After wrapping up our Pathfinder campaign we had a short hiatus before beginning a new campaign with the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons.
I’ve been meaning to review 5e since we picked it up, alas — I’ve been running weekly sessions with it for almost a year now and never managed to get further than sketching some notes down in the blog editor… To remedy that situation here’s a quick post in order to get the ‘review’ off the queue so I can work on some other articles I have planned.
5e has been a revelation for me, running it has really helped me admire the wider d20 systems and realise some of my beef with Pathfinder was due to (uneducated) choices we made.
My favourite things about 5e are:
- The advantage/disadvantage mechanism (and related, inspiration).
- The default flavour, classes and races, aligns much better with the homebrew setting my group have been adventuring in for almost 20 years.
- Bounded accuracy keeps things really exciting and interesting — my players no longer rush head-first in to every fight without thought for the consequences, they recently came across a group of Orcs and spent a lot of time whittling them down and manoeuvring to a more beneficial terrain before engaging head on.
The only two criticisms we have of 5e, and these are only minor gripes, are:
- Buying and selling magic items is almost entirely absent from 5e. Coming from Pathfinder, where items are an expected part of the scaling mechanism and a significant percentage of page count of the books is spent on equipment, the lack of support for item trading (and for me the onus that puts on the GM) is a little upsetting.
- The lack of specificity in the rules. Pathfinder had begun to feel like it bound us by having explicit rules for every situation, whilst 5e leaves a huge amount up to GM interpretation. Neither is ideal when we only have a 3hr session to get some gaming done and my prep time is limited. With each system I’ve ended up spending a chunk of my session preparation time understanding how a rule should work…
In summary, I highly recommend 5e! For me running it has been not only fun but also educational and insightful in understanding more about d20 game mechanics.