D&D 4E House Rules for Old School 4e

[AbdulAlhazred]

When I want a "quick and deadly" variant game, I halve the monsters' hit points and double their damage dice. So a quick and deadly orc berserker (normally 66 hp, 1d12+5 damage) would instead be 33 hp, 2d12+5 damage.

I used this option a lot in my Fall of Civilization campaign, but they had 2-3 leaders in the (large) party. A couple of the most memorable encounters in the campaign were with monsters using this variant, though. I haven't playtested this is a leader-light group.

The problem I see with this variant is that it REALLY devalues anything EXCEPT damage. There's not a lot of point to careful positioning, control, even in-combat healing, when the fight is over in 2.5 rounds. Certain conditions become super strong but overall it turns into a slugging match and from what I've seen high damage output for the quick kill just blows the doors off any other kind of tactics. Seems to rather miss the whole point of 4e combat. I guess you can call that Old School, but having been there from day one my biggest complaint with older-Es was that monsters just can't stick around long enough to do much.

 

[S'mon]

The problem I see with this variant is that it REALLY devalues anything EXCEPT damage. There's not a lot of point to careful positioning, control, even in-combat healing, when the fight is over in 2.5 rounds.

I prefer more monsters, less hp per monster. 2d12+5 seems a bit much for a 4th level critter, but I certainly boost Paragon tier critters' damage output; Large size creatures get more damage dice, and high level NPC types get damage bonuses from enchanted weapons (why should a Drow Soldier-18 with STR 17 be doing 1d8+3 with his basic attack?).

 

[Chainsaw]

What is your D&D gaming background hailstop? I think there is alot more to the old school mentality than just quick combats, so I'm trying to get a better handle on what you want. I'm working on a sword/sorcery/planet type setting that may have some "old school" characteristics, so this topic is interesting.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Seems to me, having started back in 1975 with the original game that the characteristics were something like:

VERY simple characters. Like you had 6 stats, hit points, ac, gold, xp, stat bonuses, level, class, damage, and the list of whatever items you had. Casters had spell lists. Made for very quick and easy character generation (5 mins tops for a level 1 PC). Character death consequently was pretty trivial.

AD&D did make PCs a bit more fleshed out, it was still fairly easy to gen up a new level 1 character and quite feasible to do it in mid game if you got killed off.

So really it seems to me the most significant aspect of "old school" was just the sheer arbitrary lethality the game expected. Spring a trap, you die. Run into any of the plethora of insta-gank monsters, you die. Get a couple bad die rolls, you die. It did keep you on your toes for sure.

Combat did go less rounds and the minor combatants were only important mostly because they acted as blockers. Usually there were one or two monsters giving you a threat and the rest just got in the way of the fighter clobbering the nasty one. There were of course those "a threat all by itself" monsters, which is something you don't really see that often in 4e. Of course most of those were of the insta-gank variety or else something that had multiple high damage attacks. Generally though those types were what you had your SOD type stuff for. At low levels things could easily devolve to a slugging match but it usually lasted 3-4 rounds and didn't often involve much maneuvering beyond "I run up to the monster". At high levels? Pretty much rocket tag.

I think there was somewhat more of a feeling of being on the hairy edge of death at all times but it was usually much tedious exploring and skirmishing puncuated with the occasional close brush with death.

Lots of other things of course and I'm sure it really depended a lot on the group. I seem to remember in our group there was a great deal of characters running around and trying to assemble the right group of PCs and items to go after a particular adventure once we were out of low levels, followed by the fairly linear dungeon crawling sort of phase, climactic encounter and either bugout or victory dance.

 

[buddhafrog]

What is your D&D gaming background hailstop? I think there is alot more to the old school mentality than just quick combats, so I'm trying to get a better handle on what you want. I'm working on a sword/sorcery/planet type setting that may have some "old school" characteristics, so this topic is interesting.

Played AD&D around 20 years ago and just jumped back in as a DM for my child/friends. The single biggest difference I feel is the healing surges, and thus the vastly less tension in every battle knowing that as long as the current battle doesn't directly kill you, then you'll most likely be OK after your surges. I've cut down my healing surges b/c of this. Most of the other differences primarily feel like more detailed explanations and mechanics (generally for the better), while the healing issue, to me, makes a constant change in how the game feels.

 

[Chainsaw]

So really it seems to me the most significant aspect of "old school" was just the sheer arbitrary lethality the game expected. Spring a trap, you die. Run into any of the plethora of insta-gank monsters, you die. Get a couple bad die rolls, you die. It did keep you on your toes for sure.

I agree that it was arbitrary IF you weren't on your toes. That's one of things I liked about it. There wasn't much room for error. That's what I'd like to bring back into my 4E games. In my current games, people are just busting down doors left and right, walking in, killing this and that, knowing they've always got several rounds in their back pockets. Part of it's probably bad DM'ing. Another part is the system controls. Maybe it's as simple as eliminating some of the "phased" effects and including more save vs. you're screwed effects. As always, this would HAVE to be something the whole group was aware of and interested in doing.

Lots of other things of course and I'm sure it really depended a lot on the group.

Very true.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, I don't know. I've spent all my time with 4e behind the screen so I can't say with certainty how the players feel about it but I know that as a point of fact I take them to the edge pretty often. It certainly isn't hard to do that in 4e in my experience.

I'd say the difference is its usually a bit less blatant as to when and where a player made a fatal mistake in 4e. In say 1e you'd screw up and probably be dead the next round. In 4e its more likely you screw up and you're started down the slippery slope that ends in death and you may not even realize what put you there.

I don't really see HS as being much more than a daily limit on how much healing the character can get. My experience was that it was pretty rare in old style games to go into an encounter with less than max hit points. It could happen but it was surely a desperate gamble when it did. Going into a 4e combat with say 1-2 surges left is pretty close to the same sort of desperate gamble. In EITHER game if there is no story reason for the players to push their luck then they generally won't. Rare was the old style dungeon crawl in 1e days when a party would continue past the point where the CLWs, scrolls, and healing potions ran out. Doesn't seem all that different in 4e, hammer on a couple characters a bit and run them out of HS and the party turns back. I think the frequency of running low is a bit less at low levels but personally I always found it pretty tedious when old time parties were constantly running in and out of some dungeon every other encounter.

I think the style of adventure you design will have the most impact on how much 4e feels old school overall. Toss in a lot of stuff that chips away at them and I think you'll get the sort of feeling you got with a level 1 party in the old days.

 

[LostSoul]

My experience with 1e-2e was that you would normally be a little depleted after your first fight. In 3e, not so much, you'd have to break out the wand of cure light wounds or else you'd be dead. Monsters, even big ones like giants, didn't smack you for everything you had in 1e-2e. I lost a PC when I didn't disengage in the very first round in 3e against an elemental.

(Though I do remember when my lvl 5 AC 0 Cleric went toe-to-toe with an Ettin and realized that this thing was out of my league. Still, I could stay in the fight; not like 3e, when I'd be dead for making that mistake.)

I also remember many times when we had to push on - to save the village from ogres or bandits or whatever - even though we couldn't heal everyone up fully.


Anyways, a real contribution to the thread:

You can either come up with an entirely different combat routine that will make things go faster, or you can limit the availability/effectiveness of extended rests and put more small combats in front of the PCs.

If you can only recover 1 healing surge a night, a quick encounter with 2 standard equal level monsters will still pose a threat. (Though mostly for the melee strikers.)

 

[Nytmare]

I think it's kinda funny that my group adopted what they saw as an "old school D&D" mentality when we first started playing 4E, and they went through 3 parties in 4 nights of gaming.

 

[Chainsaw]

You can either come up with an entirely different combat routine that will make things go faster, or you can limit the availability/effectiveness of extended rests and put more small combats in front of the PCs.

If you can only recover 1 healing surge a night, a quick encounter with 2 standard equal level monsters will still pose a threat. (Though mostly for the melee strikers.)

I think limiting the availability/effectiveness of extended rests and adding more small combats is the key. Plus, I think these two suggestions can be implemented together by simply adding a) more random encounters with minions led by a tougher guy (easy to do in a dungeon where there should be patrols/hunting parties/etc) and b) having more "extending rest" busting interruptions. This may already be happening in alot of groups, but my current DM isn't really doing it.