Got the beginners 5e d&d box… going to be playing with the family soon.
I played 2nd edition back in the day.
Any opinions on 5e?
It is the most like 2nd Edition AD&D since 2nd Ed.
3.0/3.5 and Pathfinder (which is basically 3.75) were really, really crunch heavy and shifted the focus away from Role-playing to Roll-playing.
4.0 was basically a tabeltop MMO and focused entirely on Roll-playing.
5th has taken it back to being more rules-light and Role-playing centric.
As a die-hard 2nd Ed. guy, 5th is the only other version i’d even consider playing.
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Oh ok, that sounds good.
I was worried 5e would be very different from 2e. I got some d&d apps to mess around with. They have the entire 5e bestiary and random encounter generators… crazy.
5e is by far the most polished edition in terms of mechanical flow. The three main books in the series, The Players Handbook, The Dungeon Master’s Guide, and The Monster Manual cover just about every scenario you can run into, with the rest of the books like Volo’s Guide to Monsters and Xanathar’s Guide To Everything offering additional options for monsters and player characters alike. They’re basically expansions to the original 3 books.
But even then, the rulebooks themselves stress that the DM should have the final say when a question comes up. Even the makers of 5e would rather the game flow well than have it stop in it’s tracks while players argue about and look up an obscure rule.
There are a couple complaints among players about 5e, but not many. For one, the Ranger is noticibly weaker than the other classes mechanically. It forces you to pick a favored terrain on character creation, and unless you’re communicating with your DM before the game, you might never even encounter that terrain in your session. The Revised Ranger in the Unearthed Arcana PDF (which is a public beta test) can be found online, and it fixes most of the issues the base Ranger has, but you’ll want to talk about it with your DM, because the official Ranger and Revised Ranger are incompatible with each other, so you really can’t mix anything in the official books with the Unearthed Arcana Revised version.
That’s really the only gripe I see most people have with 5e, but as I said, the DM has the final say, so even if you use the base ranger, it has a TON of rollplay options that can basically negate any weaknesses it has in terms of combat effectiveness. They’re still a great party contributor for the rollplay aspects.
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That sounds cool. A smooth flowing game vs a strict rules game is great.
Also the info online is brilliant… wish I had that back in the day… (well that goes for everything I guess).
At the very least, I’d still recommend buying the Player’s Handbook in addition to the starter set. It has the majority of the rules you’ll likely run into.
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5e is amazing.
Something I never experienced in previous editions – making a list of houserules and watching it shrink over time. Usually it was the opposite.
My only issue remaining is the Beastmaster Ranger, but WotC is in the process of rebuilding the Ranger class.
Something to keep in mind, there are many variant rules (in both the PHB and DMG) which allow you to really fine tune the game how you want. Even to the point of swapping racial ability score bonuses (DMG).
It’s really an excellent ruleset.
If you want to keep playing after Phandelver, I highly recommend Curse of Strahd or Waterdeep Dragon Heist.
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