D&D General Explain 5(.5)e to me
- Thread starter GothmogIV
- Start date
I think one of the big differences between 1e/2e and 5e was that the earlier edition accommodated a lot more players at a table, more than what is recommended today. That typically meant more characters to spread damage around, and if one was playing a wizard, they had to know where they were in the party marching order - surrounded by fighter types to protect them. 5e plays a lot looser. A wizard PC can still get in over their head but nowhere near as badly as a 2e wizard could. Likewise fighters couldn’t simply break ranks to go charge whomever they wanted. They’d leave squishier PCs exposed.
But…if you played smart with those ideas in mind, it was survivable for low level wizards.
GrimCo
Hero
Might be that ( or people taking henchman and having more than one character in same party). But, we played it standard (5 players, one character each, no henchman/hirelings). With 1 hp, AC10 and 1 spell. Wohoo. Cast once, run away rest of the session (or at least until someone sneezes at you )
In 5e, 1st level Wizard feels like a wizard, novice one, but still wizard. It has some utility (by way of cantrips and rituals), some offense/defense/control options (be it slots or cantrips), enough HP to eat at least one regular hit from creature like Giant Rat ( unless you rolled high on that d4 and DM rolls low, Giant Rat, with his 1d3 bite, can one shot level 1 wizard in 2ed), and it has better ac ( with standard array, 14 dex is easy for +2ac, mage armor gives you another +3 for 8 hours, so AC 15 which is damn solid when most critters have +4 to attack at that level).
Might be that ( or people taking henchman and having more than one character in same party). But, we played it standard (5 players, one character each, no henchman/hirelings). With 1 hp, AC10 and 1 spell. Wohoo. Cast once, run away rest of the session (or at least until someone sneezes at you )
1 HP at first level, ooof. We never played that way. We gave everyone max hit points for 1st level. There was so much variability from table to table; probably moreso in the early editions that even today.
GrimCo
Hero
Max HP at level 1 became RAW from 3ed onward. In 1&2, RAW was roll for hp, and we played it mostly as written, so roll and pray. Same with stats (hated rolling for stats also, gimme point buy or fixed array any day). Even with max at 1 (tried it), 4 hp and AC 10, means you need copious amount of luck to survive those first few levels ( while having slowest low level xp progression). Like you said, i think you really need large party in those older editions, to soak up damage and shield squishy wizard&thief from getting one shot KO.
People have always had house rules. We did max HP at first as well and, IIRC, when you rolled for leveling up you had to get half or more. We also started using a variation of point buy in 2e, before that we basically rolled until we got something we liked and assumed the ones where we rolled poorly stayed on the farm.
It shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of people didn't, and still don't, play the game strictly by the rules.
Yeah, I think RAW was much less of a consideration back then. Not that people didn’t attempt it, but just that house rules were so much more standard and assumed. I think you see a lot more RAW games today.
This reminds me of a quote from the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy that goes something like this (can't be bothered to look up the exact wording): "Humans believed they were more intelligent than dolphins, because humans had made so many great inventions like fire, or New York, or the atomic bomb, while all the dolphins had done was swim around in the ocean having fun. Dolphins believed they were more intelligent than humans, for exactly the same reason."
In other words, people enjoy different things. Those things you dislike about 5e are generally what people who like it actually like.
There's another Douglas Adams quote that goes something like: "Things that exists when you are born are considered old, established, and boring. Things that come into being when you are growing up are new and exciting. Things that come into being when you're an adult are unproven dangerous things that will ruin society as we know it."
IIRC, he was mostly talking about technology, but the sentiment applies to other things as well.
I think that while D&D is by no means video game-like, the developers have probably learned some lessons from video game development. The one that comes to mind are subclasses and how they affect character development.
Looking at World of Warcraft, you initially just had classes as the main choice, with specialization done via detailed talent trees. These trees often had important defining abilities buried fairly deep into the tree, because that's how you made sure they were exclusive to that specialization. Usually you had moderately defining talents at rank 21+ and a capstone talent at 31, so if you wanted the capstone talent you couldn't get the defining talents from the other trees. But note that this gates defining talents at rank 21+, which in classic WoW means level 30 of 60. No Ice Block or Blast Wave for you until level 30. And that kind of sucks. In addition, the talent trees were often "solved" by the community, at least for players who wanted to do raiding and/or PvP. You had guides online saying "take this, this, and that talent" for each tree (albeit usually with different specs for raiding and for PvP), so the system that in theory granted a lot of freedom boiled down to fixed choices with maybe 5 out of 51 choices being "take whatever I guess" because the really useful talents had already been picked.
So eventually what they did was to just give you a choice at level 10 about which spec to play, and gave you the defining tools for it. Some stuff was still delayed until higher levels, but a level 10 Fire mage definitely felt different than a level 10 Frost mage, whereas under the old system the difference was that the Fire mage-to-be had a 0.1 seconds shorter casting time on Fireball and the Frost mage had the reduction on Frost Bolt. They kept talents as a concept, but instead of having talent trees you got a choice of three abilities every so often that usually had a common theme but did it in different ways (e.g. all level 30 mage talents being some flavor of defensive ability).
This is, I think, the lesson that was learned with 5e: don't hide the goodies. If someone wants to play an evoker, don't make them wait until 10th level before they can get the tools that make them feel like one. Give them the tools right away. Maybe not all the tools, but enough to feel like a ________. It's not done in the same way as it was in WoW, but I believe it was a lesson learned from it.
I am kind of in a weird spot with 5e which is not my default system when running fantasy. However, it is the version of D&D that I will run if the group wants D&D despite starting D&D around 1980, I prefer the 5e 2014 chassis to TSR D&D/AD&D. Yet, at the same time, I dislike the default fantasy flavor of 5e, many (most?) of the subclasses in the PHB and official supplements and even a few of the PHB races.
One of the nice things about 5e (as with 3e), is that It is not too difficult to tailor the feel of the game. It is easy to limit the official races, subclasses, and spells in the campaign to those that reflect the fantasy setting I want to run. Furthermore, the availability of third party material is also helpful in finding additional races, classes, subclasses, and rules variants to further tailor the game/campaign.
One of the nice things about 5e (as with 3e), is that It is not too difficult to tailor the feel of the game. It is easy to limit the official races, subclasses, and spells in the campaign to those that reflect the fantasy setting I want to run. Furthermore, the availability of third party material is also helpful in finding additional races, classes, subclasses, and rules variants to further tailor the game/campaign.
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