Only the Lonely: Why We Demand Official Product

[doctorbadwolf]

I own nearly every pre-3E Greyhawk book/boxed set, and some 3E ones as well.

You don't need special rules to run or play GH. It's just D&D. (Or Rolemaster. Or Burning Wheel. Or . . ..)

If anyone wants to play GH, just buy a copy of the boxed set from DM's Guild and start playing!

Psionics is its own thing - though a sorcerer might be used to approximate it.

Athasian bards, without spellcasting, can be done as assassin rogues. The actual 5e bard is a spellcasting class - I don't think we're going to see it rebuilt as a non-caster.

Defiling magic can presumably be done the same as in the 2nd ed books, or else using the 4e variant. In 2nd ed AD&D, the rules for the effects of defiling can be ported wholesale to 5e (I just reread them to make sure). Being a defiler rather than a preserver gives, in effect, a bonus to earned XP (approx +40%, meaning that quite a bit of the time from 2nd through name level the defiler will be a level ahead of the preserver). In 5e you could just do the same thing, or if in the hard cold light of 30 years of D&D experience that seems too broken or ad hoc you could do something else - eg +1 to save DCs and attack rolls for the defiler.

I'm not meaning to cast aspersions on your imagined book. Just trying to point out that so much of this material is already able to be used in 5e with minimal fuss and effort.

I don’t care. Go through out your own ideas.

 

[hawkeyefan]

The Dark Eye does something like that.


Honest question because I don't have a lot of experience with this type of play, but does it really need a whole book? It seems like 2-5 pages apiece to expand on each of the points you made would be enough, making a document about the size of one of the longer "Plane Shifts." It looks to me like most of getting "vanilla" D&D to sword & sorcery is subtractive, and it doesn't take a lot of page space to eliminate or restrict things from the base game.

However, as I said, I don't know much about the genre, so maybe you or others can tell me what I'm missing here.

I think it mostly can be done with just the options that exist in the DMG. Maybe "Slow Natural Healing" or "Gritty Realism" rest options to mitigate the resiliency of 5E characters. This will slow things down a bit, but also makes combat less assured.....PCs will have to carefully consider every combat. Combine this with XP for gold rather than for killing monsters, and you've pretty much got the crunch down.

The rest is really just removing the races, classes, backgrounds, spells, and items that you don't think are a proper fit for such a campaign. Then you're pretty much good to go.

The amount of guidance this would take would likely be 1 to 2 pages of text.

 

[jmucchiello]

Yep! That’s exactly the sort of thing I’d want in a guide to multiverse. “Here is Greyhawk. Here are the themes of it, and here is how to run games in this sort of world.”

I can't imagine there are themes exclusively available in Greyhawk. Just about any 'kind' of adventure you can run in Greyhawk will run in Forgetten Realms or Mystara just as well. These settings are generic. They are designed for ease of use by all players. Now, a place like Dark Sun or Dragonlance will have themes specific to it. I'm not sure what you mean by "how to run games in this sort of world" when you refer to a world with no restrictions.

 

[Tony Vargas]

But given that it's almost certain that WotC will never republish it in a 5e form, if you want to use it you will have to write your own stats. @Tony Vargas on these boards has said that he runs pre-3E material by just converting the AC from low-is-good to high-is-good. I'm guessing he uses the THACO number, damage and hit points as written.

At low levels, yes. In the olden days you'd often get really abbreviated stats. AC, att/dam and hit points, sometimes going to the trouble of a individual hps, like the writer had rolled their HD. At low level, just inverting AC and using the damage and hps given works - they can be a tad whimpy, I suppose, but numbers might well make up for it. At higher levels it wouldn't hold because hp/damage scale faster in 5e. Pre-THAC0, you can just arbitrarily assign an attack bonus. Doable on the fly.

 

[MarkB]

I want a pocket size edition of the Player's Handbook to make transport easier.

So, a tablet and D&D Beyond?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I can't imagine there are themes exclusively available in Greyhawk. Just about any 'kind' of adventure you can run in Greyhawk will run in Forgetten Realms or Mystara just as well. These settings are generic. They are designed for ease of use by all players. Now, a place like Dark Sun or Dragonlance will have themes specific to it. I'm not sure what you mean by "how to run games in this sort of world" when you refer to a world with no restrictions.

Dude I don’t care. I’m not going to get into a discussion about whether Greyhawk should be included. Find someone else.

 

[Don Durito]

So, a tablet and D&D Beyond?

It's much faster to find things in a book.

Although, it would be nice if they at least fixed the index so that entries pointed you to the actual page you need and didn't just send you to other entries.

 

[pemerton]

I don’t care. Go through out your own ideas.

What do you mean "go through out your own ideas". I do use my own ideas. Others are welcome to also. They're even free!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

What do you mean "go through out your own ideas". I do use my own ideas. Others are welcome to also. They're even free!

I mean I don’t care. I’m not here to defend Greyhawk’s place in a hypothetical dnd book. I can’t imagine very many more inane and useless arguments to have.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

It's much faster to find things in a book.

Although, it would be nice if they at least fixed the index so that entries pointed you to the actual page you need and didn't just send you to other entries.

It would actually be one of the better RPG indexes of all time if they had. Almost everything I look up has an entry in the index....and more than half of them tell you to look something else up rather than just give you a page number. I don't get it.