Dumbed down but there's still enough to satisfy most people; lots of us houserule in favourite bits from older editions. Pathfinder 2 seems a lot closer to a cool middle ground but stealing the best parts of it and 3.5 to add to 5e makes it a lot better. It's a really good chasis for adding to and the shitloads of free content online makes it much better.
I've been playing 5e regularly for years now. The more I play it, the more I hate it. There are some aspects that are streamlined (positive) but so many more that are dumbed down (negative). The system feels incoherent in a lot of ways. It's like they decided to streamline it to an extreme degree, but didn't have the balls to actually follow through with all that entailed. So you end up with this weirdly bloated system that has all kinds of baggage from previous editions masquerading as a sleek streamlined system.
For example, they kind of got rid of the idea of "skill monkeys" as part of 5e's core design. The idea was for every character, regardless of class, to have skill strengths and weaknesses. Your fighter can be the guy who knows about magic, or about lockpicking, and be the best in the party at that. Which is cool. It's a great idea. But it's not true. For some reason, rogues and bards are still skill monkeys, because they get features which push their modifiers in certain skills of their choosing up to significantly beyond the limit any fighter could ever achieve. So if the bard decides to be an arcana guy, there is nothing your fighter can do to match him. It's just weird and contradictory. Why even try to even out the skill system at that point?
And then they get abilities which let them basically be as good as you ... at every skill. Regardless of training in it. Like, fuck it, forget about that idea of everyone being able to contribute to skill checks. Rogues do everything.
Another example is feats. In 5e, feats are literally an optional rule. They're tacked on, like an afterthought. The only time you can take them, according to this optional rule, is when you would otherwise get an ability score increase. And ability score increases are really fucking good. And most feats are not really fucking good. So this means that 99% of the feats are a complete waste of time, no point ever taking them, unlikely to ever see them. And then there are the few feats that are completely broken and there's no reason you'd ever not take them. There just wasn't any thought put into it.
I was just asking about feats elsewhere. Anyway, these feat problems you describe, are they problems in the corebooks or is this just normal RPG power bloat? For increasing your ability scores vs feats, don't you have a max ability score you can reach in 5e? There was a lot of talk about "Bounded Accuracy" early on, did WotC actually have the discipline to keep to that or did they slowly power creep in order to sell supplements? I haven't followed 5e since very early on so I haven't been paying attention to how it developed.
As someone whos experience with tabletop games is 5e. pf2e, and a little shadowrun, its fine. How good it is depends on what you want from a system. From what I can tell they've streamlined quite a bit from old systems and meshed concepts from 3e and 4e, but certain aspects are really dumbed down to a bad degree.
For example, theres not really much you can do in the way of 'builds' in 5e. You choose a class, race, and subclass (at level 3 for most classes), but after that you only really get one ability score increase every 4 class levels, and if you want feats you have to trade your ASI for it, meaning a lot of classes play pretty much the same.
Martial classes are also pretty meh, not getting to do much in combat other than doing a basic attack, and most weapons being exactly the same except for damage type (and damage type barely matters in 5th edition, which is a pretty bad problem).
All my bitching aside, 5e is the most popular tabletop system atm, meaning its the easiest ones to find games for, and because character creation is so simple it only takes about 4 minutes to make something usable for a campaign, so there are some upsides.
When it first came out I was in love with it for how much more streamlined it was. Character creation is such a breeze, and some of the choices you make are more flavorful than mechanical, the system gets out of your way for the most part while providing a basic framework and it's really accessible.
At the same time I've come to appreciate how much fun I've had delving into the complexities of Pathfinder and discovering weird obscure quirks and exploits. There's definitely less of that in 5e, but character creation often used to involve basically an entire session, especially with new players, and now it's much more convenient.
It's kind of a question of what you want out of a system. If your group is full of math nerds, they may not be as into 5e. But if you have people who like to act and draw character art and stuff, they'll probably appreciate it more. I also would rather DM in 5e bc there's less to organize and keep track of and the random dungeon generator is fun and easy to use.
I really don't like 5e but it's an ok starting point for some one who's never played PnP before. I ran a short campaign for a group that hadno experience and then switched to pathfinder 2 as soon as we finished. It seemed to work pretty well.
How is 5e overall? Was it streamlined or dumbed-down?
Dumbed down but there's still enough to satisfy most people; lots of us houserule in favourite bits from older editions. Pathfinder 2 seems a lot closer to a cool middle ground but stealing the best parts of it and 3.5 to add to 5e makes it a lot better. It's a really good chasis for adding to and the shitloads of free content online makes it much better.
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Didn't 5e have that thing where they made feats an optional rule? I know there was a huge outcry about that early on. Did the company back down?
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I've been playing 5e regularly for years now. The more I play it, the more I hate it. There are some aspects that are streamlined (positive) but so many more that are dumbed down (negative). The system feels incoherent in a lot of ways. It's like they decided to streamline it to an extreme degree, but didn't have the balls to actually follow through with all that entailed. So you end up with this weirdly bloated system that has all kinds of baggage from previous editions masquerading as a sleek streamlined system.
For example, they kind of got rid of the idea of "skill monkeys" as part of 5e's core design. The idea was for every character, regardless of class, to have skill strengths and weaknesses. Your fighter can be the guy who knows about magic, or about lockpicking, and be the best in the party at that. Which is cool. It's a great idea. But it's not true. For some reason, rogues and bards are still skill monkeys, because they get features which push their modifiers in certain skills of their choosing up to significantly beyond the limit any fighter could ever achieve. So if the bard decides to be an arcana guy, there is nothing your fighter can do to match him. It's just weird and contradictory. Why even try to even out the skill system at that point?
And then they get abilities which let them basically be as good as you ... at every skill. Regardless of training in it. Like, fuck it, forget about that idea of everyone being able to contribute to skill checks. Rogues do everything.
Another example is feats. In 5e, feats are literally an optional rule. They're tacked on, like an afterthought. The only time you can take them, according to this optional rule, is when you would otherwise get an ability score increase. And ability score increases are really fucking good. And most feats are not really fucking good. So this means that 99% of the feats are a complete waste of time, no point ever taking them, unlikely to ever see them. And then there are the few feats that are completely broken and there's no reason you'd ever not take them. There just wasn't any thought put into it.
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It sounds like your son took Observant in real life if he's adapting to your strategies like that.
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I'm a big fan of both Observant and Keen Mind, they can be pretty fun.
I was just asking about feats elsewhere. Anyway, these feat problems you describe, are they problems in the corebooks or is this just normal RPG power bloat? For increasing your ability scores vs feats, don't you have a max ability score you can reach in 5e? There was a lot of talk about "Bounded Accuracy" early on, did WotC actually have the discipline to keep to that or did they slowly power creep in order to sell supplements? I haven't followed 5e since very early on so I haven't been paying attention to how it developed.
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As someone whos experience with tabletop games is 5e. pf2e, and a little shadowrun, its fine. How good it is depends on what you want from a system. From what I can tell they've streamlined quite a bit from old systems and meshed concepts from 3e and 4e, but certain aspects are really dumbed down to a bad degree.
For example, theres not really much you can do in the way of 'builds' in 5e. You choose a class, race, and subclass (at level 3 for most classes), but after that you only really get one ability score increase every 4 class levels, and if you want feats you have to trade your ASI for it, meaning a lot of classes play pretty much the same.
Martial classes are also pretty meh, not getting to do much in combat other than doing a basic attack, and most weapons being exactly the same except for damage type (and damage type barely matters in 5th edition, which is a pretty bad problem).
All my bitching aside, 5e is the most popular tabletop system atm, meaning its the easiest ones to find games for, and because character creation is so simple it only takes about 4 minutes to make something usable for a campaign, so there are some upsides.
Yes.
When it first came out I was in love with it for how much more streamlined it was. Character creation is such a breeze, and some of the choices you make are more flavorful than mechanical, the system gets out of your way for the most part while providing a basic framework and it's really accessible.
At the same time I've come to appreciate how much fun I've had delving into the complexities of Pathfinder and discovering weird obscure quirks and exploits. There's definitely less of that in 5e, but character creation often used to involve basically an entire session, especially with new players, and now it's much more convenient.
It's kind of a question of what you want out of a system. If your group is full of math nerds, they may not be as into 5e. But if you have people who like to act and draw character art and stuff, they'll probably appreciate it more. I also would rather DM in 5e bc there's less to organize and keep track of and the random dungeon generator is fun and easy to use.
I really don't like 5e but it's an ok starting point for some one who's never played PnP before. I ran a short campaign for a group that hadno experience and then switched to pathfinder 2 as soon as we finished. It seemed to work pretty well.
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