I don't like 5th edition but that doesn't mean it isn't good

I have a confession to make: I both don't like and admire 5th edition.

Prance! Prance against the giants!

I'm not in tune with the cultural zeitgeist this time around, I guess. Although I like the first season of Stranger Things well enough, and that Rocks and Marty is a pretty funny cartoon. I have trouble deciphering what the fuck is going on with a lot of this stuff:

I guess this guy's pretty normal, though

Here's some stuff I don't like:

1.  The players get stupid, stupid powerful, but the game keeps treating them like they're normal people. Like "Oh I'm going to go to the market and haggle cheese prices then cut a Basilisk in half later". Nobody recognizes the demigods wandering around and it bothers me. It's tonally incongruent.

2. There's no advice for running a game in the DMG. I had to get all my functional game-running advice from the Alexandrian; none of the subjects brought up in any of those actually useful articles is even hinted at in the $50 guide to mastering dungeons. I basically paid the price of entry to get my favorite mechanic from the D&D next playtest back, which was the skill die. It feels a lot better than the flat bonus. Fight me.

3. They use a bell curve on encounter charts! Why would you do that?!

4. Actually, they just stuff needlessly complex math into everything for no reason. The single-die systems for things like HD and encounter charts weren't just "stupid and simple", they were elegant and more functional than what you've replaced them with!

5. Why does everything have so many hit points? Is it because everything does piles more dice of damage for no reason? This smacks of solving a problem you yourself introduced by introducing yet more problems.

6. Is there any actual benefit to monsters having types? Ooo, you mean I get to know whether a Basilisk is a dragon-type or a magical beast? And I get to finally have official, cannon confirmation that a Brain Beast, a four-limbed giant brain monster, is an aberration? No fucking joke?

7. Paladins can be Atheists now? Who are they supposed to be appealing to, again?

8. Infinite ammo magic guns for all wizards forever. I once had a warlock treat his eldritch blast like a nail-gun on auto-fire strapped to his hand.

In defense of that last one, having a single one-time-use spell is pretty weak and always has been. I feel like, maybe reduce the die type of damage a step or something? Like make "I ran out of spells" still suck. Or maybe you've got to pass some kind of spell-casting roll to suck your magic well all the way dry.

...

I do admire 5th though.

It's so much simpler than 3rd, which is the edition I started in, and better-organized than any edition prior to that. You can kinda jump in with an idea and very rapidly cobble it into a perfectly functional and fun character; that's an impressive achievement.

I like that the game acknowledges that playing a role (you know, roleplaying) is fun. I get sick of the "it need social rules!" crowd sometimes and it's great to just level my finger at 5th and go "SEE?! TALKING LIKE A GNOME IS FUN ON ITS OWN"

I like that backgrounds are little packages of stuff you get. Like the criminal gets to break the law, that's fun.

I like the magic items quite a lot. It's clear they put some thought into limiting them so they're magical tools and not components of CCG-esque gonzo schemes.

I like that some monsters get to be extra most special monsters and have extra actions they can take to fuck with the players. It makes them hard to metagame and it's just a really neat idea.

Mostly though, I like how gosh-darn simple and friendly the whole thing is. It sacrifices a bit in terms of cohesiveness, and it certainly occludes it's inner workings needlessly from enterprising GMs (the better to sell you supplements, my dear) but as far as being something you can use right out of the tin: it's as delectable as pineapple spam.

Behold, Ambrosia

What's the takeaway here? How does this tie back to Tian Shang?

The takeaway is this: don't get too technical. You'll slam the door on too many of your fans. Not because they're dummies, mind you, but because, they're trying to use your game to have fun. Stereo instructions aren't fun; they suck. The clarity of instructions are great, but not if they're so painful to read that people don't bring them to the table.

Latest draft of LWF is scaling back on the technical elaboration considerably and it's a much stronger product for it. While writing it, I came to appreciate this aspect of 5th edition, so I thought I'd blog about it.

What? Sometimes they're only little revelations.