Tabletop Community Watch

[Gingervitis]

When I see Gnoll race blocks in other editions, I assumed that was to make Gnoll counter-adventurers as enemies, or for powergamers. Gnolls are as a race worshipping Yeenoghu, a not very nice demon. I don't know how you make a gnoll adventurer except as an easily ammused Drizzt.

Maybe I'm a fag, but I've always been a sucker for le good drow trope. Ironically, I tend to avoid drow when it comes to that stuff, all while favoring half-drow.

 

[Wormy]

-Beholders are no longer racial supremacists.

-Mind Flayers have their hive-mindedness de-emphasized because the comparison might be offensive to the Chinese.

WHO IS THIS FOR?!

I'm all for something to replace the alignment system, it's something that's needed overhauling since...forever, but this?!

 

[EnemyStand]

WHO IS THIS FOR?!

Twitter.

 

[Wormy]

Twitter.

Of course. Of fucking course. Why would I expect anything fucking else.

 

[Ghostse]

WHO IS THIS FOR?!

Trannies.

 

[Wormy]

Trannies.

I don't even believe it's that. I've had trannies in my games before and they didn't bring up this shit. This is for the Twitter botherers.

 

[Adamska]

I tend to favor culture trumping race, but I'm not above working that.

Though it takes a pretty massive racist to look at a soulless brain parasite who kills others with its young and who must sup on the mind and souls of the victims and go "Yeah, they're clearly chinese".

The actual fuck. Even racists don't usually go that far.

 

[Ghostse]

I tend to favor culture trumping race, but I'm not above working that.

Though it takes a pretty massive racist to look at a soulless brain parasite who kills others with its young and who must sup on the mind and souls of the victims and go "Yeah, they're clearly chinese".

The actual fuck. Even racists don't usually go that far.

Especially since they are clearly supposed to be Jews.

 

[George Lucas]

On the subject of Wizards of the Coast being fags, the Avalon Hill brand was taken away from them a year ago: https://archive.md/V5VjG

Avalon Hill was the premiere publisher for traditional hex & counter wargames. producing classics like Rise and Decline of the Third Reich, Advanced Squad Leader, and Empire of the Rising Sun (yes, WWII is the most popular subject in historical wargaming). Not all of their games were stupidly autistic though. They had more casual (though still on the hardcore side of boardgaming) games like Dune, and Civilization. (Yes, the same Civilization that Sid Meier based his game series on.)

Avalon Hill eventually ran into financial difficulties and was sold to Hasbro (newly formed in 1998 through the merging of Milton-Bradley and Parker Brothers). Hasbro gutted the company and shuffled some of the more serious board games from Milton-Bradley under the Avalon Hill brand. The most well-known of these board games was Axis & Allies.

Axis & Allies was a hugely popular board game in the 1980s when it was introduced, being the most successful of Milton-Bradley's Gamemaster Series, a series of board games that were all somewhere between Risk and hex & counter games. Instead of boring counters, the games included fully sculped plastic miniatures. The designs were great and still hold up today.

As Avalon Hill, Hasbro finally released new content for Axis & Allies, including European and Pacific theater variants, and a popular PC game. The PC game made use of Microsoft's Zone network for online play. Eventually the Zone players got tired of the bugs and lack of customization for house rules and joined online clubs like IAAPC and AAMC, playing via email and using dice servers for gamekeeping (I'm not sure if these clubs existed before or after the PC game). AAMC was active at least until around 2012 (when I stopped paying attention to it). It appears to be gone now, though it may still survive on something like Facebook. Idk too lazy to find that part out.

Aside from online popularity, there are other indicators that Axis & Allies was a money-maker for Avalon Hill and Hasbro as a whole. The game got a sort of reboot in 2004 with what is known by fans as Axis & Allies Revised, personally I didn't care for this version much because it wasn't all that different from the original, and the map looks stupid:

Spoiler: Stupid Video Game-looking Map

Original (1984):

Revised (2004):

But looking back, it was definitely an improvement over the original. By 2004, everyone who played the original (known as 'Classic' or 'Second Edition') house-ruled the shit out of it, because if you didn't, you had things like submarines hitting planes, Japan trekking across Siberia to invade Moscow, and Germany taking over the entire continent of Africa in about one year.

After Revised, Larry Harris (designer of the series since the beginning) seemed to have artistic license to do whatever he wanted, as he released no less than five new editions of Axis & Allies, each one targeted at a different type of player with a different historical focus, as well as a WWI version of the game. The new games finally tapered off in 2014 with 2nd editions of the 1940 games (European and Pacific theater games that can be combined to form one massive game of autism) and the 1942 Edition of the game (the successor to Revised and the current 'mainline' version of the game). Sometime after, Larry Harris left Hasbro to focus on a new game called War Room (funnily enough it uses counters instead of minis). I haven't played this game, as it's rather expensive, and since it was never mass released, it seems not many people have played it, but from what I've seen and read, it does seem like an overall improvement over the Axis & Allies series. I'll be getting to what happened to Axis & Allies post-Harris shortly.

Spoiler: The Great Map of Spergery

Axis & Allies Europe 1940 combined with Pacific 1940

Enough nostalgia. Where does Wizards of the Coast (WotC) fit into all this? Around 2004, Hasbro gave the Avalon Hill brand to WotC. Much like giving them D&D, this was really retarded, but it's even worse because at least D&D is Fantasy themed. Avalon Hill games were mostly historical, and WotC never appeared to give a rat's ass about history. If anything, they seem like the type of spergs who would want to rewrite it

WotC released a variety of games under the Avalon Hill brand, mostly old titles that were either acquired from Avalon Hill directly or were from Milton-Bradley. But they did publish some new titles, the most famous of which is probably Betrayal at House on the Hill. This game had a bunch of spin-offs associated with it. They also released Legacy games, like Risk Legacy, in which you permanently alter your game over the course of several sessions, included writing things onto the board and tearing up cards. There's no doubt that WotC released some great games under the Avalon Hill brand. None of these games were anything like Third Reich, however.

So after Larry Harris left Hasbro, WotC decides to make their own Axis & Allies, with hookers and blackjack. Well not really. But they did want to make it more accessible and faster paced. You see, Axis & Allies acquired a (well-deserved) reputation for being esoteric, requiring a specific strategy to win (think opening moves in chess), and LONG (the numbers on the box are lying to you). Unfortunately, they also just decided to not give a fuck about historical accuracy (the game isn't even really that historical to begin with, to give you an idea of just how not-give-a-fuck WotC decided to be). The result was Axis & Allies & Zombies. Zombies were already long overplayed when this game came out, and fans were not happy. We don't have sales figures of the game, so I won't speculate about it's financial success. Long story short, we don't know why Avalon Hill was moved from WotC to directly under Hasbro. The Axis & Allies thing is just one piece of the puzzle, but it is interesting to see that the Zombies game is nowhere to be found on their website. And when you see the piddly number of games on that website (and not all of them are even in print), you realize how far from grace Avalon Hill has fallen.

 

[Ghostse]

Excellent, unquotable post @George Lucas
I didn'tknow the history of Axis and Allies, but was around people who played and the (Pre-2004) versions. And the game they talked about enoying vs. The Full Sperg Press of what was getting pumped out in that time when I was looking at the game based on them talking about itmake sense now.

War Room looks like a game I want to play but know it'd be too complex to enjoy.

Betrayal At House on the Hill is a pretty good game that needed some better play testing. When it works, its great. But its really easy for a game to result in what is clearly unintended consequences and states, and is nearly unwinable.

They have a sort of "Dread Otherworldly Horror" vibe. You explore the house on the hill by flipping tiles from a deck, so the house is different each time. One of the players is the traitor (usually; its possible there is no traitor) and you don't know who is the traitor until you trigger the Betrayal, at which point the game goes from semi-cooperative to 1 vs All.
So sometimes you end up with a house that is clearly too big or too small for what they intended, and I wish they'd included a "house size" balancer. but they didn't. So when you get a shitty end condition, it sort of sucks because your game fizzles. But when it works, boy howdy does it work.

 

[Dave.]

Setting aside the wokeshit, why do people hate 5E? I have never played any of the other editions so I’m genuinely curious. I’ll say this being that 5E is my first exposure to D&D and my DM said “this is one of my more challenging adventures” I’m kind of underwhelmed because in terms of difficulty it’s surprisingly too easy.

 

[Gingervitis]

Setting aside the wokeshit, why do people hate 5E? I have never played any of the other editions so I’m genuinely curious. I’ll say this being that 5E is my first exposure to D&D and my DM said “this is one of my more challenging adventures” I’m kind of underwhelmed because in terms of difficulty it’s surprisingly too easy.

Maybe its just me and my motley band of zoomers, but it feels like combat takes a long while.

 

[Road Work Ahead]

Setting aside the wokeshit, why do people hate 5E? I have never played any of the other editions so I’m genuinely curious. I’ll say this being that 5E is my first exposure to D&D and my DM said “this is one of my more challenging adventures” I’m kind of underwhelmed because in terms of difficulty it’s surprisingly too easy.

Generally the people that complain about 5e are upset that it's too simplified over 3.5e.

As for difficulty, that's entirely on your DM.

 

[DeagleNationRefugee]

Setting aside the wokeshit, why do people hate 5E? I have never played any of the other editions so I’m genuinely curious. I’ll say this being that 5E is my first exposure to D&D and my DM said “this is one of my more challenging adventures” I’m kind of underwhelmed because in terms of difficulty it’s surprisingly too easy.

Any time I run a modern or non OSR ruleset nobody ever fucking dies after about lvl 2 and it feels extremely difficult to put something in front of the party that will even challenge them without really trying to stack the odds against them. Swapping to OSR suddenly there were TPKs and occasional deaths on even simple monsters. Even in higher level BECMI the players can be put down in a single bad round. It's way less effort and more "fun" from my perspective as a DM. I can design an encounter based on what I think would be living in the cave vs what would be "balanced combat" or whatever.

Playing 5E is fine IMO but I don't wanna run it.

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

Any time I run a modern or non OSR ruleset nobody ever fucking dies after about lvl 2 and it feels extremely difficult to put something in front of the party that will even challenge them without really trying to stack the odds against them. Swapping to OSR suddenly there were TPKs and occasional deaths on even simple monsters. Even in higher level BECMI the players can be put down in a single bad round. It's way less effort and more "fun" from my perspective as a DM. I can design an encounter based on what I think would be living in the cave vs what would be "balanced combat" or whatever.

Playing 5E is fine IMO but I don't wanna run it.

Official body count of the 5e campaign I'm running:
3rd session, level 3 bard impaled by orcs while arguing with the rogue on watch.
4th session, level 3 paladin drained by stirges while the cleric stood ten feet away flinging cantrips at them
6th session, level 3 cleric swarmed by goblins while attempting to engage in honorable melee combat
7th session, level 3 rogue and level 3 paladin jr could have died, but were captured by a drow enchanter and rescued in the next session before they could be taken back to the underdark for interrogation/experiments
9th session, monk and fighter that kept flaking died off screen in an avalanche because fuck 'em.

In previous campaigns:
Level 3 party of a paladin, cleric, wizard, barbarian, and I forget what else died horribly in a TPK by standing on top of a ridge in broad daylight and gawking at the camp of 20 some odd orcs below for a solid five minutes before being spotted.
Level 6 light cleric ironically died by falling into magma on a greased stone bridge just one day after receiving plate mail of fire resistance after attacking kobold guides hired to lead them through their territory peacefully.
Level 8 bard disintegrated by beholder.
Level 9 gnome arcane trickster died due to defenestration by party after thoroughly annoying everyone with dickish pranks.
Level 10 fighter/cleric died after overestimating his ability to handle six ghouls and 2 ghasts and failing the paralysis save. Fortunately, a party member was able to cast revivify.
Level 11 figher/cleric sacrificed by pirates law-abiding sailors to appease ocean god after he cast inflict wounds on a dolphin.
Long period of competency ends at level 15 when the Eldritch Knight, Evoker, Assassin, Druid, and BardLock get their shit stomped in by a Storm Giant Quintessent, six Frost Giants, 4 Gargoyles, and 2 Crystal Golems due to a poorly thought out fireball before scouting the other side of the fortification/building they had snuck up behind. Monk escaped due to being the only party member capable of outpacing the Storm Giant's speed and lightning javelin range.

It's not that difficult to kill PCs in 5e. Give them enough rope and eventually they hang themselves.

 

[SpaceMovie1992]

Setting aside the wokeshit, why do people hate 5E? I have never played any of the other editions so I’m genuinely curious. I’ll say this being that 5E is my first exposure to D&D and my DM said “this is one of my more challenging adventures” I’m kind of underwhelmed because in terms of difficulty it’s surprisingly too easy.

Honestly I don't hate 5E. It's very good at being a simple and intuitive entry point for TTRPGs. Advantage, Disadvantage, and Inspiration points are all excellent ways to boil down complicated concepts and give the DM ways to reward and punish players. Balance isn't as horrible as 3.5E. The game isn't a complete atrocity like 4E.

If you want your broken-in-half minmaxing autism, you can go play Pathfinder. There are ample systems you can use if you want a crunchy, punishingly difficult scenario.

WoTC is guilty of allowing insufferable current year politics to pollute its product but that doesn't make 5E itself bad.

 

[George Lucas]

Setting aside the wokeshit, why do people hate 5E? I have never played any of the other editions so I’m genuinely curious. I’ll say this being that 5E is my first exposure to D&D and my DM said “this is one of my more challenging adventures” I’m kind of underwhelmed because in terms of difficulty it’s surprisingly too easy.

The same problems I have with 3E but worse.

3E wants to be a fiddly rules-heavy game but leaves a bunch of things up for DM discretion. The result is ‘player vs. DM’ type games and the player usually wins if they get past level 2 because of how fucked up the scaling is. The game has baby things in it like ‘negative hit points’. In my day. 0 HP meant your character was dead. Dead dead. Flanking rules led to silly, unrealistic combat tactics. Feats were just ridiculous.

5E tried to temper the scaling and simplify the game. Most of the ridiculous stuff you could do in 3E isn’t possible anymore, so 3E fans hate it. Vancian magic is replaced by a system that is somehow more confusing and convoluted (seriously, new players don’t even try to understand it. I have had to sit them down and explain it to them directly), so it fails its goal of being simpler. The advantage/disadvantage mechanic is interesting but also super swingy. Nobody likes keeping track of spell concentration (they should have just limited status/buffs to one at a time or something). Saves don’t make any sense (wtf is a ‘wisdom save’?). The babying is even worse. You have at least three rounds to try to ‘stabilize’ after going to 0 HP. Non-magic classes like fighters get all these goofy superpowers, and unlike magic classes where magic rules are the same across classes, there are mechanics specific to each class (including magic classes ugh) that you have to spend familiarizing yourself with. It also makes it hard for new players as there really aren’t any ‘simple’ classes anymore.

There are a bunch of other little things that bother me. The gist is that ever since WotC got the series, the game has gotten more gamey and more role-play focused. Gone are the days of dying and quickly rolling up a new character. Now, if you die (which is rare anyway because of how much the game babies players) you usually will sit the game out for a while unless you just ‘restart’ your character with a different name because making a new character takes time not only to design but also familiarize yourself with all the various shit he can do. The game is player-focused in the sense that it’s all about allowing players to role-play as their fursona or whatever. In the old days, this is how you’d make a character:

1. Roll your stats
2. Based on your rolls, pick a complementary class, or just reroll if you’re not happy with the choices
3. Come up with a shitty backstory for your character

Now it’s:

1. Bring your woke, self-insert minority woman-of-color character to the table
2. Choose her race and class based on what makes the most sense for your character
3. Meticulously min-max her stats using point buy (conveniently forgetting her backstory for this purpose)
4. Min-max skillset based on stats and class (also conveniently forgetting that she has a character)

One last thing to add: the art is shit.

EDIT: to relate this to my earlier post, the things WotC did to D&D aren’t far off from what they did to Axis & Allies. In short, focusing too much on balance, playability, and making sure everyone has ‘something to do’ at all times results in a tacky shell of a game that has mostly the same mechanics as its predecessors, yet feels ‘off’ and inauthentic.

 

[Ghostse]

Setting aside the wokeshit, why do people hate 5E? I have never played any of the other editions so I’m genuinely curious. I’ll say this being that 5E is my first exposure to D&D and my DM said “this is one of my more challenging adventures” I’m kind of underwhelmed because in terms of difficulty it’s surprisingly too easy.

I liked one impartial reviewer's summary which was "it was the most soulless system he's ever had tons of fun playing".

I don't like 5e because its the worst parts of 3.5 and most of the badness of 4e with very few lessons learned.
Subclasses are unbalanced and only exist to sell supplements and provide faux depth; there's one OP subclass for each class and the others are window dressing.

Primarily I checked out when they went back to Vancian casting.

This is also when WotC started to go woke and terminated in the latest attempts to memory hole alignment for being problematic.

There's some good stuff in there to loot (stat boosts in leiu of feats, advantage, etc), but I hate the system because I hate WotC and that colors my perception of the system because its impossible to extricate the two.

There is also an issue with a Pavlovian response: all of the CR faggots want 5e and only 5e. So when I see 5e on anything I feel the red mist descending as I remember all the other people I want to murder.

 

[Adamska]

The same problems I have with 3E but worse.

3E wants to be a fiddly rules-heavy game but leaves a bunch of things up for DM discretion. The result is ‘player vs. DM’ type games and the player usually wins if they get past level 2 because of how fucked up the scaling is. The game has baby things in it like ‘negative hit points’. In my day. 0 HP meant your character was dead. Dead dead. Flanking rules led to silly, unrealistic combat tactics. Feats were just ridiculous.

Sounds more like you're not very good at designing fights IMO, since it's actually fairly simple to kill players still at level 2, especially since the base classes don't fully get into the swing of things until usually level 3 - 5. Also I think you're confusing ADnD with 3.x, since Player v. DM was more often in that edition.

And feats took quite a few updates in game to get better, since most of the ones for martials mainly were shit.

I get the vibe you mostly are the 1e only kind of guy who hasn't played any of the other editions all that much honestly with these two bits of criticism.

5E tried to temper the scaling and simplify the game. Most of the ridiculous stuff you could do in 3E isn’t possible anymore, so 3E fans hate it.

My only solid gripe when I played was that I don't feel competent when I roll for skill checks, since you never can quite stack the deck like you could in earlier editions.

Vancian magic is replaced by a system that is somehow more confusing and convoluted (seriously, new players don’t even try to understand it.

You're literally full of shit; it's still there. I've not played a caster, but slots and advancements are the same. I know they added tweaks to sorcerers given sorc points are gained and can be used to add slots and other effects, but it's still there.

The advantage/disadvantage mechanic is interesting but also super swingy. Nobody likes keeping track of spell concentration (they should have just limited status/buffs to one at a time or something).

Then don't fling your wizard into melee then.

Saves don’t make any sense (wtf is a ‘wisdom save’?).

It's called will saves dude.

The babying is even worse. You have at least three rounds to try to ‘stabilize’ after going to 0 HP. Non-magic classes like fighters get all these goofy superpowers, and unlike magic classes where magic rules are the same across classes, there are mechanics specific to each class (including magic classes ugh) that you have to spend familiarizing yourself with.

Yes, and fighters in 3.x and anything post 2e weren't designed well to begin with. Since you clearly never touched anything barring 1e it seems you'd not cotton on to how fighting men were no longer partially skill monkeys and no longer had the powers they did in ADnD. An ADnD fighter was actually fun; 3.x fighters I considered so boring they weren't worth playing ever.

It also makes it hard for new players as there really aren’t any ‘simple’ classes anymore.

Wrong. Barbarian's still a class.

There are a bunch of other little things that bother me. The gist is that ever since WotC got the series, the game has gotten more gamey and more role-play focused. Gone are the days of dying and quickly rolling up a new character.

Quickly meaning you needed to fuck off for about 10 minutes at minimum and you needed to then shove them in with the most bullshit excuse possible. This wasn't a bad change.

Now, if you die (which is rare anyway because of how much the game babies players) you usually will sit the game out for a while unless you just ‘restart’ your character with a different name because making a new character takes time not only to design but also familiarize yourself with all the various shit he can do.

This is so dishonest it hurts. If anything it'd be simpler and encouraged in a high lethality game to just reuse "Billy the Wizard" and rename him to "Jimmy".

The game is player-focused in the sense that it’s all about allowing players to role-play as their fursona or whatever. In the old days, this is how you’d make a character:

1. Roll your stats
2. Based on your rolls, pick a complementary class, or just reroll if you’re not happy with the choices
3. Come up with a shitty backstory for your character

Okay. I mean this hasn't changed other than in the straw man you build but okay.

Now it’s:

1. Bring your woke, self-insert minority woman-of-color character to the table
2. Choose her race and class based on what makes the most sense for your character
3. Meticulously min-max her stats using point buy (conveniently forgetting her backstory for this purpose)
4. Min-max skillset based on stats and class (also conveniently forgetting that she has a character)

One last thing to add: the art is shit.

I do miss water color paintings. It's the only thing I agree on with you in this case.

Now as for why I don't like 5e?

I actually liked it on release; I thought it was a pretty good shift getting between 3.x and then. But then Wizards started to write out splats and proselytize. Basically the game was mostly good as it was, but it's now getting crammed with unbalanced bloat that tries to preach at me.

 

[George Lucas]

@Adamska I can’t reply to your post, but I’ll just say that I’ve played more 5E than any other edition. There are a number of errors in your post. Will saves don’t exist in 5E. Magic in 5E for Wizards and Clerics is similar to Vancian, but there are differences. Concentration is a thing (saying ‘Wizards should stay out of melee’ is dumb; a good DM will throw out various ways of doing damage on the party not just limited to dudes with swords), certain spells can be cast at various levels, spell saves/spell attacks are calculated differently. I can go on, but it’s probably the most complicated system. Vancian was simpler. You have X number of level-specified spells prepared. Once you use them, they are used. 5E splits preparation from spell slots, so you can ‘prepare’ various spells but just spam magic missile all day if you want.

I haven’t played a regular wizard in a long time, so forgive me if I’m wrong, but every class has its own system anyway so it doesn’t really even matter. You pretty much have to learn a new magic system for every fucking class (including martial classes like monks which now basically have spells anyway).

Barbarians have rage and some other mechanics. They are simple but not simple enough that you can just read their entry up once and play (unless you play as barbs all the time).

Sorry, by player vs. DM I didn’t mean the traditional Gygaxian sense. I meant that for a DM, running 3E or later ends up being a game of players choosing various abilities from various books, and you often have to come up with contingencies on the fly and try to engineer the campaign to avoid either easy mode or targeting specific ‘problem’ strategies. I don’t think players even do this on purpose. I think it’s just the nature of the system. Spoony referred to 3E as ‘Dragon Ball Z DnD’ and I think it’s fitting.

I guess AD&D1E is my preferred version, but I don’t care much for tabletop RPGs to begin with. I do like DMing though, and I DM whatever the players want to play (usually 5E). I may be biased towards 1E, but I know many people share my opinions on 3E+, so I think it’s fair to look at my criticism as a part of the overall tapestry of 5E-hate. Again, apologies if I have some of the rules wrong. I haven’t played since pandemic started.