D&D General The Monsters Know What They're Doing ... Are Unsure on 5e24

[billd91]

I would care if someone said "let's play Axis and Allies and then busts out a Clue board, Monopoly tokens and the Pop-O-Matic bubble and said how flexible the rules to A&A are.

I can see this is a serious discussion.

 

[Marc17]

My problem is that D&D was never as modular as people thought it was (it's nearly impossible to change the magic system without effectively rewriting the game) and the only reason earlier D&D was modifiable was because it was never well balanced to begin with. I don't feel D&D is any more generic or easier to modify than Genesys or Storyteller, and really only has the advantage of most people knowing the basics of d20 and you can call anything "D&D" even if you are using some retro indie game as long as it uses a d20 and has magic in it.

Well, that's why you just convert to the D&D system, spell slots or other Abilities/Spells at will, by day, or per other condition is a good enough first order conversion of any other spell system for most. Just like if you were making some fictional monster from literature into a D&D monster.

 

[el-remmen]

I would care if someone said "let's play Axis and Allies and then busts out a Clue board, Monopoly tokens and the Pop-O-Matic bubble and said how flexible the rules to A&A are.

I would be fascinated by that and have a lot of questions to ask and probably tell them about all the rules hacks we added to A&A back in the day that switched to d12s and gave certain countries’ units unique benefits based on the reps of those armies (like German Panzer units and Russian Infantry being slightly better).

 

[Marc17]

I would care if someone said "let's play Axis and Allies and then busts out a Clue board, Monopoly tokens and the Pop-O-Matic bubble and said how flexible the rules to A&A are.

Well, gaming is a social contract between all players, but sounds like an excellent excuse to go buy a copy of Axis & Allies (or Pendragon) and then get everybody else to play that instead.

 

[Xenolith234]

Yes I ran an ancient greek bronze age campaign. All humans. Limited classes. We used 5e, but I relied heavily on Age of Heroes. We had a blast.

I also ran a Witcher campaign, using the classes from Adventures in Middle Earth, which have zero spellcasting. We also had a great time with that.

And we also had a great time with the Call of Cthulhu 3e game from back in the… was it late 90s? Early 2000s? Whatever it was fun.

I know that you disagree, but my experiences with D&D with humans-only, limited classes were great and memorable.

The indignation in this thread that some of us managed to use low-magic D&D in a fulfilling way is starting to get absurd.

That sounds amazing! Restriction breeds creativity. I’m not opposed to low-magic, medium-magic, high-magic, what have you; I just want WotC to show D&D as the toolbox it is, provide variant rules for settings/restrictions if one wants them, and show us the levers that we can push and pull to modify the rules in the way we need without entirely breaking the system.

 

[Remathilis]

Yes I ran an ancient greek bronze age campaign. All humans. Limited classes. We used 5e, but I relied heavily on Age of Heroes. We had a blast.

I also ran a Witcher campaign, using the classes from Adventures in Middle Earth, which have zero spellcasting. We also had a great time with that.

And we also had a great time with the Call of Cthulhu 3e game from back in the… was it late 90s? Early 2000s? Whatever it was fun.

I know that you disagree, but my experiences with D&D with humans-only, limited classes were great and memorable.

The indignation in this thread that some of us managed to use low-magic D&D in a fulfilling way is starting to get absurd.

You can play Doom on a TI-83 graphing calculator. That doesn't make it a gaming console nor the best way to experience Doom.

But humans are nothing if not resourceful and if all you have is D&D shaped hammer, every fantasy setting under the sun looks like a nail.

 

[Minigiant]

I just feel fortunate as a millennial born in the '80s that what I grew up liking will just be repeatedly created over and over by the media entertainment industry due to their laziness. Thus my preferences will never leave the social fantasy construct that we have in the community and thus not age out.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

The AD&D “green books” were evidence of that. Official source books for running D&D in historical Earth settings (eg Age of Heroes’ ancient greeks).

Always had a section on what rules to omit to better curate the setting “feel” to different degrees.

Those books were so amazing. I got a lot of mileage out of A Mighty Fortress.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

Could you though, really? Like, let's be realistic. If you're making low fantasy you're chopping the wizard, the dwarf, the elf, probably the halfling, I'd say you want to chop the cleric as well. That's already 3/4 of the most basic races and 2/4 of the basic classes. You're excising a lot of stuff right off the bat, to say nothing of how many creatures just aren't ending up used. How many items are being thrown on the chopping floor. So much of the work is being thrown away I'd easily say its at least 80% even when we're talking the most basic books of Basic, not even going into the expanded line.

Yes, you totally could, and we actually did. The great thing about AD&D 2E in fact was that it provided an entire line of historical resource books which you could use to run reasonably authentic adventures in different time periods (Greek, Roman, Viking, Renaissance) and add/subtract magic and other elements according to the rules. So as an example, you could have magic in The Mighty Fortress but it provided rules (clunky, because it was AD&D, but still they were there) for more hermeneutic, slower and methodical magic that better fit the genre. The Viking book ditched regulr D&D magic for a runecasting system. These were fun books for the time. 3rd edition didn't get much of that from WotC, but it was heavily supported with historical references from Green Ronin and others.

Another important difference was that most class builds in older editions did include distinctly non-magical class designs. I am not entirely sure any class isn't at some point using magic or at least fantastical feats in the latest edition.

Either way, as one who cut my teeth on AD&D 1E and 2E, I can assure you that yeah we totally did this and it was also quite doable, and even supported with official materials. And by 3E it was still doable, supported by tons of OGL material. Arguably, its still possible to do this with 5E today if someone were to write a supplement, but the shift in the D&D gamer aesthetic has moved away from tying the game to its origins in myth, legend and history, making this a much more laborious task. (EDIT: and I'm okay with this, because these days I can rely on BRP, Cypher, Savage Worlds, and of course the best resource for historical gaming, GURPS....which by the way was also the best resource during the AD&D 1E and 2E days, too).

 

[TwoSix]

Yes I ran an ancient greek bronze age campaign. All humans. Limited classes. We used 5e, but I relied heavily on Age of Heroes. We had a blast.

I also ran a Witcher campaign, using the classes from Adventures in Middle Earth, which have zero spellcasting. We also had a great time with that.

And we also had a great time with the Call of Cthulhu 3e game from back in the… was it late 90s? Early 2000s? Whatever it was fun.

I know that you disagree, but my experiences with D&D with humans-only, limited classes were great and memorable.

The indignation in this thread that some of us managed to use low-magic D&D in a fulfilling way is starting to get absurd.

Eh, it's less indigination (for me) than cynicism. Over the decades, I've seen a lot of setting concepts based around a specific milieu and limited player options, and they almost always seem way more attractive to GMs then they do players.

As a player, I would always rather reskin my concept to fit the GM's setting, OR have a set of new options that fit the setting, rather than just have a limited list of options available.