If you trust the system and try the system in good faith, you can’t break it. The guardrails work, and everything stays on track.
But not everyone does that. In the past 13 months, we’ve seen a bunch of people look into or be introduced to the game who don’t really want to try it, but feel some sort of internal moral pressure or external social pressure to abandon 5e, who then either want to beat it back into a 5e-like shape (use a separate and splitable movement pool, expand mis/fortune rules to better emulate dis/advantage, give monsters legendary buklshit, try to actually use proficiency without level, etc), or who are so used to these games being non-functional out of the box that they insist on implementing homebrew originally crafted with broken character builds or boring, HP sack monsters in mind, and then end up finding the game both boring, and unfairly deadly.
Plenty of people break the game. Breaking it is a lot more than just trying to win in character creation.
If you trust the system and try the system in good faith, you can’t break it. The guardrails work, and everything stays on track.
But not everyone does that. In the past 13 months, we’ve seen a bunch of people look into or be introduced to the game who don’t really want to try it, but feel some sort of internal moral pressure or external social pressure to abandon 5e, who then either want to beat it back into a 5e-like shape (use a separate and splitable movement pool, expand mis/fortune rules to better emulate dis/advantage, give monsters legendary buklshit, try to actually use proficiency without level, etc), or who are so used to these games being non-functional out of the box that they insist on implementing homebrew originally crafted with broken character builds or boring, HP sack monsters in mind, and then end up finding the game both boring, and unfairly deadly.
Plenty of people break the game. Breaking it is a lot more than just trying to win in character creation.