D&D 2E What does AD&D 2E do better than 5E?

[Ath-kethin]

I've never played 5E, so a question.... how hard is it to make an NPC based on the PC classes? For example, in 1E/2E it was rather easy to make an NPC fighter of a certain level with certain equipment to face off against the PCs. From what I see of 5E though, character creation is a lot longer process, and NPCs seem to be in the MM with such titles as archmage and bandit....

If you start with one of the NPCs from the Monster Manual, it doesn't take too long. It's very easy to just make minor adjustments, and the 5e DMG has a table of easy stuff to change if you want the character to be an elf or a goblin or whatever. And the real question to ask is how much a given feature will matter; if it won't come up in play, there's not necessarily a reason to worry about the fact that a given NPC knows the Protection fighting style, for example.

What CAN bog things down is if you add a bunch of different traits to the NPC. The Challenge Rating calculation part of NPC or monster creation is literally 20-odd steps (though many steps won't apply to a given monster), and skipping them can have serious consequences on the final CR. Another table that many people miss in the DMG is the one that gives adjustments for different traits (according to the table, magic resistance impacts the final CR in much the same way way an AC increase would, for example, and the table gives instructions on how to account for it), and those adjustments can have a radical impact too.

 

[Mannahnin]

I've never played 5E, so a question.... how hard is it to make an NPC based on the PC classes? For example, in 1E/2E it was rather easy to make an NPC fighter of a certain level with certain equipment to face off against the PCs. From what I see of 5E though, character creation is a lot longer process, and NPCs seem to be in the MM with such titles as archmage and bandit....

Yeah starting in 4e, WotC decided making monsters that use the same rules as PC's was a bad idea, so you really can't build a PC sheet and put it up against the players without there being some issues.

Monsters require tons more hit points to deal with players, and generally need upgraded damage. The Gladiator shows this in action; rather than build him as a Fighter, he has some "Fighter-like" abilities (even though a few of them, like Brute and Shield Bash are better than what the Fighter can do), but he's also a CR 5 with 15 Hit Dice (!).

Right. Kind of the point of this is that monsters and PCs are built to do different things.

PCs need to have a variety of abilities which handle different kinds of problems. They need enough stamina to do a whole day's adventuring, but not so many hit points that they're impossible for the antagonists to ever take down in a fight. So usually not a huge pool of HP, but one which can be restored over time with rest, for example.

Monsters need a small range of abilities so they're more manageable for DMs who are juggling several things at once (instead of just one PC), but need enough damage and HP to be useful and scary in the usual 3-5 round duration of a single fight, which is their primary use-case. Giving them the whole range of abilities a PC has is a waste of time and space and puts a huge overhead on the DM.

Classically, pre-3E, D&D never made monsters the equivalent of PCs, but NPC antagonists were the exception. PC stats were a bit simpler in the TSR years, and more standardized, so building a party of evil NPC antagonists was simpler than it would be in the WotC years, but it was still a lot of work to build an NPC party compared with a regular monster encounter, and the stat blocks were much longer.

in 3E WotC made the attempt to rationalize and regularize the whole game, so monsters and PCs almost entirely worked by the same baseline rules. There were a few less-powerful NPC classes, monsters had special Feats, and monster stats gave Equivalent Character Levels, which you'd stack on top of any class levels you gave a monster, but they followed the same basic rules. Every level gave skill points. Every so many levels gave feats and ability bonuses. But this wound up meaning that monster and NPC stat blocks became huge and enormously unwieldy at mid and high levels. It was one of the biggest obstacles to running 3E and 3.5. Putting hours into meticulously getting the stats right for monsters, then them being a giant PITA to use at the table, and most of the abilities and skills going unused in a regular encounter.

Starting in 4E WotC went for ease of use instead, and optimizing monster design and statblocks for use at the table and fun fights. Of course, this has the cost of lesser verisimilitude.

5E rolled back a little more 3E-style. NPC casters, for example, would be given a whole suite of spells like a PC caster. More recent monster books tweaked that more in the direction of 4E, because of the unwieldiness issue again.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Classically, pre-3E, D&D never made monsters the equivalent of PCs, but NPC antagonists were the exception. PC stats were a bit simpler in the TSR years, and more standardized, so building a party of evil NPC antagonists was simpler than it would be in the WotC years, but it was still a lot of work to build an NPC party compared with a regular monster encounter, and the stat blocks were much longer.

I feel like TSR-era and 4e/5e are roughly similar -- in both there are monster section entries for bandits and berserkers and merchants and such, 4e/5e just expanded it to casters and the higher-power NPCs that might previously fallen under 'just use Fighter-6 for the duke with an MU-4 as his advisor.' Likewise, you can make NPCs like you do PCs, and if you have an NPC fellow-adventurer it works fine but otherwise there's going to be issues based on the difference in what PCs and NPCs/monsters usually do. 3e was a real odd-one-out with NPCs built vaguely like PCs, but using different classes to do so. The overcomplexity of that, plus the balance nightmare that the ECL system turned into showcasing just how PCs and non-PCs were asymmetric, probably lead to 4e/5e leaning into the PCs-are-different mindset.

in 3E WotC made the attempt to rationalize and regularize the whole game, so monsters and PCs almost entirely worked by the same baseline rules. There were a few less-powerful NPC classes, monsters had special Feats, and monster stats gave Equivalent Character Levels, which you'd stack on top of any class levels you gave a monster, but they followed the same basic rules. Every level gave skill points. Every so many levels gave feats and ability bonuses. But this wound up meaning that monster and NPC stat blocks became huge and enormously unwieldy at mid and high levels. It was one of the biggest obstacles to running 3E and 3.5. Putting hours into meticulously getting the stats right for monsters, then them being a giant PITA to use at the table, and most of the abilities and skills going unused in a regular encounter.

Exactly.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Right. Kind of the point of this is that monsters and PCs are built to do different things.

PCs need to have a variety of abilities which handle different kinds of problems. They need enough stamina to do a whole day's adventuring, but not so many hit points that they're impossible for the antagonists to ever take down in a fight. So usually not a huge pool of HP, but one which can be restored over time with rest, for example.

Monsters need a small range of abilities so they're more manageable for DMs who are juggling several things at once (instead of just one PC), but need enough damage and HP to be useful and scary in the usual 3-5 round duration of a single fight, which is their primary use-case. Giving them the whole range of abilities a PC has is a waste of time and space and puts a huge overhead on the DM.

Classically, pre-3E, D&D never made monsters the equivalent of PCs, but NPC antagonists were the exception. PC stats were a bit simpler in the TSR years, and more standardized, so building a party of evil NPC antagonists was simpler than it would be in the WotC years, but it was still a lot of work to build an NPC party compared with a regular monster encounter, and the stat blocks were much longer.

in 3E WotC made the attempt to rationalize and regularize the whole game, so monsters and PCs almost entirely worked by the same baseline rules. There were a few less-powerful NPC classes, monsters had special Feats, and monster stats gave Equivalent Character Levels, which you'd stack on top of any class levels you gave a monster, but they followed the same basic rules. Every level gave skill points. Every so many levels gave feats and ability bonuses. But this wound up meaning that monster and NPC stat blocks became huge and enormously unwieldy at mid and high levels. It was one of the biggest obstacles to running 3E and 3.5. Putting hours into meticulously getting the stats right for monsters, then them being a giant PITA to use at the table, and most of the abilities and skills going unused in a regular encounter.

Starting in 4E WotC went for ease of use instead, and optimizing monster design and statblocks for use at the table and fun fights. Of course, this has the cost of lesser verisimilitude.

5E rolled back a little more 3E-style. NPC casters, for example, would be given a whole suite of spells like a PC caster. More recent monster books tweaked that more in the direction of 4E, because of the unwieldiness issue again.

Yeah, ease of use was never a priority for me. Personally, I prefer the classic method.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I feel like TSR-era and 4e/5e are roughly similar -- in both there are monster section entries for bandits and berserkers and merchants and such, 4e/5e just expanded it to casters and the higher-power NPCs that might previously fallen under 'just use Fighter-6 for the duke with an MU-4 as his advisor.'

See, I see that difference as a pretty big one. If a creature could reasonable have class level based on what it is and what it does, then I think it should.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Yeah, ease of use was never a priority for me. Personally, I prefer the classic method.

See, I see that difference as a pretty big one. If a creature could reasonable have class level based on what it is and what it does, then I think it should.

For what reasons/reasoning/principles/etc.?

 

[Micah Sweet]

For what reasons/reasoning/principles/etc.?

Because I don't see the PCs as so special that they need different rules than an NPC who is (for example) also a wizard. If you and another character are both clerics of Torm in the FR, you should use the same rules, or at least a reasonable approximation of them, regardless of the fact that one is a PC and the other is an NPC. To do otherwise in my view un-anchors the PCs from the setting they supposedly came from and grew up in.

 

[el-remmen]

Yeah, I recently started flipping through my 2e books trying to remember how I ran encounters to balance them. Digging through a few random notes I had from 25 years ago, I quickly realized the answer is I didn't. lol

I still don't when running 5E.

 

[el-remmen]

I know it has been said before but I really miss specialty priests and spheres. I actually re-created all the homebrew specialty priests I had created for 2E in 3E (replaces spheres with unique spell lists for each one) but when it came time to run 5E after a 10 year break running games, I decided to hew closes to 5E RAW rather than do the work of all that conversion (and created a new looser cosmology/pantheon for a new setting than I had in my old) but perhaps unsurprisingly, no one has chosen to play a cleric since I started running 5E (though the bard in one of my groups is planning to multi-class to cleric next level).

I have slowly been working on a 5E clone that ports in 2E stuff and I think the cleric/druid/paladin are going to be the most work.

 

[Celebrim]

in 3E WotC made the attempt to rationalize and regularize the whole game, so monsters and PCs almost entirely worked by the same baseline rules. There were a few less-powerful NPC classes, monsters had special Feats, and monster stats gave Equivalent Character Levels, which you'd stack on top of any class levels you gave a monster, but they followed the same basic rules. Every level gave skill points. Every so many levels gave feats and ability bonuses. But this wound up meaning that monster and NPC stat blocks became huge and enormously unwieldy at mid and high levels. It was one of the biggest obstacles to running 3E and 3.5. Putting hours into meticulously getting the stats right for monsters, then them being a giant PITA to use at the table, and most of the abilities and skills going unused in a regular encounter.

Personally as a long time 3e GM, I never felt obligated to work up a monster to publication quality. I figured the monster was good enough if everything was roughly calculated and being +/- ~1 to any given skill or stat or whatever was not even worth getting concerned about. I also felt that if you were deciding to run customized monsters that was your choice to accept the burden. Many of the stock stat blocks were perfectly fine, and customized ones if you were trying to make generic examples of say "ogre chieftain" were reusable. Granted, I usually confined most of my play to under 13th level, but with a fairly slow pace of leveling that wasn't a problem. It was a choice to play at above 13th level, and historically anything above 12th level was difficult to run in every edition of the game and required a lot of work and imagination by the DM. Consider the examples provided of things like 1e's "Isle of the Ape" or 2e's "Axe of the Dwarven Lords" for examples of the complexities and compromises you were likely to have to endure to run games that were suitably challenging for high level PCs.

In short these problems are, whether we are talking about 2e or 3e, problems that DMs tended to take on themselves and which many groups never encountered by simply never playing at very high level. One thing 5e has done is pull back from the (video game inspired?) idea that games should naturally go on to 20th level as a culmination of play.

 

[Voadam]

I've never played 5E, so a question.... how hard is it to make an NPC based on the PC classes? For example, in 1E/2E it was rather easy to make an NPC fighter of a certain level with certain equipment to face off against the PCs. From what I see of 5E though, character creation is a lot longer process, and NPCs seem to be in the MM with such titles as archmage and bandit....,

Mostly what I see is 5e adventures and sourcebooks using the MM NPC stat blocks (Thug, Noble, Acolyte, Gladiator, mage, etc.) instead of PC classes, which is super easy to implement. They have a bunch of low level stock NPCs with some combat ability and stuff that seems to fit a thematic niche.

This is a bit more narrow than making any level opponent, but bound accuracy means they are at least somewhat useable mechanically with different levels (tougher with High powered baseline archmages and low level parties than low level thugs with high level parties though)

You can create a full PH classed PC in 5e and use them as an NPC, I would say it will be about as involved as making a 2e specialty priest. There will most likely be some spellcasting and a variety of different powers. It will take a bit to figure out how much of a CR they end up being.

I find I most often find a monster doing something similar in concept and reskin them. So a 5e Derro Caller in Darkness from a 3rd party 5e monster book takes the place of a non-Derro Necromancer in a converted module I am running. The darkness bolts, powers in darkness, and ghoul summoning all fit the underlying theme of a necromancer and work with the module's story, just changing the narrative description a little.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Because I don't see the PCs as so special that they need different rules than an NPC who is (for example) also a wizard. If you and another character are both clerics of Torm in the FR, you should use the same rules, or at least a reasonable approximation of them, regardless of the fact that one is a PC and the other is an NPC. To do otherwise in my view un-anchors the PCs from the setting they supposedly came from and grew up in.

Okay, so a worldbuilding-mechanics matchup or 'treat like thing the same.' Certainly one option. I recognize the logic of the preference. I think the counter-point is that the game is PC/player-facing*, and the mechanics of things should be designed around how they most frequently will intersect with the played game. Which one prefers probably depends on how much one finds one convenient or the other better at anchoring, etc.
*a common example being the equipment costs/hireling wages designed for PCs making tough decisions around dungeon-crawling equipment and hireling costs, not to model a functional economy.

In short these problems are, whether we are talking about 2e or 3e, problems that DMs tended to take on themselves and which many groups never encountered by simply never playing at very high level. One thing 5e has done is pull back from the (video game inspired?) idea that games should naturally go on to 20th level as a culmination of play.

I honestly don't know where that came from. I feel like it existed somewhat throughout most of the AD&D (where the charts listed the levels out to 20) and BECMI (where there was an actual cap at 36). At the same time, I think it was treated as a much more theoretical cap, as 1) advancement was very slow, 2) actually surviving enough adventures to get to very high levels was a challenge*, everything after name level (or definitely after MUs/mages got 9th-level spells) was very similar (and nothing special about the capstone levels).
*of course, given the variety of how people actually played, exactly how challenging is perpetually up for debate.

If I had a guess, I think 3e just inspired the notion by making 1-20 a continuum (no name-level inflection point where everything (supposedly) changes, with hitting the capstone having a special quality (even if it is simply 'past this point, you use the Epic rules').

That said, I don't remember that actually being that much of a thing in-real-play. Online, particularly in the Optimization boards on Wizards.com and GitP and such, I certainly think there was a mindset of mapping out a character 1-20. But at tables? I think it was the same old 'we play until keeping all the plates spinning becomes more work than fun, then we quit and start over (or do something else)' same as it always was.