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I have made an entire playable dragon race template. It completely defies all 5e conventional design.
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Or, instead of twisting 5e into a different TTRPG, just play a different one better suited to your goals for the game
It's more that this game doesn't have enough content and variety. But it's popular, it's the zeitgeist, so it's what you can get your players to play.
Most homebrew isn't changing core rules. Just adding more variety. As long as the dragon race template runs in 5e rules, no problem. Balance will be harder be it's not like core 5e is balanced anyways.
Precisely. 5e's greatest strength is its' simplicity. A player who's never touched a TTRPG before will have a much easier time picking up 5e than a more niche system (although PF2e is definitely not bad on that front, 5e is just super simple and even has resources for absolute beginners)
But that simplicity is also 5e's greatest weakness. Once you're beyond the starting phase and understand how to play, then you realize how much stuff 5e is missing, you start noticing how some of the rules are oversimplified and unclear, and you REALLY notice how the game starts to get dysfunctional at levels 13 and above due to Quadratic Wizard and the fact that AC doesn't keep up with hitrate.
But 5e at its' core is a simple, robust system that's dead easy to homebrew for. So covering that weakness (and being able to keep finding players for your games) is entirely within the realm of possibility. And hey, unlike trying to mod an actual game, if you decide that at all costs you want to play an Actual Dragon? Fuck it, we Homebrew.
Now that's straight up not true. 5e is a lot of things (unfinished, unclear, underhanded) but it isn't simple. And thanks to it's inconsistency it's a nightmare to make good, reliable content for. There are many, many, many better systems to start a new player on and it's quite possibly one of if the worst to start a DM on.
It has some pretty good stuff for beginner players. Early 5e stuff is some hot garbage (Tyranny of Dragons isn't even a dragon-focused adventure, for fuck's sake. And don't even talk about Descent into Avernus and Curse of Strahd.), but more recent stuff like Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is actually pretty well-made, decently written with interesting character templates, and comes with some solid resources for walking beginners through how to play.
It probably skews my opinion that the only pf2e adventure I've tried to play was Strength of Thousands, which was just... Unfathomably low-stakes and dry. The system really excites me for all the balance improvements and much tighter mechanics, but if there's one thing that really just kills a group dead in a matter of two or three sessions, it's being boring. For all its' flaws, 5e adventures, homebrew or premade, are not boring.
I'm just gone give you a quick run down of the simplest ttrpg i play; Chronicles of darkness.
Every single roll uses the same type of dice and the numbers you need to hit are almost universally the same. Every skill, ability, power, or what-have-you uses the same simple system (with only two ways to resist/contest roles). All characters (including NPCs and monsters) are created in roughly the same way with roughly the same rules (with certain stuff added on depending on what you're making). The book has an entire section on homebrew, with guidelines and examples. Every book has advice on playing ttrpgs broadly (like setting up what's off limits from the start) and specifically Chronicles (like offering sources of inspiration). Speaking of books, there are plenty of them but you only need a single book to play a full game. The game also uses a major cheat code for the setting; it's set in the modern world, so new players have an easy time understanding what's going on.
I say all of that to say 5e is all together bad for new players. It's price gouging, it's convoluted, and isn't actively friendly to new players like other systems.
I will say that I think 5e is better at tactical combat and I think has a more popular genre, but other than that, I'm glad to see someone else with the church of Chronicles of Darkness.
I actually prefer world, like, by a massive margin, but Chronicles is by far the best game to recommend newbies imo (that I've had extensive time with).
I can agree that most of Paizo's adventure paths can be lackluster. I highly prefer PF2e to 5e, but my favorite adventure paths are the 3 part ones, Stolen Fates, Quest for the Sky King's Tomb, the 6 part ones definitely feel like they're stretching a plot to reach 6 parts and should have broken it into separate stories or fewer books.