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Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
making 5E more "old school" (updated)
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<blockquote data-quote="epithet" data-source="post: 7265913" data-attributes="member: 6796566"><p>You can't really capture the feel of "old school D&D" by limiting player options. I mean, sure... the AD&D Player's Handbook didn't have the selection of races and classes that we have now in 5e, but that didn't matter at all. There were, from the earliest days of Dragon magazine, plenty of other options that included Half-Ogre (<em>The Whole Half-Ogre</em>, <u>Dragon #73</u>, 1983) and the Duelist class (same issue.) <em>The Rogue's Gallery</em> (1980) provided as NPCs a number of characters that had been played by Gary Gygax and other TSR staff, and included both a lizard man and a centaur.</p><p></p><p>The difference between "old school" and "modern" regarding character options is that back in the early days, if you wanted to play something more exotic you had to either find a write-up of it somewhere or make it up yourself. Now, there are "official" stats for a lot more races and classes.</p><p></p><p>That's what I was getting at in my post on the first page of this thread, although I didn't articulate it as well as I should have. In the early days of D&D, you could do anything, play anything, be anything your imagination could conceive of. Most of the groups I played in had a tacit agreement that we would stick to fantasy tropes and not get "too weird," but for the most part we made up rules and stats for whatever wasn't covered in the books or in Dragon magazine.</p><p></p><p>If you want to simplify your game, you can always stick to the Basic Rules pdf, but that's boring, and it isn't "old school" in any meaningful way.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="epithet, post: 7265913, member: 6796566"] You can't really capture the feel of "old school D&D" by limiting player options. I mean, sure... the AD&D Player's Handbook didn't have the selection of races and classes that we have now in 5e, but that didn't matter at all. There were, from the earliest days of Dragon magazine, plenty of other options that included Half-Ogre ([I]The Whole Half-Ogre[/I], [U]Dragon #73[/U], 1983) and the Duelist class (same issue.) [I]The Rogue's Gallery[/I] (1980) provided as NPCs a number of characters that had been played by Gary Gygax and other TSR staff, and included both a lizard man and a centaur. The difference between "old school" and "modern" regarding character options is that back in the early days, if you wanted to play something more exotic you had to either find a write-up of it somewhere or make it up yourself. Now, there are "official" stats for a lot more races and classes. That's what I was getting at in my post on the first page of this thread, although I didn't articulate it as well as I should have. In the early days of D&D, you could do anything, play anything, be anything your imagination could conceive of. Most of the groups I played in had a tacit agreement that we would stick to fantasy tropes and not get "too weird," but for the most part we made up rules and stats for whatever wasn't covered in the books or in Dragon magazine. If you want to simplify your game, you can always stick to the Basic Rules pdf, but that's boring, and it isn't "old school" in any meaningful way. [/QUOTE]
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making 5E more "old school" (updated)
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