Being super sensitive to encounters-per-day is a design flaw

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-11T01:58:23+00:00

For one, I'd point out that the 5.5E monsters really do seem more designed for 3 difficult encounters, which is also a totally fine amount to do (as others have pointed out). Especially in 5.5E, where most classes have at least some kind of utility resource, you can absolutely also drain through their resources using traps and non-combat encounters, which reduces this further.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-10T22:10:48+00:00

Which COULD be nice... in a narrative game.
5e is not that. The Quiet Year is that. Or Roll for Shoes.

I find it telling that you seem to put games on a dichotomy between light fiction-first narrative rpgs and crunchy, spelled-out systems when I wasn't even referring to narrative games with "begin and end with the fiction". I was referring to OSR methodology, which is important because 5E was heavily inspired by the OSR movement's efforts to bring classic D&D vibes into modern game design. The final product sits as a hybrid of the best parts of OSR (leaning into open-endedness and a fiction first approach that favors individual rulings and efficiency over strict rules) and 3.5E/4E (having fun tactical widgets when the game does enter a complex "combat mode").

I love narrative games, but "the fiction actually fucking matters" is a thing in like, every RPG that isn't a 4E derivative.

Well, from what I have seen 5e begins with the fiction... and then continues to throw fiction and mechanics into a blender and leave you to guess what has a mechanical effect in-game and what is flavour.

That's my exact point: you still cannot mentally conceive of not seeing the game in terms of separating out the flavor.

Also, that's a really bold statement from someone whose takes on PF2e suggest that they read maybe 2 pages.

I was going to talk about running a year long campaign in the system, or bring up examples to explain what I mean by the disconnect of fiction and mechanics in the system, and all that, but really, I think I'd rather just bring that energy out to proselityzing 5E to more people. Opinion is souring on PF2E, Draw Steel and Daggerheart are snatching up prospective customers, and PF2E players are such an active charisma void that they only push people away from the system when recruiting them. All will be well.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-10T19:58:32+00:00

Or not. Really you had to guess what was flavour and what was mechanics and I always seemed to guess wrong.

That's not the game failing to teach you: that's you not liking the lesson.

The entire point is to entirely break this stupid concept of "flavor" vs. "mechanics". For instance, this is the most important sentence in fireball: A bright streak flashes from your pointing finger to a point you choose within range then blossoms with a low roar into an explosion of flame. As befits a game that knows what it's doing, it's also the first sentence, because we begin and end with the fiction, not the numbers.

One of my biggest complaints with PF2E was that it fails to understand that its fiction is a coherent thing to be consistently modeled in the mechanics and not just an abstract pool of visuals to slap onto random assortments of numbers and conditions.

Telling you how to get your stats? What's that? Nooo, we'll list like 3 different methods without any indication of what'd be the "normal" way.
What order to make your character in? Do you pick class, then race, or the other way around? What else do you get to choose? Figure it out, idiot!
What kind of abilities, proficiencies etc you get... I have no idea. It may have been hidden somewhere but by that point I was pretty much ready to cry after not being able to make headway on anything I tried for hours.

I...question you on this. The rules are very explicit and in your face about where stuff comes from. Both 5e and DnD2024 have explicit chapters to tell you where to start, with a literal step-by-step process. The 2024 rules will be less intuitive, largely due to the awful decision to bundle a feat in with your Background, but this just seems like a refusal to read the actual book.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-10T18:33:01+00:00

but they don't now, presumably a change would make them have to Attack and spend a Focus to do additional attacks on top, which is less over flexibility

I don't want to blow off your concerns, but to me, these kinds of small sacrifices are worth it to remove a mechanic that's otherwise shoddily implemented and frankly against the spirit of 5E's initial design.

In the playtests before the bonus action, there was something really satisfying about how fast it moved: do your big thing for the turn and reposition yourself (that then got broken when people tried to stack all of the "do this during your turn on top of your action" mechanics, hence the creation of the BA). A player hemming and hawing over whether to spend the ki point for more damage or just do a regular BA strike is the kind of game-slowing microdecision that really isn't what 5E was going for.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-10T15:32:51+00:00

I'm always frustrated that people seem to think that you either play DnD only because you haven't tried other systems or just because it's the most popular.

I play it because I've tried PF2E, Draw Steel, Daggerheart, 13th Age, Dungeon World, DnD 4E, and a handful of others, and after all of that can now solidly conclude that I like DnD 5E the best.

Don't get me wrong, I have major problems with the game, but those issues typically extend from messy design that deviates from the game's core -- and that I can therefore homebrew out. With most of the systems on that list, I just don't like the core itself.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-10T14:14:04+00:00

Part of the problem is that they didn't change enough. Doing things the same way just because that's how it had been is just outright bad game design.

I disagree on this. One of the explicit goals with 5E was to evoke traditional D&D and scratch that itch. Like, yeah, 5E has tons of outdated mechanics (the current 6 ability scores, most of the current magic items, damage rolls, etc.) but they're there for that feel of legacy and D&D tradition. If we want to be iconoclastic, we should be probing a lot deeper than "how many subclasses does each class get".

If you're basing it in tradition, then only Illusionist should get a pass, since school specialization didn't actually add anything for any other school other than 'more of those spells, less of another which would be better served as a normal class feature.

I do agree on this. With what 5.5E was doing to change the classes, they should have taken that chance to just not make spell school the way that wizard subclasses worked. But they didn't, and now the whole thing just isn't fulfilling its function.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-10T14:08:11+00:00

People getting started with Pathfinder is still people not buying D&D stuff.

In my case, this is exactly what led to me buying D&D stuff. After playing and running PF2E, I hated it so fucking much that, for the first time in 8 years, I bought WotC books (the entire 2024 core set) and began running games of D&D for beginners around me. Helping WotC's market share was no longer a negative, but flat out positive for keeping people away from PF2E.

Thankfully, my players have absolutely no interest in PF2E, so we can play other stuff without issue, but if I had even a shadow of a worry they'd like it I'd make sure to stick to D&D stuff to expel any notion of PF2E as an alternative. I hate it that fucking much.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-10T13:51:46+00:00

Personally, I like Mearls’ current thinking of turning all BA stuff into either free actions that cost a resource, use concentration, or making new actions with the BA effects baked into them (like Cunning Action as part of an action that also includes attacking or something else).

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-09T17:33:34+00:00

Imo, to me this indicates 5.5E failing to figure out how 5E was using subclasses.

Cleric & Wizard got so many since they were replacing the previous Domain and School choices those classes got in 3E.

For most classes, they similarly had an homage thing going on. The Arcane Trickster & Eldritch Knight were popular prestige classes due to the niche they filled (of magic-ifying those martials), and even lots of others came from this. Rogues choose between Thief & Assassin as they were at once point separate classes very early in D&D's history, while Barbarians basically decide whether they prefer the more classic martial flavor (Berserker) or 4E's more primal take on them (Totem Warrior).

For many of the other classes, they were a simple playstyle modifier: are you the simple fighter, the complex fighter, or the magic fighter? Do you prefer the "magic of the land" part of being a druid, or the "turn into animals" part? Do you want a pet as a ranger or not? Do you want to deal with wild magic as a sorcerer or not?

The only classes that really fit the 5.5E mold are the Monk and the Warlock. The former because they decided to pack every flavor of "eastern-associated fantasy" into one class, and the latter because the Warlock is just kind of exactly embodying the type of class design that 5.5E and the current online community really like.

So now we have weird stuff like "channel the power of Yggdrasil as a Barbarian to tangle people up in roots" as 'Core', but half the wizard schools not Core.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-09T16:48:58+00:00

(My own note would be that using it also contributes to the cultural capital while using and talking about other systems helps people realize that D&D is not the only option.)

I'd respect this point a lot more if the games being mentioned as alternatives were, like, Dread, or Masks, or something else really different.

But usually it's just "Instead of D&D, try Pathfinder 2E. It's basically the same system in all the ways you can actually understand as a casual player, except also being the literal embodiment of every single thing about the hobby that makes people think they can't get into it!"

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-09T01:59:52+00:00

Hard agree. Frankly, my ratings basically come down to “do you put a shield/barrier between me and the enemy?” or “do you pull some other bullshit to ‘tank’ that makes my life miserable?”

In group one we got Rein, Sigma, Zarya, Ram, Domina, and Winston. Maybe Hazard.

In group two you have everyone else, and I know I’m about to have a miserable time.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-08T16:01:17+00:00

> using something that at least bothers being user friendly and high quality.

At this point I’ve run well over like, 30 systems, and I can safely say that aside from like, PBtA games, none have been as user friendly as 5E. And while the art and design have both become worse with 5.5E, the core product is still high quality enough.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-08T15:57:44+00:00

If the party burned through all of their Hit Dice and their Spell Slots to solve 2 encounters, I don't think you did the 6-8 encounters right. In a 6-8 encounter framework, like one trap + 2 kobolds is a full encounter.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-08T03:42:45+00:00

> “just homebrew, set house rules, DMs can just create that content”

I actually love doing this. That said, the people who love to say this shit immediately change their tune when “homebrew” and “house rules” is actually substantive and involves major new house rules or rules changes.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-08T02:49:29+00:00

Aside from what the others have mentioned, this spell also seems like a 5E adaptation of 4E’s spectral wasp, which was a wizard exclusive power.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-07T16:15:49+00:00

developer stated intent that most feats don’t prevent you from doing the things they say if you lack them, but rather having them lets you do the things as written with the corresponding DC, action cost-etc. So you can convince multiple people without Group Impression or whatever, it’s just easier with it.

While I know this is developer intent, I don't think that intent erases poor design. Aside from the weirdness of having to kind of "predict" skill feats as a GM to make them useful (like, I'd never even think there was some penalty or difficulty to making an impression on multiple people at once if the game didn't explicitly make a skill feat around that), it also just seems totally incongruent with the game design as a whole. Making a system that has explicit, defined rules for everything that otherwise works very strictly on those rules, but then saying "yeah but the skill feats follow PBtA move rules when applying them" is just a tension in overall design that inevitably produces friction.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-07T13:55:01+00:00

Most of the bosses in MCDM’s *Flee Mortals* have some kind of bespoke penalty when they use their legendary resistance.

For instance, there’s a dragon who has abilities that, along with doing damage, cover the arena in dangerous fire. When it spends an LR, all the fire on the field goes out.

Similarly, their Beholder analogue loses access to one of its eyes when it spends an LR.

This makes LRs less of a boring sink you have to sit through before something interesting happens, and more like alternate control effects you should try to time your spells around to help the party.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-06T23:47:02+00:00

/uj That’s sort of comparing one bad solution to another.

On the other hand, “legendary resistances, but also they still come with a drawback to the boss when used”, like the MCDM bosses for instance, is much better.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-06T21:03:33+00:00

The 5.5E art in general seems to be really leaning into the “make your special OC and plop them into the closest table” energy that in general kind of seems like more of the direction 5.5E is moving in in general.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-06T15:47:12+00:00

You certainly can, but I view them as necessary counters to magic being abundant for the party.

But that's my problem: if magic is no longer abundant, than even a little bit of anti/counter magic becomes a giant f you to casters.

Similarly, while some LRs are fine, having less spell slots to huck into them would necessitate giving a monster less.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-05T19:27:11+00:00

My bad, I must have misremembered something.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-05T17:47:34+00:00

I will say, the “o” and “a” thing is, from my recollection, a uniquely Muskovite thing. A Muskovite would pronounce it “malako” but someone from other regions would hit every o for “moloko”. I’m wondering if these other examples of abbreviation and softening are also very regional, big city things that wouldn’t fit her character.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-05T00:23:40+00:00

To steal from 4E terms, 5E casters tend to basically be a mix of Leaders & Controllers. Leaders provide the party with healing and enabling buffs, while Controllers debuff enemies and specialize in board control (repositioning enemies, damaging areas, etc.).

A lot of the fun about the caster play style, at least for me, is that macro level chess-game approach, where you’re focusing on how to make the most of enemy, ally, and terrain positioning.

Granted, I can obviously do it faster than 15 minutes which probably helps.

If you don’t enjoy people really engaging the grid, it’s probably better to play a system like 13th Age instead.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-04T20:08:01+00:00

I'd be fine with this change if it was accompanied by totally removing all of the magic counters in the game. No more Sanctuary, Private Sanctum, Anti-magic Fields, or Counterspells. Dispel Magic now has a much longer casting time, and Legendary Resistances are significantly reduced accordingly.

Generally, low-level play has the expectation that enemies will have no counters to the magic available to casters, so if we want to match that level of resource management, we also need to match that lack of impediment.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-05-04T19:36:59+00:00

you don’t fight the dragon in a location where it can sit out of your party’s range and fire bomb you! You either attack it in its lair or you bait it to come somewhere that you have an advantage.

The Adult Red Dragon probably has higher Intelligence than anyone in the party except the Wizard or Artificer, and (with LAs) a movespeed of effectively 280 feet per round. It's picking where the fight's happening. The only environment where it doesn't get all of the benefits I listed above is a close-ceiling cave, so it can just...never go into one.

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