D&D 5E Converting Old Adventures

[James Gasik]

You could always power through with more damage. You just needed weapons with higher pluses or that were made out of different materials.

What D&D (and D&D-alikes) really needs to do is lean into monster weaknesses, have monsters be weakened or repelled by the presence of a mirror or the scent of burning herbs or the sound of a rooster crowing. Have cockatrices actually die if forced to battle a weasel, or zombies die if they eat salt. Give dragons that weak spot on their breast. Things like that. Other than some monsters being weak against silver or iron, a half-hearted attempt to use "true names," and the "Ravenloft specific" various Van Richten Guides, they never really explored that idea.

I think it would be keen if there were more monsters with vulnerabilities. Just from recent experience, damage types come down to:

(Anything that isn't Necrotic or Poison): Usually works.
Fire/Cold: occasionally things are vulnerable, occasionally things are immune.
Force: Almost always works.
Bludgeoning/Slashing/Piercing: often resisted until you get magic.

Like we'd often fight enemies where my Wizard was doing top tier damage because I had force spells (fighting oozes, devils). Several party members did radiant, but even when we fought a creature made of living darkness, it didn't take any extra damage from it.

It felt like "why do we have all these damage types, really? You could just have damage and magic damage for the vast majority of combats."

 

[James Gasik]

Did Advanced Dungeons and Dragons have make whole as well?

No, but you mentioned Pathfinder so I thought I'd bring that up. The 3e rule is that magic items are generally immune to damage unless: unattended, specifically targeted by an effect, or the owner rolls a natural 1 on a save against something that could damage them, and even then, magic items had their own saves based on caster level, so it was a fairly rare occurence.

The 2e DMG has this to say:

 

[Micah Sweet]

This. I just finished the mega-dungeon I was playing in today, and we have something like 30k in gold laying around at level 9. Everyone wants to head to a major city to spend our gold, and I'm thinking "100 healing potions, 10 more healer's kits, 5000 gp in diamond dust...what are we going to do with the other 20k?".

And sure, you can make magic items available (and I know our DM will, when we get back to that campaign), but there's really only so many you'd want to have, and there's some you probably don't want players to have (we found a Cube of Force and a Horn of Blasting in the BBEG's lair and I'm scared...).

For my campaign, I'm going to need ways to make money investments that do things the players will care about. Every game I'm in, we go out of our way to make a base of operations, but then we basically never go back to it (in a Fantasy Craft campaign, I received the deed to an Inn as a quest reward and I kept throwing money at it to upgrade it, but we never did go back to that town).

I have some NPC's who can train players in various things with some downtime, so that might burn up a little- in Fighter's Challenge you're meant to return a chunk of treasure to the town, and I certainly made doing just that have benefits (so hopefully the PC's don't take the money and run, lol). There are hirelings available, some good, some...yeah.

But the big wall I keep running into is that I don't want gold to turn into just another kind of xp, where it's just a way to get power in a different way than leveling up- I want it to do more, but the essential D&D game loop is adventure > grow in power > more adventure. Even if you add rules for keeps and followers, it's mostly just busy work if the heroes keep wandering the world unless I want to try and incorporate some kind of mass combat system.

And I don't want to create a money sink either- with that, I could just as easily have them run afoul of taxes or thieves, or not give them treasure at all!

Fair. It's a matter of what you and your players want out of the game really. I tend to approach D&D more like a survivalist sim than anything else, so basebuilding is important.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You could always power through with more damage. You just needed weapons with higher pluses or that were made out of different materials.

What D&D (and D&D-alikes) really needs to do is lean into monster weaknesses, have monsters be weakened or repelled by the presence of a mirror or the scent of burning herbs or the sound of a rooster crowing. Have cockatrices actually die if forced to battle a weasel, or zombies die if they eat salt. Give dragons that weak spot on their breast. Things like that. Other than some monsters being weak against silver or iron, a half-hearted attempt to use "true names," and the "Ravenloft specific" various Van Richten Guides, they never really explored that idea.

If you didn't have sufficient gear back in the day, it didn't matter how much damage you could do. And that assumes that killing is the answer to a monster problem (not always the case). Spirits in particular tend to be tough to take out this way traditionally.

 

[James Gasik]

Fair. It's a matter of what you and your players want out of the game really. I tend to approach D&D more like a survivalist sim than anything else, so basebuilding is important.

I could have made the game completely based around a particular geographical area and then a base would be more reasonable. Unfortunately, I found while working on the modules I chose that they have some logistical issues if the locations are too close to one another, at least for the foreseeable future.

 

[jasper]

I literally cross them out. I did this even when I ran them in their original editions.

Yes, on the first read through of the old modules the pencil came out. Every third item was struck thru.

 

[jasper]

Also, magic items could "die" at any time. All it took was the item's carrier to fail a save vs AoE damage, and then the item to fail its own save.

Which meant a DM could give out way more magic, safe in the knowledge that it wouldn't all stick around forever.

You DON'T want to be standing next to the thief when he fails a fireball save. And then the helm of brilliance has a cascading failure.

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

No, but you mentioned Pathfinder so I thought I'd bring that up. The 3e rule is that magic items are generally immune to damage unless: unattended, specifically targeted by an effect, or the owner rolls a natural 1 on a save against something that could damage them, and even then, magic items had their own saves based on caster level, so it was a fairly rare occurence.

The 2e DMG has this to say:
View attachment 358087

I brought this up at a Pathfinder Society game I was running and shocked all the players. They melted my heart with all their puppy-dog eyes so I let them off with a warning. We play despite the rules.

 

[Lanefan]

Fun Fact: Pathfinder 1e had this rule as well, so it's likely that Dungeons and Dragons 3e had it too.

In 3e you only had to worry about items* if your character's initial save was a natural 1, which made item destruction far less common than in 1e.

* - or maybe just 1 item, or was that 3.5?

Did Advanced Dungeons and Dragons have make whole as well?

1e didn't. 2e might have, I'm not sure, but it's not familiar.

 

[Lanefan]

No, but you mentioned Pathfinder so I thought I'd bring that up. The 3e rule is that magic items are generally immune to damage unless: unattended, specifically targeted by an effect, or the owner rolls a natural 1 on a save against something that could damage them, and even then, magic items had their own saves based on caster level, so it was a fairly rare occurence.

The 2e DMG has this to say:
View attachment 358087

That passage from the 2e DMG is already far more generous than was 1e. There, magic just gave any item a straight +2, with +1 more for each extra '+' it had beyond +1 but only for +x items. Miscellaneous items got no such help; except saves against effects in an item's own mode (e.g. a flametongue vs fireball) got a huge bonus (+10?) but that IME has been a surprisingly rare occurrence.

And to add to the fun, there's some items that go boom if-when destroyed ( @jasper mentioned Helm of Brilliance as one such; certain rods and staves also had this feature), meaning another round of saves for the bearer and any nearby, and potentially another round of items going up in smoke.