>In my late 40s, I came back to the hobby I'd left three decades previously and I had a blast with 5E. I still do, in an ongoing campaign. There's a lot about the mechanics I admire, but I do share several of my gaming generations' hesitations about the system. The power level is considerably higher than my druthers, not even so-called epic fantasy, but Tolkien-inflected Justice League. Of course, there's always been class roles, but in 5E, the rules and multi-classing methods, the notorious dip, and the stacking, branching abilities lend themselves and lean in not just to power gaming and min-maxing, a way of playing that's always left me as cold as a frost giant, but more generally to a drab and wrote build culture, strongly influenced by video games, for which left field choices, eccentricities, surprises, let alone randomness, are, broadly speaking, discouraged. Just look at the widespread hate for the Wild Magic sorcerer by some way, the most interesting class in 5E. And to be clear, of course, I'm delighted for you if you don't play the game that way, and I'm also delighted for you if you do play it that way, and you love it. I'm not the cops. I'm not lawful. But this is how the implied rule culture of 5E sits with me. And along with that evolution came an epochal shift in aesthetics. Look at the modern illustrations. Again, your mileage may vary, and Godspeed to you. But for this grumpy old man, the pastle garishness of 5e images, the glitz and schmaltz, the weird superposition of epic, kitsch, twee, heroic and cozy, does very little.Do you agree?
im not reading all of that, but congrats. Or sorry that happened. Maybe both.
>I hate that players in DnD can actually do things besides dying to instant kill traps and poking things with 10 ft polesWow grandpa, I have never heard that said before
>>98896179>Do you agree?No, I can't find any evidence that he said any of that.
>>98896179nodidnt read btw
>>98896179Do you have a source for that? It's uncommon that Miéville speaks about ttrpg these days. Provide a link.
>BaldNot reading
>>98896422>>98896742https://thegrognardfiles.com/2025/04/10/more-magic-in-rpgs-with-china-mieville/At 53mins
>>98896179>I had a blast with 5ENo.
>>98896179> the rules and multi-classing methods, the notorious dip, and the stacking, branching abilities lend themselves and lean in not just to power gaming and min-maxing>bitching about 5eDid this nigger miss 2000-2007?
>>98897859>In my late 40s, I came back to the hobby I'd left three decades previouslyYou tell me
sounds like a guy who didn't play 3.5
>>98896179>Do you agreeFuck around and find out
>>98896179I don't read authors who bash Tolkien, it just shows they're jealous of their better.
>>98898542But Tolkien's books are boring?
>ITT, I can't read
Unreaded, saged and reported
Yeah I agree it's based. And it makes up for him shitting on tolkien for being "immature" which just proves he didn't get it.
>muh sacred cow
>For all those reasons, I was one of many excited by the OSR, but like Glorantha, your nostalgia will vary. The OSR constructs certain tendentious fables about its honored antecedents, and that's 100% fine. All artistic moments do so, that's part of the Creative Act. Just so long as people don't necessarily mistake that for universal, accurate histories. More frustratingly, I soon found out that for all the incredible creativity in the OSR space, a few of its widely shared tenets didn't chime with me. Me? I like just a smidge more crunch than the savage pairing knife instincts of rules light, for example. And in particular, I regret the ruthless stripping down of character options, the disdain for skills, for feats, for the much derided backstory. And along with all that often comes a certain easy-come-easy-go attitude to characters in general. That's not what I want, nor how we, my table, at least, used to play. Absolutely the games were more lethal, and absolutely our characters died. But, and this was 1981 and too, we spent hours on those back stories, the OSR Edge Lords, so enjoyed despising. And in our youthful way, we adored the RP aspects which demanded and fed back into character specificity, what set them apart, in fluff and maybe crunch too, from generic fighterness, thiefness, clericness, and so on. And if, when they did die, we were appropriately sorrowful, which was part of the point.
>>98898542The Bas Lag trilogy is actually worth reading (because it's everything he professes to hate).
>>98905239I wonder if anyone here has run it as a setting
>>98898542China Mieville and Moorcock are great authors. Their works are worth reading.But their hate of Tolkien is retarded contrarianism, yeah.
Apologize
>>98900724There's nothing to get
>>98896179this was pretty much my take on 5e the one time friends got me to play it
>>98906212No, I'm not going to apologize. I think China Melville is a pretentious fart-sniffer.BUT.That doesn't mean I can't agree with him. He's right.
>>98896179Hes a pretenious douche
>>98896179A bit too verbose, but mostly correct. TTRPG and board game design has been heavily influenced by video game design and balancing over being its own thing for over a decade now, at least. The generalization of art styles and too much focus on crunch.I can agree with basically all this.
Most people play 5e wrong. It's balanced around 6 to 10 resource draining encounters with a Short rest after every two or three. That's not just combat, and can be puzzles, searching places, needing the Wizard to use Fly, and so on. But because no one plays that way it seems unbalanced. It's really not.
>>98896179Eeh more or less. I think it's completely understandable that new generations try and adapt their games to other things they know and like (in this case, stuff like video games, anime, movies, etc.). I also think that DnD isn't really suited for that, so it does make for a weird superposition of a bunch of different things. The books try to encapsulate a lot of different styles at once and lets the DMs and players decide how they want to do their setting and characters.That being said, I prefer to be a bit more old school with my settings and characters. I find it a bit jarring to have a multi-class anime-like character in the middle of a more classic group, or vice-versa.
