#might be harder for me to divorce them from being similar lmao.

[greyplainsttrpg]

5e Villain Arc 2

Last time we discussed 5e's stupid non-name. This time we're going to talk about chapter order.

I saw a post earlier about giving suggestions to 5e Players to "read the rules." While it is always a good time to poke at the children, I don't think that it is actually their fault (entirely) that nobody playing the game knows the rules. The Chapter order of 5e (and most TTRPG books, for that matter) is not conductive to actually knowing how the game works. This is compounded in 5e in particular because the game design is such that you never really have to learn anything outside what your character can do.

It is okay to divide chapters into parts. That's fine. What upsets me is that the Chapters have titles, but the Parts do not have titles. What is weird is that the game's introduction actually provides pretty good names for the three parts, albeit in inconsistent formatting: Adventurers, The Three Pillars of Adventure, and The Wonders of Magic.

Those align pretty much exactly with the three Parts of the book. Why is that not their names? Why must I divine what the parts are by intuition. This is not an abstract art piece--this is a textbook.

More importantly, the order of information is entirely wrong.

The reason why Players do not know how to play that game is because the rules for the game show up in between things that they actually care about. The game is so hyper-focused on a player making a character that it abdicates the responsibility of knowing how to play the game exclusively to freaks who actually want to read the rules in depth. You know: min-maxers and rules lawyers. The average player's interaction with the book is thus:

Read the introduction and get the gist of the game.

Make a Character through part one.

Oh wait, now I need to flip to the end of the book for spells (since more than 3/4 of all characters will have spellcasting)?

The Player FEELS like they have read more of the book than they actually have because they went through the process of flipping through it from beginning to end. However, at no point did they ever get a real understanding of how the game actually functions. They grasp that they have a thing called an action, a thing called a bonus action, and they have some amount of movement, but what these do does not mean much to them outside the confines of what their Character can do with those elements. They never learned what those terms actually mean, because the action economy of the game is not explained until WAY later (page 189). Even if you bother to read this section, it is entirely divorced from other important, very relevant sections. In particular, the exclusion of Saving Throws and Conditions from the Combat Chapter means that it will be even harder to guarantee a player will have read them.

Why are conditions in the appendix? They should not be in the appendix. They are standard things that players will encounter during regular gameplay.

Why are backgrounds AFTER class? Would it not make much more sense to put the background BEFORE the class? It is, after all, your background, the thing you did before gaining a class level. If you pick a background that compliments your Class by giving you similar skills, then you just get to pick random skills instead? This would not be a problem if you picked a background first (which gives you a set of skills without choice) and then you picked the skills from our class. I suppose the problem might still arise from tool proficiencies, but tool proficiencies suck, and they should be done away with, anyway.

Now that I'm looking at it, another case of "why are these in two different chapters lmao."

The reason they designed the book this way is because of the tradition of D&D being laid out in the dumbest way possible. Do not trust Gary Gygax's ability to convey information through text. He was not good at it. AD&D is a disaster of explaining its mechanics to the player, and 2nd edition is not much better.

The formatting of the book also sets a really bizarre trend throughout modern gaming that making a Character is the first thing every new player should do in a system when, like, no? Making a Character is a complicated process in most, if not all, games. At least in the sense that you have to make a lot of decisions upfront. The best way to introduce a player to a system is to have them play a pre-made and put a book in front of them whenever they want to review whatever is listed on their sheet. Once they've played the game, then they can evaluate how to make a Character because they will actually know what they are building towards. The formatting D&D has maintained funnels GMs and game designers everywhere to force new Players into a awkward, decision heavy first couple of hours instead of playing the game.

I'm not saying players can't make a character before ever having played the game. People want to do that sometime for my system; however it is a lot of work and time on my part to babysit you reading the most complex part of the book and answer your questions when MOST of what you are about to ask would be covered during typical gameplay.

Okay, that's pretty much all I have to say about this, I think.