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How Old-School is 5th Edition? Can it even do Old-School?
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<blockquote data-quote="Shiroiken" data-source="post: 8497021" data-attributes="member: 6775477"><p>Breaking up the order, because this question matters first. The mechanics of 5E have nothing to do with old-school play; they're largely taken from the best ideas of 3E and 4E. The reason why 5E is considered old school is the fact that unlike those editions, the role of the DM has been made more relevant. 3E tried to have a rule for everything, which bogged the game down in minutia. 4E was built on certain assumptions for the role of the DM, which made it hard to break free from those assumptions (at least without causing things to crash). 5E keeps the overall rules simple, relying on the judgement of the DM to resolve them, which is largely what happened back in OD&D, BECMI, and AD&D. This is what makes 5E "old-school."</p><p></p><p></p><p>Here's a big "secret" of 5E: it's meant to be customized. The initial goal was for there to be various modules for DMs to choose from, but that got reduced down to the simple variant rules scattered across the core rule books. The concept is still there, however, as with 5E's solid chassis you can do a LOT with it using 3PP or houserules. Hell, the entire purpose of DMGuild is for people to share the equivalent of homebrew.</p><p></p><p>While there's a lot of options in the DMG you could consider, I'm not always a big fan of the official versions. The only one from your list I'd suggest you consider is Encumbrance. It works pretty well, forcing characters to either put some nominal value into Str, carry next to nothing, or suffer significant penalties. I'd just allow dwarves to ignore the first penalty, since they lose out on their racial benefit for wearing armor.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Shiroiken, post: 8497021, member: 6775477"] Breaking up the order, because this question matters first. The mechanics of 5E have nothing to do with old-school play; they're largely taken from the best ideas of 3E and 4E. The reason why 5E is considered old school is the fact that unlike those editions, the role of the DM has been made more relevant. 3E tried to have a rule for everything, which bogged the game down in minutia. 4E was built on certain assumptions for the role of the DM, which made it hard to break free from those assumptions (at least without causing things to crash). 5E keeps the overall rules simple, relying on the judgement of the DM to resolve them, which is largely what happened back in OD&D, BECMI, and AD&D. This is what makes 5E "old-school." Here's a big "secret" of 5E: it's meant to be customized. The initial goal was for there to be various modules for DMs to choose from, but that got reduced down to the simple variant rules scattered across the core rule books. The concept is still there, however, as with 5E's solid chassis you can do a LOT with it using 3PP or houserules. Hell, the entire purpose of DMGuild is for people to share the equivalent of homebrew. While there's a lot of options in the DMG you could consider, I'm not always a big fan of the official versions. The only one from your list I'd suggest you consider is Encumbrance. It works pretty well, forcing characters to either put some nominal value into Str, carry next to nothing, or suffer significant penalties. I'd just allow dwarves to ignore the first penalty, since they lose out on their racial benefit for wearing armor. [/QUOTE]
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How Old-School is 5th Edition? Can it even do Old-School?
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