By Michael Robinson
Rutibex
"OSR"/5e
Levels 3-5
Greetings Adventurers! Embark on an exciting hex crawl adventure in the new module – Three Witches! Explore a diverse and dangerous realm, where three rival witches vie for power and influence. Unravel the agendas of the Desert, Forest, and Mountain witches. Will you ally with one to defeat the others? Can you resist their corrupting influence? The fate of the realm lies in your hands!
This 145 page adventure uses 35 pages to describe twenty hexes and about thirty rooms over three dungeons. A bland outline, I’m not even sure there’s a pretense that this is OSR.
Hey man, I’m reviewing a longer work! Know you all want this! Let’s see … “For OSR and 5e!” Usually that means its a 5e adventure with maybe a page of stat conversions for OSR systems. This doesn’t even do that. It is clearly a 5e adventure, even though the cover and marketing indicates that its compatible with OSR. Sure, in the same way that a Funyun is compatible as a hammer. I could take all of the stats in that Star Frontiers adventure and do my best, on my own, to convert it all over to B/X. But, then, is that worth marketing? So, fuck you Rutibex. After this one I’m moving on with my fucking life, such that it is. Fucking garbage.
Most of this product is the witch class, with the usual long ass spell descriptions taking up most of the page count. That’s about 35 pages for the hex crawl and dungeons and about 110 pages for the witch class, spells, and a couple of new monsters. Joy. Love this. A 140 page adventure with a hexcrawl and three dungeons and five pages of bullshit tackon? Super cool. But the other way around? No thank you.
There’s no lead in here. I gather that there is a region and that there are three witches here all crying for power. We know nothing about the region, or town, or people, or even the witches and their vying for power. We just get a wandering monster table for each terrain type. Here we go! “A fairy ring. Entering it could transport the players to a fey realm or cause other magical effects.”No? How about: “A cursed statue in a small pond, with a puzzle that, if solved, breaks the curse and grants a reward.” These are typical. No detail at all. I get it, wanderer. Short. Terse. But, man, you write the fucking encounter. Put the fucking thing down on the fucking page!
This is, of course, a pretty blatant symbol of whats to come. Let’s look at those hex descriptions, shall we? “A barren and scorching desert, where only the hardiest creatures survive. A large sandstorm obscures the horizon, making navigation difficult. The players may encounter a band of nomadic raiders, a hidden oasis, or a mysterious ruin.” Again, this is a fairly typical hex. A little one liner that is super generic about the terrain and then “you might encounter/see A, b, or C.” This is not creativity. This is not, IMO, a hex crawl. This is just a bunch of crap thrown down on page that requires a DM to do a metric FUCK ton of work to turn it in to an adventure. That’s not my fucking job. That’s not why I bought this fucking adventure. I wasn’t hoping for “frozen tundra. Maybe there is something here for the party to interact with?” Thats the fuck the job of of the fucking designer. I swear to fucking god. How can someone think that this is an adventure, or adding value, or making a DMs life easier? Or even inspiring to run? There’s nothing specific about anything in that fucking hex crawl.
Let us move on to the rooms in the dungeons. “”As you step into the cavern, your footsteps echo ominously through the dimly lit corridor” Second person read-aloud and purple. And the, how about this: “This corridor serves as the foreboding entrance to the Cavern of Bones, setting the tone for the grim discoveries that lie ahead” That’s the DM text, describing what the room is. You know what would be better? Designing a room in which you show us that this is a foreboding entrance rather than telling the DM that this is a foreboding entrance. It’s absurd to put in a line of text that tells us that room one, the entrance, is the entrance. In another place you come upon a pit trap with some bones at the bottom. The DM text tells us “it’s rumored that the bones within the pit belong to thieves and adventurers who sought to plunder the cavern’s secrets, only to meet their demise at the very threshold” This is clearly not written for a DM or for a player. It’s written to be read. And an adventure to read ranks just above “shameless money grab” at the bottom of the list of adventure sins.. In another room, the Guardian Chamber, the read-aloud tells the players “As you step into the circular expanse of the Guardian Chamber your torchlight flickers “ Now how the fuck are they supposed to know that its The Guardian Chamber?!
This is absurd, and not in a good way. Page long rooms are the norm. Overwrought read-aloud in the second person. DM text telling us background and … I don’t even know what, information that no one can possibly know or care about?
The hex crawl is abstracted encounters. The dungeon encounters are torturous to wade through. Bad read-aloud. Bad DM text. Standard challenges. And there’s not even a pretense of this being OSR. Nope.
This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is fifteen pages. OIt shows you the hexes and the first part of the firs dungeon. More than enough to see what you’re in for, so, good preview at least.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/524814/three-witches?1892600
The machine-generated cover illustration should have been a red flag. If an adventure has actual art it means the publisher spent money on it or the adventure was itself made by an artist. If an adventure has no art you know at the very least that it’s not a cynical cash-grab.
The blatantly AI-generated cover image should have been the indicator of the AI generated text. My dude asked for suggestions to chatGPT and copy pasted those as an “adventure”.
Also, the fact that the product description says it “Contains AI-Generated Content” might have been a clue that it contained AI generated content.
Also, the author has put out 37 titles since May of this year. I looked at 8 of them; the total pagecount for those 8 modules was 1542 pages. One of them was 459 pages by itself.
So either they are all entirely AI generated, or Malrex really needs to step up his game and get modules out quicker.
I don’t know – art is distinctly separate from text. Anyone can write text; few people can make passable art. My baseline assumption when I see AI art is “that guy didn’t want to pay an artist, but also didn’t want his adventure to look like a Word doc”, which I can forgive for hobbyist/free work, but not for something that cost money.
The better indicator of AI text is churn, as Beoric states. If this is indeed the author’s 37th title in 2 months, that’s a HUGE red flag. Even a cocaine-fueled Stephen King would struggle to reach that output.
Just recently under ‘The Snake Temple Ruins’ I said that that people are too quick to accuse adventures of being LLM text and tend to overestimate machine writing. But looking at the preview for this one it is absolutely written by a machine with minimal editing.
I used AI when the craze started. Privately, for fun. I kept reading articles about how it can write adventures on its own with prompts, and I thought I’d test it out of curiosity. That’s exactly the way it replies. With maybe, perhaps, could be. This designer copy pasted the answers and sells them for 4 dollars.
I am not against ai. It’s a good tool and it’s here to stay. There are ways (dnd or not) that it can be helpful. But copy pasting like that is the worse way to do it.
This content is 100% AI slop, and any editing sone to it is minimal. Rutibex is a blight churning out endless amounts of AI slop onto Drivethrurpg, and does not deny it when accused of doing so.
Just take a look at their products. This time the accusations are real and apt.
Agreed. What a slimeball. I can forgive some use of AI art for free illustrations (and I’m an artist for chrissales…!). But when you are using AI *text* to churn out so much junk, how can you even pretend to yourself you are making something. Plus youre polluting the world literally and figuratively. Just pathetic.
Short of altered statblocks, rebalanced treasure amounts, and the absence/presence of terms like “CR” and “DC”, what exactly differentiates a 5e adventure from an OSR adventure? And please don’t say “open world agency” and “problems solved off the character sheet”, because that stuff is purely authorial choice, and not at all system inherent.
Someone really should publish some kind of conversion manual, considering the number of times it gets brought up.
OSR is a style, not just a set of systems, and plenty of people have already published style guides on it. But even when doing a 1:1 conversion from one system to another, you have to understand the game you’re converting to and play-balance it so all the gameplay loops work as intended and nothing breaks, either as the writer or the DM. If you give someone a conversion manual but they’re never played the game they’re converting to, they’ll still mess it up.
Yeah I get what you’re saying, but you’re not quite picking up what I’m putting down.
When Bryce says “this says it’s an OSR adventure but it’s clearly a 5e conversion”, what does that mean exactly, beyond adjusting some numbers? That is to say, what are these so-called “gameplay loops” that are apparently only capable of existing in OSR and not in 5e? Because I can’t name a single thing you can *only* do in an OSR game that you *can’t do* in 5e, and vice-versa.
The only issue I can identify between the two is the imbalance of direct numerical conversion (monster hit points and issues with gold-for-XP, mostly). And if it is the case that numbers are the only difference between the two, than simple conversion metrics would fix that, no? Literally a conversion manual (a 5e creature with AC 15 and 100hp = a B/X creature with AC 11 and 50hp”, or whatever). “Half all the hit points”, “Multiply GP values by 1o”, and so forth.
Assuming numbers are converted, what other factor could possibly distinguish a 5e adventure from an OSR one, that isn’t just an author’s personal bad practice choice to railroad or what have you?
Older edition modules have a different aesthetic than newer ones, and make different assumptions as to how the DM and players are going to relate to the game and each other.
IME, newer edition modules are far more structured in ways that limit the choices, not just of the players, but also of the DM. A DM *can* colour outside the lines, or allow players to do so, but newer modules make it much harder for the DM to do so.
An example of this would be the way travel, or other transitions between encounters, are handled. An area map allows the players to choose routes or modes of travel that were not contemplated by the module designer; it is an aid to improvisation. Whereas if movement between encounters is directed or handwaived, and the players want to go another direction, the DM has to invent the new route from nothing.
There are also differences in action resolution. An early edition module is likely to assume that many obstacles will be resolved narratively, with a discussion between DM and player respecting the approach a PC will take, with the DM determining the odds of success after the player has described an approach. This is supported where a module either describes an object that can be interacted with in a fashion that encourages players to make choices about how to interact with it; or the module give no significant description of the many objects stated or assumed to be present, so the DM and player end up figuring out together what things look like and how they may be approached. Later edition modules instead present a list of objects with no particular description, but a list of mechanics with DCs attached to them. By default, this encourages interactions that are related to relevant skill and related DC.
Another issue is presumptions of difficulty. If you are converting from an edition that has save-or-die mechanics to an edition that does not, you either have to invent a mechanic or lose some flavour. Another example would be converting from a system that gives a thief a 20% chance of finding a trap, to an edition that gives a 50% or more chance of finding a (probably less lethal) trap.
What you describe are things that, while common to OSR modules, are nowhere near exclusive to them.
Choices for example; there is nothing mechanical in modern editions that limits choice. Setting a DC for an action’s difficulty does not exclude the possibility of a different solution altogether. “Structure” is a writing issue, not a system issue. Any Dragonlance module is proof enough of that. Ditto for travel – the rules are so obscure that there are just as many “how to do overland travel” videos for 5e as there are for any old edition, and they all offer the same advice. The way travel is done at the table is 100% based on how the DM does travel (I mean, obviously). Modules, be they modern or OSR, simply try to capture whatever way best communicates the writer’s vision to the DM (which is also subjective based on the author).
Ditto for action resolution – a lot of people fail to take into account that a DC (seen as the primary resolution mechanic for 5e) is an entirely optional thing, and that a decent DM is one who is willing to allow any resolution that satisfies the situation. I do it in my game all the time – “tell me how you plan to accomplish that”; “I do X, Y, and Z”; sounds good, it happens”. Sure, DCs are used if there’s an element of chance, but when there’s no chance required, DCs are likewise not required. And a percentage is just a DC roll in another form – a target number to be rolled on dice, with modifiers applied depending on the character and/or situation.
Presumption of difficulty is just as easily at the author’s whim – there are literally no rules in modern D&D that say “you cannot use save-or-die situations”. Yes, there are death saves, but again, entirely at the whim of the DM, and a module author is perfectly within their rights to say “they die, no death save” in their works. But they don’t because players don’t enjoy those kinds of games.
I concede that modern authors adhere to certain trends of design (as you say), but there no codified guidance to that effect; they’re all just copying one-another, which goes back to my main premise that all the difference between editions are more due to authorial decisions rather than actual mechanical differences.
It occurred to me after the fact that Bryce could very well be referring to the author tendencies rife in modern modules (basically what you’ve identified Beoric) being present in older “conversions-which-aren’t-really-conversions” as being a sign that something was lazily converted, and I suppose in that sense I can see where he comes from. It just irks me that what he gripes on are writing problems inherent to shitty authors, and not actual issues in the conversion of one edition to another. But then that’s just more proof that some kind of guidance documentation is required, because nobody seems to be getting it right.
@DP: I can’t think of anything you can *only* do in an OSR game that you *can’t do* in, say, a GURPS game either, but different systems create different modes of play that call for different approaches, even on a more granular level than just the overall style of play that ruleset encourages (and which is often recognisable in a conversion).
Lots of little things add up, like: is the ‘long rest’ system and reduced focus on resource management in 5E relevant when running a hex crawl? How about the PCs’ unlimited access to cantrips, including good odds that at least one PC has a 30′ range telekinesis power they can use any time they want from level 1, is that going to affect dungeon crawling? These things, because there are a lot of them, tend to express themselves a lot in adventure design and assumptions.
I’m presenting it from the opposite perspective because it might make it clearer: If you run a particularly lethal, trap-heavy, secret door riddled dungeon in OD&D, the bulk of playtime will consist of the party side-eyeing the architecture, bickering with each other, asking careful questions and coming up with elaborate precautions before making any moves. None of that is mechanical, but it will be the meat of the game. If you convert that dungeon to 5E changing only the numbers, the players will roll insight and perception checks before moving on, possibly getting upset when a low-level spike trap insta-kills a PC. It would not be fun, it would not be suited to the rules or expectations of that game. The same is true in the other direction, when you convert adventure to OSR without taking into account what makes it suited to a particular system.
> I’m presenting it from the opposite perspective because it might make it clearer: If you run a particularly lethal, trap-heavy, secret door riddled dungeon in OD&D, the bulk of playtime will consist of the party side-eyeing the architecture, bickering with each other, asking careful questions and coming up with elaborate precautions before making any moves. None of that is mechanical, but it will be the meat of the game. If you convert that dungeon to 5E changing only the numbers, the players will roll insight and perception checks before moving on, possibly getting upset when a low-level spike trap insta-kills a PC. It would not be fun, it would not be suited to the rules or expectations of that game. The same is true in the other direction, when you convert adventure to OSR without taking into account what makes it suited to a particular system.
I think that may be more subjective to the players/DM than you give it credit, but I will admit that it certainly is *likely* to happen, sure. I still maintain that a DM can run old-school style with new school rules, and therefore an author can just as easily write a new school module in the old school style, but it seems to be either a skill or desire that is lacking.
> Lots of little things add up, like: is the ‘long rest’ system and reduced focus on resource management in 5E relevant when running a hex crawl? How about the PCs’ unlimited access to cantrips, including good odds that at least one PC has a 30? range telekinesis power they can use any time they want from level 1, is that going to affect dungeon crawling? These things, because there are a lot of them, tend to express themselves a lot in adventure design and assumptions.
This part I agree with, and was exactly the sort of difference I was looking for. The long rest system and cantrips do indeed change long-form session play, you’re right.
Speaking from experience, you can run an OSR-feeling campaign in 5E with some house ruling but you do have to either wrestle with the system or amputate it because it’s not designed for that, and because it *is* designed to be internally congruent for what it is. It’s simply not true that it all comes down to the writer’s preferences.
To use your example above, death saves are at the whim of the DM in that you can *change the rules*, but the rule is that a PC reduced to 0 HP falls unconscious and makes death saves. It has a real effect on play whether an orc will chop your head off or put you in time-out. The mechanics of the game are more than incidental to play, and the issues that come up are not whether you’re “allowed” to do anything in particular as a DM (because you can of course do anything, including and play a different game) but the structure and assumptions of the game rules you’re using and how they inform play.
Good luck getting people who are used to playing 5e to accept death at 0 hp without death saves. All you hear is that the rules are carefully balanced and must be adhered to raw raw raw all the time. Long rests make you shiny and brand new, even when interrupted by battle. If you try to change this stuff you will get pushback and lose players. A spike trap intsta killing a pc? Player packs up his shit and walks out. The rules are designed for heroic tales to take place and for grittiness and resource management to be avoided. So I think the adventure module and the system go together and the expectations of the group are going to be different. Yes you can convert either direction but you have to account for those differences and have players with the same mentality.
I never was able to negotiate my 5E players into accepting death at 0 HP, but I did manage to replace death saves with a death and dismemberment table and to get rid of long rests.
Let me give you a very specific but clear example.
B4 The Lost City has such monsters as gargoyle and wight.
In B/X, they are very bad news for a level 1-3 party. Can’t be hurt by normal weapons, spells that deal damage are weak. Level drain is crippling at best if not downright deadly. If you failed to find a magic weapon and ran into any of these, your chances of survival are slim.
Enter its official 5E conversion. Same monsters but an entirely different picture. Damage from mundane weapons is halved but hey, that’s better than nothing. Magical damage is very easy to come by, most classes have access to it right at level 1. Energy drain is not permanent. As a result, the gargoyle and the wight become glorified speed bumps rather than horrors to run away from.
As a result, the conversion is faithful in theory but plays entirely different in practice.
And we are talking about the most basic things on the lowest levels.
Fair enough. Though I’m not sure I share the consideration that “playing differently” equals a failure, except in the sense that it doesn’t quite capture the same “vibe” as the original. Folk make it sound like conversions are unplayable trash, when really the worst case scenario seems to be that it just doesn’t feel the same (and if that’s of utmost importance, there’s always the original – it’s not like converting it destroys the source material or anything).
That’s to say, unless the conversion *literally* breaks the game (like for instance if there’s a wight from a 5e conversion that always kills every party every time in a B/X game so the adventure literally can’t be played), then I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing – just a different thing. The sloppiness of said conversion can usually be worked with a little effort and knowhow – it’s as easy as saying “stats as Wight, except immune to nonmagical damage”, for example. But nobody seems to do that.
The worst case scenario isn’t that it’s different, it’s that it’s bad. If it’s converted properly it should be different. If a sloppy, thoughtless conversion plays as well as the original, that’s by accident. You can convert or rewrite any adventure yourself or play D&D off the back of a napkin, but an adventure you pay money for is supposed to be a designed play experience.
Grandpa Bryce got scammed by a robot this time, but this part is consistent with his other reviews: “I could take all of the stats in that Star Frontiers adventure and do my best, on my own, to convert it all over to B/X. But, then, is that worth marketing?” I’m surprised to read someone in the comments of this particular site suggest it doesn’t *matter* if a for-profit adventure is well-designed or not because you can always put some elbow grease into it.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m sensing something… non-germane? About your response here. “Folk make it sound like conversions are unplayable trash”, “it’s not like it destroys the source material”, it seems like you have some other issue on your mind besides what differentiates a 5e adventure from an OSR adventure or how to properly convert between the two.
> The worst case scenario isn’t that it’s different, it’s that it’s bad.
I know, but my point is that if it isn’t bad (which again, I attribute to an authorial skill issue here), then it’s not worth fretting over. The amount of extra work to convert something that wasn’t converted properly is not based on the thing being a conversion – it’s based on the author just sucking at making conversions.
The “other issue” on my mind is the calling out of conversions as being bad practice (which Bryce does a lot in his reviews), when in reality it’s only bad when… it’s bad. I know that’s a tautology. Like Bryce’s Star Frontiers point that you identified (which is a bit hyperbolic – we are talking converting 5e to B/X; D&D to D&D) is not indicative in itself that conversion is a bellwether of quality; it’s indicative that the author didn’t write properly.
I am not saying conversions are smooth and easy and always functional (as I state, someone really should codify some guidelines to mitigate). What I am saying is that declaring something bad based solely on it being a conversion is disingenuous. A work should be judged on it’s merit, not on what it was in past life. That’s all.
I have no skin in the game; I am not an author. I just simply can’t wrap my head around the frothing hate-boner people seem to spring whenever “conversion” is mentioned.
The amount of work to convert an adventure is based on how suitable it is for the system it’s being converted into. Converting is an “authorial skill”.
If Bryce thought conversions were bad practice in principle he probably wouldn’t have given ‘the best’ ratings to multiple 5E/OSR adventures and nobody replying to you has evinced a “frothing hate-boner”, you might be tilting at windmills here.
Maybe “frothing” is too strong, but statements like these…
>“For OSR and 5e!” Usually that means its a 5e adventure with maybe a page of stat conversions for OSR systems. This doesn’t even do that. It is clearly a 5e adventure, even though the cover and marketing indicates that its compatible with OSR. Sure, in the same way that a Funyun is compatible as a hammer.
…strikes me as indicative of a dismissive attitude against 5e conversions, no? Like, I don’t see how that statement could be taken any other way than as a preempted dig at conversions in general, and I’ve definitely seen plenty of similar sentiment in the other reviews (and also in the comments of said reviews) in the past. Even if a few have been branded “Best Of”, it doesn’t negate the plentiful “Worst EVARs”.
As example: if I was writing a review, and I said “It says ‘for OSR’, but ‘for OSR’ usually only means high lethality at best, and this adventure doesn’t even do that!”, you’d probably draw the conclusion that I didn’t think highly of any so-labelled “for OSR” materials, no?
No? Most adventures marketed as 5E/OSR are 5E adventures with maybe a few pages of stat conversions for OSR systems. This adventure was clearly written by a machine and is incompatible with the OSR (or anything else – but the machines train on 5E style and clearly no human effort was made to convert this). Some 5E/OSR adventures are worthy of high praise. Many more are dreck and rightfully panned. All of these things can be true, none of them are an attack on the validity of conversions as a process. Or were those Worst Evars judged unfairly?
It’s a bit disingenuous to dismiss “problems solved off the character sheet” – it IS system inherent. Unlimited cantrips including mage hand, light, and minor illusion are system solutions on a character sheet that could simply handwave away what might have been a tense OSR challenge.
Additionally
– 5e explicitly teaches DMs to balance around combat, the CR budget often making it so characters can sleepwalk through most of the adventure and win.
– The fact that a wizard can have unlimited firebolts suggests a system designed around longer drawn-out battles. And your adventure is also going to look drastically different when your average combat lasts around an hour, instead of 5 minutes. That experience simply doesn’t convert well.
– And 5e teaches DMs to design “combat encounters,” “social encounters,” and “exploration encounters.” It’s part of the 5e balance, but it’s a very different game when it’s the DM rather than the players who determine which encounters are combat and which are social.
– 5e teaches players to interact like they’re playing a videogame; pressing buttons for their skills or powers to go off.
Sure, in theory you could play 5e in an OSR style, I contend that in order to so, you have to fight the system rather than be helped by it.
5e merely has optional guidelines for how to design encounters from scratch, if one were so inclined. If we are talking published modules, the balance/design is done by the designer, not the DM. That’s kind of the whole point of buying something pre-made.
OSR games have rules for hirelings, right there on your character under “Charisma score”; there’s your unlimited mage hand (“go pick it up, Pondrick, or you don’t get your shiny silver piece!”), your unlimited light cantrip (“hold the lantern straight, Pondrick, the wagon only has five more barrels of oil!”) and even your unlimited minor illusion (“put on these sheets and make ghost noises Pondrick, we need a distraction!”). And a firebolt does about as much damage as a bow & arrow (“what are you doing Pondrick?! Shoot him!”). Hell, you can clear the OG Tomb of Horrors with what, 100 cattle and some orcs? Just different tools to the same ends, at the same accessibility given the absurd amounts of gold in OSR games. The effective difference between them is that level 1 Wizards in 5e can actually play the game they’re there to play. Not exactly what I’d call “game-breaking”.
In case it wasn’t apparent, the last bit was deliberately cheeky. I get that different systems play differently. But I also believe that proper conversion – when done right by someone with the skills to do so – is a good thing, not a bad thing.
That was funny. Pick it up pondrick!
Pondrick also has 4 hit points and your mage hand dies falling into the spiked pit trap while trying to reach the lever on the other side. Pondrick runs out of torches. And yeah, Pondrick putting on a sheet to create a distraction is a very OSR shennanigan. But that’s far from the utility of minor illusion. The point is, Pondrick himself is a limited resource. If you don’t see the difference between this and unlimited cantrips, then I’ll back off from correcting the fool according to his folly.
> The point is, Pondrick himself is a limited resource.
Ah, but you forgot about his father Gondrick, his brother Kondrick, and their twins sisters Laundrick and Flaundrick. Plus all those beggars eager for coin back in the town of Mondrick.
Good thing the party looted a single 50gp tapestry in an unguarded room and can now afford to pay all of them for a year (oh right, torches cost money, better set aside 2gp to cover that).
Don’t be daft, DP:
Retainers/henchmen die mid-adventure. They fail morale checks. What’s more, they take a share of monster XP, and more importantly, treasure in a system where 1GP=1XP.
So not only are they a limited and unreliable resource, they slow character advancement significantly in a system where it’s not uncommon to take 4-5 adventures even to reach level 2.
You only need acknowledge that Pondrick, Gondrick, Kondrick and family are a more significant decision and a resource trade-off than unlimited cantrips. Enough so that it feels like you’re playing a different game.
> Retainers/henchmen die mid-adventure. They fail morale checks. What’s more, they take a share of monster XP, and more importantly, treasure in a system where 1GP=1XP.
The 5e party Wizard is immortal, and always turns down their share of the loot/XP…
DP, I’m not sure why you asked the question of the difference between 5e and OSR adventures when you refuse to acknowledge when other people point substantial comparisons out from actual play experiences. At this point I’m writing you off as a troll.
Well AAA, I asked the original question a week ago. It was actually answered to my satisfaction roughly around the same time.
And yet people still keep on posting in here, taking things in all manner of different directions. So now I’m just responding in kind to the all the latest things that fall out of other people’s heads. It’s not trolling – it’s just that I don’t dwell on the same singular topic for an entire week straight.
I played a ton of 5e. I grew to dislike it for some reasons but the cantrips are not ir. As DP says below, so what? Firebolt is just a flavoured bow.
My main problems with 5e are bloat of HP and bloat of abilities. A 10th level fighter has 9d10 + 10 from first level + CON hp, which if he didn’t dump it is at least a +2. Fights last forever. Similarly, each class has a gazillion of options to choose from. Enemy casts a spell and rolls a Nat 19. Enter reaction silvery barbs, oh it still hits. Then reaction shield spell. Enemy counterspell. Damn. I take the damage. But wait, I have a thing called evasion. Half the damage. It’s crazy. Each round of combat lasts 30 minutes. Hell, the last fight of CR against Vecna was less than 10 rounds? And it lasted 1.5 sessions.
My exact numbers may be wrong, but the point remains. 5e is bloated with abilities and features.
It’s a bunch of straws that break the camel’s back. 5e was initially a breath of fresh air compared with 4e, but the problems kept piling up:
– almost immediately I discovered unlimited cantrips made dungeon dangers trivial.
– by level 3-4 players began realizing that treasure was useless since there was nothing to do with it. Worse, magic items were less exciting because everybody already had a slew of powers on their character sheets to keep track of … and spell-casters had unlimited cantrips.
– and yeah as AB Andy points out, HP bloat. I had already noticed how even combat with orcs took twice as long at low levels since it’s very rare for them to go down with 1 hit, but by mid-high levels, fights were lasting forever. Not as bad as 4e forever, but too long to sustain an OSR-style exploration game.
Now, it’s not like 5e allowed for no instances of player resourcefulness. My favorite was the party Transmuter finding the one use of treasure during the entire campaign (at low level) by using silver pieces to line everyone’s weapons when they went hunting wererats (yes, I’m counting it even though it’s a power on a character sheet because it was creative and not a straight up “combat power”). But those were much fewer and farther between than the schemes my players come up with in an OSR-oriented system.
“by level 3-4 players began realizing that treasure was useless since there was nothing to do with it.” Hah! 5E is far from my preferred system, I like AD&D, but come on, glass houses.
I remember reading on another blog (don’t remember which one) that their main frustration with 5e is
a) virtually everybody’s a spell-caster
b) combats are either trivial and a waste of time, or they’re drawn-out and exhausting.
And while we all have different takes, I think point (b) is one that all of us who get tired of 5e agree on.
I don’t mind 5E combat, but the ridiculous number of race and class feats make it too complicated. I think 1E combat in stages makes more sense, so why was it ever changed? Too tactical? Idk.
For some reason, 5E seems to attract or create players who love endless class options taking the place of actual role playing. The 5E people I’ve played with do not want to think critically about the problems with the way D&D is currently written.
My problems with it:
Death saves – you really can’t die unless the DM tries very hard to kill you. Players will split up and each walk into rooms without caution. You should die at 0 HP.
Short/long rests – this is dumb. You can rest one hour and use all your hit dice. You can be attacked during a long rest and then go back to sleep and finish your rest. I personally think an uninterrupted 8hr rest should give you 1HD of healing.
Too many classes, races, feats – why do core races include dragon people and fiend people? Is human/elf/dwarf/halfling just not exciting enough for a fantasy game?
Material components – we’ve had to put up with them for 50 years. Most are handwaved. There is no fun to be had by using these.
Skills that can be done X times per rest – if doing something exhausts you, you shouldn’t be able to keep doing difficult things. I guess this is 5E’s attempt at resource management. Should just be recharge 5-6 or something.
Barbarians choose to become enraged – wait, a lvl 1 barbarian has so much self-awareness that he can choose to be enraged? It should be something that happens under specific conditions.
No class limitations for stats or race – you can be a wizard with a low IQ or a sneaky dwarf thief (I mean rogue) or a gnome barbarian. Do we have to throw out every fantasy trope for the sake of being inclusive? You should roll for abilities and then choose an available class and race.
Yes, too many spellcasters and every class can do everything – I actually DMd a party of all clerics, and they did just fine. They shouldn’t have. Probably works with any class. I mean wizards can pick locks if they have thieves tools.
Too much focus on rules – players feel fine challenging the DM to explain what rule allowed something to happen. No good.
Ability checks – if you make your persuasion check, it doesn’t matter what your character says. These checks should be used only if the DM is on the fence about the outcome.
Proficiency with too many things – how is a 1st level fighter proficient in all simple and martial weapons? That’s a 1st level weapons master.
No magic weapons shops – what are you supposed to spend your treasure on?
Good things about 5E – I think the stat blocks are good, including proficiency and ability bonuses. Advantage/disadvantage. Inspiration. XP for defeating monsters or difficult situations and not for finding treasure. AC is mostly good.
I’m not saying 5E players are bad or wrong. People want different things from their games. Just one guy’s opinions here.
Yup, we all have different takes. I’m old school (started with B/X and AD&D with a preference in that direction), but interested and appreciative of developments in the game. Heck, I even enjoyed 4e for what it was, despite it being unnecessarily bloated with fights that drag.
Blakely, I agree, or am sympathetic with most of the issues you list. Not really upset about a fighter being proficient in all weapons. Why not give fighters nice things? And while some classic heroes have their signature weapon, there’s guys like Conan who grabs and swings whatever is at hand.
And I’m definitely not against GP for XP … advancement should be defined by what the game is about. If it’s monster slaying, it’s for monsters; if it’s about quests, then milestones work well; if it’s about treasure hunting, GP for XP is a perfectly reasonable way to go. And if exploration, a combo of all three work fine.
And material components … I once played an AD&D game where that was a thing, and it was actually kinda fun watching our M-U get creative in improvising components. But yeah, never seen anyone pay attention to this rule otherwise.
There’s a very long discussion that I have only skimmed, so forgive me if this has already been adressed.
5e and OSR games go by different assumptions. Party size, length of combat, gold = xp, are some of the major considerations. 5e adventures still carry a lot of 3e DNA within them, so while it is theoretically possible to create a large, open-ended, modular 5e adventure with hidden optional areas, its not a ‘natural move.’
In gold = xp systems you are rewarded mostly for bypassing hazards and getting to the treasure. The game doesn’t care that much how you do it, but since combat is dangerous and yields little XP, even though you will fight, its not the only option. But in monster = xp systems, you kind of want to fight as often as possible, with as many people as possible, as primary means of progression. Milestone XP is different, but also de-incentivizes optional areas.
Because of the greater length of combat (because of increased complexity + action economy), 5e adventures dont work so well with random encounters. In fact those random encounters don’t serve the same role as in an OSR game. In an OSR game, random encounters tend to have little treasure and yield little XP, so they are just there to deplete your resources if you don’t hurry the fuck up. But in a 5e game, those random encounters are a staple diet, and they are either easy and yield little XP, or hard and they yield much xp. So their purpose is going to be different. You can work AROUND it, but once again, you need more ingenuity to achieve the same effect, you cant just convert the AC and hit points and expect everything to play the same. That is one of the lies of system neutral, that the fundamental assumptions of a game do not matter/are easily bridged.
A couple of respectful akshuyallys from the viewpoint of a decade of 5e gaming praxis:
1) Levelling by XP is all but dead now. It’s still in the books (including the recent “5.5e” manuals), but everyone (myself included) seems to be using milestone levelling. Official adventures basically assume it at this point in time. Obviously, it disincentivizes level-grinding and picking needless fights, so weirdly old-school I guess?
2) Random encounters in 5e praxis, where they exist, are essentially plot devices/window dressing/vignettes/fluffy nothingburgers because the system of short/long rests has basically killed off the idea of random encounters as speed bumps/resource drains. As a silver lining, this encourages creativity in designing them, rather than simply throwing a good old “2d6 orcs, they attack”.
3) An interesting paradox exists in Mainstream 5e’s attitude to combat. While it is generally accepted this is major part in the game, and most class abilities do revolve around combat, 5e adventure writing almost comically avoids the idea of “interesting” set-piece combats with round-by-round tactics, monster zoos, hazardous terrain, gymnasts swinging on trapezes, and other such ideas that have plagued the game for almost two decades, since latter-day 2e, reaching their absolute zenith (nadir?) in 4e. This creates a curious situation where one part of the fanbase mounts houserule upon houserule to make combat more “interesting” while the other half wants the combat rules to be drastically simplified because they take too much time away from Le Story Arcs and Muh Roleplaying.
In my praxis, 90% of combats end within three rounds, and 99% end within five. I guess those are AD&D numbers?
I suggest a new category “ AI Slop” and a blacklist of AI authors.
If only for your own good – this is the third thing youve reviewed by this shitepeddler.
Should a no-AI policy be instigated? I’m not against the judicious use of AI for spell checking, minor art generation, etc, but wholesale adventure writing that results in slop will surely result in Bryce expiring of apoplectic rage and dismay.
Please don’t review AI generated content.
> “A fairy ring. Entering it could transport the players to a fey realm or cause other
> magical effects.” No? How about: “A cursed statue in a small pond, with a puzzle
> that, if solved, breaks the curse and grants a reward.” These are typical.
They are also obviously AI-generated. So is all that other tripe you quote. It’s blatantly AI-generated chum.
Bryce, you really need to screw around with AI. Just go to “chatgpt dot com” and play around for free. It’s fun.
If you do, you can pretend you have one friend in this world!
This does illustrate pretty well why special technologies for “AI detection” aren’t actually necessary: because everything made with them sucks ass, simply filtering for quality will also exclude it, too.
Agreeing with everyone that you should check the description for AI bullshit. You’re wasting your time with something no one bothered to write.
100% AI generic crap.