5e Is Crap; Is DnD?

"On the phone, you and me

'Til dawn, 'til three"

 

Michael Jackson - Remember the Time

 

 

It took me very little time while playing Solasta to begin hating what I was seeing of the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons. While I'm sure the tabletop arguments are old news after a decade, it's taken a while for adaptations to filter into dekstop gaming. When I said I'll complain about it "another time" that can indeed mean three and a half years later -- which is now, having also played Baldur's Gate 3 for comparison. My conclusion? 5e is relative shit. Not complete shit, which from what I've heard of 4e is the best I could've said, had anyone bothered adapting it... but still, relative to 3.5e, shit.

 

I do like some additions like expanded combat style / path / subclass kits or short rests or even inspiration points though they could do with a bit of tweaking (preferred Tides of Numenera's system) but most everything else is oversimplified or otherwise more idiot-friendly. Reduced spell lists, trivialized familiars and completely deleted animal companions, magic creep into nonmagical classes (e.g. fighter self-healing) buffs fixed instead of additive, positive and negative energy no longer seem to matter (e.g. undead) no deliberately investing in "use magic device" for versatility, "legendary actions" are a bad joke letting any creature deemed speshul play calvinball with turns and initiative, arcane / divine casting increasingly indistinct... and that's just scratching the surface of superficiality.

 

Limiting spellcasters to only one "concentration" spell at a time is a stupid means of strangling them due to decades of bitching about quadratic wizards, especially if you insist on tossing the vast majority of spells into that category, including simple buffs/debuffs like barkskin or hunter's mark. It just moves magic closer to idiotic "nuking" identical to hitting shit with sticks since instant, direct damage falls outside that category. Casters could at the very least increase their concentration slots as they level. Not necessarily a bad mechanic at its core, but is obviously being used as a cudgel.

 

Alignments are ignored or outright abandoned. At first I thought this a problem with Solasta's barely-there campaign writing, or BG3's adolescent rebellion monomania obviating further moral considerations, but 4th edition had previously gutted alignments and I've seen comments that removing such restrictions from paladins and the like is apparently in keeping with tabletop 5e, so this monumental idiocy is apparently working as intended. The intersecting alignments and their associated multiversal cosmology are, bar none, D&D's most interesting, most central and most enduring contribution to storytelling. Making players consciously decide on a personal ethos and forcing them to rationally evaluate actions on keeping with such principles is just about the only thing elevating D&D over Saturday-morning cartoon tripe. I doubt it's any accident that the best-written computer adaptation by far to this point, Planescape: Torment, dealt extensively with this precept even if it failed to incorporate it into gameplay. That a character may occasionally find himself in a position to also break his alignment is not a bug; it's a feature. The arguments are part of the product. They represent psychological growth from formal to postformal thought.

 

Just as bad however is the apparent phobia of arithmetic the system picked up by contagion with modern schooling. The "proficiency" system replaces numeric skill point investment with a fire-and-forget "like" button. Replacing derived saves (will/reflex/fort) with ability checks muddles defensive/offensive distinctions. By the time I noticed advantage/disadvantage had replaced almost all buffs/debuffs and homogenized all numeric effects into merely rolling an extra die, I finally realized the underlying pattern:

5e has outlawed arithmetic.

Don't worry your pretty little hollow gamer head about adding or subtracting stacking buffs, bonuses, skill points, whatever, and figuring out what can best benefit your character. The dice will tell you all you need to know in what is increasingly a high/low game. No frontal lobe required. Jus' a-keep rollin' dem bones!

 

In a sense the same trend has played out all across the game industry, on and offline, with one-shot kills replacing gradual advantages, infinitely powerful creatures killed by "murder" cards and so forth. Action-action-action! (Don't sweat the details.) So at this point we need to backtrack to that celebrated third edition to which die-hard dungeoneers affix their nostalgic eyes. How have its adaptations fared? Pathfinder is based on that era, but quite recently Wrath of the Righteous was as guilty as any of inflating enemy stats until they became meaningless, with not only players but the monsters themselves unable to land a hit on each other. Or let's try one of the classics applauded specifically for its adherence to the ruleset, Troika's Temple of Elemental Evil.

The kicker? Zoms're standing immobile after being turned.

The "roll to miss" bullshit starts right from the tutorial, with even my barbarian struggling to resolve the "stick x zom head" equation. Is it not dice still ruling the interaction instead of the player? The fact that my wizard, with the lowest attack bonus, is the one who scored a hit there, I should think illustrates the insanity quite aptly. But beyond that, I held a reasonable expectation that my wizard/ranger/druid/cleric/barbie party could adapt to various situations. Flexible for range and melee with lots of summons to soak up some front line damage, mix of arcane and divine spells, the usual concerns. Even a bit of diplomacy on the cleric, uncharacteristically. Except the game's tutorial is split by alignment. My usual Chaotic Neutral party was suddenly barred from exiting.

Note the issue is not that the chest is locked. It's explicitly coded to be opened solely with the open locks skill and only that skill at a rank only a rogue could reach without tools. A quick browse for answers turned up this old 2006 thread on the forums of some modders who patched the game's Troika-grade buggery and so forth. The original poster rightly pointed out:

 

"I was planning on my casters being able to use open/close lock for simple chests, and Knock when it becomes available. In theory I should be able to replicate most rogue benefits through spells."

Which was largely my plan as well. Or hire a rogue NPC later. Or multiclass my ranger later with a bit of rogue if cross-class skills aren't enough. He was given nothing but the nonsensical: 

"It's simple. If you want at Chaotic Neutral party, you are going to have to start with a rogue. You can get rid of him or her later. I see no reason why we should try to make every possible option available to every possible party configuration."

Eeeeeexcept coding a chest whose lock does not function like other locks also took extra effort. I see no reason why you should try that either, at least as a level 1 gatekeeping mechanism.

 

Then, from an administrator no less: "Well, the Rogue practically embodies the CN philosophy" 

Which just goes to show that learning how to code in no way lends one common sense or anything but the most common taste in entertainment. Leaving aside the question of whether every other of the nine alignments also had to bring a specific class along to be permitted to so much as exit the damn tutorial (did CE need a raging barbarian? was LN barred from casting ray of frost from scrolls/wands without a wizard?) you're talking about CHAOTIC NEUTRAL! What other players would be less likely to follow a likely template?

 

I don't know whether the chest in question was locked by the original developers or the modders, but Troika itself being an amateurish startup at the time, it's a moot point for our purposes here. And sure (if you know it ahead of time) buying my ranger some thief's tools in the modded pre-game shop got me through it without having to redistribute my character classes, but it does illustrate the centrality of simpleminded cookie-cutter builds to the dungeoneering mindset.

 

The old "difficulty" was in essence min-maxing and over-randomization, and it takes no real cogitatin' to scribble an 18 in front of your character's core stat or blame luck. So, at its core, the millstone around D&D's neck is its own audience. Its most fervent adherents crestfallen at the idea of anyone changing the fighter/wizard/thief template, mocking anyone who would dare roleplay in a roleplaying game, fetishizing colored dice and insisting any flaws are just a show of secret brilliance on the part of Wizards of the Coast and you-just-don't-get-it-maaaaaan! It's "working as intended" and you're just rolling the dice wrong.

 

Now, for anyone who remembers beyond Y2K, you can probably point to another nerdy staple with a fanatical base which historically did more to tear down the target of its obsession than support it.

You know the one.

Come on, say it with me:

Trekkies!

To such cultists, the show or the game does not exist to excel in its creative field, but to provide them with personal validation as fanatics thereof. It will not be fixed because they don't want it fixed. Forget the numbers, forget the roleplaying, distill everything down to the core endorphin boost. Hit the goblin, goblin dies. You're awesome, you saved the world. (So is 5e the Voyager of D&D? Discuss amongst yourselves.)

 

So, much as I scoff at The Kids These Days ignoring the numbers and alignments, I'm not seeing that far a drop in mental level from "max" as a number and pigeonholing rogues as chaotic neutral. Always giving the right answer to an eternally unchanging question is not a mark of  creativity or superior intelligence. The problems 5e has worsened were always there in a different form, because the fans wanted them.

 

So where does that leave me as a peripheral audience? Certainly, I assume some numeric simplification has greatly sped up tabletop campaigns, but:

1) For computer adaptations where it only takes a tenth of a second to crunch ten different modifiers for each of thirty different creatures' five attacks every round, that benefit is entirely absent.

2) That in no way excuses everything else they dumbed down (e.g. alignments).

Whether Hasbro's capitalizing on the kiddie market or just the idiot market, they have exhaustively demonstrated they have zero eye for any market but the munchiest kin. So let it die, just as Star Trek should in retrospect have been given another decades-long rest after TNG.

 

I've been holding out more hope for Pathfinder, but if the audience for that is the same crowd insisting "you must be at least this min-maxed to ride this TUTORIAL(!)" from 2006, I ain't seein' it. (And, judging by Wrath of the Righteous, it is.) Doesn't help that Golarion's so haphazard. You need more coherent RPG worlds than Faerun's grab-bag of steam-peasant-fairy-dragon-punk (and maybe some lasers) and mashing cyborgs and anime-worshipping "kineticist" bullshit together with Excalibur doesn't help in the least bit.

 

The simple observation that 5e reduced so logically from 3e's most crowd-pleasing elements (while leaving nothing that would challenge its audience) would seem to indicate it can never get better. Any tabletop system popular enough to get a computer adaptation funded will end up just so. As with entertainment in general, mass appeal is pablum and creative death. But, more than that, dungeoneers will not let their childhood memories grow up.