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Failings and Flaws (Part 1) — Why D&D 5th Edition is bad

We’re starting off with a bang aren’t we? Seeing how criticizing the things people like makes them feel defensive, I find it might be best to open up with a disclaimer:

Regardless of the flaws your system has and how bad it actually is, that does not mean you cannot enjoy it!

It is a common, but mistaken notion that anything someone likes is absolute good and that it cannot be bad. In a future post I’ll tackle a system I actually love. Just to make things fair!

Enough procrastinating though, let’s see why I cannot stand D&D 5th edition and why I do not think it to be the renaissance of tabletop. I will be handling this chapter-by-chapter for the most part. There will be varying lengths as some chapters simply have more to talk about than others. I will keep foul language and vitriol to a minimum, but...

Let’s just say I’m passionate about a hobby I love.

 Chapter 1  Introduction

I was going to skip this because no one really reads these, but already we have a giant red flag. Skipping the bulk of racist references from Dark Sun, explanations of situations that the rules don’t account for, and other things, we place our focus right on the ‘Wonders of Magic’ section. Already we can see magic being placed on a rather high pedestal, while also being strangely outlined as “rare”.

Considering there are entire church organizations of clerics, schools of magic, and nearly every village having a hedge mage of some sort, I’d hardly call it rare. Uncommon, sure, but rare? Not in Greyhawk. The default setting is still Greyhawk, right? We’ll have to find that one out later.

I realize it sounds like a nitpick over language—and it is, to a degree—but the place where language matters the most is in the introduction! This is where you tell people what your system is about and describing a franchise that has long been about high magic and heroic fantasy as having a scarcity of magic (that is what “rare” means) shows a deep misunderstanding about it. This is actually integral to understanding D&D 5e’s failings and why, even if it is an okay game (and that’s being generous), it is a terrible iteration of D&D.

But let’s move on and ignore how this section contradicts itself. For sanity’s sake.

Chapter 1 (for real this time)

It is actually very rare for a section dedicated to making a character to have some severe flaw with it. Sometimes it’s a good example of how not to make a character, but that is not as common as one might think. Ultimately it comes down to a few things I’ve noticed as being treated as the default.

Such as rolling ability scores. It is honestly something I take a lot of umbrage with. You can harp on about how there is no ‘winning or losing’ in D&D, but let’s face it: people like to feel like they’re accomplishing things. When you introduce a stat rolling system as the primary means of finding out your attribute scores, you are potentially denying people that. It is possible for a highly mediocre character to accomplish things, but more often than not they end up either dying in an unsatisfying way or they end up having to get coddled. Which seems to defeat the purpose of rolling stats in the first place.

At the very least they still have point buy, but why is this not the default? Perhaps Mearls was wary due to the rather misplaced thought among the community that it’s for “min-maxers”, a common bogeyman among tabletop groups. A bogeyman I actually find absurd on its own, but that is a discussion for another time.

The only other thing that really stands out is that small change to “finesse” melee weapons and ranged weapons. That being Dexterity to both attack rolls and damage rolls. I have mixed opinions on this. Making things simpler is fine, but Dexterity is often considered a “god stat” due to how much it’s worth.

Well, there’s also the advancement table barely being helpful, but this is the flaw of making a system “modular”. Let’s keep going.

Chapter 2 : Races

Now we’re going to talk about races. I will refrain from being a “grognard” so to speak, but I will be looking at the mechanics of them closely.

I’m also going to ignore the constant use of “diversity” throughout this book. Diversity is good and desperately needed in the hobby, but the way it’s constantly signaled at feels like it’s trying to draw attention away from something. We already got a nice dose of some archaic 90s racism with the previous blurb about Dark Sun.

This isn’t a social issues blog, so I’ll keep that to a minimum.

Already it seems we are trying to appease both the “old” D&D crowds of pre-4e and the 4e crowds. At least people will be ecstatic to know that Gnomes are back to being a race in the core rulebook, but the raceplosion of 3.5 and 4e has still been dialed back. They often do that to sell more books, but it took a while for 5th edition to start truly releasing content compared to its predecessors. In fact, D&D 5e used to be so devoid of content and took so long to come out and presented such little information that on many boards it was considered to be vaporware.

I’ll confess to being one of those people and I still think that what we have gotten is a sign of a definite decline. However, tabletop as a hobby in general has been shrinking. It does that sometimes and the absolute wealth of specialized board games has been cutting into traditional RPGs quite heavily.

Anyways, I’m losing track of the topic here. Let’s see how 5th edition handles races.

First we have Dwarves. Or Dwarfs, if you prefer. No huge issues with their description, it’s typical and generic, but that’s the default. All I have to say is this:

What? Female Dwarves don’t have beards?

Joking aside, it’s very typical- hold up.

Darkvision got nerfed, huh? In older versions, Darkvision let you see within a threshold of darkness as if it were normal lighting. Now it only lets you see it as dim light. Interesting.

Racial combat bonuses against Giants and Goblins are gone. I would argue that this is a good thing as it separates culture from race and allows for things like dwarves who live in overworld urban centers who would probably not have this kind of combat training...

But then they still give them obviously cultural bonuses. Oof. I would argue that race and culture should be separate, but we can ignore the problems that arise from them being treated as similar and instead move onto Elves.

Who are still perfect. Good grief.

Nothing else- wait a moment. Darkvision? Now things are starting to make sense. It seems that Low-Light Vision from older versions and Darkvision have been pushed back together into something resembling Infravision from the AD&D days. Except a little less evocative. A weird change, but I guess we wanted to make things easier on new players and “sees farther in dim light” and “sees in darkness” are too complicated of distinctions.

Another curiosity is that racial penalties appear to be missing. This is definitely something of a hold over from 4e and I am fine with it. It’s a definite positive for people who might find an entire group of people being dumber to be offensive.

Now we are onto Halflings and what the hell is that?!

Ugh. Ugly design and art aside, let’s see. They try to avoid making the obvious faux pas that Halflings often have by making them nomadic thieves who travel on colorful wagons. You don’t get points if you guess what that’s a caricature of. In fact, they emphasize the default Halflings being Hobbits with the serial numbers filed off. This is what they originally were, so it’s a return to form of sorts.

They are even better at saving throws now. A reroll on a natural 1? With no daily limit? That’s fucking amazing. The Stout Halfling is also a rather clear winner here. Being survivable is valuable in D&D.

It’s time for Humans. Yawn. Not because Humans are dull, but it is very hard for a fantasy setting to make them exciting it seems. Either they are just the generic everyman or there is an almost uncomfortable and, dare I say, cringe level of “humanity fuck yeah!” to them. There is also a curious level of Forgotten Realms discussion in the blurb-

Wait. Is the default setting fucking Faerun? Did Mearls seriously, in the same breath, use Faerun as a base and then imply that D&D is low magic? Holy shit.

Moving on from my brief stint of acidic bile, we see that Humans are still the everyman. Big yawn. However, something draws my attention. Particularly that ‘variant rule’ box. Two piddling attribute score bonuses (but they can still be valuable increases, especially with a hard cap on stats) are nothing special, but proficiency in a skill (akin to 3.5′s free skill point) and a feat of their choice?

Given 5e’s feat design (we’ll be tackling that one later) that is a significant boon. In fact, it’s safe to say that humans are most likely one of the strongest races again. Some things never change.

Dragonborn are next. They essentially became the gateway furry race in 4e and it seems that we are keeping them here. Now, I don’t have a huge problem with Dragonborn, big dragon people are cool, but I can see how some people might have an issue with it, especially given their old and new lore. Whatever. We get a little blurb that people might be afraid of Dragonborn because your average peasant is kind of racist. Sure. Though I feel like if you are normalizing oddities like this enough for them to viable character options, only the most rural of folks would act like this.

Then again, probably not.

Their stats are typical and what you’d expect. There’s also a blurb about Draconians from Dragonlance now being evil Dragonborn. Okay? They say that they lack breath weapons and have unique spells instead, but they don’t say what these are so it’s an actual waste of fucking space to mention. There aren’t any subraces or actual variants, which is a bit egregious due to how different dragons are.

Now we are at Gnomes. I don’t like them. I find it funny how they have been downgraded from a core race to an unusual one. I also find it bizarre and I am curious about the reasoning behind it. People may find a sense of dread in the “Seeing the World” section outright saying that Gnomes tend to be obnoxious pieces of shit and I would agree with them.

Fuck Gnomes.

Mechanically speaking they are odd in that the base race barely applies anything at all whereas the subraces add in the vast bulk of it. All Gnomes are more intelligent than others, but for the most part it seems that they are keeping the differences between them significant. Which is fine.

Half-Elves are kind of whatever. No subraces, despite Elves being different from one another. Okay.

One of the most problematic races of them all, Half-Orcs, are still in. They’ve been a core thing for a while, but it can make some people uncomfortable. Whether it’s due to the typical circumstances of their birth or the near-alcoholic levels of urges to commit violence, they are worth a lot of complaints. You can tell good stories involving these, but it’s a hot topic that may not be worth tackling.

As usual they are oriented entirely towards hitting things good and being hard to kill. Halflings are more survivable though.

Now here’s something interesting: Tieflings, but no Aasimar. Surely with the subrace system an overall Half-Outsider with subraces involving the main planes would be better? I guess not. Oh well. Surely Mearls has used this subrace system to allow for Tieflings that have descended from different devilish lineages? No?

What a fucking waste of potential. Again. I really have nothing more to say about this.

They’re what you expect.

That’s about it for this post. The next one will pretty much be solely dedicated to classes. There’s a lot to go through there and this post is already painfully long. Long enough that I may break it up into two parts in the future. We’ll see. Until next time!