D&D 5E 5E OB5ERVATIONS - from an Old School Ref

This is cross-posted from my blog, where most of the commentators are going to be fellow old schoolers already. How many folks here at EnWorld have come to 5th from old editions (1st ed AD&D, Classic, OD&D, or one of the clones?)

Also, if it's not clear, the players are completely enjoying 5E, I'm finding it mostly easy to prepare (and super easy to run) - it really feels like it hit the mark in terms of bridging the editions. These notes are really just calling out adjustments I've needed to make.

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I've only run about 5-6 sessions of 5E, but I'm beginning to get a sense on some adjustments to make to my encounter and dungeon designs going forward. Here's what I'm figuring out.


Rest Versus Lethality
5E has very generous recovery rules. Characters completely heal over night, and the party can recover a lot of their fighting capability after a short rest (defined as 1 hour, sitting put in the dungeon). Once the party manages to survive a treacherous encounter, they can recover quite a bit back to normal and take on another difficult challenge without leaving the dungeon.


There's the rub - surviving the encounter. Monsters hit hard, dice matter, and players frequently go to zero hit points, getting revived mid combat by healing. My old school games featured a longer attrition based approach to whittling away resources, with cumulative small combats wearing the party down over time until they hit a breaking point and decided to leave the dungeon site entirely to recover overnight.


In 5E, you can push the players to that breaking point repeatedly in a single game session, because once they survive the first encounter, enough resources reset for the next encounter and the party can stay in the dungeon. The angst filled discussions aren't "can we go one more room", they're more like "can we actually survive this room and get to a rest point?"


Delve Pacing
We try to play a 3-4 hour game session. Depending on how long it takes everyone to catch up with the chit chat at the beginning of the game session, the group has been able to clear 3-4 combat encounters per night. That means a one night delve or lair should be 2-3 planned encounters, plus the chance for a wandering monster or two.


This is important to realize: In old school games, wandering monsters waste party resources. In my current game, where I'd like the players to complete a mission by the end of the night, wandering monsters waste table time and threaten the party's ability to clear the delve. Technically the wandering monsters waste resources, too, but I'm much more sensitive about the time, because resources refresh so much in between fights.


This is a self-inflicted problem. I don't know which players are going to show up each week, so I want the games to always start and end back in town. And because I'm a jerk, if the players leave a dungeon half-finished with a dangling plot hook and the treasure just hanging out, it's likely someone else (one of my asshat NPC parties of rival adventurers) is going to come along and finish the quest while the party is out of the dungeon. Wandering monsters waste the player's time, not their resources, by preventing them from completing objectives.


Tactics
Although they're not explicitly called out in MMORPG terms like tank, cannon/DPS, buffer / healer, etc., it's clear some of that philosophy is still present. An optimized party backed by good tactics will do much better in combat. I saw a glimpse of the future last game session, where a tankish fighter tied down the enemy boss (and went into defense mode) while a group of heavy-damage striker types pummeled the boss at range - it was ugly for the bad guys and I wept bitter tears on the inside. Luckily the tank isn't an every week player, and being that high-defense damage sponge is an unglamorous role. Hopefully, the glory hounds of the group will continue to turn up their noses at that kind of role. It's much more fun as referee when everyone's a squishy striker with low hit points, and the monsters get to wail on them. Just saying.


The net-net - much like 3.x or 4E, a highly skilled party will be able to roll over poor encounters that don't present the players with tactical challenges, either through raw power or difficult terrain, environments, or deployments. It's important to give some thought to challenging the players via sound tactics. I'm off to read some Sun Tzu.


The complexity of running the game during the combat has shifted more towards the players, who have all the custom abilities and fiddly bits. Monsters are very easy to run in 5E - it's so easy to run as referee, my heart is about to explode in my chest with joy at the ease of running 5E. So yeah, the point is you should have brain power left over to think about tactics, because your brain isn't forced to keep bonuses, modifiers, and player facing rules in the frontal lobe during the game. It's all been shifted to the player's side of the table.


Say Goodbye to Your Chestnuts
Our old school groups used to feature 8-10 characters; 5-6 players and the rest were meat shields, hirelings, and retainers. Because the old school game is attrition based, the players needed those bags of hit points to rotate in and out of the front lines - sheer numbers mattered. This isn't really an issue in 5E and the party hasn't had a need for any retainers or mercenaries.


There's no zero to hero arc. Even first level characters can do amazing, every-round magical feats via cantrips. 5E is a high magic, high power style of adventure game. It's great fun, but it's certainly not literary or amenable to magic realism or the historical fantasy I've favored in recent years. My players say they don't miss the days of "pitchfork wielding peasants who learn how to fight monsters the hard way", but I love that style of campaign, so I'm still going to inflict some true old school games on them - probably next time I need to run a horror game by Halloween or something.


I also loved old school reaction rolls and morale rules. Random results force me to improvise - they're fun curve balls to navigate from the DM's side of the table. They're not in 5E from what I can tell, so I'll probably have to house rule these things in there some way.


Good Luck With Those NPCs, Ref
Yeah, I don’t love building NPC parties in 5E. My referee style fills the world with rival adventurers and dungeon factions - it's a roleplaying game, and the players need foils. There are a handful of suggested NPC type "monsters" at the end of the Monster Manual, but otherwise, you have to build NPC monsters from scratch. I don't love it.


Here's a sample issue. XP value of a monster (and therefore challenge rating) is a function of attack, defense, hit points, special abilities. Two different NPC magic users, each representing a 5th level magic user, err… wizard, will have a wildly different XP values based solely on their spell choices. The guy with Fireball, Flaming Sphere, and Heat Ray will have a damage output off the chart compared to the guy with utility spells, or Sleep and Hold Person.


In an old school game, each of these "monsters" would be 5 HD (with an asterisk or two to cover the special abilities) when calculating XP and difficulty level. But it makes sense that the guy with Fireball is an order of magnitude more difficult to fight than the guy with a Fly spell - not only does he do a lot of damage, but it's an area effect that could nuke the whole party! 5E takes into account that degree of nuance, but it means each homebrew NPC requires assembly or calculation according to the monster rules and their specific abilities. I'm still in the process of making my peace with this particular sub-system. I'm not friends with it yet, having only created stats for a handful of NPC's so far (and choosing refuge in the expedient practice of reskinning stat blocks for many of the NPCs). But your time is coming, awkward NPC rules! I will conquer you and destroy you!


If you've made the switch from a rules light D&D clone to 5E, what kind of adjustments have you had to make to your style or expectations

In my brief time of DMing 5e, I made one significant change to rules to healing:

I like the short rest/long test mechanic because it keeps the game moving. I don't like the idea that a PC can potentially fully heal by simply "eating, drinking, reading, and tending wounds" for one hour.

So i've decided to add a resource cost to healing. The pc's need to use a healers kit per HD of healing for short rest. During long rest, one "use" of a healers kit heals one max HD. Healers kits now cost 50gp, making it 5gp per "use."

The healers kit is now a triple antibiotic with gelatinous cube added to really kill the germs. Acolytes of the local temples pay good money for gelatinous cube in order to create these kits.

Healing without a healers kit is 1hp plus con bonus per long rest. No short rest healing without a healers kit.

I've done one long session with this new rule and the group seems fine with it.

What do you think?

(This was copy/pasted from an old post of mine)

For a background, I have pretty much exclusively played AD&D (and some B/X) continuously since 1981. Kept with AD&D when 3e came out, and kept with it when 4e came out. Now we play 5e.

Some of my experiences are similar to your, especially in regards to the recovery rate. To get that more lethal feel, a houserule I use is that you don't recover full HP after a long rest. You only recover hit dice. You can also easily get rid of death saves too.

But honestly? That's the only houserule I've had to make and still get the same experience as we do playing AD&D. The encounters move just as fast, and I do think there is a zero to hero feel to the game prior to level 3. It just goes by a lot faster than AD&D did due to the XP table. Yeah, casters have cantrips, but for me, what makes zero to hero isn't a cantrip, it's the feeling that at 1st and 2nd level, you're fragile and you better use your brains instead of thinking combat will resolve your problems. The difference between a cantrip and a sling (go to weapon for MUs in AD&D) is largely only flavor, not mechanical--you're still doing an attack roll for so so damage (or saving throw for other cantrips). Damaging spells in 5e either require an attack roll, or a save. And slots are fewer than in AD&D on top of that. So the "manage your spells wisely" is still very much a thing in 5e in my impression.

Creating NPCs is much the same as AD&D too. Once you get a good understanding of the game, you can create them (and monsters) based on feel, rather than pour over the rules of CR calculations. That's what I do anyway. I hate spending time going over calculations to ensure everything is perfectly in formula. Especially with a formula that is a bit wonky to begin with. So far so good with my method; there haven't been any issues in game.

Sounds like you might be interested in some of the variant rule options in the DMG—for instance Slow Natural Healing or the Gritty Realism rest variant on p. 267, and Morale on p. 273.

The variant mentioned isn't in the DMG.

Getting back hit dice but not hit points is what I use too. ☺

CapnZapp said:

The variant mentioned isn't in the DMG.

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Understood—I was replying to the original poster.

Beedo said:

Good Luck With Those NPCs, Ref
Yeah, I don’t love building NPC parties in 5E. My referee style fills the world with rival adventurers and dungeon factions - it's a roleplaying game, and the players need foils. There are a handful of suggested NPC type "monsters" at the end of the Monster Manual, but otherwise, you have to build NPC monsters from scratch. I don't love it.


Here's a sample issue. XP value of a monster (and therefore challenge rating) is a function of attack, defense, hit points, special abilities. Two different NPC magic users, each representing a 5th level magic user, err… wizard, will have a wildly different XP values based solely on their spell choices. The guy with Fireball, Flaming Sphere, and Heat Ray will have a damage output off the chart compared to the guy with utility spells, or Sleep and Hold Person.


In an old school game, each of these "monsters" would be 5 HD (with an asterisk or two to cover the special abilities) when calculating XP and difficulty level. But it makes sense that the guy with Fireball is an order of magnitude more difficult to fight than the guy with a Fly spell - not only does he do a lot of damage, but it's an area effect that could nuke the whole party! 5E takes into account that degree of nuance, but it means each homebrew NPC requires assembly or calculation according to the monster rules and their specific abilities. I'm still in the process of making my peace with this particular sub-system. I'm not friends with it yet, having only created stats for a handful of NPC's so far (and choosing refuge in the expedient practice of reskinning stat blocks for many of the NPCs). But your time is coming, awkward NPC rules! I will conquer you and destroy you!

Click to expand...

If you want to create NPCs the same way that you did in 1e in 5e, can't you just ignore the rule for calculating CR? In other words, the rule in 5e just helps you get a better feal for how hard an NPC is compared to the 1e rules, where you just had to wing it.

I ran an encounter in 3e which didn't have rules that took this into account either, with 4 level 6 sorcerers with Fireball as their level 3 spell, which is a EL10 encounter, but being blasted for 24d6 damage each round makes for a hell of a beating for the party. In 5e, I would actually know that this encounter probably is a lot harder than an encounter with 4 level 6 Fighters just by using the guidelines.

I was introduced to D&D 2e in 1990, but really became a D&D-for-life player during the twilight years of 2e and the 3e pre-launch frenzy. As such, my love of D&D sits squarely with 3e. My ideal system would be "3e with more fun and less math." As such, I'm pretty thrilled overall with the 5e core books. As for table time, D&D today is definitely a well-defined evening event, not the slumber party D&D bingeplaying of my teenage years.

Blackbrrd said:

If you want to create NPCs the same way that you did in 1e in 5e, can't you just ignore the rule for calculating CR? In other words, the rule in 5e just helps you get a better feal for how hard an NPC is compared to the 1e rules, where you just had to wing it.

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Yes, absolutely, it's most straight forward to create NPC's the same way as PC's. Then you cross index the defense, offense, specials, etc and identify their CR and see where it lands. Where I haven't loved the DMG approach is when I set out to make a CR 3 boss NPC and then need to work backwards to figure out which level should be the character, what kind of damage or attacks to reflect a certain CR, etc.

That raises an interesting question, though - about creating a range of monster NPC's in advance, calculating their CR's, and then keeping them on the shelf for building NPCs or rival adventuring parties on the fly. You could have cleric stats representing a L1 cleric, L3, L5, L7, L9, and so on. You could do that for all the basic classes and have it ready on the fly. Assuming I'm in 5E for the long haul, it's something for me to consider - a personal "Rogues Gallery" or "Shady Dragon Inn", if you remember some of those 1980's supplements.

Beedo said:

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I've only run about 5-6 sessions of 5E, but I'm beginning to get a sense on some adjustments to make to my encounter and dungeon designs going forward. Here's what I'm figuring out.


Rest Versus Lethality
5E has very generous recovery rules. Characters completely heal over night, and the party can recover a lot of their fighting capability after a short rest (defined as 1 hour, sitting put in the dungeon). Once the party manages to survive a treacherous encounter, they can recover quite a bit back to normal and take on another difficult challenge without leaving the dungeon.

Click to expand...

I think you're profoundly over-estimating the short rest. Both how 'short' an hour is (though, yeah, I remember 1e parties barricading themselves in a dungeon room for a whole 8 hours), and how much you recover. HD are enough to heal from a fight or two, and most of the really important resource - spells - require the long rest.

There's the rub - surviving the encounter. Monsters hit hard, dice matter, and players frequently go to zero hit points, getting revived mid combat by healing. My old school games featured a longer attrition based approach to whittling away resources, with cumulative small combats wearing the party down over time until they hit a breaking point and decided to leave the dungeon site entirely to recover overnight.

Click to expand...

5e really is designed around a longer-horizon, attrition approach. The encounter guidelines suggest 6-8 moderate-hard encounters per 'day,' if you go easy-moderate encounters, the party could handle even more. At first level, any moderate-hard encounter might turn deadly (or easy, especially if someone casts the right spell). Beyond first, as the party starts on it's rapid zero-to-hero power climb, that issue drop off and attrition should become a more consistently viable model.

In 5E, you can push the players to that breaking point repeatedly in a single game session, because once they survive the first encounter, enough resources reset for the next encounter and the party can stay in the dungeon. The angst filled discussions aren't "can we go one more room", they're more like "can we actually survive this room and get to a rest point?"

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At low level, that's really only true of the first encounter. You push the party to the edge, they spend their HD, the wizard gets back his 1 spell, and that's it. A second 'short' rest won't help them much. So it's still primarily a matter of managing daily resources.

Although they're not explicitly called out in MMORPG terms like tank, cannon/DPS, buffer / healer, etc., it's clear some of that philosophy is still present.

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It's not like we didn't have a wall of fighters in the front, with magic-users casting and clerics healing from behind them, in the olden days. I don't understand the impulse to give MMOs credit for PC roles, when D&D has had 'em from day 1. Tank, Blaster, Healer? Fighter, Magic-user, Cleric.

There's no zero to hero arc. Even first level characters can do amazing, every-round magical feats via cantrips. 5E is a high magic, high power style of adventure game.

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OK, it is high-magic, granted - 87% of the sub-classes players have to choose from use magic, mostly in the form of spells - but it's hardly high-power at 1st level. PCs can die instantly. Moderate battles turn deadly with a surprise round or a few bad rolls. While cantrips are flashy, they really don't do much at first level - a kobold with a shortsword would hit harder than most cantrips. High magic, yes, high power, no.

XP value of a monster (and therefore challenge rating) is a function of attack, defense, hit points, special abilities. Two different NPC magic users, each representing a 5th level magic user, err… wizard, will have a wildly different XP values based solely on their spell choices. The guy with Fireball, Flaming Sphere, and Heat Ray will have a damage output off the chart compared to the guy with utility spells, or Sleep and Hold Person.

Click to expand...

Yeah, between the issues with encounter guidelines and monster CR, and the issues with class balance, there's not a lot to be done about it.

As you know, in the olden days we didn't really /have/ encounter guidelines. You just eyeballed everything. Your eyeballs will get used to 5e, eventually, and you won't bother with 'designing' monsters or NPCs to that level of detail.