I really hate whenever I try to explain how some bad rules can be abused and immediatelly get someone say shit like “If this happens in your group, change it” as if that would solve the problem. And whenever it is not soemthing you witnessed personally, then it means it never happens and could never happen.
This has a lot of “stop enjoying that!” energy.
There’s no set of rules that a clever person can’t exploit or circumvent in some way, and min/maxers have been a plague on the RPG community since long before 5e. Frankly, if this sort of thing is a regular issue for you then the problem is the people you’re playing with. A good DM can roll with players like this and balance them.
Also the toxicity that is implied to exist by this post is pretty rare really. Even back when I was using Reddit, toxicity generally sank to the bottom of comment sections, and even more so here. When I got into D&D close to the beginning of 5e, some online voices on YouTube for example carried this toxicity but nowadays, most voices are far newer and friendly.
In general, most people are more interested in what happens at their table instead of all tables, and the rules are just guidelines to aid that.
Are the 5e apologists in the room with us?
No, but seriously, most people I know (rightfully) criticize 5e for a lot of things, from sloppy writing in general, to shitty adventure books, to nonsensical rulings and poor balance. I’ve never met someone willing to defend 5e so passionately.
I’ve always claimed that base 5e is basically unplayable past tier 2 because of how wild power scaling becomes, and how sloppy certain rules are (God forbid that your wizard doesn’t attempt to Shapeshift the Fighter’s Echo before you even reach tier 3). And frankly, base 5e is too boring to play for long, anyway. Homebrew is where it’s at.
It’s a story telling framework encouraging creative problem solving and creation, all rules can and will be exploited, all rules are “bad” rules. Do what works for you and your group.
But it is useful for someone to make rules that are balanced and lead to interesting gameplay. There are entire companies that make their business around printing rule books and selling them to people who think it’s worth the money.
Think of it like this: if you have a high enough GM skill, then you’ll pass whatever check God has and make the game fun. But with more balanced and interesting rules, you get a bonus. Even if it’s just a +1 bonus that makes your game 5% more likely to be fun, that means everyone who plays that system gets that bonus from one person making it. You’d be crazy not to do it.
Different things work for different groups. But some things tend to work well in general, and others do not.
This argument just dismisses all criticism of the rules and implies that the “game” portion of the role-playing game is irrelevant. By that logic, the design of D&D 5e (and every single rule and mechanic in it) is no better or worse than any other game, including stuff like F.A.T.A.L.
If the rules don’t matter, why bother? Why buy books, learn a whole system, and go through the effort of trying to use a specific RPG instead of just doing free form role-play?
If they do matter, then they can and will impact the quality of your experience in positive and negative ways. They can be well designed, easy to understand, and effective at serving their purpose, or they can be poorly designed, incomplete, confusing or nonfunctional.
Sure, you can ignore rules when you don’t want to follow them, and you can do your own thing and homebrew it if you like. You can also ignore the ending of a book and write your own headcanon, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any point in criticizing bad writing.
To put this another way, why have rule books and a character sheet with all those numbers on it? Why not just flip a coin whenever you want uncertainty about an outcome? Would a game with only that mechanic be just as effective as D&D at providing the type of experience that D&D is trying to create? If not, then why not? What makes the big complicated mess of rules that is D&D better than my single rule RPG?
This is a bad take. It would work if D&D 5e were the only rules in existence, but it isn’t even the only version of D&D in the conversation, pretty alone the wife breadth of other systems out there. I’ve been singing Pathfinder 2e’s praises for nearly 2 years now, and if the problem with PF is that it’s too crunchy, there are numerous other much lighter systems out there like Dungeon World or 13th Age.
By all means, use 5e if it works for you, but that shouldn’t stop criticism of it in places where the rules can be exploited, especially if other systems lack those exploits.
Every edition of every ttrpg has had rules that can be exploited and abused, and the solution has always been for groups to alter rules as necessary. It’s impossible to make an airtight ruleset. You are just a 5e hater.
It’s impossible to make it perfect, but it’s trivial to make it better. For example, get rid of Silvery Barbs.
And we’d really hope with a large corporation behind it, they could do more than get rid of the obvious. They could do the playtesting necessary to properly balance martials vs casters.
Considering I’ve been running 5e since the Plague Year, I wouldn’t call myself a hater. I did notice, however, this very pattern whenever I voice concerns about anything with the rules - first people assume whatever flaw or exploit I point out, has been used in my group and then their solution is always to leave the group or kick someone out of it, and if it didn’t happen in my group, then it means it doesn’t ever happen. It’s a catch-22 debating with these people.
every ttrpg has had rules that can be exploited and abused
That’s true for games in the tradition of D&D/F20/Trad, but not all ttrpgs. Fewer rules, a tighter scope and more elegant design make it much easier to rule out the kind of bad interactions or edge cases that lead to rules that run counter to the game’s purpose.
My Life with Master, Fiasco and Fall of Magic are all games i’ve played, where exploitation or abuse of rules is just not possible. Unbound is a tactical combat rpg without any room for abuse of rules.
John Harper’s rules-lite DW hack World of Dungeons is probably too elegant for abuse to be possible.That’s the first few that I can think of, but i’m sure there are plenty more.
my Lasers & Feelings officer is absolutely unbeatable when it comes to lasers. he does suffer a bit when it comes to feelings though
I agree and I’d take it one step further: it’s undesirable to play games with elaborate exploit / abuse guards. Those systems suck! They’re boring, same-y, and labyrinthine. I literally don’t care about pvp, or balance, or “winning”. It’s not that kind of game play
i wanna see someone run a broken build in Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast
You are just a 5e hater.
Yes (though mostly a 3.5 hater, though hate is probably way too strong a word, more like a “I wish 80% of RPG players played something else”) (I haven’t played 5e, played a bunch of 4e)
There are valid concerns and invalid concerns because a huge assumption is that the DM won’t use the rules about being able to address edge cases. A large and complex system will always end up with some weird combination that can be abused, but as long as there are a reasonable number and they don’t come up often then the system is fine.
5e does have some basic problems like exhaustion undercutting barbarian rages, but the vast majority of online examples of things being broken involve a massive misreading of the rules by ignoring context, vague rules (a separate problem from being broken), or people thinking an outcome is broken when it is just the system working as intended. Like being able to use Shield Master to knock down/shove opponents with a bonus action before making attacks since the bonus action rules say it can be in any order. Knock them off a cliff and no opponents? Ok, since you must attack on the same turn your action is lost because it could only being used to attack. That doesn’t make it broken, and it is addressed as an edge case by the DM.
Again, some things are broken, but most of the things people call broken are just edge cases that can easily be handled by the DM being overblown in a game that has too much focus on fiddly combat while being written with the story first.
