D&D 5E Is 5e "Easy Mode?"

[Todd Roybark]

In 1e if you had max hp of 50 and were down to 5 hp and took 16 hp in damage you were killed.

1e Magic Missile for the win, unless they had a Brooch of Shielding, then it was Dimension Door time, because casting spells in CQC was really tough to do by RAW in 1e.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Garthanos]

4e had way more tactical levers to pull to make encounters more or less difficult without even changing the total XP budget.

Yeh the tactics is nice but I think there is a bigger benefit for me
Balance serves story flexibility and 5e feels way less flexible as a storytelling goes in 4e you can have any number of encounters a day without everything being blown out of the water by casters.
Further out of combat balance was better too with characters that invest heavily in skills could be just as awesome without being a caster

 

[Sadras]

This fascination to paint 5e as anything less than easy mode is bizarre.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

This fascination to paint 5e as anything less than easy mode is bizarre.

In my case I was just surprised at the math, since I hadn't directly compared it. Overall I agree with many others' assessments that it's a different game for many different reasons.

I'm much less concerned about whether it's easy or hard, as I am about the game having the feel that I originally learned and loved, which is heavily influenced by Holmes Basic/B2 and AD&D along with many Dragon articles and eventually the Forgotten Realms Gray Box.

We'll all have different experiences and goals in our games, and what we consider easy/hard, etc. is quite different from person to person. But as I continue to tweak, looking back at the math from those editions has altered how I'm approaching it a bit.

 

[Essafah]

No 5E is not easy mode. What 5E is about is having PCs be larger than life action style heroes and as both a DM and player I think this is fine and keeps in like with many classic larger than life Sword & sorcery heroes of old like Conan who may or may not be born to a lower social class but whose innate abilities are clearly beyond the normal human to mythic in nature. As an player who started many editions ago. I think this change is and play style is good.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

Here is the full text, @Lanefan



So, notice that the heading- it's a subheading, under the "HIT POINTS" section, called, "Zero Hit Points". The first sentence ie explicit - when any creature is brought to 0 hit points (optionally as low as -3) it is unconscious. This is the specialized case for when a hit doesn't kill you (take you negative) but instead drops you to 0hp.

Why is this specialized and optional rule for zero hit points in the DMG? Look at the PHB section for damage:

Damage is meted out in hit points. If any creature reaches 0 or negative hit points, it is dead.

The specialized rule for unconsciousness is in contrast to the general principle that 0hp = dead that was well understood.

See, e.g., Len Lakofka in dragon Magazine #26 - June 1979 (killed is zero hp). This is the same as in OD&D, Holmes Basic, and Moldvay Basic.

I think that a lot of the confusion comes in from people who ended up playing a lot of 2e, and remember the "Hovering on Death's Door" rule, which is similar but different than the 1e DMG rule.

No, the "confusion" didn't come from 2e for us. That was how we always interpreted that rule. We figured that since the DMG was published later the rule was a new addition, superseded the earlier "holdover" from OD&D/Basic and we liked it. I seem to recall my friend's parents played the same way (we were kids after all).

Even today it seems an oddly specific and complex rule for a relatively rare circumstance (being reduced to exactly 0 hit points, with the optional -3 extension to make it more likely) for such a thorough rule to be written. I don't recall the Dragon article, so I dug it out. Are you referring to a sentence on the article on how to become a lich? If so, I'm impressed. Even I wouldn't have found that reference or considered it as clarification for a rule in the DMG. Maybe I missed another reference in my skim through the issue?

In any event, I'll agree that upon closer examination, that appears to be the intent (the example of combat on pg 71 supports it as well). Regardless, everybody I knew who played AD&D used the -10 rule, and yes, we continued to use it in 2e, although we stuck with the 1e version. I recall it being one of the rules that we specifically pointed out that made AD&D "more realistic" than what became BECMI and evidence of the authors' war gaming and love of history, since many deaths in war are from infection rather than actually dying on the battlefield.

It seems like we weren't the only ones, so I'm not sure it was "well understood."

Regardless, I agree that the feel and the type of game is quite different between the two. I think Tomb of Horrors is a good example of a 1e adventure that really doesn't translate well to 5e, and I'm not sure it really translated well to any later edition. At least not if you're looking to get the same feel out of the adventure.

But thanks, I learned something today!

 

[Ilbranteloth]

No 5E is not easy mode. What 5E is about is having PCs be larger than life action style heroes and as both a DM and player I think this is fine and keeps in like with many classic larger than life Sword & sorcery heroes of old like Conan who may or may not be born to a lower social class but whose innate abilities are clearly beyond the normal human to mythic in nature. As an player who started many editions ago. I think this change is and play style is good.

This I definitely agree with. For a mass-market game in the age of the MCU, this is exactly what it should be. Unfortunately, it's also not really what I want.

The new mechanics are strong, and Adventures in Middle Earth is an amazing template for how you can tone 5e down to a much more AD&D feel. It also shows how you can modify races, classes, etc. to tie them into the setting more tightly, just like they did in 1e/2e.

But that's OK, because if they designed what I want, it wouldn't be selling nearly as well. I will say that when we started with D&D Next, and even with the final version of 5e, I was extremely excited and my initial reaction was, "now this is D&D." Especially at low levels they really nailed it. It's when I started digging a little deeper, plus getting to higher levels, that it veered more toward the BECMI model than the AD&D model. So we did what we've always done, and have made it into the game we want to play.

Right now, since I have some time, I thought I'd try to finally get our rules into a format where I could put it on DMsGuild as an AD&D/5e mashup, which is what led me to look more closely at how they differ. What I've learned is that while I think our feel is still very AD&D-like, we've found that we really have chosen to take ideas from all editions and it's really something that's uniquely ours. But that's kind of always how I thought it should be.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

EDIT- just compare, for example, the orchard in Tharizdun in the 1e module and find anything similar in 5e. I don't think you can. Completely different gestalt.

I'm kind of wondering what you're getting at with this? Not saying you're wrong, just don't understand.

It's a classic 1e puzzle, where each PC needs to figure out which tree relates to them, and it provides a bonus for success (and a big one in that era where increasing Ability Scores was not baked into the rules). It's also a lesson in greed. Rather than an arbitrary, "it only works once," it actually has an in-world answer to why everybody can't just eat more fruit.

Are you saying that 5e doesn't do this sort of thing at all?

I'd agree with that, other than republishing older adventures. 5e is built on bonuses alone, rather than bonuses and penalties. D&D as a whole has shied away from player-solved puzzles. I think a big part of this is that it's much harder to design a puzzle for players so it's not too hard or too easy. Spoilers are also an issue. But I think the real reason is the increased desire for "balance" and that you can design for PC skill much easier than for player skill.

Having said that, I'll also admit that I haven't run any of the 5e APs, so perhaps there are things similar to this that I'm not readily aware of.

I miss those sort of things myself, but I do think it requires a certain sort of gamer mentality that is probably absent in a lot of gamers today. They just aren't used to them at this point. Player skill is now more focused on the character build and finding creative use of manipulating the mechanics/rules (I'm not saying that's a bad thing, just different). Sure, there were always players trying to find loopholes in the rules, but then the DM was assumed to have the authority to say, "no."

 

[Garthanos]

No 5E is not easy mode. What 5E is about is having PCs be larger than life action style heroes

Personally I feel the large than life was first invoked in Chainmail with the superhero called out as a one man army who could drive enemies from the field with his presence alone and
(it was only poking its head through a window in AD&D and felt a bit lost ) but 2e brought the flavor back at least in naming a fairly large number of Demigods in 2e phb as inspirational characters descriptions particularly for the fighter ok the mechanics didnt do as well as later 3e or 4e definitely did or 5e perhaps can do but its been part of the mix a long time.