I played 5e twice, in a game store. I had not touched D and D since third edition, my last iteration was Pathfinder, and I loved that game. I was a player, and I liked playing non-magic users like fighters and Barbarians. It was fine, but I never felt that tension, I thought it was me. No, the game is not the same, and I have gone back to my roots. When I think about it, the most enjoyment I had in D and D was BECMI. I don't know why, sure the rules are old, but there is something about percentile rolls for thieves and slogging through dungeons that newer editions just don't have. I recently have found a channel called questing beast and he does a good job explaining the OSR. He even suggested a movie called the secrets of blackmore. From those videos, and now you channel, I am building my own 5E game, using a third party game as my base called Anime 5E. This is not vanilla D and D, and if I am to have a version of D and D that is the opposite of BECMI its going to be bad ass. I have been watching your video, you know what, magic should be magical and dangerous. To that end I am building a 5E system with no long rest periods, and no negative hit points, and I am using a spell point system from EN publishing for spell casters. Yes, magic in this world has no spell slots, with one exception, Clerics, clerics in this world have spell slots because they are gifted magic from the Gods. I am even considering using a more brutal combat system from a third party with wounds and critical wounds which cut limbs off. Even though its high fantasy, I want death to be apparent, oh yeah, this iteration gives me an excuse to use psionics from a pathfinder third party called psionics unleashed. I might even bring back the old saves, death from rod, and petrification and all that. I know, it's not 5E anymore, but in a sense it is.

You know, I think you are right, my first experience with D and D was in the 80s, I played the 2nd iteration of Basic, the one before BECMI. and what I was rum through was keep on the borderlands, but my gamemaster, before that had us play a semi board game on a hex grid called Man to Man, by Steve Jackson games. It was an arena game where we killed each other. When I think about it, it was a great way to seg way into D and D, because it was a game where death was the theme. Man, I was a cleric, and we did the roll 3d6 down method, and if the rolls were borderland really hard (bad stats) we were allowed to make one stat swap. It was dangerous, one fight against a room of Kobolds and we were almost dead. I healed the party, but we were still low on hit points. Supplies were also important, especially torches. The other party members wanted to keep going, but I wanted to go back to town, and come back to the caves later, we kept going and we fought one bugbear, which really almost killed us, so we were low on hit points again. The party kept going, but I argued that we should go back to town, I almost ditched the party, like seriously, I have 2 hit points, but I got dirty looks around the table like don't you even dare ditch us, well, the next fight was two minitours. I knew we were done for. I stayed back and did not fight. Within two rounds the two people were down. Instead of killing us, the DM had the minitours steal all our equipment and had us wake up naked at the entrance of the caves. Yeah, the DM had mercy, but did he, sure we were alive, but we had no equipment, no weapons, and no armor, hell we had no cloths, and we had to go back to town naked. After that, the other players saw why I wanted to stop and go back to town. I was hooked, we never played that game again, but the very next day I went to the gaming store and boght the red box for BECMI. I read everything, again, I played against Bargle and Bargle left someone outside dead. By then, I got the message, death is common, if you are not careful, and at the moment I saw the cleric dead at my feet, I knew that my character should be dead, not naked in town. I read all the books and then built my dungeon extension in that second book. I ran my game for the two players, and they enjoyed it. From then on, I was the game master and was never a player. Hell, the person who introduced me to the game gave me The Keep on The Borderlands. He was playing another game called advanced dungeons and Dragons with another group. I never got it, because I never thought I was advanced enough. In my mind this is what I thought. You get through the red book, then through the blue book, all the way to immortal. then when your character leveled up from that, you were ready for the advanced rules. Years later, when that person who introduced me to the game asked me why I never played advanced D and D, I told him my reason, and he just laughed and called me crazy. I never understood why he was laughing, until the year 2000, when the internet existed, and I found out that they were two separate games and were not connected at all.

11:20 in "recent" (for an old fart like me) game design, from 4e and PF1e onward, a weird idea creeped in, that anything that takes out a character from combat is not "fun". The end result is defanged spells and effects and the end of any sense of danger. While PF1e is still quite deadly (3e derived) and 4e had chance to stunlock, 5e is so utterly defanged that nothing has sense anymore. As you said - why bother.

Advanced Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry are both more Dungeons & Dragons than 5e or Pathfinder.

I have always found the AD&D Wilderness Survival Guide extremely useful, and very much in this case of wanting to detail the effects on the party of the environment, food, water, and shelter or lack there of to get some verisimilitude into the game. Certainly more detailed and complex than 5th Ed but I've always enjoyed the numbers, tables and the look of fear on my players when I reach for the Wilderness & Dungeoneers Survival guides.

oh dear !!!

A comment for the numbers brother

I don’t mind the general concept of “giant robot in medieval D&D”, but the utterly absurd, skyscraper size of Earthshaker rubs me the wrong way. I’d prefer it to be a much more modestly sized machine, like 10 - 16 meters, and have semi-functioning projectile weapons.

Brilliant videos. Addictive viewing. Was there a BECMI Monk class by any chance, somewhere? I’m getting into OSR via Old School Essentials, and that led me here, but I’m currently missing a martial arts monk. I have fond memories of those… I’d like to port one into OSE. Thank you!

This is a great video, with useful examples, and helpful background. I’m going to watch all of your series. The narration is ideal, too. The right pace to take it all in. Thanks. (I gather you likely did a Hollow World series, too.)

this was really cool --I love the GAZ series

How quickly does leveling up happen?

Is he going to have piglets?

Crab riding hippogriff LOL

Nicely narrated

Tom Moldvay wrote the first adventure I ever purchased. I wish there was more information about him out there on the interwebs. he contributed some very cool stuff to the gaming world!

Heck yeah!

Having said that, great art and sculpture of monsters and creatures and heroes can also be quite inspirational.

Final thread sewn into the tapestry - masterful wording.

I really like the idea of subdual rules. it makes fighting a dragon more deadly with the breath weapon not decreasing, and requires it to be done by hand rather then by subterfuge or planned spells, really giving the sense that someone has dominated the dragon’s will head on and that has some kind of mystical compulsion for the dragon. Sounds like a great feat for a fighter or other canny martial to have done, and an even greater reward in the fealty of a dragon. I cant express how much that itches a fighter end goal fantasy that is often seems neglected. while a high level wizard gets to have a tower and research thier own great spells, and a thief collects connections throughout the underworld having a hand in everything, the fighter can go out and gain the fealty of powerful creatures through his might. having a dragon next to your throne to show just what calibur of person you are dealing with. its metal. though on a mechanical point, i wonder how you would deal with both subdual damage and regular damage? given that you might have a magic user or archer in the party. two separate HP’s I guess?

Personally, I would add a party outcome option of them somehow using the mindgem to grow them to relative gigantic size and fight it Ultra-man style. Really like the idea of someone makes a sequel to this module were you have to fist fight kaiju like the cursed giant reborn using the Earthshaker or a super enlarge spell.

BECMI will always be my favorite D&D ttrpg. I enjoyed it's mix of simplicity and expansive rules. I do also have the D&D Encyclopedia.

I'd rather there be some voice on here, but I enjoyed the content.

There can be only one!

Dragons seem way better in the becmi era this was an inspiring video, i play ad&d 2e/hyperborea 3 but i think you've convinced me that becmi is likely the best edition objectively despite my fondness for ad&d.

Recently, one swept down on us during travel. It sought magic and we managed to send it in the direction of a 'powerful' Magic-user - several miles away.

Aleena is hot !

would it be best to just get this book and for go getting the box sets as i have none on them

If 5e aimed to make balanced magic they did a shoddy job of it. Compare old school Identify to modern Identify and 5e looks incredibly overpowered. Cast this 1st level spell and a small 100gp pearl, and you know everything there is to know about the object. No other caveats, ifs, ands, or buts. In fact what you can learn includes more, like the exact number of charges, all its properties and how to use it, you can even cast it on a person to find what magic is affecting them. All this with no limiting conditions. Idk where the game designers thought that was balanced if at all, but it’s not. Only saving grace is you can make pearls not commonly found or sold.

I’m a fan of AD&Ds bleeding out system. I think it’s the perfect balance. Going to 0 is still very bad, you’re bleeding out and it’s the middle of the fight so it’s risky for someone to go over and heal you. It basically puts the fight on a clock for you. But if you take damage past 0 at all you’re still dead. And if you bleed out to -6 before being healed you’re permanently scarred somehow. I like that because it gives the player some leeway, a chance at surviving without taking away the feeling of it being seriously bad how close you came to death. I think later attempts to make this more forgiving overstep and kind of miss the point.

Me personally when I ran 5e more than I do now, I tried fixing rests and never actually found a satisfying solution. The rules are so unified that changing one rules means touching a million other subsystems. Like anyone with a class feature that affects rests may need their feature modified to accommodate the homebrew system. And at the end of the day the basic premise is that you heal when you rest and there’s no cost to that besides maybe risking an unprepared encounter. Frankly the whole time I was trying to fix it I kept thinking I shouldn’t even have to deal with this problem and it should’ve been caught in initial play testing back in 2014. When I first ran 5e I wanted to run a gritty and difficult game and 5e just fought me at every attempt to make something like that. Which is what pushed me to look to other systems in the first place.

“Realism” is a word I try to avoid. I like the word verisimilitude. Basically in creative writing a narrative shoukd abide by its own rules. If a narrative regularly breaks its own rules it will be jarring to the audience. Often those without the experience or vocabulary will phrase this as “unrealistic” and it sparks these arguments hinging on that word, when what was meant is the narrative broke their expectations of how the fictional world should work in a jarring fashion. In our case the expectation was being seriously injured should incur effort to overcome the injury, because that’s how injury works as most people assume knowing nothing about the game. But instead the game says it’s actually trivial to recover from near death. That’s not upsetting because it’s not realistic, it’s upsetting because it’s not how one expects injury to work. Not to mention it’s not satisfying from a game design perspective. It’s anticlimactic at best.

Great stuff! Those Elmore paintings were always so epic and evocative, especially the first three. If they didn't pull your imagination immediately into the scene, putting you right there with the character depicted, I don't know what you were doing playing the game.

@3:54 in honor of the ridiculousness of 5E, you should have presented the difference in ascending fashion, or a 148% difference. I think it better shows the power creep. Great videos!

i loved becmi and ad&d but dragons werent Dragons until 3rd edition

The Expert Rules was the best of them.

How do you feel about Old School Essentials and other OSR or games that combine the old games and the new kinda like shadowdark ?

The players handbook with the wyrmling dragon strung up from a tree, a small treasure pile and a party that looked under level 5 ... that lit my imagination on fire