5E: Precalculated

I did more YouTube D&D watching, and I found a few having an issue with how everything in D&D is precalculated and complaining about the minimal choice in building characters or selecting weapons and armor.

Single-handed weapons? Pick one that does a d8, and go for martial weapons if you can.

Two-handed weapons? Ignore damage, and always go for reach.

Dual wielding? Go for the d6, and your damage output will equal a two-hander.

Armor? There is really one best pick, and that depends on your DEX.

And as you level, all the choices you make feel like they were run through a computer thousands of times, and the damage outputs and effects really don't matter much beyond "the best choice you should make." Either that or the statistics majors have gotten to them and found the absolute best choice.

And the martial-caster damage gap gets worse at every level, so no choice you can make as a martial character matters. Even defenses get better for casters.

So, just play a caster.

Wizards have always made overpowered casters in D&D; every version they made of the game was superheroic-magic and, frankly, overpowered the casters to an insane degree. And they can't maintain a version and keep the game stable for more than 5 years before the overpowered options creep in, and we need a new edition again. Yes, the game is insanely popular, but design-wise they have not done the best job.

The game they were given with AD&D 2nd edition worked fine. The OSR proves that easily.

Every edition of D&D since Wizards has taken over has been another significant change.

Part of me feels they change things to sell books, as this is the Magic the Gathering sales method. And I get the feeling for the last 20 years, the game hasn't really been in the best of hands. They refuse to support their world settings. The lore past 3.5 feels dead and unsupported. They embraced the World of Warcraft-style default setting, and the fiction and excitement around their "worlds of adventure" feel long gone.

Given D&D 4's mess of a design, the damage gap between martial and caster characters was not that high. D&D 5 went back to the "glass cannon" caster design philosophy, and then, later on, they just went and added equivalent defenses for casters anyways. Because I suppose casters complain the loudest. And there are designers at Wizards who have no clue what some of these changes do to the game.

I am still reading Level Up Advanced 5E and seeing what they did to address this problem. Part of me feels like the obvious answer for 5E is "more rules," but the game is already heavy enough with rules, so why would I need more to patch issues? Fighters and martial characters are very cool in Level Up - I give them a lot of credit for making them enjoyable again.

I honestly get the feeling trying to patch 5E's flaws is like taping together a shelf, so it keeps standing up. At some point, just get a better shelf.

Low Fantasy Gaming does many cool things, too - primarily by throwing out 5E rules and replacing them with "fun play" systems like exploits. Exploits in LFG solve many of 5E's problems and add that "Savage Worlds" flair to the game. Out of all my 5E clones, LFG is hands-down the best and one I would play to get my investment out of the 5E third-party books on my shelf.

But it does this not by writing more rules but by throwing them out and replacing them with thematic systems. The exploit system, the resting system, arcane dark & dangerous magic, the faith & favor system, the escape & evasion system, the supply system, the skill system - seriously, read this book and check out all the fun "minigames" they added to 5E and realize all the heavy rules they replaced. They didn't patch and tape; they did some fascinating game design to enhance OSR-style play but abstract a lot of the bookkeeping away.

LFG is honestly a genius design.

But it also has a lot of baggage in the base system to deal with, including Wizards' habit of overwriting and over-connecting every rule to each other and introducing complexity where there should be clarity and simplicity.