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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Korgoth" data-source="post: 4479784" data-attributes="member: 49613">Wow. Housecats, rose-colored glasses, nostalgia. This thread has just about every erroneous polemical cliche in the basher's book.Rather than point at 3E and 4E as being corporate pablum aimed at robotic consumers of McFun (which is not necessarily true but would counterbalance the insulting cliches)... let me point out the actual difference. It's the same difference that Mearls pointed out vis a vis 4E versus OD&D.In old school play you challenge the player, not the character. In new school play, puzzles, riddles, tricks, traps and all the meat of exploration are solved by high dice rolls. Suspicious room? Search check. Dodgy NPC? Sense Motive check. Cryptic inscription? Knowledge Whatever check. In old school play, rather than rolling dice for those things you give your gray matter a go.That's why in new school gaming, combat comes to the fore so much. Since *all* conflicts are resolved by rolling dice and hoping you roll well (and have leet bonuses), there's very little difference between searching the wizard's lab and stabbing an orc: you roll 1d20 and try to get a high roll, and if you roll low you may be in for some damage. Exploration just becomes another occasion for dice rolling, but a less fun one than combat. So why care about it? Bring on the orcs.In old school gaming, you didn't even get many XP for fighting. Most of it comes from getting away with the loot. Rather than the trap being just another monster (new school), in old school the monster is just another trap: an encounter which if you mishandle it could be deadly, but is ultimately just an obstacle in the way of acquiring the dingus.One more not, on "boring Fighters". Fighters are far more intersting in old D&D where you didn't have feats. Why? Because when you have feats in the game, the cool stunt which the feat governs can only be done by someone with the feat. "Tightrope Fighter" feat introduced? Now only people with the feat can do it. "Fast Draw Knife from Teeth" feat? Now only people with that feat can do that move. Each feat that is introduced limits and constricts what is possible for a character to do.Perhaps people are too brainwashed by 3E+, and when they see a 1E Fighter with no feats they assume that means he cannot do anything. Wrong! That means he can do everything.</blockquote>

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