Old-School feel, modernized rules.
At the beginning of Episode 1, I mentioned that I am taking ideas for Original D&D. I wanted to clarify what I meant. I started DMing in 2015 and the group began with playing the shiny new 5th Edition. We probably got a quarter of the rules right, half of the time. I learned through experience and watching many of the channels that inspired this one here. But it has taken me many years to figure out how I like to play the game. 5th Edition's rules set up a lot of expectations from the game without it being explicitly stated such as; players are rarely in any real danger, every creature is hostile, every fight is to the death, you get XP from killing everything or you level when the DM says so, the world is tailored to the player's power level, and the DM services the character's "story". These are the common assumptions I've seen many players come to the table with and generally have in online discourse. When I say I am taking notes from old-school play, I mean that I am completely throwing these out.
I am making a big point with this game to reset the players as well as my own assumptions about how the game works to get a different experience out of a familiar system. From what I have read from OSR rulebooks (Swords and Wizardry, Old School Essentials) and old editions of D&D (B/X and Original) as well as seen/heard from discussions online it seems that the old-school experience was intended to follow a few key assumptions; adventuring is dangerous, player skill is more important than character abilities, the DM doesn't award XP you earn it, and the core mode of play is dungeon crawling where you pick your level of difficulty based on how deep into the dungeon you go. I wanted to bring these ideas to life in 5e. I am doing this with a few core changes to the aforementioned assumptions of 5e, so let's break those down.
The players are rarely in danger - As you can tell from Episodes 1 and 2, the players are always in danger of dying if they roll initiative. 1st level 5e is particularly deadly compared to higher levels, but this trend will continue. The world will not be "scaled" to them, there are no leveling zones like in a video game. The players will have to use their heads to decide if they can pick a fight or not. This also breaks the assumption that the world is tailored to their power level - it isnt. We aren't only dungeon crawling so they will have to use their setting knowledge and experience to know if a conflict is over their heads or best solved through other means. But they will be choosing their own difficulty as they go with what they get into and how they approach everything.
Every fight is to the death, we only get max XP from killing everything - During the first two episodes, I rolled a lot of Morale Checks (p. 273 DMG). This is an optional rule in the DMG which basically says that a creature might flee when it's surprised, at half HP, or have no way to harm its enemies on its turn. A group of creatures might flee when they all are surprised, their leader is knocked to 0 HP, or the group loses half their forces. The check is a DC 10 Wisdom save. This is pretty easy to do as a DM and doesn't take a lot of extra work in order to implement. It is sad it is an optional rule because I really like the change it had to combat once I started using it. The old-school way of doing it was to roll 2d6 and compare it to the creature's morale score. This method has slightly different statistics and isn't as swingy but 5e's monsters don't have morale scores so that would be too much work on the DM's side. Using the core mechanic of ability saves is perfectly fine. I also give full XP for any monsters that flee because they eliminated the threat one way or another.
Every creature is hostile - To combat this I am using an old-school mechanic known as the Reaction Roll. I rolled for this once for the tied-up kobold to see his demeanor. Any enemy you come across that doesn't have a predisposed demeanor (the raiders in the opening adventure were obviously hostile) rolls on this table.
This is the table that I made and is a simplified and modified version of this one that I found from an older edition.
Personally, I just found that to be too much rolling and there are many versions of this that can be found online, I prefer a simple bell curve that I would give a +/-1 or 2 to depending on the player's actions and approach to the creature.
We are playing through the DM's Story - This is the last assumption that I was upfront about with the players during session 0. A story is a retelling of events that have already happened. Events have to happen in order to have a story to tell. I will set up conflicts and events for the players to get involved in, shenanigans will happen, and after the fact when we are talking about this campaign post-mortem we will then tell the story of the heroes and their journey. I am taking the role as a DM not as a scriptwriter but as a neutral arbiter of the rules and the actor of the world's reaction to the player's actions.
The goal of implementing these slight rules and attitude changes is to create a fresh experience for my players and me as well as get a more rewarding, player-focused game that feels like we truly are exploring and inhabiting a living breathing world.
- C&D Daniel
