Is 5e Too Easy?

So there was a great discussion today on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons page on Facebook about what people liked and disliked about 5e. It was, by and large a reasoned discussion designed to be supported by logic and evidence. Admittedly it was on an AD&D group, but several people who commented actually are playing 5e currently--so we have a fairly decent cross section of respondents.

I found the discussion interesting for a number of reasons, but before I get into all of those, I wanted to share the comments which I've broken out by like and dislike and rough topic areas. Please note these comments are roughly summarized by me, and may repeat several times. All this means is that the same idea was expressed by more than one poster. So, here they are:

5e Like/Dislike Comments

Reasons People Give for Liking 5e

It's a lot like the old editions

It's Smooth and Playable like 1e & 2e. It has the feel of 2e. 5e has about the same flavor as 1e & 2e. It feels like it has come full circle back to 1e. There are less rules (like 1e). It has the adventurous feel of earlier editions without the “tyranny of the rules”. 5e seems like a return to 1st. I could run the old modules with almost no conversion. It has a sort of old school feel that got me hooked in the first place. I really like that the 3 core rule-books were delivered to publication in the same way as AD&D. It is, at its core, still D&D.

The Magic is Improved

I like the spell slots mechanic The magic is "sort of" Vancian and that feels familiar enough, but low level casters can cast more spells. Spells can be cast at different slots instead of a different spell type. Spell concentration is more exacting and keeps spells from being stacked or getting too powerful. Offensive cantrips solve the one shot wonder problem. Casters can use magic every turn. Spell slots are a useful mechanic.

Advantage/Disadvantage

5e's advantage disadvantage makes the game better. Advantage and disadvantage makes it easy to quickly ratchet up difficulty or easiness of a challenge. Advantage/disadvantage is an elegant mechanic. Advantage and Disadvantage is a great mechanic. Disadvantage/ Advantage is so much easier than bonuses. Advantage/disadvantage is a cool mechanic.

Character Creation

Built in flexibility—I can create any sort of character RAW without house ruling. Class customization without point counting and long term planning is so much of a relief. Archetypes add class diversity (I think he meant backgrounds?). Backgrounds make for much easier character creation than a multiplicity of classes. No arbitrary race and class restrictions. All of the classes are useful in all situations (roleplay, exploration and combat), though some are better than others. Cleric domains are cool. 5e is still new school D&D with lots of recent races and classes included without the mechanical complications of 3.5/4e.

Support/PR

WotC is doing a great job at PR (YouTube, Critical Roll, streamers), it makes the brand really well known and “more cool”. 5e has made D&D cool. Tons of great support. It’s what’s popular and is easy to find players for. There is lots of demand for 5e games right now. 5e is still in print. It is what is in print now. 5e is easy to homebrew (I placed this here because I am assuming the DMsGuild support has helped this). There is lots of support, especially with Adventurer League. It is so easy to get a group together. 5e is readily available and easy entry for newcomers.

Roleplay/Story

5e focuses on character driven play. In 5e story and characterization evolve out of character driven play instead of exploration driven play. 5e allows me to focus on the story more than the rules. 5e has focused on roleplay more than 3.5. The feedback loop between Inspiration and a character's bonds/ideals/flaws/traits is fantastic. WotC shift in focus to story oriented play encourages roleplay.

Simplicity/Flexibility

This new edition is easy to convert from just about any edition. It is the Rosetta stone with easy conversion to any edition. I love that you can twist it to fit your needs and nothing breaks. 5e has simpler combat than 3.5/PF. 5e has streamlined rules and requires minimal referencing in the books. 5e has lots of room for customization. I really like the proficiency mechanic that applies across multiple things. 5e is easy to teach to new players. 5e has very smooth gameplay that encourages people to try out of the box actions. Fast playing! Easiest edition to adjust on the fly for DMs. It has a wider more flexible sweet spot for encounter balance. In 5e it is very easy to poach from other editions without conversion headaches. 5e has fast playing quick combat.

Bounded Accuracy

I love bounded accuracy. I like it that monsters stay threats for longer. Saving throws scale (or don’t) in ways that leave even high level characters with real vulnerability.

Miscellaneous 

It's forgiving. It gives you lots of chances to save your character. This allows people to take risks that might hesitate to take in an AD&D game and gives it a potentially more 'swashbuckling' feel than a slow tactical advance. I like 5e DMG toolbox approach. I like XP awarding. 5e has cool looking maps. It looks like an opportunity (not sure what this means?). It's a fine edition. Well written with great mechanics. It’s good, just easier/different. It’s better than nothing

Reasons People Give for Disliking 5e

Overpowered

Power levels are off the chart. 5e has easier starting to hit probabilities. There's still quite a bit of power creep. The base starting power level is way too high.

Bounded Accuracy

Monsters stay dangerous regardless of PC level, they should become easier to kill has players advance. Bounded accuracy is not a great idea. Bounded accuracy makes the game play inherently different from other editions. The "action economy" makes encounters much less intuitive.

Healing

Easier healing is not a great addition. It is too hard for a PC to actually die. It is too hard to die or face real danger. Core healing rules are way too generous. 5e gives you too many of chances to save your character.

Magic

5e puts more magic in caster’s hands. 5e seems super magic saturated. Spellcasters run around wielding magic like it was just air. Seems inimical to Vancian casting since casters run out of slots, but never out of magic? You can fill up your magic tank and then run low, but never run empty?

Monsters

Nerfing of many 5e monsters has made the game a disappointment. They've lowered dangerous abilities of some monsters. Monster immunities have been reduced to resistances only. Monsters that used to be really dangerous are now much weaker,

5e is too easy

Older games used to have randomness to encounters and less of concern about balancing. 5e is too controlled and balanced. Older games made PCs cautious about traveling to dangerous places, in 5e everywhere seems relatively safe. 5e allows people to take risks that might hesitate to take in an AD&D game and gives it a potentially more 'swashbuckling' feel than a slow tactical advance. 5e doesn’t require players to be in tune with the tactics and strategies of efficient dungeon crawling, but just show up and have a slug fest with whatever is in front of them. It feels like a video game rather than an epic adventure. It’s too forgiving. I miss the AD&D “hard mode”. Older games used to be fun because they were dangerous, 5e is not dangerous. Adventure league stuff is light and fluffy.

Races

No minuses to races is a big dislike. I don’t like monster races as core races. Demi-humans are humans in a different costume.

Adventures

Sub par adventure designers, Tired of having every classic module rewritten, how about some new stuff? Story lines could be more original  and better quality.

Miscellaneous

In 5e, story and characterization evolves out of character driven play instead of exploration driven play. The rules are a bit fuzzy, I never really know how well my PC can do certain things. There's too much uncertainty in the game. It’s not Hackmaster :-). It’s from WoTC.

Summary

While these comments are fascinating for what they are, it is it is obvious that many are subjective and sometimes rhetorical on both sides of the equation. For instance evidently the game feels a lot like the old editions to some while it clearly does not to others. It certainly can't be both, but it can feel that way. A more helpful analysis may point out that 5e obviously does feel like older editions compared to other recent editions (3.5 and 4th), while not as old school as 0e or early AD&D. We don't have the data to say whether or not 5e feels more like older school editions to those who do not like the game. Though there was comment I found hard to categorize wherein one DM said his players felt like it was too much like 3.5 and 4th for them to want to play anymore. For this DM, his players were simply too jaded by any WotC project to give 5e a fair shake.

However, what I wanted to focus on has more to do with the trouble I had in breaking out the dislikes of 5e into categories. As you can see above, I chose the categories Overpowered, Bounded Accuracy, Monsters, Magic, Healing and 5e is Too Easy. At first, I'll admit, I lumped them all into the overpowered section, but that seemed not granular enough so I tried to separate them out into more defined sections. However, the common denominator in all these categories is that they can all be explained as many feeling as if 5e has made it too easy on players. Evidently the feeling behind many of the dislike comments are that WotC has taken away the challenge of the game so much so that people dislike this edition. 

Let's examine each category and I'll explain my thinking. The Overpowered section is fairly self explanatory, but one comment in particular bears special mention. The idea that to hit probabilities have started to high comes down to a proficiency bonus of +2 being awarded at level 1. Effectively this gives all characters a +2 to hit with proficient weapons at first level. At first blush this seems high, and it is. It really stands true across all levels to about 3 for most PCs, and higher for some. What I mean by this is that in AD&D if we take magic user as the baseline ...

AD&D To Hit Matrix
	1	2	3	4	5
Fighter	10	10	8	8	6
Cleric	10	10	10	8	8
Thief	11	11	11	11	9
Magic User	11	11	11	11	11
AD&D To Hit Bonus
	1	2	3	4	5
Fighter	+1	+1	+2	+2	+5
Cleric	+1	+1	+1	+3	+3
Thief	+0	+0	+0	+0	+2
Magic User	+0	+0	+0	+0	+0
5e Proficiency Bonus
	1	2	3	4	5
Fighter	+2	+2	+2	+2	+3
Cleric	+2	+2	+2	+2	+3
Thief	+2	+2	+2	+2	+3
Magic User	+2	+2	+2	+2	+3

In other words using the MU as the base to hit armor class 10, and call that a +0 you can see that in AD&D the to hit bonuses are actually very modest at lower levels. What you also notice is that some characters become better at hitting more quickly than others. Contrasting this with the 5e table you see a flattened table that, while it gives everyone more hitting power, there are no differences across classes in base attack bonuses. This is of course what our dislikers were getting at, and if we carried this out we would see that their concern is diminished somewhat as, in AD&D fighters seem to outstrip even 5e's to hit bonuses rather quickly. However, this is a difficult comparison because we are comparing apples and oranges here. 5e used bounded accuracy, meaning it doesn't want everyone to get lots better at hitting at quickly as AD&D did. The entire class philosophy is structured differently in 5e. This concept, in truth, is a post unto itself, but briefly here recall that levels in D&D usually meant the equivalence to normal men. So a 6th level fighter was equivalent to 6 normal men. This was a combination of factors, only part of which was the ability to hit opponents. But in 5e we have scaled that curve to allow the game to be played differently. Not I did not say badly or wrongly, simply differently. 

I am going to come back to Bounded Accuracy, but for now let it suffice to simply say most of the complaints about Bounded Accuracy have to do with the fact that it makes the game "easier" in some ways and that has been generally dissatisfying to some. This conception isn't exactly "true, but I'll return to this at the end. For now, let's move on to healing. 

There was much made of the 5 minute workday during the D&D Next playtest, which basically went like this: characters enter a dungeon, fight their first fight of around five rounds and then have to leave, go back to town or camp and rest and heal in order to come back when refreshed. I was always curious about this, as it was never a problem in AD&D. At least we didn't see it as one. It became a serious problem with 4e because of limited power usage by all classes that needed a long rest to recharge. Yes, in 1e we often had to leave to rest up and recuperate, but we also had to manage resources, and utilize clerics. Yes, MUs and clerics only had a limited number of spells but we didn't cut and run just because the MU has used up her magic missile. In short, we see the complaints about healing being based in 5e being to soft on healing and too generous to players. 

Magic too, is very simply stated as many do not like how much magic is running around in 5e. At-will cantrips, overpowered magic, increased spell slots, they all point towards too much power for beginning casters. These new rules also do something else: they make 5e a much more magic rich game than earlier editions. This in itself is not overpowered, but a difference in flavor of the genre, but that too can be discussed elsewhere.

I was initially confused by the Monsters in 5e. While the goal of boundned accuracy was to make it possible for lower CR monsters to remain a challenge to higher level layers, and for players to be able to challenge a lower number of higher CR monsters, they turned right around and nerfed a lot of the monsters and their special abilities so as to threaten players less. It seemed like a contradiction to me. Very few monsters have deadly poison anymore, nor do they permanently drain levels or abilities. The point here seems to have one purpose to me: to make combat easier on the players, evidently many agree.

And lastly, we come to the real category of the night, 5e is Too Easy. All of these comments hit to the heart of the problem and really encompass all of the above complaints as well. 5e is not adventurous enough, not dangerous enough, not enough of real challenge for the players or their characters. They begin to feel invincible after a while and also begin to default to a rush in and kill it sort of tactic 8 or 9 times out of 10. I've said it before too, 4e was actually more deadly for my players than 5e is. This, in my mind points directly to the concept of bounded accuracy and what some readers have called the action economy of 5e. I've explained it before, but allow me here to simply and strongly reiterate, 5e plays like a different beast than any other version of D&D to date. 

I know many find it's basic simplicity, flexibility and speed of play reminds them of their early days in gaming when we didn't pay attention to a lot of the rules. But the fact is for those of us from a certain era, and style of play 5e is a very different animal indeed and unable to satisfy our desired style of play. It makes different assumptions about the game and about it's players and dungeon masters. I would go into it here, but I am saving it for another post. This post has grown already overly long. However, I can't emphasize strongly enough that though many dislikes are rooted in 5e being too easy or not adventurous enough, that I feel it is rooted in the fact that 5e is, moreso than those in the past, a very different game than some early D&D gamers are used to. More on this to come.

AD&D Thoughtful Comments

If you don't know Benoist Poire, you should really check out some of his writings and work. He is probably best known for his work with Ernie Gygax Jr. on The Hobby Shop Dungeon under the G.P. Adventures company name. He has also become quite an AD&D advocate and has shared some very insightful comments about the theory behind AD&D, some of which I wanted to highlight today. The first was in a note he posted about AD&D level limits and how they structure the entire philosophy of the game.

Some of the insights he shared here, I had never thought of before. The idea that levels for instance were indicative of the number of men your character represented, from the old Chainmail days. How did I miss that? I mean, I'm currently going through a little project where I am rewriting the entire corpus o the little brown books and supplements to get a better grasp on the nature of the game. Somehow I totally missed that.

Conan, 6th level i.e. the equivalent of 6 Fighters

Something I was aware of was how Chaos and Law worked and how men differed from the demi-human races. I always knew D&D was always intended to be Human-o-centric because of this difference between Law and Chaos. Although I didn't read Poul Anderson's Three Hearts & Three Lions until last year, it really opened my eyes once I did. It also made me agree when Benoist so confidently says AD&D is not based on LotR. AD&D draws so much more from Vance and Anderson and others in Appendix N than it ever did from LotR.

The thing was, I never really knew this stuff back in the day. Am I biased to say it makes a difference now?

Well, I can say that when I read Benoist's note and other such insights he has offered up say, here




What I realize is that Benoist is capturing something that feels very familiar to me. This is the beauty of writing about games. Sometimes commentators are able to capture something that we didn't even realize ourselves. AD&D is what it is because of its rules and assumptions. And when we play that game those assumptions, mechanics and spirit come out in our play, define it, and give shape to the experience. That is what I'm talking about when I say I prefer this game. Yes its mechanics can be stilted and appear somewhat baroque or even "baroken" :-) but they are not. The mechanics are there to give spirit and feel to the game. AD&D is what it is and you have to appreciate it for what it is.

I play 5e currently, and the fact is, as Scott Anderson pointed out to me a couple of posts ago, 5e confounds me because it presents itself as something it is not. It is a very different game, with a very different feel. You have to accept it on its terms, not another's. The facts also speak clearly now, that 5e will never be what I want it to be. No matter how much Mike Mearls or  I try and AD&D-ify 5e it will never be AD&D. If you want the AD&D feel you have to play AD&D.

And Mr. Poire is doing an awfully good job of explaining what that feel is about and from whence it comes. Thank you sir.

"The Story's the Thing, Wherein We'll Catch the Conscience of" ...

I will admit that I am not the most savvy Facebook user, and don't even have an Instagram account. Recently my daughter tech-shamed me because I didn't know that my IPhone (I still have a 5) had a default flashlight function. I thought I needed a separate app for that. But, I would like it known I do _own_ an IPhone, I keep my computer up to date and protected. I am reasonably tech-wise, though I used to be much more so, I have begun to rely on my 18 year old for some things.

In gaming terms I am a decidedly old school guy in a new school world. I have been drug along with the new wave of gaming design and innovative mechanics all the while lamenting the good old days when we did everything with pencil and graph paper. But, I've come today to talk less about particulars and more about story.

The idea of story in roleplaying is not new or innovative. In fact most of us came to roleplaying for the chance to live out such stories we only read about in fantasy fiction or popular mythologies.  The chance to be the hero in shining armor, or swirling black cape, or with sizzling magical wand and facing the thrill of mortal combat with mighty dragons was what we all wanted. We wanted to be a part of that story. However, the idea that story was king in the game is a relatively new concept.

In old school D&D generally speaking we ran dungeons, sometimes hexcrawls, and dared our players to get through them alive. The few that did, and believe me it was few, grew into legends. Not only in the game world, but in our own minds as we replayed their triumphs and defeats again and again in our post game conversations. I still remember such heroes from my early gaming days. They were all the greater, it seems, in large part because it was so damn hard to survive in those early days. If you earned bragging rights in those days it really meant something!

The interesting thing is, that post Gygaxian gaming began to take a decidedly different turn storywise. If you take a look at product of the 2e period you see a much more story oriented focus in the game and the gaming products. Paradoxically this is, I believe, a result of Gygaxian Naturalism. People in the world have motives, purposes, schemes and plots. They don't always work out like we think, but they do. Combined with the obvious corollary that D&D was designed on the medium of literature, story became an increasingly expected part of the game.

And I do not decry this shift. I mean, one can choose or prefer one style over the other but I do not consider one better or worse than the other. And in fact many of us had already begun shifting in this way if we did any DMing for lengthy time periods. By that I mean running more than a couple of sessions and adventures connected by the same characters. We inevitably began to weave thew story around the PCs actions. Campaigns took on a decidedly epic feel as grand story arcs played out as players interacted with the world and the events therein.

Even if our story focus was no more than stringing together the relationships and happenings into one coherent weave or necklace to be appreciated for the narrative that it was. Our game style may be very un-driven by any story we wished to tell or "saw" happening as we DMed and our players reacted, but nonetheless a sort of organic story developed. Our job became the "seeing" of the story that had happened and beginning to make synchronicites and events occur in harmony with the story to give a greater sense of overall satisfaction.

The danger that arose about this same time was the anathema of the railroaded campaign where players began to feel they had no choice in the narrative at all, but were simply along for the ride while they DM told her own story and the PCs were given nominal choice if any at all. This kind of campaign arose for several reasons, but came about largely from the two play styles that ruled back in the day.

Sandbox play was quite common, especially once hexcrawls and topside adventures were more common. Essentially players had total freedom to spread about and investigate whatever they found interesting or appealing. Some DMs were literally blank slates, giving very little to their players in terms of hooks or hints as to where they might go, placing huge emphasis on the players to drive the action. And other DMS had planned out certain things and, not wanting to be caught unprepared, developed the quantum ogre to satisfy their need for the party to go to what they had planned regardless of what they thought they wanted to do.

The railroad story was very similar, in that the things the DM had prepped for the players revolved around an awesome story they so much wanted their players to participate in. So the railroad becomes plot points and clues and NPC interactions that simply have to occur if the players are to reach the next milestone in the story arc. When players frustrate their DM by not playing along or tugging against the direction of the story tracks, the DM gets frustrated and the railroading becomes stronger and stronger.

Of course, a lot of this can be resolved by the social contract at the start of the game and refined as the group grows in cohesion. The agreement we all sort of make when we sit down is that we are going to play together. We have to work together. But we also have to be at least in the same chapter if not on the same page. What do your players want and what do you want out of the game we are agreeing to play together? A consensus on such things helps avoids a lot of heartache later on. But I'm not telling you anything you don't know.

Storytelling is something I think later editions of D&D have gotten right. Just comparing the recent Lost Mines of Phandelver to something like the Keep on the Borderlands is a great case in point. I love Keep, and it was certainly sandboxy. However, what was not so clear was how to get the PCs there, keep them there, and get them involved in the rest of the adventures set about the region. Lost Mines, spends as much time on the village and the NPCs there as they do on the mines themselves. That's because what you need for story to unfold is context, meaning and connection. Sure, a story can unfold in Keep, and many did in my early gaming days. And there are, admittedly, little hints about how to weave reason into the campaign. But Mines does a much better job of giving the context for such things to happen. I would even make the same claim for Keep on the Shadowfell, another somewhat sandboxy campaign from 4e that was much easier to weave a story around the Keep on the Borderlands ever thought of doing.

I would even say that these adventures Shadowfell and Mines were part of what allows me to be somewhat okay with the edition I am playing, since the stories flow so easily out of these adventures. Now, maybe my own creativity was lacking. Maybe I was also a very young and inexperienced GM who barely knew how the play the game, let alone make it story-rich--all of which is very true. However, I can't help but think that if I had Mines of Shadowfell back in the day our games would have been that much more fun.

One last parting shot to make my point and out of which this line of thought has grown. My players are just cresting 5th level in our current 5e campaign. I had planned for a long time to run them through the Slaver series, A1 to A4. The current campaign is cooking along rather nicely, and I was planning on having them make a run at the Slavers in Highport soon. However, perusing through the old adventures, I came across 2e's Scourge of the Slave Lords and the presentation of the slightly more challenging series of modules as an overarching campaign was much more of what I was looking for. I have been able to set up the transition from one phase of the campaign to the next with the help of this edition and am looking forward to how the story unfolds.

All of this may make me a more story driven GM than some of my other old school counterparts. Or maybe not, as I've made lots of assumptions--as always. Either way if you have an opinion feel free to weigh in. Where do you land on the story as old school vs story as new school spectrum?