Here I am, punctually after the announcement of D&D's new edition.
Punctual because for several reasons, I was waiting for this for a long time already.
- I'm really, really tired of D&D 5e. There is no fun material coming out anymore, and the few interesting things that came out after Xanathar's Guide To Everything (the last book I liked) were marred by game design choices that I seriously disliked.
- I'm a game design freak, but instead of enjoying the differences of the many systems out there (which I anyway read whenever I get a chance), I always want D&D to be good for every need. This is inside me to stay, like an incurable autoimmune disorder...
- I strongly believe that I can't be the only one who disapproves of the direction the mechanics of the game took. Sure, most of the gamers I know are utterly in love with 5e, but I refuse to believe I alone see the defects. I'm not a contrarian hipster or grognard: I really want to feel part of the community, because (at least until some years ago) I really always liked it, for as long as 80% of my whole life.
Ok, I wanted to be concise and schematic with bullet points, but predictably wrote too much, so let's get into the "crunch", starting from what I've been teasing: what I don't like of 5e.
What D&D 5e was supposed to be, but never was.
The 5th edition of D&D started as a very ambitious project during its playtest "D&D Next" phase, but even before release, it had already lost a lot of features it was supposed to have.
Here are the first things that 5e "lost" early on, which I really wanted and never got again.
