I don’t hate 5e, in fact I’d join in as a player very happily, but I wouldn’t run it. 5e is geared towards a very specific kind of campaign that I’m not very interested in running.

I’m more of a social campaign with big action sequences kind of DM and Savage Worlds does that perfectly. It is:

• Classless
• 3 actions per turn, going over 1 heightens the chance you’ll fail on all actions. Players tend to spend less time thinking.
• Step die instead of d20, easy math.
• Extremely easy to make homebrew for.
• Generic, which means it can do any genre (I’ve done dark fantasy western and high fantasy medieval, next up I’ll do dark fantasy cyberpunk hopefully).

I tried to turn 5e into something that fit a cyberpunk setting for about 3 months, before just buying SWADE and being able to run every genre I could imagine from the go.

My party tends to try to optimize starting positions, and it makes sessions kinda long. Last session, I decided I would add extras to a boss fight that would aid the players during the fight. The players started debating what the best approach would be after successfully sneaking into an already good position.

Decided right then and there that the extras were red shirts. While the players were debating, I interjected saying that one of the zombies took a chunk out of one of the gunmen (one of the extras). The energy in the call heightened immediately and they started to frantically make a battle plan and triggered the fight quickly.

I’m thinking I’ll start doing that more often. Adds narrative weight to their dilly dallying.