The worst part about 5e

Besides the semi-immortality of PCs, that is. I bet you're dying to know. The answer is its pluralities of disassociated choices and disassociated designs.

Short and sweet, this could be my shortest blog entry for a long while.

Who knew blogging was this easy? Let's just party instead.

Alright alright, I'll go into some detail to explain what I mean. Others have gone into more detail about disassociated mechanics. Briefly a a disassociated mechanic is a mechanic that does not refer to an event being resolved in the fiction.

"I cast Charm Person" is an example of an associated mechanic. You take an action in the game world and something happens in the rule mechanics (a save vs spells) that then affects the outcome in the fiction too.

Most infamous of disassociated mechanics is Trip attacking oozes in 4e, where the action of "tripping someone" in the fiction is wholly secondary to the mechanic initiation and outcome. But 4e has of course often been described as basically a tactical skirmish game with roleplaying on top. It's fundamentally disassociated. Its mechanics aren't modelling events in the fiction, it models its interactions with its own mechanical framework and how that impacts the mechanical gameplay. A veneer of fiction can then be applied, but it's basically inconsequential.

So I'll ignore 4e's existence for now and instead give an example of a disassociated mechanic from TSR D&D rulesets:

Gary the player: "My 5th level fighter Ragy (26 HP) is down to 1 HP and decides to rest for 25 days to fully recover".

Now, Hit Points are in and of themselves not a disassociated mechanic. They are abstracted, representing "actual physical ability of the character to withstand damage  and a commensurate increase in such areas as skill in combat and similar life-or-death situations, the "sixth sense" which warns the individual of some otherwise unforeseen events, sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection" (Gygax, 1e DMG).

Though "Hit points" do not exist in the game world, and are as such an abstraction, they still point to something that does exist in the game world, even if it is something as broad and intangible as "the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection" + meat points.

That's fine - We can also just represent Hit Points in-world as the high level fighter only taking a scraping wound from the 7 points of sword damage that might kill the 1st level fighter. At other times, for monsters, we represent it purely as meat points. 

The flexibility of the HP abstraction is quite actually useful for explaining the mechanic durability of higher level characters in relation to high level monsters with one singular mechanic. 

But the healing of HP is disassociated, because it treats HP strictly as meat points when they are not. How do you explain in-world why 1st level fighter with 6 HP takes 5 days to fully heal from death's door, whilst Ragy above needs 25 days? You can not. So healing HP is a somewhat disassociated mechanic.

Tell me again why the wizard heals fully faster than the fighter from 1 hp?

Let's give the equivalent disassociated mechanic from 5e and discuss why it is worse:

Gary the player: "My character, Ragy the 5th level Battlemaster, decides to take a short rest to heal all 5 of his HD."

"A short rest" is an associated mechanic, it's an hour in the gameworld, and the healing does happen in the game world. How does Ragy totally heal up in just an hour? Let's call that semi-disassociated - The flexibility of how Hit Points are abstracted gives some leeway there. It may grate a bit if we remember how the DM treated that damage a few minutes earlier when describing what happened when the player took that damage, but ok.

The actual bad part is the disassociated choice the player makes - to heal 5 HD instead of 1 or 3. That's a choice the player makes that has no connection to anything related to the gameworld. Everything around that choice is wholly inaccessible to Ragy the PC.

And that is bad. Because it tells players to inhabit the world of mechanics over and above the world of fiction. There should be as few as at all possiblle of such disassociated choices in RPGs.

Please, should I spent 2 or 4 HD to fully recover over the next hour?

Another example: The Battlemaster's superiority dice.

Superiority dice do not refer to something that exists in the gameworld. They refer to a game limitation - That battlemasters may be able to pull of these cool Maneuvers, but for game balance reasons, this is a limited resource that only re-stocks after a short rest. No in-world reason exists for why your fighter can't just keep parrying to keep those orcs at bay, but he can't. Gary the player will need to manage his dice pool in complete segregation from the considerations that Ragy the PC might have about the battle.

This could perhaps be made an associated mechanic, by going the Earthdawn route where all talents are explicitly magical in nature. But that's not what the 5e Battlemaster is supposed to be. So it's disassociated.

In both cases, these mechanics instruct the player to manage choices based on game artifacts that have no representation in the game world. In other words, it simply can't be roleplayed as there is nothing about it that is accessible to Ragy the PC.

What happened? I ran out of Superiority Dice is what fucking happened.

There are exceptions, though rare. The inspiration die for example. You get one for good roleplaying and the PC never knows about this resource. But its saving grace is that it doesn't intrude on the fiction either. Its presence in the game world amounts to no more than luck. It is disassociated the whole way through. It's also very ephemeral - a quick in-an-out from the fiction. It doesn't give you a pool to manage or tactical decisions to weigh. It neither disturbs the fiction nor invite players to inhabit the mechanic space instead of it. I don't particularly like it myself, but that's a preference of game style. It's not necessarily bad design in this regard.

Luck point mechanics basically work the same way and I mostly find them fine as well.

JFC. The caption doesn't help one bit.

The other part where I began to go off 5e are the disassociated designs.  Primarily as found in its latter-day splats, ie the new classes and class features presented in Xanathar's Guide to Everything and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

A disassociated design isn't necessarily a disassociated mechanic. But the design is that of a game mechanic that was never actually made to represent something in the world. It was wholly developed based on how they work mechanically - and then overlaid with a thin veneer of fiction on top. 

This veneer could make the mechanic fully associated, but the way players end up engaging with it is still predominantly disassociated, because its impact has everything to do with its mechanic significance and very little to do with its in-world significance. For that reason, I also call these "Bullshit designs", because the thin veneer of fiction layered on them are simply bullshit thrown on top.  

Let's look at some examples from 5e. First the Twilight domain for clerics:

1st level - Darkvision, shareable with others for up to an hour. This actually makes sense and is thematically pretty cool for a priest of a twilight deity. No veneer is even needed. The mechanic is inherently so associated to the game world that it stands on its own.

1st level - grant advantage on next initiative roll to a creature you touch -  thin veneer: "The night has taught you to be vigilant". Bullshit. 

2nd level - channel divinity: dim refreshing twilight and grants temporary hp or dispels charm/fear. That's ok. On brand I suppose.

6th level - fly while in darkness or dim light. Bullshit.

Contemplate... The bullshit rationales for my existence.

Or the Circle of Stars Druid. They create a Start Chart as part of their celestial studies. It lets them

Cast Guidance and Guiding Bolt. Why? Because reasons. Bullshit reasons. 

At 6th level, they can consult the chart for "cosmic omens". This lets them:

add 1d6 to the save, ability checks or attack roll of an ally, or subtract 1d6 for a foe for the same. Uses = proficiency bonus.

What a fucking dull implementation of a druid able to divine cosmic omens. Bullshit.

I think I hate the Horizon Walker the most. Here's a ranger that walks the planes. You'd think that gives some sort of ability to actually travel the planes right? To do their fucking job? WRONG. They get stuff like

Deal extra force damage to a designated foe by "drawing on the energies of the multiverse."  Bullshit.

Teleport 10 feet before each attack by "passing between the planes". Bullshit.

Use your reaction to grant yourself resistance to an attack by "slipping through the planar boundaries". Bullshit.

Or how about the Fey wanderer's "dreadful strikes" - 'You can augment your weapon strikes with mind-scarring magic, drawn from the gloomy hollows of the Feywild.' - Ermh, ok, this veneer of fiction is thin before I even hear about the mechanic side. Turns out it's 1d4 psychic damage once per turn, guys. Bullshit.

The point in all these cases is that these class features are unconcerned with what they let the character do in the fiction and wholly focused on what they let the player do with the mechanics. 

And, as with disassociated choices, these designs instruct the player to inhabit the world of mechanics over and above the world of fiction. Why did you become a Horizon Walker? To teleport 10 feet and be resistant to attacks. 

What is extra sad about it is that those who actually choose such a sub-class because they really like the theme of a ranger walking the planes get no real reinforcement to play such a character from the sub-class, except an ability to detect portals within 1 mile. The nudging is all towards combat benefits that have no connection to the role. This is what the system wants you to appreciate about it. It's just shitty design from start to finish.

You thought this is what Horizon walkers were about?
FOOL. It's about that sweet damage resistance.

Now, this was actually worse back in the heady days of 3.5 prestige classes.

Not only did you have similar shitty disassociated designs, but they also coupled with forced dissociative choices, because you had to actually plan out your choice of skill ranks many levels in advance to qualify for a lot of them. But I am more forgiving of that because it is basically what the game wanted to be. 

It wanted to be a game where you play the mini-game of charop and plan out your character 15 levels in advance. It wanted to be a game that rewarded system mastery. Anyone who plays it today does so knowing that is what you sign up for.

5e, less so. It was an attempt to dial all that back from the ledge that 3.5 and 4e jumped over. It was supposed to be based on natural language (spoiler: it isn't) and let the fiction dictate the rules. 

So it is disappointing to see how poorly the designers learned the lessons of it. All of this was, I propose, entirely avoidable without any compromise to the core of the game in any way. But they never identified the problem to avoid in the first place. It's really not the amount of splat I find objectionable in these books, but the quality of it. The splat mentality it enforces on players, even those actually looking for flavour choices with mechanic impact.

By comparison, disassociated mechanics, choices and designs are much much rarer in TSR D&D. Despite its wargame roots, it remained a game fundamentally rooted in the choices made by the PC more so than the player.