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I have made an entire playable dragon race template. It completely defies all 5e conventional design.
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Precisely. 5e's greatest strength is its' simplicity. A player who's never touched a TTRPG before will have a much easier time picking up 5e than a more niche system (although PF2e is definitely not bad on that front, 5e is just super simple and even has resources for absolute beginners)
But that simplicity is also 5e's greatest weakness. Once you're beyond the starting phase and understand how to play, then you realize how much stuff 5e is missing, you start noticing how some of the rules are oversimplified and unclear, and you REALLY notice how the game starts to get dysfunctional at levels 13 and above due to Quadratic Wizard and the fact that AC doesn't keep up with hitrate.
But 5e at its' core is a simple, robust system that's dead easy to homebrew for. So covering that weakness (and being able to keep finding players for your games) is entirely within the realm of possibility. And hey, unlike trying to mod an actual game, if you decide that at all costs you want to play an Actual Dragon? Fuck it, we Homebrew.
Now that's straight up not true. 5e is a lot of things (unfinished, unclear, underhanded) but it isn't simple. And thanks to it's inconsistency it's a nightmare to make good, reliable content for. There are many, many, many better systems to start a new player on and it's quite possibly one of if the worst to start a DM on.
It has some pretty good stuff for beginner players. Early 5e stuff is some hot garbage (Tyranny of Dragons isn't even a dragon-focused adventure, for fuck's sake. And don't even talk about Descent into Avernus and Curse of Strahd.), but more recent stuff like Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is actually pretty well-made, decently written with interesting character templates, and comes with some solid resources for walking beginners through how to play.
It probably skews my opinion that the only pf2e adventure I've tried to play was Strength of Thousands, which was just... Unfathomably low-stakes and dry. The system really excites me for all the balance improvements and much tighter mechanics, but if there's one thing that really just kills a group dead in a matter of two or three sessions, it's being boring. For all its' flaws, 5e adventures, homebrew or premade, are not boring.
I can agree that most of Paizo's adventure paths can be lackluster. I highly prefer PF2e to 5e, but my favorite adventure paths are the 3 part ones, Stolen Fates, Quest for the Sky King's Tomb, the 6 part ones definitely feel like they're stretching a plot to reach 6 parts and should have broken it into separate stories or fewer books.