hanging around on the easy top levels, but maybe that's never really an issue in play.

Well, by 10th level, they should have moved on past creeping through the forest to find a monster lair. In a megadungeon, hanging around at a low level is extremly boring and has a very low payoff.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1017553Well, by 10th level, they should have moved on past creeping through the forest to find a monster lair.

I generally find with sandboxing it works best to have a concentric circles approach, with a low threat starter area in the middle and higher threat areas further away. Published sandboxes by necessity have a limited level range, eg Isle of Dread 3-6; Vault of Larin Karr 4-9.

Quote from: Ulairi;1017525I purchased and read the first couple adventure lines and I didn't like them so I stopped. Admittedly, I'm not the target audience for 5E because after 3E and 4E I just don't have the energy to really play D&D again but if they bring back BirthRight or other campaign worlds I enjoy I'd jump back in. I now only run 5E via AiMe.

A big issue I had with 5E is the production values make it difficult for me to read the books. They are too busy.

Yeah it is unfortunate that the first few releases weren't great, I think they have improved since but could see why one wouldn't want to blow $35-65 to determine that. I don't find the layouts too busy myself, the last few books seem even comparatively skimpy on art so perhaps that has changed as well.

Concerning:

Quote- 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.

Quote from: rawma;1017489What would these rules cover?

I don't know exactly.  That's part of my frustration with it not being developed as a part of the system.  But as a general idea of something more ambitious they could have tried instead of the "slow, standard, fast", "advantage/disadvantage", "navigate, forage, watch" version, consider something like:

- A subsystem for foraging, that has some mundane and fantastical details on various plants and animals, with guidelines for modifying for your campaign.
- Tie it into the encumbrance subsystem, for operational play.
- Tie it into the economy via harvesting monster parts.
- A couple of pages that are a little more involved in how to avoid getting lost, what to do when it happens, etc.  Carve out slightly different roles for the skills, instead of the GM ad hoc deciding where the boundaries are for Survival and Nature and the like.
- A more useful time system for that level of exploration and movement.  I've started using 3 hour blocks, as superior for my purposes to the 1 hour or 12 hour or 1 day approach.  I can see 6 hours working, too.  Some playtest experience would be nice.  You need enough chances for the players to make informed decisions, but not so many that they get dulled by the repetition.
- Something tied into the exhaustion/healing rules about camp conditions.  We've got bedrolls, tents, tinderboxes, rations, and other such things on the equipment list, but there are no guidelines for the GM in how these affect day-to-day play.

I can figure out a lot of that, and know where to go look for parts that I don't know.  But then there is not much in the way of anchor points in the system to attach such things.  That's part of what I meant about the skills being inadequate.  I hate to think what a budding GM would do if they wanted something like that, and had to start from scratch.  Indoor/Outdoor ranges, and 10 minute turns, and so forth wasn't perfect, but it was a starting place.

So they do have rules for foraging and navigating but they aren't detailed or flavourful enough is what you are saying?

Quote from: Voros;1017752So they do have rules for foraging and navigating but they aren't detailed or flavourful enough is what you are saying?

Partly, though I know most people wouldn't like such rules, which is why I think they would be optional.

But mainly, my complaint is that because they didn't try hard enough to develop such rules, optional or not, they did not sufficiently consider/develop/test how such rules would interact with the rest of the system, and thus missed opportunities to make the simplified version we got more modular and coherent.  And keep in mind the "exploration rules" is just an example of this trend.  I see the same thing in equipment, economy, etc.  Though of course they had priorities, and could not do them all.

Contrast that to the immense work they put into making feats and skills optional.  They were only able to make that work because they took a serious stab at developing the feats and skills.  There are problems with the feats. There are problems with the skills.  There really aren't any problems with the way they hook into the system, though.

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I'm not sure more detailed rules would have helped anything.  The encumbrance rules are pretty ridiculous so it is pretty trivially easy to gear up.  I think that a lot of the stuff that you bring up is stuff that the designers decided was best handled by individual tables -- you want more detail, make up something that seems cool.  This is DM's Guild type stuff not evergreen rulebook stuff.

If the problem with a rule seems to be insufficient detail, then it is simply a bad rule. More detail makes rules more cumbersome, not more useful, and therefore more likely to be ignored completely. Tracking weight down to the pound is just a bad rule, for example.

5e has rather simple combat mechanics, but they're the sort of simplicity that came from a lot of thought and testing. It would be nice if exploration had a similar level of investment put into it.

Quote from: KingCheops;1017861I'm not sure more detailed rules would have helped anything.  The encumbrance rules are pretty ridiculous so it is pretty trivially easy to gear up.  I think that a lot of the stuff that you bring up is stuff that the designers decided was best handled by individual tables -- you want more detail, make up something that seems cool.  This is DM's Guild type stuff not evergreen rulebook stuff.

Again, it is my point that an attempt at the detail is more important to test the underlying system, not so much that we get the resulting details.  Though it is nice to have something in the way of details, if only as a starting point, that is secondary.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1017868If the problem with a rule seems to be insufficient detail, then it is simply a bad rule. More detail makes rules more cumbersome, not more useful, and therefore more likely to be ignored completely. Tracking weight down to the pound is just a bad rule, for example.

Yep, big equipment lists and weights are a good place to start, since that is the way people think about it.  It's a lousy place to end.

A good system for getting lost should be like the combat system: it should be simple and intuitive enough that I don't have to flip around charts to resolve things for the players do or engage in obnoxious levels of book-keeping. Navigating your way through the jungle to get to the lost pyramid should be, on an abstract level, no more complext than fighting a few monsters.

I think 5e is fun. I like it better than 3e and 4e, but probably not 2e, which I started with. Good things - plays quick at lower levels, easy to understand, love making custom feats, lots of cool abilities to choose from, classes feel distinct.

Problems with 5e for me are: way too much hp bloat, way too forgiving on death/dying (we havent had a single PC die in 3 years, on and off playing - and if you switch to slow healing with week long rests etc, you weaken long rest classes), too much magic (almost every subclass has magic), at will cantrips and rituals intended to balance out weaker overall magic (consequently magic feels less magical/spammable), concentration should have been limited to one spell at a time OR interruptible (not both), adv/disad is good but minor modifiers should have been retained (ie it is too blunt a tool - and they kept some minor modifiers anyway - eg partial cover +2 AC), and short rest vs long rest classes affects intraparty balance depending on the kind of adventure being run and opportunities for breaks (should have been a consistent recovery mechanic across all classes).

Also while I think of it - very much dislike the rise of the adventure path - which is from memory is all wotc has released barring the starter set (which I have and liked a lot).

Quote from: Psikerlord;1017904Also while I think of it - very much dislike the rise of the adventure path - which is from memory is all wotc has released barring the starter set (which I have and liked a lot).

They also did a bunch of conversions of old modules in Tales From the Yawning Portal - good adventures, but the redone maps are often too small to read.

Re death rate, I got to really hate killing dozens of PCs running 3e (then seeing powergamers trivialise all challenges in Pathfinder), I still kill PCs now and then in 5e (three PC perma deaths in the last few months), but I like it that the rate is lower and smart play gives a decent chance of success. Also like that I can ignore encounter-building metrics and still the PCs will likely survive.

I found the Long Rest classes overpowered vs Short Resters, because I was never seeing the assumed 6-8 encounters per LR. LR PCs would just rest overnight & recharge every couple encounters. Going to 1 week LR immediately solved that. Doesn't really work with Paizo style AP plotting ("Grind through these 30 encounters before the Ritual completes and the Gate to Oblivion Opens!") but great with episodic play.

The starter set was their best adventure. It gives you a skeleton of an adventure with a sandbox built in, and from there you can fill it out. I've been fleshing it out into a full on setting for the last 2 years.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1017881A good system for getting lost should be like the combat system: it should be simple and intuitive enough that I don't have to flip around charts to resolve things for the players do or engage in obnoxious levels of book-keeping. Navigating your way through the jungle to get to the lost pyramid should be, on an abstract level, no more complext than fighting a few monsters.

Sorry I'm not understanding the problems you guys have with the exploration system.  Navigating is a single check and if you get lost you spend 1d6 hours trying to get your bearings before you re-check.  Pretty simple.

We have rules for party order, ranks determine what the DM lets you spot, and there are a variety of actions you can take during a march.  I'm not sure what else you guys are looking for.  It is actually far more robust than anything we got in the 2e, 3e, or 4e Player's/DM's guides.

Quote from: Psikerlord;1017904Also while I think of it - very much dislike the rise of the adventure path - which is from memory is all wotc has released barring the starter set (which I have and liked a lot).

CoS, Out of the Abyss and Tomb of Annilation are no more adventure paths than the starter set. People love repeating cliches from the 3e era without even reading or playing the actual adventures. I think it is the problem of received wisdom in OSR circles. Everyone just parrots the same lines.

As to death being too rare, just institute death at 0 hit points, the way people talk you'd think they're helpless and have to follow BTB play only, even though you're overtly invited to tweak the system as you like.

My main issue with 5E is that it repeats all the old WOTC problems of still having too much implied setting.

Quote from: Voros;1017935CoS, Out of the Abyss and Tomb of Annilation are no more adventure paths than the starter set. People love repeating cliches from the 3e era without even reading or playing the actual adventures. I think it is the problem of received wisdom in OSR circles. Everyone just parrots the same lines.

As to death being too rare, just institute death at 0 hit points, the way people talk you'd think they're helpless and have to follow BTB play only, even though you're overtly invited to tweak the system as you like.

I picked up tomb recently actually because I liked the look of the jungle exploration part. I mean you can always steal parts of any adventure for your own sandbox, but I would like to see some 20 page, episodic drop in adventures, for example.

edit - well, got it for an xmas present (I requested it)

Quote from: Voros;1017935CoS, Out of the Abyss and Tomb of Annilation are no more adventure paths than the starter set. People love repeating cliches from the 3e era without even reading or playing the actual adventures. I think it is the problem of received wisdom in OSR circles. Everyone just parrots the same lines.

I hat talking about what 'people' love. Who are these people? Are they representative? Are we just making sweeping generalizations. And how do we know they are just parroting and don't have the same opinions about 3e and 5e adventures? That's not just putting words in peoples' mouths, but thoughts and motivations.

...That said, Tomb of Annihilation is the anti-adventure path. It is a mapped out mini-continent with lots to do on it, one super dungeon the players probably will want to explore, but don't have to, and a 'go at it, find your own adventure' mentality.

QuoteAs to death being too rare, just institute death at 0 hit points, the way people talk you'd think they're helpless and have to follow BTB play only, even though you're overtly invited to tweak the system as you like.

 I will definitely agree that many of the same people who will defend OSR games with a 'you use the parts you like' attitude often do not extend the same perspective to newer ground. But again, 'people' is such a useless term.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1017983I hat talking about what 'people' love. Who are these people? Are they representative? Are we just making sweeping generalizations. And how do we know they are just parroting and don't have the same opinions about 3e and 5e adventures? That's not just putting words in peoples' mouths, but thoughts and motivations.
...

 I will definitely agree that many of the same people who will defend OSR games with a 'you use the parts you like' attitude often do not extend the same perspective to newer ground. But again, 'people' is such a useless term.

I was harsher towards Psikerlord, who is a good poster, than I intended, mostly it is from how tiresome it is reading the same half-baked claims again and again.

And surely it is a generalization but what do you expect me to do, go through this forum and copy and paste every time someone lazily criticized the modern WoTC adventures for the supposed sins of 3e? Or claimed they were overwritten (with the average location being described in total within 200-500 words) or underwritten? How often do you have to hear the same weakly argued claims repeated over and over before you call bullshit?

Because when I ask what adventures they've read (forget having played) what do I hear back? That maybe they read the first one or two but most often they clam up because they've been caught talking out of their hat. It is the same received wisdom you hear on DL by those who haven't ever even played past the first module, if that. These claims are so common and so commonly revealed to be petty prejudice.

There are certainly things to criticize about the more recent adventures (like S'mon's issues with the maps in Yawning Portal) but that they are somehow 'adventure paths' or 'linear' is not one of them.

And I have trouble buying that it is an honest difference of opinion when so many of those criticizing haven't even read the books they speak of.

Quote from: Voros;1017990Because when I ask what adventures they've read what do I hear back? That maybe they read the first one or two but most often they clam up because they've been caught talking out of their hat. It is the same received wisdom you hear on DL by those who haven't ever even played past the first module, if that. These claims are so common and so commonly revealed to be petty prejudice most of the time it is beyond tiresome.

I appreciate the head-wind you are trying to deal with here, but keep in mind that some of this is aggregate dissatisfaction.  I don't doubt your characterization of the modules, but the fact remains they are hardbacks, focused on a campaign arc, written by WotC.  Given how disappointed I've been in WotC's non-core products since launch, that's too much headwind for me to try them, even if you are underselling their merits.  WotC's writing in general now has a bad rap with me.  Hell, as much as I enjoy and use the core products, there is nothing special about the writing or presentation of 5E in the core.  Nothing terrible, either, but you can see signs of what comes later.  It's just a good system, which means I can overlook a certain amount of it, and I don't need to reference it much in any case.    So far, Xanathar's Guide appears to be more like the core, which is a mild positive after the abomination that was the Sword Coast Guide.  Combine all that with, I'm not usually in their target audience as far as content, and I'd rather write my own adventures than read theirs.  

When WotC produces an adventure that many agree is great, super, innovative, something similar, I might take a peek.  "Hey, there is some solid stuff in there that you can mine for your own game," is a valid selling point, but not sufficient to get me to pull the trigger at this time, given my very tangible regret at some of my non-core purchases from WotC.

Sure and I can understand why one would rather not blow $35+ when you can just design your own adventures or buy some of the excellent OSR material out there for significantly less, at least on pdf. But I do think WoTC is trying to introduce new (and even returning) players to more flexible playstyles and don't doubt some of these adventures will be fondly remembered by newbies in the future.

I just got an Xmas copy of Princes of the Apocalypse today - going over it, may give some thoughts.

The sessions of Tomb of Annihilation I played definitely didn't feel railroady. I get the impression the WotC adventures still tend to be over written in the wrong places sometimes, but definitely more concise than Paizo, covering the rough equivalent 6 96 page Paizo AP books (ca £90) in one 255 page hardback (ca £30).

Quote from: KingCheops;1017933Sorry I'm not understanding the problems you guys have with the exploration system.  Navigating is a single check and if you get lost you spend 1d6 hours trying to get your bearings before you re-check.  Pretty simple.

And shallow and uninteresting. The only way it seems to make it more "interesting" is to add more book-keeping, which actually makes it more boring. I don't really know how I would make it better; this is why I pay other people for their games and rules. I currently use a hex-crawling guide I bought on DMs Guild that is reasonably okay, but tracking food by the pound is boring.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1018006And shallow and uninteresting. The only way it seems to make it more "interesting" is to add more book-keeping, which actually makes it more boring. I don't really know how I would make it better; this is why I pay other people for their games and rules. I currently use a hex-crawling guide I bought on DMs Guild that is reasonably okay, but tracking food by the pound is boring.

Okay let me put this another way: why do you feel something more robust is needed in the Core Rules?

Quote from: S'mon;1017998I just got an Xmas copy of Princes of the Apocalypse today - going over it, may give some thoughts.

Not to prejudice your read but I found Princes... a bit too repetitive. Probably best as a source for dungeons that can be repurposed elsewhere.

Quote from: Voros;1018033Not to prejudice your read but I found Princes... a bit too repetitive. Probably best as a source for dungeons that can be repurposed elsewhere.

I most likely will do that if anything; I've managed to cut my ongoing campaigns down from 4 to 2 recently and I don't fancy launching a third campaign, but some of the material might be useable in my Wilderlands game. There's an evil earth cult on the horizon (Natch Ur) that might tie in.

Quote from: KingCheops;1018031Okay let me put this another way: why do you feel something more robust is needed in the Core Rules?

Because I like the idea, in the abstract, of exploration being a major pillar of the game on the same footing with combat. I just dislike the execution.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1018039Because I like the idea, in the abstract, of exploration being a major pillar of the game on the same footing with combat. I just dislike the execution.

The main failing I see is not having all 3 pillars get XP in the basic book.  Mearls is showing a more robust system on his twitter for the Nentir Vale campaign he's preparing.

Quote from: KingCheops;1018283The main failing I see is not having all 3 pillars get XP in the basic book.  

Hm... Yeah. There is some indication but even 4e did it better with the "quest" awards sytem. Social & Exploration achievements should be specifically called out and rewarded on an XP scale.

There are plenty of Man vs Nature short stories, novels, and movies. Now how do you bring that into a game? The simple "Roll to not get lost, roll for random encounter, roll to forage, subtract daily rations" bit gets pretty boring, pretty fast. Neither creating meaningful challenges nor providing any rewards is something the official 5e material makes any attempt to provide.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1018287There are plenty of Man vs Nature short stories, novels, and movies. Now how do you bring that into a game? The simple "Roll to not get lost, roll for random encounter, roll to forage, subtract daily rations" bit gets pretty boring, pretty fast. Neither creating meaningful challenges nor providing any rewards is something the official 5e material makes any attempt to provide.

Yeah, I am trying to make a pure sandbox game for my friends for 5e and that's one of the things I'm trying to figure out, since it's basically the core of the game.

Unless your group is trying to be really old school and bring a whole baggage train in order to haul loot I'm going to have to disappoint you guys and point out that 5e does not care about man versus nature.  Spells, class abilities, backgrounds, and tools make it far too easy to circumvent the mundane stuff.  Wilderness travel is about getting you to the place where the next part of the adventure is going to take place.  It doesn't support the in-between at all.

You can make the in-between interesting by making set piece encounters but after the first 5 levels (which blow by quickly) the average party will be fully set.  Fuck them up by splitting the party with nighttime goblin raids on their gear, mudslides, giant apes make off with the halfling/gnome or sudden falls into hidden ruins.  Can the city slicker rogue and the soldier who's used to camp followers suddenly survive for a few days on their own while everyone tries to find each other?

Honestly I'm not sure any edition of D&D has ever really gone beyond track rations and encumbrance.

Quote from: KingCheops;1018344Honestly I'm not sure any edition of D&D has ever really gone beyond track rations and encumbrance.

When I used the Moldvay/Mentzer nautical rules as written, I was amazed how good they were. The PCs' ship would end up blown about all over the map! :D The key was the combination of the weather table and the mis-navigation table. D&D for some reason generally doesn't pay much attention to weather on land, but a 2d6 type table with effects would go a long way.

As far as 5e goes, I think the key to overland survival is the Exhaustion system - it's brutal, and a great way to make travel feel dangerous even without any goblins. If it's a choice between a level of Exhaustion from the storm, and going into the haunted keep, PCs will have a strong incentive to go say hello to Dr Frankenfurter.

I'll reiterate a lot of the opinions expressed already:

Pros

* The system hits the sweet spot in complexity and mechanics. It makes AD&D and 3E obsolete for me. Maybe B/X too. D&D 5E really does take the best part of all editions. The only other edition of D&D I can imagine myself playing again is 4E, because it provides a fundamentally different experience.

* For the first time in almost 20 years, official D&D easily supports theatre of the mind play. This is huge.

* The core books are really well designed and presented. They make me want to play.

* Classes provide great scope for customization and trying new things without encouraging min/max char op power-gaming. As a player I'm still finding cool sub-classes and character concepts I want to play.  

Cons

* Combat can get really draggy at higher levels, when PCs and monsters can feel like little more than huge backs of hit points.

* NPCs - especially spellcasters - are still a big pain in the ass to run. The need to spend half an hour creating a 4th level wizard NPC and then reference his spells scattered across a 250 page book in play is a big step back. WotC should have learned the lessons of 4E and made ease of play at the table a core design principle.

* The support material for DMs is completely lacking. As noted, the exploration rules are weaksauce. There are no books of lairs, NPCs, plug and play towns, maps, etc. And all the supplementary systems WotC promised during the Next playtests - naval rules, winter or desert setting environments, etc. have clearly been abandoned.

* The published adventures have been bloated sacks of shit, full of the kind of writerly background fluff that turned me off Paizo adventure paths. And their presentation is awful - blocks of text in tiny fonts with essential information buried. They're basically useless at the table without extensive home-made notes.

Quote from: Haffrung;1018373* The published adventures have been bloated sacks of shit, full of the kind of writerly background fluff that turned me off Paizo adventure paths. And their presentation is awful - blocks of text in tiny fonts with essential information buried. They're basically useless at the table without extensive home-made notes.

Yet again, which of the published adventures have you actually read or played? Because this is bullshit. The fonts are not tiny, there is little 'writerly background fluff' and essential information is not buried.

Quote from: Haffrung;1018373* Combat can get really draggy at higher levels, when PCs and monsters can feel like little more than huge backs of hit points.

Yeah, I've been wondering about that.
I've only run 5e for up to about level 7 characters.
I've been tempted to run some special sessions where the characters start at level 5 and level every session through to about level 15.. I want to see how 5e plays out at higher levels.

Quote from: Haffrung;1018373* The support material for DMs is completely lacking. As noted, the exploration rules are weaksauce. There are no books of lairs, NPCs, plug and play towns, maps, etc. And all the supplementary systems WotC promised during the Next playtests - naval rules, winter or desert setting environments, etc. have clearly been abandoned.

I don't really mind this as there's a LOT of 3rd party support material, much of it free.

Quote from: Haffrung;1018373* The published adventures have been bloated sacks of shit, full of the kind of writerly background fluff that turned me off Paizo adventure paths. And their presentation is awful - blocks of text in tiny fonts with essential information buried. They're basically useless at the table without extensive home-made notes.

Yes, the 5e official campaign books are often quite overblown and often not organised very well.  
You really have to read through the entire campaign book, then find the various errors/omissions (in particular Princes of the Apocalypse), go online to get some very useful guides by fans (I downloaded a very nice PDF made by a 5e fan ) , then remove stuff that is just stupid (some of the names of NPCs are just dumb for example) .  
I have also changed the content/scenarios in PotA quite a bit to fit my tastes.

Quote from: Voros;1018376Yet again, which of the published adventures have you actually read or played? Because this is bullshit. The fonts are not tiny, there is little 'writerly background fluff' and essential information is not buried.

I have most of the campaign books for 5e.

Not particularly because I'll use them as they are. It's mostly I as I like to mine them for information and content to use that I strip out.
I AM running the "Princes of the apocalypse" campaign though ATM.

I have found in particular, the earlier campaign books are organised badly.  Hell, even PotA got the scale of the MAIN map wrong, which they admitted themselves.  
The Phandelver lead on campaign book (the Dragon one) needs serious work to make it useable.

I didn't get the Giant's book yet, but I did get the Undead one (a more recent book) which looks pretty good.

I think WotC are getting better at making these campaign books, but still, they're very verbose and not easy to keep track of things or know where to look next for information in the books.

I don't think I've really noticed draggy combat in 5e, short of crazy stuff like 24 Vrock demons attacking the party. High level PCs can put out tons of damage. BBEGs all seem to drop pretty fast. I guess hordes of CR5s can be sloggy, but my high level (15+) Varisia group took out around 15 CR 4-5 ettins & hill giants in a big battle which played pretty fast I think; much faster than 3e or 4e.

Anything that fits even vaguely within 5e encounter guidelines generally plays out ok.

Quote from: Voros;1018376Yet again, which of the published adventures have you actually read or played? Because this is bullshit. The fonts are not tiny, there is little 'writerly background fluff' and essential information is not buried.

I played in a PotA campaign and my DM complained about all the work he had to do between sessions.

I've sat down with the Storm King's Thunder and read through it extensively. I've also spent time reading through borrowed copies of Out of the Abyss and Curse of Strahd. I simply can't deal with that much content - dozens of NPCs and plot points and background information and events - delivered in walls of text. When I was seriously considering buying CoS, I spent a lot of time on forums getting a feel for how the campaign was to run, and again and again I came across home-made aids that DMs felt they required to run the campaign. I don't have time for that shit. If I'm going to spend hours reading an adventure and taking notes, and then hours writing up play aids, and then hours preparing between sessions, I may as well use my own material (which is what I've done with 5e).

WotC isn't any worse than Paizo in this regard. But these publishers have the same problems:

A) They're trying to both present a setting and tell an epic story, so they awkwardly mash the two goals together in one book.

B) They know half of the audience for adventure paths aren't actively playing and just buy them for reading material, and so they write them to be entertaining to read rather than useful at the table in play.

C) The insufficient use of table, graphics, sequenced lists, call-outs, sidebars, flowcharts, etc. demonstrates that they don't have competent document design / technical writers on staff. Or if they do understand the principles of effective information design, they choose not to employ them because of A) and B) above.

I found the 4E Essentials adventures much easier to use at the table. 5E has been a big step back in usability.

PoTA is probably one of their weakest books I have to agree. But I have to disagree with the claim of 'walls of text' in Out of the Abyss or Curse of Strahd, approx. 5-10 pages of background material at the beginning, including NPCs, etc and then 200-500 words of text per location doesn't equate to walls of text to me. I found the locations easy to reference as each location layouts out the relevant monsters, location, traps, etc in a few hundred words. That there are a lot of NPCs is true and I think one of the strongest parts of those books. I ran most of CoS and didn't need any of these DM guides on DMGuild and I'm hardly a superstar DM. I don't find the layout problematic, I could see the advantage of an NPC relationship flowchart though.

Quote from: Voros;1018385I don't find the layout problematic, I could see the advantage of an NPC relationship flowchart though.

From a DM aid perspective, I think a fold-out relationship map of all NPCs in a campaign along with page references to their entries in the book, would be a godsend. These campaigns-in-a-book present an enormous amount of complex information. I just think the users of the book would be better served if the writers innovated beyond the traditional block of text narrative approach to presenting that information. And as I said, it isn't just WotC campaigns that suffer from this. I was flipping through the WFRP 3E Enemy Within campaign recently, and I realized I would never run it because it's just not worth my time to re-write all that content in a user-friendly format.

Quote from: Voros;1018385PoTA is probably one of their weakest books I have to agree. But I have to disagree with the claim of 'walls of text' in Out of the Abyss or Curse of Strahd...

I played a few sessions of Out of the Abyss, the GM definitely struggled with the presentation and eventually gave up (whereas she had run her homebrew fantasy Japan setting without problems). Also played a couple sessions of Tomb of Annihilation recently, it seemed a bit better as far as I could tell but again the campaign died pretty fast.

AFAICT the WotC books are a bit better than Paizo, but that's certainly damning with faint praise. I think having everything in a single hardback makes integration easier and they definitely seem less linear than Paizo APs. But they still suffer from overly verbose presentation that fails to call out vital info. TSR modules ca 1983 had vastly superior layout.

Well for whatever it's worth - 3-years later and I'm pretty much out on D&D. The ground of the game and system has shifted below my feet and has become in the modern context "something else". And that's cool.

When I go back to D&D I'm going to hack 2e into a 10-lvl spread with optional rules for going 10+ being God-mode rules or something. It'll be my fantasy heartbreaker.

Quote from: tenbones;1018514Well for whatever it's worth - 3-years later and I'm pretty much out on D&D. The ground of the game and system has shifted below my feet and has become in the modern context "something else". And that's cool.

Do you mind elaborating?  Curious minds want to know...

Quote from: S'mon;1018425I pllayed a few sessions of Out of the Abyss, the GM definitely struggled with the presentation and eventually gave up (whereas she had run her homebrew fantasy Japan setting without problems). Also played a couple sessions of Tomb of Annihilation recently, it seemed a bit better as far as I could tell but again the campaign died pretty fast.

AFAICT the WotC books are a bit better than Paizo, but that's certainly damning with faint praise. I think having everything in a single hardback makes integration easier and they definitely seem less linear than Paizo APs. But they still suffer from overly verbose presentation that fails to call out vital info. TSR modules ca 1983 had vastly superior layout.

Hard to say what happened to your DM but I think we all know moving from homebrew to written can be challenging as some think the adventure is some Bible they have to memorize instead of a guide they can improvise from.

When I'm reviewing CoS or OotA I'm not seeing anything in the prose that qualifies as 'verbose.' The average key description is around 200-250 words, I can't find one in excess of 500-600 words for the largest locations, the text is about the relevant details and monsters in simple language, no endless rambling about irelevant backgrounds or histories.

Funny that you bring up TSR ca. 1983. I never found there was a 'house-style' at TSR. Cook and to a lesser degree Moldvay were clear and concise, Hickman despite his reputation as some heretic had very clear and simply written modules, Douglas Niles to me is the weakest writer in the period which is no surprise as he was just starting yet I see his (to me, overrated) modules praised all the time. And of course the late 70s Gygax modules are massively overwritten, yet this overload of imaginative detail is a large part of what makes them so great, a little remarked upon element that challenges OSR orthodoxy.

Quote from: Voros;1018578And of course the late 70s Gygax modules are massively overwritten, yet this overload of imaginative detail is a large part of what makes them so great, a little remarked upon element that challenges OSR orthodoxy.

Yeah, I find a lot of Gygax stuff over written, though not universally - Keep on the Borderlands is fine, so is Yggsburgh, and I thought Fane of the Drow merited it, whereas I found the Against the Giants modules over written despite their brevity. But most of the 32 page late 70s/early 80s modules are very clear and easy to read, surpassed only by the best OSR stuff.

Quote from: KingCheops;1018536Do you mind elaborating?  Curious minds want to know...

Since you asked... (and I'll stipulate these are strictly just my opinions)

My tastes have changed and those tastes didn't change with the way the D&D editions evolved. I did a lot of design stuff for the 3e era, waged edition-wars with the best (i.e. worst) nerdzerkers. And I came to realize how over-wrought the whole thing had become and how bad the math was and ultimately the game had mutated into something else.

Like a prodigal child I didn't realize how much St. Gary and his crew of scalawags *really* understood about their system that jackass upstarts like myself didn't realize going into 3e and beyond. Well with the surge in new players, D&D has transformed into a freak-show of sorts by implication, an oddity that isn't generally as informed by fantasy as much as become trapped in its own conceits as it's own "thing". Each edition wandered a little bit further into solidifying this emergent D&D-as-its-own genre, to the point that a casual pass at 3.x/4e doesn't really comport with the assumptions of any particular setting without implied weirdness. The emergence of MMO's has done a lot to impact this trajectory of design and its myriad of bad ideas. But that's another topic.
 
Ultimately I became less interested in trying to reconcile with the hottest flavor of D&D (or Pathfinder) and simply looked elsewhere for other systemic options for fantasy, and ultimately non-fantasy RPGs.

5e has done a *lot* to alleviate this... but enough time and distance has created opportunities to explore other options of what I want mechanically. And like that prodigal child - I'm a little wiser, a hell of a lot older, less "orthodox" in my approach to gaming in general. Lesson's learned and all that.

And so - I've "let" go of D&D as *my D&D*. I'm less interested in system-fidelity as I am in good mechanics that give me the gameplay I want. I've found other systems that let me approximate many of the various fantasy sub-genres, including D&D's settings, *better* than the current 5e ruleset at my table. I like to have rules that enhance my gameplay not *be* the game.

I'm not knocking D&D at all, mind you. I'm just saying as a GM, were I to come back to the House of Gygax, I would do so with humility, hat in hand, like a good prodigal son. I would pick up 1e/2e and start there and tweak, and the only major differences would be 10/10+ split in game assumptions. But I'd try to cleave closer to Gary and Dave's ideas at a lower scale that what is assumed today rather than trying to get as far away from them as possible. But that pretty much means by that definition - I'm out on 5e (and anything else post 2e.)

In the meantime - I'm perfectly happy with the systems I'm indulging in now.

Fair enough.

Welcome back, tenbones! :cool: Maiden 'AD&D 2e' has been waiting for you in the Sacred Unicorn Grove this whole time. Here, have a blesséd box set, and let's traipse back to La La Land! :D

Quote from: Opaopajr;1018606Welcome back, tenbones! :cool: Maiden 'AD&D 2e' has been waiting for you in the Sacred Unicorn Grove this whole time. Here, have a blesséd box set, and let's traipse back to La La Land! :D

Oh but I've developed a taste for Unicorn steak in my travels. La La Land is not without it's virtues either. But now I'll open a race-track so we can sprint around instead of traipsing like a ponce.

But traipsing is so very much like skipping. And skipping is ever so merry. :) Is this not what merry men do? :D

Quote from: Opaopajr;1018732But traipsing is so very much like skipping. And skipping is ever so merry. :) Is this not what merry men do? :D

Quote from: tenbones;1018709Oh but I've developed a taste for Unicorn steak in my travels. La La Land is not without it's virtues either. But now I'll open a race-track so we can sprint around instead of traipsing like a ponce.

When you two knuckleheads are done traipsing/poncing/toffing about with 2e, find your testicles and come back to 1e. :D

Quote from: tenbones;1018596Since you asked... (and I'll stipulate these are strictly just my opinions)

My tastes have changed and those tastes didn't change with the way the D&D editions evolved. I did a lot of design stuff for the 3e era, waged edition-wars with the best (i.e. worst) nerdzerkers. And I came to realize how over-wrought the whole thing had become and how bad the math was and ultimately the game had mutated into something else.

Like a prodigal child I didn't realize how much St. Gary and his crew of scalawags *really* understood about their system that jackass upstarts like myself didn't realize going into 3e and beyond. Well with the surge in new players, D&D has transformed into a freak-show of sorts by implication, an oddity that isn't generally as informed by fantasy as much as become trapped in its own conceits as it's own "thing". Each edition wandered a little bit further into solidifying this emergent D&D-as-its-own genre, to the point that a casual pass at 3.x/4e doesn't really comport with the assumptions of any particular setting without implied weirdness. The emergence of MMO's has done a lot to impact this trajectory of design and its myriad of bad ideas. But that's another topic.
 
Ultimately I became less interested in trying to reconcile with the hottest flavor of D&D (or Pathfinder) and simply looked elsewhere for other systemic options for fantasy, and ultimately non-fantasy RPGs.

5e has done a *lot* to alleviate this... but enough time and distance has created opportunities to explore other options of what I want mechanically. And like that prodigal child - I'm a little wiser, a hell of a lot older, less "orthodox" in my approach to gaming in general. Lesson's learned and all that.

And so - I've "let" go of D&D as *my D&D*. I'm less interested in system-fidelity as I am in good mechanics that give me the gameplay I want. I've found other systems that let me approximate many of the various fantasy sub-genres, including D&D's settings, *better* than the current 5e ruleset at my table. I like to have rules that enhance my gameplay not *be* the game.

I'm not knocking D&D at all, mind you. I'm just saying as a GM, were I to come back to the House of Gygax, I would do so with humility, hat in hand, like a good prodigal son. I would pick up 1e/2e and start there and tweak, and the only major differences would be 10/10+ split in game assumptions. But I'd try to cleave closer to Gary and Dave's ideas at a lower scale that what is assumed today rather than trying to get as far away from them as possible. But that pretty much means by that definition - I'm out on 5e (and anything else post 2e.)

In the meantime - I'm perfectly happy with the systems I'm indulging in now.

Preach it, brother! I too have long since parted ways with D&D.  5e fixes some things, sort of. It's not bad. But like someone wiser than me once stated, it's like D&D has disappeared up its own ass.  It has become a genre unto itself, and it doesn't really resemble the blank canvas game that I grew up with that could be Greek myth, or Camelot, or Middle Earth or whatever you wanted it to be.  If I want fantasy, there are more open games with better mechanics, and if I really want D&D, there's BX, 1e or a half dozen great OSR games that are better than 5e at delivering that experience.

In my mind, the best thing to come out of 5e is Adventures in Middle earth - D&D without spellcasting is at least enough of a hook to keep me interested.

If I wanted a simple version of D&D I'd play Beyond the Wall or B/X, not 1e.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1018761When you two knuckleheads are done traipsing/poncing/toffing about with 2e, find your testicles and come back to 1e. :D

But 1e has complicated grappling rules. Doing so that way may take awhile... :(

Quote from: Opaopajr;1018821But 1e has complicated grappling rules. Doing so that way may take awhile... :(

And try and parse the iniative rules.

1e is a significantly more complex game than 5e. Monsters are easier to abbreviate if they don't do anything special, and a 1st-level character is quicker to put together, but otherwise, 1e has a lot more fiddly bits in play.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;10188421e is a significantly more complex game than 5e. Monsters are easier to abbreviate if they don't do anything special, and a 1st-level character is quicker to put together, but otherwise, 1e has a lot more fiddly bits in play.

This gets back to the old question of 'what is complexity?' Anything from late 2e onward is going to have more character creation options. 4e is the most divergent so for someone with a 'base generic understanding of D&D' it probably has the steepest learning curve. OD&D has some highly ambiguous language, so parsing that could be considered complexity. But for number of rule (that are not just specific variations on a central premise) 1e and 3e have the most, while I'd say 5e and B/X have the least (not sure where to put oD&D, it could also be in the least category). 1e AD&D and 3.x D&D both tried somewhat hard to be low-resolution world emulators, and the result is a very complex game if you keep all the rules turned on.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1018761When you two knuckleheads are done traipsing/poncing/toffing about with 2e, find your testicles and come back to 1e. :D

I use 1e pretty freely in my 2e. So it goes without saying... I'd be using both.

But I still feel I can make the perfect skin of the cat. There is a fantasy-heartbreaker of epic proportions to be made that exists by taking 1e/2e and making some good tweaks to it. That game is not 5e (but I'm thinking the Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic would be a nice lift from it).

It'll happen one day. And everyone will say "OMG - this is best iteration of D&D EVARRRRrrrrrRR!!!" - said every heartbreaker designer!

Quote from: Opaopajr;1018821But 1e has complicated grappling rules. Doing so that way may take awhile... :(

I would use Roger E. Moore's Open Hand fighting rules from Dragon Magazine #83 "How to finish fights faster". That problem was long solved for me.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1016850Overall, I think 5e is easily the best edition in at least 30 years, and hope it sticks around in some form or another for at least as long as AD&D did.

I remember all the fuss about 5e before its release. Turns out, 5e is just an improved version of 2e is all. You rarely hear about how bad 2e was. So 5e is selling well, just as it should be. I'm thinking a 6e will not be produced for awhile, because reasons.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1018847This gets back to the old question of 'what is complexity?' Anything from late 2e onward is going to have more character creation options. 4e is the most divergent so for someone with a 'base generic understanding of D&D' it probably has the steepest learning curve. OD&D has some highly ambiguous language, so parsing that could be considered complexity. But for number of rule (that are not just specific variations on a central premise) 1e and 3e have the most, while I'd say 5e and B/X have the least (not sure where to put oD&D, it could also be in the least category). 1e AD&D and 3.x D&D both tried somewhat hard to be low-resolution world emulators, and the result is a very complex game if you keep all the rules turned on.

Yes.  Furthermore, as you allude above, the complexity is not evenly spread in each edition.  It is true that there are some relatively complex parts in 5E, compared to those same parts in other versions.  Usually, they happen to coincide with where I want a little complexity spent on options.  Therefore, I don't mind them.  Mileage, varies.  In contrast, 3E isn't as grossly complex as it is sometimes made out to be, but I don't particular value where it spends its "complexity capital".  Part of the charm of AD&D (especially 1E) is the complexity of certain pieces in how they are presented.  Sometimes I'm up for that, sometimes not.  Even RC is a swath of multi-layered complexity wrapped around a dead simple core, though most of the complexity is clearly optional.

From a Game Store Worker's perspective......

People Like it, I mean they REALLY Like it.

The low price point on the starter box has helped a LOT (20 bucks American) - plus the fact that the adenture or scenario book in that is pretty damn Good.

The current or new versions of the main three books look good and we have an ongoing discount price on those. We sold a TON of Starter box sets, Player Handbooks , and Dungeon Masters Guide during Hanukkah and right before the Christmas Holiday break week.
Based on that there seemed to be a Huge amount of people planning to start campaigns during the Holidays or do one shot sessions with friends and family that they hadn't seen in a while.

- Ed C.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;1018891I remember all the fuss about 5e before its release. Turns out, 5e is just an improved version of 2e is all. You rarely hear about how bad 2e was. So 5e is selling well, just as it should be. I'm thinking a 6e will not be produced for awhile, because reasons.

I agree with you on all counts here. I like to think of 5E as a return to AD&D, but as you noted it probably is a lot closer to 2E than 1E. Either way, I think they removed enough of the 3E/4E stuff to make it one of my favorite versions of the game.

Don't know if it's been mentioned, but if you're not a fan of the exploration rules in the WOTC 5e books, I strongly recommend you check out the 5e Lord of the Rings books. It's built on the 5e system, but alters the exploration rules to be much, MUCH more detailed.