this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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If you trust the system and try the system in good faith, you can't break it. The guardrails work, and everything stays on track.
But not everyone does that. In the past 13 months, we've seen a bunch of people look into or be introduced to the game who don't really want to try it, but feel some sort of internal moral pressure or external social pressure to abandon 5e, who then either want to beat it back into a 5e-like shape (use a separate and splitable movement pool, expand mis/fortune rules to better emulate dis/advantage, give monsters legendary buklshit, try to actually use proficiency without level, etc), or who are so used to these games being non-functional out of the box that they insist on implementing homebrew originally crafted with broken character builds or boring, HP sack monsters in mind, and then end up finding the game both boring, and unfairly deadly.
Plenty of people break the game. Breaking it is a lot more than just trying to win in character creation.
Dnd5e leaves to many things up to the gm, like magic items and encounter balancing. CR is notoriously inaccurate and running level appropriate fights can easily end up as unwinnable deadly or just a trivial steamroll. Especially once higher lvl magic comes into play with save or suck spells (cough polymorph cough). Yes legendary resistance can fix that, but that is not the system being stable, it is the system giving you tools to fix its unstableness. And even then, the fight ends after X presses of the "I win" button instead of one.
While there are a lot worse systems than dnd5e, when comparing it to pf2e it is objectively the system with more holes. No doubt, partly because pf2e could learn from dnds mistakes and is not produced by a company trying to milk its customers for every cent.
D&D leaves a lot up to the GM to fill in that Pathfinder doesn't, but it's mostly in the subsystems. Pathfinder has all of the subsystems, to the point where many fans don't accept that you can swap them out for other ideas that might work better for their table.
But 5e doesn't leave core systems up to the GM. Magic items and encounter balancing are there as intended. They just intended magic items to be lame and bullshit, and encounters to be balanced around core rules.
But everyone plays with variant rules, classes are not balanced, or even particularly well thought out, and bounded accuracy breaks down completely around 10th level, because it's a half baked mechanic that stinks of "well, what if we didn't even try any more?"
The issue isn't that WotC leaves everything up to the GMs, it's that GMs have had to take everything on because they produced a broken game and released it to an audience that wanted to love it anyway, because it seemed like a mea culpa after everyone shat all over 4e.