The wight came back, the very next day...
Now my age has more than quadrupled since I first rolled a d20. My youngest kids are teens and they have expressed an interest in D&D. I’ve been asked to DM a game for the first time in over 30 years. Once again, the ruleset has changed. Once again, I find myself buying a Players Hand Book, a Dungeon Master’s Guide, a Monster Manual.
I have to admit, this time the thought of playing (much less DMing) had me in a bit of a panic. I played 3e and 3.5e, and even then the franchise was trending toward more of a numbers based game, rules heavy, devil in the details. Feats. Skills. Terrain modifiers to DCs of every description. Armor check penalties. Move actions. Spell components. Synergies. Seemingly random Attacks of Opportunity. And oh... the combat mat. Gone were the days of just randomly slinging shit at enemies and shooting from the hip. If anything was indicative of the increasing degree of anal retention required to play the game, you should take a look at the miniature I painted for my character. I look at that thing now and wonder how the hell I did that without a microscope. Also, clearly my caffeine addiction hadn’t caught up with me yet because damn, I had steady hands. Everyone had a miniature. It was only the rarest of inconsequential skirmishes that didn’t call for their use.
Over the years I had heard chatter about 4e and it sounded like a plan hatched by a cabal of war gamers and certified public accountants. It didn’t surprise me given the spin that 3e leant to the game. It’s not like that’s a bad thing - accountants deserve to have fun, too. But it’s not exactly dyscalculia friendly. I imagined that 5e was simply more in the same direction, and imagined my learning curve going asymptotically vertical. Not to mention the codified world of Faerun, a world I knew nearly nothing about. During my time with 3/3.5e, we played a module that wound up more home-brew than not, so I never picked up the geography. (I realize that I can avoid the Faerun learning curve by making my own homebrew, but my time is limited and so is my experience DMing, so I'm sticking to modules for now.)
So imagine my surprise and delight when I picked up my new copies of the PHB, DMG and MM.
For the person who invented the advantage/disadvantage system, I owe you a pie. (I love baking pies. Pecan is a childhood favorite, but I also make fruit pies year round and pumpkin pies in the fall. Mmmm. Pie.) I love how broadly applicable the advantage/disadvantage system is. And while I’m a little daunted by the number of ability scores and learning about when they’re applicable, I deeply appreciate how simple the system is at its core, and how proficiencies are tied to level advancement. I mean it just makes a whole lot of sense. In real life, if you have proficiency in a skill and you use it on the regular, your ability in that area ought to scale as you gain experience. I’m not sure if that was added as 4e or 5e (as I said, I’m wholly unfamiliar with 4e), but like the advantage/disadvantage system, I admire its elegance.
And combat grids and miniatures truly optional? Count me in. Don't get me wrong, I love the combat aspect of the game. I'm no peacenik, this ain't Star Trek and exploration/social dynamics are only 2/3rds of the game in my view. I don't mind the idea of really roughing up or even killing off a player character if the dice roll the wrong way. It happens. (If I recall correctly, and admittedly it's been 35 years - it happened an awful lot in 1e.) But I felt like combat just dragged in the last games I played, and I am glad I can streamline or go details oriented for combat as I see fit. I have a mat, and I picked up some simple acrylic game pieces that can be customized to use with it. For big boss battles, I’ll probably pull that bad boy out. But for a goblin skirmishes and random encounters, it will be fun to do the math in our heads. And while I haven't experienced this firsthand, I also like the chatter I hear about deflating the degree of level power. I wonder if this also means that your characters retain utility longer? I seem to recall that the level disparity became so great during a campaign that by the end you were stuck killing deity level monsters and there was no way to make circling back to previous areas all that interesting without repopulating the area with entirely different monsters (which seems unrealistic from a storytelling point of view).
And finally, I don't know when the Ideal/Flaw/Bond/Trait business got added to the character sheet, but I love that. I especially appreciate a nice robust flaw. Because that's where the humor, the interesting story lines and the ingenious problem solving can come in. I guess I just find it much more interesting to watch how people work with imperfection vs. the Stepford Wives polished version of an uber barbarian and the perfectly adept rogue catering to the min/maxing (and perhaps other) needs of their players. We get enough airbrushing on social media and advertising and I'm pretty full up.
But I think the thing I like most of all about this particular edition is this: it's being played in my house and under my direction. 5e, 3e, 1e, whatever - it's the house rules that set the tone, far more than the edition. I'm not a control freak - life has taught me by a number of hard kicks that any semblance of control or self-determination is mostly an illusion. The universe is vast, we are small, and life is fleeting. And yet I have found that small moments of control can add real beauty and stability to a chaotic system. And the reverse is true, too. Small moments of cruelty or chaos can add real ugliness to a stable system. So yes. For the first time in a long time, my house, my rules, my tone. Let's roll.
And combat grids and miniatures truly optional? Count me in. Don't get me wrong, I love the combat aspect of the game. I'm no peacenik, this ain't Star Trek and exploration/social dynamics are only 2/3rds of the game in my view. I don't mind the idea of really roughing up or even killing off a player character if the dice roll the wrong way. It happens. (If I recall correctly, and admittedly it's been 35 years - it happened an awful lot in 1e.) But I felt like combat just dragged in the last games I played, and I am glad I can streamline or go details oriented for combat as I see fit. I have a mat, and I picked up some simple acrylic game pieces that can be customized to use with it. For big boss battles, I’ll probably pull that bad boy out. But for a goblin skirmishes and random encounters, it will be fun to do the math in our heads. And while I haven't experienced this firsthand, I also like the chatter I hear about deflating the degree of level power. I wonder if this also means that your characters retain utility longer? I seem to recall that the level disparity became so great during a campaign that by the end you were stuck killing deity level monsters and there was no way to make circling back to previous areas all that interesting without repopulating the area with entirely different monsters (which seems unrealistic from a storytelling point of view).
And finally, I don't know when the Ideal/Flaw/Bond/Trait business got added to the character sheet, but I love that. I especially appreciate a nice robust flaw. Because that's where the humor, the interesting story lines and the ingenious problem solving can come in. I guess I just find it much more interesting to watch how people work with imperfection vs. the Stepford Wives polished version of an uber barbarian and the perfectly adept rogue catering to the min/maxing (and perhaps other) needs of their players. We get enough airbrushing on social media and advertising and I'm pretty full up.
But I think the thing I like most of all about this particular edition is this: it's being played in my house and under my direction. 5e, 3e, 1e, whatever - it's the house rules that set the tone, far more than the edition. I'm not a control freak - life has taught me by a number of hard kicks that any semblance of control or self-determination is mostly an illusion. The universe is vast, we are small, and life is fleeting. And yet I have found that small moments of control can add real beauty and stability to a chaotic system. And the reverse is true, too. Small moments of cruelty or chaos can add real ugliness to a stable system. So yes. For the first time in a long time, my house, my rules, my tone. Let's roll.
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