So I was browsing some forums today, and came across a discussion about if the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons or the successor to third edition Pathfinder better corrects the flaws in the 3.5 edition of Dungeons & Dragons. The fact that this thread had started recently struck me as a bit odd, especially as it seems like nobody can agree on most of the flaws, or even how many there are.
The only real flaw most people can agree on is that the game was unbalanced, with a lot of theoretical optimisation having been done to work out that the Monk class was generally underpowered and that the eleven extra combat Feats gained from being a Fighter didn't stack up to the hundreds of spells known by wizards and clerics.
However after that the agreement seems to stop. Was the skill system a problem, or was throwing it out in 4e a bad move? Was the problem that classes had too many abilities to remember, or too few? And somewhat crucially, would it be better to make characters balanced at the higher or lower end of the 3.5 extremes.
Possibly the two most popular successors to that edition to date, both D&D5e and Pathfinder seemed to fly to opposite ends of the spectrum. They both retained the race-class structure that people have come to expect from D&D, but Pathfinder acted more as a bugfix and reworking, bringing weaker classes closer to the extremes of the Wizard and Cleric, even if they never reached it, kept every ounce of complexity, and even today exists as an edition that is essentially compatible with the game that came before it. Meanwhile D&D5e attempted to streamline everything while keeping in everything players seemed to want, and brought the power ceiling down closer to the bards of 3.5.
The result was two different games, even outside the direct rules. While they both decided to rely on adventures over character options in order to sell more books Pathfinder set itself in an entirely new setting which they could add to freely and present as they saw fit, while D&D5e presented itself as 'generic fantasy' and has set most of it's adventures in the somewhat divisive Forgotten Realms, with it's public library of established lore and characters. While neither setting is strictly better or worse than the other, and neither would be near my first choice if I was to run D&D again, I personally think Pathfinder's move of including a default setting built for the game to solve a major problem I have always had with D&D, that it is not the generic fantasy it presents itself as.
The exact kind of fantasy has changed over the years, but D&D has never been able to do every sort of fantasy. Mainly because the genre is so broad, it's like trying to make a game that allows you to play every kind of science fiction, even generic systems don't actually make it over this hurdle. GURPS is gritty, Fate is pulpy, you get the idea.
So D&D instead has been relatively rooted in the heroic fantasy genre, with more high fantasy being added as the editions have gone by. Originally most of your party would have been warriors, because that was needed to keep the nerd or two you brought along alive until it was fireball time. But in modern D&D the assumption is that most members of the part will be able to use magic, literally every character class either uses it was standard or gets rituals or spells as part of a subclass, and the often-used feats give characters the ability to dabble in spells or rituals. However the core expectation of what your characters will do is still going out into the wilderness and cleaning ruins of any treasure and green skinned humanoids you can find. While you can run courtly intrigue in D&D characters will begin to look redundant, with their twenty or thirty abilities designed solely for combat or avoiding traps.
I suppose my point is that, as long as D&D allows you to go into a dungeon, fight some orcs, and steal a dragon's treasure, then as long as everybody has fun there's no such thing as a problem. Therefore the fact that 5e's skill system is essentially nonexistant or that Pathfinder has six different spells that do 'turn into creature' and powerful casters is irrelevant, both games have players who feel that whatever class they play allows them to have fun and contribute to going into the dungeon, fighting the orc, and stealing the dragon's treasure. Any differences are therefore just differences, and they can only become problems when a player decides they stop them from having fun.
If you don't want to go into a dungeon, fight some orcs, and steal a dragons treasure, then the fact that D&D can't do that is not a problem. This is the reason why that there is more than one game on the market, there's no one single system that does everything brilliantly. The solution is either to research and buy a system that does it, or you can adjust a system you like, which might be D&D, to do it enough that your group will have fun.
So yeah, there is no problem with any edition of D&D or it's various spinoffs as long as everybody has fun. I have a personal preference for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but that won't stop me from enjoying 3.5 as long as I don't feel like my character is useless.
I wasn't planning to resume posting on here for another month, as Christmas is coming up and I'm going to be busy for a couple of weeks, but I guess this means I'm updating again. I'll try to come up with a schedule in the next week and a bit, I've got some GMing thoughts and some more general gaming thoughts I want to share, and even a couple of reviews of some games in my collection I'm considering putting up (nothing new, I'm planning to stick to older stuff and pdfs mainly for budget purposes).
