Looking at Low Fantasy Gaming (LFG), a lot of what I see spends time rolling back well-intended but thematically incorrect 5E rules meant to speed up play but ended up making the game way too easy. You can see the whiteboard in the Wizards' office with the words "problems with D&D!"
- Characters die too quickly!
- Encounters are hard to balance!
- Constant searching and interaction skill rolls slow down play!
- Long downtimes will slow down play!
And we get the well-intentioned rules like the long and short rest system allowing the party to quickly reset resources to "level set" before an encounter. We get passive skills to eliminate constant "search rolls" and "sense motive" checks. We bring healing skills and healer kits that can act as instant CPR devices in combat to revive party members. A long rest will heal any wound.
5E only models a videogame or MMO-style reality these days, such as a World of Warcraft. This is the hidden legacy of 4E in the game. You stand still for a moment, and you regain all health and mana. And I feel this will get even easier to do in One D&D.
At times I feel D&D 5E has moved out of the roleplaying game realm and more into the board or video game realm. The systems are heavily abstracted, and compared to the OSR, the game is very different. The streamlining and optimizations removed a lot of what the OSR enshrines as the core of the game.
The OSR has a deep interpersonal interaction, the act of one person describing a room and the players describing how they search it - all without rules. Exploration, interaction, and parts of combat are all this interpersonal storytelling game that does not require rules. The only thing which requires combat rules is hit points and AC, along with spells and a few other things.
Where D&D 4 went wrong is they tried to optimize out too much, to the point D&D became a wargame. They rolled back a lot with D&D 5E, but still, they left many of these optimizations in or changed them slightly to fit this new concept of play.
And many of the rules that a 5E implementation uses run counter to the OSR.
Resting
https://5thsrd.org/adventuring/resting/
From an OSR perspective, the 5E resting rules are overly generous. Being able to take a short rest, 1 hour, and heal hit points equal to hit dice (plus CON modifier) up to your level in hit dice is letting the party have too much innate healing. And this is often done "in dungeons" in the middle of adventures, and this is also one thing you see a lot of published adventures try to roll back to increase tension and challenge.
With long rests, you heal all hit points and regain half of the spent hit dice.
Low Fantasy Gaming rolls back short rests to only three times per day (a few minutes each), where one to three WIL rolls (you get a one, two, and three roll rest each day) are made to recover:
- Half of the character's lost hit points
- One class ability use
- One reroll pool die
Long rests in LFG take 1d6 days (1d4 in a restful location, such as an inn), which restores most all lost pools and abilities, half +1d4 + CON bonus hit points, and the long rest restores 1 point of luck. A character who loses almost all their hit points will be out a week on average. Luck, which is used as a direct-use luck ability and as all of the character's saving throws, comes back even slower. A total of 10 points of luck lost will take about a month to recover, and luck is incredibly easy to spend.
Old School Resting
Old School Essentials sets healing at 1d3 hit points a day. The Castles & Crusades game sets the healing rate at 1 hit point a day for the first week, 1 + CON bonus for the second week, double that on the third, and 3X that on the fourth - and can be adjusted by the referee. If you do not have magical healing, you are out for a while in any OSR game. Any disruption discards healing for the day.
Resting as a Game
Part of me feels the LFG rules are "gamey" because they need to replace the generous 5E resting rules and create a "rests" resource to track. They introduce a roll to recover a resource, so while resting is short, it is not guaranteed. LFG resting is still very generous compared to the OSR and ties in with the pool recovery mechanics.
In the OSR, you need magical healing, healing potions, or some other resource to heal. Or you need a lot of downtime and a safe place. Time and resource management is a massive part of the OSR and an excellent skill to learn in real life.
I know why the 5E designers did this; no one likes "interrupting the adventure" and having to go back to town and rest a week on behalf of one character taking a lot of damage. 5E is heavily borrowing on board game mechanics here, and this is a lot like what they did in 4E to "keep players on the board" - just that in this case, there could be no board, but there is no reason to interrupt the adventure because someone needs to heal.
What We Lose
But on the downside, we lose a lot. We lose a lot of the simulation and interpersonal aspects we love. The storytelling. The poking and prodding of strange frescos and statues in alcoves. Character death. The feeling of danger and the tension of ever-decreasing time, health, and resources. The fear of touching a trap or stepping into the abyss.
I like the OSR because it leans into danger and embraces it as the genre. Some 5E players said when they tried the OSR, it felt like a horror game - that is cool. Your eyes are opened. You feel alive. Choices matter. Exploration matters. Thinking and experimenting are essential.
LFG walks a line between the genres, keeping modern mechanics but game-ifying many OSR concepts and presenting them in a more modern-rules format and style.
Board Game Mechanics
As a result, 5E feels more like a board game than a roleplaying game. You get nearly free "resets" between encounters, which keeps players around the table engaged, makes encounters easier to balance, and quickens the pace of play. The game became more popular because of these "soft factors" that made the game more accessible. I think the direction that D&D is going in (if they are smart) is to keep this accessibility moving forward and enhance the experience.
I like that LFG leans into the game aspects of 5E and extends them. The OSR is one thing, a game that simulates the OSR concepts is another. This is a sort of "OSR the Game" presented in 5E-like rules, and while yes, that is not really OSR, the concepts are being introduced in a game-like format, and that is both a great thing to players new to the OSR, and 5E players looking for a more rules-framework-like version of OSR gaming.
No comments:
Post a Comment