Inspired by reading this great article on B/X D&D playstyle, I thought I’d jot down my thoughts on Old-School D&D (and in particular, Basic/Expert or B/X D&D) vs. 5e, and include some easy ways to get 5e to run more like B/X D&D.
Category: D&D (Page 1 of 16)
Stan’s Favorite D&D Editions
I’ve been playing D&D off and on since 1979, and I’ve played all the editions. I’ll rank order my favorite editions from a GM perspective. I’ll also comment on the edition from a Player perspective.
My top four favorite D&D games were from the ‘D&D as War’ approach. Things were deadly, scary, and character death was a real possibility. If you encountered an Ancient Red Dragon, you had better run! My least favorite three D&D editions were the 3rd to 5th edition era, all of which approached the genre using a ‘D&D as Sport’ approach where you are expected to have balanced encounters, and monster stat blocks had about 10 times the amount of text and creature special features of the early edition, making things harder to run and slower to play.
I am kicking off an Eberron D&D campaign that will have a Noir feel. The characters will all be Inquisitives working for a detective agency. I want each character to have a secret of ‘scar’, some sort of dramatic element in their past that can drive adventures. Secrets can either be truly secret (the other players don’t know about them), or just secret to the PCs (so the other players know about the secret even if their characters don’t).
With all that in mind, here are 20 secrets and scars for Eberron characters to spark your imagination.
My Thursday group discussed running some old-school modules for nights when we aren’t doing our main campaign, ideally, the UK series, since those tend to be overland and less dungeon and combat-focused (so-as not to be too much like our main campaign).
Here are some various notes on old-school gaming for a group that mainly does modern D&D (5e, 13th Age, etc.).
This is the third of a 10-part series I’m doing on my favorite game systems.
My 8th favorite game system is the latest edition of the world’s oldest roleplaying game: D&D. It’s also the most popular RPG in history right now (at least in terms of a raw number of players; it would be interesting to normalize the data for the population of the 1980s since to see if on a per capita basis that was still true).
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