I very much like 5e, and am looking forward to starting up my first full campaign in a couple of weeks. That said, there are a few things that bug me. Not enough to abandon the game, you understand, but enough to set my teeth on edge. For example:
- The Character Sheet: I spent a couple of frustrating hours at the week painstakingly entering the PCs for the new campaign into the PDF form character sheet. And my overwhelming impression after doing this is that I'm very glad I didn't spend hours whipping up an auto-calculating form from the sheet. Because the official 5e character sheet sucks. Some things that are quite important are in a teeny tiny space, some things that are unimportant have huge amounts of space, there's no space at all for some key things (such as weapon keywords), and the spell sheet is carefully designed to have too much space for Wizards, Bards and the like and not quite enough for Clerics and Druids. It's just annoying.
- Why are Wizards Proficient in Weapons: In days of yore, the various classes had different attack bonuses (BAB, or THAC0, or attack matrix, or whatever), and there was also a penalty associated with not being proficient with the weapon. In that model, it made sense that Wizards could be proficient in a weapon - they would thus avoid the penalty but still not be particularly good. But 5e has replaced the attack bonuses with a unified Proficiency Bonus, which by rights therefore should apply to "those things the class is good at". Characters who aren't proficient don't suffer a penalty; they just don't get the bonus, and so don't get anything. And under that model, then, Wizards really shouldn't have any weapon proficiencies, any more than Fighters should be proficient in magic. It's not what they're about, so why is the Wizard as good as the Fighter with a quarterstaff?
- Armour: Similarly, I'm a little peeved that 5e threw away one of the advancements of 4e, and switched back to having many different armours in each category, some of which are quite clearly than the others. 4e had it right on this one - all the Light armours should be equivalent, as should the Medium ones, as should the Heavy ones (and then differentiate with other traits for those with custom armour). This would also allow them to tie the armours into the same Proficiency Bonus mechanism as everything else: Light gives the bonus, Medium x2, and Heavy x3.
- Alignment: I've complained about this before. Now it has been removed from the mechanics of the game, and especially since Traits, Bonds, Ideals, and Flaws do it better, it's time to remove it from the game entirely.
- Multiclass hit points: 5e has the same flaw as 3e here, in that characters get max hit points at 1st level and then a lesser amount thereafter. This means a Wizard 1/Rogue 1 is different from a Rogue 1/Wizard 1. Fortunately, this is an easy one to fix, if it ever comes up at all.
Still, just a few annoyances, which is good - and nothing like the mess that was multiclass skill points for 3e...
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