D&D General Hot Take: Dungeon Exploration Requires Light Rules To Be Fun

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

But the rules were not designed to be optional. That's the whole point here. People just CHOSE to ignore them, or never even realized they were there. But they were.

Even apart from that, though: Again, you want to claim that attack matrices, the five saving throws (Paralyze/Poison/Death, Rod/Staff/Wand, Petrify/Polymorph, Breath Weapon, Spell), and indeed the very concept of "saving throws" in the first place as opposed to just having attacks (they're even named "Attacks" in AD&D1e!), etc. are "rules light"? Or how about THAC0?

Pull the other one. AD&D, and its successors, have NEVER been "rules-light." Ever. Period. Anyone claiming otherwise is either playing sillybuggers with definitions, or genuinely out of touch with what a "rules-light" game is for one reason or another.

Because, as I and others have said, "rules-light" has paragraph-sized as its low end and "12 printed pages" as a pretty typical size. Even the simplest versions of Basic, which I have bent definitions to allow as possibly maybe kinda-sorta vaguely "rules-light," are four times larger than that--and that's for a very barebones offering in D&D terms.

AD&D is not, and never has been, "rules-light."

AD&D is a rules heavy, crunchy game. So is BECMI - see Weapon Mastery, the class/prestige class system, etc. B/X is Rules Medium, at best. I'd argue its also rules heavy.

Into the Odd is Rules Light - the rules are like 2 pages. Lasers and Feelings is rules lite. Honey heist is rules lite. Risus is rules light.

TSR d&d is only rule light if you decide to ignore 95% of it.

 

[Reynard]

I hoped they would transfer over more easily, e.g. remove or nerf Tiny Hut, Goodberry, etc. and move over the resource management of SD, something like that

I do think you could probably implement slot based encumberance, but 5E just has too much stuff built into it at various levels to make old school crawling work.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

No. Everyone is different and enjoys different things. Also, people have different ideas on what a dungeon crawl is. So that may be your preference, but it is not a requirement.

However, in general I agree with, it find 5e light enough to work well for us (of course I have no idea what the actual rules would be - I just play the game!

 

[Mannahnin]

I do think you could probably implement slot based encumberance, but 5E just has too much stuff built into it at various levels to make old school crawling work.

You don't have to hack a lot out of it, IME. You do need to add a procedure, like the one from B/X.

It IS nice that a game like Shadowdark exists and does it for us.

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

Sahdowdark is a great implementation of 5E bent toward the express purpose of recreating the feel of old school dungeon crawling. It not only bends its rules that way, but its GM advice and all of its non-rules tools to that end. it is really a masterclass in taking 5E and making it about a specific style of play.

Shadowdark is not based on 5e. The only mechanic it takes directly from 5e is the Adv/Disadv system.

 

[Mannahnin]

Shadowdark is not based on 5e. The only mechanic it takes directly from 5e is the Adv/Disadv system.

It uses the same ability score bonus charts as 5E right? As opposed to B/X-style or AD&D-style?

In fairness, the 5E chart is the same as 4E and 3E...

 

[borringman]

That's a lot of things per day, and even if you cut a character down to it's bare minimum (a human champion fighter) that's still a lot of numbers to monitor.

Yeah, it kind of rankles to hear 5E described as "rulings not rules" when I use a spreadsheet to track my PC's abilities -- and it's a melee build! It's a pretty bureaucratic system.

D&D is not "lite", I hope it makes folks happy to see me write that, but FWIW. . . I don't care? I don't care what bucket it goes in. At the end of the day, it's. . . well, OK. It's fine. I have fun with it, even though it's weird and anachronistic and a bizarre mix of extremely pedantic player option details and almost nonexistent survival mechanics.

Don't give me "lite" games. Don't give me "crunchy" games either! Give me good games. There is nothing inherently good or bad about the length of a system. It's entirely possible to create an atrocious one-paragraph system, or a core mechanic that needs a proper book spine yet is a masterpiece of elegance. I'll play it if it's fun.

And I guess that's my answer to OP. The problem with WotC's D&D and Pathfinder wrt dungeon delving isn't their complexity. It's that they chose to focus on certain things and dungeon delving wasn't one of them. So they're bad at it. Stripping either down to half a page to make them "lite" won't fix that, because "lite" isn't a panacea.

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

It uses the same ability score bonus charts as 5E right? As opposed to B/X-style or AD&D-style?

In fairness, the 5E chart is the same as 4E and 3E...

As you've said yourself - that's not a 5e-specific mechanic.

 

[payn]

Yeah, it kind of rankles to hear 5E described as "rulings not rules" when I use a spreadsheet to track my PC's abilities -- and it's a melee build! It's a pretty bureaucratic system.

D&D is not "lite", I hope it makes folks happy to see me write that, but FWIW. . . I don't care? I don't care what bucket it goes in. At the end of the day, it's. . . well, OK. It's fine. I have fun with it, even though it's weird and anachronistic and a very bizarre mix of pedantic player option details and almost nonexistent survival mechanics.

At the end of the day, don't give me "lite" games. Don't give me "crunchy" games either! Give me good games. There is nothing inherently good or bad about the length of a system. It's entirely possible to create an atrocious one-paragraph system, or a core mechanic that needs a proper book spine yet is a masterpiece of elegance. I'll play it if it's fun.

This is key. Folks often mistake their fun as objective truths about things.

And I guess that's my answer to OP. The problem with WotC's D&D and Pathfinder wrt dungeon delving isn't their complexity. It's that they chose to focus on certain things and dungeon delving wasn't one of them. So they're bad at it. Stripping either down to half a page to make them "lite" won't fix that, because "lite" isn't a panacea.

Yeap, I think folks get confused about the old/new school divide, especially, since 5E was specifically designed to do so.

 

[CreamCloud0]

I do think you could probably implement slot based encumberance, but 5E just has too much stuff built into it at various levels to make old school crawling work.

I’ve wondered before if DnD could implement a workable encumbrance based less on exact weights and just doing a weight point heavy/moderate/light/trinket model alongside depletion dice on some types of consumables, so say, a Bundle of torches is a medium item, medium items are 4 weight, and torches begin with a d10 sized depletion die.