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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8496814" data-attributes="member: 6670763">I admittedly don't know very much about 5th edition. I only ran one campaign in 2020 that went for 19 games, which actually was both the best and the longest campaign I've ever run in my 20 years as GM. But I didn't exactly enjoy the mechanical aspects of running this system. But my players, who mostly were GMs themselves with a lot more experience with the system than me, said the things I disliked most about it don't have to be that way if you run the game differently. One of my main issues was that there's much too few encounters for players to try out the new toys they got for this level before they get more new toys at the next level, and that I felt pressured to artificially create situations where they can use all those shiny combat powers they got. And admittedly, simply reducing the amount of XP that characters get for encounters should help with that quite well. So now, a year later, I am considering giving the game another chance by tailoring it more to my gamemastering style.Now all the way back since 5th edition came out, I remember there being discussions about how much old-school D&D influences are in 5th edition, and over all the years I've seen self-proclaimed old-school DMs say that they are quite happy with 5th edition, and that it does a decent job at working with their campaign styles. I even vaguely remembering some talk recently about whether 5th edition made old-school D&D obsolete. I don't know how those arguments went and if it was a rhetorical question (remember: "If any headline ends with a question mark, the answer is always no."), but apparently people considered that a topic at least debating.But now sitting down again with the PHB and going over the rules for character abilities, I am really not seeing where that idea could come from. It's not quite as complex as 3rd edition was. But you still got these huge amounts of hit points, automatically healing all damage at a long rest, only a few encounters needed to level up. People talking about how every 1st level character is assumed to have at least an 18 in its main stat, but better a 20. Battlemasters with a full page of maneuvers in the PHB, and rogues being assumed to do sneak attack on all attacks. I don't know how to draw a line between what's old-school or not, but all of this really doesn't feel like it to me.I think I could make this game work as something that is appealing to me, by creating my own custom XP award system to roughly double the time to level up, using the slow rest variant that requires a week of rest to regain spells, enforcing food and water mechanics, overhauling Encumbrance, hard-capping the game at 10th level, porting in the wandering monster mechanics and monster reaction rules from older games, and so on. But would that even still be running 5th edition or rather some custom homebrew abomination?I guess this question is primarily directed at people who consider 5th edition to be a system that works reasonably well enough for a more old-school style campaign. What exactly is it about the mechanics that has a certain old-school ring to it, or makes it suitable to be used for such a purpose?</blockquote>

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