D&D 5E Greyhawk: Pitching the Reboot

[Azuresun]

Also, the idea that Attack on Titan isn't escapist is pretty bloody wild mate. It's extremely escapist - it doesn't deal with any emotional realities or make people think about their own lives - ironically unlike a lot of more "brightly drawn" anime.

Okay, you definitely haven't watched the last two seasons.

 

[TwoSix]

So dark I can get behind, but I just don't think relentless darkness is a good fit for GH or D&D in general, nor something that sells in 2021 (much as it might have in 1995 or whenever).

Yea, I don't think relentless darkness works either. But I think "evil ascending, good in disarray, and the powerful distant and unconcerned" can certainly work. Grim but hopeful.

The other issue is "low magic". I don't think D&D handles that well at all, and whilst you can go with "the PCs are special", it tends to work against darker fantasy because it can make the PCs seem like superheroes even more than D&D usually does.

I don't particularly think of Greyhawk (the home of most of the famous wizard names in D&D) as being low magic myself. I think it has a low frequency of magic users, like maybe a hundred human wizards of 5th level or more. Almost every wizard knows of each other, and were probably apprenticed by a Circle member or one of their own apprentices. Sorcerers are rare enough they probably each have their unique origin story. Warlocks are becoming more common (especially fiendish ones), but typically hide their power or have a convincing story. Druids are reclusive and only reluctantly come near the borders of civilization.

I'm generally against strong class concepts that exist deeply within the fiction (I prefer looser magic systems and reskinning), but if there's any setting where playing up the classic class tropes works, it's Greyhawk.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

The 5e player advancement rules are not a fantasy society demographic rules. Just because there would be thousands of copies of a hypothetical 5e Greyhawk book sold and hypothetically might have thousands of parties playing in the setting, does not mean the setting must account for an in-world reality of tens of thousands of high level non-human PCs dominating the mid-level NPCs running kingdoms.

A Greyhawk setting book can say a career in ruin delving is very very rare resulting in deaths at very high rates, and normal in modified 5e Player’s Handbook works fine for the rules to running a 5e game in Greyhawk because the PCs are not NPCs and work with different rules.

 

[jasper]

My hot take on doing Grayhawk. Humans get the +1 bonus. All other races flip those bonuses to negative. Keep on xp chart for all classes but once pass level 10 xp to is 10* or more than the current chart. Certain spells either do con damage, exhausation, etc when casting. Alignment will be in play. Short rest is 8 hours etc.

 

[fearsomepirate]

How do you handle the power growth?
I ran a game and still feel like I wasn't handling it properly so I'm interested to learn how you handled that!

1. Gold for XP
2. AD&D XP tables (used the Thief for everybody)

Nobody has ever been past 9th level.

 

[fearsomepirate]

The 5e player advancement rules are not a fantasy society demographic rules. Just because there would be thousands of copies of a hypothetical 5e Greyhawk book sold and hypothetically might have thousands of parties playing in the setting, does not mean the setting must account for an in-world reality of tens of thousands of high level non-human PCs dominating the mid-level NPCs running kingdoms.

A Greyhawk setting book can say a career in ruin delving is very very rare resulting in deaths at very high rates, and normal in modified 5e Player’s Handbook works fine for the rules to running a 5e game in Greyhawk because the PCs are not NPCs and work with different rules.

The problem is that you need to show, not tell, the players how the world works. This is incompatible with 5e pacing. Players really don't have to accomplish much in 5e to get to high levels in relative terms of how much they accomplish. You can say something in some splash of text somewhere, but when visiting a few towns, clearing a couple smallish dungeons, and rescuing somebody's cat from an owlbear takes you to 8th level, you do not feel the same as somebody who got to 8th level by, say, clearing the Temple of Elemental Evil and banishing Zuggtmoy back to the Abyss over a full year of play that included multiple near-TPKs and the loss of a dozen friends. If you want people to have lands & titles at 10th level, then they need to feel like the sort of people who have earned lands and titles. This doesn't work when a few weeks ago, they were hobos.

 

[Mort]

FWIW, I've been running Greyhawk in 5e for several years. I just use the 1e setting book. It works well enough if you change some 5e rules to make it pace more like 1e. As much fun as I've had, that's the biggest thing that won't sell. I think most 5e players want to get to 17th level and kill a demon lord or an ancient dragon, not struggle through the muck and mire to finally have a character survive to 5th, then carefully eke your way through to tenth level when you get your stronghold. My table's been great, they've had fun for over a year without getting past 9th level. I just think that by and large, you can't sell people on "a year of play, and you never get Wish!"

I'm really struggling with your assertion that this is "Greyhawk" and your earlier one that NPCs above 10th level are rarer than other settings (such as Forgotten Realms):

1. Greyhawk, in it's early days forward, was all about zero to hero. There were plenty of adventures, Dungeons etc. - for low, mid and high levels. Sure you could keep the PCs low level - but it was, in no way, baked into the setting.

2. Greyhawk isn't Eberron. Eberron expressely stated that NPCs above 10th level were rare, most had died in the war. Greyhawk details lots of 10th+ level NPCs, especially in populated areas such as the city of Greyhawk itself. Again, PCs don't have to interact much with them, but there's not a shortage.

 

[TwoSix]

The problem is that you need to show, not tell, the players how the world works. This is incompatible with 5e pacing. Players really don't have to accomplish much in 5e to get to high levels in relative terms of how much they accomplish. You can say something in some splash of text somewhere, but when visiting a few towns, clearing a couple smallish dungeons, and rescuing somebody's cat from an owlbear takes you to 8th level, you do not feel the same as somebody who got to 8th level by, say, clearing the Temple of Elemental Evil and banishing Zuggtmoy back to the Abyss over a full year of play that included multiple near-TPKs and the loss of a dozen friends. If you want people to have lands & titles at 10th level, then they need to feel like the sort of people who have earned lands and titles. This doesn't work when a few weeks ago, they were hobos.

I think these are orthogonal concerns. You can have a game where a 5th level magic user is an uncommon thing, and yet the PCs still get to high level fairly quickly; the characters are simply achieving their heroic potential. (That's the point of the PCs are special.)

If you want a game where getting from 1st to 9th level is an epic achievement requiring great deeds, simply lower the rate of XP gain or use milestone leveling with wide milestones.

 

[dave2008]

In D&D? I don't buy it. I don't buy that that audience really plays TT RPGs, or if they do, wants D&D to be like that. And D&D is extremely bad at that because of the Vancian magic system. The idea that you can have "grounded low-magic" when people are daily summoning magic animals and shooting fireballs and so on at level 5 is pretty silly imho.

Something like 50% of D&D players don't play in a published setting. So what are they playing? I can't speak for others, but we play and low magic, grim dark type setting. Not exactly GoT, but adjacent. On top of that, I think 5e is the best D&D ruleset yet to play such a setting. 5e doesn't require magic or magic items to be great fun. Believe it or not, not everyone wants to play a magic user1

And since I am old, I will let you know my 20-year old son told me 2 days ago that he wants to run a GoT style game in D&D. So this isn't just coming from us 1e old guard either.

I would be surprised if there isn't a sizeable group of players who would be interested in a Witcher / GoT type setting. The issue is less the interest in such a setting, but the interest in WotC in providing the restrictions (removing / revising magic classes & races) to make it work best.

 

[dave2008]

I'm basing this on having a 14 year old son with a group of friends who are all into anime, and all of them devoured (npi) the new seasons of AoT when they started watching it 2 years ago. Most of what I watch nowadays is based on my son's recommendations, rather than my own. I've seen too much isekai for my own good.

Purely anecdotal, but that's all any of us can offer. None of us are subject matter experts on this.

@Ruin Explorer I will point out that my 18 yr old son is really into Attack on Titan. He both reads the Manga and watches the Anime. Another anecdotal point, but it seems to be more than you're offering.