ADAD: Legitimacy

A group of goblin bandits are holding the quarry outside of town.

I played this scenario in 5E, and I felt this sense of comfort. It will be no problem; I have an unrestricted power that lets me toss magic bolts every turn, we can heal, this one gets an advantage on many attacks, and we are all doing super significant damage with maximum ability score modifiers. Every magic character can fling damage as if we were playing an MMO.

In fact, the entire encounter felt like an MMO. I had this "bored sense of it being a waste of time" running through my head as I played it out. Just get me to the boss fight to finish this and turn in the quest rewards.

In 5E, I had so much power before level five that I was tired of the game and uninterested in whatever stories I could tell with it. This was the ultimate easy mode, and I quit the system.

5E is over-reliant on false empowerment, where they double the hit points and make daggers do 1d4+5. There was no damage scaling in the original game, so we did not need all these fixed modifiers. B/X started these out-of-control modifiers, and I prefer 0e or 1e games where those modifiers are scaled way back and kept under control.

You could not infinitely blast away with cantrips. You did not have feats that added damage to attacks. Your ranger had 20 arrows and a melee weapon. That is what you have to deal with the situation. Do you have a mage? Do you want to expend magic to solve this, or is there another way?

Swords & Wizardry was like this: The game did not hand out bonuses like popcorn and candy, and only fighters thoroughly enjoyed the STR bonus for to-hit and damage. Other classes, even the fighter sub-classes, did not get the bonuses. Swords & Wizardry gets it right like Shadowdark gets it right by keeping the numbers under control.

You start throwing fixed modifiers into everything, and they take over the game. A fixed modifier of more than half the dice size, like a 1d4+5, is a sloppy game design that invalidates the meaning of the dice. It is a significant mistake in 5E's math. For all the vaunted 'bounded accuracy' 5E hyped (and later tossed out) in the design, they did nothing on the damage dice and let those numbers get out of control.

In ADAD, to-hit modifiers for STR start at 17, and damage starts at 16 - which is only a +1. Most characters will never see a melee damage modifier unless they use magic weapons or are fighters who selected weapon specializations. You need to understand the rules and where your fixed modifiers come from, and you aren't just given everything.

I can play a character who does flat weapon damage; it is not a problem, and the game is designed that way if the monster hit points are low and kept under control. The polyhedral dice mean more if hit points are lower, and when Wizards' D&D starts scaling hit points two to four times and you lean on fixed modifiers far too much, the game breaks hard.

Dungeon Crawl Classics has replaced D&D for me. Shadowdark is still the best 5E, but if I want super-heroic fantasy with many character powers and toys, then DCC fills the need. It is far less complicated than D&D, with its mess of actions and complex builds, and I can run DCC character sheets by hand.

ADAD is perfect for first-edition games. I want characters to do without and have limited powers and options in the first five levels. They need to work together during this time and think smart, use gear, leverage skilled classes, and play smart.

In my 5E game, the party rarely needed synergy or cooperation. Everyone was an “army of me,” and healing did not need to be shared; everyone could heal themselves or rest it off later.

ADAD hits the serious game notes perfectly for me while providing new options to explore.

In DCC, monsters can be deadly, and my characters must work together. At first level, they have quite a bit of power, so they are capable and potent. The world can hit back hard, death is easy, and healing relies on a cleric and a god’s benevolence, which can run dry.

With ADAD, I am playing stories again, and characters must make hard choices when taking risks. Sometimes, there is no choice at all, and fighting is unavoidable. The fewer powers and abilities characters have, the better the stories become. What they get means something, and being a thief in these games is fun; since few have repeatable powers, your thief skills begin to shine, and you are doing all sorts of sneaky things to get away with the crazy plots the party thinks up.

Your weapon speed matters, your armor matters, your encumbrance matters, and the few powers you have matter. Your party composition matters, along with your hirelings. How you travel matters. Rangers can make a journey where you are lost and lose party members to wilderness encounters into easy navigation, and a few times, you make camp. Did you take enough hirelings, pack animals, and carts to haul your treasure back home? Do you have a home?

DCC, S&W, and ADAD all have this style of gameplay. Some are a little more rules-light than others, and some are more gonzo fantasy. They all have that legitimate game loop, where you need to be careful about how you approach situations and think beyond an encounter, and the game forces you to consider the entire journey.