Yet, Another Rekindling...

 As you can see from the previous posts, my D&D gaming experience has been quite.... sparse.

During the pandemic, I ran a Swords & Wizardry sandbox campaign on Roll20 for my wife and friends, most of whom never really played D&D. It was an actually pretty fun campaign and I had every intention of recording their exploits here as I had done with my previous S&W campaign. These adventures existed in the same campaign world that I've been running in my previous years long sandbox setting.

This "COVID Campaign" was also my longest Roll20 campaign as well. Roll20 served nicely for all of us to get together and play for a few hours each week during the world's apocalyptic pandemic.

Swords & Wizardry was a great ruleset for getting noobs into a fantasy RPG. Simple rules and mechanics got everyone up and running pretty quick. Everyone enjoyed the game, we all had lots of laughs and it was a great way to kill long hours at home. With characters like Karona Viress the cleric, George Michael the wizard and BuFoo the assassin, you can imagine the good times that we had as I ran them through everything from the Keep on the Borderland's Caves of Chaos to Rahasia and the Endless Tunnels of Enladin to all manner of one-shots and home made dungeon crawl adventures. 

Running the sessions on Roll20 evolved into me having to prepare a lot more assets for game play. We ended up relying quite a bit on the maps, tokens and interfaces to 'enhance' gameplay. This meant I spent more and more time preparing maps and tokens. This took a bit of a toll on me especially when my job was becoming more and more demanding.

We wrapped up the campaign with everyone's characters hitting about 5th level or so. I really do wish I recored the campaign because it was quite wild and fun.

So, let us flash forward to 2022.

Friends from my old group were looking to get together for at least a one-shot and maybe more if things went well.  Well, we're all a bit older and have more responsibilities and, after weeks of scheduling conflicts, we finally go together to play some D&D. This time it would be D&D 5e.

Yes, the cool-aid has been sipped.

I stepped back as a DM and slipped in as a player.  

Brian (Teabag and Arg form our old S&W campaign), our 5e DM ran the classic Sinister Secret of Salt Marsh.  It was a fun romp through the infamous 'haunted house' scenario and beyond. And 5e wasn't so bad either.  Brian played very loose with it so it pretty much ran like a classic D&D game.  

Annnd, of course, this piqued my interest in running a 5e game myself.  There are some mechanics I really liked, and, I will soon fine, some I will need to tweak.

So, yes, here we are again. I'm diving into 5e and seeing where that takes me....

D&D Evolutions

At last, the 5th edition displacer beast is outta the bag. By these initial accounts, WOTC is foregoing designing a FRPG by committee and instead going with designing a FRPG by community.

Now, one might initially feel that by going with an 'open forum' style of design you might get the best of the best ideas, the creme de la creme. Well, I'm more of the belief of "too many cooks..."

Lets take a walk down the evolution of Dungeons & Dragons with the 1st level Wizard:

OD&D
Creators: Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson
1st level wizard was lucky to survive leaving the tavern. Hell, most characters were lucky to survive leaving the tavern.

1st ed D&D
Mostly Gygax (one man vision)
Wizards still started out quite weak but, if surviving initial adventures, became quite powerful. Big If. What?
I can only cast one spell!?!

2nd ed D&D
Zeb Cook
1st level wizards were still pretty wimpy, no doubt influenced by the earlier editions, but had much room to grow. Looks cool but still only 4 hp.

3rd and 3.5 ed.
WOTC (Okay, I don't know who really put this one together but it's not just a single vision).
The 1st level wizard begins to break away from the wizard tradition into something more super-heroic and super-profitable for WOTC.

4th ed D&D
Designed by focus groups and in committee meetings and directed by suits who know nothing about gamers, games or gaming but only how to produce the maximum profit.
Enter the indestructible Super-wizard.
"I can fuck you up with Magic Missile every round, sucka!"

5th ed D&D
Designed by a fickle community

Or in other words...

Being a graphic designer, there are many times when I have to please a committee and I can tell you from experience that you end up with a product and I would be ashamed to put in my portfolio. Sure, everyone is somewhat happy and was able to put in their two cents worth of their inflated ego onto paper or on the computer screen but they ended up with crap.

So, now WOTC is going to pass the buck and let the game be designed by a bunch of fickle gamers. WOTC can say don't bitch at us, we gave the community exactly what they wanted. Nice to show some real cajones.

So how much coin do you want to bet that 5th ed D&D will be a collectible card based board game?

But I don't really care one way or the other as I haven't bought any of their products.

Oh well, on to games that are actually fun created by people who love them.