When Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition launched in 2014, it was heralded as a streamlined, modern take on the legendary tabletop RPG. Its simplified mechanics, focus on narrative, and player-centric design brought a new generation to the table. Yet, beneath the polished veneer, 5e hides a host of systemic flaws that turn what should be a collaborative storytelling experience into a logistical nightmare for Dungeon Masters. Here’s an in-depth look at why D&D 5e is increasingly unplayable for DMs.
1. Bounded Accuracy: A Broken Foundation
The philosophy of bounded accuracy – the idea that attack rolls and AC would remain relatively consistent across levels – seemed like a promising innovation. But in practice, it erodes the sense of progression. High-level characters can still be hit by goblins, and bosses who should inspire dread are constantly chipped away by lucky low rolls. The system forces DMs to artificially inflate monster hit points or add more enemies to maintain any semblance of challenge, turning combat into a tedious slog.
2. Action Economy: The DM’s Eternal Struggle
The game’s action economy heavily favors players. A single monster, no matter how powerful, is unlikely to survive against a party of four or five players taking multiple attacks, spells, and abilities each round. Multiattack helps, but it doesn’t compare to the sheer weight of player actions. Legendary monsters barely stand a chance unless they come with lair actions, legendary actions, or absurdly high hit points, making it feel like the DM is stacking the deck just to keep their villains alive.
3. Flying Races: Breaking Encounters at Level 1
Allowing players to choose flying races like Aarakocra or Winged Tiefling fundamentally undermines encounter design. Pits, walls, and other physical obstacles become irrelevant. Grounded enemies are rendered impotent as flying characters rain death from above with ranged attacks. For a system that emphasizes theater of the mind, these races destroy the sense of space and strategy in combat.
Flying playable races fundamentally disrupt encounter design because they bypass the physical challenges that are integral to the game’s tension and pacing. Dungeons and outdoor environments are traditionally built with obstacles – pits, walls, rivers, chasms, and cliffs – that require teamwork, creativity, and resource management to overcome. Flying characters render these obstacles irrelevant. Why work together to find a way across a pit when one character can just carry the entire party over? Why struggle to climb a treacherous cliff when a flying character can simply scout the area above and potentially solve the problem alone? These bypasses not only trivialize exploration but also rob other players of the opportunity to shine. Rogues with expertise in climbing or survivalists with tools like grappling hooks and rope no longer feel useful when the party has access to flight. The game stops being about shared problem-solving and becomes a series of moments where one character carries the rest, both literally and metaphorically.
Combat encounters fare no better. Flying characters often break the spatial dynamics of battle by completely invalidating melee-based enemies and traps. A grounded enemy, no matter how fearsome, can do little against a flying attacker raining arrows or spells from above. Monsters with devastating close-range attacks, such as ogres, trolls, or gelatinous cubes, become impotent against airborne foes. Even ranged attackers struggle if the flying character can simply hover out of range. Legendary monsters with specific movement limitations or lair designs, such as a lich or a dragon’s minions, lose their effectiveness because a flying character can navigate around the intended challenges of the encounter. This ruins the DM’s careful planning, forcing them to either rewrite encounters on the fly (pun intended) or awkwardly introduce flying counters like anti-air spells or ranged weapons, which can feel contrived and immersion-breaking.
4. Spells Problem
The magic system in 5e, for all its elegance, harbors a subtle menace: cantrips. These “harmless” spells, available at will and with no resource cost, are the DM’s quiet adversary, capable of trivializing exploration, combat, and creativity. Designed to empower low-level spellcasters, cantrips have evolved into tools that, in many cases, upend entire gameplay dynamics.
Take mold earth and shape water, for instance. At a glance, they seem like flavorful utilities meant for minor adjustments to the environment. In practice, they become the Swiss Army knife of problem-solving. An impassable cliff becomes a manageable slope. A pit trap becomes a steppingstone. Rivers that were once hazards to be crossed with careful planning or resource use are pacified into calm streams. Mold earth effectively turns any adventurer into a part-time construction worker, while shape water turns fluid dynamics into a child’s game. The creative potential is fun – but unlimited use turns small challenges into speedbumps.
And then there’s thaumaturgy, prestidigitation, and minor illusion. These spells, designed to add flavor and flair, instead enable players to manipulate environments and NPCs with ease. Want to distract a guard? Minor illusion creates the sound of a scream down the hall. Need to fake a divine intervention? Thaumaturgy creates tremors and booming voices. These effects are small in scale but limitless in application, allowing players to bypass encounters that would otherwise require ingenuity or risk.
The problem is magnified when you consider the cost: nothing. Cantrips don’t consume spell slots or components. There’s no significant risk to repeated use, meaning players can spam these spells as much as they want. Why engage with a challenge when you can brute-force the solution? Exploration becomes a loop of mold earth and shape water. Puzzles become a guessing game of minor illusion. Tension melts away as players lean on cantrips to sidestep danger and complexity.
Even combat isn’t immune to the cantrip effect. Eldritch blast, with its scaling damage, quickly becomes the centerpiece of any warlock’s arsenal, rendering other attack options irrelevant. A fire-based enemy? Ray of frost. A flying enemy? Create bonfire pulls them down. The supposed “simplicity” of cantrips often leads to monotonous encounters, with casters repeating the same spells over and over. Their scaling damage ensures they remain viable, but it comes at the cost of encouraging varied tactics.
5. Short Rest Shenanigans
Classes like Warlocks and Monks are built around short rests, but the game provides no clear limitations on how often a party can rest. This creates a perverse incentive for players to short rest after every encounter, effectively giving these classes infinite resources. Meanwhile, the DM is left scrambling to create arbitrary time pressure, which players often perceive as punitive.
6. No One Dies Anymore
Death in D&D used to carry real weight, but 5e’s mechanics and player expectations have drained much of its sting. At low levels, players wield incredible power thanks to scaling cantrips and the abundance of healing options. Spells like spare the dying ensure unconscious characters are stabilized without risk, while others like healing word revive allies from the brink with a bonus action. These tools, combined with the scaling damage of cantrips like eldritch blast, make even early-level adventurers feel invincible, reducing once-deadly encounters to exercises in routine cleanup.
This sense of invincibility is compounded by how tough players are even in the early game. A group of Level 1 adventurers can march fearlessly into combat, trading blows with creatures that should inspire terror. Where parties once feared facing a single wight or a pack of skeletons, they now mob undead without hesitation, raining down endless sacred flame or fire bolt barrages. The cantrip system, while empowering for players, removes the need for resource management or clever tactics, as low-level spells can accomplish what once required higher-level planning and preparation.
For DMs, the pressure to avoid killing characters adds to the problem. Modern gaming culture encourages prioritizing player enjoyment, which often translates to not letting anyone’s character die. This expectation makes it difficult for DMs to craft truly tense encounters. Pulling punches or fudging rolls to keep players alive undercuts the drama of the story and can lead to players taking reckless actions, knowing there’s an implicit safety net.
This lack of fear changes the dynamic of the game. Players who once strategized carefully now charge headlong into danger, confident that their cantrips, healing, and DM’s reluctance to kill them will see them through. Even creatures meant to evoke dread – like a banshee’s wail or a vampire’s charm – become manageable nuisances rather than existential threats. When the stakes are this low, combat risks becoming repetitive and devoid of the weight it once carried.
7. Stealth is Ridiculously Overpowered
Stealth in 5e can absolutely feel overpowered. The rules governing it are intentionally broad to accommodate narrative freedom, but this often leaves DMs struggling to apply consistent rulings. When a party is built around high Dexterity and picks up options like pass without trace, the stealth checks soar into the mid-to-high 20s, well beyond what most enemies can realistically perceive. This renders entire encounters moot, turning potentially thrilling challenges into avoidable blips on the radar. DMs face a tough choice: either rewrite encounters on the fly, add contrived environmental conditions that nullify stealth, or accept that what should have been a tense scenario ends with the party sneaking by unnoticed.
This state of affairs doesn’t feel balanced. The players end up expecting to bypass challenges through stealth, while the DM is pressured into artificial or clumsy solutions just to maintain the game’s tension. Over time, this can erode the feeling of accomplishment in overcoming carefully crafted obstacles. Instead of stealth being a useful tool, it morphs into a near-guaranteed way to trivialize encounters – an unfortunate side effect of the game’s flexible yet vague stealth mechanics.
8. Overpowered Feats
At low levels, optional feats can warp the power curve of a 5e campaign. Characters who gain early access to feats like Sentinel, Sharpshooter, or Great Weapon Master suddenly become forces of nature, capable of locking down enemies, landing incredible long-range shots, or dealing massive bursts of damage. These abilities, once meant to be rewards for character growth, instead turn new heroes into juggernauts who can trivialize encounters that should still feel tense and uncertain.
The problem isn’t just about raw power. When one character can dispatch foes effortlessly, the rest of the party risks becoming supporting actors in someone else’s highlight reel. Balance suffers as the DM struggles to provide challenges that engage everyone. Without careful consideration of when and how these powerful feats are introduced, what should be heroic teamwork can feel more like watching one player’s unstoppable wrecking ball flatten the battlefield.
9. Infinite Resource Exploits
At certain levels of optimization, D&D 5e becomes less about overcoming challenges and more about exploiting infinite resources. Twilight Clerics can generate temporary hit points with their Channel Divinity to the point where damage is nearly a non-issue, drastically reducing the impact of encounters that should feel dangerous. Meanwhile, Warlocks gain endless use of eldritch blast, effectively turning them into long-range artillery batteries that never run dry and rarely need to consider positioning or ammunition.
This abundance of infinite-use abilities can warp player behavior. Instead of carefully planning spells or working as a team, parties might lean heavily on a single class feature to bypass challenges. Druids can use goodberry to replace entire stockpiles of healing potions, removing the need for careful rationing or downtime – making healing potions, scrolls, and more worthless. The game’s intended push-and-pull between using resources wisely and risking further exploration fades away when characters have solutions that never expire.
The issue is not simply that these abilities exist, but that they offer no real trade-offs. Without meaningful constraints, players are encouraged to game the system rather than engage with it narratively. A character can provide healing on tap, annihilate enemies from a safe distance indefinitely, or shrug off damage that should force strategic thinking. Over time, these infinite resource exploits dull the edge of adventure, making what was once a tense, immersive experience feel more like a series of foregone conclusions.
Resource scarcity and survival are meant to heighten tension – cornerstone to immersion – when the player fears for their character, needing observe and manage their environment… .
10. Action Surge: The One-Turn Wipe
Nova damage, the ability of certain classes to unleash overwhelming power in a single turn, has become a defining feature of 5e’s combat system. Fighters with Action Surge and Paladins using Divine Smite exemplify this design, with their potential to deal absurd amounts of damage in one explosive burst. This can make encounters feel lopsided, where even high-CR monsters or carefully crafted villains are wiped off the board before they can meaningfully react. What should be a climactic showdown often fizzles out in a single round, leaving the DM scrambling to salvage the narrative.
The problem stems from the mechanics themselves. Action Surge doubles a Fighter’s offensive output for a turn, while Paladins’ Divine Smite can stack enormous radiant damage onto every successful attack, particularly when combined with critical hits. These abilities are not inherently broken in isolation, but when optimized, they can produce astronomical damage numbers, especially at mid-levels where their power spikes. Add in synergistic party compositions that enable or boost nova damage – like spellcasters granting haste or bless – and it becomes difficult to create encounters that feel balanced without overcompensating.
For DMs, this creates a dilemma. Buffing monsters to withstand such damage risks making non-nova party members feel irrelevant, as they lack the same damage-dealing potential. Alternatively, introducing mechanics like legendary actions or resistances can mitigate nova bursts, but if overused, these can feel like cheap counters that punish players for using their abilities effectively. Striking the right balance between letting players feel powerful and ensuring the challenge remains engaging is a constant tightrope walk.
This focus on nova damage also distorts the pacing of combat. Encounters meant to play out over several rounds can feel anti-climactic when the party dumps all its resources into a single round of devastation. It shifts combat from a tactical, multi-turn experience to a race to deal as much damage as possible before the enemy gets a turn. This can rob encounters of their drama, as battles devolve into quick blowouts rather than tense, evolving conflicts.
Ultimately, nova damage is a double-edged sword. It empowers players and gives them moments of glory, but it can also undermine the game’s balance and storytelling if left unchecked. DMs can counter this by designing encounters with multiple stages, durable minions, or environmental factors that split the party’s focus. By creating situations where burst damage alone isn’t enough to win the day, they can reintroduce the tactical depth and pacing that makes combat feel satisfying for everyone involved.
11. Legendary Resistances: Fake Tension
To counteract the overwhelming power of player spells, many high-level monsters have Legendary Resistances that let them auto-succeed on saving throws. While this keeps them alive, it feels cheap to the players, who see their most powerful spells wasted. At the same time, without Legendary Resistances, bosses are sitting ducks for hold person or banishment.
12. Overloaded Magic Items
Magic items in 5e aren’t just powerful, they’re downright infuriating when players start stacking them up like some kind of magical Jenga tower. On their own, an item like a bag of holding might be a neat trick for carrying a dragon’s hoard worth of loot, but add an immovable rod into the mix, and suddenly you’ve got players using high-fantasy cheat codes to trivialize what should be deadly encounters. Are you a DM who spent hours designing a devious puzzle that requires clever thinking and precise timing? Too bad – your players just turned it into a laughable side note with a single stupid item combo.
And that’s just the appetizer. The main course comes when you start looking at items like the cloak of displacement or boots of speed, stacking their effects with class features and spells to produce characters who are basically impossible to pin down. Forget carefully balanced CR ratings or thoughtful villain tactics – none of it matters if the party’s rogue is constantly under a blur-like effect and zipping around the battlefield like a caffeinated hummingbird. Wizards and warlocks become mobile turrets of destruction, laughing at any attempt to challenge them because their movement and defenses are now on steroids.
It’s honestly maddening to watch your lovingly crafted game world devolve into an arms race of magic item exploitation. As soon as you try to compensate with tougher monsters or more elaborate traps, the players find a new combo that renders all your efforts useless. You want tense survival horror? They’ve got bottomless extradimensional pockets full of supplies. You want a thrilling chase scene? They’ve got items that obliterate travel times and leave your NPC pursuers in the dust. At this point, you might wonder why you bother at all.
If the system offered some kind of hard cap or meaningful trade-off, you could manage it, but 5e’s approach to magic items often feels like a giant wink and a nod at players who want to exploit every loophole. Instead of careful resource management or tactical decision-making, you get this circus of absurd combinations that no amount of DM sweat and tears can contain. And guess who ends up looking like the villain when they start banning items left and right just to keep the game from collapsing under its own broken weight? The DM, of course. It’s a thankless job, made infinitely harder by a ruleset that happily hands out overpowered trinkets like candy.
13. Player Knowledge Breaks Immersion
One of the most immersion-shattering issues in D&D is when players weaponize their out-of-character knowledge. They know trolls burn when exposed to fire or acid, or that vampires are repelled by running water. It doesn’t matter that their characters – grizzled mercenaries or small-town farmers – shouldn’t have a clue about these weaknesses. The moment a troll shows up, someone’s immediately stockpiling torches or casting flaming sphere. What could have been a tense, discovery-filled encounter turns into a metagaming clinic that yanks everyone out of the story.
For DMs, this is a special kind of hell. To keep encounters interesting, you have to either accept that your players are going to cheese every fight with their encyclopedic knowledge of the Monster Manual or go back to the drawing board and rewrite creatures just to surprise them. Suddenly, your trolls are resistant to fire, or your vampires laugh at running water, but this feels less like creative storytelling and more like doing homework to outwit people who refuse to play fair. And when you do change things, the players don’t marvel at the twist – they complain that you’re “breaking the rules” or “ruining their strategy.”
The worst part is how it undermines the narrative. A new player, excited to roleplay their character’s fear and confusion at seeing a horrifying undead, is drowned out by the veteran who announces, “Hit it with radiant damage!” before anyone’s rolled an Arcana check. It’s not just immersion-breaking; it’s downright deflating for anyone trying to experience the story organically. What’s the point of mystery or exploration if someone at the table always acts like they’re playing chess with the DM instead of being part of the adventure?
DMs shouldn’t have to do extra work just to patch over players’ inability to separate their knowledge from their characters’. The game already has mechanics for learning about creatures, like skill checks and trial-and-error. But when players bypass these systems with meta-knowledge, they rob themselves of the joy of discovery and make the DM’s life infinitely harder. It’s not about punishing smart players – it’s about preserving the spirit of the game, where what you don’t know can be just as thrilling as what you do.
14. CR System: Completely Broken
The Challenge Rating (CR) system is one of 5e’s most glaring failures, promising an easy way to gauge an enemy’s difficulty but delivering nothing of the sort. Supposedly, CR should tell you if a monster is appropriate for a given party, but in practice it’s a meaningless number that often leads DMs straight into disaster. Take a creature like the Ankheg – marked as a low-CR enemy, it can still wipe out a low-level group in a few unlucky rounds. Meanwhile, supposedly fearsome high-CR monsters frequently crumble under the onslaught of optimized parties, their “difficulty” feeling more like a polite suggestion than a genuine threat.
This disconnect forces DMs into a constant cycle of guesswork and adjustments. You can’t trust the numbers the game provides, so you either rely on trial-and-error or resign yourself to underwhelming encounters. The players aren’t exactly thrilled either; they can sense when a fight intended to be a balanced challenge is either a trivial walk in the park or a sudden and unceremonious TPK. This undermines the entire gaming experience, robbing moments of triumph of their meaning and making failure feel cheap and arbitrary.
What makes it even worse is how the CR system fails to account for party composition, tactics, and resources. A monster that’s supposed to be a decent challenge can be trivialized if one character brought the perfect spell or if the party has certain magic items. Conversely, a supposedly manageable foe can become a nightmare if the group lacks key abilities or if the dice simply don’t fall their way. That’s not just variance – that’s the game’s own math being out to lunch. The DM, who should be focusing on storytelling and creative world-building, now spends their prep time recalculating hit points, tweaking damage, or shoehorning in minions to compensate for broken CR estimates.
The tragedy is that CR should have made DMs’ lives easier. Instead, it’s a trap that inflates expectations and dumps extra homework into the DM’s lap. Balance should emerge from the rules, not from perpetual DM guesswork. If the CR system were reliable, everyone would have more fun – the DM could trust their encounter design, and players would face challenges that are thrilling rather than baffling. Instead, we’re left with this embarrassing farce, where official guidelines feel like bad jokes told at the DM’s expense.
15. Wild Shape Abuse
Wild Shape used to feel like a flavorful trick in a druid’s arsenal -shape into a harmless animal to scout ahead, communicate with forest creatures, or escape tricky situations. Now it’s an overpowered “I win” button that can turn a level-2 character into an unkillable juggernaut. Instead of relying on careful planning or teamwork, a low-level druid can just become a dire wolf and shrug off lethal hits with ease, all while dishing out damage that leaves enemies reeling. Balance? Forget it – this is a straight shot to the top of the tanking and utility food chain.
And it only gets worse at higher levels. Once druids gain access to more powerful forms – elementals, dinosaurs, and other monstrous shapes – the game’s intended difficulty curve collapses. The DM’s intricate plans for a harrowing trek through harsh terrain or a cunning ambush set by intelligent foes? Rendered moot by one druid’s animal-shaped cheat code. Need to scout? Turn into a tiny critter that no one will notice. Need brute force? Turn into a behemoth that swats aside the DM’s prized monsters. It’s basically freeform shapeshifting that trivializes what should be memorable, challenging encounters.
Sure, DMs can try to counter these tactics. Maybe they throw in more environmental hazards, creatures that specialize in sniffing out intruders, or situations where pure animal might doesn’t solve the puzzle. But at that point, you’re over-engineering encounters just to counter one broken class feature. It stops feeling like you’re running a story and starts feeling like you’re balancing a video game – badly. The druid’s wild shape abuse doesn’t just break immersion and challenge; it hijacks the game’s entire dynamic.
What was once a thematic, story-rich feature has mutated into an open invitation for players to dominate the table. Instead of nurturing a sense of wonder and respect for nature’s forms, Wild Shape is just another exploit that leaves everyone else feeling like they’re struggling in the druid’s sprawling, overgrown shadow.
16. Not A Scrappy Adventurer
Low-level characters in D&D 5e are closer to superheroes than scrappy adventurers, a stark contrast to earlier editions of the game where low-level play was defined by fragility, resource scarcity, and a constant fear of death. In 5e, even at level 1, characters are equipped with abilities and durability that make them feel like seasoned veterans rather than inexperienced adventurers. This shift undermines the narrative progression of a heroic journey, where characters are supposed to start as underdogs who grow into legends. Instead, players begin their careers with powers that rival those of mid-tier characters in previous editions, removing much of the tension and stakes from early gameplay.
First and foremost, hit points in 5e are dramatically inflated at low levels. Characters begin with a sizable pool of hit points thanks to their Constitution modifiers and starting class features, making them far more durable than their counterparts in earlier editions. A first-level fighter, for instance, can easily start with over 12 hit points, while a wizard might have 8 or more. Compare this to the days of AD&D, where a first-level wizard often had 1d4 hit points and could be killed by a stiff breeze or a single goblin’s arrow. In 5e, even goblins, wolves, or other low-CR threats struggle to pose a serious danger unless they are encountered in overwhelming numbers. This durability encourages reckless behavior among players, who feel emboldened to charge headlong into danger because they know they can take a few hits.
Combat abilities at level 1 also contribute to the superhero problem. Martial characters like fighters, barbarians, and monks begin the game with multiple powerful abilities. A barbarian’s Rage, for instance, provides resistance to damage and a significant boost to survivability, turning them into tanks that can shrug off early-level threats. Spellcasters are even more egregious. Unlike in earlier editions, where low-level wizards and clerics were severely limited in the number of spells they could cast per day, 5e casters have access to cantrips – spammable, no-resource-cost magical attacks that scale with level. A wizard can repeatedly cast fire bolt to deal damage comparable to a longbow, ensuring they always contribute meaningfully in combat without worrying about conserving their resources. This fundamentally changes the dynamic of low-level spellcasting, removing the need for caution and cleverness that defined earlier playstyles.
The abundance of healing options also enhances the superhero feel. Even at level 1, parties have access to healing word, goodberry, and other healing spells that can easily undo the consequences of combat. A character who drops to 0 hit points is no longer in mortal danger – they can be revived instantly with a bonus action, often returning to the fray without missing a turn. The death saving throw mechanic further cushions the threat of death, allowing characters to linger unconscious for several rounds before there’s any real risk of dying. This safety net drastically reduces the stakes of early-level play, as the fear of permanent loss is almost nonexistent.
Additionally, 5e’s design gives low-level characters abilities that were once reserved for higher levels or elite builds. Rogues can deal bonus damage with sneak attack as early as level 1, doubling their effectiveness in combat. Clerics can cast bless to turn the tide of battle by boosting the entire party’s attack rolls and saving throws. Even level 1 feats (if allowed) can turn characters into powerhouses. A Variant Human with the Sharpshooter or Great Weapon Master feat at level 1 can output damage that rivals or exceeds most CR-appropriate enemies, reducing fights to trivial speed bumps.
Exploration and survival, traditionally the hallmarks of low-level play, are also trivialized by 5e’s design. Rations, water, and travel logistics – key elements in previous editions – are rendered moot by spells like goodberry or create water, both of which are available at level 1. Environmental hazards like difficult terrain or extreme weather are easily bypassed by cantrips like mold earth or low-level spells like feather fall. Instead of feeling like vulnerable explorers struggling against a dangerous world, level 1 adventurers feel like demigods who can bend the environment to their will.
The result of all this power is that low-level characters don’t feel like fledgling adventurers on the brink of greatness – they feel like seasoned superheroes who have already arrived. The narrative arc of growing from zero to hero is cut short before it even begins, robbing the game of one of its most satisfying progressions. For DMs, this creates an immediate challenge: how do you create meaningful stakes and tension for characters who are practically invincible compared to their low-level counterparts in older editions? By turning every character into a powerhouse at level 1, 5e sacrifices much of the grit and drama that once made early-level play so compelling. Instead of fearing the dangers of the world, players find themselves breezing through encounters, confident in their ability to survive almost anything the game throws at them. This design choice, while appealing to newer players who value empowerment, ultimately undermines the balance and narrative depth of the game.
At its core, D&D 5e is a player-centric game. It prioritizes empowerment for the players – at the direct expense of the Dungeon Master. For new or casual DMs, this can feel like the game is working against them, with broken mechanics and poorly balanced systems forcing them to either “cheat” or let players steamroll the game.
While 5e has brought many to the hobby, it’s undeniable that the system’s design flaws leave DMs struggling to maintain the tension, challenge, and immersion that make tabletop RPGs truly magical. Maybe that’s why so many DMs left the game, with players outnumber DM’s 20 to 1, and why at the height of the games revival there were over 50+ meetup groups surrounding Wizards of the Coast HQ offices, but today there are only 6.
