this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
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Look, they're the main characters of the story, they're supposed to look badass sometimes..
Plus it's just far more fun when players get to actually use the character building decisions they made. I think it's much more fun to base enemy actions on what they can reasonably perceive. If someone has innate fire resistance, let the enemy sorcerer cast burning hands on them once to figure that out. If it's a fabled and well-known Robe of Fire Resistance that they're wearing, any half-intelligent spellcaster will know not to use fire spells on them, but the goblins with flaming arrows might not be so savvy.
But you see, that's not how 5e works. 5e just throws an endless amount of instant problem solving abilities at your players to the point where there are no problems left except for "How do I deal even more damage?". It still kind of works with characters up to level 7ish, but everything after is just cool™ character moments without any problem left to overcome. I mean, there's a reason why almost no one plays double digit levels in DnD.
I just finished my last DnD campaign and am now enjoying my life with systems that allow me as the DM to actually challenge my players without the need to spend several days of preparation to make sure my encounters won't just be solved by a single "Um actshually..." sentence.
I don’t want to sit here defending 5e but 80% of the complaints I hear about always seem to boil down to “why isn’t the system creative for me?!”. It’s a lot of people self-limiting and then being mad.
You can instantly create a harder, thoughtful encounter by simply introducing more enemies than just one they can beat on, and/or by doing WHAT THE BOOK SAYS and get the players used to multiple encounters per day so they need to manage their resources. My DM wanted to make fights harder and I simply mentioned that a stronger enemy is cool and all but what would be better is making us have to make choices. I was a stupid accurate fighter and focused on range, and while feats and stuff made me a dangerous close-quarters fighter I was also the only one who could reliably down other ranged enemies. We played up to level 13 in that campaign and there were a lot of fights that were pretty stressful and fun. We even had a tournament arc and that was wild.
Your inability to create complex encounters is not the fault of the system, especially when the system literally tells you how to make it work and you ignore what’s in the book. But, of course, not reading the material is pretty standard procedure for D&D players.
Wrong. I'm perfectly capable of creating complex encounters. It's just a fact that the system actively punishes any DM who tries to set up a FUN encounter because there's so many special abilities that just simply solve any inconvenience at the cost of an action.
My players should feel rewarded because they managed to build a campfire from discarded boxes so that they have a steady source of light during an important fight and not feel punished because they picked one of the threeish races that don't have darkvision.
My players should feel clever because they managed to fashion a pulley system to move a significant amount of treasure out of the dungeon and not because they just stuffed everything into their bag of holding and forgot about it.
5e is boring by design and making it interesting means fighting against the system every step of the way!
“Wrong, I don’t reward players for being smart so it’s bad!” Dude my group went into town and bought a bunch of fertilizer and other things(because I checked and making explosives actually isn’t that difficult apparently) and that, plus a bomb-crazy dwarf we knew nearby, let us do some crazy damage to a golem.
You like a certain style of play, fine, but acting like that’s the only way to feel rewarded is showing your limitations, not the system’s.
You just gave a perfect example for my "How do I deal even more damage?" point and you don't even realize it. Do you? If all you have is a hammer...
I very much did not. He was complaining about D&D having spells that made him feel bad and I offered an example of how there’s more to 5e than spellslots to get the job done.
Do you think we don’t also talk our way out of problems? We do that all the time. I routinely, even with -1 charisma, would do shit all the time to get us out of dangerous fights and solve problems in more ways than “gun”.
And none of you have even given examples as to why other systems are better so please, do go on.
I’ve run campaigns all the way up the level 20. It’s still possible that to challenge the PCs, just increasingly difficult. Eventually it gets to be so much work on the DM that it’s not really worth it anymore.
Any favorites? Our DnD campaign just fizzled out due to several unsatisfying sessions - mostly due to an increasingly boring combat experience.
See, my question here would be "Why is combat boring in your games?" Because I see a lot of people try to fix D&D by focusing on making the most interesting board game possible, but roleplaying games aren't board games, they're stories.
For me, combat in systems like Shadowrun, D&D, WFRP, Storyteller and so on is boring because it brings the game to a crashing halt. The fact that it can takes hours of table time to play out a few rounds of combat in most of those systems is, to my mind, a far bigger issue than their relative quality as tactical gameplay experiences. Shadowrun tried to layer on more and more special moves and manuevers and combat abilities in the name of making combat more "interesting" and the effect was the exact opposite as so much more of the game became looking up the mechanics for the specific action you're trying to take.
Combat should be fast and vibrant, and sometimes really scary. A firefight in Shadowrun - my go-to because it's the game I run the most - should feel like a shootout from Heat or Ronin, or a John Wick movie. And it's impossible to make anything feel like that when it takes an hour for everyone to get a single turn in.
This is just my take at the end of the day, but I don't think the solution to boring combat is more or better rules. I tried that for years and nothing ever worked. What did work was finally shifting to more narrative focused systems with minimal, versatile rules that allowed me to treat combat just like anything else in the game. That way I could stop focusing on tracking hit-points and initiative, and I can make combat flow into the rest of the rest of the story in a way that feels natural, fluid, and visceral.
Completely agree. Combat should feel fast and dangerous. With 5e It feels exactly like what it is. A bunch of sweaty nerds having a make believe d*ck measuring contest of whose made up character is the most awesome. But combat is far from the only problem here.
I've switched to GURPS because the mechanics aren't so combat-focused, but it has interesting combat mechanics too. A lot of people think it's too complicated, but I've always started off super simple and slow-dripped additional mechanics as players get comfortable with the system and start actively looking for more crunch.
I do think it balances the super involved, tactical combat well by making rounds much shorter. Instead of 6 second rounds with Action, Reaction, Bonus Action, Movement, you have 1 second rounds that give you a single Action. There are ways to squeeze in a bit more on your turn, but it comes with trade-offs, like sacrificing active defense.
Active defense is also a great mechanic. Instead of just swinging at an AC, the defender actually gets an opportunity to Parry, Block, or Dodge. This means a lot less damage gets done every round, but that's balanced by having way fewer Hit Points. I always thought people chipping away at each other's mountains of HP until one dies to be kinda boring and unrealistic. In real fights, it's generally a back and forth of attack and defense until an attack finally gets through and does significant damage.
And I won't really get into all the details of the many different maneuvers available to you, or the techniques you can train. I'll just say that it's extremely tactical and provides for suspenseful combat with real stakes.
I think my biggest complaint might actually be that no matter what you plan to do, you're pretty much always better off just bonking your opponent and doing damage.
Taking an extra turn to sneak around enemies and take them out stealthily? Hitting two turns in a row is better! Grapling an enemy to give your teammate a better chance at succeeding his attack? Still, two bonks will do twice as much damage. Healing? Complete waste of time as long as your HP stays above zero (and even then it only matters when you're still down by the start of your next turn).
But I think my biggest paint points are not even combat related. It's stuff like dark vision, spider climb, passive perception or Alarm, fly or breathless nature. A lot of characters start with these get out of jail free cards from level 1. 5e players will never experience the sense of dread and excitement that comes from exploring a deep windy dungeon with only a couple of torches that may run out at any given moment. 5e players will never struggle to hunt down enough prey in the arctic wilderness because someone will just cast goodberry.
DnD takes everything that makes the journey just as interesting as the goal and throws it away. There's only this fight and then a long/short rest followed by the next fight. That's really all the fun DnD allows its players to have.