D&D 5E How Old-School is 5th Edition? Can it even do Old-School?
Voadam
Legend
When I ran 5e White Plume in Tales of the Yawning Portal for my son and my brother and his two kids I had them roll 3d6 in order for the one shot. I also disallowed multiclassing.
TPK from a vampire.
When I ran 5e White Plume for my son and my brother-in-law and his two kids they made it through to escape with an artifact despite blowing up part of the dungeon.
Such divergent results in White Plume mountain running 5e straight felt very old school.
TPK from a vampire.
When I ran 5e White Plume for my son and my brother-in-law and his two kids they made it through to escape with an artifact despite blowing up part of the dungeon.
Such divergent results in White Plume mountain running 5e straight felt very old school.
darjr
I crit!
Apologies, I have not read the whole thread but I wanted to post something I just discovered myself.
Old Swords Reign. A man attempt to use 5e to rebuild OD&D.
www.drivethrurpg.com
I just bought it and haven’t read it yet.
Erg… though race class restrictions I will change.
Old Swords Reign. A man attempt to use 5e to rebuild OD&D.
DriveThruRPG.com
Your one-stop online shop for new and vintage RPG products from the top publishers, delivered fresh to your desktop in electronic format.
I just bought it and haven’t read it yet.
Erg… though race class restrictions I will change.
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AdmundfortGeographer
Getting lost in fantasy maps
I am eager for your review!
DND_Reborn
The High Aldwin
I just posted one here:
D&D 5E - Is 5E "big enough" for a Basic/Advanced split?
Huh, I just discovered this. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/351050 That's cheap enough (on PDF) to check out.
www.enworld.org
darjr
I crit!
Mainly so they can play in that style and not have to have the players learn a completely different game.
For me the bonus is the deep, almost invisible on first look, subtle changes to class and spells while still being compatible enough I could run that new Esper Genesis adventure.
GreyLord
Legend
I did a similar thing as well, several years ago. It's not just OD&D though, it also had things with BECMI and AD&D as optional items. It was more options to make your game run like OD&D with 5e rules.
(Look up 5e Old School on DMs Guild).
Mine (or my reason for doing so) was more to have various options that one could include. This also meant that one could play OD&D but with the new things from 5e if they wanted (proficiency bonus, new races such as Dragonborn, Tieflings, etc). They could play with it as much or as little as they wanted to make it more like OD&D, or less like OD&D (and the same with BECMI or AD&D).
teitan
Legend
How I would old school it up
1. No feats
2. No drow, dragonborn, tieflings
3. Variant humans to make them more attractive to increase the human to demihuman ratio, yes it brings in feats but it's one. One feat. Whoopdie doooo.
4. PHB only classes, when you get outside of that, case by case. De-emphasize the magical fighter phenom in post 2e era D&D when you get outside the core rules.
5. Limit multiclassing... or don't use it at all.
6. Use the gritty healing rules
7. Milestone leveling, but every 4-5 sessions or more. SLow that roll. If they are level 10 in a year, you are not old schooling it. If you are doing XP, then reward it for smart play and not slaughter. D&D was a resource management game, not a hack & slash game. Reward XP for getting out of scraps. 2-3 xp per encounter times the CR, minimum 1. Level 1-3 might go quicker than old school but it's a different way of doing it.
8. Scale down the hit points, cap them at level 10 and half the monster HP suggestions when they start hitting about 20-40. Ain't no one got time for 300-500 hit point whittling fights. Cap at about 125.
That's just a few things off the top of my head that I would do to bring it to a more old school level of play. 5E is pretty old school in a lot of ways. It's a logical progression of 2e in the same way 3e was but if different designers handled it. If more people read the DMG instead of watching the less than wonderful youtube reviewers saying "you don't need to read this book" like it's the 2e DMG or something inconsequential, we would see a lot more interesting house rules and stuff I think that could make for some awesome kit bashes.
1. No feats
2. No drow, dragonborn, tieflings
3. Variant humans to make them more attractive to increase the human to demihuman ratio, yes it brings in feats but it's one. One feat. Whoopdie doooo.
4. PHB only classes, when you get outside of that, case by case. De-emphasize the magical fighter phenom in post 2e era D&D when you get outside the core rules.
5. Limit multiclassing... or don't use it at all.
6. Use the gritty healing rules
7. Milestone leveling, but every 4-5 sessions or more. SLow that roll. If they are level 10 in a year, you are not old schooling it. If you are doing XP, then reward it for smart play and not slaughter. D&D was a resource management game, not a hack & slash game. Reward XP for getting out of scraps. 2-3 xp per encounter times the CR, minimum 1. Level 1-3 might go quicker than old school but it's a different way of doing it.
8. Scale down the hit points, cap them at level 10 and half the monster HP suggestions when they start hitting about 20-40. Ain't no one got time for 300-500 hit point whittling fights. Cap at about 125.
That's just a few things off the top of my head that I would do to bring it to a more old school level of play. 5E is pretty old school in a lot of ways. It's a logical progression of 2e in the same way 3e was but if different designers handled it. If more people read the DMG instead of watching the less than wonderful youtube reviewers saying "you don't need to read this book" like it's the 2e DMG or something inconsequential, we would see a lot more interesting house rules and stuff I think that could make for some awesome kit bashes.
Nefermandias
Hero
Since this thread seems to be still running, let me give my two cents on ho why I think 5e has quite a few old school elements in it.
Firstly: Character generation is quick and straightforward. If you are not using any of the optional add-ons like feats and multiclassing, you are basically down to choosing class, race and background. It's nothing like the huge skill trees from the previous two editions.
Secondly: It's the first time in the WotC era that you can run actual dungeon crawls. 3e had the problem of easy access to magic items creation and parties had nearly infinite resources, which eliminated the main aspect of dungeon creaking: resource management and strategic thinking (talking strategy, not tactics). 4e on the other hand had really good pacing tools and ways to make the party exhaust their resources, but the system was better geared to just a few set piece fights instead of long dungeons. Ironically, that's the way most people (at least on Reddit) play 5e today. They would probably have a stroke if I told them that 4e could handle that style better.
And finally, the way 5e handles Abilities and Skill checks is very old school. Unlike the previous two editions, 5e puts the adjucation powers squarely back into the DMs hand. Heck, you could even give up the dice completely while out of combat and run the game solely based on "skilled play", using a Free Kriegspiel approach. You don't believe me? Page 236 of the DMG says it's a perfectly valid (and within RAW) way to run the game. It even makes me think that skills are actually something they only included in the game because they feared the backlash if they had completely removed them. Just like the optional feats and flanking rules.
Firstly: Character generation is quick and straightforward. If you are not using any of the optional add-ons like feats and multiclassing, you are basically down to choosing class, race and background. It's nothing like the huge skill trees from the previous two editions.
Secondly: It's the first time in the WotC era that you can run actual dungeon crawls. 3e had the problem of easy access to magic items creation and parties had nearly infinite resources, which eliminated the main aspect of dungeon creaking: resource management and strategic thinking (talking strategy, not tactics). 4e on the other hand had really good pacing tools and ways to make the party exhaust their resources, but the system was better geared to just a few set piece fights instead of long dungeons. Ironically, that's the way most people (at least on Reddit) play 5e today. They would probably have a stroke if I told them that 4e could handle that style better.
And finally, the way 5e handles Abilities and Skill checks is very old school. Unlike the previous two editions, 5e puts the adjucation powers squarely back into the DMs hand. Heck, you could even give up the dice completely while out of combat and run the game solely based on "skilled play", using a Free Kriegspiel approach. You don't believe me? Page 236 of the DMG says it's a perfectly valid (and within RAW) way to run the game. It even makes me think that skills are actually something they only included in the game because they feared the backlash if they had completely removed them. Just like the optional feats and flanking rules.
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