Glutton for Punishment

As you might have gathered, I am currently DM'ing a 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons game, but this is far from my first D&D rodeo, so to say. For me and many others out there, D&D was my introduction to tabletop RPGs, way back in the days of sometime in the mid to late 1980s (it's been so long ago, I can't remember exactly), but it was most definitely Basic D&D.

Quick trivia question and history lesson: How many editions of D&D are there? Well, we're on what is officially labelled "Fifth Edition", so you'd be surprised that this is actually the 9th iteration of said RPG. There was the original, colloquially and unironically known as OD&D (for Original D&D), followed by 1st edition, but even 1st edition contained Basic, Expert, and Advanced so already we're up to 4 distinct iterations. 2nd edition came out, and they narrowed everything back down to just the one edition for the 5th iteration. 3rd edition was very popular with gamers, but got split and reiterated into Edition 3.5 after Wizards of the Coast (D&D's publisher at the time, who themselves bought it from TSR, D&D's original publisher) got bought by Hasbro, for the sixth and seventh iterations. 4th edition came out and lasted for a few years without any splits or reiterations (and besides OD&D, is the only edition of the game I haven't played), and now we're on 5th edition, which also has yet to fork. See? Nine separate iterations. And really, I also like to include Pathfinder from Paizo, because it is a further split of Edition 3.5, and not so much a different game entirely and competitor of D&D as it is an improvement and continuation of 3.5e published as WotC moved on with 4th edition.

Out of all of that, 3rd edition is easily my favorite. It really seemed, to me at least, that the authors of that edition had plenty of support and backing from their managers and a real desire to head off as many questions as possible by codifying as many things in the rules. This last didn't always work for them, enough that they updated the rules set once themselves, but was further refined by another publisher completely. 4th edition felt like WotC was pandering to the World of Warcraft crowd (it feels that way to me, apologists, and lots of other people, so I'm not just being bitter here), and while that set of rules had some very interesting parts to it, it never appealed to me enough. But now they have (and I'm running) 5th edition... WotC really is trying with this one, but mostly it feels like an apology to all of us who skipped over 4th edition, while trying to simplify all rules yet still include all the most popular bits from every edition stretching back to OD&D.

I feel they've done a decent enough job with 5th, but you can tell that Hasbro (WotC's parent company) has really cut back on staff around the D&D production offices, as this current edition is missing a bunch of basic things that have been identified in several of the past editions as useful to both the DM and the players. As a DM, the reference tables in the Monster Manual are woefully lacking (check that, they're completely absent) and the two updates in Volo's Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes have mere stopgaps in amongst their extra content and still don't fulfill the needs of a modern DM. Since this is a teaching blog (supposedly), if you are DM'ing 5th edition, I strongly suggest you make the acquaintance of one of the many online resources that give you basic monster info in an easy to reference table, like this one here. There's also a lot of questions about the rules (the Thief, sorry, Rogue, can Hide as a bonus action... they are standing in the middle of a room full of bad guys and no cover, what does that mean?) that are too vague - on purpose, to allow each DM leeway? or on accident? no one who knows is talking! - or poorly defined and just raise questions from all sides. There are more examples that I can give of this, but trust me, there are many things in the 3 core rulebooks and even the 3 supplemental rulebooks (the two I just mentioned and Xanathar's Guide to Everything) don't fully fix everything they should. Some of these books have been out over 4 years now, folks, you kind of expect something more than a few errata files.

I'm still running my current campaign using 5e rules, however. Yes, I know, I just spent two paragraphs praising another edition and critiquing the one I'm using, but I have reasons. Mostly it's the group I'm running for now is the leftovers from a previous gaming group, and they were playing 5e when I joined, so inertia is mostly why we're still playing 5th edition. That and it would be a real dick move on my part to tell my players "you've all got 5e books, that's fine, put them away and go buy 3rd edition (or 3.5 or Pathfinder) books 'cause we're playing that now!" Plus, while I have problems with 5e, it's still good enough that I can make it work despite the blemishes. Oh well, the current campaign I have laid out for the party stretches for a grand total of all 20 levels (though I've been toying with dragging it out into possibly in the neighborhood of level 30), but at some point, whether the party members retire (the characters, not the players) or I TPK the group, we will shift off of 5e to something else. There's always other games I and the party want to play (Tales from the Loop is already a good palette cleanser we use, but we have many others to hand), but unless WotC does a lot to fix 5e between now and then, I foresee switching over to 3/3.5/Pathfinder or even Pathfinder v2 (whatever that ends up being called). Already reviews of the Pathfinder Playtest are surfacing, and they are comparing it favorably to 5e, so we'll just have to wait and see.