4w ago

Former DnD designer outlines why boss fights suck in fifth edition

www.wargamer.com

Just a moment...

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What they don't acknowledge is that the long rest problem is something of a self-inflicted wound.
No shit. Players don't actually enjoy holding onto their powers all day. They want to use their cool powers.
Some small, vocal, minority of players really enjoy the resource management game. Most people want to do cool shit every turn, not use a hand crossbow or shoot a cantrip. Spells-per-day has sucked the entire time I've played D&D, which admittedly is only 3.0 onwards. It has always caused pacing problems.
Back when D&D 5e was being playtested, its early designs openly said that the recommended number of encounters between long rests was four - or as few as two if you throw some particularly challenging fights in there.
They fucked up changing that.
There are also many other ways powers and abilities could work that aren't based on spells-per-day. D&D probably won't adopt them. The population of people in the hobby also has a survivorship bias- most people enter through D&D, so the people who stick around are mostly people who find its quirks acceptable. Who knows how many players bounced off because they looked at this system and saw "I can cast my cool spells twice? That's it?"
- Some small, vocal, minority of players really enjoy the resource management game
  Do they? I don't think I've ever heard anyone defending it. At least not with the excessive amount of combat 5e assumes. 4e handled it much better, by making a very clear differentiation between powers you're meant to use a limited number of times per encounter, ones you should only use in big combats, and the bread-and-butter powers that you can rely on all day. When all your powers are coming from the same single pool of resources that only refreshes daily, or at best with a significant 1 hour rest.
  
  I don't have any studies to back it up so I might be wrong. I wonder if anyone's done any rigorous investigation into this. An old DND group never agreed with me when I'd bring up the topic, but they might have been more "it is what it is stop rocking the boat" than an active support for the concept.
  I'm pretty sure if you went into a DND space and suggested rebalancing the game so it's not resting on (pun intended) powers per day, you'd get a lof of push back. Maybe I'll go post a poll somewhere later.
  I've also met a few players who have somehow never considered any other way things could be. I had a friend in college I tried to get to play a world of darkness game. Powers in those games are either unlimited use, or bound by a renewable resource like blood. He was like "this sounds totally broken yo".
The primary problem is that dnd 5e was made to be a dungeon crawler, and most people play it like a narrative driven rules light game.

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