#like I understand being invested in a game! I'm a magic the gathering junkie for goodness sake! but please bestie you deserve better than 5

[dumbasshivemind]

AND! the rules for fighting are at the same time needlessly complicated (compared to almost any other "generalist" rpg's combat) and kinda underwhelming (compared to other rules heavy combat-focused rpgs)

Like, advantage/disadvantage is a fine system, but by the way it's implemented it's way too easy to get/give just a single instance of either and then you cancel out the other, and there's almost no payoff for engaging with the system past that. Just roll for hit and roll for damage.

Contrast with Pathfinder or Lancer or hell even a skirmish wargame like Kill Team 2e, the combat in those games is given center stage- sure it's more complex (tho if you count all the rules in 5e that are there but you never use in practice they're about the same), but you have a LOT more options from the get go, you have way less "nothing" turns, and also significantly more ways to interact with your opponents.

Look I love 5e because it was how I got into dnd, but let's be honest its popularity doesn't come from its rules, it comes from the marketing miracle that were critical role and stranger things.

It's often remarked how D&D 5e's play culture has this sort of disinterest bordering on contempt for actually knowing the rules, often even extending to the DM themselves. I've seen a lot of different ideas for why this is, but one reason I rarely see discussed is that actually, a lot of 5e's rules are not meant to be used.

Encumbrance is a great example of this. 5e contains granular weights for all the items that you might have in your inventory, and rules for how much you can carry based on your strength score, and they've set these carry capacities high enough that you should never actually need to think about them. And that's deliberate, the designers have explicitly said that they've set carrying capacity high enough that it shouldn't come up in normal play. So for a starting DM, you see all these weights, you see all the rules for how much people can carry or drag, and you've played Fallout, you know how this works. And then if you try to actually enforce that, you find that it's insanely tedious, and it basically never actually matters, so you drop it.

Foraging is the example of this that bothers me most. There's a whole system for this! A table of foraging DCs, and math for how much food you can find, and how long you can go without food, etc. But the math is set up so that a person with no survival proficiency and a +0 to WIS, in a hostile environment, will still forage enough food to be fine, and the starvation rules are so generous that even a run of bad luck is unlikely to matter. So a DM who actually tries to use these rules will quickly find that they add nothing but bookkeeping. You're rolling a bunch of checks every day of travel for something that is purpose built not to matter. And that's before you add in all the ways to trivialize or circumvent this.

These rules don't exist to be used, that is not their purpose. These rules exist because the designers were scared of the backlash to 4e, and wanted to make sure that the game had all the rules that D&D "should" have. But they didn't actually want these mechanics. They didn't want the bookkeeping, they didn't care about that style of play, but they couldn't just say, "this game isn't about that" for fear of angering traditionalists. And unfortunately the way they handled this was by putting in rules that are bad, that actively fight anyone who wants to use that style of play and act as a trap to people who take the rules in good faith.

And this means that knowing what rules are not supposed to be used is an actual skill 5e DMs develop. Part of being a good 5e DM is being able to tell the real rules that will improve your game from the fake rules that are there to placate angry forum posters. And that's just an awful position to put DMs in (especially new DMs), but it's pretty unsurprising that it creates a certain contempt for knowing the rules as written.

You should have contempt for some of the rules as written. The designers did.