Sunday, August 16, 2015

Dungeons & Dungeons - My Basic D&D/5e Mashup

The record high in the valley
was actually 117°
I think the sun has finally baked my brain yesterday because I'm about to "Frank"-enstein D&D Basic with 5e.

Because I'm essentially trying to keep the overall feel of Basic/Expert I'm retro fitting the numbers from 5e into the Basic rules to start. There's a few things I like about the new rules, but for me it's not just nostalgia that keeps me going back to version of the game that got me hooked, but there's an elegance to the simplicity. I can just sit down with a group of players and be off and running in minutes. I don't expect to change much as far as rules go, but I hope to have characters that look and feel like Basic characters in much the same way  Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardy, or Blood & Treasure do, but can be played in any 5e game with little to no changes. The way I understood it, one of the core goals of the 5e design team was to make it modular so that swapping in and out simple house rules would not hurt the system. My vision right now is that this is just as much a set of house rules for 5e as it is a hack of Basic. Hopefully the math works out in the end. 

Sources of inspiration: Mentzer Basic Player's Guide,
Modlvay Basic, 5th Edition Players Guide, and the Rules Cyclopedia
First up character creation- rolling up attributes and aligning the Basic and 5e stat bonuses. This is still Basic D&D so there will be no point buy or average stat pool—3d6 down the line as The Maker intended it.
Comparing how the two systems handle attribute bonuses, Basic places modifiers per attribute rather than 5e's universal modifiers, so I'm going to replace all the Basic numbers with the bonuses from 5e.

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