Written by: J.A. Iris (DesViper)
“5th edition” or “5e” refers to Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition, which was published in August 2014. As the originator of fantasy tabletop role-play games (TTRPGs), Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is the only game of its genre with a long enough pedigree to publish 5 editions. This most recent edition has been and continues to be an immense commercial success, enough to spawn Hollywood adaptations and continued video game adaptations such as Baldur’s Gate 3. Its design goal of becoming simpler and more approachable for a wider audience proved effective. It spawned a renaissance in the TTRPG community with Matt Mercer’s Critical Role switching from Pathfinder (a TTRPG originally based on D&D 3.5) to 5th edition.
All that said, 5th edition continues D&D’s history of being a combat-first game, with few distinct mechanics outside of delving into dungeons and fighting the dragons within. Visit our blog to read more about how our authors interact with 5th edition and other game systems; in this article, we will summarise the system, especially compared to D&D’s previous publications.
Advantages and Proficiencies
Previous editions of D&D lent heavily on their wargame roots with endless tables and addition and multiplication bonuses. It’s no wonder these editions spawned video games to do the math for you! 5th edition streamlined the mechanics and turn of play. Over a turn your character does the following: moves, has one main action to attack or cast a spell, and maybe has one additional action to do something special. Outside your turn, you have one “reaction”, usually for attacks of opportunity to prevent foes from running away easily.
The number of statistics to maintain also decreased. Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma, the same 6 statistics D&D started with, are all the numbers one needs to keep track of. No Reflex, Will, Fortitude or other numbers floating around a character sheet.
Many of these other numbers were combined into a universal bonus called a “proficiency bonus”. This bonus tracks how powerful a character is, ranging from +2 to +6, and overtakes nearly all the situational bonuses previous editions gave for height, size, resistance, synergy, miscellany, etc. With this, you only need to know if a given roll “has proficiency” or not. A roll without proficiency is a 20-sided die plus the most relevant of the 6 statistics above; a roll with proficiency simply adds +2 to +6 to the roll. This seemingly simple change allowed 5th edition to remove dozens of tables from the books and sought to free space for more story-telling and less arithmetic.
Another innovation of 5th edition is the advantage/disadvantage mechanic: instead of rolling a single 20-sided die, you roll two. If you have advantage, the higher roll is taken; if you have disadvantage, the lower roll is used. Parallel to the proficiency bonus, this mechanic removed much of the math involved in complicated situations like facing a much larger foe or being poisoned. Larger characters have advantage on rolls to grab smaller ones, and being poisoned imposes disadvantage. This mechanic is also widely used by GMs to give an edge to a player character. For example, they may have advantage on a roll to recall history and folklore about their homeland, whereas other characters might be less familiar but could still recall the information without this advantage.
Both of these innovations succeeded in making D&D more approachable to new players and levelled the learning curve considerably. This streamlining certainly contributed to 5th edition’s commercial success this past decade.
One-Size-Fits-All Edition
While the innovations of 5th edition, especially compared to past editions, succeeded in bringing many new players in, it also left many unsatisfied. The core mechanic remains: roll a 20-sided die, add the relevant bonuses, then look at the GM intently to see if the roll was a success or a failure. If it is a success, play (and therefore plot) progresses, but if it is a failure, nothing happens. The sword bounces off the dragon’s scales, or the knight easily shrugs off the wizard’s spell. The entire flow of time seems to halt. A skilled GM can flavour the failure as the knight struggling against the magic through sheer force of will wisdom, but the mechanics of 5th edition too often make no distinction between a failed roll and a turn having been missed entirely. Other systems, like Powered by the Apocalypse, a system famously used for Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game and Thirsty Sword Lesbians, employ partial success to mitigate the disappointment of a non-successful roll, but 5th edition continues D&D’s binary success system despite its innovations.
Additionally, the downside of streamlining mechanics is that complex situations become mechanically vague or oversimplified. For example, a goblin wants to climb on the back of a massive dragon to avoid its fire breath. Mechanically, this would involve grabbing the dragon, but logically, this would be impossible for a nonmagical goblin. This leaves the GM in the position of bending the rules everyone agreed to play by or following the tradition of Gygax and Arneston and inventing a new ruleset on-the-fly.
5th edition compromises between being a one-system-fits-all TTRPG and having the density of rules to satisfy every combat situation. GMs often take on the Arneston-esque game designer role to add in complexity that 5th edition chose to remove. This urge fragments the community such that no two 5th edition tables play the exact same game. Matt Mercer of Critical Role popularised “The Mercer Rule”, stating that taking a healing potion didn’t use a character’s main action, a rule that 5th edition’s design lead, Jeremy Crawford, now wants to make official.
Upcoming Revisions: 2024 5th Edition, One D&D, 5.5th Edition, etc.
As of the writing of this article, 5th edition is in a state of change. D&D’s publisher, Wizards of the Coast, has been in a tumultuous playtesting phase for the next publication of 5th edition core books this fall. Beloved fans wait with bated breath while sceptics begin to explore other games like Pathfinder or DC20. Third-party publishers have fragmented the game further since the core rules of D&D have been released under Creative Commons with Kobold Press releasing Tales of the Valiant, their take on revising 5th edition. The official publishers of D&D could find themselves building and selling a version of the game its community is no longer playing.
Yet, Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition continues to hold an unsteady market dominance in the TTRPG space. Its innovations have massively eased the barrier of entry to D&D, and by extension, the RPG community as a whole. The movies and video games expanding on 5th edition’s success continue to popularise the hobby we all enjoy. We can only hope the TTRPG community can build on this success and learn from 5th edition’s mistakes.
Sources:
https://gizmodo.com/dungeons-dragons-2023-retrospective-ogl-baldurs-gate-1851097352
https://kotaku.com/dungeons-deceptions-the-first-d-d-players-push-back-1837516834
https://kotaku.com/d-d-5th-edition-is-deeply-flawed-so-why-not-play-somet-1847698975