5E and Me

I still play low-level 5E, but I feel my desire to keep playing starts to fade around level 6 to 8. The build is fun; the unlocks are fun, but the complexity isn't. I play mostly solo, so building characters is fun, but level after level, the characters just die for me under the weight of complexity and too many options.

The higher level my characters get, the better the choice of options gets, but the less fun they are to play.

And the worse they become at playing as a group, when playing solo.

I play solo; I don't have three other people to manage this complexity. Pathfinder 2 failed for me for the same reason. I can't be a "class expert" in everything. With a game like GURPS, the characters are all the same, slightly different, so I can manage a few of them in a group. With these games that require a few dozen pages for a higher-level character sheet, the capacity for my head to wrap around everything goes away.

5E, any version of it except something simple like Shadowdark, is a terrible game for me.

It is tough coming to terms with that, but it is what it is. It is a game I want to have fun with, but because of how it developed and the design it brings to the table, it slowly becomes increasingly difficult for one person to solo. Above thenth level, running a party of four would be a lot of work. I could do it, but I would not enjoy it. Some probably do this and enjoy it; I don't doubt that if you are a fan of something that big, you could probably do it.

But I am not that big a fan of 5E as I am of other games, and those games are an order of magnitude simpler than 5E. So the entire effort is less worth it for me, and I don't get much out of it.

I have games with emergent gameplay, amazingly detailed character builds that are easy, and some so easy they play off 4x6" index cards at any level. I have better games I am interested in, all the way up to high-level play. And I don't have too much time for games that take that much effort. While I could play on a VTT, my heart is on the tabletop. I don't like the digital world. I like rolling dice by hand.

At low levels, 5E is fine.

At higher levels, it all starts to break apart.