Shadow of the Weird Wizard First Impressions! 

Yeah once the PDFs come out for SotWW, I'll do more content on it that gives me (and hopefully those interested) a better idea of what this system is about and what is different :)

Yeah it's really fun! That's how clockworks worked in SotDL as well and it is an insanely handy ancestry trait! Literally just came off of running this quickplay again 30 mins ago and the player playing Soldier V kicked ass with that ability!

That's great to hear! Yeah I was reading the early build when Schwalb was releasing it and I really liked how a lot of it was working! Excited for the final product and I am glad you're having a good time with it! :)

That's... literally the whole reason it was developed, though, to be a counterpoint to Demon Lord.

@@colbyboucher6391 And is nothing wrong, theres plenty if Demon Lord

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I can´t wait for your channel to really take off and people going through your backlog thinking: "Who is this asshole in the comment section and why wasn´t he banned?!"

@@mittelz5976 🤣

Completely agree. I came into the hobby because of 5e and stuck around as I found more stuff. WotC is really shitty but the more people in the hobby, the better imo. Plus, the more people who play it means the more people who trickle down into other games which provides everybody with more people to play with and more people potentially supporting smaller creators.

Oh no, 5e is a shitty system and always has been. It's literally one of the most poorly designed RPGs I've ever seen and I've played a lot of them. Wasabiburger himself here is willing to call Demon Lord "5e but good" and there's a reason for that. As soon as I started playing other games (didn't take long honestly) I breathed a sigh of relief and realized I'm not a bad GM, actually, 5e just sucks and does nothing whatsoever to teach it's GMs how the game is actually played in practice. Even other games that try and play like 5e end up doing a MUCH better job of it. Don't get me wrong- hiding somewhere under all of 5e's cruft there's the bones of a pretty solid narriativist d20 system. But that's about it. Where to even begin. - 5e's HP, recovery and death mechanics are an unfixable mess. It can't break away from AD&D style HP progression where at low levels, especially level 1, you die if something sneezes on you, so the game NEEDS a death save mechanic to avoid Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. AD&D itself handled it sanely, if you hit 0 HP you're unconscious for 1d6 rounds and need to recover for a week. 5e, though... in 5e, every form of healing is actually REVIVIFY. The end result is that any sane party just lets their HP drain to nothing before bothering with any form of healing beyond rests, because doing anything else would be inefficient. Combat becomes a "X is downed again" whack-a-mole. And oh my god, rests. "Mother may I rest, now?" Literally so much of every game of 5e is players trying to figure out whether they're allowed to do the thing they always need to do to recover HP n' shit. It's effectively just GM fiat whether they can or not, which is _horrible._ PF2e got it right by just letting players recover everything between fights. If you're gonna have a system like this so players can keep going for a long time, don't let the GM get involved, it's waaay too easy for it to be adversarial. (This is all ignoring the madness of the "6-8 encounter adventuring day" left over from early dungeon crawl-heavy playtests, we'll get to that.) - Pretty much every GM who plays other games comes to the conclusion that D&D 5e is _exceptionally_ hard to prep for. It expects balance in it's combat but does a piss poor job of helping you figure out how to do that as evidenced by the _endless_ "how should I know how this encounter is going to go" and "I accidentally the party" posts on forums. WotC has admitted to making certain parts of the game intentionally way overpowered (Fireball...) or underpowered (Monk, and certain Fighter subclasses _because_ they're easier to use) in their game where you really, really needs an understanding of how strong a party is to not either kill them or leave them totally unchallenged. Monsters regularly function in ways that make absolutely no sense at their CR. The way WotC "balanced" 5e in general was to say "we're gonna make sure that the game is balanced, except for when it shouldn't be" and I shouldn't need to explain why that's fucking stupid. - 5e's stats and even it's core systems are just bizarre sometimes. Due to how Proficiency works in practice people who're supposed to be knowledgeable about something or skilled at something will fail at what they're supposed to be good at while the dunce who should hardly have a chance at all completes the task no problem. Yes, random dice rolls are always a thing, but 5e in particular is inexplicably random in how challenges actually get resolved. It's too afraid of stacking bonuses, the Advantage system makes any bonus other than the first you come up with disappear into a "there isn't a rule for this" black hole. - 5th Edition, as of the PHB, had no idea what it's own design goal was. The Equipment and Adventuring chapters are unfinished leftovers from a different game. Arguably multiple. Have you ever thought about donning and doffing armor? _Encumbrance?_ Ever notice how the Adventuring Packs you can get don't even fit in the backpack they're provided with, per the game's own rules? Have you ever cared about the price of an elephant, saddlebags, a pound of flour? Has anyone ever thought that 5e's travel rules are anything but broken and unfun? Why is it that when something's time-limited, the time it lasts is actually listed in minutes (always 10 minute intervals because that's how long dungeon turns take- oh, wait...)? On the flipside, does _anyone_ actually use Ideals, Bonds and Flaws + Inspiration as-written? Does anyone see that page as anything but a flimsy nod to a different sort of game that was appearing at the time? In 5e's early playtests, I mean when it was still called D&D Next, WotC's main concern was getting all the people back they lost with 4th Ed, and to a lesser extent even the people they lost with 3rd. They wanted to go "back to basics" and evoke what B/X evoked. They wanted a dungeon crawler at heart. So that's what they built! That's where all of the procedural stuff in 5e comes from. Problem is, they tried to re-mix it all in ways that don't make a whole lot of sense, and leave out the heart of those procedural rules that gave context to it all *(DUNGEON TURNS.)* End-result is everything boils down to a Passive Perception "does one of your characters have the stat for this to be relevant?" check. There's no actual player choice in any of it. If WotC stuck to their guns and just kept trying to make this version of the game work, maybe it would have, but they wanted to please _everyone._ So they threw 3.5's Feats mechanic back in there, but they didn't want to piss the B/X crowd off, so it's optional. Since it's optional, they didn't really "need" to balance it all. So we ended up with a list of feats that pretty much everyone agreed made little to no sense, despite _everyone_ who plays 5e using Feats. How 5e actually played at tables was _incredibly_ unstable for years, everyone tried to shape it's amorphous blob into something they personally liked and everyone else complained about whatever you came up with. _Eventually_ everyone started to settle on what rules they were actually going to follow, which parts of the game to handwave away, and the people who felt otherwise finally moved on. We're still left with a game where the core rulebooks are really just gesturing at a whole bunch of potential poorly thought-out versions of a game your GM cobbled together out of the ideas the writers threw at the wall. - A consequence of all this design-by-committee cruft is that 5e is chock-full of rules that feel totally arbitrary. They don't operate in a way that makes them easy to remember, it's a bunch of "atomic" rules that all mesh together to make something way complicated than it otherwise would be (why do you think we have YT channels that were halfway dedicated to talking about rules misunderstandings and weird interactions for years?) D&D 5e is often described as a medium-crunch game that's as hard to actually grok as a pretty high-crunch game as a result, and I've got to agree. Actually this video hints at that when it mentions how Demon Lord's rules "are just kind of self-explanatory, they take the base core mechanics and then they just kinda make sense" @ 2:49. - The PHB is poorly organized and the DMG is pointless. Darkvision. That's all I'll bother saying about how the PHB is written, just... Darkvision. 5e has _years_ of errata while most other semi-popular RPGs I've played end up with a couple pages at worst before a reprint. Sometimes the answer from the writers has been "lol, I dunno" as they realize a system they come up with just doesn't actually work (grappling rules, I forget exactly what happened there). Other people have said plenty about how unhelpful and phoned-in 5th Edition's DMG is. - A good chunk of 5e's adventure modules seem like they were written by someone who doesn't know what a TTRPG is, and play out like a single-player video game. Even when they're not like that, they're filled with fluff you're never going to need that your players won't care about, and no advice on how to run them in practice, often shored up by the community (see r/CurseofStrahd stitching WotC's best, which still wasn't great, into something awesome).

My issues are with WOTC AND 5e.