Brain Rotting Qualities

[Hobart]

My friends and I played D&D throughout the 80s.  Other role playing games caught on in the early 1990s.  But yeah, it seems D&D disappeared for a while and then had a recent rennaissance over the last decade or so.

D&D sort of became the Kleenex of TTRPGs from what I can tell in the past few years... the issue is that Wizards of the Coast (parent company who I'm pretty sure is owned by Hasbro) is doing a pretty good job of making it run aground. I mainly play it sometimes because it's what the most people run.

There's other systems I'd rather play, like Pathfinder, or Gamma World, or some of the White Wolf games. 5e has a lower barrier to entry but gets stale, is a little bit of a power fantasy, and has other idiosyncrasies I'm not a huge fan of. Plus they released unbalanced source materials in their latest module by giving out free feats... it's like they didn't even proofread.

[Scott5114]

D&D 5e is what you run if if you want enough rules to feel like you're playing a game but not so many that it distracts from the story playing out.

The first RPG I played was Pathfinder 1e (because D&D 5e wasn't out yet) and my main memories of it was the story grinding to a halt while people dug up all the various bonuses they're entitled to, and being told I couldn't do whatever it was I wanted to do because I wouldn't have enough actions. That meant that as soon as we went into initiative I'd mentally check out of the session; the rest of the night was just going to be a bunch of tedious math. (Didn't help I was playing a bard and I didn't have much I could actually do in combat.) The first time I played 5e (as a druid), I was like, "holy shit, combat can actually be fun?"

[Hobart]

D&D 5e is what you run if if you want enough rules to feel like you're playing a game but not so many that it distracts from the story playing out.

The first RPG I played was Pathfinder 1e (because D&D 5e wasn't out yet) and my main memories of it was the story grinding to a halt while people dug up all the various bonuses they're entitled to, and being told I couldn't do whatever it was I wanted to do because I wouldn't have enough actions. That meant that as soon as we went into initiative I'd mentally check out of the session; the rest of the night was just going to be a bunch of tedious math. (Didn't help I was playing a bard and I didn't have much I could actually do in combat.) The first time I played 5e (as a druid), I was like, "holy shit, combat can actually be fun?"

Maybe this is a DM issue, but I find it's hugely party and situation dependent on how 5e combat plays out. Yeah, sometimes you're a fighter and you can mow down like 20 people in a turn, and it's quite enjoyable. I played a wizard for about a year, and found myself sitting around for a solid 40 minutes to an hour (often browsing this forum because it was an online game) while everyone else had their fun due to action economy. Sure I'd deal 70 damage on one turn, but like... it's a lot of looking pretty.

Pathfinder 2e is a little bit more flexible in that regard, because you get 3 actions and can choose what to do with them, but dashing is goofy.

I will say though, I've slapped together enough characters in 5e to where I can probably do it in my sleep, which I find to be an upside. The quick builds are good for getting something going in like 4 minutes.

[Scott5114]

Since I homebrew monsters with some regularity, I've found that how quick a fight goes in 5e tends to be more a function of how the enemies are statted out than anything else. Challenge rating, used indirectly to balance an encounter, is simply the average of an offensive CR and a defensive CR. This means you can make a creature stronger either by letting it spam Fireball (3) over and over, or by cranking its HP and AC up really high. I've found that high-defense fights tend to be the long, plodding ones, since most turns are either the PC missing, or when they do hit, taking off something like 5% of the enemy's HP. It's even worse if your players are all tanked up too and/or the enemies have no reason to target the squishy casters in particular. As a result, I try to tune for lower-defense enemies, then balancing it out by either giving them more of them to fight (which makes action economy more important), or if it makes sense to the story, triggering multiple encounters per adventuring day (which makes resource management more important and short rests become relevant).

The nice thing about being a wizard is you have lots of utility spells you can sometimes use to avoid combat altogether.