What things would you like to see fixed in 5e?

[KorvinStarmast]

but learning to DM from bad DMs makes more bad DMs.

You assume new DMs are by default bad DMs. Bad assumption.

my friends and i all took turns DMing, we sucked. the games sucked.

That's on you. We didn't have that problem.

i didn't know good games until i lucked into a good DM 20 years later. now i am a better DM.

I tip my cap to your persistence.

the most important player in the game has to learn it by screwing up, getting shamed. best model for shy nerdy 13 year olds.... do something that is going to fail. oh, wait, no. that's a crappy model.

That's a crappy model for behavior, regardless of someone's age. Get some real friends.

Any reason why you're not giving high level warriors of renown advantage on Intimidate checks? And no published DnD world is based on a Feudal society barring possibly Birthright. Eberron, Krynn, Faerun, Greyhawk, Athas - none of them were remotely close to Feudal.

Feudal led to medieval led to middle ages led to late medieval led to early renaissance. Have played campaigns in all of those. (Such as, "no plate mail armor in the Feudal game ... the DM was most insistent. (He also DM'd our C & S games). (Man, I wish they'd release a 5e version of Birthright, there was a lot I liked about that piece of 2e ...

There are no Serfs anywhere of note,

in FR? Yeah. IT's mostly early Renaissance, and maybe mid to late based on the WoTC artwork and the steampunk gnomes.
In my world? Three of the kingdoms have serfs/bound to the land farmers.

Most towns are run by Mayors or similar and not Knights, cities are generally governed by noble or merchant houses acting in loose alliance with each other etc.

Nation States have well and truly formed

Nope, in FR Kingdoms have. and empires. What Republics? (Eberron?)

The Merchant class (which saw the death of Feudalism with its rise) is well and truly established.

Yes, hence mid to late middle ages FR, (Hanseatic League!) like with the Iron League in WoG (1e) to early renaissance.

Saying DnD accepts a default feudal society as its core assumption is as wrong as saying it accepts a default bronze age or even earlier hunter gatherer society as core.

We played a Bronze age D&D in 1e. It was pretty neat. (And lethal). Phil Barker's Tekumel was an interesting meshing of bronze age (clenh hide) and steel iron age and some SF stuff (eyes) thrown together in a mixture. Mazes and Minotaurs tries to capture that feel.

The core assumption seems to be more of a late renaissance/ early industrial level of governance and technology more akin to our own Age of Exploration mid 2nd millennia, with magic taking the role of technology (and stagnating its development), featuring primitive Nation States, merchant alliances, banking and so forth.

Disagree with your "early industrial" in general, but I'll not object too hard due to steam punk gnomes.

Rethink how the three pillars (combat, exploration and social) work and why it's supposed to be fun that a few classes are excluded/dominate some of the pillars to the extent they do. It's a major downside of DnD that rangers have a lot of fast forward features and often martials can basically just tag along or stay away when you move in the city.

Really? We don't have that problem at our table.

Most important fix for D&D 5e: Move chapter 8 of the DMG, Running the Game, to chapter 1. Put it in the DM basic rules as the very first thing too. Better yet, also put it at the end of the PHB as an appendix for DMs, so players will see what's expected of DMs.
Far too many DMs have never read this chapter, and it's the most important thing a DM needs to read before they sit down to try to run their first game.

Applause. Yep.

Why is EXP a sacred COW?

The point is to incentivize adventuring. It reaches back to pre D&D in Arneson's games, which included a mod (Svenson's notes cover this) where 1 HP = 1 XP. If a monster had 7 HP, you got 7 XP for slaying one, and either 100 or 1000 XP got you to the next level. Never made it into published form, but it started like this:
Huh, using chainmail combat here in the dungeon under the old castle, on hit and your soldier dies. 4 hits to kill the hero.
How do you become a hero? They tried a lot of different ways to figure that out (to include DM fiat by Dave A) and the eventual gamification of it appeared in Men and Magic. It's hard coded into the game's DNA. (the "by adventure leve" works for me too, ever since they removced XP for GP in treasure feature ...)

5e is often called a "retro edition", but not with INT, which could provide extra languages even in "Men & Magic"

Yeah, I miss that.

For instance, right after a Long Rest, you have everything you need available, and you can just spend it however you want. You play through 4 or so fights, and you didn't pace yourself properly, but this session was a blast because you were reckless and overpowered. Session ends.

Two weeks later, players rejoin, and now that player is feeling the struggle of only being able to provide cantrips. A recent Short Rest helps, but not enough to matter, and so they're limited to the next few fights of doing nothing. At this point, there's not much the player can do but wait to be useful at the next Long Rest, and feels like the game is rigged because they're no longer having fun.

Man, that is reaching really hard to find something to complain about. We don't have that problem at our table, in terms of people complaining if they run out of special resources and have to dig and scrap to contribute.
Most of us accept it as a challenge, and try stuff 'off the character sheet' in order to contribute. You can always offer the help action so that that barbarian next to you gets advantage on his next attack. (My cleric frequently did this when short on spells, since I rarely did as much damage as our barbarian could).
Teamwork, not a bunch of individuals out for themselves.
The complainers can try doing that.
Here's another tip for them: stop looking at the character sheet and come up with a way to influence the situation.

Also, DM does "in summary of last session, this is what is going on ..." helps get us all back into the situation as the game begins three weeks latger. (Happens a lot in our Tier 3 game .. RL and adults, as you mentioned)

[PhoenixPhyre]

One solution I've been wanting to implement was a variant on the Gritty variants on rests.
Short Rests are 4 hours, a Long Rest is 24 hours.

To compensate for the fact that rests may not be available for when players may need to fight, I want to implement Ley Lines, which shorten the time it takes to rest when resting in one of these locations, and you can simply "feel" these locations, even without any magical experience. Ley Lines cut the time for a rest by 80%, making a Short Rest about 45 minutes, and making a Long Rest about 4 hours. Most Ley Lines are within dungeons, as many people in power seek to use this resource, but the Ley Lines shift slightly each year, making it difficult to plan a specific room or building to their use.

As a result, an entire dungeon can be built with a Ley Line point in the center, but several centuries later, the Ley Line point may be focused in the dungeon's latrine or some other unfortunate location that may not make sense.

This solves the problem of players having both too many rests and too few, with the decision being at my discretion to fine tune.

My gut feeling about that is that it's identical (from a player's perspective) to "you get a rest when the DM says you do." I would feel helpless to control anything under those circumstances--either the DM put a ley line in the right spot or you go without; miss your chance and you're facing what's supposed to be 2 adventuring days all at once.

But then again, I lean strongly to the cinematic. Normal short rests and "normal" 8-hr long rests work well for me 90% of the time because the party is usually working out of a safe haven on a daily time-scale (in which case they're home for a long rest every night) or are in the wilderness traveling (in which case there are very few adventuring days happening). Very rarely they're under a hard time crunch where they have to face a full day without any chance to take a 1-hr short rest--then I'll give them SR tokens. Basically I do a sliding scale depending on what they're doing. There's nothing magical about 8 hours of rest--it's just the average time needed (under safe conditions) to replace your expended inner strength. And either I'm tracking at the minute-to-minute level or at the hour-to-hour level (with fights at the turn-by-turn level), so a 45-minute rest falls in the cracks.

[Max_Killjoy]

Any reason why you're not giving high level warriors of renown advantage on Intimidate checks?

And no published DnD world is based on a Feudal society barring possibly Birthright. Eberron, Krynn, Faerun, Greyhawk, Athas - none of them were remotely close to Feudal.

There are no Serfs anywhere of note, most towns are run by Mayors or similar and not Knights, cities are generally governed by noble or merchant houses acting in loose alliance with each other etc. Nation States have well and truly formed, and Republics and so forth abound. The Merchant class (which saw the death of Feudalism with its rise) is well and truly established.

Saying DnD accepts a default feudal society as its core assumption is as wrong as saying it accepts a default bronze age or even earlier hunter gatherer society as core.

The core assumption seems to be more of a late renaissance/ early industrial level of governance and technology more akin to our own Age of Exploration mid 2nd millennia, with magic taking the role of technology (and stagnating its development), featuring primitive Nation States, merchant alliances, banking and so forth.

I wish Galloglaich was still around, he could detail chapter and verse how you're making a lot of bad assumptions about who lead towns when, feudalism vs the merchant class, etc... maybe based on "everyone knows" information originating scholarship that is simply bad and/or based on a narrow sample centered in England and France.

In the Baltic region, as a counter-example to the Anglo-French assumptions, "mayors" and councils ruled many cities in conflict with the feudal system, merchants competed with knights and nobles for their rights and powers, and so on, for several centuries.

[Man_Over_Game]

Man, that is reaching really hard to find something to complain about. We don't have that problem at our table, in terms of people complaining if they run out of special resources and have to dig and scrap to contribute.
Most of us accept it as a challenge, and try stuff 'off the character sheet' in order to contribute. You can always offer the help action so that that barbarian next to you gets advantage on his next attack. (My cleric frequently did this when short on spells, since I rarely did as much damage as our barbarian could).
Teamwork, not a bunch of individuals out for themselves.
The complainers can try doing that.
Here's another tip for them: stop looking at the character sheet and come up with a way to influence the situation.

Also, DM does "in summary of last session, this is what is going on ..." helps get us all back into the situation as the game begins three weeks latger. (Happens a lot in our Tier 3 game .. RL and adults, as you mentioned)

Sure, I don't have an issue with that aspect of things, I was just trying to detail the concerns Pelle had to ChrisBasken.

[EggKookoo]

Sure, I don't have an issue with that aspect of things, I was just trying to detail the concerns Pelle had to ChrisBasken.

An effort I appreciate. And man I wish I had thought more than FirstLast for my handle here, but it feels like it's too late to change it now...

[noob]

True. But not having ki point limits would make 4e monks broken once they get fireball--at will fireballs. Or all their other abilities.

As for short rests in general, my preferred solution (since I run more cinematic games) is something like this:

You get 2 short rest tokens at the end of each long rest. As long as you have a few minutes to rest out of combat (or anything else with significant time pressure), you can spend one for the benefits of a short rest.

That, or I've given a "short-rest-in-a-can" potion in-game. Drink it over a minute of uninterrupted time and you have a short rest. These are given out when the quest-giver knows they're on a deadline. Here, they can stock up if they don't need the second rest and use one later (to give incentives to be sparing with resources).

I'm also quite open about "now would be a good time to take a short rest" comments, depending on the group in question.

I do not see anything broken with at will fireball.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I do not see anything broken with at will fireball.

When you compare to the same-level wizard who can't exactly do the rest of what a monk (even without a subclass) can do...

[Man_Over_Game]

My gut feeling about that is that it's identical (from a player's perspective) to "you get a rest when the DM says you do." I would feel helpless to control anything under those circumstances--either the DM put a ley line in the right spot or you go without; miss your chance and you're facing what's supposed to be 2 adventuring days all at once.

But then again, I lean strongly to the cinematic. Normal short rests and "normal" 8-hr long rests work well for me 90% of the time because the party is usually working out of a safe haven on a daily time-scale (in which case they're home for a long rest every night) or are in the wilderness traveling (in which case there are very few adventuring days happening). Very rarely they're under a hard time crunch where they have to face a full day without any chance to take a 1-hr short rest--then I'll give them SR tokens. Basically I do a sliding scale depending on what they're doing. There's nothing magical about 8 hours of rest--it's just the average time needed (under safe conditions) to replace your expended inner strength. And either I'm tracking at the minute-to-minute level or at the hour-to-hour level (with fights at the turn-by-turn level), so a 45-minute rest falls in the cracks.

I get that.

Most of the times I have listed are there to be *mostly* organic, focused on the fact that, on average, Long Rests are provided long before players actually need them, so I focused on that first (as that's my biggest concern).

Once per day just wasn't working with the 8hr option, so I thought maybe an entire day's worth of rest would be an adequate choice. Still very possible and reasonable for an adventurer to want a day off, but not without wanting to get back into the action the next day.

From there, I wanted an option that reflected roughly the amount of rest someone might get overnight on an adventuring day, but also something they can do in the middle of an adventuring day if they need to. 6 hours was too long to use in the middle of the day, but 4 hours seemed fine. With 2 fights before 4 hour break, and 2 fights after, that sounds like a pretty physically exhausting day for an adventurer.

Then the Ley Lines just make delves and other risky adventures possible, especially if players are able to gather information about where the local Ley Lines are (so they know where and when rests may be possible and that investing heavily into a dungeon may be worth it).

I tried to come up with a reasonable amount of time for how long it may take for an adventurer to magically/naturally regenerate minor wounds, and an hour seemed pretty reasonable. This is enough time to cover things like the Monk's requirement of 30 minutes for their Ki regeneration, or to cover the attunement of most magical weapons. 45 minutes was a happy balance between 30 and 60 minutes. I don't plan on being strict on the per-minute requirement, with the actual minimum being about 30 minutes.

For Ley Line Long Rests, when a character can become fully rejuvenated in the middle of a war zone, I wanted to make it possible to do during a day, but still be just long enough to impose great risk at overstaying your welcome. 4 hours in a dangerous area is possible to do with some preparation, but can easily sway the remainder of a dungeon in the party's favor. They now have to plan around barricading a room, making a temporary location to rest in, or to avoid being spotted by patrols. It adds a lot of risk, with some major rewards, and I really like that. They could always high-tail it out of the dungeon and lose 1-2 days, or they can just risk it while they have the advantage and numbers, and Long Rest in the Ley Line.

[Pex]

Maybe not fixes per se, but the following are design assumptions I wish would have been different:

1. There are too many resources to spend between Long Rests. I wish the game was balanced instead so that one adventure day worth of encounters could roughly fit into 1 session of play. The variant resting rules don't fix that for my style of play.

2. Get rid of Bonus Actions. Yes, it gives more options, but it also makes the game more fiddly. I don't want combat to be a cerebral process of contemplating which combination of normal and bonus actions to make the turn tactically optimal, but rather quick decisions on which general action to take.

Small fixes don't bother me that much, those are easy to house rule and adjudicate at the table.

Before 4E they didn't use the terms "rests". You get back everything after a night's sleep and 3E introduced getting abilities you can do a number of times per day. I don't mind the rest system. I wouldn't mind a little borrowing from 4E where everyone gets something fun and awesome back on a short rest and then everything on a long rest. With everyone having long and short rest stuff there's no competing interests in when to rest.

Sometimes you can't short rest when a PC desperately needs to, and that PC was not being wasteful using his short rest dependent stuff. Conserving resources is fine and dandy but there are times when you have to use your stuff right then and there. Once in a while running on fumes, so to speak, isn't a terrible thing overall, but when you are running on fumes that game session will be frustrating and not in a fun way.

[Ignimortis]

I like that there are different SR and LR dependent classes, that's nice. What I would like to see, is take a LR class like maybe Wizard and halve their number of spell slots per LR. Then balance other classes accordingly, expecting maybe 1-4 encounters and 1-2 SR per day. That's more feasable to get through in 1 session IME. Then it's much easier to pace the game such that only SR are taken at the table, LR happens between sessions, independent of heroic or gritty time scale. I want players to feel the consequence of wasting or saving their resources for later in the adventure day. That is diminished when you take several weeks break real time in the middle of it.



In theory bonus actions are neat, but in practise I find it becomes quite fiddly. "I want to do this, now which combination of actions is more optimal for achieving that" or "I want to take this main action, now for my bonus action, let me look over all my spells to see if there are any bonus actions ones I want to cast". Removing BA surely reduces the granularity of actions, but it also makes the decisions much simpler and faster. Which I think is better, because I mainly want a quick narrative resolution of the combat, and not really a tactical puzzle to solve.

Wait, so you want to remove one third of actions in combat your character would take, thus reducing the complexity (already quite low) of 5e combat? What am I supposed to play this system for, if it won't even have somewhat tactical combat? At this point, I might as well as homebrew my own "D&D" in two days which won't be much different from 5e, and might even have some out-of-combat mechanics 5e lacks.

When you compare to the same-level wizard who can't exactly do the rest of what a monk (even without a subclass) can do...

But 4E monks get Fireball at level 11. Sure, 8d6 in an area is still probably slightly stronger than punching someone with Flurry of Blows. But eh, it's not THAT broken at level 11.

[PhoenixPhyre]

But 4E monks get Fireball at level 11. Sure, 8d6 in an area is still probably slightly stronger than punching someone with Flurry of Blows. But eh, it's not THAT broken at level 11.

Except they can do that when needed and still be a full monk the rest of the time, throwing out 4 stunning strikes/turn without fear of running out of resources. While the poor wizard is sitting on his 3 (max 4 with arcane recovery) fireballs (unless he wants to cut into his higher spell slots)/day and his d6 hit dice and feeling a bit miffed. You also have the bard with infinite cutting words/bardic inspiration, the druid with infinite wildshape from level 2, the fighter with infinite second winds (healing 1d10 + level every turn he doesn't need his bonus action), the warlock with literally infinite 5th level spell slots...

If you want to remove SR, you have to go to a per-encounter model or to a full LR-based model. Both of which have their own consequences. Just simply making everything SR at-will breaks everything without a full re-write.

[Ignimortis]

Except they can do that when needed and still be a full monk the rest of the time, throwing out 4 stunning strikes/turn without fear of running out of resources. While the poor wizard is sitting on his 3 (max 4 with arcane recovery) fireballs (unless he wants to cut into his higher spell slots)/day and his d6 hit dice and feeling a bit miffed. You also have the bard with infinite cutting words/bardic inspiration, the druid with infinite wildshape from level 2, the fighter with infinite second winds (healing 1d10 + level every turn he doesn't need his bonus action), the warlock with literally infinite 5th level spell slots...

If you want to remove SR, you have to go to a per-encounter model or to a full LR-based model. Both of which have their own consequences. Just simply making everything SR at-will breaks everything without a full re-write.

That much is true. Though I think that BM Fighter maneuvers can lose the bonus die and become at-will, at least.

[DrowPiratRobrts]

Roberts is on point. Almost all of the games I was a player in had no changes to any rules and they were usually fun, and a good DM can usually make a ruling on the spot.



For example: Several weapons are better or worse, with disassociated costs (like how the Trident is so bad as a martial weapon). On top of that, the game allows us to "reflavor" things into any direction we want, so there's nothing stopping us from reflavoring a Short Sword into a Scimitar, except for the fact that a Scimitar already exists (at 2.5x the cost of a Short Sword).

So either Reflavoring is broken, and "customizing" parts of your character should come at an extra cost (to maintain balance with the weapons), or the weapons need fixing (to maintain balance with the existing option to reflavor them).

That's one direct example, and most people would just say "ignore it", which is the same kind of solution of kicking dirt under the rug. It might not be relevant if you ignore it, but that still doesn't mean that it's not a problem.

As far as the weapon table goes, I guess that's one thing I can think of where you've got a point. I don't get why scimitars are so much more than shortswords for an almost identical weapon. Maybe the flavor of the craftsmanship. The only difference is damage type though, and that hardly matters as far as increased value goes. But things like this are so absurdly easy to fix that it's not even worth mentioning IMO. I've never met or heard of a DM who wouldn't let a player pay 10gp for a scimitar or even just re-imagine their shortsword as a scimitar and change the damage type to slashing.

Also, why does everyone hate the trident??? I keep seeing this. It's the perfect versatile weapon and infinitely cooler than a boring spear. Who cares that it's 5gp instead of 1gp. You really breaking the bank with that 4 extra gp??? I wouldn't want to play with a DM that gives me so little money that I can't justify buying a trident instead of a spear.

[Willie the Duck]

Also, why does everyone hate the trident??? I keep seeing this. It's the perfect versatile weapon and infinitely cooler than a boring spear. Who cares that it's 5gp instead of 1gp. You really breaking the bank with that 4 extra gp??? I wouldn't want to play with a DM that gives me so little money that I can't justify buying a trident instead of a spear.

Not that I personally consider it a big deal, but it's not the extra 4 gp. It is that the martial version isn't better than its' simple equivalent in any real way. The extra 4 gp is just a micro insult on top of injury.

[KorvinStarmast]

Also, why does everyone hate the trident? I keep seeing this. It's the perfect versatile weapon and infinitely cooler than a boring spear. Who cares that it's 5gp instead of 1gp. You really breaking the bank with that 4 extra gp??? I wouldn't want to play with a DM that gives me so little money that I can't justify buying a trident instead of a spear.

It's a martial weapon that gets no bonus from being a martial weapon versus the simple weapon "Spear." (I think they gooned up that one, personally, but I am not sure what to do about it). the only niche use I see is "Trident of Fish Command" .., and for sure that's a handy feature. Get a giant octopus to fight for you. :)

[Man_Over_Game]

Also, why does everyone hate the trident??? I keep seeing this. It's the perfect versatile weapon and infinitely cooler than a boring spear. Who cares that it's 5gp instead of 1gp. You really breaking the bank with that 4 extra gp??? I wouldn't want to play with a DM that gives me so little money that I can't justify buying a trident instead of a spear.

"Can I just reskin my Spear into a Trident?"

The trident is a lot more unique, and I definitely agree with you there. But to choose between a simple weapon or the martial equivalent that costs 5x as much and weighs 1lb more just doesn't make much sense.

DMs can add flavor to weapons to balance them, but that's just a roundabout way of fixing the problem without trying to address it directly. Rather than trying to come up with a soft fix, I think it'd just be better to make pointed changes to certain weapons. Even if it's something small.

Like a new trait, called "Exotic", which grant advantage on Performance and Intimidate checks related to using those weapons, provided for Tridents, Scimitars, Great Axes, and Sickles.

Or virtually every weapon that's cool but sucks.

[MaxWilson]

That much is true. Though I think that BM Fighter maneuvers can lose the bonus die and become at-will, at least.

They pretty much already are. Compare Battlemaster Disarm with the (DMG) Disarm maneuver: the differences between them are that the BM version (1) costs resources, and (2) does damage including bonus damage while disarming, (3) is based on saving throws instead of ability checks.

It follows that there shouldn't be anything particularly broken about allowing you to forego attacks against a given enemy in exchange for gaining superiority dice usable against that enemy in future attacks. Call it Tactical Study or something.

Not that I personally consider it a big deal, but it's not the extra 4 gp. It is that the martial version isn't better than its' simple equivalent in any real way. The extra 4 gp is just a micro insult on top of injury.

Give it a niche bonus for thematic-but-niche situations, e.g. extra +half-proficiency on Disarm attempts, or 1d10 damage instead of 1d8 against Restrained targets (because retiarii nets). Or whatever makes sense--I'm not an expert on retiarii or tridents.

[Waterdeep Merch]

I wish mundane equipment was better handled. (Nearly) all non-magical longswords are functionally identical to all other non-magical longswords. A master smith can't forge anything better than that.

+1-3 on equipment ought to have been mundane, I think. A sign of superior forging. Let magic add more interesting effects.

I also miss special materials, and superior (or even magical) tools. I'd like to see those.

The weapons and armor table has a ton of dead weight because there's only four kinds of armor worth using, a handful of basic weapon types that just have permutations instead of distinctions, and they interact very badly within their own system because not enough monsters actually have resistances or vulnerabilities to specific weapon damages to make something as simple as, say, war hammers be uniquely suitable in situations where a longsword isn't. And the few times that is a thing, magic-anything bypasses the resistance anyway and makes the whole thing moot again.

Some interesting 'cinematic' abilities you can use with skills at higher trained proficiency could go a long way to making mundanes feel better at high levels. Speaking of, why don't fighters get more skills? I get they're not the skill monkey mundanes, but I feel like 'mundane' ought to automatically qualify a class to have more and better access to skills while all the magical classes don't. And without things like Expertise, a fighter's not catching up to the rogue anyway, so why not?

Some specifics on mechanics to prevent rest abuse would help settle a lot of online fights.

Some specifics on skill DC's would be nice. I'm not super gung ho about skill tables for everything and the like, but a simple sample table to explain how the system's Easy/Medium/Hard/Very Hard/Impossible looks could help a lot.

As much as I like multiclassing, I feel like there should be some extra barrier of entry that isn't ability score minimums. Not to prevent someone from going into them like the minimums do(which I actually dislike), but as a way of making the opportunity cost for dipping all over something you need to give more thought to.

Finally, I do like the idea of having a slower release schedule for splats, I really do. But, like... could we get a few more? I don't want to see a saturated market I can't afford or find time to read, but I like having a small library of books to pour through. In 5e's case, small means "could conceivably read everything in a day".

[stoutstien]

I like the idea if a smaller ki pool for monks but they refresh every fight. It would allow them to be more monkish more often but cut down on dumping them all on a stunning strikes spam or what not. The shadow monk spells would probably have to be reworked to just be x times per rest. I do think classes should each be as unique as warlocks.

[MaxWilson]

I can see why 5E is more relaxed on stuff such as encumbrance, it can be time drag and its not a survival show.

IMO the right way to be relaxed about encumbrance is to devote zero rulespace to it, not to create redundant and unrealistic rules. 5E's encumbrance rules are not completely terrible for human-sized characters at least, but they're also not better than nothing. The game would not be worse off if there were no "15 lb. per point of Strength" rule in the PHB and no weights listed in the equipment tables.

[Witty Username]

make save DC's 10+ instead of 8+, bounded accuracy makes saves always favor the defender by about 15%.

[Psikerlord]

Better pictures for Halflings. I've never had a player in 5e play one, and I think the terrifying imagery on the page might be a contributing factor.

Yeeps this is also my number 1. For the love of the gods, fix the halfers.

[Max_Killjoy]

Something that's always bugged me a bit, and it's both system and typical settings, is the proliferation of magics. I don't mean that there's too much magic or that magic is too powerful. What I mean is that you have a bunch of classes that all have a different source of magical power, a different technique for using magic, etc. Wizards, sorcerers, druids, clerics, rangers, paladins, warlocks, monks etc, almost seem to be a bunch of different ideas from different outside fiction, etc, about what magic is and how it works, all crammed into one kitchen sink -- and never actually blended much, either.

For some reason it really bugs me that a character can be a sorcerer who literally has magic inside them, and also a monk, who controls internal energy to do things that are blatantly magical, but if you have a sorcerer/monk, their quote-unquote "magic" and their quote-unquote "ki" are two entirely different things and don't appear to interact at all.

And maybe it bugs me that, for example, the warlock's abilities and mechanics are bundled irrevocably within the same package as an external source of magic based on servitude.

I've wondered if there wasn't a way for D&D to say "this is what magic is, this is how magic works", and then also "this is how THIS character taps into it" and "this is how THIS character interacts with and shapes it", in some way that unifies it all while opening up more character concepts.

[Pelle]

Pelle, maybe you could provide some specific examples?

I think Man_Over_Game got my sentiment quite well. Let me try again.

D&D is a resource management game. It feels best when characters are forced to spend some of their resources during the adventuring day, full casters can't cast their highest spell slot at will in the single combat, etc. It doesn't have to be the same every adventuring day, but let's say 6-8 medium encounters with 2-3 SR between each LR (the number and encounter definition can be nitpicked, but irrelevant to the point), not a 5-min workday. Then choosing to spend (or not) high level slots has consequences, and the situation gets more tense as the party requires a break. And the SR and LR dependent classes are roughly balanced, cool.

Now, for my personal game, I can manage to run the above pace, and have it make sense in the fiction. Perhaps using gritty resting of it's on overland travel to match the time scale. The problem is that for my personal groups' playstyle, getting through the above adventuring day takes roughly 2 sessions of table time, independent of how long it takes in-game. So if I want to keep the same resource management aspect, to keep the game exciting, players need to note how many resources they have spent at the end of the session. If they have been liberal in their use this session, they will return in a few weeks, and discover that they have very few resources left, making for a not so fun session before they can get a new LR. If the session had been twice as long, this would have been great however, because of the player remembering spending those slots too early. The solution is not to give them more resources on a SR, that ruins the resource management aspect of the game further.

Again, this is not really a fix, but a design assumption I wish was different. For my preference, you could take the wizard and cut his spell slots per LR in half. That's it. Then the 'expected' adventuring day would maybe be 3-4 medium encounters and 1-2 SR, between LR. Which is more feasible to complete within a session (for my table). The rest of the classes would be balanced accordingly. With this, it would be the same tension at the end of the adventuring day as above, but players get to reset each session, and don't need to suffer from decisions they made weeks ago.

[Willie the Duck]

Give it a niche bonus for thematic-but-niche situations, e.g. extra +half-proficiency on Disarm attempts, or 1d10 damage instead of 1d8 against Restrained targets (because retiarii nets). Or whatever makes sense--I'm not an expert on retiarii or tridents.

Certainly a solution. The general trend for D&D from '74 to now has been to remove realism, but if we were to do so*, that answer would be: both retiarii and tridents were used in arenas because they were showy, not practical military weapons. A trident really has no place as a martial weapon. It is less effective than a spear, not more. However, if it's going to be the martial spear equivalent of the game, then sure improved disarms sounds great.
*and I guess the critiques are valid, 1) most people seemed to ignore the charts anyways, and 2)why care about the relative martial qualities of sword vs. axe vs. spear when you aren't even usually fighting those beings against which those real world weapons were designed?

IMO the right way to be relaxed about encumbrance is to devote zero rulespace to it, not to create redundant and unrealistic rules. 5E's encumbrance rules are not completely terrible for human-sized characters at least, but they're also not better than nothing. The game would not be worse off if there were no "15 lb. per point of Strength" rule in the PHB and no weights listed in the equipment tables.

Again, as a trend, D&D has moved away from this. oD&D - B/X and halfway through BECMI and AD&D they did not have any skill system or (codified) general resolution mechanics, and to this day there is bitching about how early D&D only the thief could sneak or climb things or how it is just a bunch of disparate mechanics thrown together. I'm not saying that your point isn't the case. I'm rather pleased with the similar examples that they did leave open (such as swimming in armor--pure DM's call). I just don't think that the D&D audience is particularly receptive to the idea.

make save DC's 10+ instead of 8+, bounded accuracy makes saves always favor the defender by about 15%.

Hm, that's the opposite of the usual complaint. Most people focus on how enemy DCs increase as you level, but (barring those saves you are proficient in), defender's saves really don't much. I would generalize the critique and say that in a fixed 5e, the save math should be reexamined, but hold off on a judgment on the numerically right solution.

Something that's always bugged me a bit, and it's both system and typical settings, is the proliferation of magics. ... I've wondered if there wasn't a way for D&D to say "this is what magic is, this is how magic works", and then also "this is how THIS character taps into it" and "this is how THIS character interacts with and shapes it", in some way that unifies it all while opening up more character concepts.

I think there are many ways to do it, but not many ways to keep it 'D&D-like.' 4e's system of magic sources, I think, would have been a fine solution that would have passed fan muster if the rest of the system wasn't a bridge too far. Anything past that, and you're kind of in 'well why are we even playing D&D then?' There are plenty of systems (Ars Magicka and Mage the Ascension on the clear definition side, and GURPS/Hero System on the 'leave it open to the DM to decide' side) which will do it much more cleanly than anything D&D could ever do.

[Max_Killjoy]

After reading through the PHB more, I think the thing that really stands out as in need of fixing is that characters have no room for added "proficiencies"

Skills, saves, weapons, armor, tools, etc -- even if you multiclass there are restrictions on what you can actually pick up from the new class (despite the other penalties for multiclassing, such as the ASI / feat issue).

There needs to be some way, beyond "DM's option", to let PCs pick up other skills, saves, etc.

Yes, technically, saves can be picked up from a Feat (Resilient?), but that's very limited, and does nothing for the other items.


Speaking of multiclassing, either the restrictions on what's picked up from the second class, or the delayed access to ASI, need to be fixed. It's too punitive imposing both limits.

[Tetrasodium]

After reading through the PHB more, I think the thing that really stands out as in need of fixing is that characters have no room for added "proficiencies"

Skills, saves, weapons, armor, tools, etc -- even if you multiclass there are restrictions on what you can actually pick up from the new class (despite the other penalties for multiclassing, such as the ASI / feat issue).


Speaking of multiclassing, either the restrictions on what's picked up from the second class, or the delayed access to ASI, need to be fixed. It's too punitive imposing both limits.

I think that is mainly a result of bonus feats going away. Back in 3.5, you got a feat every 2 levels instead of 4 but the bonus feats were chosen from a selection based on the class giving it. The cost of spending a feat to gain a semi-fluff or not quite optimal ability was't as big of a deal (even with feat chains still a thing). The skill system being points you allocate (bleh) rather than just proficient/not proficient also helped a great deal in that if you had decent int you could toss a point in a side skill you want some skill with from time to time.

[PhoenixPhyre]

After reading through the PHB more, I think the thing that really stands out as in need of fixing is that characters have no room for added "proficiencies"

Skills, saves, weapons, armor, tools, etc -- even if you multiclass there are restrictions on what you can actually pick up from the new class (despite the other penalties for multiclassing, such as the ASI / feat issue).

There needs to be some way, beyond "DM's option", to let PCs pick up other skills, saves, etc.

Yes, technically, saves can be picked up from a Feat (Resilient?), but that's very limited, and does nothing for the other items.


Speaking of multiclassing, either the restrictions on what's picked up from the second class, or the delayed access to ASI, need to be fixed. It's too punitive imposing both limits.

Note: You can pick up armor, weapons, skills, and tools from feats as well. You can also gain proficiency in them as quest rewards. Tools and languages you can gain by spending cash and downtime.

I'm curious as to why this is such a big issue? Proficiency is not like it was--you can still use anything (except armor* and some tools) without penalty, you just don't get the bonus from it. There are no "trained only" checks*, so by default anyone can roll for anything. Some people are just better at those specific things than others--if you could easily gain all skills and saves without spending permanent character resources, it would be an optimization tax, a must-have.

Instead, classes define archetypes for functional things (armor, weapons), while saves are distributed on a strong (DEX, CON, WIS)/weak (STR, INT, CHA) basis--each class gets one of each. Intentionally, no class gets two strong saves except through class features (cf monks at higher levels). If a one-level dip gave saves as well, that would be out of bounds from the design. No one is supposed to be unhittable/untouchable. You're supposed to fail saves--specialized saves about 20% of the time, proficient but secondary (or primary and non-proficient) saves about 50% of the time, and non-proficient/non-primary saves about 80% of the time. In return, the effect of the failed saves has been reduced substantially. There are very few SoD effects; most of those that exist take multiple failed saves to have their effect or are concentration or save-ends, meaning that the median effect of a failed save is damage, not death/incapacitation. The same goes for monsters. And for AC vs attack rolls. In part, this is because hitting is fun. Whiffing all your attacks makes things seem like a farce rather than an actual fight.

For skills, if everyone could get all skills easily, rogues and bards would lose a lot of their draw (which is getting more skills and getting better ways to use skills). I know you don't like archetype-protection, but 5e is based strongly in that idea. Rogues/bards as skillmonkeys is ingrained in the DNA of the game. Although they're less skill-monkey-exclusive this edition, because anyone can pick up any skill or tool (using backgrounds).

* lack of proficiency in armor prevents spell-casting. You still get the armor mod (just not shields).
** you can't use thieves tools without proficiency. Other than that...there really aren't any significant "proficient only" tasks.

[Willie the Duck]

Back in 3.5, you got a feat every 2 levels instead of 4 but the bonus feats were chosen from a selection based on the class giving it.

Minor correction. This is the feat situation specific to fighters and fighter feats. Regular feats came at 1st level and then every level evenly divisible by 3, which did not have to come from a specified list.

Yes, technically, saves can be picked up from a Feat (Resilient?), but that's very limited, and does nothing for the other items.

Speaking of multiclassing, either the restrictions on what's picked up from the second class, or the delayed access to ASI, need to be fixed. It's too punitive imposing both limits.

There are ways. Skilled for skills, Resilient for saves (well, one save), feats for various weapons and armor proficiencies, an actual training system for languages and tool proficiency. All of it is possible, but it requires you to turn the feat option on (whether you want other feats in your game or not), and once every four levels makes it pretty hard to accomplish (especially since only one sub-race starts with a feat). Personally, I think they were a little bit between a rock and a hard place, given audience expectations, but really the having multiple different ways to accomplish the multiclassing concept and making feats optional (rather than just declaring that DMs should make a list of acceptable feats) caused no small part of these downstream consequences.

[MeimuHakurei]

There's a couple points of contention I have in 5e, but for things like the skill system or the multiclass progression (MC is weak except for a handful of dip choices) I don't really know a solution, but I think they could be addressed without adding too many moving parts or changing up the design philosophy.

But my biggest problems are two kinds of magical effects: Transformation and Summoning.

Transformation issues:
(Most of these pertain to wild shape, but the Polymorph spell allows you to abuse this to a lesser extent on other casters)
-Hit points. I don't like abusing polymorph for free hit points, which makes any caster who transforms (Moon Druid or anyone with Polymorph) either able to use their boosted physical prowess with impunity or tank hits into an HP pool that doesn't require healing - basically, damned if you do or damned if you don't. Wildshape in particular even allows using concentration spells with that as well!
-Familiarity/Form choice. No you can't just grow claws to swipe in melee or think up some swift predatory form to hunt an opponent - the only forms allowed are real-life animals and you have to provide an essay on how your caster studied this form before being allowed to transform.
-Irrelevance of stats. No matter what, you're always the same kind of bear, wolf, shark or what have you. Physical stats become near-meaningless if you can just turn into a strong/agile creature as needed and there's no such thing as a powerful or weak shapeshifter.
-Limitation on concept. Related to the second bullet point, you're out of luck if you want to have any non-animal theme in your shapeshifts (like draconic features, changing into Ooze or something crazy like growing blades out of your body) because the only way to change shape in that way is a 9th level spell.

Summoning issues:
-Numbers. There's just way too many creatures in play at once; even 3.5 was more reasonable by allowing only up to 1d4+1 creatures per cast which only last one round per caster level (anything that lets you spam unreasonable numbers is not a problem with the summoning spells itself imo). And for some reason, the upcast version boosts the numbers and not the power of the creatures conjured.
-Creature selection. The way conjuration was "errata'd" is for the DM to select the exact creatures (thankfully, this is not the case in AL), pulling the double duty of forcing the DM to learn all the summonable creatures and make a snap decision on what comes whenever the player casts it as well as making it impossible for a player to reliably get the appropriate creature for the situation at hand. It doesn't help that this whole dilemma came to be because pixies are a comically overpowered summon option.