Review and thoughts on D&D 5th Edition

[ripx187]

I thought that I did this already, but I write a lot of stuff that I end up throwing away but later think that I have posted.

I was reluctant to try 5th Edition as I had negative experiences with 3rd. I saw it as just a way for them to make money. I played AD&D, mixing rules of 1e and 2e together, but that was just from the DMs perspective, the players always used 2e.

A bit more background on me. I had been playing for many years already before I found a copy of The Complete Fighter’s Handbook, but when I did; and once I actually read it, it blew my mind! It changed my game. Today folks flip through that book and laugh at its simplicity but at the time, this book was a game changer. It introduced me to Role-Playing. That sounds odd since D&D has always been sold as a role-playing game, but it is what it is. We as a club never really role-played during the game before, I mean other than arguing about alignments and meta-playing. It also introduced us to the idea that the rules themselves could be altered for the better.



Now, my favorite book was the 1e DMG by Gygax. That book is fun to read and inspiring! Inspiring. That to me is what a book should be, but that is rarely what you got. I got a lot of joy out of playing 2e AD&D! As soon as I read the 1e DMG I had to incorporate it into my game, which wasn’t a problem. Just pick and choose what you want as you go.

You play a system long enough you are going to find its warts and things that bug you. There are things that we can smooth over through subtle rule changes, or we things that we can cut out completely if we want to, but there are things that aren’t that simple.



So, 5e! I, like many folks got introduced to it from a loved one who bought me a starter set as a gift. They knew that I loved D&D, and this box is D&D so I’ll get it for him. That kind of thing. So I got a hair in my bum and we had been experimenting with playing different forms of early D&D, why not try out this new fangled system? The game itself was just a one-shot, we’ll see what happens. What happened was I loved it. The players were using pregens and they were into it and liked actually knowing how the game was played for once. Combat was a breeze, not a chore. From the DM side, I read the gamebook a couple of times before running it and it was a good mixture of facts with lots of improve on my part, so that was fun. We had a great game with very little prep. We did have to refer to the rulebook some, and figure out how new machanics work, but after playing with the system and knowing that I no longer had the time to administer games as I used to, this was a very impressive system. I decided to buy in.



I think that that is a good marketing plan. The basic rules are available online, and you can run games with them! But, is actually buying the Player’s Handbook a value? YES! Remember what I said about the original DMG? Well, this book is actually better. As a book it is fun to read, it is chock full of inspirational ideas, and presents character classes that you really want to play.

It isn’t just rules, it is a philosophy in regards to how we use them and how to design games which maximizes the value of the limited time that we have gaming. AD&D never really told you how to play the game, it never even gave you suggestions! This book quickly goes through specific beats, common patterns of play, and a huge collection of ideas that are fun for the game. Even as an intermediate-expert DM I see the value of having this clearly presented. This stuff has been gleamed from decades of failure, billions of articles, and lifetimes of experience, but here it is presented in an entertaining and amazing way, and it doesn’t really take away from the limited page count either.



When I first played through the starter set, I told my players that I’ll probably need to get a module because I just didn’t understand the logic behind the changes. Monster XP is different, how difficult tasks are decided is different, the lack of Non-Weapon proficiency is different. I didn’t believe that I could take this new system and create right out of the box, but with this book you can.



One of my biggest beefs with AD&D was it’s dependency on modules; most of them terrible. It never made you feel that you could write your own content and make your own fun, instead you should pay the good people at TSR so they can do it for you. This book has the opposite approach, it tells you that you CAN. It gives you tools which empower the DM to take the information presented in the book and make incredible games. Notice that I said DM? That isn’t a typo. The only book that you need to run a 5e game is the PHB, it covers everything and even has some monster stats at the back of the book.



The layout is clear. As a stubborn old oooo who knows his way around the 2e books without effort, this is a bit of a struggle, but the layout still makes sense. I just have to remap it in my head. The system itself is familiar but new, I am struggling with that a bit, but I still feel that it is worth the struggle. A lot of the algorithms that I have in my head are now backwards, but at least the system has me running hits and misses correctly, which 3e didn’t do. It is just simple stuff, like last game I messed up the initiative order because I reversed it. I am used to 1 going before 10. The same goes for ability checks, we always modified the number and you had to roll below your ability score to succeed, and this system is totally different. It is faster! Once we get it out of our heads it will be. Most of my players can’t figure it out because that old machanic is just so ingrained into our minds.

So why do it? Why change how a mechanic that I’ve used for 20+ years works? Because I think that this new one is better. I do miss rolling below a number, but even after all that time playing AD&D, figuring out how saving throws work still took a bit of thinking.



It is fun to roll dice, we want to keep that. But I want the emphasis to be on immersion, and figuring out simple math problems takes the players out of that. As DM I can quickly just throw a number out there and the player just has to roll above it. It doesn’t matter what that number is for or why it is there, you just have to roll above it.

Lets talk about the character options.



Races: I never was a fan of the one and done approach to races. It gave bonuses at early levels of play and supposedly you had to pay for those bonuses by being limited in levels. This system gives everyone their bonuses, and it modifies the class that you choose as you gain levels. It isn’t just free bonuses at first level, but something that works with the class and I really like that. It is also more fair, 1st level elves aren’t better than 1st level humans. All of the decisions which you make during creation modify the class in some way, from race to the background which you choose to help you play the character, it all creates a unique experience. Even choosing a class to play gives you options for progression, it starts you out with two or three options but this can be expanded as you play the game.



A cool feature about class is the saving throw system, everybody is better at some saving throws than they are at others, and different spell casters use different saving throws. A basic hedge wizard enemy causes the player to make all saving throws resisting his spells to be rolled against their INT, while resisting a different spellcasters charm would be against your CHA.

I like the fact that different spellcasting classes have different spell lists to chose from. The magic system is more advanced than 0D&D, but without the bloat of AD&D. I don’t think that many of the spells are as powerful as they once were, but even the low level spells can be beefed up by casting them with a higher slot. A big part of my beef with AD&D was the magic system and how it worked; I like this one. It is different and has new warts that don’t bother me as much as the last ones have. I also like that half of the book isn’t taken up by spell descriptions. I know that a lot of players of the game love spell descriptions but I’m not one of those guys.



The actual rules of the game take up very little of the book, and I think that these, because AD&D is so firmly wired into my head, are the most challenging to master. They are the same as the free rules. Once we get over this hump, the game will chug right alone at a fast pace. As written, the combat rounds are way more structured than we are used to playing, but so was BTB AD&D which we really didn’t use either. I may go back to my old system of disorganized combat, that is always an option which is another bonus to 5th Edition, you can modify core mechanics without harming anything. I am hesitant to do this though because I do have some quiet players who get more out of everybody taking turns over everyone freaking out and giving me numbers at the same time while I try to unravel what the hell is going on.



How the game plays is nice. How the game evolves as the players gain levels is nice too. As a DM and looking over abilities and improvements, I don’t get this feeling of terror as I try to come up with designs for that much power. This is do-able. I don’t think that the monsters in previous editions were all that well designed for high level play, and it definitely didn’t give the DM any direction on how to go there, which is a problem for me. As a player, you want to see your character improve. You look at all of the cool things that you’ll be able to do when you get there, but you never do. Classes become powerful without becoming Demigods, or the game just devolving into players gleefully trashing the DMs game world because it never gets old.



AD&D and 0D&D both threw the DM right into the deepend of the pool without much of any help at all. You learned your craft through drowning and having a psychotic need to constantly go back for more. It was a slow process of fixing things one problem at a time. I have faith in this system, the writing and the ideas presented gives you the sense that everything is okay. As a basic tool kit, we are going to be able to have fun with this new system for a very very long time, and I think that it is scaled more fairly. I mean, just look at the monk class as it evolved over time. It was literally just one guys idea of having a Kungfu fighter in the game with no concern as to how it will affect the game at all. It wasn’t scaled in, it was crazy, it broke the game, and players loved it! 5e includes it, but does scale it in. It gives it teeth but it also makes sure that the DM can keep providing goals and challenges for that character. Do I believe that we can still have amazing games at level 20? No, not really. But this game is shorter than AD&D and I think that we can get up to at least 15th level and still have fun and be afraid for our characters. That shortened game is a big selling point to me, btw. I do like the long game, but AD&D was designed with more playtime involved than we can give it.



As a product, this book is what I would call expensive, but for all it gives you I think that the price is worth it. There is a ton of content here! The format of the book is beautiful, the artwork amazing, the binding tough. You can find the page that you want to reference, set the book to the side and it won’t turn pages on you. That is impressive on its own.



Unlike AD&D where the most important book was the DMG, this is the most important book. This is the book that you’ll spend most of your time with. The free to download rules are amazing all by themselves, but this book is much much better. It allows you to create characters that you want to play on every level, provides experienced insight into how the game should run, the process of campaign design has returned to 0D&D style; there is still lots of improv needed, rules to be interpreted, large gaps that can easily be fleshed out. My biggest beef with ‘modern’ D&D was its dependency on the rules themselves, and this system has gone back to that loosie-goosey style of play with less emphasis on published materials and more on creating within a sound structure.



I recommend buying a copy, but I am warning you, once you do this thing just screams to be played.

[ripx187]

The 5th Edition DMG.

Lots of folks say that you don't need it, and you don't. But, you'll probably want it. Like the PHB, it has it's own philosophy which quickly gives readers 40 years of experience that we never got told to us. A lot of the things that one would expect to find in the DMG is already in the PHB, so what is in this book?

The emphasis of 5e isn't buying and using modules but on creating and doing their best to help the reader feel confident enough to do that. It gives you quick ways to take existing ideas and changing them, talks about different styles of play, gives you a manual to the planes of D&D existence and lets you know that you and your world has a place here. World-building is a focus, both on building within commercial settings and creating your own. The basic tools of drawing a map by scale, what you need to create to ensure that you can create a successful gaming experience, stuff like that. It also has lots of random tables so you can create a villain, a dungeon, a plot, lots of stuff randomly if you were so inclined, they also brought back the random dungeon generator which I love!

A big problem that I had with 2e is that there was too much space dedicated to treasure, and that appears here, but it doesn't feel like it takes up as much space and the tables to randomly determine treasure is structured differently. Treasure tables are assigned by tiers of play which is easier to use. I know that back in the day you always heard about those horrible Monty Haul campaigns, and it was just too easy to get there because the damned treasure generator always regurgitating garbage which you eventually abandoned, but still ended up doing because you like Steve and Steve should have a +5 sword of fireball hurling at 3rd level. I like tools that work and this one is different. I have used it and it gives good results. Again, I have faith in it.

All of the things that concerned me during that first playtest, how I didn't understand how the XP was calculated or how to build new monsters is addressed in this book. It gives up the system, holding nothing back so you can easily turn your ideas into mechanical simulations. It's not much different than AD&D, but it is weird. I've always used monsters by level, but that doesn't seem to be what is going on here. There is also a pitfall trap the size of New Jersey inside of this book which claims that we can use figure out how many monsters to throw at players and have it be amazing and predictable. It's a great trick! It's not real but it has cause so much self-doubt and second guessing in experienced Dungeon Masters that it is crazy. I include myself in the list of victims. Chris Perkins, the guy behind 5e himself says that he doesn't use this system. We want a mathmatical system, or maybe we don't. My old method was to just include monsters which I think should be there and how many, the rest was the PC's problem. 

I finally did get a module and there is no magic scale or formula at play to provide perfect combat encounters. I'm sure that if we plug some of them in and do the math that they will reveal some information, but I mean, who has time for that? There is better stuff to be thinking about, but that doesn't stop our brains from getting caught up on this idea. It has caused a lot of mayhem.

Another part of the DMG is dedicated to tinkering with how the system works. It has elements of older systems that you can plug into it, such as old-school initiative, as well as new ideas that are so shocking and wrong that they break my brain. Moding the game keeps a system alive and healthy. We can create our own backstory ideas, add races to be playable, invent new classes, take old spells and fix them so that they won't break the game too much. 

The background procedures are very familiar, oddly enough there really isn't any one stop sandbox defaults here. Monsters are listed in different configurations such as by level and terrain, but the we are expected to create our own tables. Thankfully I can always just go back and use my favorites from AD&D as bases, but the system does encourage you to have a more fleshed out version of random encounters than AD&D did. I had started doing something similar during my sandbox sessions, but this book has something simpler and more productive that what I was using (and always misplacing). 

You also get your weird rule sections for stuff like underwater and airborne combat, things that you would expect to find here in this book of secrets. I've always prefered the 3 book system over the single guide book. Secret information that is withheld from the players on purpose used to have a mystique to it which is gone today, but I still prefer that format. There is a weird learning curve, movement wasn't really addressed in the AD&D PHB, it was in the DMG so I knew exactly were to find it. In 5e, most of it is in the PHB with only a couple of secrets in the DMG which is kind of a pain. Moving across the map is something that I prefer to do during prep, and now I find that I have to have two books to figure that stuff out now, vs. just having the DMG in AD&D. Movement has been simplified . . . kind of, but not really. To figure out horseback movement in AD&D we needed the MM and the DMG, 5e has 3 different speeds, but becomes more muddled once we have horses. Some weird stuff about being able to run a horse only for the first hour and then the MV changes ? ? ? I don't know. I think that the flat rate of AD&D was easier, but I still am not proficient in the system yet.

5e does not like horses. BTB it says that a mounted fighter can move to a target and attack, but you can't use the rest of your MV after the attack. But people on foot can. Why this is the case is never explained and very well could be an error. It's not like we can't fix it, but it is a weird rule that I've found so far. ANYWAY! Destractions! 

The DMG is a great read and full of ideas and gaming theories. It is full of experience and tools to change how the closed systems work. I don't believe that we will ever really use this book during play unless we're going to use that random treasure table, or if the players manage to pull a fast one and sneak off to a different plane of existence and we have to improvise stuff real fast, but this book will see lots of use outside of the game, when you are designing and prepping. It goes deeper into the philosophy of 5e than the PHB does. It gives new DMs direction that we never really had, it allows advanced users to modify the game and create amazing things. Like the PHB, this book seeks to inform and inspire. I do find the random campaign ideas to be rather lazy and repetitive but the fact that they are there is still a positive in my book. This is not a replacement for many of the tools that I prefer to use, I still keep my old books handy, but it is a great companion to the PHB. It still impresses me that it emphasizes DIY over buying your way out of it. As a DM I still find myself flipping through this book and finding fun ideas and discovering new things to try. 

[The Perilous Dreamer]

I understand why you are excited about this. I am happy that you are having fun with it. You mention "old school imitative," IMC from day one to now I do not use initiative outside of one way, I use it during surprise, otherwise it is all simultaneous action with a 6 second melee round. You also mention tables, I love tables, but other than creating them and reading them, I do not use them in game. For me they are about documenting ideas more than anything else. I love tinkering and until I started my blog series this year, going back to 1975 I did not realize how much I tinkered and how quickly so much of it happened, but I still constantly tinker. I come from a different place, I only do DIY and have never used modules so I just do not relate to some of the things that excite a lot of people since I have always done some things and never departed from them. I custom build my encounters on the fly, so they are never random, but by design and specific.

Anyway, I enjoyed the read, have an Exalt!

[ripx187]

There are things that I want to prepare ahead of time. Things that I know will be better the longer I have time to put some thought into them. There is always going to be that improvisation which takes place during the game; that is part of the game, but as a DM, I think about the game all of the time. This is my hobby and a place that my mind retreats to. Structured thinking helps me cope with stress. 

I am also a believer in random encounters. I've run the game without them for many years, and I really like what they have to offer. The dice should have a function, and allowing elements in there can make a confined dungeon more alive and be used to quickly fill in large open spaces. Maybe the adventures will be ambushed by bandits? Maybe they'll stumble upon a dead party of explorers, their treasure just left there? Maybe an animal will get into one of their packs and eat all of their rations? I like a good mix in there of good, bad, or just colorful ideas. I like how the dice picks through these random things, but during the game I can always just pick one or ignore results if I want to. I wouldn't have that option if I didn't have something prepared.

I suppose that there are those modules where you sit down at the table on game night, strip off the cellophane and just read whatever garbage is on the pamphlet as the player's go. I wouldn't ever use something like that, that sounds terrible. I have come to the conclusion that a module is a collection of fantastic places, distinct NPCs, interesting secrets, magical treasures, a new monster or two, and maybe a spell that your players have never heard of yet. I like the larger modules, but the idea of it is that you edit it. You build upon ideas, cut things out that you don't think that your players would like or doesn't make sense; it isn't a completed idea yet. It won't be complete until it happens at the table.


I think that the older ones may have just had monsters standing around in dungeons, but it was always up to the DM to bring these things to life. I like modules that give me ideas or new skills that I can use. It is also nice to have some kind of satisfying ending; a place where you are working towards. I love it when I can weave plotlines and leave clues about things to come. I do that with my own games, or at least try to, but I don't always have time to craft that kind of detail in.


A good module is not a complete idea, it isn't a game that has been played before. It is a frame which we build upon, a setting all to itself which takes place in the game world. It should be a new way of looking at an old idea. Not all modules are good, some are really terrible because they are ridged and unbending or they are just uninspiring to you personally. Some DMs are just lazy and expect all of the work to be done for them, but I think that they are the exception, not the rule. When you buy a module you expect a really good collection of ideas that you can turn into amazing ideas, but you have to put the work in.