Monday, April 30, 2018

D&D 5e: A Slower Healing Variant

For many who have played D&D over multiple editions, especially those from the TSR days, the rate of healing and recovery in 5th Edition may seem a bit fast. PCs come into every fight feeling fresh and energetic, which is a bit counter to the old school play style.

I wanted to be a healing and death to be a little more gritty than standard 5th Edition. I also wanted falling unconscious to be more dangerous and the possibility of instant death more likely. My desire was to removes some of the pop-tart effect of constantly letting the fighters drop to 0 hit points only to spring back up 6 seconds later. The healers should be doing their jobs before the front line falls unconscious.

When considering the changes, I thought the 7-day long rest variant as outlined in the Dungeon Master's Guide was overdoing it. While want healing magic to become a more important resource to be managed, I did not wish to alter other long rest recharge powers. In that vein, I wrote up a slower healing variant for B/X-5, my own home brew homage to Old School D&D. I think this modification strikes a balance between seemingly fast default healing and  overly slow variants I've seen. Healing works essentially the same as in 5th Edition with some minor changes highlighted below.

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Star Wars Wrasslin' Wroundup

This is a bit of a diversion from the regular blog, but I decided to just have a Star Wars conversation with two RPG luminaries... for no other reason than because I wanted to.

Join me, Marty "Raging Owlbear" Walser, Tom "Dungeon Bastard" Lommel, and Chris "King Torg" O'Neill (All Hail King Torg!) for a fireside chat minus the fire, about all kinds of Star Wars adjacent topics, from science fiction and fandom to prequels and sequels.

I want to thank Tom Lommel (@DungeonBastard) and Chris O'Neill (@AllHailKingTorg) for humoring me in this effort. The conversation was tangential, unruly, unexpectedly weird at times, and funny.


Thursday, April 12, 2018

D&D 5e: There's No School Like Old School

Artist: Bill Willingham
A recent post on Facebook got me thinking about Old School play again, and how Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition can be adapted to imitate the feel of older editions.

The gist of the post was that a DM had his players roll 3d6 in order to determine their character's ability scores and the now 5th level Rogue was concerned about his exceptionally low hit points (which they are also rolling for) due to a low Constitution and some bad die rolls.

Of course, there was a combination of "Your DM sucks!" and "This is old school... Suck it up and have fun with it." responses, which all somewhat miss the point because Session 0 should have set the expectations for that game...

But I digress... because that's not what this post is about. It's about B/X-5.


You see, a couple years back I had actually started to compile a list of rules for an 5th Edition compatible "old school" game based upon the D&D 5th Edition System Reference Document (SRD5). But, you know how life can sometimes get in the way of shit you want to do.

Anyway, after seeing this post, I took some of the pieces of my original idea and crafted a document for anyone who wants to try their own version of Old School 5th Edition. You can view the Google document here.

Other Owlbear musings