How happy are you with your regular ruleset?

[Corinnguard]

5E doesn't rub me the wrong way. Its just not enough. I want more adventures, more feats, more sub-classes, more sub-systems,...just more. I was hopeful about modularity during the NEXT playtest. I thought I would get my more once a good base was designed, but thats just not in the cards. That said, I think 5E is a good base and likely right where it needs to be for D&D. Accessible to the most folks without being too much.

Any chance you have looked at Level Up for what you feel is missing from 5e?

 

[payn]

Any chance you have looked at Level Up for what you feel is missing from 5e?

I certainly would suggest if not demand it if I got pulled into another 5E game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's amazing to me that World of Darkness 1.0 more or less solved this, IMO, with nature/demeanor, which rewards tokens to players when characters act on their nature when it's to their disadvantage. Mechanical carrots to get folks to at least lightly roleplay and a system that actually models how people behave in the real world a lot more realistically than alignment ever did.

Thirty years later, the rest of the game industry is till very "meh" on the system. Other than the whole sacred cows thing, I just don't get the resistance to this system.

You see similar things in some supers games.

 

[Li Shenron]

Very.

 

[Lord Shark]

So if you are comfortable talking about it, what are you struggling with in PF1e? What about Star Wars feels creaky?

PF1E: Caster supremacy (especially since we're at high level at this point) and having to build martial characters to be one-trick ponies if you want to be any good at combat.

Star Wars: Characters just don't feel capable enough to do the sort of daring heroics I associate with Star Wars -- unless you spend a Force Point, which are extremely rare (to the point where some of the other players seem to have forgotten they have them at all). In general, West End seems to have been terrified of letting player characters be as cool as the protagonists of their licensed universes. If they ever did a Star Trek game, you'd probably be stuck playing Reg Barclay.

Part of the problem is that there are just too many skills and you don't get enough dice during character creation. This is something I associate with late 80s/90s game design: the idea that you need a separate skill for every possible area of human knowledge and endeavor, regardless of whether it's useful in a typical adventure.

 

[GrimCo]

So extra work required to get to the desired play?

Extra work is always required to tune up system. But 5ed required minor tweaks and mostly removing stuff which is easier than adding or reworking.

Can you elaborate a bit on what doesn't work well for you in D&D?

D&D, and any system with levels and classes, doesn't support horizontal character growth well. Also, it doesn't support "very powerfull but very vulnerable" characters. Dnd characters with leveling also get better saves and more hp.

My favourite system is White Wolf's nWoD. I like horizontal growth. I like that you can be powerfull mage or vampire but regular joe with .50 cal bmg is still very real danger.

 

[overgeeked]

Star Wars: Characters just don't feel capable enough to do the sort of daring heroics I associate with Star Wars -- unless you spend a Force Point, which are extremely rare (to the point where some of the other players seem to have forgotten they have them at all). In general, West End seems to have been terrified of letting player characters be as cool as the protagonists of their licensed universes. If they ever did a Star Trek game, you'd probably be stuck playing Reg Barclay.

Part of the problem is that there are just too many skills and you don't get enough dice during character creation. This is something I associate with late 80s/90s game design: the idea that you need a separate skill for every possible area of human knowledge and endeavor, regardless of whether it's useful in a typical adventure.

Huh. We always have the opposite problem with WEG Star Wars. Characters are swimming in character points so advance quickly. And as long as the PCs aren’t actively evil, they should be earning Force points regularly. If I recall you earn Force points by “being heroic at the dramatically appropriate moment” or similar. As long as your PCs aren’t part of the Empire that shouldn’t be an issue.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

Playing two systems currently. PF2 and D&D 5E.

Mainly happy with PF2, though it's borderline too heavy. Combat is great, though, and it works well enough for me outside combat too.

Mainly unhappy with 5E. My biggest issue is the system is paradoxically too heavy and too light at the same time. All the weight of the system is in spells, and everything else is basically air. Want to play an interesting character in combat? If you pick a caster it's mostly fine, but if you pick a martial you better be careful when you choose.

 

[billd91]

D&D 5e is the most regular game I play and run, so it’s the system I answered Satisfied to in the poll. It is, by far now, my favorite implementation of D&D. And I’ve been running it since the play test including running games from 1st level to 18th (still heading for 20). It has a few rough spots, but none that are unmanageable.

The other two systems I’m currently most willing to run also qualify as Satisfied (otherwise, I wouldn’t run them). They are Call of Cthulhu 7e and Mutants and Masterminds 3e. No game I play has ever really been perfect enough for me to really say Very Satisfied. CoC’s chase rules, which Chaosium seems proud of, I find clunky. And M&M’s use of conditions is a bit fiddly. But both offer a lot of excellent value for me in running those games.

 

[grimmgoose]

What is it about the 5e system that you are having trouble with?

I just have foundational design issues.

• I don't like the spellcasting system (too many spells, too many "I win" buttons, martials don't have an equivalent, monsters use the same spells that players do)
• Little-to-no DM support outside of the Combat Engine, and what support remains is obtuse and unfun (why spend so much text on explaining how to run an "Avalanche", which might come up once in a campaign, over a generic skill challenge system?)
• The reliance on the Adventuring Day is such a drag. You don't really feel it until around level 8, but the higher you go in levels, the more necessary it becomes.