My friends and I started playing DnD during COVID. We’re all at least normal intelligence, college educated people (I even work in a job where I regularly research federal regulations, so I’m used to navigating complex rules). Our biggest complaint was how obtuse and difficult to pin down some of the rules in this game are.
Six of us spent a half hour trying to figure out how darkvision works, and the answers we found online didn’t seem to match up with what we were reading in the handbook. You would find something mentioning darkvision, but it wouldn’t explain how it worked. Then somewhere else would say something different about darkvision. It seemed like you needed to go to multiple different sections of the handbook to piece everything together. We encountered multiple instances of this.
Our one friend defended it all saying it’s deliberately obtuse to allow for DM flexibility, but most of us disagree with that approach. The rules should be explicitly stated, and then a caveat added that all rules are flexible if the DM wants them to be. There should not be a debatable way to play the game, as far as official rules are concerned. How you bend the rules is entirely up to you.
While it’s true that 5e places a lot of the work on the DM, I think in that case your group just failed to read the rules properly. Darkvision is one of the more well-defined abilities in the game.
When six newbies struggle to figure it out, then it isn’t well-defined. Or at the very least isn’t well structured to find the definition quickly. I will die on this hill.
I think what you’re actually alluding to is that the books are poorly organized, which is indeed a common complaint. Darkvision is very clearly explained, but the explanation is “treat dim light as bright light and darkness as dim light”. In order to understand what that means mechanically, you then have to go find the section on light levels and obscurement (and then the rules on obscurement require you to read the blinded and invisible conditions). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing and is actually how most TTRPGs handle nested mechanics, but D&D notoriously has a really bad index in the PHB, which means it’s very hard to actually find the nested mechanics you need. Lots of other TTRPGs will give you a page reference or something when they reference rules found in other parts of the book. 5e doesn’t.
While I’ve come to appreciate and prefer the crunchier PF2e, I’ve gotta say I agree with this. I bounced off of D&D multiple times as a kid, and only when I was first exposed to 5e did I actually stick with it long enough to really discover the beautiful world of TTRPGs. D&D may not be the best system, but it’s the gateway drug.
Just so long as WOTC continues to fuck up and do something despicable once every few months which encourages all of their players to branch out and try other systems, all will be right with the world.
What a lazy article. It’s just restating the PHB text of the subclass with the most blindingly obvious commentary. The spells they suggest aren’t even good suggestions. They mention a bunch of blaster spells which are not great on EK due to low spell slots.
I always tell my players: the best sessions aren’t the ones that are planned and executed perfectly. It’s the sessions where things go tits up and you manage to find a way to prevail that stick with people.
Amazing! I did the same thing… Never played just started DM’ing form friends… the satisfaction of a good session lasting for days and the afterthoughts is very rewarding. This is the true spirit of the game that brings back people to the table session after sesssion. I remember being rigid on my first sesssions and then we had a wild one where I had to improvise because the party went off track and everyone remember that session! We are four years into the campaign and they are going to the final act. They finally are on the right way behind the bad guys, a lot has changed, I hope they win.
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