Fixes for 5e

A discussion on how a fix for some of the most egregious problems with 5e is already right there in the DMG (5e, not 5.5. I don't know about the new one.)

To its great credit, there are a lot of interesting variant rules in the 2014 DMG. One of these is Gritty Realism, which I’m planning on using in an upcoming campaign: long rests take 7 days, and short rests take 8 hours. I haven’t played with it yet, but it seems - assuming that the difference between an hour, a week and a day matters at all in one’s campaign - that it combats a lot of “problems” with 5e:

The 15 minute Adventuring Day: It much easier (narratively, mechanically, etc.) to consistently put players up against the resource attrition that 5e seems designed for. Places that are safe for 7 days in a row are hard to come by, presumably mostly friendly towns. So, resource expenditure on quests (the best spells, abilities, health/healing) must be allocated with care. Decisions and performance in one encounter more significantly influence the next. The final fight of the week is gonna be tense.

Martial/Caster Imbalance: Casters can’t really count on getting to use all their best spells each fight. The endurance of martials and their short rest recoveries shine.

Many Annoying Spells Elegantly NERFED: Rope trick and Tiny Hut are no longer free short and long rests respectively (Tiny Hut with its ritual casting is still kind of crazy IMO but progress is made). For exploration oriented campaigns, Goodberry’s nourishment is no longer an every day gimme - casting the spell everyday (since the nourishing berries spoil after 24 hours) is an actual cost. Likewise Create Food and Water - it now requires more conscious use in periods of nutritional scarcity. Wind Walk gives you one day of crazy travel a week instead of 7 until you are very high level.

Wilderness Adventuring: Besides some of the aforementioned wilderness travel-killing spells getting nerfed, multi-day travel away from a safe haven becomes much more attritional (and thus a possible challenge requiring some planning) across the board: DMs don’t have to choose between parties going nova on every challenge or having a slog of multiple challenges each day. It is now possible that Ranger exploration abilities may actually matter and get used in a way that is more interesting than automatically solving any survival or navigational obstacle.

Time Becomes a More of a Resource: A lot can happen in 8 hours, or 7 days. The world keeps moving, dungeons restock, factions do stuff. Players get to trade off resting decisions against broader movements in the campaign world. Political and villianous developments can arise naturally. You can more plausibly have a race against time that plays out over days and weeks. You can also now plausibly make Living/Lifestyle expenses have an effect since they need to be paid semi-regularly: you even could let higher lifestyle expenses in a settlement let you shave days off of the 7 day long rest, for instance. There is now a pace of adventuring that naturally supports the use of Downtime Activities. Parties will no longer look back and realize they went from level 1-10 in a few weeks.

Of course, the other problem is bloat. 5e claims to be simplified compared to earlier editions. That may be in terms of some questions of complexity, but the page count begs to differ. I asked Gemini to summarize for me, and it came up with the following page counts for the combined three core rulebooks for each edition, PHB, DMG and MM.

• 1e: 480 pages
• 2e: 831 pages
• 3e: 722 pages
• 3.5: 960 pages
• 4e: 832 pages
• 5e: 992 pages
• 5.5: 1,152 pages

Calling 5e or 5.5 a pared down, simplified game system compared to earlier versions of D&D, (and honestly even 1e is too complex by far) is a joke. If the books are going to be huge anyway, give me some meat on them. But better yet, let's not go for the complex gaming.

What I find with 5e, limited in some ways though my experience is, is that the game itself plays very similarly to 3.5, especially in combat, which isn't good, but it lacks the character customization that made that complexity tolerable. In other words, in spite of a few shortcuts, like advantage/disadvantage and stuff instead of calculating bonuses and penalties (which I didn't do anyway; I always saw that as an example rather than a rule) they actually cut the part of the complexity that I liked and left all of the complexity that I didn't. And somehow, still managed to become significantly larger.

Sure, some of that is adding more spells or monsters, or whatever. But again; the game isn't simple. That's an insane thing to claim.

But the solution above? It works, if I run 5e. I'd still prefer not to run 5e.

This has nothing to do with the post. It's just gratuitous visual interest.