The Edition War-icane

Another late post. With any luck, this won't become a habit.

I blame D&D night. And Shadowrun: Hong Kong. Two very time consuming affairs, but for very different reasons.

Now's probably a good time to get all my complaining about 5th edition out of the way. I've got my grumpy-old-curmudgeon hat on. And it's not that it's a bad system, it's that I just don't like it. I'm also notoriously hard to convince of anything. I may be the worst person to argue with ever because I'll just eventually devolve into name-calling and consider that a victory.

I am not a sensible man.

Seriously, though, I think my biggest problem with 5th is the complete dearth of class features and customization. It all seems very samey--though I'll admit that might be a problem with the table i've played at. Maybe it's the removal of massive piles of feats, or maybe its the condensation of power into much smaller modifiers overall.

The biggest offender in my book is the bard's inspiration. Instead of applying +1 (or more!) to pretty much everyone on nearly everything for practically forever, you give a single +1dX to a single person for a single roll per use. And you don't get all that many uses. Sure, they come back faster once you reach a certain level. You still have a really pitiful amount of 'inspiration' to share with the group.

Also, why are bards 9th level casters? Since when should a bard be roughly equivalent to a wizard in terms of magical oomph?

Who seriously looked at D&D and thought, "Hmm. We need more 9th level casters. Magic is too weak!" Meanwhile, my beloved ranger is gutted and miserable. Martials get the shaft, as they always do.

Goddamn.

Forget it. I could rant and rave forever, but I'd rather let the edition war-icane die down. Let me just briefly mention what it does right it does really right. I love the overall simplification... to a point. Accessibility is one thing, dumbing them down is another. I think 5th has hit a pretty happy medium on that.

Advantage and disadvantage is really a brilliant little mechanic to that end. Why bother with all the situational modifiers adding and subtracting and percent-ifying your attacks, when you can just roll twice and take the better/worse?

Removing saves is the same deal. It takes out an unnecessary complication and makes saving against some X spell or Y effect what it logically should be. Allowing any stat to be a target makes playing minmaximus the mighty less appealing. After all, your charisma dumps are actually punished when you have to resist a charisma-based charm. No longer will every barbarian ever have 7 Cha.

Besides, real barbs dump Cha to 5. Charisma's for babies.

(Also, hopefully, I'll have some awesome news to share later this week. Woo.)