Dungeons & Dragons used to have a reputation for being incredibly challenging, and you were lucky if your character made it past first level. But 5E changed all that, turning the game into an inviting environment for new players and making the game much, much easier. But did making the game easier for players inadvertently make it a nightmare for DMs? Join us this week to discuss this topic live and give us your thoughts!
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OSR – Your character will die
5e – Your character can never die
PF2 – the perfect mid point between these extremes
It’s a cakewalk due to min-max too much magic items given out and death saves being in favor of player odds
32:00 Mark, can you share whatever academic paper you wrote? That sounds interesting. TYVM 🙏🎲
I believe that FA at odd levels might help balance things, so instead of FA feat and class feat at even levels get FA feats at odds and class feats at evens… but if you do this I would think that you would restrict FA's to not include class archetypes.
Our group never gets XP when a character is not present, so we have a group with varying levels.
There is a series of videos on YouTube where a gamer had his wife (who has more or less zero experience with the most common genres) play various games while not helping her in any way. Turned out, most tutorials do a pretty poor job of teaching people who legitimately know nothing while simultaniously being overbearing to people who already played many similar games 👌👌👌
This has been one of my favorite topics thus far. Thanks for such a thoughtful discussion
persepctiv eis eveything, 5e jsut like eveyr other edition is a box of tools, is your game easy? then your DM is easy, make it harder… iv eplaye din 5e games that were a cakewlak, and others wher ewe were lucky if osmeone didnt go down eveyr single combat. and had a few TPKs…
Played D&D since the early 80s, and I may not understand the issue, but if you want the players to feel the mortality of their characters, have the monsters stop pulling their punches and/or lead them into traps. Also. Monty Haul issues are on the DM not the game.
Also, you can cut down the power level of magic items if you need to, and have identify "reveal" a difficult quest to unlock the full power of the item. Easy plot hook, right there. Repeatable ad infinitum.
My issue with the tutorial comments is that you never know what a person's first game is.
Bronze dragon is best dragon
Currently there are 3 DM's in our group and we are swapping between arcs. Have a Star Wars 5E, a PF1 Kingmaker adventure path, and one of us running the old DC Heroes. We swap to prevent burnout. Having run 3.5, PF1,4th and 5e, I have found 5e not to be hard, but dull. My group finds 5e somewhat intolerable without large amounts of house rules, home-brew feats and classes, etc. They built a game so simple your 8 year old nephew can play, and it feels like a game for eight year olds. It feels like a group project where someone wrote the classes, someone wrote the feats, someone wrote the monsters, and the actual rules were written by the lazy kid who turned in a single page with "Ask your DM" written on it. With home-brew it's passable, but it still lays all the work on the DM, unlike earlier editions that left a lot of the work to the players. In earlier editions, your player would say "Here is what I want to do, here is what I need to buy to do it, and here are the rules I looked up". Now it's basically "I want to do something different DM, how do I do it. The rules say to ask the DM".
I have been running a ton of 5E games and have had no difficulty in scaling encounters up and down or even creating unique encounters. I openly run a more deadly game and yes, I have had PC's die. I even once had a TPK with a low level party. The truth is I have had players steamroll my creatures, but I have seen players dying in crazy situations. This seems like an issue with how you chose to run your game.
Stephen: 🎶"We… are never ever ever ever ever ever ever… doing that again together. Like… ever." 🎶
I don't get how 5e is hard to run, but it's also not my first rpg and the 5e DMG was purposely written with bad monster CR XP rules that didn't help. I got started with Battletech and Palladium games so everything else seems easier by comparison.
Anyone who thinks 5e is hard should buy Rifts and run that.
Mark and Stephen are so great and giving of their time
Around 0:59:00 – "Strong emotions form memories." Yes. I said the same thing myself not long ago in one of my rant videos while playing City of Heroes – we remember *how we feel*. You remember that you felt angry or sad or happy or scared, much more than we remember how many monsters we fought. I remember character deaths from 1e for things like failed save vs. poison, trapped in a pocket dimension "forever," Deck of Many Things, etc. I remember few other details about those adventures, but I remember the deaths, the traps, and the other things that brought about strong emotions.
Haven't really run into this problem. I use a mix of basic box set, advanced 2nd edition and 5E. I run the party through encounters before the session on my own to see how it might play out. I try and keep it as close to the dice roll decides as possible.
My biggest problem with new D&D books is the overload on fluff content and the format is horrible making you search through it for information that should all be in one spot.
I would posit OD&D as WAAAAAYYYYYYYY easier than 5e. I feel like everyone forgets about the original.
Which they do and it's sad.
Fun to hear someone else bring up Eternal Darkness Sanity's Requiem's sanity meter. One of the few times a game actually managed to scare me was when multiple sanity effects went off at the same time before and after one of the events during the Interlude/Alex's part. Yeknow, the place where you're supposed to be (reasonably) safe.
Have a crypt dragon fighter/phoenix sorcerer/gray gardener and a sea dragon ranger/marshal/acrobat
I've never had a problem running 5E. It seems to work equally well for both map-based encounters and theatre of the brain.
I would contend that the wild success of 5E can be laid at the feet to Critical Role and the scores of online TTRPG influencers inspired by them, showing the world 5E. If they had been playing a different game then 5E would probably never have gotten nearly so big. Critical Role and other media put D&D back on the map, and 5E happened to be the version du jour when the hobby gained so much popularity in the zeitgeist.
I have made housrules for PF2E, I made alternate rules for crafting because as written there is no benefit to crafting vs just buying the item, but there are the detriments of taking more time and having the ability to fail. This didn't improve at all with the crafting rules in Treasure Vault.
I also have alternative magic rules because I am not a fan of strict Vancian casting or the weaker state of spellcasting and casters.
Mark how hard is it to convert a p1e adventure path to 2e? i have not played either edition yet but i have been watching the glass cannon networks playthrough of strange eons and that got me wondering how much work converting one of the old adventure paths might be
We all know 5e is heavy to DM and known to cause DM-burnout. But is it only 5e though? Is there any DM here who has long-term DMed both 3.5 and/or Pathfinder and 5e and can say if 3.5 or Pathfinder is as heavy to run as 5e? ❤🩹