NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 8752825" data-attributes="member: 86653">I came into the hobby in '84. I started with B/X and switched to AD&D fairly quickly. My longest standing D&D group is made up of mostly the same people we played with back then and some of our kids. We kept playing AD&D through 2E, 3E, and 3.5...utterly ignoring the edition churn. Though I absolutely love many of the 2E settings. For some reason we jumped on 4E and played it from launch to the start of the Next playtest. We've played 5E since...and are about to switch to DCC. Though I play and run a bunch of other games with other groups.I consider myself a grognard even though I'm a bit of a late comer because I still prefer that earlier style of play. Zero to hero. The possibility of death around every corner. Hard scrabble adventures. Avoiding combat as much as possible because it's deadly. Combat as war. Characters starting weak and having to do things in the game to earn all the bells and whistles. Player skill. Emergent story. Etc. As much as I like the smoother bits of the 5E system, to get it to play how I want, i.e. for it to be a challenge at all to the PCs, I have to house rule the thing within an inch of it's life. That's not what I'm paying professional game designers to do. Which is one reason why the debacle that is Spelljammer 5E irritates me to no end. The whole premise of the setting is tall ships in space...and yet their ship-to-ship combat "rules" consist of a few lines mostly telling you not to bother and instead focus on boarding actions. There's nothing on making wildspace systems. Nothing on the various wildspace systems not directly related to the module. A few pages on Bral is the most you get. There's basically nothing there. The original is $10 as a PDF or $30 as POD and has an order of magnitude more useable information than the new one...which is $70. And that's the "professionals" who're putting out "professional products" at the biggest RPG company on the planet. LOL.But...I'm also on the fence about a few things. I think the modern way of doing things is better in some areas. As much as I like the default to human feel of older editions, I was always trying to play goblins, drow, minotaurs, orcs, etc. I like that there are more and more varied race options now than there were before. But I also recognize that there's something lost in making the magical so mundane. You lose the wow factor. It's no longer a terrifying monster at the center of an endless maze when it's your friend Bob the minotaur's cousin.What do I think of this new version of D&D? It will be great to mine for ideas. Not sure how much I'll actually play it. I expect the PC option power creep we've seen since 2014 will continue. It will now be baked into the revised PHB. Likely they'll power creep the base classes even more so that it will pull the power gamers in. It's a great marketing strategy to get people to buy the new stuff. It's terrible game design, however. I don't like feats no longer being optional. As much as I like the idea of ASI being flexible, I don't think the background is the right place for them. While it makes sense, they should more rightly be with race or class...and as I think through this stuff part of me is boggled at why I'm bothering.If I want to play D&D I have B/X, AD&D, DCC, and OSE Advanced among so many others. There's so much great original old-school and OSR content out there. More than I'll ever be able to actually use at the table. And yet, whatever new edition of D&D WotC puts out is the supermassive black hole at the center of the RPG industry's galaxy.</blockquote>

Verification