why i hate 5e aka the tragedy of 5th edition
creatures hello
i went off about 5th edition and why i dont like it to a friend in discord and my points (though they may be factually incorrect) came out in a way that i like and think are well reasoned, so I’m gonna put the spam here.
He asked me to elaborate about 3rd edition being the start of the same kind of more fighting-centric kind of game that 5e is turning into, and this (largely-uneducated-but-decalred-as-fact) is what followed:
heres the thing, D&D has always been a monster fighting game.
but in 1e, your character sucked at fighting however, your character sucking at fighting meant you had to think outside the box, stack the deck in your favour. In general, treat the fantasy world as a real place to come up with innovative solutions to problems, a thing that is only possible because you have a human computer as your task resolver that created a really fucking unique and amazing problem solving type game with monsters and treasure and ambition and actual true blue adventure all of the weird old archaic rules from 1e make sense when you think of them through this lens random encounters, then, are literally random monsters that are running around in the dungeon it wasnt just “roll a d100 then fight 3 owlbears” when you rolled an encounter, you also thought about “this monster, in this environment, how does it react? why is it here? (the module would tell you) does it want to fight? eat? get treasure? How far away are the characters? How much light? Is anyone surprised?” gygax and the gang created scenarios that were not realistic, but taken seriously everything had a well thought out point and purpose but at the end of the day, the game was about fighting monsters so 2nd edition comes around, and they give all their players a poll asking them what they want to see colville has a video all about this poll its fucking massive
and because the game is about fighting monsters, players want to be stronger and cooler and so the game comes out and your character is now more in depth, and way better at fighting you’re generally more heroic, but the system still tends towards creating peasants with pitchforks by default but by this point people have been using D&D for heroic fantasy for years then the guy whos running TSR almost bankrupts D&D and wotc comes along to make 3rd edition and it blows everything out the fucking water cos they design it from the ground up for fighting you get combat feats and you have heaps of hit points and there are intensely dedicated systems for grappling and mounted combat and all this stuff to simulate fights
[“cos they design it from the ground up for fighting”] might be a lie, I think they actually designed it from the ground up to have a good answer in the rules to any question you might have back in 1976 if you had a rules question you literally called gygax on the phone for the answer and his sage advice was “make it up, it’s your table”
cos the game was about experiencing a realistic fantasy world (with a bit too much detail in the fights) then gygax got sick of answering the phone so they started tending towards rules and more rules 2nd edition fucking sucks i was in a server playing a 2nd edition play by post game and they were rolling on charts upon charts to resolve fishing [this is true, it was amazing and boring as shit all at the same time]
but the heart is still old school and can still create fun fantasy games
friend: “that explains why 3rd edition was so rules heavy”
yeah and people actually wanted it but 3e was the first of its kind so it got a bunch of shit wrong so then you have 3.5 and pf which tune things up a bit 4e comes out of the fact that after all this time there was still great imbalance in character classes so they make an mmo from the ground up to make sure all the fights are balanced. and it fails because by this point they basically make a game thats just for fights 5e comes along and says “hey wait, there’s a soul to these older editions that we’ve been missing, but it’s also from 1974 and it was written by a literal real life crazy old wizard so let’s make it not shit” and it sells mega mondo bucks because it’s genuinely the best thing to happen to ttrpgs in like 40 years but now we’re like 10 years along and people are playing the monster fighting game and complaining that its not balanced cos heres the thing they dont know that the soul of the game is experiencing a realistic fantasy world the modern RPG era is gonna be defined by cinematic moments and storytelling, we’ve seen the pivot towards it but mechanically the game is still about fighting monsters
so they improve their monster fighting rules and try to pass it off like the same 5e as ever and all the while they’re draining what little soul 5e had leftover from early editions and we’re left with this not-rules-light-but-not-rules-heavy game about fighting monsters that is being used for story type games by people that never learned that the game is about experiencing a realistic fantasy world and thats why i hate 5th edition
[An additional note I added in reflection after my rant]
thing is the 5e rules dont actually say any of this stuff it’s the product of almost 50 years of cultural development in a hobby that exploded into worldwide conscious i’ve been doing dives into different bits of what the 5e books actually say and underneath it all they actually did succeed at making a game that is modernized and has that old school soul but no one plays it like that it’s more of a culture around the game than the game itself and i guess like, I cant really condemn that i just heavily disagree with it
friend: “I feel that its never gonna go back to that and its up for the DM to make a realistic world. D&D has evolved into a more heroic setting and some people like it but it still has the tools to make a realistic world its just a less popular setting”
yeah very astute thats the tragedy of 5th edition