Any one finding any rough spots in D&D 5.0? Seems pretty smooth to me.  I have a Druid charcter that grapples, I've only played him a couple times but when ever I have to do a quick refresher of the rules for grappling, with the DM.

Anyone finding other problems or unclear parts?

There are edge case when the fact that advantage/disadvantage do not stack seem a little out of whack with what is happening in the game.  Lack of light/Blindness interactions with more prosaic applications of the advantage/disadvantage rules are particularly jarring.  

I'm not sure any fix would be worth the cost, though. It works well enough most of the time.  Would hate to complicate it all the time for the sake of the edge cases.

Yeah, the disadvantage/luck issue is weird, but only comes up every month or so. There are number of spells that are out of whack, and the usual balance issues relating to spellcasters...but I wouldn't call anything "unclear."

The only negative thing I'e heard about 5E, from a couple of members of my DW group who play in regular, weekly, D&D groups outside our game, was mention of some overpowered race/class/archetype combos, which wouldn't be anything new, really. They seem pretty happy with everything else. My own experience is way too limited to draw any great wisdom in this regard, but it seemed rather clear and easy to run, from what I saw.

Quote from: cranebump;962644overpowered race/class/archetype combos

I feel that some of the newer races are built just to break the system, at least in Adventurer's League play. Maybe I'm just too traditional, but I'd rather stay with the core races and not allow bird-men and the like. Just seems like those races break the game more than they help it, IMO.

Quote from: finarvyn;962698I feel that some of the newer races are built just to break the system, at least in Adventurer's League play. Maybe I'm just too traditional, but I'd rather stay with the core races and not allow bird-men and the like. Just seems like those races break the game more than they help it, IMO.

Could be I'm just old, but whenever I see a D&D  list of playable races with more than elves, hobbits, dwarves, and gnomes, I scratch my head and wonder what the need was. I don't ever know what the new names mean as I haven't read the books; I just see them mentioned here and there: tiefling, gully dwarf (makes me picture a homeless muttering short person), kinder (reminds me of kindergarten), dragonspawn (I think), and so on. Then again, I don't even like elves, hobbits, dwarves, and gnomes all that much.

Long Rests being virtually unbreakable is one issue that so far is know but hasn't popped up as the DM just said "No" to Mearls and co's ruling.

Short rests can be a hassle if the players try to pull them off in the middle of a dungeon. Easy enough to educate them that that doesnt work that way. Sorry.

Past that its been little things where the player read a rule one way and the DM, and sometimes everyone else read it the other way.

Wizards can get really powerful. But alot of their power is in versatility and that power can be somewhat curbed by just limiting or even removing findable spells. They'll have to get by on just the ones they have picked up from level up. Also docking all the combat cantrips a damage die will help too. Allways keep in mind that concentration spells are akin to the older AD&D casting disruption element. Zap em, arrow em whatever.

Quote from: Omega;962719Long Rests being virtually unbreakable is one issue that so far is know but hasn't popped up as the DM just said "No" to Mearls and co's ruling.

.......

Past that its been little things where the player read a rule one way and the DM, and sometimes everyone else read it the other way.

Please elaborate on these two points.

PC's are too rugged. I understand it is intended as a 'feature, and things have improved relative to 4E. Nevertheless, D+D's greatest strength as a rules system is its elements of resource management over time scales much longer than a single encounter. When you think of your HP as something that has to last you all week rather than for the next 3 minutes, it changes how you play (I would say for the better).

Quote from: Dumarest;962710Could be I'm just old, but whenever I see a D&D  list of playable races with more than elves, hobbits, dwarves, and gnomes, I scratch my head and wonder what the need was. I don't ever know what the new names mean as I haven't read the books; I just see them mentioned here and there: tiefling, gully dwarf (makes me picture a homeless muttering short person), kinder (reminds me of kindergarten), dragonspawn (I think), and so on. Then again, I don't even like elves, hobbits, dwarves, and gnomes all that much.

Because literary sources have provided with other types.

Curse of The Azure Bonds gave us "Dragonbait", a member of the lizard like Saurial race in D&D.  R.A. Salvatore gave us Drizzt Do'Urden, a Drow heroic character (The Drow always were considered powerful for some odd reason.)

Outside of D&D we were given a whole slew of characters in fantasy settings, hell the Forgotten Realms COMIC gave us a Centaur Fighter!

Originally, according to Gronan, Gary Gygax never wanted to have any of the LOTR races in his game, being a Conan of Cimmeria fan.  But he got badgered and pestered into letting them in (and in retaliation put in restrictions to de-incentivize people from taking them in later editions), so frankly, new races are no different than allowing players to have access to Hobbits, Dwarves, Elves and Gnomes.

Quote from: Larsdangly;962961PC's are too rugged. I understand it is intended as a 'feature, and things have improved relative to 4E. Nevertheless, D+D's greatest strength as a rules system is its elements of resource management over time scales much longer than a single encounter. When you think of your HP as something that has to last you all week rather than for the next 3 minutes, it changes how you play (I would say for the better).

Given that in the original game you were effectively a military commander of sorts with years of experience, I find this hard to understand.

Quote from: Omega;962719Long Rests being virtually unbreakable is one issue that so far is know but hasn't popped up as the DM just said "No" to Mearls and co's ruling.

What?  'Unbreakable'?

Quote from: Omega;962719Short rests can be a hassle if the players try to pull them off in the middle of a dungeon. Easy enough to educate them that that doesnt work that way. Sorry.

Yes, because dungeons have thousands of inhabitants crowded in a bunch of 10-20 foot boxes and resting in a room for an hour is always going to be discovered.  100% of the time!

Really?

Quote from: Omega;962719Wizards can get really powerful. But alot of their power is in versatility and that power can be somewhat curbed by just limiting or even removing findable spells. They'll have to get by on just the ones they have picked up from level up. Also docking all the combat cantrips a damage die will help too. Allways keep in mind that concentration spells are akin to the older AD&D casting disruption element. Zap em, arrow em whatever.

Wizards and the new changes make playing any non-Divine Caster class pointless.  The Wizard is THE best Arcane Caster, bar none.

Quote from: Headless;962957Please elaborate on these two points.

1: Long rests are 8 hours. The only way to break a long rest is to keep the PCs active in combat, doing stuff continuously for a whole hour. Short rests can be interrupted. Long rests you cant short of jumping through a few hoops. Combat rarely lasts more than a minute or two so you'd have to throw masses of Zulus at them non-stop to interrupt a long rest and thats more likely to just kill the PCs through gradual attrition.

Common sense of course says Long Rest should work otherwise for interrupting. But according to the designers no. That is how it is supposed to work and it can be a pain in the ass if you have players trying to exploit that. Haven't had it happen personally. But another DM running the Adventurer's League had a group pull that in the middle of an active, not cleared out, dungeon.

2: Wizards scribing spells into their spellbooks, reach and attacks of opportunity, ready actions, and a couple of others.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;962963Yes, because dungeons have thousands of inhabitants crowded in a bunch of 10-20 foot boxes and resting in a room for an hour is always going to be discovered.  100% of the time! Really?

Wizards and the new changes make playing any non-Divine Caster class pointless.  The Wizard is THE best Arcane Caster, bar none.

1 & 2: You just love being consistently and blazingly wrong dont you? Yes. Yes you do.

Try again please.

I think the long rest part is mitigated by the fact that you can't take more than 1 in a 24-hr period, not only that but it only recovers 1/2 of your current Hit Die. Those limiting factors help maintain the danger of a populated Dungeon. It also means that you can still have some combat within a long rest and they're still running out of resources until the long rest is complete.

As for the Wizard being the BEST arcane class, I dunno. They're good and that's hard to dispute but the Sorcerer and Warlock bring both interesting and fun concepts to bear, not to mention power as well. Then there's how good Sorcerer/Paladin combos are with all those juicy Spell Slots to use Smite with and the fact that they're both Charisma based to boot. Versatility is a good feature but it's not the end-all, be-all of power in D&D.

Quote from: Omega;9629701 & 2: You just love being consistently and blazingly wrong dont you? Yes. Yes you do.

Try again please.

Huhn?

OK, the fact is, random encounters, still being a thing in 5e means that for a fair amount of the time, taking a 'Short' one hour break isn't going to immediately get the party killed, or attacked.  Sometimes, it gets interrupted, sure, but sometimes you gotta give your players a bone.

Unless, and this is not snark in any way, your crew is OK with rerolling new characters after a wipe out, and the DM is OK with reseting certain bits (like the background NPC's if there are any) every time.  I prefer giving my players a 60% chance of Short Resting in a Dungeon.  Long rests, well, that's a whole 'nother ball of wax.

As for the Wizard, it now works exactly as a Sorcerer does, except that over its lifetime, even assuming your DM is a dick and doesn't give you any chance at getting a scroll to scribe or an enemy spellbook (which can be an adventure in itself), you'll still end up with more spells than the Sorcerer.  Now, the only issue is losing the spellbook, which unless your DM IS a colossal bag of shredded man-meat, the odds of that being a permanent thing is unlikely.  But if you do lose the Spell Book, that still means that whatever spells you had the day before you'll still have.

I doubt the Sorcerer with its shorter spell list (It gets a total of 15 spells, like the Warlock) matches the sheer potential versatility that a Wizard will get.

The Warlock's only saving grace, which isn't all that great is it gets it's 1-4 spell slots after a SHORT rest, but the real meat of the class, the Invocations suck so hard, I'm impressed the book doesn't implode in on itself whenever you open it to the page.

The Bard is a 'face', he's got a wide array, but most of the spells are about illusion and interaction with others.

Every other caster is not Arcane.

The alt races are fine, underpowered even. It is just the min/maxers that obsess on such things. Playing a bunch of monsters is fun (I love the old Creature Crucible series) and has been around from the beginning of the game as Monsters! Monsters! and Gygax's anti-monster screed in the 1e DMG show.