Hot Take: D&D 5.5 is kind of boring now (but it could just be me)

 Well, the title says it all: I played more D&D 5.5 ongoing last night, and while fun was had, I realize I've been avoiding combats, sometimes like, a lot. We have them; the game kicked off with an encounter between the group and a red hag, some millitaurs (both from Tome of Beasts), and a stone giant from the new Monster Manual. The fight was brief and while its "sort of fun" the combat wasn't terribly exciting for a group of level 6 PCs, nor was there much in terms of dynamic interaction......D&D 5.5 is basically a process of generating numbers (attack rolls and damage) to make other numbers (hit points) go down. Words are interspersed to imply something different is going on, but ultimately it is a very basic process. 

I would argue this isn't entirely a D&D 5.5 issue, and not even really an issue; I may just have played this game for too long now, and its no longer as exciting. But there are some fingers that can be pointed: D&D 5.5, for example, has some big numbers being thrown around, and there's not a lot of nuance; the notion that someone might miss an attack isn't terribly common; its far more likely that the staying power of a monster isn't in resisting damage or avoiding it, but instead in being a bag of hit points. All of the older mechanics that let a monster bypass, ignore, or deflect damage are mostly gone these days. I was musing on the fact that the red hag, with her magic resistance, was still easily dropped by magic missiles in the final round (she was whittled down to a few HP left) because, unlike the original incarnation of magic resistance from long ago there's no possibility it would affect magic missiles. 

The characters all have their cool attacks and abilities, but these are by and large the same abilities, used over and over again, because the game system has since at least 4th edition been trying to flatten out and remove all the bubbles or bloat in character options; the bygone era of 3rd edition where a PC could have too many choices to pick from in terms of actions and strategies are a thing of the past, for the large part. It all plays more or less the same.

So for me, this means I spend an inordinate amount of gameplay time focusing on the story, exploration, role play moments and mystery because that stuff is fun and doesn't get old. But for my players, some of them do look forward to those combat moments. It is hard for me to admit to them that....yeah....those combat moments are just not doing it for me. And for some of my players they aren't that excited anymore, either. 

Last time we played Cypher System a couple of my players commented that it was really exciting to play a game where the combat/conflict was genuinely exciting and unpredictable, with a sense of tension. It is very, very hard to get that feeling in D&D 5E. This is, of course, why a lot of my recent posts are all about figuring out what game system I want to play next.

Heck, I feel like I would love to be playing this exact campaign I am in, right now, but with the Cypher System and Godforsaken fantasy book. That would be cool! And fun! And surprising. Maybe that will be what we do next.