Fifth Edition: Thoughts, Part I

I've had a lot of opportunity lately to talk about my gripes with Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, especially since the RPG community has been abuzz about Daggerheart. The child of Critical Role's enormous success, the game seeks to capitalize on the familiarity of 5e and the narrative engines of games better suited to their playstyle - a combination that I firmly think does not work. But my issues with Daggerheart are a separate topic - for now, I'd like to focus on my core criticism of D&D 5e. Simply put, the game does not have a mechanical identity, only a brand identity. 

The success of 5e is beyond dispute; the announcement plastered on every book that it is the "World's Greatest Roleplaying Game" is unquestionably true in terms of market share, brand recognition, public awareness, and the very fact that "Dungeons and Dragons" is a genercization of the genre. This success comes partially from a successful marketing campaign, partially from the publicity granted by actual play programs such as Critical Role, and partially - I would even say dominantly - because the game tries to include multiple different styles of play in its core rules. And here is the crux of my critique: in appealing to so many different types of gamers through the power of its brand and the incorporation of that genericness into its rules, it lacks any fundamental identity as a game.

The closest thing we can identify to a "core gameplay loop" is the character sheet building. Players do activities that earn experience points, level up, add new abilities to their character sheets, which they then use to do more experience-earning activities. This is a valid style of game design; it is not my preferred style (I am a dungeon crawler down to my bones and cannot function if I am deprived of a ten foot pole and a bag of rapidly spoiling rations), but 3e and the Pathfinder games prove this can be done extremely well. 5e, sadly, does not do this very well. The character options in the core rulebooks are a solid set, but the lack of balance means some builds are objectively better choices than others.

This imbalance is especially obvious in the martial-caster disparity, a gap I feel is often misunderstood by new players of the game. The issue is not that Wizards have magic and are therefore more powerful, which is all but definitionally unavoidable. It's that the earning of experience points relies so heavily on defeating monsters in combat, and defeating monsters in combat relies so heavily on dominating the action economy of the game. A caster has a lot more ability to control that action economy than a fighter does, meaning the game is far more imbalanced than it would be if the action economy were balanced the way it is in Pathfinder. 

Even for casters, however, 5e still fails to be a good character-sheet building game. I mentioned that experience points are typically achieved through monster encounters, but 5e does not focus on being a good combat simulator, even for casters. The three pillars model D&D uses involves Combat, Exploration, and Social Interaction. Only one of those is designed to contribute to the gaining of experience points, and thus, the core gameplay loop; the others have anemic rules and mechanics at best that nevertheless share space with combat rules, and to the extent there is specific XP to be gained, it is at DM discretion. The Dungeon Delver feat is a good example of a mechanic that facilitates exploration in a game where there is no clear mechanical reward or incentive for exploration.

Yet few tables actually advance using XP. When I DM'd 5e, I certainly didn't, because I was taught D&D using a model where narrative came first, character building meant character arc and personality building, and role-playing means fantasy improv play. Leveling was gained by milestone. Playing this way is fun, it is popular, and it is supported by WotC's recent releases. Unfortunately that means that the majority of players are getting fun at the expense of the game as written in the core rulebooks, and new rulebooks, in an attempt to appeal to this style of play, avoid adding the kind of new mechanics and rules that could contribute to the core gameplay loop. To worsen the situation, too much lore chokes the DMs, so these books cannot emphasize the decades of backstory that have been built for Forgotten Realms, Planescape, or most notoriously, Spelljammer. WotC's business model demands it publish a steady stream of books for a character sheet building game with decades of lore where players are often not interested in character sheet building and DMs cannot absorb decades of lore. No wonder the Spelljammer book was a mere 128 pages. 

There is an awful trap here where 5e's mechanics do not make the core gameplay loop of "earn XP through combat, enhance character abilities, use them against monsters to earn XP through combat" fun, so players use the game as a kind of narrative engine. WotC responds to their consumers wishes by focusing on fluff instead of mechanics, which makes the game less focused on doing something well and the core gameplay loop less fun. The game is less any specific game and more and more the scaffolding of improv sessions with dice. We might consider this the "core WotC loop," a kind of hideous parody of what a funny game mechanic could look like in RPG Tycoon 2000. Sadly there is no funny dinosaur slaughtering innocent park goers or rollercoasters to hell, there is just an anemic brand controlling the lion's share of what could be a thriving marketplace.