D&D5e Rebels

[Mike]

Aidan is running a campaign for me and Elijah and Noah. It's a scifi/fantasy setting of his own making, but we're just using straight up D&D5e rules with the ability to flavor anything we want as technological.

I created a character through an app without knowing anything about the rules. First session was a ball. I'll have more as I get to know what these rules can really do, but I like the feel of it, and our first huge combat went very smoothly.

[Stan]

I like the relative simplicity of 5e. Isn't cool when the kids can start to run things as well as play?

If you wanna look at the rules but not bite the bullet on a new hardback, there are free basic rules (not all the races, classes, or spells)

and the srd:

[Mike]

Thank you!

Aidan has books, but he plays a lot of D&D, so borrowing them is not practical.

[El Jefe]

Does it use a rest mechanic (short and long rest) like 4E did? If so, what did you think of it?

[Mike]

It does. I will report more later.

[Stan]

Jeff, 5e has a fair amount of 4e in it. Instead of encounter and daily powers, the rules state that certain things can be used X times per long (or short) rest. Cantrips are at-will so all full casters have an at-will roughly analogous to a martial's attack. The difference is that they made no attempt to make all classes conform to the same number of at-will, encounter, and daily powers, so the classes feel more separate like in pre-4e editions.

There are healing dice you can use during short rests, then you heal fully after a long rest. Healing is too fast for my taste but it's easy to adjust.

Overall, 5e feels like a mix 2e, 3e, and 4e.
No prestige classes but each class gets 2+ subclasses.
Feats but only every 4th level and you have to give up an ability score increase. In return, feats are bigger and there are no real feat chains.

If you are really into character building from a mechanics perspective, there is not as much to work with compared to 3e/4e/pathfinder. The rules are simpler with fewer total choices and most of them occur at or before 3rd level.

[Mike]

What he said. 5e is interesting in that other than spell choice, there is very little to do when you level up. There's just no choices you need to make. In that way, it is very reminiscent of AD&D 1 and 2. A 7th level Thief is a a 7th level Thief, and they all do the same thing (pretty much). This means that there's more room (and encouragement) for interpretation and doing your customization through personality and roleplay. For Aidan, this is ideal. He wanted to create a science-fantasy pastiche of a world and 5e makes it really easy to reskin everything into pseudo-techno equipment just by saying so. And as a new gamemaster, Aidan is not a master of the rules yet, and 5e seems to be very forgiving of that.

In contrast, I feel like P2 wants to continue giving you the same level of crunchy character-building people got used to in 3e and beyond, but simplify gameplay so that the action runs faster. I have yet to play it and see if they succeeded, but I still love the character creation and can't wait for a couple more sourcebooks to help flesh stuff out.

[El Jefe]

Nah, I've got no dog in this fight. I can't really handle PF style anymore, outside of video games. OSR style is probably the best choice for me now, like in SWN. Was mostly just curious how it worked. Thanks for the info.