Round 2: my giant list of complaints (read: rant) 

My previous post deals with more design level issues and my philosophical underpinning for how I judge games. The next two posts actually dive into more specific examples of where I think they dropped the ball. I give alternatives options in as many places as I can. If I can’t give an alternatives, I at least try to give an example of what it should look like on a redesign.

1. Attributes, Modifiers, and Saving Throws… pick a mechanic and stick with it

We do not need all 3 of these. Pick one and stick with it. Modifiers make the most sense, but if you can build a system using one of the others and only one, great use that instead. Remember my minimal impact point from last week? Here it is, modifiers can be -3, 0, +3, or +6… or another blocky scaling similar to that. Nothing else and nothing in between. Big blocks and easy to remember. No more trying to recall if that was a +3 or +4 or a +1 unless it is a saving throw then it is a +4 or wait did I gain a level so it is a +1 unless it is a saving throw then it is a +5. This, this right here is what slows down D&D games.

But Sean! I think saving throws are super engaging! Ok, fine. Make a feat to gain some saving throws. Oh wait, that is already a feat and no one takes it. Seriously, I have been playing 5e since the first night of the play test including many years of playing at adventurer’s league and dozens and dozens of one-shots and I have never once seen anyone take this feat. Not even on a joke character. Ever. That is how engaging saving throws are vs. base stats. 

This is the biggest example of complexity for little to no reason. Every time you add an element to a game you have to ask yourself “is the impact or range of options worth this additional complexity” and here it clearly is not. You don’t need 3 different mechanics to say “that character is the smart one and that character is the strong one”. 

I get why this system is still here. It is a sacred cow from the 70’s. Let’s kill that cow.

2. Way too many skills/tools/languages are given out 

Rogues used to be the skills monkey. Return to that or more specifically the idea that powerful skills are an unique and defining element to your character. If you want your character to have special skills, great! Use the feats to gain those skills or gain them as a class feature. Want humans to be less bland… I mean special but in a general way? Great! They now gain 2 skills, which means something unless everyone is swimming in skills already. Your 1st and 2nd skills are interesting. Your 6th and 7th are not just forgettable, they are actually often forgotten and at the table players look down and say “oh, I am proficient in that, huh.” Same for languages and tools (a note of tools later). Let characters be special but don’t force special, that just creates bloat which then makes those skills/language/tools bland. Can you make a case to me that Rangers should have Survival and Wizards should have Arcane? Yes, yes you can but why do you need them to also take the other 3 skills to get that one? Let the classes get their one bonus skill and move on. 

The more you make people track extra stuff because it was tacked onto their class the more they will forget what they chose and have to pause the game to look it up. If I take a feat to gain a skill, I gave up something else to get that so I will remember it. Special skills aren’t special if everyone has so many that they overlap by happenstance and people forget what they have. I would favor far less skills given out and bigger bonuses on each. What if we did only expertise? Some classes gain 1 skill, but they get a +8 in it? See, that is a big, meaty bonus. That is something that defines who your character is. 

This is actually an overarching design issue. If a mechanic can affect one class, they want to make sure every class has a little piece of it…. Because why? If a class can do something special then just let them do something special and move on. 

3. Action, Move Action, Bonus Action, and Reaction… is just too much. 

So this is actually not my complaint but a complaint of Mike Mearls, the co-lead designer on 5e. While I will be harsh to D&D 5e, there are clearly some solid designers behind this game and they are very self aware. They were very data driven during the play test and shared much of that data. They have also been very honest about the strength and weakness of some of their designs… which as a DM I find super helpful. I have a ton of respect for Mearls, Crawford, and team… but I am still going to pick on you a bit. This is a rant after all.

If you give someone resources like Bonus Action and Reaction to play with then they will want to use those… and if they have nothing to do with them they will feel they are being wasted and their turns will draw out as they try to figure out what they can do. What this means is that instead of doing 2 things they are trying to do 4 even if their class is not really designed to use all 4. Often the bonus action and reaction are complex and thus slow down the turn more than an action. 

I get it, you want the swashbuckling dex classes to get extra cool things to do. Less powerful attacks but more of them? Great! Build a mechanic into those classes to do that. Monks get 4 attacks as part of their attack action if they are not using weapons. Solved. This is how Extra Attack works and you nailed the design on that one. No need to add a new kind of action that burdens other classes. If you still want Monks to have bonus actions and reactions, fine, but give those to just Monks. There is no reason for the Barbarian player to juggle that piece. The original design goal was for bonus actions to be rare, now they feel mandatory for every class.

Mike Mearls has pinpointed this as an oversight in design. They intended it to give players a cool extra thing they could do… but only from time to time, not every turn. As they started to add those in they need a speed limit, thus the bonus action was born. This was meant to be a maximum, they never thought of it as a minimum. The designers talked about a 2 action system but rejected it. They did not want a 2 action system… but when players got their hands on it they started to heavily leverage the bonus action and it fell into a 2 action system with the second action just being limited. This kind of makes the bonus action the worst of two designs.

In the case of the swashbucklers, the bonus action was leveraged as a was to give them a style choice. Do I make this character a dual wielder or someone who can hop in and out of the front line without getting an attack of opportunity? They can dabble in the other, but it was assumed they would mostly do only one. The constant switching up turn to turn was not intended by the designers. 

This could be handled by just making a selectable choice at a low level. If you are a rogue then gain 1 of the following 3: 1) never triggering opportunity attacks 2) always double moving or 3) you get the off hand attack. There, we just created 3 new kinds of rogues that play very differently and removed the complexity of juggling bonus actions. We increased Range of Outcomes, Impact of Outcomes in unchanged, and it is now a much simpler system overall. We improve 2 of 3 elements that make up our elegance of design equation. Our rogues are a bit more limited but now there is more diversity between rogues. 

4. Vancian Magic Spell Slots… are the most complex and least interesting way to play. 

The DMG contains alternative options for spell points. You should always use that, or maybe that -15% for a bit more balance.  It gives the player a more organic way to play. It steps a little bit of the sorcerer’s toes… but who cares. Don’t make other classes suffer so one class can be special. If it is a better mechanic, give it to everyone and then find something else for the other class. Credit to the designers… wait a second? Are the spell point costs and spell levels different numbers? (facepalm)

I joke a bit here. Part of 5e’s issue is it is held to the older designs of D&D and that forces some odd numbers. Still, instead of the whole spell point system, translate that to spell levels (yes, it will be unbalanced) and then round down the total number of spells level they can cast by the 15%-ish. This better system is  “your character can cast X levels worth of spells”. So if X = 6, you can cast two 3rd level spells or two 1st level spells plus a 4th level spell. This gives players flexibility and it is much easier to track.

The issue here is the spells in 5e are just not balanced to work that way. They are balanced for an uptick in power with 3rd level spells. That is why I added in the -15%. You may want to also give a small bonus to first level spells, possibly second. As a house rule, I would say they are always an extra 1 or 2 dice over what a cantrip at this level does. This way spending a single spell level is always an attractive option and there is already a cost in terms of action economy so I think this still works. Either way I think a big pool of castable spell levels is far more engaging than the accounting of Vancian Spell Slots.

If you wish to keep higher level magics less spammable, I would use 1 of 2 hybrids. First hybrid, keep level 6th to 9th spells spell slots and make the rest a pool. Second hybrid, keep the highest level of spell slot a spell slot and make the rest a pool. And yes, you can actually use both of these system together, with the second hybrid being used below level 10 and the first hybrid being used above level 10.

5. The good levels are 3 to 8. Make everything else play like that. 

Levels 1 and 2 are really designed to teach new players the game and stop multi-classing from being runaway powerful. So… if multiclassing makes all other classes worse, what should we do? A) create a complex rule set with a ton of exceptions, competing rules for variation between classes, and to allow for granularity so we can spend 6 hours trying to juggle in another +1 which doesn’t really have an impact yet sometimes creates broken combos or B) tell people you get 2 and you have to split them evenly…. 

Wizards of the Coast, you picked “A” didn’t you? 

Post level 8, the problems becomes health inflation and challenging your players. At higher levels the game just breaks because they become unkillable Gods… which sucks. Really, Really, sucks. I mean I have put in about 300 man hours to my 1 year long campaign and now my characters are so powerful I can’t challenge them without retconning every enemy, town guard, and soldier in my world. It is a shitty world building tool if it forces me to tear down my world and rebuild it every 4 character levels. If your design works against world building, it is quicker for me to just break your design then rebuild my world. 

It is worth noting that older versions of D&D solved for this. You gained levels until 8 or 9 and then just followed a formula for +1 or +2 health for every level afterward. Levels did not go to 20… they technically went on forever but the additional class features stopped near level 10. And let’s be honest, if a player has leveled up their character from level 3 to level 10, are they really still playing for the power gain? No, they are playing for the friendships, character stories, and the world… which just become broken because of the power inflation. Speaking of which… 

6. Remove the inflation 

This is actually my biggest complaint and what makes it worse is this design decision works against the best parts of 5e. By creating a large level of power inflation you actually remove content from the game because that content is not relevant to your players at that point in time. Yes, you need power gain. But if the power gain is so great it turns giant sections of the world into “instant death” or “nothing here can kill me”, you have greatly limited what I can do with your content at any given moment. 

And in terms of engagement, gaining a +1 to attack when you know that all the enemies have just gained a +1 to AC is just not engaging. Bigger numbers are not fun, impactful numbers are fun. Also, bigger numbers just make the math harder which slows down the game. Huge health pools just feel strange in play. If you are going to give a creature a ton of health, I would also make the creature change somewhat at different health points or it just feels like you are headbutting a brick wall until the brick wall randomly falls over. 

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Next week we will have the other half of my list of specific issues as we move to part 3.

Today I will be reviewing D&D 5th edition using two approaches: first is walking through its “elegance of design” and secondly through a more free form “pros, cons, this is broken, here are my fixes” kind of list. 

When judging table top games, I have a very specific method I use to determine “elegance of design” 

(range of outcomes) x (the impact of outcomes) x (simplicity) = (elegance of the design)

Range of Outcomes 

This is simply how many choices you have to create your character. A game with 12 classes is a better framework than a game with only 4. If you know anything about the various editions of d&d, adding new classes was a design priority in the early years. Some new classes were simply alternative versions of previous classes… which is fine. If they give you a different feel or a notably different set of options in play, great. 

Sometimes specific mechanics or flavor elements just rub specific players the wrong way, so alternative classes can “save” that element of play for other players. See the Wizard spell casting table vs. the Warlock spell casting mechanic. Those feel different at the table. 

For D&D 5e, this is where the game shines the most. There are a moderate number of classes but also a moderate number of subclasses within each. There are also plenty of races to choose from, many feats, and a huge list of spells. This is where 5e shines out shines almost every other d20 style game. 

10 out of 10 on Range of Outcomes. 

Impact of Outcomes 

This is a measure of how much your choices actually matter in play. Now I want to be super specific here: I am NOT arguing that there is a statistical difference or that “on average” this feature is really powerful. What I am looking for is that a given feature is so powerful that it changes how you play the game. Do you ask a specific character to roll a specific check type on behalf of the party because in play you have noticed they always do well without knowing their exact bonus? Do you choose to charge into combat instead of staying at range because of a specific feat you gained last level? 

Before I give you my answers to this let me address the two most common arguments. But I can feel a +1 bonus, that counts right? No, a +1 is not good enough. Does the player next to you feel your +1? Do you change what action you are going to take this round because you now have a +5 instead of a +4 with swords? A bonus needs to change the actions and perceptions at the table, not just give you a bigger number. Levels effects feel. Low level is deadly and at high level I am an unkillable God. That is a difference right? Actually, that is just bad game design. If you look at the monster numbers, you will see that they tried to design the game so that variation by level wasn’t really a thing… they just failed at the balance point or DM’s ignored the balance rules because the suggestions did not fit their world. DM’s can also choose to make low level forgiving and high level deadly but it is just harder to do that in 5e because of the way the monsters and players were built. Yes, having 10 health feels different from having 40 health, but if monsters just go from dealing 1d6 damage to 4d6 damage, have the outcomes changed? That is just inflation. 

So how much of a bonus do you have to give a character before the effect is felt: I think at the lowest, it is a +3. I think a +4 is honestly the most likely answer. There is a case to be made that it is actually a +5 before it is consistent enough for other people to see/feel it at the table. So our answer is somewhere between +3 to +5… but a lot, and I mean a lot, of D&D is built around a +1. Now, multiple +1’s will get you to a notable bonus, but that means that from level 1 to 20 you are really only gaining 2 or 3 bonuses of impact assuming you line them up perfectly. The rest of your bonuses are just power inflation. This lack of impact is clearly D&D 5e’s greatest weakness. This is rooted in a system that is too granular and trying to hide impact in power inflation. 

While I am harsh on D&D for its impacts, there are exceptions. Some feats grant things like bonus to initiative, skills expertise, or dramatically extend the range at which bow are accurate. Those do change game play. There are plenty of class features that do change game play… but far more that are just inflation or tiny bonuses. At the end of the day, 5e is a mix bag of tactical shifts and wrestling with inflation. I consider this power inflation a tax built into the system. If you don’t take some upgrades into your main power sources your combat power will lag behind. This means characters are really choosing between maintaining power and impactful play options as they level up. 5e has some good power ceiling and floor mechanics to help with this, but that tax is still part of the game design. To make a balanced character, I still think you are limited to 2 or 3 real impact options with the rest of the upgrades playing down the inflation tax bit by bit. 

3 out of 10 on Impact. 

Simplicity  

5th edition D&D is highly refined and you can tell. A lot of needless complexity has been removed from older additions and core elements have been streamlined. I would call this one of the simplest of the d20 systems… but there is still plenty of room for improvement. D&D is still based on the assumption that your character is complex enough that you will always have a reference sheet nearby. That is a crutch. The character sheet filled not with story and items, but with references to other complex mechanics, is an admission that a character is so complicated that a player can not reasonably be expected to remember what their character can and can not do. It is better than most d20 systems, but most d20 systems are great examples of over complexity for the sake of over complexity. 5e is the least guilty, but not innocent. 

Now I happily point out that of my three variables, this is the one that is the most debatable. Many players really do enjoy the complexity of certain systems. They enjoy the min/maxing. They enjoy learning that 101 unique systems a game has to offer. These are people who play to learn, not play to play. There is nothing wrong with playing to learn. I enjoy doing it myself… but I quickly leave those games to try the next one. That is a very different kind of activity then having a story or world you want to explore and choosing a system to do it in. 

6 of 10 on Simplicity .

Results

So back to our original equation:  

 [(range of outcomes) x (the impact of outcomes) x (simplicity) = (elegance of the design) 

(10*3*6) = a score of 180 for D&D 5e 

But what could it be with some improvements? What if we removed some complexity that has minimal impact on play? What if we replaced a large number of tiny bonuses with a few bigger impact options? What if we removed the inflation and just plain bloat from the system? 

I think it is possible to get the impact moved up a few points from 3 to 5 and I think the complexity can be improved to 7 or maybe 8. To do this, we would have to give up a few things along the way. 

Assuming we could do that it would get us: (10*5*8) = 400… which is a huge score improvement. So… what are those design changes and why didn’t they make those to start with? 

We will talk through those next time.