The player characters are generally adventurers fated to achieve greatness, for them the extraordinary is just ordinary.

People tend to not realize how often something is going to be happening with a one in twenty chance and that you are going to be rolling your basic attack roll a gazillion times per session. When you start rolling the dice, making attacks every turn, that is going to come up very often. In fact, statistically this rule would mean that your character would be carrying on average ~13½ arrows. By the time you’ve rolled 14 times it’s more likely that there was at least one 1 in there than not. With multiple attacks per turn that’s going to happen infuriatingly often.

The way a party is going to be adjusting to a backstabbing murderhobo is to throw them out of the party at the earliest convenience. It’s the only realistic outcome. If you want your character to be a part of the party, it’s your job to come up with a backstory and personality that makes them willing to work with the party, not the others’.

The reason all of this is skipped on a meta level is that most people want to get to the actual adventuring instead of trying to figure out one good reason why they’d ever keep someone’s unique evil snowflake in tow.

If theres going to be a party then the players are responsible for coming up with a justification why their character would agree to work together with the rest of the party. I will always welcome even evil characters if and only if their player can actually show that they are capable of the necessary teamwork. The evil guy helping good guys begrudginly because they get something out of it is a classic trope and that’s all fine.

Meanwhile, if your alignment is the classic Chaotic Stupid and you go full murderhobo and backstabber, why would the rest of the part ever tolerate that? They’ll turn up face downwards in the nearest ditch and the player can try coming up with a new character that actually wants to be in the party.

Sure, but the equivalent here would be stealing the cars from your family. Just no.

Okay, explain to me why do you need rules for holding your breath in 5e.

Because water is generally everywhere and you might go in it? Surviving poisonous gases? Strangulation? If you wanted to point at rarely used rules there’s a plethora of better options to pick. This is more like asking why do you need rules for combat.

Why are people just accepting casters taking forever to pick their spells? They should preplan their turns during other creatures turns. If your wizard is spending 15 minutes to pick a spell, it’s your DM’s duty to tell them that they’re skipping their turn as the character is too indecisive to figure out what to do, better plan for your next turn instead. If a player is consistently slowing down the game multiple orders of magnitude they either need to learn what their character can do and make snappier decisions or play a class with less choices. There is no reason to tolerate people wasting other players’ time to the point it’s making the game unenjoyable for them.

Yup, it’s so hard to make resource expending non-combat encounters without effectively sidelining some of the party members. If you build an encounter that effectively requires spell slot expenditure, the martials are basically relegated to an audience position. And if you build an encounter where spell slot use isn’t absolutely necessary, the party will try every imaginable way of conquering it without using up resources first, defeating the whole point of forcing resource expenditure.

I guess one key part of this issue is that generally speaking, caster resources (slots) have universal uses in combat, exploration and social interactions, whereas martial resources only ever have combat applications. This, in presence of resource expending non-combat encounters, kind of creates a situation where your choice of caster or martial decides whether you want to participate in the game the entire time or just half of it.

The “adventuring day” is a relic of times when your entire campaign was exploring a megadungeon and you ran from one encounter to another, back to back, all night long. But barely anybody runs their game like that these days and the rules just never caught up with reality. Some people suggest having a constant time pressure on the party limiting long rests, and while it can work, it also puts a straitjacket on your story pacing where balance flies out the window if you ever let up on the pressure. “Guys, the apocalypse is merely hours away” quickly gets old when it’s been that way for months.

Well, that and 99% of the rules involve fighting or exploring. Anything the rulebooks have to say on social interaction boils down to “well, you just talk to the DM, and sometimes they might have you roll a d20, just figure something out”. D&D isn’t really so much a role-playing game as it is a weird dungeon-crawling boardgame with some role-play elements. Sadly, people are allergic to trying new systems so instead they’ll just try to bodge the one big-name king of TTRPGs, D&D, into doing things it was never built for, forever leaving them wondering why driving in screws with a hammer isn’t as fun as they expected.

Yamcha not only looked awesome first, but he is genuinely one of the strongest human characters in the entire series. In his first fights with Goku he even clearly has the upper hand. It’s just that the series is also infamous for the rapid power creep and starts rolling in all kinds of non-human monstrosities and alien races that his strength as a mere human is dwarved in comparison.

we also create a bunch of NPCs specifically bonded to our characters that the DM weaves into the plot.

That’s the kind of good backstory a DM can use in crafting the campaign, things like:

• Past friends and foes to bring in as impactful NPCs
• Things your character might want/love/hate/fear enough to drastically affect the way they’ll behave
• What your character wants to get or achieve as a basis for a personal quest

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a DM who wouldn’t love a trove of these for your character.

Conversely, stuff like inconsequential past deeds, unnecessarily detailed physical descriptions and personality traits are things that people can pick up on as you play and not something a DM can really use. Save your DM’s time and cut that unnecessary fluff.

I haven’t found a solid contradiction to this plan in the rules-as-written.

If you read Vampiric Touch it’s literally in the first sentence:

The touch of your shadow-wreathed hand can siphon life force from others to heal your wounds.

This is easily a rule as intended type of thing.

Not just that, it’s also rules as written, Vampiric Touch explicitly states:

The touch of your shadow-wreathed hand can siphon life force from others to heal your wounds.

It doesn’t explicitly say they can only siphon from others.

And it doesn’t explicitly say they cannot fly yet no sane person would infer that this spell makes you capable of flying. The spell does only what it says it does, otherwise you are still bound by all the base rules and limitations of the game, like not being able to willy-nilly siphon life force out of things without a feature that explicitly says you can.

Doesn’t say “exclusively from others”. Without casting this spell you couldn’t do that normally.

It also doesn’t say that you cannot fly yet that doesn’t mean it gives you a flying speed. The spell only does what it says it does: It makes you able to siphon life force from others. In any situation not explicitly mentioned in the spell you are still bound by all of the other game rules and as far as I know there is no rule that’d say you can go siphoning life forces from anything without an effect explicitly stating that you can do so.

The D&D rules do not run on a principle of “you can do absolutely anything except for what is explicitly forbidden”.

No qualifiers about the target having to be a creature other than you. It just has to be a creature within your reach.

You do not get to cherrypick which sentences of the spell description you read and follow. It does quite explicitly state “can siphon life force from others to heal your wounds”. There is no concept of flavor text in 5e, every word of a spell description is rules.

And it doesn’t say “you cannot fly”, yet it doesn’t make you capable of flying. This means nothing: The spell does only what it says it does and it quite clearly says “you can siphon life force from others”.

That’s flavour text.

There is no concept of “flavour text” in 5e. If you believe there is, quote a part of the rules that says as such. In 5e, all of the spell description are rules and this has been debated many a times with the very same conclusion.

If you have a mean DM, get a new DM. D&D isn’t an adversarial game where a DM plays to win or turn every player plan on their head like an evil genie. Even if they get to decide what kind of creature the players get, they should pick whatever would be the most fun to introduce to the scene, not whatever would be the worst for the players. If they can come up with something that isn’t the most obvious good pick and surprises the players while being useful in their own way, it’s a good pick. Not to mention, usually forcing the players to improvise parts of their strategy on the fly leads to more fun play than just letting them steamroll an encounter using a predetermined, infallible plan.

The more I look into it the more I start to feel like it’s entirely intentional. As OP mentions, the other forms of polymorph explicitly spell out you get to choose, but normal polymorph does not.

Also, while it’s of course not directly related to DnD, there are some older dungeon crawling media that have both been inspired by DnD and been an inspiration to it that run with this interpretation. For example, in Nethack, a dungeon crawling game first released in 1987, polymorph is entirely random making it a gamble. At least DnD 5e caps the challenge rating so at worst you’d get another monster in the same ballpark strength as you had initially, in Nethack you could just as easily turn a goblin into a dragon.