Let's talk Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition

For anyone who didn't know, the Basic Rules are absolutely free.

The crowdtesting did seem to help FFG with its Star Wars RPGs, which are very, very good. The Pathfinder challenge was I'm sure certainly a part of why it might be better or more effort of a certain kind put in, but I think it also makes sense to treat D&D as its own genre and treat 5th as a best-of rather than try to derive inspiration from online RPGs or tactical board games (although, yes, I know that D&D arose from miniatures play). I would quite like to play it now, but time is agin' it. I'm having enough trouble trying to regroup the Edge of the Empire group that ran through the beginner game and at least claimed that they liked it.

Someone has done the hard work and converted 1st ed. Ravenloft to 5e. Grab it while you can (but not you, Jeff!)

Ravenloft 5e

I haven't really played the D and D since about 1983 or so. Are the fifth edition rules compatible with the fourth edition modules and what not?

My son has a mountain of Pathfinder but is looking for players.

craniac wrote: I haven't really played the D and D since about 1983 or so. Are the fifth edition rules compatible with the fourth edition modules and what not?

My son has a mountain of Pathfinder but is looking for players.

No, they're not compatible but 5e is easy to convert to. Although I don't know if it's worth the effort, 4th ed. didn't had a lot of good modules.

I suggest you get some d&d classics pdfs on rpgnow or go through your son's Pathfinder pile and see if any AP suits you.

I'm pretty psyched to get a game going. I've been GMing a PF game for over a year now and I hate that system. Everything is way more complex than it needs to be and it feels like I am playing a technical manual for engineers. That is cool for some stuff (hey, I have Phoenix Command) but all I want to do is go back to 2e. 5e gives me that feeling, that I can innovate on the fly, whip up stuff on the go, and jave a stack of bad guys all on one sheet that doesnt require me to search though pages of keywords to figure out how they work. And I'm hoping my players wont have to use calculators to optimize their level increases and can just pick what they think they will enjoy.

Agreed -- Pathfinder sucks! /troll

EDIT: If you want real ease-of-play, though, you could go Dungeon World -- once you grasp the basics, you never really have to refer to the rulebook.

Have they made combat less slow and cumbersome? It always seemed off to me that there was such a combat-heavy focus in the rules but combat itself was kind of boring and repetitive. Then in 4th edition they decided to give everything more hit points across the board...

Combat killed 4E for me. We'd do some actual roleplaying and then get to a combat that lasted 90 minutes. We used our dailies and encounters and then just futzed around with At-Will's for the next hour. Good times....

I think there's been a fundamental flaw in role-playing since its inception 40 years ago. The best role-playing happens with less rules, but publishers need to sell in order to survive, meaning a need for more rules. The result is that they have to persuade you that you're getting a better experience when you're not, or drop an entire chunk of rules on you in a single package for an expensive price to maintain revenue. This was true for AD&D in 1980. New spells, new critters, new magic items were all great and some of the modules coming out were very good. But "publish or die" put some pretty weird stuff out there that rules-wise that didn't work very well or sell very well.

So StormSeeker's comment above regarding combat is on the money as far as I'm concerned. It seemed to be quicker and paint a better picture when there were less rules, and we ignored some of the others that seemed to detract. I had a devil of a time getting into a combat in Pathfinder recently because the DM was pinging me on "facing rules" or something like that (don't remember, it seemed stupid that I couldn't come into a combat late which is what thieves do). We would just spitball it years ago in AD&D and that kept things moving faster and kept things more dramatic. Maybe they were less "real" but who cares? Real is overrated when you're looking to blow off steam.

I suppose you can ignore or add whatever rules you want, but if 5th edition is moving towards a more simplified form of combat that's a plus as far as I'm concerned. Easier to get down to the gaming.

By the way, what the hell is a "daily"?

S.