5th ed sucks, but it’s not because of the lack of minmaxing - it’s because it doesn’t have an identity beyond being quick to start playing. It’s not actually particularly simple or easy to pick up, having only a very mild edge on 3.x due to replacing some of the +1’s and 2’s with advantage and making move actions movement only, and for DMs there’s much less support to run the game than 3.x or 4e, so any perceived lack of complexity is overridden by having to design the game yourself. It talks about rulings over rules, but the rules it provides are incredibly specific, not wide ranging ideas that can be applied to a variety of situations. It wants to provide a wide range of customisation, but only really provides subclasses to do that by - even feats are dependent on the GM allowing them to be taken instead of ASIs. Magic is everywhere, but also inaccessible - there are no real rules for buying magic items (or anything else), and the game heavily restricts how many can be used. The classes aren’t particularly well balanced against each other so it’s very exploitable by minmaxers, but combat is such a big nothing anyway that it only matters in a white room. It has 20 levels but most people only consider levels 3-10 playable.
In my experience 5e players much prefer either Shadow of the Demon Lord/Weird Wizard or Pathfinder 2e once they start playing, but most of them refuse to try either out of brand loyalty or misconceptions about difficulty.
5th ed sucks, but it’s not because of the lack of minmaxing - it’s because it doesn’t have an identity beyond being quick to start playing. It’s not actually particularly simple or easy to pick up, having only a very mild edge on 3.x due to replacing some of the +1’s and 2’s with advantage and making move actions movement only, and for DMs there’s much less support to run the game than 3.x or 4e, so any perceived lack of complexity is overridden by having to design the game yourself. It talks about rulings over rules, but the rules it provides are incredibly specific, not wide ranging ideas that can be applied to a variety of situations. It wants to provide a wide range of customisation, but only really provides subclasses to do that by - even feats are dependent on the GM allowing them to be taken instead of ASIs. Magic is everywhere, but also inaccessible - there are no real rules for buying magic items (or anything else), and the game heavily restricts how many can be used. The classes aren’t particularly well balanced against each other so it’s very exploitable by minmaxers, but combat is such a big nothing anyway that it only matters in a white room. It has 20 levels but most people only consider levels 3-10 playable.
In my experience 5e players much prefer either Shadow of the Demon Lord/Weird Wizard or Pathfinder 2e once they start playing, but most of them refuse to try either out of brand loyalty or misconceptions about difficulty.