D&D 3E/3.5 Thoughts of a 3E/4E powergamer on starting to play 5E

[Tony Vargas]

It doesn't really succeed in what you describe IMO. Given that I take a negative few of "old school" feel and DM Empowerment, when I look at 5E what I see is a D&D that tries to be light on its feet and stay out of the way of play.

OK, I can see that. The potential negatives of DM Empowerment, like the potential positives, are, naturally, a function of the DM in question. Find the right DM and you can get the right experience out of 5e. Or just run it, that's what I do.

On a side note, I should point out that I have been talking in this thread from an almost entirely player-centric perspective. Over the years though, like most people I believe in this forum, I've been the DM more than I've played. I'm sitting in the player seat now mostly because the Edition Wars really burned me out on D&D, and I almost walked away entirely during the 5E playtest. If it wasn't for personal relationships with my 4E group, I would have. That being said, since that burnout, I haven't been the DM for more than the odd LFR module, and avoided even that as much as I've been able. So right now, I'm more or less purely a player.

One difference I have found among modern editions is whether I enjoy them more as a player or DM. 3.x I quite enjoyed playing, but didn't much care for running. 4e was fun to play and very easy to run. 5e is a blast to run, but so far hasn't not appealed to me from the other side of the screen.

Maybe you've picked the wrong time to give up on running?

 

[thecasualoblivion]

One difference I have found among modern editions is whether I enjoy them more as a player or DM. 3.x I quite enjoyed playing, but didn't much care for running. 4e was fun to play and very easy to run. 5e is a blast to run, but so far hasn't not appealed to me from the other side of the screen.

Maybe you've picked the wrong time to give up on running?

I prefer running a much higher powered player-centric game than 5E tends to be. From my viewpoint, it would be easier to get to where I want to be starting with 2E or 3.5E than with 5E, and I could manage it with 13th Age or 4E more or less out of the box.

The reasons you like running 5E don't really do anything for me. This being said, in a vacuum I'd probably prefer to run 5E more than to play it, even though that would involve feeling like I'd rather be running something else throughout the entire campaign. The hitch is that being the DM is a much bigger personal investment than playing, and given I'm not a big fan of the system either way, I'm more inclined to go with the lesser personal investment.

 

[dave2008]

I prefer running a much higher powered player-centric game than 5E tends to be. From my viewpoint, it would be easier to get to where I want to be starting with 2E or 3.5E than with 5E, and I could manage it with 13th Age or 4E more or less out of the box.

There are people on this forum that are playing super high powered 5e. Taking on Demon hoards (Marilith and 10+/- other demons), and liches, etc. at 10th level high powered. So it can be done fairly easily if you want to be generous with magic items (That group also had one house rule to allow 2 concentration spells if one buffed someone else). Still might not be your thing, but you can definitely play high powered 5e if that is what you want. I would probably recommend reviewing the variant rest and healing rules as well if you want something more 4e like and the DMs Guild if you want more feats. If you got a DM that is willing, and with what is available now on the DMs Guild, it is fairly easy to trick out 5e to haev most of the options and play style as 3e & 4e. You get there RAW though (for now), but it is easy. So if you want to DM again it should be easy to do in 5e for the players. What you will find though is that you will need to upgrade the monsters to taking in these uber-adventurers.

 

[dave2008]

In AD&D however, I would feel better about running it higher powered than vanilla(back when we ran it, we almost always did just that) than I would with 5E. Higher stats would interfere with the ASI/feat system, and I wouldn't feel as comfortable messing with the healing system or magic item rarity as I would with 2E.

Why is that, just not as familiar with 5e? Personally I find 5e very flexible and able to accept modification, but then again I have heavily modified every edition of D&D I have played, so maybe it just comes naturally to me. You can do low magic, high magic, gritty, super-hero, etc. with mostly the variant rules already provided in the core. A few house rules will take you even further.

 

[Guest 6801328]

That's not the assertion that I made.

True, but taking a specific assertion, extrapolating it to an extreme and ludicrous interpretation, and then ascribing that viewpoint in an attempt to discredit the original asserter (or, better yet, tacking a question mark to the end of the assertion so that you can disingenuously claim innocence) is a common* tactic around here.

*Where common means "cheap, tawdry" as much as "frequently encountered."

 

[Shasarak]

If a player did that in one of my sessions he would be out for good!

That was the whole point:

"This game is boring, I quit!"

"If you quit then you are out for good!"

 

[thecasualoblivion]

Why is that, just not as familiar with 5e? Personally I find 5e very flexible and able to accept modification, but then again I have heavily modified every edition of D&D I have played, so maybe it just comes naturally to me. You can do low magic, high magic, gritty, super-hero, etc. with mostly the variant rules already provided in the core. A few house rules will take you even further.

Part of it is familiarity. I have modified 2E to my satisfaction in the past, and am still familiar enough with both 2E and my modifications that I could start a 2E game tomorrow with full confidence. I even might be tempted to try to add in some modern bits like defender mechanics, at-will magic, and non-2E classes and feel like I have enough system mastery to at least contemplate doing so. With 5E, I run into things like ASI/feats, and juggling bounded accuracy and magic items. The healing/resting system I could probably modify no sweat. The bounded accuracy thing would probably be my biggest hangup. The modifications I would make would likely break bounded accuracy, and the mathematician in me would be bothered by the conflict between my modifications and the base system being designed around bounded accuracy. It probably wouldn't affect play at all, but it would drive me nuts(just like 3E's mathematical flaws drove me nuts regardless of whether they impacted play or not).

Another consideration is culture. Back during the 2E era, heavy modifications and/or playing a higher powered game was more or less par for the course, at least in my area. Nobody even blinked, and playing it straight would have been much stranger and/or unpopular. I find 5E's culture to be geared mostly towards more or less playing out of the books, and while I don't foresee the reaction to heavy modifications being likely to be negative, I would expect puzzlement.

Last of all it would be investment. I don't particularly like 5E, and my motivation/enthusiasm for modifying it would be less. Given that I wouldn't really have to put much work into putting my modified 2E together, or running 13th Age more or less out of the book and dumping the setting for something more like D&D, I'm not sure I would bother given a similar end result as a goal.(running 3.5E E6 would be more of a stab in the dark for me).

 

[dave2008]

Part of it is familiarity. I have modified 2E to my satisfaction in the past, and am still familiar enough with both 2E and my modifications that I could start a 2E game tomorrow with full confidence. I even might be tempted to try to add in some modern bits like defender mechanics, at-will magic, and non-2E classes and feel like I have enough system mastery to at least contemplate doing so. With 5E, I run into things like ASI/feats, and juggling bounded accuracy and magic items. The healing/resting system I could probably modify no sweat. The bounded accuracy thing would probably be my biggest hangup. The modifications I would make would likely break bounded accuracy, and the mathematician in me would be bothered by the conflict between my modifications and the base system being designed around bounded accuracy. It probably wouldn't affect play at all, but it would drive me nuts(just like 3E's mathematical flaws drove me nuts regardless of whether they impacted play or not).

Another consideration is culture. Back during the 2E era, heavy modifications and/or playing a higher powered game was more or less par for the course, at least in my area. Nobody even blinked, and playing it straight would have been much stranger and/or unpopular. I find 5E's culture to be geared mostly towards more or less playing out of the books, and while I don't foresee the reaction to heavy modifications being likely to be negative, I would expect puzzlement.

Last of all it would be investment. I don't particularly like 5E, and my motivation/enthusiasm for modifying it would be less. Given that I wouldn't really have to put much work into putting my modified 2E together, or running 13th Age more or less out of the book and dumping the setting for something more like D&D, I'm not sure I would bother given a similar end result as a goal.(running 3.5E E6 would be more of a stab in the dark for me).

A few years ago, in the middle of our 4e campaign, I found my last set of AD&D house rules from the early 90s, all 26 pages of them! That is culture I came from as well and I continued to play that way in 4e and 5e. No real change for me. That is why I have never understood the edition wars, I can play D&D my way not matter what edition. Every edition only adds a little more to the greatness that is D&D IMHO. But I only play with friends, no conventions or store games, so that helps.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I prefer running a much higher powered player-centric game than 5E tends to be.

Well, you can certainly dial up the power as high as you like. Simply running at higher level. Passing out more magic items - you could go full old-school 'Monty Haul' if you wanted.

From my viewpoint, it would be easier to get to where I want to be starting with 2E or 3.5E than with 5E, and I could manage it with 13th Age or 4E more or less out of the box.

But, yeah, 'player centric' isn't a feature of the system. OTOH, you could run it that way. It's just a matter of paying attention to what players want and being there to customize character details to meet concept as needed. Hammering out a variation on or entirely new Background is an example 5e mentions explicitly, for instance.

The reasons you like running 5E don't really do anything for me. This being said, in a vacuum I'd probably prefer to run 5E more than to play it, even though that would involve feeling like I'd rather be running something else throughout the entire campaign. The hitch is that being the DM is a much bigger personal investment than playing, and given I'm not a big fan of the system either way, I'm more inclined to go with the lesser personal investment.

DMing is more of an investment, sure. But, it's also more of a contribution to the health & success of the hobby. Think about the players who'd enjoy the kind of game you might able to run with 5e...

Another consideration is culture. Back during the 2E era, heavy modifications and/or playing a higher powered game was more or less par for the course, at least in my area. Nobody even blinked, and playing it straight would have been much stranger and/or unpopular. I find 5E's culture to be geared mostly towards more or less playing out of the books, and while I don't foresee the reaction to heavy modifications being likely to be negative, I would expect puzzlement.

That's probably just the lingering influence of the Encounters program on AL. AL needs to standardize because it's organized play. But, even then, the standard resolution systems leave you with a lot of latitude to make rulings in the moment.

Why is that, just not as familiar with 5e? Personally I find 5e very flexible and able to accept modification, but then again I have heavily modified every edition of D&D I have played, so maybe it just comes naturally to me. You can do low magic, high magic, gritty, super-hero, etc. with mostly the variant rules already provided in the core. A few house rules will take you even further.

I was an inveterate rules-tinkerer, myself. Not everyone's up for that. But, while I had a giant D-ring binder of variants for my long-running AD&D campaign, I quickly found it wasn't worth the effort with 3e & 4e. In 3e there was just too much cultural resistance to the idea of 'house rules' RAW just had a stranglehold on the community consciousness. In 4e I could just add stuff or do this or that thing differently, but formal house rules substantially re-working the system weren't worth the relatively small improvements possible. 5e is really open not just to 'modules' (variants we used to call 'em) and formal house-rules, but to just that 'get out of the way' feature - you can largely ignore it and do whatever works in the moment. It's at least as much a matter of attitude as system, though, and attitude may vary.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

A few years ago, in the middle of our 4e campaign, I found my last set of AD&D house rules from the early 90s, all 26 pages of them! That is culture I came from as well and I continued to play that way in 4e and 5e. No real change for me. That is why I have never understood the edition wars, I can play D&D my way not matter what edition. Every edition only adds a little more to the greatness that is D&D IMHO. But I only play with friends, no conventions or store games, so that helps.

Most of the drama in the edition wars was over tradition, change and identity, as opposed to play style. I can play D&D my way regardless of edition too, even 5E, but it's easier in some places than in others. My major beefs with 5E are lack of character customization compared to other games(including rpg video games), DM empowerment(which is more a philosophical thing than a problem at the table), randomness(which I am learning is a direct consequence of bounded accuracy), and a de-emphasis on combat. Note that the comparison between combat between 5E and 2E is an interesting one, which I will expand upon at the end.

Well, you can certainly dial up the power as high as you like. Simply running at higher level. Passing out more magic items - you could go full old-school 'Monty Haul' if you wanted.

I still wouldn't feel 5E lends itself well to this, compared to other editions. The combat de-emphasis really is hard to get around, especially given my note on AD&D at the end of this post

I was an inveterate rules-tinkerer, myself. Not everyone's up for that. But, while I had a giant D-ring binder of variants for my long-running AD&D campaign, I quickly found it wasn't worth the effort with 3e & 4e. In 3e there was just too much cultural resistance to the idea of 'house rules' RAW just had a stranglehold on the community consciousness. In 4e I could just add stuff or do this or that thing differently, but formal house rules substantially re-working the system weren't worth the relatively small improvements possible. 5e is really open not just to 'modules' (variants we used to call 'em) and formal house-rules, but to just that 'get out of the way' feature - you can largely ignore it and do whatever works in the moment. It's at least as much a matter of attitude as system, though, and attitude may vary.

I think two editions and how many years of D&D where there was 'resistance' to house rules has definitely carried over to the 5E era to some degree. In addition, one thing I will give 5E credit for is that it doesn't have glaring issues that almost demand fixing like AD&D and the 3E era tended to have.

Now, a note on AD&D:

I have a hell of a lot of respect for AD&D as a base combat engine. There is a lot about it that if played RAW tend not to square with running a long, ongoing campaign where the main characters don't die and the lethality was very much in conflict with running a cinematic action combat focused game, but the base engine with its wargaming roots was very good. I feel this way more than anything because of a computer game called Curse of the Azure Bonds. There were some scant bits of story and exploration, but that game was more or less 90% killing monsters using the AD&D combat engine, and the game was fun just for that. I had actually played that game beginning to end at least 3-5 times before I started playing D&D tabletop with live people, and it was a big influence on me when I became a DM. The game itself actually addressed those flaws. It ran a higher powered game with lots of magic items and you could start with 18 in every stat(Max exceptional strength). Resting for hp and spells was downright trivial, and saving most anytime eased up on the lethality.

It's partly for this reason I find 5E combat to be lacking compared to AD&D(the other part would be the greater consequences of AD&D combat adding drama and meaning). I compare it to what AD&D could do in Curse of the Azure Bonds or with my houserules, and it really doesn't measure up.