Sunday, May 10, 2015

A Little Spitballing

So, I've been thinking. I like to stick as much with free RPGs as possible. It's not even a monetary thing because I usually print them or have them printed. It's just a preference. As we all know, the basic rules for 5E are freely available. I printed the player and DM pdfs this weekend and did some home binding. I've been thinking about using just these as the basis for a hypothetical campaign. Stick with the classic classes and races, as presented. Clean and simple, and in only one book (not including house rules and such, see below).

Even though the core books aren't free, I would cull from them certain things, kind of like incorporating articles from Dragon. I would include Feats. I think that between Backgrounds and Feats, it really is possible to take the "Core Four" and create most, if not all, the additional classes, to some degree. I would likely include Colleges for wizards and Domains for clerics, as much for campaign flavor as anything else.

Over at the City of Iron there is an excellent series of posts on race-as-class. Mr Norman takes the dwarf, elf, and halfing from 5E and gives them a very nice B/X twist.

A short post, I know, but it is a brief idea in the description. I may while away some time this afternoon knocking together some class/background/feat combos to represent some of the other classes. If I'm happy with how it is working, I'll post them.

5 comments:

  1. I think it could work great. Let us know how it works out.

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  2. I think it would work. I have thought about taking the 5e basic D&D, and bolting on the treasure system for b/x. Take the fighter or cleric advancement from b/x and apply it to all classes for xp for gold. Maybe even reduce the HD of the classes to the b/x level.

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    Replies
    1. See, that's where my ADD slowly rears its many heads. "Hmmm, maybe I bring this and that from B/X. And if I do that, I can also port in these other things." And, finally, "Screw it, B/X it is!"

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  3. If you like only four core classes, you might like this hack I made of D&D 5E. I don't use feats though.
    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KO84MiJh3DHr92QW6agg-W2Dh6zOig2sY2bVYUIwZNw/edit?usp=sharing

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