Too Hard to Referee?

I have seen a discussion lately about some games being hard to referee, specifically D&D 5E. What makes the game hard to referee specifically relates to overpowered or broken character builds and expecting referees to "adjust" for that. You will have OP builds blowing through everything, the rest of the group sitting there bored, and you are expected to raise the challenge level of the encounter (causing the rest of the party to feel worthless) or buff the rest of the part with magic items (which makes everyone OP).

And if you can't adjust, you are a terrible referee.

My D&D 4 Experience

The last DM-ing for me was D&D 4, so my experience is not current, but I see everything they are complaining about. At low levels, D&D 4 was great, and my experience was the DM was the person who told the story, set up the encounters, sensed when things were going well or poorly, and tweaked difficulty on the fly.

At high levels, D&D 4 was horribly broken for us. Endless combats and missed attacks. Piles of hundreds of hit points. Characters felt like they were getting weaker as they leveled compared to the monsters. The constant MMO gear grind where every item came in +1 to +6 flavors for no reason, and the books wasted hundreds of pages on lists of things you never used or wanted since one or two were OP and required anyways. The constant rebalancing of monsters in every monster manual. The insane power creep of later books. The Essentials disaster that soured us a little to D&D 5. The stacks and stacks of turn-based conditions to track, we had piles of paper condition trackers and dozens of colored dice and counters just to keep up with it all. The over-use of stun-locking and turn denial powers.

We had one encounter where we all started laughing at the giant boss monster getting knocked down, over and over, unable to get in any actions, and everyone at the table knew the game was over. Not just the game that night, but D&D 4 as a whole.

This was a broken game.

In the beginning, it started out great.

 As we leveled up and added books, the entire game blew up.

My players hated the feeling. I hated the feeling. And we walked away from D&D. It felt like the game before Wizards rebuilt D&D as a collectible card game, but it failed horribly, and they moved a new team in and went back to basics.

It was hard to referee because I hated being the one responsible for patching balance issues. As the DM, I would get blamed for following the rules on CR and encounter balancing, and if the game felt broken, it was my fault for somehow messing up something that "should" have worked. Wizards would not ship a broken game!

Yeah, they shipped a broken game. Every time you bought a book, they patched it a week later online and made your purchase a waste of time. They rebalanced monsters constantly. Sorry.

Was D&D 4 even play-tested?

It felt like it wasn't, and our high-level games felt horrible.

But everyone is guilty to one degree or another. D&D 3.5 was similarly broken with OP builds. Pathfinder 1e had its OP combos. D&D 2E started out as AD&D but mutated into an OP splat-book mess. Pathfinder 2e makes a heroic effort toward balance and playability; we will see how that goes. And I sit here, wondering has D&D, or its descendants like Pathfinder 1e, been chiefly broken for the last 20 years? In most cases, I could just say yes and be right.

Pathfinder 2e, Not Perfect, but a New Start

I feel Pathfinder 2e went the better route by being the tabletop figure combat game, and ultimately that feels like a more balanced and maintainable structure. This also feels better for referees, and if I was "being expected" to run a D&D 5 game - this late in the game's lifecycle - and know all the balance issues, OP classes to watch out for, and how to tweak encounters. The library of add-on books and rules a majority of the player base wants in a game...I just could not do it. Maybe if I started with D&D 5 years ago, I would be able to do it, but not now.

As a referee, I do feel better about Pathfinder 2e - it is a newer game, I can jump in, they feel on top of balance issues, and the rules are designed for tabletop play. I think I could referee that with fewer issues than an end-of-cycle game with a large group of players expecting experienced referees. Currently, I collect and read Pathfinder 2e and hope to play someday.

I feel the whole "hard to referee" feeling comes from not refereeing a game, but managing encounter balance given the plethora and number of class and option books this late in the D&D 5 lifecycle. It is not really uncommon for games with this much content available either, as managing encounter balance in late D&D 4 was a massive pain - especially with all the rebalancing going on. Since Pathfinder 2e is a newer game with less out there, it is easier to balance encounters.

If it stays this way or gets worse depends on the publisher and the game, honestly.

5E: The First Edition I Skipped

Life came at me, and I was forced to skip 5E entirely. I was going to start playing this with my brother, but he passed on, and I could not get into the game. Perhaps it was because it reminded me of him. So I looked into other games, explored B/X, tried a lot of OSR games, and focused on other things.

The most popular edition of the game in history that we played since AD&D was the one that got away.

I am not sad; many things in D&D 5 are not really my thing. The character protection, ease of healing and gaining spells, and relative video-game mentality of the game's resources and the wounding system just feel like a turn-off to me. My brother even felt those were way too generous. The art as well seemed very pop culture and for younger audiences, which feels sadly like an issue in Pathfinder 2e as well since they are aiming at the same target market.

We liked a little risk and danger in our games, like in the old days, so if he were around, I feel my current choices of Castles & Crusades (C&C), and even the Savage Pathfinder games would be more to his liking. The former is for the classic OSR dungeon feeling, and the latter is more for pulp adventure.

Not to say 5E is bad; millions enjoy the game and more power to them. I just missed out, and a lot of what's in there does not really appeal to me.

I understand how hard it is to referee a late-cycle D&D edition, especially with the many options and books you need to juggle, and you can always cut down the books you play with and support to simplify things. I also refereed a Pathfinder 1e game with three shelves of books, so yeah, I know the complexity and how tough it can be for referees.

This is why I like the B/X games and OSR favorites like C&C. Simple sets of rules that stay out of the way and encourage roleplaying. Not too much in the way of complex character builds and combat options. Story first games.