D&D 2E Should 5e use optional rules like 2e did?

[Tallifer]

I'm not sure how to fit "I can breathe acid" or "I can teleport 25 feet" into racial/background abilities for a gritty, low-magic, humans-only campaign. Saying "I was a wizard's apprentice" doesn't really explain the +2 Str, Fury, and Healing bonuses that seem to come with knowing one "Acid Spray" spell, and also sorta kills the "low-magic" vibe. "I always carry around buckets of acid that I learned to make as an apothecary's apprentice" doesn't really do it for me, either, because then we are interfering with encumbrance and everything else.

I'm perfectly fine with D&D supporting the Wahoo! Its all in there! Mos Eisley Creature Cantina meets the Justice League playstyle. However, I also want it to support the cold, grim Black Company playstyle and the perhaps colder, grimmer Song of Fire and Ice playstyle. I have happily played and ran both styles with several different editions. Some mechanics, be they Racial, Spell, AEDU-power, healing, Critical Hit Tables, or whatever, simply don't support some styles of play regardless of reflavoring. Mechanics do matter, especially in a game as complicated/precise as D&D, even in the older versions.

If you want a world with such little magic, you would have to disallow half the classes as well as well as most of the races. Better to use a different system like Pendragon or Call of Cthulhu whose default characters are non-magical. If I knew how Green Ronin's Ice and Fire game worked, I would say that. (And I do sympathize: I love Westeros. But I would never attempt to play Westeros in D&D.)

 

[variant]

I figure the best way to have variant rules all at the same table is to incur an experience point cost for the rules. So healing surges could be like -10% exp.

 

[Mokona]

If you want a world with such little magic, you would have to disallow half the classes as well as well as most of the races.

I've played numerous D&D games with such "little" magic and it worked fine. If you go all-out low magic it takes a extra work but there is also the middle ground that is not high magic but still pretty easy.

 

[Ratskinner]

If you want a world with such little magic, you would have to disallow half the classes as well as well as most of the races. Better to use a different system like Pendragon or Call of Cthulhu whose default characters are non-magical. If I knew how Green Ronin's Ice and Fire game worked, I would say that. (And I do sympathize: I love Westeros. But I would never attempt to play Westeros in D&D.)

Only in 4e, IME. I've handily done it (or similar enough) with little fanfare in previous editions. 3e is a bit more involved than the early editions, but even that's not too hard. You make a few changes to the way magic or spells work across the board (like...a Spellcraft Check.) Throw out or modify some feats and the magic item creation rules. You still have to forbid some/many races, but you can fold some of that into "backgrounds" like Green Ronin's Black Company campaign setting did. I think the modifications fit on two pages when I did it last for 3e. The DM has to take the lack of magical umph into account when designing encounters, but that's not surprising.

You're dead right for 4e, though. I tried working it out and just found myself putting red lines through soo much that it wasn't worth it in the end (I didn't feel.) Which, I thought, was a shame because I really liked some aspects of 4e. I liked 4e for what it was, but so much seemed "baked in" that it was very hard to bend it too far out of its native playstyle. YMMV, of course, but I'm not alone in feeling this way:

"With fourth edition, there was a huge focus on mechanics. The story was still there, but a lot of our customers were having trouble getting to it. In some ways, it was like we told people, ‘The right way to play guitar is to play thrash metal,’ But there’s other ways to play guitar.” - Mike Mearls.​

 

[CM]

Only in 4e, IME. I've handily done it (or similar enough) with little fanfare in previous editions.

Huh?

If you use Inherent Bonuses, 4e has some of the best support for low-magic games of any edition so far. It's certainly the first edition where an entirely martial-based party is completely viable without heavily modifying published adventures.

Yes, you would have to exclude certain races, but that's true in any edition. Just because there's a flood of wahoo magical options doesn't mean there is a dearth of nonmagical options.

 

[Ratskinner]

Yes, you would have to exclude certain races, but that's true in any edition. Just because there's a flood of wahoo magical options doesn't mean there is a dearth of nonmagical options.

An objection to the exclusion of races for this purpose is what got us here.

As for the rest of it...well it's hard to "tone down" magic in 4e without excluding a bunch (like any without the Martial power source) of Classes. I'm sure it can be done, but its more complicated (to me, anyway) than toning down magic in previous editions. Turning magic off is easy, though.

 

[Ramen]

Yeah this sounds like what they're planning. In truth that's the D&D I have been hoping for since 2nd edition. I wanted a D&D that was more a generic Fantasy RPG rather than a set type of rules system which takes a lot of modding to play outside some assumed genre range. 3E went that way sorta (not enough in my opinion) while 4E took the other route. I want a fantasy toolkit that will allow me to run and play in a lot of differently flavored D&D settings with a simple system that D&D players are familiar with.

I'm sorta hoping that the DMG for 5E is a proper DMG akin to the AD&D 1st edition where it gives you alot of information, optional rules, added detail, and advice. The DMG should always be bigger then the PHB since there so much a DM might need to customize their own game and setting.

Options = Win IMHO