What the Game Should Accomplish

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that even though I haven’t played much 5th edition D&D, I have opinions on the game.  The people I played 1st and 2nd edition with know that I had to be dragged into the next editions of the game by the rest of the group.  Those same people promised me that we would stop with 3rd edition (and later with 3.5) because those editions fixed problems with the earlier versions.  Fortunately, no one tried to interest me in 4th edition.  And my latest foray was into Pathfinder, which is a 3.5 variant.  So now, the prospect of 5th edition (2024 version) games is coming up.  So let me explain why, even though I haven’t played the game beyond a few sessions of the 2014 version, I know that this will be an inferior experience:

It’s too much like work.

I haven’t talked a lot about the work I do.  For many years now, I have worked with subcontractors to design and construct facilities to house and support specific, specialty work operations.  The job requires dealing with the subcontractors doing the design, with the organizations who will be doing the specialty work, and with owners who don’t want to pay too much.  The organizations and owners have their ideas of what should be designed (not, importantly, of what the design should accomplish), and given their way they would provide so  many detailed requirements to the designers that the job could never satisfy them.  Likewise, when I look at D&D now I see a system where so many people want so many things that the edifice constructed to accommodate it all does not accomplish what the game should accomplish.

People have different reasons for playing the game, and enjoy different aspects of it.  Over the editions, ideas have been developed and adopted into the core rules of the game that maybe shouldn’t be core rules.  I say this not because they are unworkable, but because they change the flavor of the game sufficiently that a given campaign should feel free to reject them.  But by and large, with its emphasis on adding details via home brew, the current game is not considering what needs to be accomplished but rather how to kludge in specific content.  Keep adopting too much, and the work-around to enable one thing will not make a whole lot of sense with that used to enable another.

For instance, over the past several editions there have been changes to the game that eliminated the class of illusionist (which became a variety of wizard), and added the classes of sorcerer, warlock, and artificer.  Not all of these changes are bad.  All may belong in some campaigns.  But not all should be expected to belong in all campaigns.  For instance, sorcerer started off more or less as a wizard with natural ability who therefore didn’t have to study so much.  I have no problem with that.  But the mechanism for explaining this is bloodlines, which therefore have to be possible in the game-world.  I doubt that every campaign should be a place where a human can marry a horse and have centaurs; why are dragons or demons different?  The warlock gains power from a supernatural patron — a mechanism that has been in the game since the beginning in the form of the cleric, except that now as well as gods there have to be many other supernatural powers to bargain with, not all of which may belong in a campaign.  The artificer in concept is fine, but many of its subclasses impart a steampunk feel to the game that should not be taken for granted by the rules.  

Every new class or race mucks with the world in which the game is played, to the point that those worlds are not the worlds in which I want to be playing.  There may be people who want to play in what is essentially the modern world except with a foundation of magic instead of technology.  However, that does not describe the fantasy worlds I read about and imagine in my game play.  And when you get right down to it, the issue for me is that the high-magic fantasy world that the rules are built for is just too much, and I want a simple set of core rules that can be thoughtfully supplemented by options rather than a complicated mess from which content has to be stripped.

I am closer to finding that with 3.0 or 3.5.