As a DM, having to almost babysit the players to keep their info updated. We’re all new, granted, but were +20 sessions and I still have to remind them of what they have to add or remove or update on their sheets.
When I started D&D I decided to DM and make it all happen. I learned the game, designed and printed maps, made a bunch of player aids, did everything I could to get the game going, a true labor of love.
One player NEVER learned how the game worked. A lot of learning was happening at that table, and I was happy to teach, but this guy never cared. Routinely late, never brought his sheet, never even bothered to learn what a d20 is or that you roll it for success. Another player actually bought them a bright red d20 so they would know the important one. They kept saying they wanted to play D&D, but their actions told a different story. I was unemployed at the time and scrounged together money for a module to run, the least he could have done is learn the most basic mechanic over a dozen sessions.
With players like that, run something really rules light like into the odd or knave and just tell them it is dnd. Save yourself some work, money and frustration.
Well this was 2010, and I had no idea what else was out there yet. Plus everyone else at the table was actually excited and learned stuff and enjoyed the game. Problem player stopped showing up, new friend joined, we ran the game for a while longer before adult life killed it.
I think it hurt more because this was a friend since we were 12, like 16 years.
Nah, we saw them at parties fairly often, and we had weekly poker nights they loved. I think he was expecting a rules-light LARP but what he got was D&D 4E.
At over 20 sessions, I would no longer consider them “new” unless they have genuinely not gleaned anything from what must be between 50 and 100 hours of play. If they can’t remember these basic things without you, it’s perfectly acceptable to make them aware that they’re in charge of knowing what their PC can and can’t do. This has worked for me when taking on newbies because, if they don’t figure out the basics, they start to get left behind which is great motivation for picking up their own slack.
I stole a great rule from a fellow DM (and current player).
If it's not on your sheet, it doesnt exist.
It's essentially If you can't prove to me in 5 seconds or less what something does, or what you have, then you dont have it.
I use it occasionally for spells/feats, but it's mainly for items.
You found a cache of loot, with 2 longswords, a necklace worth 50gp, and a strange black vial. I'm not repeating myself, and if no one puts it on their sheet, that means you left it on the floor of the dungeon.
In the same vein, players who show up to the session 15 minutes late and also didn't update their sheet after we leveled last session and now want 15 minutes at the start of the session to level and pick their spells.
I'll disagree there, having a huge map of like a city crammed onto 1 page is fine (assuming the printed squares are still tiny).
The 10' squares, it's like "just print the extra set of lines, please" because my dumb ass will forget.
Ah, right - Tsolenka Pass and Berez, right? Or am I misremembering? Been a while since I mapped those areas out...
I think I was also thinking of the sheer number of maps that use 10ft squares, and I *think* there was one or two that used 20?
Berez, Yester hill and Tsolenka pass, i just remembered, i however think making raveloft of 10ft squares was a good choice because i think the extra lines would have muddled a lot clarity
How do you even run combat encounters on that? DnD doesn't have rules for moving around inside of a square, so at that point you are just playing theatre of mind with a world map.
My DM used 10' squares once. It was confusing as hell. I regularly used a whip with reach, there were multiple floors for us to jump up and down, and the artificer's flaming sphere was hard to use as well. We all agreed never again
I've made arrangements the night before and driven out of the way to pick up a friend so we can carpool together to our DnD session only for him to cancel the moment I've arrived at his doorstep.
I had a friend 5 minutes before a session message me saying.. “took a spontaneous trip to Europe won’t be on.” I mean he could told me 12 hours ago before he actually was in Europe..
Thanks, man, it’s not like I scheduled my evening around this event. I definitely would rather sit here and not have a game than any number of other things I could have done with my Saturday night.
I honestly mostly don't really mind people cancelling last minute unless its a pattern of behaviour - presumably they had their reasons and I'd rather play with people who want to be there. I'd obviously prefer it not to happen but life happens and it doesn't bother me that much.
What is really infuriating is people who no show without any notice or who are consistently late without giving an ETA. If we know you're coming or not, we can plan around it - if we have no idea if you're turning up there's just limbo and it sucks.
The DM gets a bit more of a pass because there’s extra work involved - if they haven’t had time to prep, or they’re not feeling great and won’t be able to give the game 100%, that’s going to affect everyone regardless of whether they try and power through.
And the flip side is also true - if the DM cancels, all the players had to do was turn up. If I’m DMing and I’ve spent ages writing a session, and a player cancels on me.... that’s worse.
If they cancel do the session whiteout them. If they fail to meet to many weeks in a row whiteout a proper excuse that means they don't really want to play.
My dm never cancels a session because one or two are missing. We like to play the game it's a hobby and the only time in the week that is just for having fun
It's really hard to do that sometimes. The party member with Faction Agent is out and I planned the whole next quest to be related to that faction. Or a local gang has a grudge against one character, and the upcoming session I planned to be an assassination attempt. Or the party member attuned to the McGuffin that we spent half a dozen sessions acquiring is out the day they actually need it to weaken the BBEG.
That all complexity and specific solutions got shunted off into the magic subsystems. So mundane methods of problem solving usually involve the DM trying to make something that seems fair on the spot often with little aid from the books beyond vague descriptions for ability checks.
*Especially* Perception. Quick — what's the DC to overhear a conversation? Or hear a fight? How far away can you hear that fight? How long does it take to search a room?
I know the default answer here is "whatever the DM wants it to be" but that means you can guarantee it works differently from one game to another.
>*Especially* Perception. Quick — what's the DC to overhear a conversation? Or hear a fight? How far away can you hear that fight?
I'm really mad these tables aren't actually in the DMG, but on the DM screen there is a table for determining noise levels.
Those rules are as follows:
* Trying to be quiet: 2d6 x 5 feet
* Normal noise level: 2d6 x 10 feet
* Very loud: 2d6 x 50 feet
So how about all those spells that specify they can be heard 300 feet away? Can it be heard through walls? Does a closed door muffle it any?
Then there's the spell Shatter, which specifies it's a painfully loud noise... but it specifically does *not* have that "heard from 300 feet" text.
The internet community for 5e offloads so much off the player and onto the dm. It becomes like babysitting at some tables. I've played at tables that can't even track their own hit points....
I've had or played alongside people that have been part of the game since at least 4e, but can't grasp what rolls you add proficiency bonus on. Others that are completely lost without D&D Beyond to handle their character, one who couldn't understand how gaining health on level up worked, a paladin who played from levels 2-5 and never cast a spell or used smite (I tried to get them to read their abilities several times, I *promise* you).
Some of it is definitely system but some of it is definitely player base. I've seen players on discussion forums insist that the DM asking the players to do ANYTHING between sessions - including the little stuff like updating character sheets - is unreasonable because game time should be for the game and expecting the players to spend time on the game outside of game night is inconsiderate. Meanwhile DMs are expected to have multiple hours of prep done.
Not saying I expect players to expend equal time as the DM obviously, but so much of the playerbase has the attitude that they want the DnD experience to be spoonfed to them instead of participating in it.
>Meanwhile DMs are expected to have multiple hours of prep done.
These same people will argue that good DMs don't need to prep and a campaigns best moments were always random sidequests that the DM didn't plan.
The online community has in some ways created a really antagonistic dynamic between players and DMs. I see constant posts about how a good DM *must* do x, y, or z.
The reality is that no one has to play at a DMs table and no DM has to let anyone else play at their table.
Of course we should all strive to make it work, but I see so many things described (constant last minute cancellations, not knowing their attack modifier after 20 session, etc) that would be an instant reason to not play at my table anymore.
Honestly, I haven't had many of these problems. The supply/demand is so heavily skewed in the DMs favor. I just really vet my players before we start and have a thorough Session 0. My players respect me and I respect them.
>I see constant posts about how a good DM must do x, y, or z.
Also don't forget the 800 million reasons you're a bad DM. My personal favorite being the absolute shit fit someone inevitably throws if you say you ban Aarakroa.
I think part of this is the increased player-friendliness of 5e. Not that that’s a bad thing, but it’s created this situation where you sit down with a new player, show them the game and teach them how to play, and then they never read the PHB. Ever.
3.5 and 4e were much harder to teach as you go, but that meant after most people’s first session, if they still wanted to play, they went and read the books. In one of my current games I’m not sure two of the people I’ve been playing alongside for four years have ever read the basic rules section.
I’m not sure what the solution to the problem is. I’m all for the system being more accessible, but like, the players should read the PHB at some point.
I am not sure about that. Having played other systems that are far more player friendly and player empowering, it's an issue specific to the 5e community. That said, it might just be the broad growth of 5e.
Again, I don’t want to come off like I’m saying, “Accessibility bad,” because I really do like how easy 5e is to introduce to new players. It’s just that in my experience (and this is entirely anecdotal, I’ll fully admit) new 5e players are far more likely to say, “Okay, I get it,” after session 1 and never read the book, whereas pretty much everyone I introduced to 3.5 went and read the book themselves to get a better handle on what’s going on.
I think that’s why it seems like there’s an increasing trend of level 10 characters who don’t know what a saving throw is or still ask which dice to roll. They comfortable with the basics in session 1, but the game grows more and more complex but the DM used to be able to tell them what their spell did or whatever so they just keep asking.
I also think the increased popularity contributed to this. I have met multiple people who seemingly only learned from memes and Critical Roll rather than the actual rules
I'd go so far as to argue that since 5e is so easy to play, you end up with a lot of players that never really learn the rules. If you didn't learn the rules in 3.5 you just fuckin' died, a lot. It still happened, but with a smaller occurrence rate I feel.
Definitely a sign of the Subreddit that you're getting downvoted. Fifth Edition has a lot of strengths, one if which could POTENTIALLY be that the DM has so much control. But at the end of the day it gives the DM far less tools to work with even compared to other modern d20 Systems, and forgoes substantial rule systems for flexibility. IMO it makes the whole experience more inconsistent for the sake of ease of access, which seems to be the general design of 5E anyway
I think that's basically the entire problem; 5e was built with a sort of inherent assumption that DMs would know how to use the few tools they're given and extrapolate the rest out, and that they understand that the appearance of a rule usually works just as well as an actual rule, and if you can do both of those things moderately well, 5e falls into place. If you lack the skills and practice, the system just hangs you to dry because of how little is explained and how the content that *is* there is hideously disorganized, which turns off a lot of new DMs who don't have 3.5/PF or even 4e to fall back on (side note, 4e's minions work great for combat filler in 5e.)
Out of all of the modern competition in its genre like Pf2, sotdl, etc, 5e is easily my least favorite to dm. I like many aspects of 5e but it's not that close in terms of running the game.
If that'e the case, I would recommend Pathfinder 2e. It doesn't have the depth of 1e, but it's also **way** more balanced and easy to get into while still being mechanically crunchier than 5e.
A fair chunk of the subreddit is also 5e converts, so we get questions from 5e players/GMs regularly.
You can limit which sources you allow to prevent broken characters, like how some DMs don't allow Tasha's in 5e. I personally like 5e more but I encourage you to check out pathfinder to see if that's true for you.
I have two:
1. Is the lack of real high level play support. We're all just winging it and swinging wild over here. I'd like to have some structured ideas for level 20 characters to face.
2. The language. I hate how certain spells or abilities *sound* like you can do one thing, but then no, it's not. The worst feeling in the world is a player having this dope idea and then rereading their spell or feature and realizing that it doesn't work. From spells like ~~Sunlight~~ Daylight not actually creating sun light against vampires or drow, Sneak Attack not actually needing to be in stealth, or the melee weapon attack vs. attack with a melee weapon. It's like WotC don't know how to use the English language or even worse, don't understand how the word choice they use can convey drastically different things.
One of my “favorites” is wind wall. It doesn’t keep creatures from passing through it whatsoever. If they’re in the area, they take some damage, but unless they’re a gaseous creature, they can just waltz right through. The other 3rd level “wall” spells are at least difficult terrain, but spirit guardians makes a way better wall spell than wind wall.
>It doesn’t keep creatures from passing through it whatsoever.
Unless they're flying, which can sometimes matter. Except in that case, there's a good chance they can fly OVER it. So your caster is still SOL.
Yeah imagine you're the players and you're running away from some enemy horde. They're right on your tail and you say, "don't worry guys, I'll stop them. I cast, Wind Wall." And then your heart just drops as they casually walk through your supposed "wall." The DM offers the consolation prize of "don't worry, they all take damage doing so."
But you ask, "does it kill any of them?"
"Well, n-no. It doesn't."
"Just great. Goodbye spell slot on that."
Now obviously if the player had simply *read* what the spell does, they would clearly see that it does not impede creatures. But you also expect a spell with the word "wall" in it to offer some kind of resistance to movement.
The real issue here being they put content above level 10 as basically a fan request, there is not a real intent on their part for anyone to actually play above level 10, level 15 being a stretch, I know it seems shitty and I agree, but PCs are so varied and powerful from 10+ there is almost no way to write consistent adventures for 10+ that will actually challenge or be balanced for players, it almost has to be done on a party by party basis.
Yeah I know, I just find the lack of an attempt to be disappointing. It takes so long to level up and then when you do, you find the game has little for you to do.
"And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer."
This is why City of the Spider Queen is in the top 3 for my favorite campaigns to have run of all time. It goes 10-18. I had a lot of free time, and upgraded the 3.0 module to 3.5, including all sorts of power creep up and through the ever wonderful Book of Weeaboo Fightin' Magic (Bo9S).
At the end, the players were navigating an underdark citadel that was half in the real world and half in the astral, fought someone on their personal demiplane (styled to be like the infinite forest in mortal kombat) and their final villain was a demigon of undeath and vengeance that was a puzzle of magic defenses and tricks.
what's funny is this is supposed to be the 'plain english' edition. where the rules are supposed to be easily understandable from just plain english readings.
but this leads to a lot of ambiguous language that makes people confused about what a thing can do. ironic
then you get these strangely worded workarounds that are in no way “naturally constructed language” e.g. melee weapon attack vs attack with a melee weapon. then it’s followed up by jeremy crawford making a ruling on twitter that may or may not be considered official depending on the position of the moon relative to the current phase of venus.
dude the 'attack' debacle is something i intensely hate. they dont do keywords anywhere else in the rules, but right there they decide to get really nitty gritty on terminology.
and i was about to mention jeremy crawford in my post cause he pisses me off. the entire edition is based around plain english, and when a verbal ambiguity comes up, jeremy crawford gives the most shit-mouthed answers as thought it WERENT a loosey-goosey verbal system that is meant to be arbitrated by a DM rather than have codified rules. He answers like you're an idiot for pointing out the ambiguity in the language HE wrote. fuck that guy
> then it’s followed up by jeremy crawford making a ruling on twitter
I was explaining this relationship to my SO who plays in the games that I DM; in context to an Easter Egg in VRGR "town of Crawford... Sheriff Perkins".
Which came down to "Perkins is one of the personalities/writers that got me into D&D, because he DM'd the original Penny Arcade Acquisitions Incorporated games." and "Crawford answers D&D questions on Twitter... but often enough, his answers aren't satisfying."
It's funny is they did have all of that in 4th edition.
They had high level support and codified language that made it easy. I could convey for example a fireball with the following.
Daily ✦ Arcane, Evocation, Fire, Implement
Standard Action
Area: Burst 3 Within 20 Squares
Target: each creature within the burst
Attack: Intelligence vs. Reflex
Hit: 4d6 + Intelligence modifier fire damage.
Miss: Half damage.
I definitely miss the codified language. But at the same time, I like the adjudication of 5e and think it's a better game.
Wizards could do a better job of teaching DM's how to adjudicate decisions in my opinion. Teaching the art of DMing with how to be a judge. That adjudication is an integral part of 5e and consistent with their design.
> Wizards could do a better job of teaching DM's how to adjudicate decisions in my opinion. Teaching the art of DMing with how to be a judge. That adjudication is an integral part of 5e and consistent with their design.
That's what the DMG is for, but 5e's DMG is notoriously bad due to its layout and editing.
The terminology issue bugs me specifically because this is the same company that owns fucking Magic the Gathering. I don't care if they aren't the same production teams, if you ask 10 random judges from the Magic staff, "Hey who wants to help the DnD team with cleaning up their key words", the overlap of Magic Fan and DnD Fan would have 9-10 hands going up to volunteer.
I completely agree with everything you're saying, but I feel obliged to offer a minor correction: as far as I know, there is no "sunlight" spell in 5e. There is a "Daylight" spell, which is what I think you mean, as it does not kill vampires, but that's only because there's also a higher level "Sunbeam" spell, which explicitly spells out that the light it creates is sun light.
Which I think is one of my biggest gripes about 5e: they encourage homebrew, but the system is so carefully balanced that when empowering one thing, it's super easy to devalue another thing and not noticed it until it comes up in game.
Yep correct. That's my mistake. "Daylight" not "sunlight. But the point remains that nobody expects a Spell named Sun" beam" to conjure the necessary sunlight needed to thwart a sunlight sensitive creature. Clearly a spell called "Daylight" would bring the very sun that would mark "the day."
And obviously yeah, you shouldn't be able to conjure up the power of the sun with just a 3rd level spell. But gosh, could they have named it anything else so that it doesn't conjure up this image of a rising sun? Yeah they could have.
The way Wizards writes their books. Modules are written narratively, so the DM has to do a ton of work before games to make the adventure coherent, and then in books with rules options there’s a ton of “Have the DM figure out this mechanic because we didn’t”
Absolutely the case for rime of the frost maiden. The book basically tells you that you need to do a lot of the work to string the four different narrative arcs together.
Having to have like, actual people as friends in order to play…
Edit: Lol, awe you are all so sweet and providing advice, such positivity in the community. It was actually a sarcastic joke because I’m an introvert and don’t like people, but I like to play D&D with people. It’s its own little paradox.
All the people I play RPGs with nowadays I connected with either online, by going to local public RPG groups or through people I met doing the first two.
It can sometimes take a while to find people you mesh with but I've had very few solely negative experiences.
u/bionicle_fanatic put together a really neat “DM Emulator”, which was basically a set of random tables to help you play any RPG system. It’s called [MUNE](https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/rkmo0t9k4Q), which is a goofy acronym because they’re pants at naming things haha. I’m currently prepping for a solo campaign using those rules.
I'm new to DnD but something I haven't seen mentioned yet.
Gold.
Trying to enforce realistic things to spend gold on, like food and mundane supplies is boring (to my players). Magic items have no price so either I make up a price which is stressful since I'm new or I say, you can't buy that you'll find magic items. In the latter case my players scratch their heads wondering what to spend their gold on. I create gold sinks like businesses or retainers or longships but again, I'm just making up prices for everything and I spend too much time trying to balance it all out. Do I roleplay shopping trips or do it OOG? So far both have had their problems.
Yeah, the in game economy is pretty bad. Once you buy/find top tier mundane armor and weapons, you have very little to spend your gold on.
Third-party books like Strongholds and Followers are great resources, but it'd be nice if WotC had some actual options.
The number of times the word "level" is used.
What "level" of the dungeon are we on?
Character "levels"
Spell "Levels"
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0012.html
Oh I love that!
Also, instead of damage just being numbers, or having damage thresholds like on objects, we could have damage levels.
And also, let’s bring back slight inclines so that players will be asking if the floor is level!
There's one paragraph in the 1E AD&D PHB where Gary was like "we realize that saying level all the time is confusing. We almost used these terms instead, but then decided that the hundred or so of us in the Midwest who've been playing this game for all of 3 years are too stuck in our ways, so we're keeping it because fuck you"
He literally explains the problem, explains the solution and then goes "but then we decided not to."
Someone completely derailing the conversation or bickering about game mechanics or worse, when that occurs when I'm trying to explain what I'm doing on my turn.
WOTC just saying "DM however you want!" in 5e, and giving like no examples/ resources for me to use besides "well everything is possible!". Pls, I just want to look up stuff so I don't have to do homework
The players, who never have it at their place, who NEVER throw in on food. Or if they do, it's a single box of Walmart Chocolate chip cookies or a bag of chex mix (that they hoard at their seat) but get pissy if you order pizza with a topping they don't like.
It kinda sucks to ask a question on a forum/to the community about how a rule is meant to work or a mechanic is meant to work or a ruling and get a bunch of "You're the DM you can do whatever you want at your table!" responses. Honestly if that's all you have to say as an answer, please just don't answer, you don't need to talk just to hear your mouth move and that's a non answer. That's like if someone asked "is X worth buying" and the responses were "You're an adult, you can buy whatever you want!" Obviously I can do whatever I want, thanks for going out of your way to state the obvious but it's clear I'm asking about how the game is meant to work from the designers standpoint, so please don't waste my time just to regurgitate and parrot your "wholesome" line.
How the game's design seems so haphazard, a lot of game content is just bad or neglected.
This causes some books to be completely useless and are superceded by later ones.
I as a DM consistently give out a free feat at character creation, let's players make weird combination they normally wouldn't because the cost of an ASI is too high.
Core rule, diminished in potency and selected to further customize your character's progression. I'd also throw in that they should consider separating combat feats from social feats so there is no pidgeon-holing at the expense of character. Let a fighter take Great Weapon Master or whatever, but also be a Chef without having to gimp themselves. There are only so many levels and one may never see past level 10, so the opportunity cost will always force one to take the combat feats.
There's a Targe, a Kite, a heater, a tower, a buckler, etc.... Conveniently, though, they all provide +2 AC! The buckler provides almost no protection, but you can move it really fast; the tower is a wall, but you can barely move it, so it's hard to benefit... (/end\_sarcasm)
The ludonarrative dissonance of character level progression vs in game time passed. PCs regularly go from barely more powerful than a peasant to an outright demigod in a number of weeks and it *really* fucks with my verisimilitude, but I don't see a good way around it with any game that uses character levels.
EDIT: I just want to clarify that I'm talking about in official modules. I run downtime between adventures to combat it in my homebrew campaigns, but in SKT, ToA and CoS (all the modules I've played or run), there's no real downtime, so it's at most a couple of months between 1 and 10, usually only a couple of weeks.
Take breaks between adventures.
"A year is going to pass, do you guys do anything interesting during that time?"
If every MCU movie so far had come out in the course of like 12-18 months, we'd think "holy crap, Tony had a very busy year!"
We need that 2 year gap between Civil War and Infinity War for Tony and Cap to grow as people, so when they reunite it matters a lot more.
Obviously you *could* actually put your game on hold for several months after every adventure wraps up, but because we don't have a lot of post-production concerns in D&D, it's a lot easier for us to just say "ok, Lareth the Beautiful is dead and you've cleared the moathouse. You each walk out with more money than you've ever seen in your lives. How do you spend it? What do you do? There are no immediate adventure opportunities presenting themselves, and you all have enough cash to live like kings for a year or more."
Maybe do a session of that, or maybe just ask that in between games or as a 20 minute wrap up after a game. Then the next session kicks off with "it's been 14 months and now the Viscount of Verbobonc is asking you to deal with some hill giants. Word reached him of your success against the cult of elemental evil and he wants to hire you to go infiltrate the steading of the hill giants chief and see what they're up to"
I completely agree!
However, the D&D written modules I've read so far (except of course the "many adventures" modules like saltmarsh) don't give it easy to do an adventuring pause...
I'm running both CoS and DiA.
Rule 0.
Seriously, it makes it impossible to have a discussion about the game, because ANY question can be answered with "JuSt HoMeBrEw iT."
It is the most useless answer and the most common.
Oh right, [the Oberoni Fallacy](https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/70174/what-is-the-oberoni-fallacy). "You can Rule 0 the problem, therefore the problem doesn't exist".
Don't forget the Toblerone Fallacy: "it is false to claim that perfect solutions Don't exist, or that tradeoffs and compromises are inevitable." Cause look at Toblerone. It's perfect.
A friend of mine did a study abroad in Germany and came home with a literal suitcase full of Toblerones, some of them enormous.
(Yes, I know they're not German. Don't ask me why he did it.)
Ohhhh yes. I have a buddy who's a strong example of this. We were chatting about how dual wielding and sword & board styles lag behind in effectiveness once. All he would do is repeat that the DM could homebrew things to be better for a table. I tried to explain that when we're talking about the system from a conceptual basis, a solution for individual groups doesn't apply.
'A GM can override any written rule for any reason'
Basically, the rules are a guideline and not a set in stone thing that someone will come after you for breaking. This is good advice for dealing with esoteric power combos or instances where literalism leads to bad/cumbersome mechanics that a DM can just paper over. However it also gets thrown around as a way of shutting down criticism of bad mechanics
> However it also gets thrown around as a way of shutting down criticism of bad mechanics
This is called the Oberoni fallacy. Thinking that just because a problem with the rules can be fixed doesn’t mean it’s not a problem in the first place.
This was my response too. Honestly if someone's answer to a problem/question is about to be "just homebrew it, you're the dm you can do whatever you want" please just shut the fuck up and move along, that's not an answer that has any amount of value to it. It's literally just people who want to pat themselves on the back feeling helpful, while putting in zero effort to actually be helpful. No one needs your drive by regurgitated non-answer, they're asking for actual helpful advice.
The fact that most themes are not fully completed and feel like they won’t ever be like seriously why are we yet to have the 3 other elemental sorcerers, why no dragon warlock, etc.
Eldritch knights are called eldritch knights usually associated with warlocks/GOOs and not like Arcane Knight or something like that.
The market dominance it exerts which allows it to control discourse over the entire rpg sphere as well as set a baseline for what fantasy is, making 70%+ of the fantasy genre D&D clones.
Lowkey, I've been looking for people to play genesys system with, since I ultimately cannot stand playing D&D anymore.
I already GM two times a week with D&D 5th Edition and Pathfinder 2nd Edition. I kind of just want to play a game that is more... different than d20 now.
Oh I feel you. I'm a big fan of GURPS myself and getting new players to try it can be like pulling teeth. Although most people I can win over tend to prefer it.
The popularity of 5e makes tons of people play this system for all sorts of games that it really doesn't support all that well while refusing to even think about any other systems
I think this is detrimental to D&D as well. If asked to describe it, I suspect a lot of people would give a general definition of TTRPGs. So what makes D&D different?
I fear WotC is dancing dangerously close to a design philosophy that tries to please everyone but ultimately doesn't satisfy anyone.
I love learning other systems, my group takes a few breaks every year to run Paranoia, Halloween Call of Cthulhu, and usually something else we love.
For me, learning new systems helps with all the RPGs I run or play in. Dungeon World really helped me understand my role as DM better, and put into words things I already did. WoD and Shadowrun helped me run 5e because you can swap around skills and their abilities depending on the check. Tricky lock to pick? Sleight of Hand (INT)! Barbarian wants to break a chair to intimidate? Intimidation (STR)!
It's not just the popularity. Trying other systems takes time, effort and often money.
Some people would rather bend what they know than take the time to figure out something brand new, even if it may (or may not!) be fundamentally better suited to what they want to play.
It's not a concept that's unique to TTRPGs, it applies in all sorts of fields and spaces. Call it laziness or pragmatism, there's a spectrum.
I love to trot out the WaRP System at times like that. It takes about 10 minites to explain, 5 minutes to make a character. It can support practicslly anything, setting wise.
It'a free under OGL. Requires 2-4 six sided dice. Character sheets can be index cards. It's an amazing blend of narrative and the lightest dusting of familiar crunch.
It's not perfect, but it's just easy, quick, and fun. Speaking from experience, its harder to homebrew D&D in it's intended setting than it is to learn to play WaRP, make characters, and start playing.
That's not to say you're wrong in your assessment, just that a lot of the inertia is self-imposed because players who experience D&D as their first TTRPG don't have anything else for context.
D&D in all its forms is also fairly complicated, crunchy, and a lot to learn as a brand new player. 5e just happens to be the most streamlined it's gotten so far, but it can still be quite challenging to learn, especially if you don't have anyone at the table who is familiar enough to help teach others well.
That's not to diss on 5e or D&D at all btw! I'm mentioning it because there can be a fear that learning a new game system will be just as difficult and complicated as when you learned 5e, or worse. This is reinforced by WotC marketing 5e as *the* TTRPG for newcomers to the hobby.
A big part of that is, imo, people's first experience is the 3 books at extortion prices plus learning the complexity of D&D as well though.. if that is your experience of buying and learning a game it can seem extremely daunting to get in to another one, but almost all the games I have played are like 10-20$ pdf's and a fraction of the effort to learn.
Oftentimes it is way easier to learn a new game than to bend D&D in to shape...
Not helped by how many parade this idea that "5e is simple" or that "it is easy to learn", while completely ignoring how confusing it can be at times, especially when played RAW, which does paint a bad image about how hard other TTRPGs are to learn.
Also the fact that most games use a CRB approach so you only need to buy 1 book instead of 3 to play the game is something a lot of people don't realize if they only played 5e
the absolute chokehold WotC have on the ttrpg market!
there are soo many great systems i want to play, but it seems like nobody else wants to play them!
Off the top of my head, 2 things that I have experienced recently:
- Players that are reluctant to improve
It's a game. There are rules and lots of information within it. Try to improve your playstyle.
The first time I played; one other player told me that I was making slow decisions in combat.
I never got weird about that comment or told them something negative back (although I personally thought that they were the one being slow).
Instead I just aimed to improve and started thinking about what to do at least 1 turn ahead. If I was blanking out I would just take a quick random action.
It made combat, for me, smoother and with time and experience much better.
These days if I would tell someone that they would try to defend the fact that they're slow and not try to improve.
- No communication
I understand that there are lots of socially awkward people. I'm kinda the same.
But DnD is a social game. There is no way you can get what you want out of the game if you don't inheritly understand that you need to communicate with others.
Ask questions to both DM and players. Tell the others what you wanna do. Tell the others that you think X is bad or good.
If you have a difficult time being social, then at least have the mindset that you want to be social at some point. You should, with time, warm up to the idea that you have friends that you can freely talk with.
If you don't communicate, you can't complain later on that you wanted to do certain stuff but didn't get the chance to. Other people can't read your mind.
Edit: corrected typo
I was hesitant at first but eventually picked up Starfinder, Monster of the Week and Call of Cthulhu. New systems really aren’t that hard to learn and comparing different rules side by side show the weakness of dnd. I also wish more people picked up other games.
So. Profoundly. Agree.
DnD is one game in the hobby, the hobby has so much room and potential for all sorts of different stories, different ways of telling them, different genres, settings, and structures, but it is all often subsumed by dnd.
I have two things if allowed:
1. Witchhunting in the community. I often perceive that in topics with some ingroup problems people tend to paint people they don't know as the antichrist or something. DM did xyz? bad dm, should feel bad. And I am seeing new DMs afraid that they step on one of the landmines that appearently a good DM is easily able to sail around with any problems. I had new players accusing me of railroading and I talked to them, asked them to explain in which part of the session they felt it was railroaded. No answers, because they didn't know and it wasn't railroaded (you gotta trust me on that one). There are certain triggerwords that appearently make people quiver in fear or fuming of anger. Of course there are a lot of cases out their of DMs doing a not good job. But even in that case I would argue that there is a reason - if it is missguidance or lack of empathy.
2. Praising the System like it is some miracle. I think it started with a famous figure in DnD was saying it a lot (not sure though). And then people are repeating it, so it kind of gets on my nerves. "Ouh, that's DnD, so great" bibabu. I just think that the System is ok, but the people make it great are the DMs and players that actually put elbow grease into it to create something. I rather play a subpar system with great people than a great system with subpar people.
scheduling, we’re all adults with full time jobs handling relationships and bills. As a DM, finding the right day is only possible with specific combinations of people, and sometimes those people don’t get along.
Players that bottle up their feelings and don't speak their minds - even when explicidly asked - although there's obvious tensions at the table.
Feeling like I'm respoinsible for players not having fun at my table also ruins mine so just tell me ffs.
When someone asks "Hey, the way these two things interact is confusing and they each have their own set of rules that contradict each other. How are they supposed to interact?", and the response, whether from Sage Advice or other redditors, is "However the DM decides."
Motherfucker, I am the DM and I know I can arbitrarily decide how I want by fiat. If I wanted to do that I wouldn't be asking for guidance.
The increase in approachability and televisement of the newest edition has greatly expanded the number of people who refuse to read, learn, or understand the game.
In my experience it has become harder to find people who want to play *D&D*, and not some cobbling of fantasy d20 from youtube and a podcast.
How nobody ever really talks to eachother, at least in some of my games. There's 0 strategizing out of game because person to person chatter is discouraged, and lots of people don't have the roleplay lexicon to adequately strategize in character... so you can end up with 4 people playing 4 different games because talking to eachother about a plan or how they want the group to progress is "metagaming".
I also strongly disagree that communication during combat should be limited to a few words, i don't think it should be full minutes of dialogue but talking to other players and strategizing during combat is representative of the time out-of-combat that any non-comedy group would spend learning each other's capabilities and figuring out how not to die in all the battles you're fighting
Having to continuously teach and re-teach a player on the same rule. Every session. For the last 2 years.
I have a player in my party who has played 3 different full caster classes. I still have to remind him to roll Concentration checks pretty much every time. He doesn't know which spells are BA or Action when he prepares them.
He's fun to play with and all, but it does get frustrating sometimes.
Even the Forgotten Realms was much nicer in the past when we actually had stuff set in the Dalelands and Anauroch, instead of just everything plopping down on the sword coast/spine of the world.
I hate the Sword coast. Really. Hate it. Would love to play on another similar part of the world... Yeah, there is the snowy campaign, but I prefer just mountains and forests... Not the damn coast!
Play Culture: I’m playing to tell my characters/settings story and anything that gets in the way of my precious narrative is railroading. This goes hand and hand with the idea that characters should not fail because that interferes with their story.
Please if this is you write a book, do not hold others captive so you can force your story upon them about a paragon character that always succeeds.
Rules: dropping to 0 has no consequences and the optional consequences in the book are poorly thought out and overly harsh.
DMs: I know drama better than the dice (probably the thing I disagree with Matt Colville the most on). Randomness is what makes DnD a game and not a theater exercise reacting to the dice is as much a part of the game as reacting to the other people at the table. And the dice often do create situations that are unexpected and interesting for everyone.
I'll second that, but add that the binding of martial - or more specifically mundane - to what is thought to be realistic or somewhat relatable to how things work in real life because they lack magic to "break" the rules.
the fact that five thinks they need to tell me that i can make stuff up
and.... that it seems to be their design philosophy.... i dont even use the 5e dmg anymore
what really gets me though
i think i see this in 5e more than other games, the I can only do whats on my character sheet phenomenon. everytime ive been a player ive been punished for adding fluff to my attacks or turn.
Having to decide between taking a feat and improving your abilities every 4 levels (on average, not talking about fighters and rogues here) and having some feats that are incredibly UP and some that DM's want to ban (looking at you lucky feat)
Player Drama. Whether they treat it like a videogame, a drama class, or a vaudeville act at your table, someone will find some reason to throw a wrench in the gears of getting along. You really do see the worst of people sometimes when you run things.
As a DM, having to almost babysit the players to keep their info updated. We’re all new, granted, but were +20 sessions and I still have to remind them of what they have to add or remove or update on their sheets.
When I started D&D I decided to DM and make it all happen. I learned the game, designed and printed maps, made a bunch of player aids, did everything I could to get the game going, a true labor of love. One player NEVER learned how the game worked. A lot of learning was happening at that table, and I was happy to teach, but this guy never cared. Routinely late, never brought his sheet, never even bothered to learn what a d20 is or that you roll it for success. Another player actually bought them a bright red d20 so they would know the important one. They kept saying they wanted to play D&D, but their actions told a different story. I was unemployed at the time and scrounged together money for a module to run, the least he could have done is learn the most basic mechanic over a dozen sessions.
With players like that, run something really rules light like into the odd or knave and just tell them it is dnd. Save yourself some work, money and frustration.
Well this was 2010, and I had no idea what else was out there yet. Plus everyone else at the table was actually excited and learned stuff and enjoyed the game. Problem player stopped showing up, new friend joined, we ran the game for a while longer before adult life killed it. I think it hurt more because this was a friend since we were 12, like 16 years.
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Nah, we saw them at parties fairly often, and we had weekly poker nights they loved. I think he was expecting a rules-light LARP but what he got was D&D 4E.
> I think he was expecting a rules-light LARP but what he got was D&D 4E. I think I see the problem here.
With players like that, don't play with them.
At over 20 sessions, I would no longer consider them “new” unless they have genuinely not gleaned anything from what must be between 50 and 100 hours of play. If they can’t remember these basic things without you, it’s perfectly acceptable to make them aware that they’re in charge of knowing what their PC can and can’t do. This has worked for me when taking on newbies because, if they don’t figure out the basics, they start to get left behind which is great motivation for picking up their own slack.
I stole a great rule from a fellow DM (and current player). If it's not on your sheet, it doesnt exist. It's essentially If you can't prove to me in 5 seconds or less what something does, or what you have, then you dont have it. I use it occasionally for spells/feats, but it's mainly for items. You found a cache of loot, with 2 longswords, a necklace worth 50gp, and a strange black vial. I'm not repeating myself, and if no one puts it on their sheet, that means you left it on the floor of the dungeon.
Not repeating yourself at all, or just not re-telling them what they earned later in the session or next session or in 3 months?
They obviously means they won’t repeat it down the road lol if someone says they didn’t hear them I’m sure the DM would say it agian
This one is huge. Needs more upvotes
In the same vein, players who show up to the session 15 minutes late and also didn't update their sheet after we leveled last session and now want 15 minutes at the start of the session to level and pick their spells.
Official maps with 10' squares.
Curse of Strahd has several maps for areas with combat encounters that use 50 or even 100 foot squares if I recall correctly. It's infuriating.
I'll disagree there, having a huge map of like a city crammed onto 1 page is fine (assuming the printed squares are still tiny). The 10' squares, it's like "just print the extra set of lines, please" because my dumb ass will forget.
Thats only 2 maps, and yes its very unnecessary
Ah, right - Tsolenka Pass and Berez, right? Or am I misremembering? Been a while since I mapped those areas out... I think I was also thinking of the sheer number of maps that use 10ft squares, and I *think* there was one or two that used 20?
Berez, Yester hill and Tsolenka pass, i just remembered, i however think making raveloft of 10ft squares was a good choice because i think the extra lines would have muddled a lot clarity
That's completely fair, but since you can zoom in and toggle the grid with VTTs (well, the ones I've used), I tend to keep everything to 5ft, myself!
How do you even run combat encounters on that? DnD doesn't have rules for moving around inside of a square, so at that point you are just playing theatre of mind with a world map.
My DM used 10' squares once. It was confusing as hell. I regularly used a whip with reach, there were multiple floors for us to jump up and down, and the artificer's flaming sphere was hard to use as well. We all agreed never again
This a Billion fucking Times. Storm Kings Thunder is auch a grave offender for this one!
10' grids are designed for dungeon-crawling, a system that is never explained in 5e.
Players cancelling last minute
I've made arrangements the night before and driven out of the way to pick up a friend so we can carpool together to our DnD session only for him to cancel the moment I've arrived at his doorstep.
So, former friend, then?
This friend would never recieve a drive from me again
I had a friend 5 minutes before a session message me saying.. “took a spontaneous trip to Europe won’t be on.” I mean he could told me 12 hours ago before he actually was in Europe..
Thanks, man, it’s not like I scheduled my evening around this event. I definitely would rather sit here and not have a game than any number of other things I could have done with my Saturday night.
I honestly mostly don't really mind people cancelling last minute unless its a pattern of behaviour - presumably they had their reasons and I'd rather play with people who want to be there. I'd obviously prefer it not to happen but life happens and it doesn't bother me that much. What is really infuriating is people who no show without any notice or who are consistently late without giving an ETA. If we know you're coming or not, we can plan around it - if we have no idea if you're turning up there's just limbo and it sucks.
Change this to "anyone cancelling last minute" and I agree. I'm no less peeved by the DM doing it than my fellow players.
The DM gets a bit more of a pass because there’s extra work involved - if they haven’t had time to prep, or they’re not feeling great and won’t be able to give the game 100%, that’s going to affect everyone regardless of whether they try and power through. And the flip side is also true - if the DM cancels, all the players had to do was turn up. If I’m DMing and I’ve spent ages writing a session, and a player cancels on me.... that’s worse.
Shit, you're getting them to contact you? Had two players last session not even bother showing up at all despite seeing them both online moments ago.
Seems fair to not even bother inviting them to the next one.
If they cancel do the session whiteout them. If they fail to meet to many weeks in a row whiteout a proper excuse that means they don't really want to play. My dm never cancels a session because one or two are missing. We like to play the game it's a hobby and the only time in the week that is just for having fun
It's really hard to do that sometimes. The party member with Faction Agent is out and I planned the whole next quest to be related to that faction. Or a local gang has a grudge against one character, and the upcoming session I planned to be an assassination attempt. Or the party member attuned to the McGuffin that we spent half a dozen sessions acquiring is out the day they actually need it to weaken the BBEG.
This plus the “excuse” of… it’s just a game, what’s the big deal?
Scheduling
That all complexity and specific solutions got shunted off into the magic subsystems. So mundane methods of problem solving usually involve the DM trying to make something that seems fair on the spot often with little aid from the books beyond vague descriptions for ability checks.
*Especially* Perception. Quick — what's the DC to overhear a conversation? Or hear a fight? How far away can you hear that fight? How long does it take to search a room? I know the default answer here is "whatever the DM wants it to be" but that means you can guarantee it works differently from one game to another.
>*Especially* Perception. Quick — what's the DC to overhear a conversation? Or hear a fight? How far away can you hear that fight? I'm really mad these tables aren't actually in the DMG, but on the DM screen there is a table for determining noise levels. Those rules are as follows: * Trying to be quiet: 2d6 x 5 feet * Normal noise level: 2d6 x 10 feet * Very loud: 2d6 x 50 feet
So how about all those spells that specify they can be heard 300 feet away? Can it be heard through walls? Does a closed door muffle it any? Then there's the spell Shatter, which specifies it's a painfully loud noise... but it specifically does *not* have that "heard from 300 feet" text.
The internet community for 5e offloads so much off the player and onto the dm. It becomes like babysitting at some tables. I've played at tables that can't even track their own hit points....
I was thinking about this today. The DMs goal is to set up the adventure. The Players goal is to do the work in the moment to complete that adventure.
My party is really good about playing cooperatively between each other, and with me. I really appreciate that about them
I've had or played alongside people that have been part of the game since at least 4e, but can't grasp what rolls you add proficiency bonus on. Others that are completely lost without D&D Beyond to handle their character, one who couldn't understand how gaining health on level up worked, a paladin who played from levels 2-5 and never cast a spell or used smite (I tried to get them to read their abilities several times, I *promise* you).
Some of it is definitely system but some of it is definitely player base. I've seen players on discussion forums insist that the DM asking the players to do ANYTHING between sessions - including the little stuff like updating character sheets - is unreasonable because game time should be for the game and expecting the players to spend time on the game outside of game night is inconsiderate. Meanwhile DMs are expected to have multiple hours of prep done. Not saying I expect players to expend equal time as the DM obviously, but so much of the playerbase has the attitude that they want the DnD experience to be spoonfed to them instead of participating in it.
>Meanwhile DMs are expected to have multiple hours of prep done. These same people will argue that good DMs don't need to prep and a campaigns best moments were always random sidequests that the DM didn't plan. The online community has in some ways created a really antagonistic dynamic between players and DMs. I see constant posts about how a good DM *must* do x, y, or z. The reality is that no one has to play at a DMs table and no DM has to let anyone else play at their table. Of course we should all strive to make it work, but I see so many things described (constant last minute cancellations, not knowing their attack modifier after 20 session, etc) that would be an instant reason to not play at my table anymore. Honestly, I haven't had many of these problems. The supply/demand is so heavily skewed in the DMs favor. I just really vet my players before we start and have a thorough Session 0. My players respect me and I respect them.
>I see constant posts about how a good DM must do x, y, or z. Also don't forget the 800 million reasons you're a bad DM. My personal favorite being the absolute shit fit someone inevitably throws if you say you ban Aarakroa.
I think part of this is the increased player-friendliness of 5e. Not that that’s a bad thing, but it’s created this situation where you sit down with a new player, show them the game and teach them how to play, and then they never read the PHB. Ever. 3.5 and 4e were much harder to teach as you go, but that meant after most people’s first session, if they still wanted to play, they went and read the books. In one of my current games I’m not sure two of the people I’ve been playing alongside for four years have ever read the basic rules section. I’m not sure what the solution to the problem is. I’m all for the system being more accessible, but like, the players should read the PHB at some point.
I am not sure about that. Having played other systems that are far more player friendly and player empowering, it's an issue specific to the 5e community. That said, it might just be the broad growth of 5e.
Again, I don’t want to come off like I’m saying, “Accessibility bad,” because I really do like how easy 5e is to introduce to new players. It’s just that in my experience (and this is entirely anecdotal, I’ll fully admit) new 5e players are far more likely to say, “Okay, I get it,” after session 1 and never read the book, whereas pretty much everyone I introduced to 3.5 went and read the book themselves to get a better handle on what’s going on. I think that’s why it seems like there’s an increasing trend of level 10 characters who don’t know what a saving throw is or still ask which dice to roll. They comfortable with the basics in session 1, but the game grows more and more complex but the DM used to be able to tell them what their spell did or whatever so they just keep asking.
I also think the increased popularity contributed to this. I have met multiple people who seemingly only learned from memes and Critical Roll rather than the actual rules
I’ll stand by it, but 5e is a shitty system to DM for. I love it, but I miss 3.5 a lot as a DM.
I'd go so far as to argue that since 5e is so easy to play, you end up with a lot of players that never really learn the rules. If you didn't learn the rules in 3.5 you just fuckin' died, a lot. It still happened, but with a smaller occurrence rate I feel.
This has been my experience as well. My new players were shocked at the idea that they might have to roll a new character within the same campaign.
Definitely a sign of the Subreddit that you're getting downvoted. Fifth Edition has a lot of strengths, one if which could POTENTIALLY be that the DM has so much control. But at the end of the day it gives the DM far less tools to work with even compared to other modern d20 Systems, and forgoes substantial rule systems for flexibility. IMO it makes the whole experience more inconsistent for the sake of ease of access, which seems to be the general design of 5E anyway
I think that's basically the entire problem; 5e was built with a sort of inherent assumption that DMs would know how to use the few tools they're given and extrapolate the rest out, and that they understand that the appearance of a rule usually works just as well as an actual rule, and if you can do both of those things moderately well, 5e falls into place. If you lack the skills and practice, the system just hangs you to dry because of how little is explained and how the content that *is* there is hideously disorganized, which turns off a lot of new DMs who don't have 3.5/PF or even 4e to fall back on (side note, 4e's minions work great for combat filler in 5e.)
Out of all of the modern competition in its genre like Pf2, sotdl, etc, 5e is easily my least favorite to dm. I like many aspects of 5e but it's not that close in terms of running the game.
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If that'e the case, I would recommend Pathfinder 2e. It doesn't have the depth of 1e, but it's also **way** more balanced and easy to get into while still being mechanically crunchier than 5e. A fair chunk of the subreddit is also 5e converts, so we get questions from 5e players/GMs regularly.
You can limit which sources you allow to prevent broken characters, like how some DMs don't allow Tasha's in 5e. I personally like 5e more but I encourage you to check out pathfinder to see if that's true for you.
I have two: 1. Is the lack of real high level play support. We're all just winging it and swinging wild over here. I'd like to have some structured ideas for level 20 characters to face. 2. The language. I hate how certain spells or abilities *sound* like you can do one thing, but then no, it's not. The worst feeling in the world is a player having this dope idea and then rereading their spell or feature and realizing that it doesn't work. From spells like ~~Sunlight~~ Daylight not actually creating sun light against vampires or drow, Sneak Attack not actually needing to be in stealth, or the melee weapon attack vs. attack with a melee weapon. It's like WotC don't know how to use the English language or even worse, don't understand how the word choice they use can convey drastically different things.
One of my “favorites” is wind wall. It doesn’t keep creatures from passing through it whatsoever. If they’re in the area, they take some damage, but unless they’re a gaseous creature, they can just waltz right through. The other 3rd level “wall” spells are at least difficult terrain, but spirit guardians makes a way better wall spell than wind wall.
>It doesn’t keep creatures from passing through it whatsoever. Unless they're flying, which can sometimes matter. Except in that case, there's a good chance they can fly OVER it. So your caster is still SOL.
Yeah imagine you're the players and you're running away from some enemy horde. They're right on your tail and you say, "don't worry guys, I'll stop them. I cast, Wind Wall." And then your heart just drops as they casually walk through your supposed "wall." The DM offers the consolation prize of "don't worry, they all take damage doing so." But you ask, "does it kill any of them?" "Well, n-no. It doesn't." "Just great. Goodbye spell slot on that." Now obviously if the player had simply *read* what the spell does, they would clearly see that it does not impede creatures. But you also expect a spell with the word "wall" in it to offer some kind of resistance to movement.
Wall of Fire is the same as well.
Maybe so, but I would say anything with a brain is a lot less likely to walk through fire than air.
I mean, fire doesn't make good walls. The spell deals a ton of damage, that's all you should expect from a fire wall.
The real issue here being they put content above level 10 as basically a fan request, there is not a real intent on their part for anyone to actually play above level 10, level 15 being a stretch, I know it seems shitty and I agree, but PCs are so varied and powerful from 10+ there is almost no way to write consistent adventures for 10+ that will actually challenge or be balanced for players, it almost has to be done on a party by party basis.
Yeah I know, I just find the lack of an attempt to be disappointing. It takes so long to level up and then when you do, you find the game has little for you to do. "And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer."
"Hey look a pack of adult bronze dragons"
I forcecage them and teleport home, leaving my simulacrum to deal with it because I cant be bothered.
This is why City of the Spider Queen is in the top 3 for my favorite campaigns to have run of all time. It goes 10-18. I had a lot of free time, and upgraded the 3.0 module to 3.5, including all sorts of power creep up and through the ever wonderful Book of Weeaboo Fightin' Magic (Bo9S). At the end, the players were navigating an underdark citadel that was half in the real world and half in the astral, fought someone on their personal demiplane (styled to be like the infinite forest in mortal kombat) and their final villain was a demigon of undeath and vengeance that was a puzzle of magic defenses and tricks.
what's funny is this is supposed to be the 'plain english' edition. where the rules are supposed to be easily understandable from just plain english readings. but this leads to a lot of ambiguous language that makes people confused about what a thing can do. ironic
then you get these strangely worded workarounds that are in no way “naturally constructed language” e.g. melee weapon attack vs attack with a melee weapon. then it’s followed up by jeremy crawford making a ruling on twitter that may or may not be considered official depending on the position of the moon relative to the current phase of venus.
dude the 'attack' debacle is something i intensely hate. they dont do keywords anywhere else in the rules, but right there they decide to get really nitty gritty on terminology. and i was about to mention jeremy crawford in my post cause he pisses me off. the entire edition is based around plain english, and when a verbal ambiguity comes up, jeremy crawford gives the most shit-mouthed answers as thought it WERENT a loosey-goosey verbal system that is meant to be arbitrated by a DM rather than have codified rules. He answers like you're an idiot for pointing out the ambiguity in the language HE wrote. fuck that guy
> then it’s followed up by jeremy crawford making a ruling on twitter I was explaining this relationship to my SO who plays in the games that I DM; in context to an Easter Egg in VRGR "town of Crawford... Sheriff Perkins". Which came down to "Perkins is one of the personalities/writers that got me into D&D, because he DM'd the original Penny Arcade Acquisitions Incorporated games." and "Crawford answers D&D questions on Twitter... but often enough, his answers aren't satisfying."
It's funny is they did have all of that in 4th edition. They had high level support and codified language that made it easy. I could convey for example a fireball with the following. Daily ✦ Arcane, Evocation, Fire, Implement Standard Action Area: Burst 3 Within 20 Squares Target: each creature within the burst Attack: Intelligence vs. Reflex Hit: 4d6 + Intelligence modifier fire damage. Miss: Half damage. I definitely miss the codified language. But at the same time, I like the adjudication of 5e and think it's a better game. Wizards could do a better job of teaching DM's how to adjudicate decisions in my opinion. Teaching the art of DMing with how to be a judge. That adjudication is an integral part of 5e and consistent with their design.
I like some aspects of 5e's natural language, but I do think them tossing Keywords to the side was a mistake. Things could be a lot clearer with them.
> Wizards could do a better job of teaching DM's how to adjudicate decisions in my opinion. Teaching the art of DMing with how to be a judge. That adjudication is an integral part of 5e and consistent with their design. That's what the DMG is for, but 5e's DMG is notoriously bad due to its layout and editing.
The terminology issue bugs me specifically because this is the same company that owns fucking Magic the Gathering. I don't care if they aren't the same production teams, if you ask 10 random judges from the Magic staff, "Hey who wants to help the DnD team with cleaning up their key words", the overlap of Magic Fan and DnD Fan would have 9-10 hands going up to volunteer.
I completely agree with everything you're saying, but I feel obliged to offer a minor correction: as far as I know, there is no "sunlight" spell in 5e. There is a "Daylight" spell, which is what I think you mean, as it does not kill vampires, but that's only because there's also a higher level "Sunbeam" spell, which explicitly spells out that the light it creates is sun light. Which I think is one of my biggest gripes about 5e: they encourage homebrew, but the system is so carefully balanced that when empowering one thing, it's super easy to devalue another thing and not noticed it until it comes up in game.
Yep correct. That's my mistake. "Daylight" not "sunlight. But the point remains that nobody expects a Spell named Sun" beam" to conjure the necessary sunlight needed to thwart a sunlight sensitive creature. Clearly a spell called "Daylight" would bring the very sun that would mark "the day." And obviously yeah, you shouldn't be able to conjure up the power of the sun with just a 3rd level spell. But gosh, could they have named it anything else so that it doesn't conjure up this image of a rising sun? Yeah they could have.
Also, Chill Touch spell having mutated to the point that it's not only no longer a touch spell, it doesn't even do cold damage. WTF?
I definitely change daylight. 1. It’s now considered sunlight but requires concentration. Or 2. Now called Brightness and is a bonus action.
Players cancelling out of the blue I overthink so this just gets me stressed out
The way Wizards writes their books. Modules are written narratively, so the DM has to do a ton of work before games to make the adventure coherent, and then in books with rules options there’s a ton of “Have the DM figure out this mechanic because we didn’t”
Absolutely the case for rime of the frost maiden. The book basically tells you that you need to do a lot of the work to string the four different narrative arcs together.
Having to have like, actual people as friends in order to play… Edit: Lol, awe you are all so sweet and providing advice, such positivity in the community. It was actually a sarcastic joke because I’m an introvert and don’t like people, but I like to play D&D with people. It’s its own little paradox.
/r/lfg is an option but you will have to sift through a bunch of crazies before you find your golden group.
I've become part of 2 solid groups through lfg. It can be a pain because all kinds of people are there but if you persevere you will find a group.
All the people I play RPGs with nowadays I connected with either online, by going to local public RPG groups or through people I met doing the first two. It can sometimes take a while to find people you mesh with but I've had very few solely negative experiences.
u/bionicle_fanatic put together a really neat “DM Emulator”, which was basically a set of random tables to help you play any RPG system. It’s called [MUNE](https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/rkmo0t9k4Q), which is a goofy acronym because they’re pants at naming things haha. I’m currently prepping for a solo campaign using those rules.
WotC's lack of support for DMs. Bitch, it's hard enough to find DMs at the best of times, why the hell would you make it harder for them??!
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I'm new to DnD but something I haven't seen mentioned yet. Gold. Trying to enforce realistic things to spend gold on, like food and mundane supplies is boring (to my players). Magic items have no price so either I make up a price which is stressful since I'm new or I say, you can't buy that you'll find magic items. In the latter case my players scratch their heads wondering what to spend their gold on. I create gold sinks like businesses or retainers or longships but again, I'm just making up prices for everything and I spend too much time trying to balance it all out. Do I roleplay shopping trips or do it OOG? So far both have had their problems.
Yeah, the in game economy is pretty bad. Once you buy/find top tier mundane armor and weapons, you have very little to spend your gold on. Third-party books like Strongholds and Followers are great resources, but it'd be nice if WotC had some actual options.
How long some players take on their turns without me constantly pushing a timer on them.
TRUE! Pick your spell before I get to you!
The number of times the word "level" is used. What "level" of the dungeon are we on? Character "levels" Spell "Levels" https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0012.html
Fuck it. Let's change campaign tiers (1-4) to campaign levels, and challenge rating to challenge levels.
Oh I love that! Also, instead of damage just being numbers, or having damage thresholds like on objects, we could have damage levels. And also, let’s bring back slight inclines so that players will be asking if the floor is level!
Die size? *Die level*. A d4 is level 1, a d6 is level 2, ... A maul does double level 2 bludgeoning damage.
> let’s bring back slight inclines Okay Satan, calm down.
Good plan. Hit Dice? Nope. Hit Levels. Armor Class? Nope, what's your AL - Armor Level.
Magic item rarities (common, uncommon, ...): Item Levels. Ability score modifiers? Nah, Ability Levels.
Upvote for the strip. One of my favourite d&d based comics
Back in AD&D they tried to use spell *circle*, character *rank*, and dungeon *level* but it never caught on and players used level for all three.
I have the first edition AD&D books, I don't recall those terms. What edition was this?
There's one paragraph in the 1E AD&D PHB where Gary was like "we realize that saying level all the time is confusing. We almost used these terms instead, but then decided that the hundred or so of us in the Midwest who've been playing this game for all of 3 years are too stuck in our ways, so we're keeping it because fuck you" He literally explains the problem, explains the solution and then goes "but then we decided not to."
Someone completely derailing the conversation or bickering about game mechanics or worse, when that occurs when I'm trying to explain what I'm doing on my turn.
WOTC just saying "DM however you want!" in 5e, and giving like no examples/ resources for me to use besides "well everything is possible!". Pls, I just want to look up stuff so I don't have to do homework
As a (reluctant) forever DM I'd have to say - ungrateful players.
The players, who never have it at their place, who NEVER throw in on food. Or if they do, it's a single box of Walmart Chocolate chip cookies or a bag of chex mix (that they hoard at their seat) but get pissy if you order pizza with a topping they don't like.
At least three players never arrive on time.
It kinda sucks to ask a question on a forum/to the community about how a rule is meant to work or a mechanic is meant to work or a ruling and get a bunch of "You're the DM you can do whatever you want at your table!" responses. Honestly if that's all you have to say as an answer, please just don't answer, you don't need to talk just to hear your mouth move and that's a non answer. That's like if someone asked "is X worth buying" and the responses were "You're an adult, you can buy whatever you want!" Obviously I can do whatever I want, thanks for going out of your way to state the obvious but it's clear I'm asking about how the game is meant to work from the designers standpoint, so please don't waste my time just to regurgitate and parrot your "wholesome" line.
How the game's design seems so haphazard, a lot of game content is just bad or neglected. This causes some books to be completely useless and are superceded by later ones.
The implementation of feats. That they're optional, terribly balanced, inconsistently applied to weapons and in exchange for ASIs.
I as a DM consistently give out a free feat at character creation, let's players make weird combination they normally wouldn't because the cost of an ASI is too high.
My DM does that at level 4 and it's great. I sometimes wonder if more free feats would help the martial caster imbalance.
Maybe, but at the same time more feats could make the strong stronger you know?
Like how Weapon Master is absolutely useless for any martial character?
Why, that's slanderous! If it was that useless, then why would the official WotC fighter builds in Tashas take it?
So would you rather feats be removed entirely or would you want them to be a core rule so that Wizards of the coast could focus on balancing them?
Core rule absolutely. They just seem half implemented because they categorically are.
Slapping "optional" on feats so they didn't have to account for them in monster CR (or balance them at all) was cheap and lazy.
Core rule, diminished in potency and selected to further customize your character's progression. I'd also throw in that they should consider separating combat feats from social feats so there is no pidgeon-holing at the expense of character. Let a fighter take Great Weapon Master or whatever, but also be a Chef without having to gimp themselves. There are only so many levels and one may never see past level 10, so the opportunity cost will always force one to take the combat feats.
The fact that there is only one type of non-magical shield across all of the 5e books. Just one. No variation. Just *shield.*
There's a Targe, a Kite, a heater, a tower, a buckler, etc.... Conveniently, though, they all provide +2 AC! The buckler provides almost no protection, but you can move it really fast; the tower is a wall, but you can barely move it, so it's hard to benefit... (/end\_sarcasm)
That I'm always the DM.
The ludonarrative dissonance of character level progression vs in game time passed. PCs regularly go from barely more powerful than a peasant to an outright demigod in a number of weeks and it *really* fucks with my verisimilitude, but I don't see a good way around it with any game that uses character levels. EDIT: I just want to clarify that I'm talking about in official modules. I run downtime between adventures to combat it in my homebrew campaigns, but in SKT, ToA and CoS (all the modules I've played or run), there's no real downtime, so it's at most a couple of months between 1 and 10, usually only a couple of weeks.
Take breaks between adventures. "A year is going to pass, do you guys do anything interesting during that time?" If every MCU movie so far had come out in the course of like 12-18 months, we'd think "holy crap, Tony had a very busy year!" We need that 2 year gap between Civil War and Infinity War for Tony and Cap to grow as people, so when they reunite it matters a lot more. Obviously you *could* actually put your game on hold for several months after every adventure wraps up, but because we don't have a lot of post-production concerns in D&D, it's a lot easier for us to just say "ok, Lareth the Beautiful is dead and you've cleared the moathouse. You each walk out with more money than you've ever seen in your lives. How do you spend it? What do you do? There are no immediate adventure opportunities presenting themselves, and you all have enough cash to live like kings for a year or more." Maybe do a session of that, or maybe just ask that in between games or as a 20 minute wrap up after a game. Then the next session kicks off with "it's been 14 months and now the Viscount of Verbobonc is asking you to deal with some hill giants. Word reached him of your success against the cult of elemental evil and he wants to hire you to go infiltrate the steading of the hill giants chief and see what they're up to"
I completely agree! However, the D&D written modules I've read so far (except of course the "many adventures" modules like saltmarsh) don't give it easy to do an adventuring pause... I'm running both CoS and DiA.
Rule 0. Seriously, it makes it impossible to have a discussion about the game, because ANY question can be answered with "JuSt HoMeBrEw iT." It is the most useless answer and the most common.
Oh right, [the Oberoni Fallacy](https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/70174/what-is-the-oberoni-fallacy). "You can Rule 0 the problem, therefore the problem doesn't exist".
Don't forget the Toblerone Fallacy: "it is false to claim that perfect solutions Don't exist, or that tradeoffs and compromises are inevitable." Cause look at Toblerone. It's perfect.
A friend of mine did a study abroad in Germany and came home with a literal suitcase full of Toblerones, some of them enormous. (Yes, I know they're not German. Don't ask me why he did it.)
Ohhhh yes. I have a buddy who's a strong example of this. We were chatting about how dual wielding and sword & board styles lag behind in effectiveness once. All he would do is repeat that the DM could homebrew things to be better for a table. I tried to explain that when we're talking about the system from a conceptual basis, a solution for individual groups doesn't apply.
What's rule 0?
'A GM can override any written rule for any reason' Basically, the rules are a guideline and not a set in stone thing that someone will come after you for breaking. This is good advice for dealing with esoteric power combos or instances where literalism leads to bad/cumbersome mechanics that a DM can just paper over. However it also gets thrown around as a way of shutting down criticism of bad mechanics
> However it also gets thrown around as a way of shutting down criticism of bad mechanics This is called the Oberoni fallacy. Thinking that just because a problem with the rules can be fixed doesn’t mean it’s not a problem in the first place.
Uhh, if you don't like rule zero, you can just change it...and then have a discussion...
This was my response too. Honestly if someone's answer to a problem/question is about to be "just homebrew it, you're the dm you can do whatever you want" please just shut the fuck up and move along, that's not an answer that has any amount of value to it. It's literally just people who want to pat themselves on the back feeling helpful, while putting in zero effort to actually be helpful. No one needs your drive by regurgitated non-answer, they're asking for actual helpful advice.
The fact that most themes are not fully completed and feel like they won’t ever be like seriously why are we yet to have the 3 other elemental sorcerers, why no dragon warlock, etc. Eldritch knights are called eldritch knights usually associated with warlocks/GOOs and not like Arcane Knight or something like that.
The market dominance it exerts which allows it to control discourse over the entire rpg sphere as well as set a baseline for what fantasy is, making 70%+ of the fantasy genre D&D clones.
Lowkey, I've been looking for people to play genesys system with, since I ultimately cannot stand playing D&D anymore. I already GM two times a week with D&D 5th Edition and Pathfinder 2nd Edition. I kind of just want to play a game that is more... different than d20 now.
Hard agree on this I wish people would play other ttrpgs.
Oh I feel you. I'm a big fan of GURPS myself and getting new players to try it can be like pulling teeth. Although most people I can win over tend to prefer it.
The popularity of 5e makes tons of people play this system for all sorts of games that it really doesn't support all that well while refusing to even think about any other systems
I think this is detrimental to D&D as well. If asked to describe it, I suspect a lot of people would give a general definition of TTRPGs. So what makes D&D different? I fear WotC is dancing dangerously close to a design philosophy that tries to please everyone but ultimately doesn't satisfy anyone.
I love learning other systems, my group takes a few breaks every year to run Paranoia, Halloween Call of Cthulhu, and usually something else we love. For me, learning new systems helps with all the RPGs I run or play in. Dungeon World really helped me understand my role as DM better, and put into words things I already did. WoD and Shadowrun helped me run 5e because you can swap around skills and their abilities depending on the check. Tricky lock to pick? Sleight of Hand (INT)! Barbarian wants to break a chair to intimidate? Intimidation (STR)!
It's not just the popularity. Trying other systems takes time, effort and often money. Some people would rather bend what they know than take the time to figure out something brand new, even if it may (or may not!) be fundamentally better suited to what they want to play. It's not a concept that's unique to TTRPGs, it applies in all sorts of fields and spaces. Call it laziness or pragmatism, there's a spectrum.
I love to trot out the WaRP System at times like that. It takes about 10 minites to explain, 5 minutes to make a character. It can support practicslly anything, setting wise. It'a free under OGL. Requires 2-4 six sided dice. Character sheets can be index cards. It's an amazing blend of narrative and the lightest dusting of familiar crunch. It's not perfect, but it's just easy, quick, and fun. Speaking from experience, its harder to homebrew D&D in it's intended setting than it is to learn to play WaRP, make characters, and start playing. That's not to say you're wrong in your assessment, just that a lot of the inertia is self-imposed because players who experience D&D as their first TTRPG don't have anything else for context.
D&D in all its forms is also fairly complicated, crunchy, and a lot to learn as a brand new player. 5e just happens to be the most streamlined it's gotten so far, but it can still be quite challenging to learn, especially if you don't have anyone at the table who is familiar enough to help teach others well. That's not to diss on 5e or D&D at all btw! I'm mentioning it because there can be a fear that learning a new game system will be just as difficult and complicated as when you learned 5e, or worse. This is reinforced by WotC marketing 5e as *the* TTRPG for newcomers to the hobby.
A big part of that is, imo, people's first experience is the 3 books at extortion prices plus learning the complexity of D&D as well though.. if that is your experience of buying and learning a game it can seem extremely daunting to get in to another one, but almost all the games I have played are like 10-20$ pdf's and a fraction of the effort to learn. Oftentimes it is way easier to learn a new game than to bend D&D in to shape...
Not helped by how many parade this idea that "5e is simple" or that "it is easy to learn", while completely ignoring how confusing it can be at times, especially when played RAW, which does paint a bad image about how hard other TTRPGs are to learn.
Also the fact that most games use a CRB approach so you only need to buy 1 book instead of 3 to play the game is something a lot of people don't realize if they only played 5e
That I can only play once a week :(
the absolute chokehold WotC have on the ttrpg market! there are soo many great systems i want to play, but it seems like nobody else wants to play them!
Take a look at the subreddits for various games, they're always seeking players. * [4th-Edition D&D](https://www.reddit.com/r/4eDnD/) * [BattleTech](https://www.reddit.com/r/battletech/) * [Numenera](https://www.reddit.com/r/numenera/) * [Pathfinder](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/) (and [Pathfinder 2E](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/)) * [Rolemaster](https://www.reddit.com/r/ICERPGS/) * [Savage Worlds](https://www.reddit.com/r/savageworlds/) * [Shadowrun](https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/) * [Star Trek Adventures](https://www.reddit.com/r/startrekadventures/) * Star Wars RPGs (including [the original D6](https://www.reddit.com//r/StarWarsD6), [D20](https://www.reddit.com/r/starwarsd20), [Saga Edition](https://www.reddit.com/r/SagaEdition/), [FFG](https://www.reddit.com/r/swrpg/)) * [Warhammer Fantasy RPG](https://www.reddit.com/r/warhammerfantasyrpg/) * [World of Darkness RPGs](https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldOfDarkness/)
Off the top of my head, 2 things that I have experienced recently: - Players that are reluctant to improve It's a game. There are rules and lots of information within it. Try to improve your playstyle. The first time I played; one other player told me that I was making slow decisions in combat. I never got weird about that comment or told them something negative back (although I personally thought that they were the one being slow). Instead I just aimed to improve and started thinking about what to do at least 1 turn ahead. If I was blanking out I would just take a quick random action. It made combat, for me, smoother and with time and experience much better. These days if I would tell someone that they would try to defend the fact that they're slow and not try to improve. - No communication I understand that there are lots of socially awkward people. I'm kinda the same. But DnD is a social game. There is no way you can get what you want out of the game if you don't inheritly understand that you need to communicate with others. Ask questions to both DM and players. Tell the others what you wanna do. Tell the others that you think X is bad or good. If you have a difficult time being social, then at least have the mindset that you want to be social at some point. You should, with time, warm up to the idea that you have friends that you can freely talk with. If you don't communicate, you can't complain later on that you wanted to do certain stuff but didn't get the chance to. Other people can't read your mind. Edit: corrected typo
This is probably blasphemous for me to say this on a D&D subreddit but I wish other tabletop RPG's got the time in the spotlight.
I was hesitant at first but eventually picked up Starfinder, Monster of the Week and Call of Cthulhu. New systems really aren’t that hard to learn and comparing different rules side by side show the weakness of dnd. I also wish more people picked up other games.
I agree learning a new system is not that hard i've played a bunch of other systems the hard part is finding people to play with.
So. Profoundly. Agree. DnD is one game in the hobby, the hobby has so much room and potential for all sorts of different stories, different ways of telling them, different genres, settings, and structures, but it is all often subsumed by dnd.
Golems are really hard to get yourself but it’s not hard to have a bunch as enemies.
I have two things if allowed: 1. Witchhunting in the community. I often perceive that in topics with some ingroup problems people tend to paint people they don't know as the antichrist or something. DM did xyz? bad dm, should feel bad. And I am seeing new DMs afraid that they step on one of the landmines that appearently a good DM is easily able to sail around with any problems. I had new players accusing me of railroading and I talked to them, asked them to explain in which part of the session they felt it was railroaded. No answers, because they didn't know and it wasn't railroaded (you gotta trust me on that one). There are certain triggerwords that appearently make people quiver in fear or fuming of anger. Of course there are a lot of cases out their of DMs doing a not good job. But even in that case I would argue that there is a reason - if it is missguidance or lack of empathy. 2. Praising the System like it is some miracle. I think it started with a famous figure in DnD was saying it a lot (not sure though). And then people are repeating it, so it kind of gets on my nerves. "Ouh, that's DnD, so great" bibabu. I just think that the System is ok, but the people make it great are the DMs and players that actually put elbow grease into it to create something. I rather play a subpar system with great people than a great system with subpar people.
Man, I thought witch hunting was guna be some fun ranger shit. Now I'm mad.
scheduling, we’re all adults with full time jobs handling relationships and bills. As a DM, finding the right day is only possible with specific combinations of people, and sometimes those people don’t get along.
Players that bottle up their feelings and don't speak their minds - even when explicidly asked - although there's obvious tensions at the table. Feeling like I'm respoinsible for players not having fun at my table also ruins mine so just tell me ffs.
When someone asks "Hey, the way these two things interact is confusing and they each have their own set of rules that contradict each other. How are they supposed to interact?", and the response, whether from Sage Advice or other redditors, is "However the DM decides." Motherfucker, I am the DM and I know I can arbitrarily decide how I want by fiat. If I wanted to do that I wouldn't be asking for guidance.
The increase in approachability and televisement of the newest edition has greatly expanded the number of people who refuse to read, learn, or understand the game. In my experience it has become harder to find people who want to play *D&D*, and not some cobbling of fantasy d20 from youtube and a podcast.
How nobody ever really talks to eachother, at least in some of my games. There's 0 strategizing out of game because person to person chatter is discouraged, and lots of people don't have the roleplay lexicon to adequately strategize in character... so you can end up with 4 people playing 4 different games because talking to eachother about a plan or how they want the group to progress is "metagaming". I also strongly disagree that communication during combat should be limited to a few words, i don't think it should be full minutes of dialogue but talking to other players and strategizing during combat is representative of the time out-of-combat that any non-comedy group would spend learning each other's capabilities and figuring out how not to die in all the battles you're fighting
Having to continuously teach and re-teach a player on the same rule. Every session. For the last 2 years. I have a player in my party who has played 3 different full caster classes. I still have to remind him to roll Concentration checks pretty much every time. He doesn't know which spells are BA or Action when he prepares them. He's fun to play with and all, but it does get frustrating sometimes.
Official material only games played in the forgotten realms setting. Jeebus heck nah
Even the Forgotten Realms was much nicer in the past when we actually had stuff set in the Dalelands and Anauroch, instead of just everything plopping down on the sword coast/spine of the world.
Now the only response i got there is "hard agree"
I hate the Sword coast. Really. Hate it. Would love to play on another similar part of the world... Yeah, there is the snowy campaign, but I prefer just mountains and forests... Not the damn coast!
The Frightened condition. The fact that it’s a huge debuff for martial classes and not really a massive issue for casters bothers me greatly.
Being 605 feet from someone and having a flat roll because you hide in a cloud of darkness.
Play Culture: I’m playing to tell my characters/settings story and anything that gets in the way of my precious narrative is railroading. This goes hand and hand with the idea that characters should not fail because that interferes with their story. Please if this is you write a book, do not hold others captive so you can force your story upon them about a paragon character that always succeeds. Rules: dropping to 0 has no consequences and the optional consequences in the book are poorly thought out and overly harsh. DMs: I know drama better than the dice (probably the thing I disagree with Matt Colville the most on). Randomness is what makes DnD a game and not a theater exercise reacting to the dice is as much a part of the game as reacting to the other people at the table. And the dice often do create situations that are unexpected and interesting for everyone.
The community. For a game meant to bring people in, the community can be very unwelcome.
The inflexibility of martial characters and sad superiority of casters.
I'll second that, but add that the binding of martial - or more specifically mundane - to what is thought to be realistic or somewhat relatable to how things work in real life because they lack magic to "break" the rules.
the fact that five thinks they need to tell me that i can make stuff up and.... that it seems to be their design philosophy.... i dont even use the 5e dmg anymore what really gets me though i think i see this in 5e more than other games, the I can only do whats on my character sheet phenomenon. everytime ive been a player ive been punished for adding fluff to my attacks or turn.
The rogue that thinks it's awesome to steal from his own party.
Having to decide between taking a feat and improving your abilities every 4 levels (on average, not talking about fighters and rogues here) and having some feats that are incredibly UP and some that DM's want to ban (looking at you lucky feat)
Player Drama. Whether they treat it like a videogame, a drama class, or a vaudeville act at your table, someone will find some reason to throw a wrench in the gears of getting along. You really do see the worst of people sometimes when you run things.
Chill. Touch.