No to D&D 4E, Yes to Old School Essentials

There is a segment of the D&D community pushing for a return to D&D 4E. My brother and I played this, a whole campaign to level 30, with multiple characters. And it's a hard pass from me. We collected the entire series, played every book, ate them up as they came out, and slowly watched a game that was great at levels 1-9 turn into a nightmare past level 10.

The multiple conditions per character, per monster, and tracking everything with tiny scraps of paper was atrocious and one of the worst examples of how not to do conditions in a game. Everything mattered! That extra minus two to one save for one turn was a core class ability for some, and we have these six PC versus 10 monsters fights that would turn into complex wargame scenarios worse than a by-the-book full-binder game of Advanced Squad Leader.

Sometimes one monster would have 4-6 "-2" conditions stacked on them in one turn, and those would end on different turns. If anyone sneezed, we would lose track of everything.

The bags of hit points led to combats where the PCs would stand around the boss, knock the monster down with turn-denial tactics, and have the damage dealers whittle another 20-30 hit points off a turn to a monster with over 450 hit points. The damage dealers missing their attacks elicited groans from everyone, players and DM included.

I ran a group at my work of D&D 4E players. Nobody liked this game. They put up with it. We needed computer programs to design and track characters. Does that sound familiar?

D&D 4E was great when it started, and I doubt the design team even play-tested this at all. The books were notorious for being obsolete when they were released, as the day-one errata for each were pages long. We were unable to keep up with the errata and had to rely on the online program to manage it all for us. Did they even test these before they went to print? Does that sound familiar?

The D&D 4E game is dead, and those wanting you to give this another try are likely just trying to keep you in the Wizards ecosystem for another few years while they rush out the "fixed" D&D 6E books in three years. A new team is in place, and the next edition is coming. This is how it always goes with D&D. You will drop 4E for 6E in two years, and never leave the mind-space of D&D.

Play Old School Essentials instead of 4E, and pick up the Carcass Crawler zines. You will have all the familiar races and classes. The game will be easy. You won't deal with shelves of broken and untested books. There isn't as much "flash bang" character power, but what does any of that matter when the damages and powers are so weak and the monster hit points so high, who cares if you get to use them every turn?

I would rather play the OSE magic user who gets fireball at level 5, and have one use of that a day that does 5d6 damage (18 hp) to everything in twenty feet. No attack roll is needed; it just happens. Save versus spells for half damage. No damage cap, 1d6 per level. OSE Ogres have 4+1 HD and 19 hp on average, which is enough damage to kill or seriously injure most of them within the blast radius. That one-use spell is more potent than most D&D 5E powers by far, just because damage scaling is not a thing on OSE.

D&D 5E? Let's go to the SRD. The fireball does a fixed 8d6 damage (28 hp) to ogres, who have 59 hp on average. Oh, so now my D&D wizard does half the damage as their first-edition counterpart? None of them dies in the blast. And damage only scales when you cast from a higher-level slot, and not even by that much.

5E takes away half your power and then expects you to be overjoyed when they give you half of that back. Then, scaling kicks in, and you get weaker anyway. This is the MMO shell game.

D&D 4E? I got the PDF. The fireball does 3d6 + INT mod (let's assume +4), for 15 hp of damage, in a 3 square burst. The ogre? 111 hit points. So my D&D 4 wizard is doing one-eighth the damage of my OSE wizard? The ogres laugh it off and apply a few layers of sunscreen. Fireball is a daily spell in this edition, too. The scorching burst spell I get as an at-will (cantrip) does 1d6+4 to creatures in a 1 square burst. I can use that every turn, and it will be a better damage output during a fight than fireball.

Was this even tested?

The D&D 4E wizard is a 1-hp minion mop.

Is D&D 3.5E any better? Fireball does 1d6 per level to a max of 10d6, so we are back to 5d6 damage, with an average of 18 hit points. The 3.5E ogres have 29 hit points. They will all likely survive the hit, since you would need to roll all sixes to kill one. So we are back to doing about half the damage again in D&D 3.5E. This hurts a little, but it does not take any of them out of the fight.

Wizards D&D started this whole videogame rebalancing of the game. Everyone got weaker.

AD&D and 2nd Edition AD&D are more like OSE, though 2nd Edition did cap the fireball damage to 10d6 (only scrolls were capped to 10d6 in AD&D 1st). 2nd Edition also upped the dragon hit dice from the first edition AD&D and B/X, with an ancient red dragon having 23 hit dice (104 hp), and in first edition AD&D, the same dragon had 88 hit points.

In OSE? That dragon has 59 hit points. That 5d6 fireball packs more punch in a game without scaled hit points. And that fireball does 1d6 a level without a damage cap. We were better off in terms of character power with TSR. All these powers you get as you level up in 5E are meaningless if the base math is wrong. Who cares that I get an action surge? The monster's hit points are doubled.

Shadowdark? This is a different game where a fireball inflicts a fixed 4d6 damage, and you can cast it repeatedly until you fail a spellcasting roll. The hit points are lower in that game and not scaled, so it feels like a higher-powered game in relative terms, especially with the repeated casting. OSE's fireball keeps going up in damage, whereas in Shadowdark it stays fixed.

Swords & Wizardry? On par with OSE, but a zero-edition game, with the same damage and ogre hit points. Functionally identical in balance to OSE, and you can't go wrong with this one either. There are fewer race options in S&W versus OSE + zines, but the OSE races are compatible with this game, so you could use them as-is in S&W without a problem. S&W includes the magic resistance mechanic first seen in AD&D, but ogres do not have that resistance.

S&W fighters are excellent. A lot of the classes have extra "heat" to them. Also note that not everyone gets the STR bonus to hit and damage; it's exclusive to fighters. Fighter sub-classes do not get the bonus either, such as paladins and rangers. This is how it was back in 1974, and I like these rules since they give people reasons to play fighters, and other subclasses get all sorts of different powers to balance that out.

The S&W fighter is very close to the DCC fighter in feeling.

S&W is like AD&D-lite based on the CC 5.1 SRD in the CC, under the AELF license. This is a future-proof game, where OSE is still OGL-based. The S&W team is bringing OSRIC 3 to an open license, as mentioned in their recent Kickstarter. I would love to see this same team tackle BECMI.

The hit point scaling started in AD&D 2nd Edition, by about 20% over AD&D for the iconic monsters.  OSE keeps them at B/X levels, or about half of AD&D 2nd. OSE maintains a lower B/X-style hit point base than AD&D, with every class being a die lower than AD&D. In contrast, AD&D scaled up character hit points by a die size per class (probably to say it was a different game; there were royalty issues back then).

The fights are faster and more deadly in B/X games, and the spells and melee attacks are far more potent in OSE than any modern version of D&D.

The damage scaling that Wizards of the Coast introduced to make it more like a videogame ruined D&D's play balance. In no version of the game have they gotten it correct, and they have been trying to fix this for the last 25 years. You can keep buying new books until you are broke, or play a game that gets it right.

This is the original Gygaxian math.

It still works today, and it preserves character power.

My Old School Essentials magic user puts every "Wizards wizard" to shame in terms of damage and power. Sure, at fifth level, that fireball is a one-use-per-day spell, but WOW is it powerful. That is a "nuking them from orbit" level of power, not to mention what it would do to creatures with fewer hit dice, such as orcs or goblins, and you don't even need to roll for them, the damage is so high, they are just instantly turned to ash and incinerated. Bugbears? 14hp and likely all dead.

That is the wizard I want to play. The one with absolute power.

"But I play D&D 5E because I have options and character power!"

No, you don't. Wake up from the delusion.

I enjoy the D&D 5E character builds, too, but I know my history and games. They lowered the power level to increase party synergy, dragged out fights to keep them exciting, and turned it into a "combat for fun" game. It is like Diablo or any other MMO.

Weak characters and repeated attacks make it seem like you are doing more than you actually are. You get weaker as you level. Once you are hooked, the company slowly stops caring; the higher level you get, the less they care.

This is the MMO formula. The start of your game, the first few levels in, is the peak of your power. You go downhill from there. At the end game, you are getting one-shot-killed by the bosses, just like you were by the boars at the start of the game.

BECMI, AD&D, and B/X were designed to give higher-level characters more power. OSE is created along that same model. In any of these games, combat is best avoided, but the characters hold far more personal power than any counterpart in any version of the game made by Wizards. This also sadly includes Tales of the Valiant and Level Up A5E.

Even the OSE fighter has more power since the hit points of monsters are under control, and those attacks will hit harder than in any other version of the game. Red dragons? 45 hit points, and my 1d8+2 longsword is doing far more proportional damage per hit than in any other edition of the game. Make that a +2 magic longsword, and I am doing 9 points of damage per hit, and my fighter alone will have that dragon down in five solid blows.

Dragons are not pushovers, though, and they can decimate your party and TPK you in a single turn. You all have lower hit points. The red dragon's base attacks are two 1d8 claws and a 4d8 bite, per turn. Or a breath weapon equal to its current hit points, and if that is the full 45 hit points of damage on a failed save, your 10th-level magic users and thieves with 24-30 hit points will be turned to ash. Even a high-damage bite could swallow them whole.

That can't happen in any other version of the game.

And this is in a game that tells you to avoid combat if you can. But if you can't, you will likely mop the floor with your foes. It's amusing how two tiny OSE books offer a game with significantly more character power than D&D 5E. Yet, the general consensus is that D&D 5E reigns supreme in terms of character power.

The math says otherwise.

Today's games give you repeated attacks, more power usage, for less damage. You get weaker as you level. They are MMOs with dice.

D&D 4E is even worse off than 5E by orders of magnitude less in terms of character power, and has to use minions and other tricks to make the illusion happen. At low levels, it feels great. Just like that MMO, get past the 10th level and start counting the games that grind by before you want to quit and find better things to do with your time.

Old School Essentials preserves character power better than any modern edition of D&D, especially 4th Edition.

But Wizards still sells one version that stays true to the original math, and it is still called Dungeons & Dragons. OSE offers more of the options I want in a game, including a broader range of character choices, a better publishing model, and a company I want to support. OSE is also far better laid out, clearer, faster to use at the table, and easier to learn and teach. OSE also supports modern class and race options, once you get into the Carcass Crawler zines.

The above BECMI book is still a scanned copy and is not as well put together with modern publishing techniques, facing pages, or bulleted layouts. It is wordy, jammed with text, and harder to read and reference. It is still a classic. If you absolutely need to have D&D on the cover, then that is your go-to book.

While the Rules Cyclopedia is a good preservation of the past, OSE remains a solid game for today and into the future.

The 4E "Renaissance"

This thing on 5E YouTube is doing a hard sell on 4E as "the next big thing."

As someone who played the game heavily since the first book came out and collected an entire 4E library - and played them all - I can't think of more of a silly and disingenuous thing to try to sell the community.

And we LOVED 4E compared to all the haters. We bought every book and played it. We watched the books get patched before they hit the store shelves, making the physical copies worthless. We did the whole thing with dungeon tiles and figures and played every night for 3 years. We watched them constantly fiddle with monster hit points and damage, making later book classes so overpowered as they tried to patch the game in motion - making the core classes underpowered and weak. We have seen 4E Essentials beta-test the 5E concepts and be this strange dongle reimagining of the game, yet it is compatible with it (that looks like 2024 suspiciously).

But the game let us down so hard that we left Wizards and the barely play-tested, buy-the-next-book, string-you-along garbage they put out. It hurt 5E and made us switch to Pathfinder 1e because it left a bad taste in our mouths.

The 4E "Renaissance" has nothing to do with 4E being great. This game breaks past the 12th level with stun locks, turn-denial, and thousands of hit-point monsters whittling them down with the same powers, turn after turn. Tracking short-duration turn conditions requires a spreadsheet. The game at 1-5 is excellent! Past 6th level, it starts to slowly break down before it fails hard, freezing up and dying a "why are we playing this" death.

By the 18th level, you are standing in a circle around a 1500-hit-point monster, watching yourself make 20 points of damage, and then waiting for the person with the stunning power to deny the monster their next turn. If you miss, ah, well! We will get back to you for the next go around!

Repeat this for 30+ turns of play for four hours for one combat.

The powers in the later books made it worse. You gave the DM a list of "expected gear upgrades" for your build, and optimization was required and assumed for every magic item slot. Optimization was required to keep up with monster progression, and you were stacking bonuses in every slot they gave you.

The math was unconstrained, adding +28 to a d20 attack roll to hit an AC of 35. People's brains were fried after a 3-hour session since it felt like a rapid-fire immersion session for basic math.

There is no way in hell they play-tested this. If they did, it was in one of the best echo chambers ever designed.

5E has a way better high-level game than 4E, and that isn't saying much.

Pushing 4E keeps you from leaving Wizards and trying other games, thus leaving the 5E Wizards community for good. This is why 4E is being pushed. When 2024 D&D comes out, 4E will be dropped by these channels, and you will be out a ton of money buying PDFs you will never use. Wizards will be happy they have the extra money, and the channels don't care as long as you give them views and stay in the D&D cave.

The company does not deserve your business, honestly. There are better and more exciting spaces to play now instead of living in the past.

We are in the early phases of the 5E alternative games, and the time to jump in is now.

Some 5E alternatives take the best of 4E and improve it - mixing the old and the new while staying true to the classic pillars of play.

And there are so many other games to explore, with unique communities and experiences.

I still have those books above; that is my photo.

But we loved 4E. We bought the maps and figures. We played it every night. We did the whole "progression of a game" through the books. We even bought every Essentials book, thinking, "This is gonna finally fix it!"

And in 5E, they ended up doing it again, though this time, they had a better base game to build upon and eventually ruin by the end of the run. The companies rebuilding 5E is where the fun is at these days. Going back to 4E and waiting for the next version of D&D to "finally fix it" is like waiting for Godot.

YouTube is full of it at times with these fads and "keep the community together" tactics, and people that buy into this will likely be unhappy (unless you are a true fan, but even then) and be sucked into wasting money on PDFs. I never bought the 4E PDFs. I have no use for them. The game is that broken. I keep the books because I want to remember the good times.

And you know, when 2024 comes out, 4E will be dropped by the YouTube community as the "we tried it, but it sucked" game that it was, and this is coming from someone who loved 4E and bought the entire run of books.

Loving 4E is about loving what they tried to do, the world they tried to build, and the game's new direction. The only two 4E books I recommend getting are the essays on the design of the world and then using a new set of rules to play in the world that these inspire. These two books made us fall in love with the new world, but the game let us down.

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/56956/Wizards-Presents-Races-and-Classes-40

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/56955/Wizards-Presents-Worlds-and-Monsters-4e

The imagination and energy behind 4E were amazing and what we loved. The rules broke the promise.

Games like Level Up A5E (and even ToV) are better systems that try to continue that legacy and move forward. They are a fresh start with no baggage, with communities and teams trying to improve the core design. Playing 4E keeps you from leaving and trying something new and keeps people in that toxic relationship with a Wall Street company.

The new games are coming out now and are exciting places to be in. Don't be fooled back into the cave.

Who makes the game matters, and supporting the people out there making a change for a better future today is a much better place to be than listening to people trying to endlessly sell you the past.

Advanced 5E: The Heir to D&D 4E

The more I read this game, the more I love it as the true successor to D&D 4E, mixed with OSR sensibilities. For one, they have a marshal class, a "fighting party leader" like the old D&D 4E warlord class. My group loved this class in 4E; seeing it again is incredible.

Sorcerers, warlocks, and wizards feel thematically different - and warlocks feel like warlocks again (and they didn't ruin the class to fix them). The class description implies the patron could ask favors at any time, a 180 from the typical D&D "just another caster" sort of class feeling I get from them. This sentence, in particular:

The bond forged between the seeker and their supernatural patron is called a pact—which can have any number of terms and stipulations, most commonly arcane power in return for work in kind.

As a narrator, can you roleplay a patron and ask the warlock player to do favors, missions, or pay tribute? Or the power gets turned off? To be fair, the 2014 5E PHB says this about the warlock and pact obligations:

Your patron's demands might drive you into adventures, or they might consist entirely of small favors you can do between adventures.

It says "work for power," but the official 5E seems to hand-wave off the patron service requirement. A5E is more explicit about the roleplaying and adventuring requirements. "Work in kind" and "terms and stipulations" are much stronger statements than "might drive you" and "small favors between adventures."

But my one-level dip into warlock for sweet power! You are not forcing me to serve anything or anyone other than "the lazy spirit of giving me power and requiring nothing in return."

The video game optimizer culture over what the books say rubs me the wrong way. Warlock is something you do not one-level dip into for free power! Warlock is signing up for a lifetime of service to an extra-worldly "something," and you will be expected to give back constantly.

This is what drives people to the OSR, I swear. A pact like this in a typical OSR game is a roleplaying thing, and the consequences for refusing to return service for powers are much more severe - and that is fun! A5E, just through their presentation of the class in a more OSR-manner of writing, brings back that feeling. 4E also presented "strong binding" to a patron, but the roots of the "lazy service culture" began in 4E since the rules guaranteed the powers (and that was a mistake).

This also plays into the "gimme culture" of the current playtests, and I like designs that put roleplaying requirements on classes that aren't laid out in rules but enforced through roleplay and behavior. The same goes for paladins, clerics, and any other class that borrows power.

In my games, service is required. Bad-mouthing a patron or god can have serious consequences, and even acting out of line will be judged harshly. You will be asked for favors, sent on missions, and roleplaying a certain way will please your patron. Do it well; you may get an extra spell point, expertise die, or another boon until you rest next. I may even drop in patron help during a critical moment in the adventure just because your patron is happy (and has another warlock they want to give a mission to).

The video game mentality is destroying 5E by making the game entirely about power.

This is probably due to the VTT. Classes and powers need to be standardized for UI elements, like power buttons. But the overall focus on power, not roleplay, will kill the game.

You can never make D&D compete with an ARPG on the videogame level.

I feel Pathfinder 2 is also overly focused on powers and not roleplaying. 4E also had that same problem. We must always take a step back from this and focus on roleplaying again and what it means to choose a class. Again, this drives people to the OSR and games like Shadowdark (and I am there too).

Focus too much on power, and there is little difference between 5E, Pathfinder 2E, 4E, and tabletop Warhammer 40K wargaming. A5E focuses on the game's three main pillars, preventing it from getting too power-centric. Social interaction and exploration are "ways you can lose" that have nothing to do with your character sheet full of powers and lean more toward roleplaying.

There were some excellent decisions in 4E related to the wargaming aspect. A5E also presents environments as participants in combats, giving environmental effects a guaranteed spot on the initiative track and integrating them into overland travel. This fantastic feature was introduced in 4E and almost as quickly dropped in 5E. Falling boulders, swirling bats, flame rain, unstable footing, jets of heated steam, and any other environmental hazard can interact with combatants at every turn of battle. They can be used as travel hazards and inflict damage or consume supplies.

Cool.

Again, more amazing 4E concepts coming back (the hazards, not the overland). 4E had some significant innovations, but the wargame part turned many people off. It is great to see the best pieces of 4E being resurrected.

4E could have had better overland travel rules, and A5E reaches into the OSR and builds a fun exploration and travel system into the game. In some ways, the game goes beyond 4E, returns to the root of the hobby, and pulls in the classic pillars of play. The ranger matters and can make the difference between never arriving at a dungeon and arriving rested, well-fed, and avoiding significant encounters that drain resources.

Without an excellent overland game, you don't need to have rangers in the game - and then you are forced to make them entirely a combat class. Rangers are to the exploration pillar what rogues are to the stealth game.

It is early, but I need to hear more on the classic pillars of play from the Tales of the Valiant team. I hope they address exploration and travel, which will be in my feedback when the playtests arrive there.

But A5E's designers had the foresight to support the three pillars of play as a part of the game's design principles. That alone makes me a fan. They went back into history and wrote a game that appeals to 5E players and OSR fans. And they also paid tribute to the 4E tactical combat and party synergy fans.

There is much to love here in a game that gets easily dismissed and ignored.

Yes, this isn't the "hot new thing," - and I don't buy the argument "they should have just made these ideas a 5E supplement." A5E is a redesign of 5E using core design goals.

Tales of the Valiant feels more like a "drop in 5E replacement" with balance tweaks, changes to inspiration, and presentation changes, which are needed, and the game will be fun. I hope part of their design goals includes the classic pillars of play, but I have yet to see too much on that - but it is still early.

A5E is a 5E fork and rebuild, taking 5E in a direction that plays more like 4E mixed with the OSR.

Level Up Advanced 5E

Level Up Advanced 5th Edition (LUA5E, or Level Up) is nothing short of remarkable if you are a 5E player, and given the 5E game will be in flux for the next 2 years, this is the perfect time to dive in and try something new while keeping most of what is familiar to you.

In fact, this feels like the perfect 5E game for the next 20 years once you realize it is a community-patched version of 5E immune to external changes and interference.

Reading through this game, I get the feeling original 5E is more spartan yet broken in many ways D&D Basic set, while LUA5E is the AD&D of 5E with the added benefit that the game is not going away or majorly changing in 2 years. EN Publishing did an incredible job of creating "teams" around each class and part of the game and crowdsourcing the best of the best improvements to 5E in every area.

Community, not Committee

Level Up is the opposite of One D&D. It sticks with what people love, the original 5E system, and goes to town making the best community-focused changes to the game. The community of designers assembled to build the best game controls the game, and it only changes for the better. Some online reviews of this game remarked that some of the Level Up rules were taken from popular 5E house rules and improvements that everyone plays with anyways, so they rebalanced them and wrote them into the game.

With One D&D, you have a government-style rules committee that thinks they know better and dictates rules to the community from on high. We get limited playtest documents and nebulous feedback forms, and nobody knows if anyone is even being listened to. Few people know what changes are coming, and when they arrive, good or bad, we must accept and live with them.

"Oh well, if I want to keep playing the game I love, I must learn to live with it."

I can't see more of a clear difference between the future of Level Up and One D&D than that. With Level Up, I feel this game will only improve in the next 20 years, and it will not change too much from what we know and like about 5E. If I were just starting with 5E today, which I am, I would learn to play Level Up and skip base 5E from Wizards.

Like Classic Pathfinder

Level Up feels like the classic Pathfinder 1e vs. D&D 4E situation. The game everyone knows and loves, and is playing today, is being preserved and improved for generations in the future to enjoy. The improved game is compatible with old guides and adventures. Everything feels the same and is improved in many ways.

You can play without the core books from Wizards, which they use to control the game. You are not under the control of Wall Street and some digital distribution and mobile-game-inspired monetization effort. You can keep playing an improved and supported version of the game you already know.

I would not be so happy to see a version of 5E like this unless the design team took some serious effort to fix exploits and cheese moves, which it appears they did. The "one-level dips" into classes to steal abilities for DPS builds are gone, and the base classes were made to work and be fun. Resting and healing seem fixed. They support three pillars of play, combat, social, and exploration, with dedicated mechanics and class features.

This is the game you get when a community that knows how the exploits and cheats work, are asked to redesign a game and build it for maximum fun. They remove the cheese, and replace it with making the classes and systems in the game fun again. You do not need to exploit to keep up. This feels like a very good "balance mod" for a game like Skyrim that is tough to play without because it fixes the underlying game so completely - and it enhances what is already there to make those choices matter.

Depth and Changes

All that said, the game feels more in-depth and a level more complex than base 5E. I am glad I skipped most of 5E and have little to unlearn here. Some online are a bit sour that the base classes and options of 5E are not compatible, but in a redesign like this, I can see why they did it. If the goal is to create a solid foundation, the broken and cheese parts of 5E should be fixed; otherwise, why waste your time making a "class and option expansion" book for base 5E? What they did here was a good and intelligent design decision, rip the moldy wallpaper off the walls, chop out the rotten wood, and rebuild the parts of the game that needed serious attention.

The whole race/class/background thing is fixed, and they give some fantastic character creation options. The system they used feels like Pathfinder 2e and feels suitable for everybody's tastes.

And they included a 4E-style warlord sort of battlefield commander fighter-support class. What? People that loved 4E are loved here too? Are you kidding me? Do we have warlocks too? Dragonborn? Tieflings? Eladrin?

I feel I could replay our old 4E Nerrath campaign and absolutely have EVERYTHING.

This is not just an advanced 5E; this is everything I loved about 4E too. That is one thing beautiful about a community-run game, one company can't come in and change things on you, remove classes, tell you DMs can't roll critical hits, change how things work, and dictate to you. If the game is loved, plays fine for millions of people with a few accepted community-suggested fixes, then it stays that way.

Pillars of Play

Level Up feels like it pays serious attention to the exploration pillar of play, which is fantastic for an OSR player. I was reading this last night and asking myself, "How long has it been since a 5E game paid serious attention to exploration?" Class abilities are also integrated with all three pillars of play.

The ranger is not holding Charlie Brown's "I got a bag of rocks" anymore.

You can fail a mission or begin with a severe resource issue because your party's exploration talents and skills are not great. Are you serious? Someone has obviously been reading the OSR here.

Welcome 4E and 5E Players

Would I switch away from the OSR for this? To be honest, Castles & Crusades is my OSR game, and with all the Swords & Wizardry content I have, I have no reason to switch.

I never got into 5E; that would be the next game for me and my brother, but life happened, and we never got to play. We were huge into 4E; we walked to the bookstore together and collected every book they put out. Nerrath was our second home. The game was not perfect, but the tabletop figure combat at levels 1-10 was incredible.

The next question becomes if I were to revisit our Nerrath game, and since I am a little tired of nostalgia, it would be something I am more inclined to leave to the past at this time; what rules would I use? A hypothetical question, but a valid one.

If I were to use C&C, my life would be much easier. No new game to learn. The characters work great, and each one fits on a 4x6 card. The game would be an old-school tribute to the times we had there. A few things would be missing, such as some of the races and classes. Some of the powers would be missing. The feeling would be missing. The game would be OSR, which is fantastic, and it would likely do what I want it to do. More characters, a few things missing, and better rules that I know and love.

Even better, I have 25 years of Swords & Wizardry and OSR content I can toss into this campaign.

With Level Up A5E, I get it all. I have to learn a new game, a more in-depth version of 5E, but I would have it all. And I would have a game that isn't changing in 2 years and plays like a community-patched version of 5E - the best of hundreds of peoples' ideas and agreement on how the ultimate version of 5E should play (with some cool 4E stuff thrown in there). I would play fewer characters since each one is 2 double-sided letter-sized pages of paper. Fewer characters, nothing missing, and rules I would need to learn.

I am converting 4E modules and playing 5E adventures, which isn't bad, but it isn't the OSR's depth and variety of adventures and content.

This would still be a 5E game, however. If you are not inclined to like 5E, you will get very little for jumping in. This has a lot of differences from 5E and an expanded exploration game support with mechanics. That is one thing that intrigues me, and feels like it does a better job than the original 5E. The cheese and exploits I disliked about the original game are gone and patched. Level Up feels like that "ultimate edition" that comes out a few years after the game that you wait for that includes all the DLC, graphical improvements, gameplay improvements, and quality of life improvements that take an okay-but-annoying game to incredible-and-satisfying.

And the game is free of Wizards, just like Pathfinder 1e was free. And my Pathfinder 1e game still is highly playable (and supported in 2022, surprisingly).

But there is one question I would love to have answered.

Is Level Up A5E the game they promised us in 4E, but this time with a massively improved 5E engine under the hood? If so, then this is my game.

D&D 4: The Fallcrest Campaign, Part 1

When we played D&D,  we only had the core material in the three core D&D 4 books - and this was the best time we had with the game. Every book we added we felt was excellent, but the power creep and changes just wrecked the game for us in the long run.

We hated the "level 10, leave for the planes" multiverse setup in D&D 4 and after. It marginalized every campaign world and made the tired "go anywhere, do anything" multiverse play the norm. To us, having a world scale from 1-30 was really cool, and it meant out there on this world, there were level 30 raid bosses lying in wait for those foolish enough to get near.

So for us, having the first three books and no "planar ejection seat" for high-level adventuring is when the game sang to us. It was cool. Paizo did a world like this with Golarion. They created this almost "sealed up" sandbox where all your fun, even the high-level stuff, was in one game world.

This was an epic place where epic creatures chose to live, and epic powers made their homes. There was a level 26 dragon in the mountains, with a dragon cult trying to become a considerable force in the world. Level 14 orc war bosses were serving as the leaders of temples of Orcus. The world felt like it had built-in challenges and a sense of scale.

No World Needed

We had the basic map and created the rest of the world ourselves. There were these "monster creation rules" in the DMG, which we used to develop foes, and we skipped many of the D&D standards. Need a level 5 brute and controller? Fine, just do some math and give them a few level 5 powers from a similar class, and you are done.

The D&D product identity monsters mainly were sidelined. We kept goblins as the lower-level humanoid monsters, while orcs exclusively started at level 5 - and they felt severe when they showed up, which we loved. We had this thing where orcs were never let out into the world until they trained until level 5, and most were followers of Orcus, so they were "bad dudes" whenever you saw them.

We let monsters take character class levels, leading to wild encounters. You never really knew if the encounter would go sideways when the monsters started pulling some of the same tricks the characters had, and the battles felt epic and unique.

It was a great place, full of adventure and nobody knew what was around the next corner.

More Books = Less Fun

The more books we collected, the less fun we had. The more official rulings told us we were playing the game wrong. The monster rebalances made us rely less on our imagination and more on the books. The new classes started repeating each other, shuffling powers or were so OP they became the hot thing and ruined the game for the original classes and characters.

We used the few bits of world info they provided and ignored the Greyhawk module transplants. The best stuff was the new and original content they produced for the D&D 4 world and that which captured our imagination.

And the constant focus on the planes lessened the fantastic world we had set up. Once you got to level 10, any one of the official campaign worlds felt like an MMO "starting player zone," and you left them to go flying around the multiverse. And it sucked. The incredible world we built felt like an aberration rather than an everyday thing.

Also, we saw the creep back towards the previous edition norms taking over. Orcs were a 1 HD creature, just like in AD&D! Please make things how they were! Run back into the cave allegory! We felt a little let down when we saw Essentials rolling things back to the older ways.

Our Way of Playing = More Fun

When I look back at this time, what was the most fun?

• It wasn't the world; since we ended up making that up.
• It wasn't product identity; we ignored it.
• It wasn't the adventures; we made our own.
• It wasn't the monsters; we made most of them ourselves.
• It wasn't the support for the game; too much support killed the game.

Was it the D&D 4 game? The rules were fun because they were new, and the new races were fun, but I am sure we could have fun with any sort of rules this way. The powers and leveling were okay, which had many problems where we felt characters got weaker as they leveled.

The unknown was very fun, using that monster creation system to come up with all sorts of new monsters "never seen before in D&D!" The more monster manuals we bought, the less fun we had fighting monsters. The more class books we purchased, the less joy we had playing classes. The more world books we bought, the less we enjoyed exploring.

It felt almost as if our imagination was better than the game we were playing. The more tools the game gave us to express our ideas, the better things were. The more the game tried to fill things in, the less fun we had.

I suppose all of that should be obvious.

The Nentir Vale (NSFW rant)

https://scots-dragon.tumblr.com/post/185426933202/the-big-fucking-dd-4e-rant

This.

This hurt to read. And it is about this:

It seems like heresy, but what the Trans Dragon Goddess (TDG, she/her) is saying is the 4E base setting is a lazy bastardization of Greyhawk. A lot of the 4E modules reimagined the classic Greyhawk modules and those were sloppily placed around the world.

To top it all off, we never got a world book for the 4E world. One was planned, but it never came out. That was the one book we were waiting for too.

Now, my brother and I loved this valley and setting, and it felt like home to us in our 4E days. We wanted a break from the mess D&D 3E had become for us and this seemed new and fresh. We did have a lot of fun here, but ultimately the lack of world info led us to make up a lot, and it never really meshed well with the modules or other official content, and all of the releases started plane-hopping and this world got left behind and put on the back burner as a "home base."

We loved it, we tried to expand it, but every book they released undercut our efforts. The version floundered, they went Essentials, and we knew the game was dead.

But what TDG is saying is painfully right. She goes on to talk about the changes to Planescape and the worse wrecking ball of a job 4E did to the Forgotten Realms, collapsing the entire Underdark (FU Drizzt!), shoehorning in dragonkin and eladrin into the setting, and how these places can never really be the same. Some of the changes just felt spiteful and mean.

And yes, she is right.

And I get this feeling there is little respect for earlier works and new creators constantly wreck and try and reinvent them to chase fads, like 4E's courting of the World of Warcraft crowd. There is this revisionism each new edition, where the AD&D Greatest Hits get replayed through 5E, 6E, and so on. The entire modern dungeon-punk faux-anime aesthetic - that started in 4E and is amplified today - feels wrong for Greyhawk and the Realms.

As if they would ever do a setting book that large again, they seem averse to the entire idea. What I want to see is a "new" Tomb of Horrors type module from these creators. Where are the new classics? Where are the new and original dungeons and adventures? At least Paizo puts its stock in new experiences and new adventures and experiences like Rise of the Runelords and Kingmaker as this generation's "classic module experiences."

Otherwise, Wizards feels like a Hollywood nostalgia remake outfit.

Even the Forgotten Realms in a way was a "reinvention" of Gary Gygax's work with Greyhawk, and you can see a new group of creators coming in and trying to one-up everything he did in the original setting. We have Lolth and the classic GDQ series! Well, we have Drizzt. We have Mordenkainen! Well, we have the "more Gandalf like" Elminster. And then the GMNPCs from the books ended up being god-like problem solving un-killable characters who eliminated the need for the PCs at all.

Bleh.

It is like going to a restaurant all your life and loving it and then finding the better place they were trying to copy and realizing you can't eat at the old place anymore because everything they tried to do to change things made it worse.

Derivative changes to be hip and cool. The turkey dinner in the hip faddish place that sprinkles inedible, sour cranberries all over the dish because "it looks cool."

You aren't supposed to eat them!

What a waste.

And the place you like now sticks to the basics. Good, hot food. No waste. Completely edible. Local sourced, and they make note of it so you can help small family farms too. Tasty. They aren't doing anything faddish or fancy, but the food is solid, tastes great, and is nutritious without going overboard on fats and salt. Sensible portions. They give you nicely seasoned vegetables too. And you get a small dessert as a treat.

You walk out feeling fed.

The fad place overdoes it, you love the giant plate of food and it is full of fat and salt, but an hour later you feel sick.

There are parts of the Realms I love and would take home to my games, but other parts that just felt too much like metaplot to explain away edition changes and the entire setting felt corporate and like it was trying to "support the company's current products" instead of being a place of imagination and storytelling.

But the modules I love, the ones I keep coming back to, are never from the Forgotten Realms setting era. They are from the classic Greyhawk and Mystara eras of the game. The Giants series. The Tomb of Horrors. The B-series. All of them are greats that stand the test of time, and they are recreating those for 5E. I can't really name one series of modules from the Realms era that really stuck with me over the years and has had this cultural impact on my life.

But I know going back is just trying to relive those moments, and what I really need are new adventures that amaze me for the first time again. I found some of those in Paizo's adventures.

And yes, we were big on AD&D 2e, but we never played modules. This was all character-driven plots and pulp adventure, and we ignored the FR setting adventures for the most part. These days, even if I play in classic Realms, I know what is coming and it casts a shadow over that setting - even if I say it never happens there are those things in the back of my head like a poorly written sequel movie that ruins the charm of the original.

The Trans Dragon Goddess wrote a great article, thank you. My world feels a little upside-down today, but that is okay. When you start to realize the lies you have been fed all your life were a bit hollow and there are better things out there to spend your time with, it hurts a little, but you get over it.

The Nentir Vale still feels like home, but if I were ever to go back here and adventure again, I would bring this little piece of home back with me to Greyhawk, where it belongs.

"Where Do I Start...?"

I was talking to a friend about playing a traditional pen-and-paper RPG with her over Tabletop Simulator, Basic Fantasy in fact. I like Basic Fantasy for new players mainly because of the modern-style AC system, the AC of a monster is the target number, and that is what you have to roll higher than to-hit. No attack charts needed, and what you see is what you have to roll.

Now she has been out of pen-and-paper gaming for a while, and we talked about her feelings about playing. Her response was she was interested, but she had no idea where to start. I actually gave her a copy of the rules last time we met, and even a game I feel is easy to pick up as BF was still a bit much to digest for someone coming into the hobby. Yes, I asked her if I could share this, by the way, and I hope to teach her how things work very soon. A new player, I know, very exciting...

Another "hard to start" issue with pen-and-paper games is inherently their open-endedness. With a game like Monopoly, there is a set board, set pieces, and a set world in a box that a player can figure out. This makes me miss the old Dungeon board game from TSR that was sort of the same way, a set board, a set world, and an ever increasing cave of danger with keyed room colors and stacks of cards for each "level" of the dungeon.

I sit here as an experienced DM with over 40 years of experience and there is a part of me saying, "Of course it is open ended with no map! That is where the fun is!"

And then there is the new player part of me saying, "I can understand why the hesitance. I can see why someone would ask, what am I getting into?"

What Am I Getting Into?

There is no map. The rules leave a lot up to interpretation. The DM can kill my character for any reason, even a stupid mistake. The world is unforgiving, as I could wander into a dangerous part of the dungeon and it is game over. I could run out of supplies down there, or worse yet, get lost. I could roll bad and it is game over. How do I trust the DM is being fair? How do I know when the dungeon is over? What if I don't want to be a part of a story, and I just want to play combat? What if I hate combat and just want to play a story?

Halfway through that list of fears that I came up with...I started to want to play the game, because I realized no other game was like this. It is a strange thought that the bad parts that a "traditional family board gamer" can come up with are actually strong selling points of a pen-and-paper game.

But I need to work harder at this I feel, harder at "selling" that fairness part of being a DM. A lot of the hesitance I feel at getting new players excited is the inherent mistrust of the dungeon master. That a DM won't be fair. That a DM will make it up as the game goes on. That a DM will look for every chance to TPK the party. That the DM will change things secretly in the background to either make things harder or easier. That a DM has secrets and can't be trusted. That a DM will use the player's misfortune as a source of enjoyment.

Again, as a DM with over 40 years of experience I laugh at those statements, but with my friend I can see how those same fears can just make someone say, "I can't put that must trust in someone so I am going to walk away."

The Game is The DM

With traditional board games, the game board is the DM. They are inanimate objects and the interaction between the pawns on the board and the rules define the "world" and the interactions between them are physical and can be understood in a 1-to-1 relationship. Like the Dungeon board game, you have these passages and rooms, you roll dice to move, and to pull cards to see what monster is in a room and your character card gives you the information you need to succeed in that battle. If you win, you pull a treasure card.

The trust is there built into the game, except the trust is contained within the world the game's designer drew on the map and built into the interactions with the pawns and game board. I see all the game's pieces, therefore my trust is built by the interactions between them.

D&D 4 was like this for us. It was "battle chess" for our group. The game was played on dungeon tiles. You didn't really need a DM, as you could setup the scenario and go. You could round-robin the monster's turn among players and have the monsters act to the best of their abilities.

The Module is the DM

I have this feeling how I am going to solve this is hold up one of my modules and say, "we are playing this, my job is to tell you what happens depending on where you go." It sounds so simple and obvious that I wonder why I am even writing this article, because that is what you are supposed to do. It is simple, right?

But for my friend, it isn't. She has no concept of any of this. For us in the hobby, this is easy. For outsiders, it is not so easy. That is why I am writing this.

That published module becomes "the game board" in her eyes, the "story book" she will adventure through. I feel this would all be harder if I were to wing it and make things up, because, "what are we doing?" I love narrative games where the action goes wherever the players drive the story to through their actions, but another part of me loves the, "buy it and solve it" style of play with prepackaged adventures. Later on, if we ever meet people who played these adventures as well we can share stories.

This becomes an experience she can talk about to others, and they can have that same experience - and they know the game's name, the adventure, and that becomes something she can share more than, "That person played this game with me and was a really good DM and he made things up and I had fun. I don't know the name what we played but we had fun."

Winging it can come later, and more story-oriented play can come later. She may just have fun doing this and that is all we do. For now, I think I solved the problem, even if this solution was the way I was supposed to do it in the first place.

But thinking through this in a different way gives me the perspective from her viewpoint, and I find that very helpful for introducing the game to her and all it has to offer.

Retainers and Hirelings Through the Ages

The original B/X rules had rules for hirelings, specialists, mercenaries, and retainers; and also the books contained rules for buying ships and building castles. One could surmise that putting together a large expedition is a part of the game.

We go to the seaport and spend a thousand gold hiring a small force of laborers and mercenaries to excavate the ruined temple while guarding our work site from the tribal lizard-men who surround the site. Make sure to find a good captain to commend the men and an experienced crew boss to manage the workers. Oh, and we will need boats too to haul everything out - let's plan on a large haul.

You spend money to get money. You spend a thousand gold because you know there are tens of thousands of coins down there in that ancient temple to haul out with pack animals (you had to buy) down narrow mountain tracks while protecting your haul from the lizard-men who see that temple as a shrine to their ancient lizard god and will do everything to keep your almost-colonial ambitions for loot and wealth in check with a poisoned spear and ritualistic shaman magic.

The hirelings? In it for the money too - probably more than they will ever see in their lifetime, so they accept the risk of being eaten by a basilisk in exchange for making what would take years with sustenance agriculture, taxes, levies, droughts, family costs, and unplanned economies that eats a hole in the bottom of the money pouch for the average peasant.

People forget medieval economics these days.

The AD&D Era

By AD&D we started to see the shift towards the more traditional "adventuring party" style of adventure, and don't worry, enough bags of holding will keep your labor costs down to a minimum. You could teleport in and out with a small team and clean out almost any location with just five people.

There were some notable mentions of large groups of hirelings being needed for adventures such as The Tomb of Horrors and others, but I don't really remember any module requiring you to manage a large group of hirelings during the time we played AD&D.

To be fair, the rules for all types of hirelings are here, but the ramp up in character and magic item power moved our games from more of an expedition-based adventure model into a super-heroic one where a small party of adventurers could do anything. Given enough gates, teleports, bags of holding, floating discs, and other cash-hauling magics there was this work multiplier with convenience magic that allowed a small group of mid-to-high level adventurers to haul huge loads. This was one of those forms of power creep that entered the game at this time, "Here's a common problem, let's solve it with magic!"

You get these types of popular wishes of players and the magic naturally rushes in to fill the void, and I wonder at times if some decisions are better left as they are, and some core concepts left alone.

AD&D 2nd Edition I felt moved farther along the "party of heroes" model and retainers moved to the back in importance. Your characters adventured alongside the heroes from the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance - just like those characters - and who needs an army of unskilled labor weighing them down when adventure awaits! We kept the super-hero model of the iconic D&D party, based our adventures off the Tolkien-like book heroics, and never really fussed with hirelings in most cases.

D&D 3.x and Pathfinder

The concept of "character build as deck build" came into play with the 3rd edition of the rules and all of its subsequent variants, and I feel retainers and hirelings moved farther back in the entire scheme of things. This is my character build, and it can take on all comers! Who needs hirelings when my character sheet is the length of a moderately complicated tax form and I am ready for any special case rule thrown my way?

Pathfinder's adventure paths are also a great example of adventures built for characters of this generation of the rules, typically focused on the party of four or five heroes and built around a mathematical challenge rating system that ensures a slow-but-steady drip-drip of resources that will be used every encounter.

And the 15-minute adventure day was born because players tended to alpha-attack the first encounter with everything they had and then headed back to the inn to rest a day before they tackled the next challenge. This was also a way to mitigate resource management and bad luck, as a bad encounter ensured you needed to bug out and rest to recover your bad situation.

But retainers and hirelings? Really pushed to the back further I feel, and the concept of putting together an expedition of NPCs and random swords for hire seemed as alien to this generation of gaming.

World of D&D 4-Craft

By D&D 4 a character was essentially an MMO character, and I don't even remember hirelings being mentioned all that much in any D&D 4 book. I am pretty sure they were mentioned somewhere but we never used them in our "battle chess" type games of tight hallways and chambers, grid based movement, and some really fun encounters during the early days of the game that we enjoyed. We never had room for hirelings on the game board since all our play were those tight, one map, small corridor and room fights the game did so well before the books piled on and the game collapsed under its own weight of revisions and expansions.

We had fun with the game, but we felt hirelings were so far removed from the game - and characters were so powerful and cool - that we never bothered with them. It felt like a cool video-game on the tabletop and that is how we played it.

D&D 5

Hireling NPCs rarely become important during an adventure...

That quote is on page 94 of the 5e DMG, and a 2 gp a day cost for any type of skilled hireling in the PHB and that is mostly all I can find on the subject. Also, D&D 5 does not scale that well (from what I hear) with large numbers of low-level characters assisting in a battle due to the flatter dicing mechanics, so I can understand why you shouldn't really cheese your way through every fight with Robin Hood and his 20-man sheaf of merry archers in formation behind you vaporizing any enemy in the Monster Manual with vollies of longbow fire. We are still in the "party as the base heroic unit" model of adventure and game balance.

B/X Style Play

I like the focus on putting together a Tarzan-like expedition of no-name hirelings and specialists for an adventure. I like having to hire mercenaries to protect our camp and supplies, and buy (or pay) ships and crews to haul back the loot to civilization. I like worrying about our supply of pack animals and food, where we get water from, and being called away from the temple we are exploring to deal with an attack or threat to on the group we hired.

That is cool, literary stuff for me, and it feels good. I like developing interesting NPCs for these groups, mostly no-names but there may be an interesting few people in the mix to interact with and add flavor to the game. Plus this matches some of the old-time movies that I love where a brave expedition heads down to a lost jungle or Antarctica and braves all sorts of hardships and dangers while seeking the lost treasures of the ancients.

And in B/X games those extra tag-alongs are typically weak, unless they are expensive and skilled hirelings (which you can have a limited amount of). The rules are also simple enough where you could battle out most any action scene with hirelings and mercenaries thrown into the mix without spending hours running the combat.

I don't like the "magic-superhero" style of play where we loot a dungeon by opening up a gate between point A and B and shove the piles of gold through the magic portal with farm tractors. I don't like magic replacing the need for hauling tons of loot, like owning twenty bags of holding and shoving everything in them for a quick teleport home. I like difficult and limited magic in these situations, and limiting the number of "ease of use" magic items so large expeditions are still needed and the way to do things.

The heroes can still be heroes, and it does not change the cool story moments where a classic skilled five-person party is needed to get things done.

This is all interesting how things changed over the years towards more 'cinematic' and party-based play and away from the classic 'expedition to nowhere' novel-style party-plus-hirelings model of play. Tastes and styles of play change, but I find it interesting (and informative in choosing a game) to reflect back on the history of hirelings and expeditions in gaming and how everything changed over the years. It is also interesting that many B/X games faithfully keep the hireling, ship, specialist, and mercenary rules around so this era of play can survive.

Wargaming Roots: Wargame Complexity

A fun little snip on the design of the Tunnels and Trolls Adventures mobile game's "about" page strikes an interesting point here about the development of pen-and-paper games and the hobby's wargaming roots:

In 1975, as role-playing games were beginning their rise to popularity among the gaming community, Ken St. Andre found himself dissatisfied by the complexity and inaccessibility which rules systems of other games presented newcomers to the genre. Seeking a game with which to introduce his friends to the world of interactive storytelling, Ken set out to create a lighter and more flexible rules system which would provide players with greater latitude for heroic feats. He did away with the often times dauntingly complex stat sheets and tables found in the wargames from which the first RPG was descended, and created a game more inspired by the deeds of comic book superheroes. Ultimately, Ken named his game Tunnels & Trolls.

We have come a long way from the Chainmail "wargame" style rules to a more player-focused and I feel accessible B/X style, and then from there I feel we went deep into the wargaming side of the hobby again with D&D 3rd and 3.5 Edition, Pathfinder, D&D 4, and then D&D 5. Our wargame roots are clearly on display and this has spawned an entire group of games these days that are more accessibility focused than complex wargame focused.

More Complex These Days?

In some ways, I feel we are way beyond the complexity of the 1970's wargame-roots games, especially with Pathfinder, D&D 4, and software like Hero Lab. D&D 5 I feel took a step back from the abyss, but I still feel the older B/X games and their clones do a better job at controlling complexity and focusing the action more on the adventure rather than the character.

Some products make me smile, like the Pathfinder Strategy Guide, a great book that tries to tamp down the complexity of the base game, explain things to beginners, and make a complex system easy to use. But really, when I think about it, I get this feeling if the effort were put into making the system easier and not needing a book like this would be a more laudable goal. Games that are simple and accessible to beginners do not need how-to books.

Part of me likes the complicated game though, and there are fans of this hyper-detailed genre of gaming, again, hearkening back to our wargaming roots and having detailed World War II wargmaes with rules for jammed turret rings, smoke capacity, the ammunition capacity and depression limits of of bow-mounted tank machineguns. I have played wargames like those, and while the one or two times that level of detail comes up in a 6-hour game you may be happy to have these rules, more often than not I find rules like this slow the game down more than they do add value.

I feel the same with detailed character generation systems. Our tendency as designers is to add more, to make options for every possible character type and background, and through universal inclusivity we weigh the system down so much we end up needing multiple pages for one character. Genesys requires three sides of paper for each character, and that has hurt our desire to play what should have been a simple storytelling game. Pathfinder, the king of complexity, requires Hero Lab these days, and it is not uncommon for us to be printing out six to twelve sides of paper for each character.

Less is More

And I look at the single-sided one-page character sheets of Labyrinth Lord and other B/X games and I see a lot of wasted space, and that is a good thing. I could do a B/X character on a quarter sheet of paper and put four to a side and still have plenty of room. Back in old-school Traveller we put one character on two lines of a sheet of notebook paper.

We still had fun with those games because we ran fun adventures and we didn't need detailed character essays for each player to pour over. I get this strange feeling at times that games use complexity to drive interest these days, that somehow a detailed character generation system makes up for a lack of compelling adventures and stories. That is really an unfair statement for many games, but I see so many games that are 90% character creation systems and then assume everything else, story, adventure, and how to have fun comes for free.

I would rather play a game that was 10% character creation and 90% story and background. Call of Cthulhu and Dragon Age are good examples of modern pen-and-paper games that minimize the game rules while maximizing story content and background information. I would put T&T in this category as well, especially with the incredible world-book in the Tunnels and Trolls Deluxe Edition in the latest version of the rules.

B/X and Labyrinth Lord? These are more giant toyboxes with 10% character design and the rest of the 90% are monster, spell, and magic item lists. That toybox content is the story and background. There are times when I like this, since I make my own stories and worlds anyways, and other times when I miss having that world and story to play through (and save me the work).

How far off are the more modern games from the toybox model? It is a bit tougher to judge I feel, since you have a good portion of these games tied up in character design and it grows in size the more books you add to the system. My generic rule is: if a computer program makes character creation easy and error free, the character design system is heavy. If it takes me more than 5 minutes and a sheet of paper to design a character that is too long.

If you need to pass a book around the table for players to design characters you have dependencies in there that should be streamlined onto the character sheet (or eliminated from the game). If I play Pathfinder with a group again I would love to have class-specific character sheets, one for paladins, one for rogues, and so on...

Everything to Everybody?

It brings to mind the question, "How much character design do you need to tell a story?" There is a point where there is too much, where you are making a feat to cover a bonus to every possible action and interaction, such as a feat that allows you to call a truce during combat. These sorts of feats rub me the wrong way in two ways: this is codifying roleplaying and creativity, and you are adding unneeded complexity to the character design system. Without this feat...you can't roleplay this? When I am refereeing the game it becomes another added "thing I have to remember" in order to play when the one character in a thousand's player actually bought this feat and expects it to come into play.

In T&T or B/X? Hell, make a CHR saving roll or roll under Charisma at a minus whatever and we are done. In most every other game it is an ability score roll, the current situation, and referee judgment. Done.

In the 1970's wargames there was this tendency to start simple, and then balloon complexity with each new expansion and revision. Track performance in taiga and mud for armored vehicles. Fuel performance and ambient temperature. Snowshoe size versus snow type. Curvature of the Earth and muzzle velocity of off-board artillery. Most of the rules had some historical event behind them and they probably affected the outcome of some real-world battle somewhere...but there is a point where enough is enough.

If I equip my desert soldiers with snowshoes does that give them a movement bonus? If my winter partisans carry large desert water packs at what point do those freeze? Do I need a table for that?

And the more complicated wargame goes in the closet and the new game that was designed for fast and fun play goes on the table. That is where I am with Pathfinder. Completely bought in with both books and Hero Lab and we never play it really all that much. Great customers and lousy players.

Simple Games are More Fun for Me

So I come back to the old versions of games, the retro-clones, and some of the classics made back in the day where they saw this problem and designed against it. Labyrinth Lord and B/X. Tunnels and Trolls Deluxe Edition. Other classics. There are some new games, such as Savage Worlds and FATE, that attack complexity of character design versus story and those are worth mentioning too.

I see a collection of huge books for a gaming system and my reaction is, "I don't have enough time for these anymore." Instead of feeling bad I switch games that I do have the time for. I am sensing another round of boxing games up coming here soon. It is a sad thing but also a good thing, since it lets me focus on games I want to play (and it frees up space for more games, like Traveller's new edition).

My thing is, play what you love - and some people love the complexity. I have moods when I love all the detail and choices. Be happy if you can find people who love what you do and play with them. As my players dwindle and I find myself more and more alone, my tastes and needs change. I want less record keeping and design. I want solo play. I want smaller rules and tighter designs. I want more story and world, and less rules. I want attribute systems that handle many things, and less flipping through books to find a rule that handles a special case.

My tastes are changing more towards the retro-clones and classic games that I started the hobby with because those are what I love and where I find the most comfort.

Fantasy RPGs and Loot

Our group had a discussion about itemization in fantasy RPGs, you know, your +2 magic sword, +1 chain mail, and +3 ring of protection sort of discussion. What game does the traditional "quest for loot" style of game the best? For this discussion we considered four games:

• D&D 5
• Pathfinder
• 13th Age
• D&D 4

Why is it Important?

Because...loot! There were some aspects of 13th Age and loot that started this discussion off, but it turned out to be a very interesting comparison between the games that we hadn't thought of. We do have some players with characters in our groups where loot and the acquisition of treasure is a very important thing, so much that systems with great loot rules and selections are a deciding factor in playing the game. Yes, I know, story matters, but I don't feel that it matters so much that it means the loot system needs to be radically changed or thrown out.

That said, this is admittedly a one-sided comparison of the games, and there are a lot more factors to take into account when determining what game is right for your group. Ease of play, ease of refereeing, story support, available adventures, published content, world support and a lot factors should go into that decision. But to just look at loot alone reveals some of the design goals behind the game, and this in turn gets at some of the inner workings of these games that is fun to study.

D&D 4 - MMO Loot

When we played D&D 4 the books were filled with page after page of the same item but with different stats. There were these pages-long loot sections with 'cards' of magic items with +1 to +6 versions of them going all the way from 1st level to 30th level. You had to get the 'best' version for your level, since the system felt like it was designed around everyone having level-appropriate gear.

We had encounters with a party that had low-level gear versus high-level monsters, and you could tell people missed a lot more often resistances rolls were tough to make, the monsters made their saves, and the entire encounter drug on forever and nobody had a good time. It felt like one of those 5 minute fights in an MMO where you spend forever killing a monster, only this was a fight 5 hours long and played on a tabletop.

Yes, D&D 4 had a lot of fun loot, but it was all 'you need to have it' and so evenly striated that none of it felt special to us. the game's loot system tired us out as much as sorting through 55 pages of green magic items in World of Warcraft's auction house tired us out. You had to have it to keep up, so we were left with this mess of a campaign where no magic item felt special and the party sorted through dozens of similar items looking for that next '+1 higher' item to get their character on par with the monsters again.

By he end of the game's life, the loot suggestions for the DM started to get kinda strange for us. Like having the players come up with a 'wishlist' of gear for the referee to hand out during the next few adventures. Sort of like an Amazon.com wishlist, but this one was for the gods (we guessed) and it felt like it was intended to end-run around random generation and avoiding the 'but his item breaks my character build' sort of random magic item handout policy.

And that was the last straw for us with that game. When character power depends that much on specific items for specific builds...no, this MMO feels broken and I am back to playing World of Warcraft.

13th Age - Story Loot

13th Age is almost an anti-loot game compared to 4th Edition D&D. The magic items are like D&D 4's, with a +1 to +3 range this time, and with specific functions based on slot, bracers do one thing while necklaces do another. They do have a cool system where magic item abilities activate on specific die rolls, even or odd results, and lots of cool mechanical interlocking rules - so there is some cool roll playing mechanics in here.

You can't buy magic items, which is a plus, but I find the lack of treasure types, monster treasures, suggestions, or tables of random loot to feel a bit lacking in my expectations for a fantasy game. The adventures I read seem also to be lacking in loot rewards so I come away with the impression that this game is more about story than it is grabbing a satisfying handful of gold coins and shoving it in your pocket. Adding to that is how magic items are handed out, as story rewards or as gifts from higher powers based on the system of faction relations built into the game.

I like loot as incentive in fantasy games, and this feels more story-like than loot driven.

If I had a group completely sick of the loot systems in D&D type games I would definitely go with 13th Age with them, since this game pushes loot to the sideline and focuses more on story and character instead of shiny objects and item power.

To be honest, 13th Age feels like a next-generation D&D 4 loot system with the wishlist feature removed but that referee-supplied loot mechanic still in place with the icon system and rewards. It doesn't feel MMO-ish anymore, but it does feel more like FATE for us, at least in story supplied loot as incentive or reward for story completion.

D&D 5 - Balanced Loot

D&D 5 is a highly balanced game with a lot of consideration to 'bounded accuracy' and other game design concepts. Magic items go from +1 to +3 and there are limits, such as limiting the number of magic items that can provide a benefit to three, as per the attunement rules.

It feels closer to the old-school versions of D&D in regards to magic items, and the game has a nice default selection which reminds me of the old AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide.

If ever there were a baseline game for magic item diversity and population, D&D 5 would be it. They worked hard to get rid of balance issues while still making magic items feel special, and the game has full support for monster treasure, hoards, upgrading equipment, and giving suggestions on what monster typically has what treasure. Most everything is balanced, so as a referee you can hand out a +1 whatever and still be reasonably sure the next game things won't be thrown out of whack too much.

I hear from forum posts that D&D 5's end game balance feels more single-character power oriented, where a one-on-one fight between a high-level character and a single high-level monster tends to go more the character's way. They say the end-game encounters in the game feel like they need to be groups of high-level monsters working together versus a single party and not a single-party against one creature. I need to do more study here (and some playtime to decide for myself) but from what I read, character power at the high-end of D&D 5 is very high on a one-on-one fight between a comparably leveled character and creature.

Pathfinder - Anything Goes Loot

Let's throw balance out the window (given a monty haul referee) and play Pathfinder. You can equip yourself into something like a minor god with some of this loot, and there are no rules on how much you can wear and equip - other than the highest bonus in a category is the one that applies, a +2 bow firing +1 arrows is still a +2 to-hit and damage bonus. Wearing a belt that gives +1 STR and a ring that give +3 STR is still only +3 STR. There are some rules in regards to effective caster level and item size that are worth following as well, which makes rings and wands less powerful than giant tomes or staves.

But if you are into stacking layers of loot and blowing balance out of the water, then Pathfinder is your game. A good game master is needed to keep things from getting out of control, but that insanely high level of crazy character power is there and attainable. Which makes gathering lot all that much more fun. Yes, part of the fun of the game in 3.5 D&D to Pathfinder is breaking it.

It is worth repeating, the referee is the one to blame if things get out of control, and I found they can go more crazy in Pathfinder than in other fantasy games. "But it was in the module," is not an excuse if a high-powered item ruins your campaign. I have had this happen, and the player in question becomes so attached to that item of power it gets tough to take it away. But rule #1 in all my games is easy come, easy go - all this stuff is paid for and you can lose anything at any time.

In other regards, Pathfinder is a lot like D&D 5 in selection, monster guidance, item tables, and loot rules. Pathfinder has been out a lot longer, so the selection with all of the books in the library is immense, so there is that to consider as well. There is almost too much loot at times, and I find myself yearning for the old-school games with the pared-down magic item lists.

In Pathfinder, there are high-level single-monsters that are designed to take on a party, so instead of D&D 5's more typical many-on-may fights you get Pathfinder many-on-one fights. Character power in Pathfinder trends to be more party and CR based, and at least I found as a referee fights are easier to balance and manage in Pathfinder than D&D 5. The traditional CR system carried over from D&D 3.5 to Pathfinder really helps and is still a strong system today compared to other games.

Another article is needed to explore Pathfinder vs. D&D 5 balancing, but it does play into magic items in regards to ultimate character power, so it is worth mentioning end-game balance.

In Summary

Play what you love. They are all different, but again there is this expectations thing with what the game supports versus a view of the game that may be off a little. Every game does something different, and they do it very well, so knowing what you like and what each game provides is a key to finding one that you and your group enjoy.

I admit, my views of Pathfinder before I did this thinking were down in the dumps a little bit, and I had my doubts on if we would play another long-running campaign with the game. Now I realize the power gaming potential here, I can better run this game with players who like a lot of loot and hand our rewards to match their expectations. this is not to say you can't have a high-powered loot game in any of the others, just that both the danger to unbalance the game and to meet player's expectations works for me a little better in Pathfinder than some of the other games on my shelf.

But if I can get a D&D 5 game running as well I would jump at the chance, truth be told. It comes down to excitement level with me and my groups, and what they would like to play. Getting myself excited and ready is the other half, and I suppose I am lucky to have a lot of games to choose from and players who like a diverse group of games. I could do a loot-based game just as well in D&D 5, and really the trade offs are personal preference and expected power level. If players are expecting to break the game (and have it broken over their heads in return with monster magic use), I will go with Pathfinder. For a more traditional experience I suspect I would go with D&D 5.

Again, play what you love and be happy. But knowing how these games works helps you understand them a little better, and also helps you find the right one to match your group's expectations. And it bears saying your experiences with these games may be different than ours, because these games can be played many many ways.