Question Dungeons & Dragons 5e

I’m a gamer.

It’s a simple thing to say, but very true. I have been playing tabletop RPG’s and warhames since I was a teen, nearly 1 1/2 decades now. I have played Exalted, Call of Cthulu, Cyberpunk in all it’s various incarnations, D&D (3.5e, 4e and the subject of this post, 5e). I’ve played Shadowrun, Deadlands, Paranoia, Mutant City Blues, Warhammer 40k, GURPS, Pathfinder, all the greats of tabletop gaming. I’ve spent countless evenings listening to dice clattering across a tabletop, and weaving epic tales in fictional worlds. But the one game I have spent the most time playing is D&D 5th Edition.

Fourth edition was garbage. The one thing I hate is unnessecary bulldrek that companies force you to buy to fully enjoy a game. This includes multiplayer subsciptions like PS+, or those frakking minitures that 4e kept shoving down my throat and chocking me yo death with, all while they ripped money from my fingers.

Now, you didn’t have to buy the minis, or the terrain tiles, or the ‘helpful’ supplements. But my god did 4e just try to make it required. It turned D&D into something akin to a warfame, rather than a RPG. If I want to play a fantasy wargame, I’ll play a actual one like Warhammer Fantasy, or whatever damn thing it’s been rebranded as.

But 5e mskes it so frakking simple. Instead of the endless supplements and the massive pair of tomes that were laughingly called ’core rulebooks’ you have three thin volumes, which are 50% hardback cover, and half easy, understandable rules.

So, argue that 5e is not the best edition of dnd ever. If you dare.

Discuss and comment

Oh, that's so cute! Here, let me show you a REAL version of DND



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And before you ask, yes, I played Chain Mail too.. Young whippersnappers!

Chainmail is before my time, but for me, D&D never recovered from Advanced.

I actually spent an evening with Dave Arneson , Co-Creator of Dungeons and Dragons, author of the Blackmoor setting and all around great guy. He was teaching at Full Sail University at the time and my buddy was a teaching assistant, and I got dragged along to the Christmas Party.

We had a great night commiserating the horrible D&D Movie (His apology for which were the first words out of his mouth to me!), gaming, world creation and life in general. It was an evening I won't ever forget. 10 years now, since he passed, rest in peace Dave. You are remembered.

I actually liked the second D&D movie, they seemed to have gotten rid of the Hollywood input and totally ignored the existence of the first movie and it was like the original European production studio hired their own writers and actors and just got on with making their own fantasy movie, it was actually quite a bit better then the original one, I wish I could find it again.

Ah, D&D, the 3 A5 booklets in a cardboard box....

Phoenix, you would probably like Gamers: Dorkness Rising by Deadgentleman Productions. It might even still be on Netflix streaming if you have it.

I have Netflix, but the Singapore catalog is substantially different to the US (well in one way it’s better, Netflix Singapore has a seriously good Anime catalog).

It's a bit battered, but I still have a Base Box of Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition back home, found it in an Emmaüs. Heck, most of my solid RPGs books are garage sales findings. Man, I wish I had more people to play with them... Welp, now I can go to play RPGs every two weeks, and none of them would exist without our Twin God Emperors, Gygax and Arneson. Thank you for creating this gender genre, and for everything you ever inspired, people.

Keeping the typo for posterity and craziness. French keeps creeping on my English.

I never went deep into the modules, although it's probably "Tomb of Horrors" that I have sitting in a box alongside "The Unknown Gods" from Judges Guild. Somewhere along the line I ended up playing AD&D and then D&D 2nd Edition (five years later) within basically the same campaign. Include exposures to Gamma World, Chivalry & Sorcery, Champions, and Space Opera around the same time.

SCA took over for tabletop games until I was encouraged to join a VtM LARP, and then another, so I didn't get back into D&D until v3.5. Our principal GM hated v.4, and no one at the table blamed him, so we switched to pre-release Pathfinder. Then there was Shadowrun 4th edition's last legs. VtM might be responsible for my character creation style shifting from Copier to "*sigh* Hand it over. *beat* You're just doing to this to see me cry, aren't you?"

Edit, after seeing the typo in Hardric's post: The latter leads to questions from the table like "Which gender are you today?" and "GM, do I WANT to know what just happened?"

E. E. Nalley wrote: Phoenix, you would probably like Gamers: Dorkness Rising by Deadgentleman Productions. It might even still be on Netflix streaming if you have it.

..."Together, the four elements are weak. But together they form the powerful fifth element: Boron"

and

..."He who walks around in darkness is blind. He who stands out in darkness is...fluorescence."

..."Lose 50 experience."

and (from the first movie)

...I steal his pants!!"

..."Why would you want his pants?"

..."I don't. I just want to see if I can steal them."

..."Ok, roll it."

...[dice clatter]

..."I don't believe it...are you quite done now?"

For those of with free time and the ability to travel to central Wisconsin in early November. I present, well actually I don't present it I present a different con, Gamehole Con Special Guests you may recognize a name or two on the list.

The five or six groups I played with, even a few initially reluctant spouses and girlfriends included in the latter ones...it was always fun, regardless of edition.

- We mostly played AD&D 2nd, though the math gets to some people, because it isn't standardized depending on what you're doing. It was always my favorite because of the sheer magnitude it became. The class kit books are my personal favorite addition.

- I personally loathe 3.5, because it practically demands the use of miniatures, and I felt it took away a great deal of your creative freedom, and eliminates so many house rules and rule exclusions simply because of the way it works. It's also far too reliant on gear, making the DM constantly have to create new loot to keep up with the level progression of the characters and enemies to keep things balanced. But a lot of people love it because of the structure, because some are uncomfortable when simply looked toward and waiting for them to tell part of the story. It's just not how I like to play.

- Fourth, we never touched.

- Fifth, is good. It is a nice hybrid between the creative freedom of 2nd and the structure of 3.5. Loved the additions of new class-specific systems added for players to have creative fun with, like for the Fighter, so they weren't reduced to just "I hit it with my sword again." Fifth actually encourages creativity all around the table.

Minh,

Naw, the best line had to be:

I will smear the buttery jam of Justice over the hard toast of your evil!

I forgot! We also played a fair amount of the d20 System titles for a few months. Modern, Urbana Arcana, Apocalypse, etc.
Those are nicely balanced and a lot of fun as well.

edit:
Oh, and Darwin's World.

Katssun wrote: - I personally loathe 3.5, because it practically demands the use of miniatures, and I felt it took away a great deal of your creative freedom, and eliminates so many house rules and rule exclusions simply because of the way it works.

On the idea that v3.5 required miniatures for everything, and took away creative freedom by providing rules for standard things that AD&D 2 failed to include, we're going to have to agree to disagree. Maybe it's just because I've never heard of a v2 (or v5) player even asking the question "Can I suplex this horse?" (The answer was "Yes") or asking someone, anyone, to please fireball the ranger because he's hurt (evocation specialists do come in handy)

"What do you mean 'our chaotic good cleric is still a virgin'? He's got a room at the brothel!" probably does get asked from time to time.

I will say that v3.5 was no more "linear fighter/quadratic wizard" than its predecessors, nor less, and even had the same option for correcting the class power discrepancies that really kick in at levels 15 and up. Some would say the system starts breaking against the fighters around level 12, but I think my longest-running characters only got to level 13 or 14. Dieties start picking up the prayer phone personally once Brother Power starts asking for Level 7 spells anyway.

I must confess that I did something really stupid in my mid 20's. I had all but the Immortals set of BECMI D&D. And now the only one I still have is the Basic Set. At some point, I threw my Expert, Companion and Master's set in the bin. My next stupid RPG decision was buying a D&D Dungeon Masters Guide instead of the Rule Cyclopedia. Which I then swapped for a AD&D 2nd Edition DM's guide, in frankly much poorer condition than my original.

On the Upside, I did manage to snag the premium reprint of Original D&D off of Amazon at a really good price. It's a very nice bit of nostalgia, with a very nice double set of dice.

Though Really back in the days I managed to game a bit my friends and I probably played more GURPS than anything else.

So true. I liked 3.x pathfinder is my favorite poison btw. Because if all the bits and moving parts. You can specialize and customize way easier. The only thing I hated was the change to how multiclassing worked.

RoseBlack wrote: So true. I liked 3.x pathfinder is my favorite poison btw. Because if all the bits and moving parts. You can specialize and customize way easier. The only thing I hated was the change to how multiclassing worked.

It worked well enough for me to give it a shot for a couple of characters. I think one of the drawbacks was that it became more difficult for the optimizers to get some of the insane Level 20 builds that 3.5 encouraged. Multiclassing plus retraining made it fairly easy for a character that started at a low level to grow along with the campaign if the story line changed course.

Yeah I was the DM for most of the 3.0-3.5 era and my group tended not to optimize to hard simply cause that's not how they pictured their characters. And note they had the skill to do it they just choose not to. I was running for a group off fort Bragg they are the ones who taught us to play back in 2e. So I was used to optimized tactics they would go through a dungeon like they were Eldritch lol. But i didn't have to worry about them pushing the limits and breaking the game. So I could scale encounters pretty easy and tweak things to challenge without worrying about this guy killing the whole group of bad guys in one round and if he missed the group getting slaughtered.

So since we weren't playing rocket tag things went great plus I could expect the older members of the group to keep the party together and be wary and not walk right into most things. Plus I could optimize enemy tactics for synergy and count on the group to fall back and figure a way around rather than fight til they died or won.

Plus them not turbo optimizing but being tactically sound ment I could toss a ccouple extra lower cr mobs in to fill out the action econ I almost never gave them one big foe to fight dragons would have riders who were pet clerics or could roar as a free action and restock the kolbolds in their hoard room unless the pcs made sure to clear them out first which was almost impossible cause kolbolds.... BBEG wizards always had a few guys in heavy armor with the feats to just keep people from going by even if they couldn't do much damage. (We had a Orge with large and in charge and monstrous blow one time. The party fighters hated that they would get knocked back out of the ogres reach every time they tried to slip by.) And other stuff like that to make things how do we do this not just wade in and slaughter.

I love MMO's

I have played since the days of the dice rolling YOU!
you got simple dice with no marked numbers, you had to color in the numbers dents to read them~!

Miss the old days of hanging with buddies and Nimh you are right the last few books that came out sucked ...because? Wizards bought them out after ruining the whole Idea of MMO's with simple 'card' games of good old 'war' I played as a kid!

Now I am in Atlanta and next week or so the MMO books are free from their shipping boxes and I will fill yard after yard of shelf space with my collections as I unpack...then maybe look for a local game?

Ohh and for rules?
I use the 'books' as a guide and come up with a VERY simplified system that does the same thing...so you can play and NOT count dice rolls...lol

E. E. Nalley wrote: Oh, that's so cute! Here, let me show you a REAL version of DND

Edit
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And before you ask, yes, I played Chain Mail too.. Young whippersnappers!

LoL I played that too!

But now let me MAKE you cry

when I moved....I had to toss my WHOLE collection of dragon magazine going back to issues like 30...so sad!

I miss planescape and spelljammer. Dam you wizards.

Let me preface this by stating I have never played a single minute of any tabletop role-playing-game. Ever. So I have no preferences whatsoever.

With that said... what is Astérix doing in that cover?

Sir Lee wrote: Let me preface this by stating I have never played a single minute of any tabletop role-playing-game. Ever. So I have no preferences whatsoever.

With that said... what is Astérix doing in that cover?

The guy falling off a boulder with an arrow in his chest?

Wishing he hadn't gone topless to catch some rays.

Another great/terrible thing about 5e is that Gygax's Legacy Lives on. Prepare yourselves for instant death and for being really paranoid at every f**king detail that the GM mentions

Tomb of Horrors returns as Tomb of Annihilation. Hide your children, and hope to whatever demonic entity that your DM isn't in a particularly sadistic mood.

Want to have some nightmares? Go face Zuggtmoy , the Demon Queen of Fungi in The Temple of Elemental Evil!

null0trooper wrote:

Sir Lee wrote: what is Astérix doing in that cover?

The guy falling off a boulder with an arrow in his chest?

Wishing he hadn't gone topless to catch some rays.

No, the archer guy in foreground. Red trousers, black shirt, brown boots, yellow belt, gladius, silver helmet... all he's missing are the wings on the helmet. He might even have a bushy blond moustache, we can't tell from this angle.

E. E. Nalley wrote: Want to have some nightmares? Go face Zuggtmoy , the Demon Queen of Fungi in The Temple of Elemental Evil!

Don't forget the special treat on the stairs..... We managed to TPK our whole party my session ever with that. As a player. The three vetrans where just like wtf guys.

RoseBlack wrote:

E. E. Nalley wrote: Want to have some nightmares? Go face Zuggtmoy , the Demon Queen of Fungi in The Temple of Elemental Evil!

Don't forget the special treat on the stairs..... We managed to TPK our whole party my session ever with that. As a player. The three vetrans where just like wtf guys.

Still, tomb of horrors (the original) is f**king insane with how many ways you can die. There's even a bit which specifically tells the GM to fake a 'rocks fall, everyone dies' moment, then close the book, begin packing up the stuff, and basically screw with you. Our GM actually had us pissed off to the point where one of our oldest members left in a furious mood, right before the GM revealed the game was still going. Gygax may have been the greatest game designer in human history, but he certainly knew how to be a complete dick.

This is true a friend of mine is running tomb right now lol.