D&D Killed D&D

As a monk you shouldn't have chosen a Half-Orc. Monks wants Wisdom and Dexterity. None of their attribute boosts help. All the other benefits Half-Orcs get are wasted. Your charisma also too high and a waste, put it to an 8, raise your Dexterity to a 15 instead.

That was the start of a five minute conversation about why one player's monk wasn't performing. As a DM, I had to intervene and stop the conversation, mainly because the Monk player was getting increasingly agitated.  The irony of course is that nothing that was said was factually wrong from an optimization standpoint. To make things worse, other classes, like Fighters end up making better Monks, than Monks after Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

The Pillars of D&D

Theoretically, D&D 5e is based on three pillars. The concept is introduced early in the Player's Handbook (PhB), page 7, and was the primary focus of D&D 5e's design.

Adventurers can try to do anything their players can imagine, but it can be helpful to talk about their activities in three broad categories: exploration, social interaction, and combat.

What's is interesting is that character creation, especially if you count spells, and combat take up the majority of the book. How much space is dedicated on exploration rules? Or social interactions? Don't just take my word for it, let's see what the PhB itself says about it

The rules in chapters 7 and 8 support exploration and social interaction, as do many class features in chapter 3 and personality traits in chapter 4. 

Chapter 7 describes ability score modifiers, skills checks, skill contest checks, and saving throws. A total of six pages.  It is fair to say that exploration and social interactions might require some skill checks, climbing up a mountain, talking to a guard could easily be skill checks.

Chapter 8 deals with time, movement, the environment, social interactions, resting and between adventure topics. Also, six pages total. Social interaction, one of the three pillars gets half a page.

What about chapter 3 and 4? Class features give at best nominal support  to exploration and social interaction. We can nitpick this. Some feature do alter what you might or might not have to roll for exploration or social interaction. However, do you consider skill such as Bardic Inspiration as something that supports exploration or social interaction? Abstractly it can modify skill rolls. It gives a boost to a roll. 

Rolling dice with modifiers does not make social interactions and exploration two of the main pillars of the game. This can be further felt by the small amount of pages dedicated two both of them. They should be  2/3 of the Player's Handbook.

Excessive? Perhaps, the problem is there. If you think of all your fond memories of D&D, 5e or not, what you will realize is that the DM made the game fun, about exploration, inside jokes, social interactions, adventure despite the rules.

D&D wasn't always like this. As it mutated and evolved through the fifty years of its existence it lost its way. Gary Gygax is partially to blame on this, the downfall started with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. His need to have a unified set of rules was the first death of D&D. I will end this post with an expert of Dragon Magazine, issue 26, written by Gary.

Because D&D allowed such freedom, because the work itself said so, because the initial batch of DMs were so imaginative and creative, because the rules were incomplete, vague and often ambiguous, D&D has turned into a non-game.

--snip--

There are few grey areas in AD&D, and there will be no question in the mind of participants as to what the game is and is all about. There is form and structure to AD&D, and any variation of these integral portions of the game will obviously make it something else. 

 ...and this is why I am writing my own role-playing game.