Saying Goodbye to D&D 5E

In mid 2022, I decided to stop running my two-year-long Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons (D&D 5E or 5E) campaign and to migrate to a new tabletop roleplaying system. This post won’t touch on what I’ve decided to move to¹, but instead focuses on why I decided to make the move.

2021

It was the summer of 2021, when I was first introduced to a new soon-to-be friend - Kieran. We met at a mutual friend’s birthday party, which given the time period - the period of readjustment post Covid-19 lockdowns, meant rolling the dice on the weather and hoping for the best for the mainly outdoors affair. Despite both of us knowing our mutual friend for years, both I and Kieran had managed to avoid crossing paths but there was an instant sense of connection because of our shared hobby - playing roleplaying games.

Kieran was playing Quest, a game I’d recently backed on Kickstarter. This was a big surprise because Quest at the time felt a bit like a big secret. It was different to D&D 5E, the game me and my friends had been playing since before Covid. Playing D&D wasn’t particularly a decision we’d made, at the time we started playing D&D was just synonymous with roleplaying. In my circle of friends you didn’t play roleplaying games - you played D&D.

Quest though, was something different. It had slick branding with light airy art, a simple ruleset that felt welcoming to newcomers, and a premise that when you rolled the dice - it meant more than success and failure. In D&D you either succeeded or failed - there was no in between, but Quest had a whole spectrum of grey in between. The difference felt refreshing and exciting.

Soon Kieran and I were chatting about other games we’d heard about, wanted to play, and wanted to run. I’d backed and bought a handful of different games by this point - but I hadn’t really played any. My first chance was when Kieran ran 13th Age, a game like D&D but that wasn’t D&D. It had goblins, orcs, dragons, and a twenty-sided die but there were subtle differences. When I first played 5E I played a Wizard but got quickly lost in the mechanics of casting spells. My first character in 13th Age was a Wizard too, but my character felt streamlined and simpler. For instance, rather than having to worry about which spells matched with my spell slots, each spell told me how many times I could use it before I needed to rest. I walked away from that session not wholly impressed but with a new perspective. The session wasn’t great², but it felt like the game maybe was.

Quickly, the group that played 13th Age became a group of friends that played “other” games. We got a chance to play Ten Candles, and then we struck gold with Stealing the Throne. Stealing the Throne had been one of the games I’d backed during Zine Quest 2020, and was a game about stealing mechs. Playing it was more of an accident than anything. I’d ambitiously said to the group that I’d run an RPG for them but I’d run out of time to prepare anything substantial. Fortunately, it just so happened Stealing the Throne seemed like a small enough ruleset that I could read it and digest it in my lunch break. That evening, I played perhaps the best session of any RPG I’d played - ever. And it was completely different there was nothing D&D-like about it at all. There was no Dungeon Master, no twenty-sided die, and instead of three large hardback books it had a rulebook the size of a pamphlet. It wasn’t a perfect game, and it was a little fuzzy around the edges, but man was it fun! It wouldn’t replace any of the games I ran or played in week to week, but it felt great. The genie was out of the bottle and couldn’t be put back in - it was clear there were other games out there that were unique, interesting, and fun.

So What About D&D?

At some point that summer, while we were setting up to play 13th Age I’d mentioned offhand to Kieran what was happening in one of my D&D 5E games - and his response was stark. I can’t remember the words, but I remember the confusion and the assertion that D&D was the only game he’d never play again. I laughed, confused about how this conversation had taken a dramatic turn from small-talk, and attempted to brush the moment off. “Oh it’s not so bad. You must’ve had a bad DM,” I responded, as he spoke about the confusing cover mechanics. I confidently pointed out, “Oh, we don’t play with those rules. You don’t have to! I guess most people don’t.” Whilst I didn’t understand Kieran’s point of view, or the emotion that conveyed his point with the conversation left a last impression on me. Kieran was the first person I’d met, or even heard of, that didn’t enjoy D&D 5E.

The summer of 2021 and the new variety of games I was getting to play hadn’t really changed my mind about the game I loved. 5E was still good fun and still the game I wanted to play regularly. Other games were different and interesting, but they were a separate affair. Not something I reasonably imagined replacing the 5E sessions I played week in week out. Besides, if I found elements I liked I could easily try and replicate them in D&D. By this point I already had plenty of house rules to try and tweak the game more to my liking.

By the mid-Spring 2022 though, the limitations of Fifth Edition had started to become plain and were pushing up against my own creativity. And by the end of June 2022 I’d already penned the first draft of this blog post: “Saying Goodbye to 5E”. So what happened?

How Much Can The System Matter Anyway?

Roleplaying games are typically³ made up of a few key ingredients, each of which contributes to the experience of a shared imagined world. The players bring their personality, their creativity, and their characters’ goals and ideals; the person running the game (typically known as a GM or Game Master) and their refereeing of the game sets a tone, limits some ideas, and encourages others; the material to be played (be it a “pre-written adventure” or one of the Game Master’s own devising) introduces the key themes for the game and specific moments of action or tension; and the rule set is the skeleton underneath everything else that provides the structure of how the game is played. If the rule set doesn’t support the idea or element, it’s hard to weave it into the game.

Whilst the sum of a game is so much more than the rules, the rules immediately begin to include certain assumptions and preclude other elements. When I first volunteered to run a game of D&D I didn’t actually want to run a fantasy adventure. I wanted to run a time-jumping sci-fi based spy game. The thing is D&D doesn’t really let you do that. There aren’t rules for guns, heists, time travel, or crossing the genre barrier - and attempting to shoehorn them into D&D 5E would be swimming upstream. Instead, I was forced to go with something more like the game D&D expects you to play - a fantasy adventure.

D&D broadly assumes you want to play as an adventurer with a sword and a little magic setting off an epic quest to save the world. By default, you’re expected to go underground (into “dungeons”), fight dragons, and be a hero in a zoo-like high fantasy world where Gods are real, magic is commonplace, and monsters are dangerous (but also can be kept as pets). This set of assumptions is pervasive: from the gear that’s available to characters, to the classes characters can be, to the rules (or lack thereof) in the rulebook. D&D 5E is clearly focused on heroic combat-heavy high fantasy adventuring.

In mid-Spring 2022 it had become clear to me that there was a mismatch between the setting I’d spent over a year developing and D&D’s assumptions. My setting, Valinde, wasn’t high magic or heroic and was more analogous to Game of Thrones than D&D’s default setting. Playing a low fantasy setting with the rules of D&D and its core fantastical assumptions lead character sheets full of powerful magical abilities that didn’t fit with the rest of the setting. These abilities also posed real challenges for running the game, regardless of its tone.

For example, Paladins at level 3 gain the ability Zone of Truth which makes people around them unable to lie. In a world where a character can at will compel people to confess, it becomes near impossible to run mysteries. Similarly, some classes obtain the ability to telepathically communicate with someone anywhere in the world in an instant. If that’s possible, why would players ever need to go somewhere to speak to someone or investigate something? In that world Gandalf wouldn’t ride for days to Minas Tirith or to speak with Sauraman, he’d just message them with his mind - conveniently shortening the dilemma of the ring.

Of course “magic” can be the solution to these problems as much as it’s the problem, if it’s appropriate for your setting. For instance the person compelled to speak the truth might be warded by a magic amulet preventing Zone of Truth from functioning, or the person that must be urgently spoken to might live within a magical shield preventing telepathic communication. For me though, these solutions feel less like solutions and more like poor patching. They rob players of using their character’s interesting abilities, they confuse the matter at hand by adding in accidental gotchas (“Next time we cast Zone of Truth, let’s take all the jewellery off the person to make sure they’re not wearing another amulet!”), and as far as verisimilitude goes it reeks of the same contrived immersion breaking handwavey nonsense that Dr. Who’s Sonic Screwdriver is marred by. If the shared suspension of disbelief is the key to creating an imagined world to explore, inconsistent but convenient magical bullshit is the silver bullet to that in my mind.

The solution to my predicament seemed fairly obvious to me. The setting and game simply didn’t match, and it was time to move on from D&D. Instead, my setting and my players would be better served by a game that more neatly meshed with the tone and shape of Valinde.

Whilst the mismatch between setting and system was the biggest driver for me to change system - after two years of play on a more than weekly basis there were a few other things about 5E that were turn-offs or frustrations that I was glad to see the back of.

Where D&D 5E Excels

Now, before delving into all the other reasons for moving away from 5E I want to give credit to things this edition of D&D gets right.

The first and main strength I see in 5e is its ubiquity. D&D is, for better or worse, synonymous with roleplaying. Heck, D&D has basically genericized the term roleplaying. Shows like Critical Role and Dimension 20 are almost mainstream, most people who have played an RPG have played 5E, and almost anyone you meet who’s interested in trying it out will almost certainly have a preconceived notion that D&D is the RPG they want to play. This ubiquity comes with advantages: it’s easy to get people involved in playing your game and lots of people start with a foundational understanding of what D&D is, how it works, and even to some extent the mechanics of the game.

This ubiquity combined with the SRD and OGL has created a wealth of content for 5E which makes running and preparing a game incredibly easy. You can find advice, inspiration, monster stat blocks, and third party tools all over the internet and most are freely available. This is unparalleled, and no other game even comes remotely close to having as much reach or influence. That of course, isn’t counting the huge number of first party books that Wizards of the Coast has been pumping out⁴.

It’s also relatively easy to make your own content for 5E. The first piece of custom content I made for 5E was a whole-blown race. Since then, I’ve made countless other game elements: spells, sub-classes, monsters, items, feats, and more. Whilst creating truly balanced game elements is more art than science, for the most part - aside from making interesting monsters⁵, I’ve found creating new elements for 5E is relatively straightforward.

Fifth Edition also has a rich historical vein that can be tapped into. Things like Beholders, natural 20s, Strahd, and Vecna have a deep connection to a part of the hobby that existed prior to its modern renaissance. As a result, the game feels like more the sum of its parts and if you’re inclined, you can draw on inspiration from more than five editions of a game so old it invented and then continually defined the genre of fantasy roleplaying through half a century. Few games have such a back catalogue of settings, bestiaries, and advice. Whilst the modern sensibilities of the game have changed a lot since the original Ravenloft, the ideas present there are still relevant and useful in the games the newest incarnation.

Why Ultimately I Moved Away

So now, with the good stuff said upfront - what else was bothering me about D&D 5E?

Cost

The price of the game is not perhaps the biggest element of D&D I dislike, and was certainly something I tolerated, but it was I was keenly conscious of it throughout my time as a player and DM. D&D 5E is an expensive and anti-consumer game.

The starting point for creating your own adventures is the core rule set which has a RRP of £141. By way of contrast, the starting point for the Quest RPG retails at just $40⁶. Infuriatingly, D&D books (unlike most other RPGs) don’t come with a free PDF. Instead, the only way to get a legitimate digital copy is to separately purchase a license for the book on D&D Beyond - an online toolset for playing D&D.

D&D Beyond is excellent⁷, however it is expensive. If you want to purchase a digital edition of the book it costs as much as the physical edition - there is no real discount for purchasing a digital copy rather than a physical one⁸. The D&D digital model also only licenses you to read the content on their website. There’s no way to download it and save it for your own use, or to read it without an internet connection. Good luck if there’s a power cut or if your internet goes out during a session! And if you wanted to share your digital content with friends, much in the way you might share out a book, you also need to purchase the highest tier of D&D Beyond’s monthly subscription. If your friends want more than a couple of characters they’ll have to fork out for their own subscription too.

When compared to the cost of other TTRPGs, most of which have a single core book for no more than £40, free PDFs of the rulebooks, and either offer free or low cost digital content for a variety of third-party online tools it’s clear Hasbro⁹, who own D&D, are after your wallet. They’ve said as much.

Monopolistic and Anti-Consumer/Creator Behaviour

As a bit of a tangent whilst we’re on the subject of the relationship between the consumer and Hasbro, it’s worth me noting that in the time since I decided to move away from D&D, Hasbro have made a huge number of unpopular decisions. These decisions have drastically shifted the sentiment around the game and the landscape of third-party content.

The most egregious decision they made relates to the OGL, the licence that dictates how other people or companies can make content for use with D&D. The OGL debacle is incredibly well documented online but in a nutshell Hasbro decided to attempt to pull the rug from under all third party content creators by unilaterally changing the licence to require content made going forwards to be approved by Hasbro and to take a percentage revenue made over a certain threshold of sales. Whilst the provisions in the licence themselves were concerning, the fact they changed the licence at all, which was originally intended to be effectively immutable, created a huge sense of distrust amongst players and third-party creators of all sizes.

As a result, Kobold Press MCDM, Critical Roll, and many other large creators have changed the direction of their company to either develop their own games. These decisions weren’t made in isolation. Hasbro genuinely believes that D&D is under monetized and that as the creators of the game that they should be the lone source of content for players. D&D Beyond to them is a portal to sell official Hasbro D&D content, and not a tool for players. It’s why MCDM, Kobold Press, and Goodman Games content doesn’t appear on the website.

Of course, none of this really changes the game you can play with your friends - but I’m glad I left 5E behind before this happened. Giving money to Hasbro wouldn’t feel ethical to me.

Complexity

One of the most illuminating parts of playing other games was coming to the realisation that D&D 5E, despite being the most popular and well renowned roleplaying game, is actually on the more complicated and obtuse side. Over two years of more-than-weekly play you become quite numb to the complexity that pervades the game, but having played, taught, and run a lot of other games - Fifth Edition is both difficult to teach and to play.

Things like spell slots, the difference between simple and martial weapons, range bands, and even simple things like hit dice, armour class, and short rests are all unintuitive and right at the core of how the game works. And they’re things that other games handle much more simply, or simply avoid.

By no means is D&D 5E the only game to have complexity in it, there are plenty of TTRPGs which aren’t easy to get to grips with! The Witcher and Shadowrun, for instance, are renowned for their complexity - but they’re also games marketed on their realism and to an extent their simulation. I don’t think the core audience for 5E though is the same crowd that wants to play Shadowrun or The Witcher. 5E is a lot of people’s first, and often only, game and the bulk of the core audience is far less 1980s-geek/autist and is much more 2010-theatre-kid/fantasy-enthusiast. The mismatch of complexity to audience leads to a confusing experience. My friend David was super enthusiastic about the idea of playing a roleplaying game but had a terrible experience making a 5E character for a one-shot game and as a result refused the idea of playing another game until I managed to convince him that making a character in a different game would be much quicker.

Through the lens of my, admittedly novice, game designer eyes I feel like the job of RPG rules is four-fold.

1. Bring structure. Answer the questions “What can I do?” and “How do I know if I’m successful doing what I want to?”
2. Bring clarity by handling the weird things players do that can’t be narratively resolved.
3. Make it easier for the GM to keep the game running and provide a framework to create challenge and excitement for the players.
4. Help the GM bring the world alive.

A lot of the rules and rough edges of 5E don’t support these goals, instead they feel like bloat. Things like hit dice, the difference between saves and check modifiers, passive stats, and the differences between attribute scores and attribute modifiers aren’t there to bring clarity or bring the world alive, they’re simply archaic holdovers from older editions. They’re there because 5E was designed to recapture an audience that had fallen out of love with D&D when the fourth edition of the game was released. The complexity of 5E is designed to be nostalgic - and it is! Those legacy ideas speak to the cultural impact of D&D, but they also make it harder to disconnect from the mechanics of the game and focus on enjoying the game.

In some cases, it’s possible to avoid these rules entirely. As a DM it’s entirely possible to say “Don’t worry about martial weapons or simple weapons, everyone can use a greatsword!” or “Don’t roll hit dice - you can recover a fixed amount per rest” with only a little extra hassle, but often it’s a feat, spell, or class feature that puts you on the back foot as a DM. What happens when a spell casts dim light in a dark area or a character suffers a third level of exhaustion? You can either rule it on the fly, or look it up quick. Either way - the game has made more work for you as a DM and the game has likely slowed down.

In the last Fifth Edition game I ran we had to stop the final battle for five minutes to figure out the poorly worded mechanics of a spell that had three different effects, each of which occurred at separate distances from the spells line that was drawn originating from the player. It was as confusing, session muddying, and anti-climatic as it sounds - and totally avoidable! A moment that pulled players away from the moment at the table and verisimilitude, and towards mechanics and overhead.

One Mode of Play

As a player, one of the ways to deal with the dizzying levels of complexity: the hundreds of spells to choose from, the seemingly endless number of race/class/subclass combinations, and the abilities provided at each level is to choose is to simply look up what’s good online¹⁰. This isn’t in the spirit of embodying a character and making choices from their perspective, but it is a way to simplify things and make sure your character is effective. It certainly beats figuring out the spell that you thought was useful is really just a useless trap choice¹¹. Of course, you need not necessarily look online to find out what’s good. One of my friends literally graphed the impact of each of his healing spells, so he’d know what the optimal choice was to use in any given moment. I’m not sure if that’s fun, if you’re the kind of person that enjoys graphs it might but, but it sure as heck isn’t character first roleplaying. It’s fighting against a system to make sure your character can be effective.

A couple of my character’s key character themes have been sacrificed on the altar of effectiveness too. Like my druid always transforming into a bear in combat or my wizard always using lightning spells¹², both of which were sidelined in favour of sites like rpgbot and hard numeric number crunching when I realised it’d leave them ineffective for doing so. D&D’s game loop reinforces and rewards these choices - D&D is a power fantasy, a game about powerful heroes doing heroic things, and in 5E by default the assumption for heroes is that they kill things. Being powerful in a game about power fantasy feels good and conversely, making decisions that are more fulfilling in terms of the character you imagined can push you away from feeling empowered or successful when combat rolls around. Instead of lopping the heads off of evil-aligned Orcs like your friends, if you design your character poorly it’s possible to be in the position when you feel like every other member of the party shines in combat whilst you’re struggling to make a difference - particularly at higher levels of play.

And if your character isn’t good at combat, 5E doesn’t give you a lot else to be good at it. By my assessment characters in 5E are built primarily for combat. Most feats, a lot of spells, and most class abilities are focused around the idea of getting better at fighting enemies. Character advancement and creation is undoubtedly at the core of the game (look online at how many people have designed their next character well in advance of being invited to play their game!) but there isn’t much else to be good at other than combat. Whilst combat takes up the vast majority of the structured rules of the game, there are either no or few rules that are related to the other pillars of the game: social encounters and exploration. Complementing the lack of rules is the lack of abilities focused on the other pillars of play, to make your character good at those “pillars of play” is effectively identical to making your character have a bigger bonus in Persuasion or Survival. That is, unless you’re a spellcaster.

Well documented is 5E’s martial & spellcaster divide. Whilst characters that hits things with sharp pointy weapons, spellcasters get a plethora of utility focused abilities that can be used to play character-sheet solution whack-a-mole to the problems that come up. “We need to send a message to a castle to warn them about the Goblin army!” says the Warrior as he heads to the stables to prepare his horse. “No worries!” smiles the Wizard, “I’ll just use Sending to let the castellan know!” Whilst I’ve never played at a high level, it’s fairly well documented online that these problems only get harder to solve as spellcasters get more and more access to high level spells that solve campaign defining problems like Wish and Scrying. By comparison, warriors get to hit something next to them a third and fourth time.

I Think Better Is Out There

For the sake of brevity, I won’t mention any of my smaller frustrations with 5E and I’ll instead just say that Kieran and I now share the same opinion. Now 5E is a game I don’t really want to play again.

This isn’t something I expected or imagined. I’ve had a long journey with D&D 5E full of fantastic memories and I really liked the game. I remember getting my friends together to do a group read through of the Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything supplement when it was released. I spent more time than I’d care to imagine tuning into D&D Beyond’s livestreams to learn more about what was coming next. Believe it or not I even purchased every single D&D book, both digitally and physically, during my time with the hobby. Heck I’ve introduced myself at jobs by saying I ran games of D&D. I was in pretty deep.

So if I have so many positive memories and experiences, why do I not want to play 5E again? Well, by playing other games I realised it’s not D&D I like - it’s roleplaying and my friends. All my positive memories from the game are the people and the moments. And whilst playing and running D&D was fun, it was also very frustrating at times. Often, running 5E felt like I was fighting against the game itself. In the last session I ran, in late 2023, I was loving running 5E again right up until combat started and 5Es actual rules, spells, and abilities reared their ugly head slowing the game to a crawl.

There are certainly ways to mitigate a lot of the issues I’ve found D&D. You can ban certain feats, spells, and classes. You can also bring in some third party content, or house rule some things¹³, to mitigate some of the game’s rough edges. Ultimately, I tried that, and I would’ve gone further if it wasn’t for the nagging feeling that I was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

D&D was never going to be a low fantasy game that fit my setting - it never wanted to be. And I found out that, out there, there are games that are a better fit for, or are more easily tailored to fit, the kinds of games I enjoy running. I also found that there are games that I think are a slightly better fit for what most people are looking for when they play D&D[^whichgames].

Now I appreciate, my opinion here isn’t going to be one everyone shares. A lot of folks out there really enjoy playing 5E, and if that’s you - if you’re reading this and think I’m completely off base and that D&D Fifth Edition is the only game you ever want to play. That’s cool! I don’t think you should stop running or playing a game you love! If you don’t want to try other systems or have tried them and don’t like them - stick to what you know and love!

My experience is the opposite though. It took feeling a little unsettled with what I had to push me out of that comfort zone to see what was out there, and I don’t want to downplay it, finding the stuff I enjoyed took some trial, error, and effort. I found getting familiar playing a new system can take a while, and learning to run a new system can certainly be challenging too. I suck every time I run a system for the first time, and the second time, and probably a few times after that. Heck, I’ve definitely had more bad experiences trying new games than good ones. It takes a couple of sessions before everyone’s familiar enough with a new system to enjoy it. That, and the fact that while you might be running or playing a game that’s not D&D a lot of peoples brains have been programmed to play just D&D.

All of that is really just me trying to say, trying something new can certainly be an investment but, for me, it’s been one that paid off. Playing the Alien RPG, Vaesen, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, and Dragonbane were some of my highlights of 2023. And in 2024 I’m really excited to see what else is out there, develop my skill set as a Game Master, and play with my friends. It just won’t be in 5E from here on out.

If you’ve made it to the end here are a couple of recommendations.

If I wanted to run a high fantasy game for my friends these days, and was looking for something with a D&D feel I’d probably play one of:

• Quest for a simpler game that values roleplaying over mechanics. It’s fantastical, gorgeously stylistic, and easy to teach.
• 13th Age for a game that feels almost exactly like D&D but with a touch of streamlining and a few other excellent ideas to bring characters more to the fore
• Pathfinder for a game that is just a little crunchier and perhaps more “mechanically sound” than 5E
• Dragonbane for a game that’s more dungeon diving and adventure but with more danger and stakes.

Some games I want to try in 2024:

• Symbaroum, a gritty dark deadly fantasy game by Free League - the same folks I love from Alien RPG, Dragonbane, and Vaesen.
• The One Ring, Middle-Earth brought to life in the period between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
• Die RPG, based on the comic by Kieron Gillen DIE is Jumanji for roleplaying games. You have a character in the real world, but you’re trapped in a fantasy world stitched from your own dreams and nightmares.