I really hate whenever I try to explain how some bad rules can be abused and immediatelly get someone say shit like “If this happens in your group, change it” as if that would solve the problem. And whenever it is not soemthing you witnessed personally, then it means it never happens and could never happen.
Are the 5e apologists in the room with us?
No, but seriously, most people I know (rightfully) criticize 5e for a lot of things, from sloppy writing in general, to shitty adventure books, to nonsensical rulings and poor balance. I’ve never met someone willing to defend 5e so passionately.
I’ve always claimed that base 5e is basically unplayable past tier 2 because of how wild power scaling becomes, and how sloppy certain rules are (God forbid that your wizard doesn’t attempt to Shapeshift the Fighter’s Echo before you even reach tier 3). And frankly, base 5e is too boring to play for long, anyway. Homebrew is where it’s at.
Check the other comments. They are absolutely in the room with us.
Oddly enough, they don’t defend it by saying it’s good. They defend it by tearing down everything else, or brushing the flaws under the carpet with “well, you can just ignore the bad stuff, so they don’t count.”
This has a lot of “stop enjoying that!” energy.
There’s no set of rules that a clever person can’t exploit or circumvent in some way, and min/maxers have been a plague on the RPG community since long before 5e. Frankly, if this sort of thing is a regular issue for you then the problem is the people you’re playing with. A good DM can roll with players like this and balance them.
You are the red box in the image.
Right, OK, yes, so what? the red box is where reasonable people arrive mentally.
Not really. You’re placing blame on players using a system as written and a DM for being unable to handle an exploit in the rules. At no point do you open the rules themselves up for criticism. In fact, you deflect all criticism away from the rules, as if the impossibility of a perfect system excuses every bad decision ever made.
Just like how there is no ruleset that cannot be exploited, there is no ruleset that cannot be improved. It’s only by acknowledging the flaws that something can improve, but you seem hellbent on dismissing flaws entirely. That’s unhealthy.
DnD isn’t just a set of rules, though. It is inherently a social activity, and that means there has to be a certain level of expectation for social norms. If your group has toxic people in it, they will be toxic while playing tic-tac-toe.
The solution is to employ social pressure or ostracism for those people. We can certainly modify rules that have proven abusive in the past, but enforcing rules of conduct must always be the first line of defense.
If D&D isn’t a set of rules, why do they charge so much for their rulebook?
It’s also worth noting that nobody has said an actual exploit. Nobody has DONE anything toxic. Someone just noticed a POTENTIAL exploit and suggested fixing it before any problems occur. Yet ostracizing people is a more acceptable position than a rules patch?
If the rules aren’t something to be changed, why do they charge so much for the rules revision they just put out?
Yet ostracizing people is a more acceptable position than a rules patch?
Yes. If you can’t get someone to knock off bad behavior, the rules do not matter.
If the rules aren’t something to be changed, why do they charge so much for the rules revision they just put out?
There are good reasons to change rules. People breaking social norms is not one of them.
Once again, nobody has done anything. There is no bad behaviour anyone needs to stop. You don’t even know what the exploit is, or how the group feel about using it. You are inventing a hypothetical person to punish for a hypothetical misdeed while the actually flawed rules (by WotC’s admission, as proven by the erattas and rules revision) are right in front of you.
At its core DnD is a wargame where we spend most of the game time fighting against monsters and bad guys. Having robust combat systems is the big draw of the game and fighting monsters in interesting ways without being too unfair either way. People want rules that are robust enough to make interesting combat but don’t completely break down under a bit of the box thinking, like the peasant rail gun, or the moon box lich, or the create water in someone’s lungs to cause drowning, or the coffeelock to get infinite spell slots.
All of these mechanical oversights are frustrating to play with because we have to stop the game and debate over whether this cheesy game breaking bullshit should be allowed at the table and it takes time away from the reason we’re all here, to get together play a game, and let everyone have fun, DM included. And sitting around debating whether the moon counts as a container for a lich’s soul reliquary or lining up 500 peasants and each of them readying and handing off an object at a bazillion mph for an hour and a half breaks the rules is not fun.
You want a system for magic that encourages being busted even at high levels? Play some Mage the Ascension, you can do some absurdly wacky shit even at fairly low power levels.
Also the toxicity that is implied to exist by this post is pretty rare really. Even back when I was using Reddit, toxicity generally sank to the bottom of comment sections, and even more so here. When I got into D&D close to the beginning of 5e, some online voices on YouTube for example carried this toxicity but nowadays, most voices are far newer and friendly.
In general, most people are more interested in what happens at their table instead of all tables, and the rules are just guidelines to aid that.
I wouldn’t say it implies a toxic fanbase at all. It clearly states that’s the MO of an apologist. It further states that someone chimes in with that MO. Not a horde, not a group, an individual.
And I agree wholeheartedly. They are a minority. A very annoying, very vocal, minority.
The amount of cope is staggering sometimes and makes me disengage from discussing the hobby altogether.
Even your comment has some cope mechanism embedded:
The rules are just guidelines
As if nobody knew that. The guidelines are shit at some points, that’s the whole discussion.
There’s a thing in D&D forum spaces called the Oberoni Fallacy. The fallacy goes that, if someone says there’s a problem with a D&D rule, they’re wrong because they can just Rule 0 it away. It’s a fallacy because they have just proposed a solution to what apparently isn’t a problem.
People constantly saying “the rules are just guidelines” to any D&D problem is the same sort of idea. Yeah, I know you can ignore them, but I paid for the damn book, so I want what’s IN the book to actually matter.
oh hey it’s that box from the chart. d&d is saved!
It’s a story telling framework encouraging creative problem solving and creation, all rules can and will be exploited, all rules are “bad” rules. Do what works for you and your group.
This argument just dismisses all criticism of the rules and implies that the “game” portion of the role-playing game is irrelevant. By that logic, the design of D&D 5e (and every single rule and mechanic in it) is no better or worse than any other game, including stuff like F.A.T.A.L.
If the rules don’t matter, why bother? Why buy books, learn a whole system, and go through the effort of trying to use a specific RPG instead of just doing free form role-play?
If they do matter, then they can and will impact the quality of your experience in positive and negative ways. They can be well designed, easy to understand, and effective at serving their purpose, or they can be poorly designed, incomplete, confusing or nonfunctional.
Sure, you can ignore rules when you don’t want to follow them, and you can do your own thing and homebrew it if you like. You can also ignore the ending of a book and write your own headcanon, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any point in criticizing bad writing.
To put this another way, why have rule books and a character sheet with all those numbers on it? Why not just flip a coin whenever you want uncertainty about an outcome? Would a game with only that mechanic be just as effective as D&D at providing the type of experience that D&D is trying to create? If not, then why not? What makes the big complicated mess of rules that is D&D better than my single rule RPG?
This argument just dismisses all criticism of the rules and implies that the “game” portion of the role-playing game is irrelevant.
If you truly think that, then I contend that you didn’t understand their argument.
They are dismissing one specific criticism of the rules; that they can be “abused”.
Roleplaying games are a collaborative social activity. The goal should be to collectively tell an enjoyable story. Under those circumstances, no one should have any incentive to abuse the rules or their fellow players.
In other words, criticising the rules because they can be abused is like criticising the design of a hammer because it can potentially be used as a weapon. There is basically no way to design a functional, effective hammer that does not open up the possibility that a bad actor could use it as a weapon. That does not constitute a flaw in the design of the hammer, and trying to redesign the hammer to prevent such an abuse will result in a very bad hammer.
There are bad rules and good rules, but good rules are good because they facilitate enjoyable play effectively. In other words good rules should help the GM and the players do the things that are fun. The rules do not exist to create a perfectly balanced showdown between equally matched opponents, and they cannot ever exist to do that in a context where you have a GM/DM, because the overwhelming power afforded to someone with near total narrative authority makes it impossible to ever balance that dynamic. Rather, the rules exist to a) introduce an element of chaos to the narrative, and b) guide the game towards outcomes that tend to reflect the individual capabilities and circumstances of the characters involved.
And within that context there are plenty of examples of good and bad rules design. You can absolutely find, make, or customize a better hammer. But if your criticism comes down to “You could hurt someone with this if you wanted to” then you have absolutely missed the point.
There is no set of game rules that will ever prevent a toxic table from being toxic. Despite OP’s objections, the only solution to shitty people in your gaming group is to either remove the shitty people, or remove yourself. I get how much that sucks, but it really is the only solution.
I just want you to know how much I appreciate your hammer comparison. That is an incredibly apt simile and I want you to get credit for it. You should feel good about your analysis and communication skills.
That’s what three years of university and a lot of student debt gets me 😅 But I appreciate the compliment.
This is a bad take. It would work if D&D 5e were the only rules in existence, but it isn’t even the only version of D&D in the conversation, pretty alone the wife breadth of other systems out there. I’ve been singing Pathfinder 2e’s praises for nearly 2 years now, and if the problem with PF is that it’s too crunchy, there are numerous other much lighter systems out there like Dungeon World or 13th Age.
By all means, use 5e if it works for you, but that shouldn’t stop criticism of it in places where the rules can be exploited, especially if other systems lack those exploits.
But it is useful for someone to make rules that are balanced and lead to interesting gameplay. There are entire companies that make their business around printing rule books and selling them to people who think it’s worth the money.
Think of it like this: if you have a high enough GM skill, then you’ll pass whatever check God has and make the game fun. But with more balanced and interesting rules, you get a bonus. Even if it’s just a +1 bonus that makes your game 5% more likely to be fun, that means everyone who plays that system gets that bonus from one person making it. You’d be crazy not to do it.
Different things work for different groups. But some things tend to work well in general, and others do not.
I get annoyed when people say things like “big deal, just do xyz yourself, why are you complaining?” . Because making a clear and comprehensive game is WOTC’s job they are being paid for with our money!
If the system has a flaw, it’s their job to fix it, if they don’t they’re doing a bad job.
That being said, 5.5e has been pretty cleaned up in this aspect. I’m honestly shocked at how they both added new fun systems and codified a lot of vague mechanics.
There are valid concerns and invalid concerns because a huge assumption is that the DM won’t use the rules about being able to address edge cases. A large and complex system will always end up with some weird combination that can be abused, but as long as there are a reasonable number and they don’t come up often then the system is fine.
5e does have some basic problems like exhaustion undercutting barbarian rages, but the vast majority of online examples of things being broken involve a massive misreading of the rules by ignoring context, vague rules (a separate problem from being broken), or people thinking an outcome is broken when it is just the system working as intended. Like being able to use Shield Master to knock down/shove opponents with a bonus action before making attacks since the bonus action rules say it can be in any order. Knock them off a cliff and no opponents? Ok, since you must attack on the same turn your action is lost because it could only being used to attack. That doesn’t make it broken, and it is addressed as an edge case by the DM.
Again, some things are broken, but most of the things people call broken are just edge cases that can easily be handled by the DM being overblown in a game that has too much focus on fiddly combat while being written with the story first.
By Exhaustion undercutting Rage, do you specifically the 2014 Berserker barbarian? That’s the only one I know of that gets exhaustion from Rage, and it’s up to them whether they want to activate that feature( Frenzy) or not.
Yes, it undercuts Frenzy which isn’t good enough to deserve exhaustion. It was story based design that worked against itself.
Good thing they removed it in in the 2024 rules then
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/free-rules/character-classes#Barbarian
Woohoo, 10 years later!
I dislike 5th edition for a lot of reasons, but this is extremely oversimplified binary thinking.
This is silly. EVERY system can be exploited, and every group should expect eachother to act in good faith. The difference between systems is what parts are done for you and what parts you do yourself, and every group is going to want a different assortment of those pieces. You’re just mad that some groups get what they want out of DnD. You are the problem person in this image.
I’m just not bothering with a company that’s repeating the exact same mistakes as their predecessors, so it’s basically anything but 5e for me nowadays.
Serious question - what rules in 5e encourage bad player behaviour?
