D&D 5E What would you miss about 5E if you were playing AD&D?

[Tony Vargas]

instead of visualizing the room from the description, asking for clarification if something was unclear, and then narrating their actions they were just stuck for awhile since they were so used to just saying "I search the 10x10 room with beds and furniture with a skill check" or two and no need to talk about how to do that. To me its more immersive to do it old school.

The flip side of that is that it's less evocative of the characters, themselves. If you're resolving actions by players describing them and DMs judging whether they're doin' it right or not, you're not playing your characters anymore.

Skills, like ability scores and class features and magic items and spells, differentiate the PCs not just from eachother, but from the player playing them.

Like me parallel parking a car now that I'm used to a camera on the back, I'm very rusty when I drive other vehicle.

Yeah, it's hard to go back once you have something better easier/more-convenient. ;P

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

The flip side of that is that it's less evocative of the characters, themselves. If you're resolving actions by players describing them and DMs judging whether they're doin' it right or not, you're not playing your characters anymore.

Skills, like ability scores and class features and magic items and spells, differentiate the PCs not just from eachother, but from the player playing them.

Yeah, it's hard to go back once you have something better easier/more-convenient. ;P

Depends on the focus, is it on the player at the table playing the game or on the numbers on the sheet. Of course in any event there is going to be emphasis on both at some point do to the nature of a RPG, but personally I liked it more bare bones where the PC was really kind of a stand in for the player to interact with the world the DM is describing vs the PC itself is the focus that the DM is trying to challenge. Though I play modern games now that are the opposite so I'm not totally opposed. However it seems a lot easier to check out of the game and then just say "well Frank the Tank makes a INT check and figures it out!" instead of the player using his noggin a bit himself. Of course even in that "old school" POV some things are going to be dictated by the character that the player is playing, is he brave or cowardly, good or evil, etc.

Its not in line with the more "community theater with dice" approach but I prefer the style. I don't really mind metagaming or expect a PC wtih a bad INT score to ignore any part of the game that may hinge of players being clever. YMMV.

 

[JonnyP71]

I hadn't played 1e in a long time and we tried a off night game and I was stunned at how reliant on making a skill check players were, myself included. The idea of taking the description of the room I had just given them and using that to narrate how they were going to search had become alien. They didn't think to say "well we are going to pull the blankets off the bed and check for anything, then flip the mattress off to look underneath". They were just kind of at a loss once they didn't have a Search check to kind of do everything for them. And these are players from the early 80's. But now instead of visualizing the room from the description, asking for clarification if something was unclear, and then narrating their actions they were just stuck for awhile since they were so used to just saying "I search the 10x10 room with beds and furniture with a skill check" or two and no need to talk about how to do that. To me its more immersive to do it old school. Like me parallel parking a car now that I'm used to a camera on the back, I'm very rusty when I drive other vehicle.

That's precisely the type of situation I mean, and one reason why I don't like the 5E conversion of Tomb of Horrors. To me a game is more enjoyable if it is a test of the players' own skills in terms of actual interaction and deduction, rather than their ability to assemble a best possible combination of skills/feats. I'm not a fan of the way the later systems attempt to create suitable encounters with xp budgets and graded difficulty levels either. I like the way a lot of old adventures were utterly deadly if they simply charged around hacking and slashing, forcing them to think of other ways to get around seemingly unsurmountable odds - Keep on the Borderlands was a perfect example.

My current group recently played The Village of Hommlet, and having avoided the Slime above the stairs and found the storeroom holding a supply of spears, moved on down the hallway to but confronted by the mass of Zombies. They retreated, collected the spears, dipped them in the Slime, and hurled Slime coated spears to dissolve the Zombies.

Of course you could try something similar in any other version of D&D, and groups do, but with everything so much more codified, I find that level of ingenuity is less common.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

That's precisely the type of situation I mean, and one reason why I don't like the 5E conversion of Tomb of Horrors. To me a game is more enjoyable if it is a test of the players' own skills in terms of actual interaction and deduction, rather than their ability to assemble a best possible combination of skills/feats. I'm not a fan of the way the later systems attempt to create suitable encounters with xp budgets and graded difficulty levels either. I like the way a lot of old adventures were utterly deadly if they simply charged around hacking and slashing, forcing them to think of other ways to get around seemingly unsurmountable odds - Keep on the Borderlands was a perfect example.

My current group recently played The Village of Hommlet, and having avoided the Slime above the stairs and found the storeroom holding a supply of spears, moved on down the hallway to but confronted by the mass of Zombies. They retreated, collected the spears, dipped them in the Slime, and hurled Slime coated spears to dissolve the Zombies.

Of course you could try something similar in any other version of D&D, and groups do, but with everything so much more codified, I find that level of ingenuity is less common.

Old school tournament modules, which were played to score players on how they played, are not very good conversions to a system like 5e which is less focused on the player himself rather than the numbers on his sheet.

But yeah 5e kind of got better than 3/4e where it seemed you could do what you had on your sheet and that was it for the most part since a lot of things were tied to feats and powers. And even if you could try things you didn't have the feat for players tended to view their capabilities only by what was on the feat and power list.

 

[JonnyP71]

I think they could be converted, but the primary consideration must be the tone of the original material, rather than the expectations of the modern gaming group and system.

Another recent example, the same group above played a 5E campaign before we switched to 1E. I wrote a short campaign, then when I was short of time/ideas, I converted some modules (X2/X4/X5). I initially took a look at the 'professional' conversion of X2 which is available on DMs Guild, but dismissed it as it changed 3 key aspects. Firstly it simplified the Amber family, suggesting the DM used default Mage or Veteran stats from the MM. NO! Then it adjusted the magical effects of the feast, so that the beneficial effects occurred if they made their saving throws. NO! The reasoning stated was that the modern game expects only bad effects on a failure, and good effects on a success. Finally adventure has a number of strange new creatures - these were replaced with rough standard equivalents from the MM. NO!

The emphasis of the conversion just felt wrong.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[TwoSix]

Nothing specifically. If I ran AD&D, there would be a lot I would change (the only class would be the S&P cleric, for example), but nothing that came from 5e. Maybe advantage as a general concept?

 

[Greg K]

I'd be glad to be done with skills really. In my AD&D days players has to pay more attention and describe what they were doing more in response to information the DM gave them instead of just making a search skill check for example. I think the players engaged with the gaming world more.

I guess it depends on how you run search skills. Tell me that your character is pulling the sconce and I am not going to make you roll to find the secret door if that is how the secret door opens. Similarly, tell me that you are removing the finial of a bedpost and you will find the map hidden in the bed post without a roll (assuming there is one there). Even with skill rolls, I want to know where your character is searching, because if you search the wrong area, I don't care what you roll- you are going to fail. If you are searching the right general area, I will simply give you a clue. If you are more specific, I may give advantage and/or reduce the search time.

 

[Greg K]

This isn't entirely true. Way back in the 70s, Dragon magazine specifically talked about this, and in AD&D skills were handled via an ability check. So any time you wanted to do something, the DM just had you roll a d20 and if it was under your ability score, you succeeded. Very simple, widely used, and it made every point you had in a score matter.

I saw DMs use several different methods
1) roll under attribute on d20
2) roll under 5*attribute (or simply ability score if it was very hard) using d100
3) simple d6 roll (either roll higher than a certain number or less than a certain number)

 

[Barolo]

I've ran Chateau D'Amberville in 5e by converting it myself (mostly on the fly), and it runs pretty well.

The only real surprise was that the guardians of the tomb at the end were ... not nearly as difficult as they were in 1e, because of the whole 5e "solo monsters die quickly" thing.

Do you know what are the specific 5e characteristics that lead to this happening? I was thinking if it is related to bounded accuracy leading to heroes hitting enemies too frequently when compared to the older editions, but on the other hand, every monster has way more HD/HPs now. Then I thought maybe the percentile spell resistance, combined with overall improved saves for high HD monsters was a more effective defense, but then again low level "bosses" usually could not count on those, and it seems to me hyperboosting your melee allies was quite reliable at the higher levels when it finally was not a clever idea to just try to affect a 80% SR elder dragon or true demon directly.

Maybe the poor thief was too ineffective on those kinds of fights (while in 5e they can hit hard in pretty much any encounter) and the cleric was pushed to a defensive game, so the overall offensive power of a "standard four-heroes group" was lower, making fights last longer?

.....


Anyhow, back to the topic, one thing I find interesting in 5e, and that would get lost when playing AD&D is the way saves (don't) evolve. To me it feels low level magic in 5e is generally unreliable (for spells whose effects depend heavily on failed saves, that is. Attacking spells seem less finicky, damaging dex-save spells still get the work done, and some other low level spells even outright just work). This changes gradually throughout the game, so that at the higher levels of gameplay they become very reliable as long as the spellcaster is smart enough to evaluate their enemies and exploit their weaknesses (as even the highest CR monsters still have one or another untrained save, based on a not-so-stupidly-high attribute, which is usually inferable through the monsters characteristics).

The above-mentioned, and also the way attacks in general evolve in relation to defenses, effectively changes low-level and high-level gameplay, and to me it seems that while a low level hero needs to rely o luck and being generally careful, a high level hero is more responsible for their own fate, as their decisions result in more strongly determined results, and this feels right to me.

The added feature of the current save system is that a high level wizard does get a better chance of charming that lowly goblin, something generally absent during the 1e/2e era. Oh, I just realized by writing this that the to say spells do not automatically scale in 5e is somewhat superficial, as whereas damaging spells do not automatically scale damage (as they used to), all spells that are resistible by saves do scale in 5e at least in efficiency.


As a last note, I do feel, though, that some higher-tier monsters in 5e should have some other spell protection buffer, as I am not a big fan of spell resistance giving advantage to saves or of legendary resistances as they are, and am not convinced that either of these mechanics delivers what they wanted to. I did not like the old percentile spell resistance either, as sometimes it would feel like a very blunt solution, but at least it had the work done.