Sandboxed 5E

I can run a sandboxed game using the base three D&D 5E books. However, these days that is a tall order. The game has moved on; people have favorite builds in newer books from Wizards, rules have changed since the original books were released, and people expect the more recent features.

This is a lot like late phase Pathfinder 1e for me - I didn't want to play with anything else than an entire shelf of books. There is so much cool stuff to play with! Why just play with the core books? Are you crazy? Rogues suck!

In the PF 1e book, they fixed rogues, but this highlights the problem; as in D&D 5E, the base-book ranger sucks as well (so I hear). So I play with quite a few things broken and live with it.

This is also the appeal of One D&D, three base books with fixed classes. We must wait two years for that if the Earth lasts that long. Well, what to do in the meantime?

Go 5E, Blue Pill

One option is to collect tons of 5E books from Wizards and jump in. There is a lot of fluff and stuff I won't use, and the quality level of the builds and classes feels low overall - outside of the few rules in each book. Still, this doesn't address a lot of the issues the base game has; just sort of patches over them. Rangers, warlocks, and a bunch of other classes have a lot of issues and require multiclassing to be interesting.

Still, I am a little turned off by the crowd of hardcore optimizers out there who have created the optimal builds for everything to win the game, and a part of me feels 5E has been "beaten" and not really worth learning or starting this late in the game's lifecycle.

I built a party of 5E characters, and they feel uninspired and plain.

OSR, Red Pill

The obvious option is the OSR; let's get that out here. Castles & Crusades is so attractive when I compare it to any version of 5E. I look at 5E character sheets and see the same bloat many modern games have. The character sheets are long, with particular special abilities that apply to things that come up rarely or combat abilities that fit into particular places into the combat system, and need a paragraph of rules per ability on the character sheet.

I have seen entire sets of rules shorter than a printed mid-level 5E character sheet. Seriously 5E players and game creators, has no one noticed your character sheets are worse than Rolemaster or Palladium in terms of complexity? Love the game, but hate the bloat. I am leaving the tax forms of Pathfinder 2e out of this discussion too. Love that game too, but appalled they think of players as computers that can fill out excel spreadsheets and branch conditions in their heads.

Some games are just made to sell digital character sheet subscriptions to online services. Very little thought is put into simplifying rules because it would hurt profitability and retention.

And some games resemble a pen-and-paper computer game way too much.

With Castles & Crusades, I get everything on one 4x6 card that covers an entire character with the same depth and cool factor as a 5E character. It is easier than a typical OSR game, too; no lists of thief abilities, turning charts, attack numbers vs. AC, skills, proficiencies, or saving throws are needed on my character sheet. No huge paragraphs of rules printed on 4-6 sheets of double-sided paper for a single character.

Castles & Crusades is the game that sits in the back of your head, saying, "I can do that easier, faster, and with less record keeping than what you are playing now. And you can focus on story, not rules."

It even says that when I am playing other OSR games, "Why are you writing down thief skill percentages and all those specific saving throws? When did you ever save versus wands?"

Yes, C&C is annoying, but I love it and cannot live without it.

Yes, C&C is one of those games once you understand how much cruft it throws out, everything else feels clumsy and antiquated. Part of Wizards' 5E problem is that the game was designed across many books by many writers, and it kept sticking things on the giant sticky ball of rules with each new release. Again, 6E is a reset, but I do not want to wait.

5E Clone, Purple Pill

My final option is to play a sandboxed version of 5E. There is no sticky ball of rules spread across multiple books because the games are stand-alone complete versions of the game.

Low Fantasy Gaming, Into the Unknown, 5 Torches Deep, and Level Up Advanced 5E are perfect 5E clones that act as sandbox worlds insulated against outside changes from the official Wizards books. These are all great ways to still play 5E but play in a sandboxed environment where you can focus on a few books and have a clean and focused experience.

I like Level Up Advanced 5E a lot, and it is a wholly cloned version of 5E with tons of improvements. The game is just three books, created with the latest changes to the core 5E rules in mind. Tool proficiencies and other changes are in here, and this is a core set of rules I would like to learn. I know base 5E is more straightforward, but this game feels like it will preserve the 5E mechanics as played in 2014 to 2022, just like Pathfinder 1e preserved D&D 3.5 mechanics and still does.

Game preservation is essential! People grew up playing 5E, and we should keep the game around as-is for future generations to enjoy. I know, for 5E players, this sounds strange; just keep going with 6E and One D&D, and then Two D&D, right...?

Welcome to the OSR, 5E.

We preserve experiences for future generations to enjoy here.

We are a living museum of gaming.

One of the strange parts about being in this museum is your game needs to be "open source" and OGL and not really under the stewardship of Wall Street or other companies that want to "lock down" the game, hence why the 5E clones are so crucial to preservation. And the words "One D&D" have a double meaning in that Wizards only wants one D&D to exist. The one they control.

I want everyone to play, to be able to create a 5E game, and for what people love to be preserved.

Level Up is essential because it is the most complete and similar to how people play the 5E version of the game we have in the OGL community.

Low Fantasy Gaming is a fantastic set of rules with pulp-action and dedicated resource management mechanics. This, to me, feels the most like OSR, but also with some excellent 5E-style design and thought put into resource management. Where Into the Unknown and 5TD do "5E-like" sims of OSR games, LFG takes OSR concepts and codifies them into game rules.

This game also introduces several great "hardcore" rules that fit right into a modded hard mode 5E game.

That is the most "5E" way of doing things, strip mechanics you do not need and give players new mechanics to enhance and enforce flavor and genre.