ARCHEIS
What Even Is 5e?
Recently I was trying to, gently, explain to someone much younger than I am why I don’t like 5e.
I set off on my usual explanation … over-powered player characters, the strange obsession with “balanced” encounters, the slow evolution into something resembling a hybrid computer game, the way actual play streamers have come to define the hobby for many, too much magic, too many magic items … you know the speech.
About halfway through, however, I found myself having a simultaneous conversation with the voices in my head. Don’t worry … this happens a lot. One of them (not the person I was speaking to in real life) quietly asked:
“Yes… but what exactly is 5e anyway?”
And that stopped me in my tracks. Or maybe it flicked that switch, like in the old Westerns, that makes the train divert so that it doesn’t run over the person tied to the … well, you know what I mean.
Because suddenly it occurred to me that “5e” has become a catch-all term. It no longer refers to a single ruleset, or even a coherent design philosophy. It refers to everything that has happened to Dungeons & Dragons over the past decade or so.
What began in 2014 as a rather elegant Player’s Handbook has snowballed into something much larger … and much harder to define.
“5e” now includes:
the not-quite-a-new-edition-but-also-definitely-new books of the current iteration,
a tidal wave of third-party “5e compatible” material in the wake of licensing dramas,
virtual tabletops, digital character sheets, and ever-present online rules libraries,
and the endless parade of supplements … Tasha’s this, Volo’s that, and so on.
At some point, “5e” stopped being a game and became an ecosystem.
And, perhaps unfairly, those of us of a more grognardian persuasion have taken to using the term as a kind of umbrella … a convenient way to lump everything modern together, whether it be good, bad, or somewhere in between.
As my rant began to unravel, I found myself saying something I don’t usually admit out loud:
If we go back to how it started out and isolate a few key examples of physical media …
I actually really like 5e!
The 2014 Player’s Handbook (which actually bears no edition number on its cover) is, in my view, a fantastic book. Clear, playable, and full of possibility. Sitting beside it on my shelf is Mythic Odysseys of Theros, which is easily my favourite 5e setting.
Truth be told, I would happily run a campaign using just those two books.
Only those two books.
Encounters would be allowed to exist in their natural, unpredictable state. Characters would begin at level 1. Advancement would be earned through experience, not narrative milestones. The available ancestries would be limited to those of Theros.
Whilst we’re at it, we would use paper, pencils and physical dice.
No devices at the table. Not for three whole hours. Shocking, I know.
Session zero would consist of building characters together … not as isolated protagonists, but as a party with a reason to exist. Backstories would be kept to a paragraph at most (or, better yet, left unwritten). The focus would be on the adventure itself, rather than the slow drift of every side path into “the story.”
Just a group of people, sitting around a table, going on an adventure.
See … even when I try to say nice things about 5e, I can feel the old instinct to shake my fist creeping back in.
But perhaps that’s the point.
What frustrates me isn’t 5e as it was … but what it has become. Or, more precisely, what we have allowed the term to become. Looking at the original books you can see how much potential 5e had. That’s what hurts the most.
So maybe it’s time to separate the two. To take those original 2014 books - the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide, the Monster Manual - and gently free them from the weight of everything that followed.
Because whatever we call “5e” now doesn’t really resemble what they were.
Perhaps the 2014 game should be re-named. OG5e? D&D14? For all I know the magic users by the sea have possibly already done this and, because I completely ignore them and stick my head in the sand, I didn’t even know. Boy, would I look like a fool …