The worst part about 5E is needing a computer to manage a character sheet. I love running sheets by hand, and filling them out the way we used to do. When D&D 4E came along and introduced the "website to track characters" - we loved it at first. And then it got to be a dependency. And then it became a pain point. And then the system was shut down and everything lost forever.
And 5E started off innocently enough where you could hand-run character sheets, and then book after book piled on the system, and you needed an online system to manage the complexity. Even the Open 5E clones all require online character sheets. After a while, 5E stops being a pen-and-paper game, and it slowly morphs into a computer game with "software as service" features and micro-transactions.
5E is a computer game pretending to be a role-playing game.
It is a wolf-in-sheep-clothing gateway to making you pay for that "something else" you need to make your life easier. This is the worst part about the system. This makes the entire game hard for me to justify and support. It does get expensive to play this.
Any OSR game is far easier to play and manage. In any version of the game past AD&D 2nd Edition, your character gets weaker as they level. You lose power, and your character is never as strong as they were in the older games. People saying, "I need 5E since it gives me the most options when leveling" are being lied to. You get weaker as you level! You don't even retain power. Your fireballs do nothing due to scaling monster hit points. I proved it here with math:
https://sbrpg20.blogspot.com/2025/07/no-to-d-4e-yes-to-old-school-essentials.html
You are far better off sticking with AD&D or a B/X system than you are playing D&D 3, 4, or 5. Even for martial characters with fixed damages, melee damage scales better in the older games. you don't need that feat that makes you do "+10 melee damage" feat if the monster hit points are on a linear scale and not a ramped up exponential curve. You see that hack added into the game to "fix things" for martial characters and you should get suspicious of a broken design immediately.
We had everything back then and Wall Street came along and "fixed it all for us." See, it feels good, like a AAA video game. Please pay our monthly fee for updates.
So, for a system that makes me weaker as I level, now I need to pay tons of money in subscription services to manage character sheets and buy expensive digital books (that I will never own and someday go away) for more weak options? And in the older systems where I am more powerful, I can still run character sheets by hand and not pay anyone anything?
You are kidding me, right?
I guess it is a good business to be in if you are a publisher or software as service person.
But not for me.
