What is Old School 5E? Well, one game begins the discussion, and that is the excellent Shadowdark from the Arcane Library. Is this game "Old School 5E"?
I need to define what I mean by 5E first. I feel the heart of 5E is not the d20 resolution system, nor is it an advantage-and-disadvantage dicing system. Nor is it in the stat rack or rolling damage on polyhedral dice. Otherwise, most of BX is 5E.
To me, 5E is the character build system. This is what people play for, why they show up at the table, and the part of the game that they play without needing a referee or an active game at the table. This is what Tales of the Valiant and Level Up A5E try to redesign with their implementations of the core rules.
The character build system is the holy grail of 5E.
Tales of Aragosa will come up in this discussion, too, since it is a 5E-like system without the comprehensive build system that real 5E needs to be compelling. This system is a refinement of the excellent Low Fantasy Gaming and remains an excellent system for low-powered 5E.
Shadowdark rewards clever play and risk management (lights, expendable items, and managing inventory space). You may need to drop that 10' pole to pick up that bag of gold. That decision may be a life-and-death one.
5E rewards character optimization and resource management (resting). 5E has a video-game power-replenishment feel built in, and in most implementations of 5E, inventory management is deemphasized. This will be a problem for us in the final set of rules we pick for Old School 5E, and we will need to find a 5E implementation that does a better job at making inventory and encumbrance important.
5E also has exponential power progression, whereas Shadowdark and Aragosa are more linear. This is another requirement for Old School 5E: we must meet the player expectations for a "5E" experience.
- We need character building
- We need the power curve
- We need the full 5E experience
So this gives us a few options:
- D&D 2014
- D&D 2024
- Level Up Advanced 5E
- Tales of the Valiant
So how do we judge these? We need a criterion to pick and choose them on; otherwise, it is just your dungeon game of choice. We need to go back to the original source and pick out some things to look for.
For that, we will use BX D&D, the classic, and figure out what we are looking for in our mythical "Old School D&D." We need our 5E game to closely align with where the challenges are in BX D&D, without just playing BX D&D. We want 5E to be as close to the challenge, resource management, and gameplay loops we find in BX. The closer we can get to BX, the better of an Old School 5E we will have.
We also need to take the Expert Set into account, since we want exploration to be supported. So, on a rough first draft, what are we looking for?
- Lethality
- Serious Injury and Death
- Balanced Rest and Recovery
- Realistic Healing
- Exploits Addressed
- Inventory Management:
- Encumbrance
- Consumable Items
- Items Used in Exploration
- Meaningful Treasure (at a cost)
- Turn-Based Play:
- Dungeon Turns
- Wandering Monsters
- Light and Vision
- Interactive Gameplay
- Wilderness Gameplay
- Wilderness Turns
- Survival Mechanics
- Food, Shelter, and Weather
- Wilderness Encounters
So we have a few areas we want to judge each game on, since these are the big reasons to play BX. We want to see whether they can be "ported in" to our favorite version of 5E, or whether our favorite version of 5E already includes these as a rule option. We could mod the rules from a 3rd-party supplement, but we want to be fair and see how many options each game comes with on its own, to reduce the number of books we need to support.
We do not want to go into this and have the same old exploits used in our games: pop-up healing, the lack of death in the game, goodberries being all the food you need, and the unserious nature that many games fall into. If a game has rampant exploitation of these rules oversights, then it will score poorly on our criteria list, which means D&D 2014 will likely start out at a massive disadvantage. But we will be fair and give it a chance, since optional rules could fix things, if they are present. If a game lacks rules in an entire area, such as exploration and wilderness rules, it will also score poorly.
Also note that Shadowdark earns an almost-perfect rating across all these categories (except wilderness), as well as under the original BX rules (which are perfect across the board). Aragosa also rates very highly in these categories.
But our job here is to find a version of 5E that preserves as much of the old-school methodology as possible, while keeping the character build system, progression, and power level intact.
BX will be our guidepost, but 5E will be the road we travel.
