5E: Old Windows

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

Even official D&D content has this problem.

5E has this problem.

It is like an old version of Windows where installing a game could wipe a part of your computer's registry and break your entire computer. Nothing is protected from anything else. If you add a piece of hardware, it could break a program. If you uninstall a program (and remove it), it could wipe out files something else uses. Once something is added to the system, it can never be removed. You are stuck with your "Bonsai web helper spyware" until you reinstall everything.

With 5E, the amount of "exploiter content" is way higher than I ever expected, and it seems design teams use certain game features to add power-gaming features in expansion books that break the game, feeling, balance, and flavor so hard my head spins.

Even official Wizards books do this.

And few want to fix this or even admit it exists since it would break their power gaming builds.

And call out books that break the game.

But it is your table! You can do what you want!

Microsoft eventually realized that the same arguments for Windows were unsustainable in support costs alone. So many unofficial add-ons plagued the system and "Windows improvements" that they needed to lock down parts of the OS just so they would have a system that worked for most people.

This isn't an argument against expansion material or 3rd parties.

I love expansion content.

It is just that 5E has built-in dongles (bonus actions) that make it way too easy to slip in extra attacks and the ability to throw the game way out of whack. I have come to expect the "natural weapons as bonus action attack" thing to pop up in expansion races, and it feels like it doubles the per-turn damage.

Races without it pale in comparison when serving as front-line fighters.

It is just D&D has gotten to be such a mess, even with a few expansion books (even Tasha's), that the game feels horribly broken internally. Multiclassing in 5E is horrible; the system is not even thought through, and I see nothing being done to address this. Unless you ban it outright, class identity is dead, and everything becomes a mess of class and power gruel.

One D&D will not fix this. It will create 2014-2023 D&D and 2024-2027 D&D camps. They are forking their game, selling both versions, and expecting consumers to figure it all out.

The D&D clones feel they will do a better job "being good stewards" to the 5E system than the company that built the game. I like Advanced 5E and Tales of the Valiant, and they are perfect "clean room" versions of the game where you can ban all the junk and find a little sanity. I can see why people leave for Shadowdark, OSE, C&C, DCC, PF2, and other games - class identity still exists.

It is strange to see Old School Essentials as a "truer version" of 5E where characters have more power and hold it longer, but that is where my thinking is headed. That d8+2 longsword attack for a fighter holds more power as you level, just because the monster hit points are linear in B/X and not exponentially scaled in anything beyond 2E.

And that d8+2 longsword is the same damage in 5E as in OSE.

An ancient red dragon has 60 hit points in OSE and over 550 hit points in 5E.

In OSE, one hit from that sword on that dragon means a lot more.

Your power is retained longer and remains potent until the end of the game.

In 5E, they need to pile on attacks, bonus actions, and modifiers to artificially raise that damage up to the scaled hit points, but martial classes will never match casters, so why bother? Post 3rd edition, D&D introduced scaling to the game and screwed up the math, and they have been trying to fix it for 23 years and have never gotten it right. They are now on their 6th edition of the game since then (3.0, 3.5, 4, 4 Essentials, 5E, and One D&D), and they still haven't fixed the problem.

OSE sits on my shelf, saying, "You can waste money on new 5E books, but my math will still be right. See you next edition!"

5E needs a rethink of the entire concept of classes, class identity, power, and accumulating power. Classes are more "what disadvantaged position do you start in" rather than something with an identity. At this point, 5E would be more internally consistent if it were a superhero game, and you point-bought your powers.