Charles Rampant
Adventurer
Last night I finished my first full campaign of D&D 5th, not including the Starter Set campaign that I ran back in the summer, and I thought that I’d share some of my feelings on the completed ruleset. One lovely thing was that a player bought me a bottle of cognac to thank me for running the campaign, which is the nicest thing that a player has done so far.
I like that D&D is now so easy to run. I’ve got a fair degree of experience behind the GM screen – Dark Heresy, World of Darkness, 7th Sea, WFRP, GURPS and a little bit of D&D but not much – and I’ve found that this game seems simply quicker to handle. I don’t need to check so many rules, usually only needing to get the rulebook out for spells, and adventure planning is pretty simple. I vaguely remember D&D 3rd being a total nightmare of maths in the adventure planning stages, whereas for this I feel confident to just eyeball encounters and even to roll treasure at the table. It is more complex than, say, Savage Worlds; but then I found Savage Worlds boring to GM, while Dark Heresy was too complex for my tastes. There seems to be a really good balance of crunch in this game, at least for my taste.
Money is a bit of a strange thing. I had players complaining that they had little to spend it on; my sort of sandboxy campaign included some significant time breaks, but naturally they mostly did odd jobs in those periods and so covered living expenses that way. Full Plate for the 6th level fighter was the party’s single biggest outlay. Some players didn’t want to buy horses due to cost, which seemed a bit daft to me. I mean, what else were they planning on spending the money on? Interestingly, however, one side effect was that the players chose to keep some art objects rather than simply sell them; they liked the description enough to value them for their own sake.
I found that the players were more willing to argue rules interpretations and metagame monster stats than in my other games. Nobody else in my Dark Heresy campaign displayed any real cognizance of the full-auto rules, for example, whereas here players got openly confused when they couldn’t instantly identify a monster. We had about ten hardbacks on the table for six players, meaning that at least some copies of the MM and DMG that didn’t belong to me were floating around; not surprising when two players were GMing games of D&D on other nights, but still not what I’ve been used to in the past. Rules disputes (i.e. with me disagreeing with one or more players) were relatively few, but still considerably more than my 7th Sea campaign last year.
Character builds and optimisation are already apparent. I had a halberd using Battle Master with Sentinel, which was mildly irritating at times, though not nearly as annoying as the 3rd edition Trip Fighter that I briefly GMed for. Most of my players were moderately keen to optimise – perhaps not scouring forums, but clearly thinking about how best to do damage – and I found that the monsters really had to be scaled up to compensate. The two-weapon wielding Champion could totally mincemeat any level-appropriate monster by himself, typically. This was not a huge problem, mainly because I just used harder monsters. As a result, I frequently had players rolling death saves, usually when a Frost Giant had hit them twice in a round or something; however, the players seemed happy to handle this level of difficulty. (I’ve always suspected that my background as a wargamer makes me perhaps too eager to try and ‘win’ combats against the players - and when I am a player, I like there to be serious risk of death; maybe just a personal taste thing.) I wonder how they would have responded if I kept them fighting relatively easy fights, but I suspect they would have found it less exciting.
I ran the game as part of a student society – relatively common, at least here in the UK – and noticed that my one-shots and campaign attracted a higher proportion of relatively new players than other games. There is definitely an appeal that D&D specifically has to novice members of the hobby, probably due to name recognition.
As a final parting comment, I shall relate the very last fight of the campaign.
After saying all that, I’ve already got a new campaign lined up to start on the 15th, so clearly I’m a big fan of the game! I don’t know if my comments above are interesting to ya’ll, but I thought that I’d share, amid my jubilation at successfully reaching the end of a campaign without some hilarious disaster on the way.
I like that D&D is now so easy to run. I’ve got a fair degree of experience behind the GM screen – Dark Heresy, World of Darkness, 7th Sea, WFRP, GURPS and a little bit of D&D but not much – and I’ve found that this game seems simply quicker to handle. I don’t need to check so many rules, usually only needing to get the rulebook out for spells, and adventure planning is pretty simple. I vaguely remember D&D 3rd being a total nightmare of maths in the adventure planning stages, whereas for this I feel confident to just eyeball encounters and even to roll treasure at the table. It is more complex than, say, Savage Worlds; but then I found Savage Worlds boring to GM, while Dark Heresy was too complex for my tastes. There seems to be a really good balance of crunch in this game, at least for my taste.
Money is a bit of a strange thing. I had players complaining that they had little to spend it on; my sort of sandboxy campaign included some significant time breaks, but naturally they mostly did odd jobs in those periods and so covered living expenses that way. Full Plate for the 6th level fighter was the party’s single biggest outlay. Some players didn’t want to buy horses due to cost, which seemed a bit daft to me. I mean, what else were they planning on spending the money on? Interestingly, however, one side effect was that the players chose to keep some art objects rather than simply sell them; they liked the description enough to value them for their own sake.
I found that the players were more willing to argue rules interpretations and metagame monster stats than in my other games. Nobody else in my Dark Heresy campaign displayed any real cognizance of the full-auto rules, for example, whereas here players got openly confused when they couldn’t instantly identify a monster. We had about ten hardbacks on the table for six players, meaning that at least some copies of the MM and DMG that didn’t belong to me were floating around; not surprising when two players were GMing games of D&D on other nights, but still not what I’ve been used to in the past. Rules disputes (i.e. with me disagreeing with one or more players) were relatively few, but still considerably more than my 7th Sea campaign last year.
Character builds and optimisation are already apparent. I had a halberd using Battle Master with Sentinel, which was mildly irritating at times, though not nearly as annoying as the 3rd edition Trip Fighter that I briefly GMed for. Most of my players were moderately keen to optimise – perhaps not scouring forums, but clearly thinking about how best to do damage – and I found that the monsters really had to be scaled up to compensate. The two-weapon wielding Champion could totally mincemeat any level-appropriate monster by himself, typically. This was not a huge problem, mainly because I just used harder monsters. As a result, I frequently had players rolling death saves, usually when a Frost Giant had hit them twice in a round or something; however, the players seemed happy to handle this level of difficulty. (I’ve always suspected that my background as a wargamer makes me perhaps too eager to try and ‘win’ combats against the players - and when I am a player, I like there to be serious risk of death; maybe just a personal taste thing.) I wonder how they would have responded if I kept them fighting relatively easy fights, but I suspect they would have found it less exciting.
I ran the game as part of a student society – relatively common, at least here in the UK – and noticed that my one-shots and campaign attracted a higher proportion of relatively new players than other games. There is definitely an appeal that D&D specifically has to novice members of the hobby, probably due to name recognition.
As a final parting comment, I shall relate the very last fight of the campaign.
After saying all that, I’ve already got a new campaign lined up to start on the 15th, so clearly I’m a big fan of the game! I don’t know if my comments above are interesting to ya’ll, but I thought that I’d share, amid my jubilation at successfully reaching the end of a campaign without some hilarious disaster on the way.
