The games alright

“The D&D rules help you and the other players have a good time, but the rules aren’t in charge. You’re the DM, and you are in charge of the game.”

-Dungeons and Dragons 5e Dungeon Masters Guide (Mike Mearls maybe?)

I’ve finally decided that 5e just ain’t my bag. It’s a fine game, and I am extremely glad that many people seem to be digging it. It seems to have brought a lot of new blood into the hobby (or old blood back). WOTC opening the garden with the SRD is super cool and I look forward to a lot of sweet hacks and homebrews.  I am not going to judge someone else for their idea of fun, especially within the small world of RPG-dom but the system just doesn’t do it for me. It’s fine for a lark, (and as my group hits session 13 of 5e we have perhaps surpassed a lark) but I have realized 5e is not something I want to do for the long term.

A map I drew for the hex crawl part of our 5e campaign. 

My experience with D&D 5 has caused me to recoil in horror at the prospect of combat. Well maybe not recoil, but I have grown bored watching the multitudinous powers and abilities play out in ever longer combat sessions. Even with the adoption of initiative by side and simplified movement and positioning the game is just too much for me. Too many mechanical bits, too many moving parts, too many hit points! The game seems bloated with rules and modifiers. By providing long detailed list of powers and effects the system seems to present options but what it tends to bring to my table is a slog. Perhaps it’s just me but even a list of a thousand different skills and powers doesn’t compare to the possibilities of you know, just using the imagination to come up with something novel?  In addition, when your characters have a list of things they can do what happens in combat? When it’s their turn they take several minutes trying to decide what is the optimal skill to use, rather than mentally inhabiting the scene and quickly acting in a way that intuitively makes sense in the fiction, or just doing something because it’s cool.

A piece of a puzzle from our game. 

The best combat actions of our 5e campaign have been the actions that were improvised. Nobody remembers the rangers numerous multi-attacks, the warlocks umpteenth eldritch blast, or the hundredth smite from the paladin, but we all recall when the bard jumped onto a shambling mounds head, or when the gnome plucked a cursed arrow from the Boar Dukes flank.

Unless it is some kind of mass battle with armies facing off, I want a combat encounter to be decided and over with in ten minutes or less. I want to be able to explore an entire dungeon level in an evening. I want time to pass in a game, for characters to grow and make their mark in the world in some way other than gaining narrowly defined superpowers.

I want to play D&D where every combat encounter is quick and always offers the very real possibility of death. Where a player must use their imagination rather than be presented with a heap of mechanics that tell them what they can do. 0e and b/x do a very good job of both of these things, and I should probably just run either of them. Alas, I must tinker.

My take on Tolbert the Paladin 

In an effort to make 5e more what I want,  I cooked up an old school-5e hybrid that basically just reduced all hit dice and damage dice to d6’s and made the death save a do or die rather than the 5e threes strikes you’re out business. I also, simplified class powers, backgrounds, races, and spell list. It’s not bad, but I feel like it could but cut more. I want to get down to the essential salts of D&D, Simplify! Simplify! I got to thinking about what makes D&D the game it is, what can you take away and still have D&D? I came up with the following list of things:

1. A character that is mechanically defined by six ability scores, a class archetype, hit points, experience level, and equipment.

2. Task resolution (combat, skill checks, and saving throws) resolved by generating a random number on a d20, modifying it by the abilities of the character making the roll and comparing the result to a target number to determine success or failure.

With this as the core, I will try and build an adventure game. The idea is to meet three goals:  

1. Simple and quick resolution of all tasks (including combat)

2. Simple classes that allow room for characters to improvise and the DM to make rulings rather than master a system.

3. A system that is still recognizably D&D, and easily convertible with older editions.

I'm probably headed down the hole of fantasy heartbreaker... wish me luck.