The problem with D&D 5e

 

Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (5e) is the world's most popular role-playing game. As often happens to somebody that prefers something different from the majority, I tend to think that it is lack of knowledge that makes other people like 5e so much.

But there were people with whom I played for years other systems, who were sighing at every session because I wouldn't run D&D. Some people feel a deep attraction for D&D. It seems to be particularly popular with players that like combat tactics and/or character (stat) building.

On the other hand, being a good RPG for combat and “build” is clearly not enough, or 4e would have been much more popular than it was. In fact, I think part of the attraction of D&D is that it offers a system that caters to many different players.

Nonetheless, I believe that 5e is fundamentally broken. And it’s not because it “tries to do everything and isn’t good at anything.” In fact, trying to do everything is the saving grace of D&D.

No. For me, the issue with 5e is that it’s a system heavily designed for combat, but most of that combat feels pointless.

Combat Without Stakes

5e is packed with combat options, an endless list of spells, powers, and mechanics that all revolve around fighting. But the fights are often trivial. Most encounters are designed to make the players feel powerful, ensuring easy wins with little risk. Even the so-called “boss fights” are rarely more than “somewhat challenging.” If you like meaningful, high-stakes confrontations, 5e actively fights against that preference.

One of the reasons for this is how the Challenge Rating (CR) system works. CR is supposed to help DMs create balanced encounters, but a fight labeled as “Deadly” is usually just a speed bump, while lower-difficulty fights offer no threat. 

This leads to two outcomes:

1. DMs who follow the CR system get predictable, unthreatening encounters.
2. DMs who want real challenge manually tweak encounters, but in doing so, must work against the system.

If a system requires you to ignore its own rules to create tension, that’s a design flaw. 

And the system is so unbalanced towards the players that it is hard to create any challenge. I literally had a fight where a dragon reduced to 0 HP all the members of the party except one, and through a combination of healing powers and recovery mechanics, the whole party was up and fighting again after one round!

You need to know the system and your party very well to create worthy challenges by contradicting the rules...

Combat as the Default Solution

Another issue is how 5e presents conflict resolution. Combat should be one of many tools available to solve problems. In 5e the system tilts everything toward combat as the primary option.

A good GM can work around it, but let’s be honest: if the game spends the bulk of its mechanics on combat— it showers players with combat abilities, tactics, and optimisations—then it implicitly encourages combat as the go-to approach. 

 If you add to that that CR balancing almost guarantees that every combat is winnable, you end up with a game where combat is by far the most popular approach to conflict resolution. Moreover, another interesting challenging in other rpgs (including older editions of D&D), is deciding whether it is wise to enter a given combat or not, and that has a default answer in 5e, and it is a resounding YES.

I can understand that combat options need to be more mechanically developed than other in-fiction activities. After all, I can easily roleplay social interactions without rules, and I don't need rules to build and solve in-fiction puzzles. Combat, on the other hand, is something that I would rather not exercise my real life skills to resolve. So, it is normal that physical activities will require more mechanics than social and mental activities, but D&D goes completely overboard.

Long, long Battles

Even if you accept that 5e is combat-focused, and that most fights are low stakes, there’s another major flaw: fights take too long. Not only are they lengthy, but they often continue long past the point where the outcome is obvious. This is the same issue that plagues some old board games like classic Monopoly or Risk—when you know who’s going to win, but you still have to go through the motions for another hour or two before it’s over.

Now, in theory, a GM can cut fights short once the outcome is obvious. But doing so removes one of the few real strategic/tacticsl elements that 5e combat has—the decision of whether to conserve limited resources and save time, or spend them to minimise damage to the party.

If the GM just handwaves the final stretch of battle, then this entire risk-reward decision disappears. The game’s built-in challenge of managing limited-use abilities gets nullified, leaving behind an even emptier tactical experience. This means that the very thing making fights drag—the need to weigh whether using resources is worth it—is also the only thing that gives them any strategic value at all.

So, either you let combat drag and pretend the outcome is uncertain, or you cut fights short and remove what little tactical challenge the system actually provides.

The few times I run D&D, I choose for not letting the combat drag. And  thus I try to design confrontations assuming that the characters have full access to all their abilities. But this is not how the game is designed to be played.

The Illusion of Depth

This is what frustrates me most about 5e: it presents itself as a tactical combat system, but in reality, it isn’t.

It offers a plethora of spells to choose, combat synergies to plan, and tactical positioning to manage—all things that should create deep and meaningful combat. But , as we have seen, combat is rarely a real challenge. Players have many powerful tools at their disposal, and enemies rarely have the resilience or tactics to pose a serious threat.

This creates an illusion of depth. The sheer number of combat mechanics makes it feel like you’re making important decisions, but in reality, the game is designed to make sure you win. The rules don’t exist to provide challenge, but to fake meaningful choice—to make you believe you fought hard for victory, even if the fight was always going to go your way.

Classes, Levels, and Ludonarrative Dissonance

Beyond combat, I’ve always struggled with RPG systems that rely on classes and levels. They introduce a kind of artificial progression that often feels at odds with the story. For example, why does every town the party visits conveniently have city guards that scale in power to match the adventurers? It’s an unspoken expectation in level-based systems, but in practice, it creates bizarre world-building inconsistencies.

This is part of a bigger issue: ludonarrative dissonance—when the mechanics and the story don’t line up.

D&D 5e presents itself as a game where players start as scrappy adventurers, growing in strength over the course of an epic journey. But in reality, levelling happens so fast that characters go from nobodies to reality-warping demigods in what, in-world, is often just a few months. This makes most stories feel completely incoherent unless the DM actively slows progression or reworks the world to justify it.

Another source of dissonance is combat itself. The story might say this is a life-or-death struggle, but the game’s rules tell a different story: you’re probably going to win, it’s just going to take a while. 

HP don't relate to physical damage, yet curing does cure physical damage. 

Characters are heroes, but due to the combat focused gameplay, always live a long trail of mangled bodies behind them.

Characters are supposed to be made of flesh and bone, but contrarily to people made of flesh and bone, they can be knifed, hammered and pierced many times with no chance of being mortally wounded or even getting a scar. If somebody points a knife to the throat of your character, a slice will cost you some 1d6 hit points out of the 50 you have.

Just rest for one hour and you are ok... combat in D&D exists in a world that is parallel to the fiction. It is like in those Japanese RPG video games where you walk in the world map for exploration and character interaction, and suddenly you zoom into a combat mode that has completely different rules and mechanics.

The Bottom Line

I get why people love 5e. It’s accessible, it’s flexible, and it gives players the satisfaction of feeling powerful. But a great RPG is about meaningful choices, hard dilemmas, high-stakes encounters, and a world that feels cohesive. 5e doesn’t give me any of that. It gives me a lot of combat, but not the kind of combat I find compelling.

That being said, I do think 5e’s greatest strength is being the “big tent” RPG— it can accommodate nearly any play style. But that’s only because it pretends to do what you want, rather than actually doing it. It gives the appearance of tactical depth, the illusion of balanced combat, the strategic challenge of character building, along with the suggestion of strongly supporting non-combat situations. In reality, it relies on GM fiat to make it all work.

However, to finish this article on a positive note: the first rpg my children ever played was 5e D&D. And it was a great experience that I will never forget. And if it was told to me that I had to choose between 5e and not playing any rpgs, I would still be playing 5e four or five times a week. Because in the end, roleplaying is still great and depends less on the rules than on the people around the table. And D&D is a serviceable system... if you know how to tame it and avoid that it gets in your way.