this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
46 points (94.2% liked)

Dungeons and Dragons

11049 readers
9 users here now

A community for discussion of all things Dungeons and Dragons! This is the catch all community for anything relating to Dungeons and Dragons, though we encourage you to see out our Networked Communities listed below!

/c/DnD Network Communities

Other DnD and related Communities to follow*

DnD/RPG Podcasts

*Please Follow the rules of these individual communities, not all of them are strictly DnD related, but may be of interest to DnD Fans

Rules (Subject to Change)

Format: [Source Name] Article Title

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

This guy breaks down just how bad the layout of the new PHB is. The cross referencing is non-existent and the subsections seem to go in the order someone thought of them. I'm sadly unsurprised that they've not improved on any of these problems which existed in the original 5e PHB.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] TacticsConsort@yiffit.net 22 points 3 months ago (1 children)

On one hand: I know damn well that formatting is a huge bitch, because I've made my own huge homebrew for the game.

On the other hand: This is a multi-million dollar company that's been around for bloody ages. Hiring a professional formatter shouldn't even be a blip in the budget.

[โ€“] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

In the 5e books, at least, the problem is not just formatting.

The structural organization of the books is an abysmal mess. Rules that must be understood together in order to resolve common situations are often spread apart and buried in subsections of several different chapters, when they could just as easily be grouped in one place, or (at the very least) have direct references to each other. Also, ambiguous prose is often used to describe mechanics that would be better represented with keywords.

They're aesthetically nice, but as rule books, they needlessly burden the DM (and to a lesser extent the players), which takes time and attention away from actually playing the game.