D&D 5E Are you doing something different with 5E?

[Mercule]

My home brew dates back to middle school, which was in the early 1980s, for me. My last 3E campaign was intended to send it into the sunset, and it was generally fun. We sat out 4E, so I now need to decide whether that was really my sign-off, for the world.

Right now, I'm running Eberron in 5E. The conversions do a nice job of filling the "fidgety DM" gap. It's the first time I've used a published setting with the intent of doing a full campaign -- I use either Greyhawk or Eberron as "one-off" settings when I don't want to explain/use house rules, etc. In that regard, I guess I am doing something new.

The tinkerer in me will eventually win, though. At this point, I see myself starting a new world. I've had a concept rattling around, in my head, for a couple years. I'd like to try to make an internally consistent setting where the world is made up of floating earth-islands that occasionally change position, relative to one another.

I see it as being heavily influenced by the elemental planes. For example, if a river runs off the edge of an island, it would dry up, if not replenished. That ends up being an elemental mote that connects to water and produces a spring at the source of the river.

Some islands are larger, with multiple nations and terrains. Others are small enough that you can see all sides from a high-point. Weather could either be controlled by a sphere around each island, such that a blistering desert exists within sight of an arctic glacier, or by zones that islands move into and out of (causing seasons).

If the "material plane" was created from chunks broken off as demons and devils were cast from heaven, it places the heavens physically above the world and hell/the abyss physically below. That gives a whole new reason to be careful around the edge of islands and to not tunnel too deeply.

 

[Blue]

I have the 13th Age stuff and I'm pilfering it for ideas, because it DOES have some good ones. Ultimately though the powers system feels too similar to 4e for my tastes, but it's still chock full of great ideas.

To me, 13th Age incorporated some of the right parts of 4e. Like not all spells are fire-and-forget, and at-will isn't restricted to the same cantrips. But both 13th Age and 5e have a much lighter system style that I'm enjoying, and along those lines Advantage/Disadvantage is a wonderful, wonderful mechanic. Doesn't change the range, just rolls up all the fussy bits into simplicity to use that also feels really good to the players to use.

Great games both. If anything them coming out so close to each other is a shame because they share a lot of design philosophy and DNA.

 

[Duganson]

I've decided to 'flip the script' with 5E and make a funny sandbox campaign. I usually write epic, world shattering scenarios that railroad good aligned PCs towards very serious choices. 5 E is so user friendly I feel comfortable just making a satirical world, improving funny NPCs, and flying by the seat of my pants with adventure design.

With this in mind I've done more research into comedic writing and improve then rules memorization. I'm pretty excited!!

 

[The Grand User]

Once my two campaigns I'm in (one as player, one as GM, shared world) are finished I'll be taking a break before running any more games, but once I am, it'll be a 5E hex crawl! I'm thinking the starting PCs will form a new adventuring guild, and as they adventure they'll come across people or cause events that'll get new characters recruited and available to play themselves. Or in other words, every adventurer in the guild will have been a PC at one point. Some character choices might be limited at the start, but opened up later.

I'm not sure on the setting exactly beyond it being a homebrew, though I am getting the idea of making it a points of light-ish type, where the "lights" are older dragons of all colors, who keep the Scary Things(tm) away, which at this time I'm thinking might be fey. So it'll be far preferably to live near even a red dragon than without any dragon. Though, I'm not too fond of the Racially Evil nature they get by default, so that's going to be toned down anyway (regardless of whether I go with the basic premise or not; no "color coded for your convenience" here ). Therefore, living next to a pair of red dragons and their young isn't going to be as terrifying as it would be in other settings.

So at least in the big region civilization congregates around the dragons, and each might get a city or a town or two and a few small villages, probably all within the 6-mile range of the lair affect. There'll be plenty of room between the elder dragons, as they don't want to be too close together, due to consumption of resources, and that's where a lot of the adventure should be, with the PCs penetrating the fey or whatever's domain in search of treasure, or for old ruins of an older empire from before the fey arrived.

If I do stick with fey, I might exclude elves, half-elves, and gnomes from initial character creation. If someone wants to play one, they'll have to recruit a character in play for their adventuring guild. OR I might refluff them as "fey-touched" races and make the actual elves really scary and powerful.

 

[JEB]

Instead of a single campaign run by one DM with all-original adventures, our current 5E campaign is a shared campaign, with a different member of our group DMing every time, and focused on using existing modules as a base for most sessions. This lets us run games more easily and more often. We figured it was working for Pathfinder Society, so why not try it for us? So far so good...

 

[KirayaTiDrekan]

I am primarily a PbP DM these days and have three campaigns going here on EN World.

The Fifth City - This one takes Babylon 5 and turns it into a swashbuckling, high seas adventure campaign.

Everything D&D Ever - This one takes Earth after a magical apocalypse/war with space dragons and turns it into a D&D uber setting with every official D&D adventure and setting material crammed in somewhere.

Exodus - Same universe as Everything D&D Ever, but looking at the survivors of modern Earth who escaped in colony ships prior to the magical apocalypse. 5E sci-fi basically, with inspiration taken from Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, and a few other sources.

 

[TerraDave]

Old school stuff in the latest permutation of my home brew. Not really new, but maybe improved.

 

[Mercurius]

My home brew dates back to middle school, which was in the early 1980s, for me. My last 3E campaign was intended to send it into the sunset, and it was generally fun. We sat out 4E, so I now need to decide whether that was really my sign-off, for the world.

Right now, I'm running Eberron in 5E. The conversions do a nice job of filling the "fidgety DM" gap. It's the first time I've used a published setting with the intent of doing a full campaign -- I use either Greyhawk or Eberron as "one-off" settings when I don't want to explain/use house rules, etc. In that regard, I guess I am doing something new.

The tinkerer in me will eventually win, though. At this point, I see myself starting a new world. I've had a concept rattling around, in my head, for a couple years. I'd like to try to make an internally consistent setting where the world is made up of floating earth-islands that occasionally change position, relative to one another.

I see it as being heavily influenced by the elemental planes. For example, if a river runs off the edge of an island, it would dry up, if not replenished. That ends up being an elemental mote that connects to water and produces a spring at the source of the river.

Some islands are larger, with multiple nations and terrains. Others are small enough that you can see all sides from a high-point. Weather could either be controlled by a sphere around each island, such that a blistering desert exists within sight of an arctic glacier, or by zones that islands move into and out of (causing seasons).

If the "material plane" was created from chunks broken off as demons and devils were cast from heaven, it places the heavens physically above the world and hell/the abyss physically below. That gives a whole new reason to be careful around the edge of islands and to not tunnel too deeply.

Sounds awesome. I'm reminded of an old novel from the 1980s, The Shattered World by Michael Reaves. If I remember correctly, the world was broken apart by some evil guys and powerful wizards held the fragments together, circling each other. The sequel is The Burning Realm.

The Weis/Hickman Death Gate Cycle books had a similar set-up.

 

[WayneLigon]

The setting is a fantasy version of the Danube River Valley, and it's a conflict between a human culture influenced by elves, and one by dwarves. The elf-influenced area is a magocracy: if you have The Gift, you are a member of the aristocracy. Among the Gifted, some are more equal than others. Wizards are on top, followed by sorcerers and bards. Arcane Tricksters and Eldritch Knights are somewhat suspect, and watched closely. Warlocks are looked on askance, having gotten their power in questionable ways.

 

[ccooke]

I'm running two games, both of which started with 4th edition. The next time I start a new game I'm planning to use some ideas some friends and I came up with on a LARP channel a few years back. Basically a post-magical-disaster world in which the nature of reality has been perverted. In terms of d&d, imagine if you (speaking extremely figuratively) used the plane of Limbo as a hammer to shatter the Prime Material - everything is disconnected pockets of solidity in a sea of multicoloured fog. Multicoloured fog that's sometimes teeming with horrors. Cheerful stuff like that. There will be some obvious (and many more not obvious) ways in which the stability of these pockets can be increased or decreased. There will certainly be someone who believes it's in their best interests for the situation to become a lot worse.

Mechanically, it's a bit like a hexcrawl. I have some predefined areas and I have the metaphysics in my head so I can come up with new bits and pieces on the fly. There's an overarching reason to do stuff - the initial hook will be "Find out why the mists are getting closer to your home village(s)", but it can develop from there in any direction based on whether the players follow the seeds I leave them or end up investigating something else.