User talk:Revival/Guy's 5e Criticisms

PREACH! --Kydo (talk) 23:20, 1 September 2018 (MDT)

Criticism of my own criticism

I would revise my arguments under Spellcasting. While it isn’t as intuitive as would be ideal, a huge advantage to the wonky “spell slot” system is that it encourages diversity of play.

When a spellcaster has something as simple and straightforward as spell points, a player will almost always use their “best” spells until they run out of SP. Most obviously, this removes strategic depth from a caster. Even a boring blast caster is likely to consider other options if they can only cast cone of cold once or twice per day. This option diversity not only adds strategic depth, but helps make different classes feel more distinct from one another.

More subtly, spell points are also more likely to cause a feeling of dissatisfaction. You either burn up all your SP too fast and become nigh-useless, or you end the day feeling like you have surplus SP that you should have burned on bigger spells. This feeling is less prominent with spell slots.

I think something like 4e’s powers would have been better to retain for at least some classes. Warlocks in particular would benefit, I think. Powers have similar benefits to spell slots, but they are much easier for a new player to immediately understand. Powers have their own problems, though.

Tl;dr - 5e’s spellcasting has problems but as far as I’ve found there isn’t a universally superior system out there covering "supernatural ability fuel" for tabletop RPGs.

Flying races should probably be mentioned alongside variant humans, but the core problem is still there. I feel like I should have stated the DMG does have a variant rule for poisons, but the core problem is still there. Pretty much everything else I wrote still feels entirely valid to me. - Guy 08:57, 7 June 2019 (MDT)