Is Dungeons & Dragons Good? An honest review of D&D 5e

Dungeons & Dragons: Pop-Culture Icon

Dungeons & Dragons is indisputably the most famous tabletop roleplaying game in history.

The fifth edition in particular surged in popularity, bolstered by pop-culture appearances in everything from FoxTrot comics to Netflix's Stranger Things. Every TV show has a token D&D episode, from Gravity Falls to Community, and the brand has historically dominated the charts for most top RPG titles. Dungeons & Dragons is indisputably the most iconic and popular RPG on the market.

But is D&D the best?

Short answer, no. For the long answer, read the in-depth review below, broken down into Hoodwink's five key rules of good game design.

Photo from Amazon

Visual Interest.

Dungeons & Dragons is undeniably a professional and impressive book. Illustrations are whimsical and fantastical, if significantly more lighthearted than earlier editions. Pages are arranged aesthetically with pleasant, unobtrusive page adornment and fonts. The book feels like what you would expect to pull from a Barnes & Noble shelf.

And yet... Dungeons & Dragons' illustrative style reflects the overall watering down of the brand as a whole. Illustrations in this book are absolutely fine. But I challenge anyone who has casually read through the book to recall a single image. There is nothing dynamic about the style or content — illustrations are just there. Whatever you think of when you imagine pop-culture fantasy — the D&D 5e rulebook is that to a T.

Visual interest grade: 4/5

Theme.

Ostensibly, D&D 5e is a fantasy roleplaying game. Picking races, classes, feats, and spells all give this impression and these, combined with the game's reputation, will often make players feel the most immersed before the game has started. Races, classes, and feats are the most flavorful parts of gameplay because they break otherwise repetitive rules in fun and unique ways. Sadly, though, even these leave something to be desired (see Variability).

Once gameplay begins and is boiled down to a series of d20 rolls and cashing in spell slots, you ironically start to wonder where the magic went. Most of the time, abilities and spells are just a series of pluses or minuses — or minutely specific functions used so rarely that players forget they are there. I'm looking at you, Turn Undead.

Now, that said, the overarching universe of Dungeons & Dragons has countless tomes of thematic lore. Settings like Greyhawk, Faerûn, and Khorvaire offer a wealth of immersive detail. However, these details rarely, if ever, overlap with players' character options in a way that makes players feel a part of the setting.

Some might be quick to point to exceptions like Eberron's Artificer class as disproof. But even these additional options, while fun, are in no way unique to the setting they come from. An Artificer from Eberron looks the same as an Artificer from Faerûn, or any other setting for that matter (which, coincidently, is probably why the D&D 5e system has been used to power so many other RPGs).

In all, the theme of Dungeons & Dragons, like the art, dances at the edge of the game to such an extent that, looking back, you wonder if it was ever really there.

Theme grade: 2/5

Once gameplay begins and is boiled down to a series of d20 rolls and cashing spell slots, you ironically start to wonder where the magic went.

Accessibility.

Accessibility may be one of D&D's greatest strengths solely because so many people want to play it. Anyone who has seen a reference in their favorite pop-culture franchise is willing to give D&D a try — which can't be said for any other RPG on the market.

It's only once you start teaching D&D that accessibility falls apart. Baked within D&D are interlocking, entirely disconnected, mechanics that each govern key parts of gameplay. The skill roll system, the damage/armor system, the saves system, and the spell system (not to mention any unique system that comes will classes) all operate entirely differently. As a result, teaching a new player feels like a cruel bait-and-switch where players are promised they can do everything, but they are unsure how to do anything.

This problem isn't helped by the game's three-book format. Dividing rules into three, several-hundred-page manuals both increases the initial cost to play and dramatically exacerbates the problem of complexity as players (or at least the DM) are forced to reference multiple chapters or even multiple books just to resolve normal parts of gameplay.

Many of these needlessly discordant systems could, and probably should, be simplified to fit the mass-market, casual players Hasbro is marketing toward. But these mechanics, and the three-book format, are so fundamental to D&D's identity that they could not be removed without the game becoming something else entirely.

And so we're left in a weird limbo where the game has complex vestiges of its old-school origin while promising to be a fun, friendly approach for first-time players.

Accessibility grade: 2/5

Photo from Amazon

Variability.

Dungeons & Dragons offers unique combinations of race, class, subclass, feats, and spells for what feels like endless character options. This is a nice perk thematically (see above) and encourages players to think big, which — for a game based on imagination — is important!

After players build one or two characters, however, it becomes clear that this variability is at least partially an illusion. While players have TONS of options, only some are actually functional enough to enjoy. For example, the entire Ranger build is notoriously obsolete compared to other classes. The Monk focuses on a skillset rarely used. An entire website exists just to help players sort through choices color-coded into useless, OK, good, and competitive options. In the end, the hundreds of pages of choices end up feeling like cleverly disguised pitfalls to disguise just a handful of viable choices.

Dungeons & Dragons' variability starts off as one of its greatest perks but becomes just another snag. Players uneducated in which choices are "good" can find themselves cornered into bad, pointless, or just boring builds. And that's just bad game design.

Variability grade: 3/5

Price.

The price for D&D is all over the place depending on how you want to play. Some options are free online at DnDBeyond, and free is pretty fantastic as far as prices go. To get the full game, though, players need to buy the Player Manual ($49.99), the Dungeon Master's Guide ($49.99), and the Monster Manual ($48.64... for some reason). All told, then, players are looking at spending roughly $150 to get started.

That's a steep price. And it doesn't include all the character creation options players might be used to, like the aforemtioned Artificer. But Hasbro gets credit for allowing players to try the game for free to start.

Price grade: 3/5

Conclusion.

Dungeons and Dragons is no doubt the most famous tabletop RPG of all time — but compared to the best practices of game design, it leaves a lot to be desired. D&D 5e is ultimately somewhat of a nothing-burger. If you need an RPG, it definitely is one. But the pop-culture craze has caused Dungeons and Dragons' management to lean into a more whimsical, fluffy realm that just doesn't work very well with its crunchy, mechanical origins. The result is a game that just is, and will continue to be as long as pop-culture momentum can keep it adrift.

Final grade: 14/25 = 56%

Josiah Mork (me) is a tabletop gamer and publisher with almost a decade of experience publishing tabletop RPGs and wargames. This review is not sponsored, but I may receive a small profit from purchases you make through links on this page.