My group gave up on 5e because it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on (especially the healing rules). It's a different style of play for people who came out of AD&D or who took to the OSR style games.
DCC, which I've been playing and running for a while, is lethal in comparison. Which is a mark against it for many people, but my group loves it. We don't have a death a week, but we had several deaths over the past year. The threat changes the play style versus what we saw with 5e where it just felt like PCs couldn't die unless the DM went out of their way to create an excessive challenge that bordered on a forced TPK scenario.
>My group gave up on 5e because it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on (especially the healing rules).
You might just be too good at the game for usually appropriate encounters. My group's having a blast, and we've come to rely on all that healing to push our luck: jumping into more dangerous encounters, building our characters more for story and less for optimization, being able to play even when two of the five can't make it (usually the healer). If imagine newer players also need that healing, even when they're trying their hardest.
That's not to say you're wrong for not liking 5e. If it's too easy for you, then it's too easy. You could try to account for that by using tougher or more monsters, but that makes balancing encounters harder for the DM.
I played a lot of 1e and a bit of 2e. I've kept up a bit with newer rulesets but have never played. Comments like this make me wonder just how different 5e is from that era. I can't imagine ever thinking players were "too good at the game" to create a situation like this.
That's not to say the current situation is bad but it definitely sounds very different
> My group gave up on 5e because it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on (especially the healing rules).
Well, compared to the “classic” versions (through, oh, AD&D/2e), 5e’s handling of cantrips and assignment of hit dice to classes make the primary casters more active and less like eggshells at low levels, and healing outside of “healer” character abilities is much more generous by default (but there is also, in the books, a simple option that makes it grittier reverses all of that except the not-eggshells parts, by increasing the time for “short rests” and “long rests” which are key for both healing and spell recovery.) Also, I feel like lots of tables by people who come from older versions underuse exhaustion.
People do ignore encumbrance/exhaustion a lot, kind of annoys me when I have to remind my players: You can't carry a battle axe, longsword, longbow, crossbow, two fishing nets, and a boulder. I don't care that you have 18 strength and it's technically something you can lift, it makes no sense to be able to run with all of that, let alone expecting to keep up with unencumbered opponent.
But this is one of the great things of this hobby:
1. There are thousands of systems to select from.
2. No one forces you to play it RAW.
3. If you do want RAW, you can probably find a system that works for you.
The most important parts are: what's fun and conveys the sense you want for the game; agreeing on the rules (either RAW or house) with some consistency (What do you mean I can't jump down 10'? You let him jump off a 50' cliff without getting hurt just last week!).
Yeah, and I have no problem with people using what they want and ignoring what they want at their tables. I just think that a lot of the people who complain that 5e boosts PC power more than they like are underusing new core features and options that counter that effect, and in the core exhaustion seems to be a common piece that gets overlooked or underused (avoiding encumbrance has been common, AFAICT, from the earliest days of D&D, and I don’t think 5e substantially alters the impact of ignoring that.)
The TL;DR is that AC/attack bonuses/saving throws/save DCs used to scale a lot more than they do now. The upshot of this change as a DM is that you can plan out encounters differently. Feel like your first-level characters aren't getting enough of a workout? Throw a CR 3 or 4 encounter at them. I ran Curse of Strahd as my very first 5th Edition campaign, and there was an encounter at the end of the early section where I'm like, they already lost one character earlier in the dungeon, this is a straight-up TPK. But they handled it fine, although they used about a day's worth of abilities/spells that recharge with a long rest in a single encounter. That's where I started to get a much better feel for how encounter balance works in 5e.
> My group gave up on 5e because it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on (especially the healing rules).
I felt the same way about 4e: overpowered early on, but underpowered (compared to earlier editions) at higher levels. It basically felt like playing a party of 30th-level characters wasn't all that different from playing a party of 1st-level characters.
> it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on
I think that's it: the stakes are too low. You don't have to ration your spells, there are few constraints, and your investment in your character is so great it's customer abuse to write them out of the story. Which is not say I don't get attached to my DCC guys.
> your investment in your character is so great it's customer abuse to write them out of the story
This is the biggest issue I've run into with some individuals/groups, and one thing DCC really helped with (for them). Character creation in DCC take about 5 minutes, if that. 6x3d6, assign to stats in order, roll on a few more tables, spend your starting coin, ok let's go. It got several people over their hatred/fear of PC death even in our non-DCC games. I'm starting up a Call of Cthulhu game (which is very rough on PC health, both physical and mental) and there's more effort needed to create characters and much more invested in each character, but now that their fear is gone the game should be more enjoyable. Even with the possibility of characters disappearing in the night or losing their minds and becoming useless.
DCC, which I've been playing and running for a while, is lethal in comparison. Which is a mark against it for many people, but my group loves it. We don't have a death a week, but we had several deaths over the past year. The threat changes the play style versus what we saw with 5e where it just felt like PCs couldn't die unless the DM went out of their way to create an excessive challenge that bordered on a forced TPK scenario.