There were videos on YouTube in the 5E community defending pop-up healing, saying, "This is the game's balance!" We have outstanding fixes to 5E's lack of lethality already in print. 5e Hardmode has plenty of optional rules to fix everything everyone complains about.
Pop-up healing is just dumb. It is not classic D&D or tabletop gaming. This comes from videogaming and MMOs, where you can die in a fight and get resurrected immediately with no consequence.
The game loses all meaning when there is no consequence for the character's death. You aren't even playing D&D at that point; you are playing a story game where you are talking and rolling dice, and there are far better story games on the market, like FATE, Cypher, and many others.
Shadowdark proves that dungeon gaming needs hard-set resource limits and a definite game-over mechanism. This is classic risk versus reward. People love this stuff. It is excitement and tension. If people don't get this in D&D, they will leave the game and find it elsewhere, and Shadowdark proves it.
The community has also proposed some practical fixes for spells banned in 5e Hardmode, many of which are addressed in Tales of the Valiant. For instance, the ToV rules prohibit people from relying solely on good berries for sustenance. This practical approach ensures you will begin to starve on day two of trying to live on these things, a situation akin to surviving on Pop-Tarts alone.
Interestingly, there is no 'Hero's Feast' spell in ToV, nor a 'Find Traps' spell. Could it be that the designers are intentionally keeping spellcasting classes from making rogues and rangers redundant? The Find Traps spell is also better than a rogue since it also finds magical trap-like spells (which makes Detect Magic redundant). This design choice raises questions about role protection and invites us to consider our preferred game if we play a non-spellcasting class.
Do rangers need to hunt and forage? The party can't rely on "magic Door Dash" for food delivery? Does somebody care about rogues and rangers again? Wow, what are we playing? Pathfinder 2?
It is almost like the community can rebuild and fix 5E a lot better than the "professional designers" at Wizards can. Where have we heard this before?
Could you repeat that? Where have we heard this before?
This again? You get the point. The more I force myself to examine 5E, the more I realize its problems have nothing to do with 5E.
The problem with 5E is Wizards and D&D.
At this point, any community-designed version of 5E is better than the main game. Most third-party versions address most of the problems people have with the game. And 2024(5) will do nothing to address issues like a "Find Traps" spell since backward compatibility is a design goal. In the new version, D&D characters will still be surviving off good berries alone (though the spell will probably be replaced by the Pop Tart spell for product placement), and Find Traps will be forcing rogues into a life of crime, unable to find a job in an adventuring party unless they 'learn to magic.'
We also have fixes in the community for many of 5E's problems to make it a more challenging game.
There is a point where all the slick, Wall Street marketing firm-produced videos hyping D&D falls flat for me. The designers in those videos do nothing to fix problems in the game's design. All those videos are meant to reinforce platform lock-in and make it seem like Wizards is the professional publisher with all the answers.
I look at them and ask, "Shouldn't you be fixing your game instead of sitting here and talking about how great your game is?"
Their answer will inevitably be another poll to ask us about the problems we already know about.
The more I look at other games and consider them the true flag-bearer for the game, the sillier this situation gets. There is nothing wrong with 5E that the community hasn't fixed. People who complain about 5E aren't angry about the rules being broken; they are angry about platform lock-in with a broken version of the game - and those who are stuck on the platform.
The entire situation is like the Windows dominance of the early 2000s, when nobody would consider Linux for anything serious. These days, almost everything on the cloud is Linux.
Free, community-developed, and open systems will always win.
Lock in is a temporary state of the market at one moment in time.
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