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View Full Version : Adapt a setting to 5e or use an existing attempt for d20/3.5e?



Smyther
2018-05-13, 12:07 PM
Me and my friends want to play DnD together (or some TTRPG game), and we want to use a setting we all really like.

We all know 5e quite well, so it seemed a simple case of re-flavoring the races and classes to fit the setting.

But then I found this: gensod20.alotspace.com/index.html (e: some of the internal links on that site need manual correcting btw. also mild NSFW warning on a handful of the pages)

It's a little weird but it looks like a more complete setting conversion than our attempt, and I want to adapt it to 5e.

The trouble is none of us know much about 3e/pf/d20, and I've heard bad things about it (horribly imbalanced classes, needless complexity, etc). I'm confident in my ability to work with 5e's good points and bad points so would rather use it, but I don't know whether we'd find what this site presents fits to be more fun or less fun if used as-is. I just don't know enough about old DnD.

Can more experienced people help us decide?

JBiddles
2018-05-13, 12:45 PM
The trouble is none of us know much about 3e/pf/d20, and I've heard bad things about it (horribly imbalanced classes, needless complexity, etc).

3.5e/PF has its detractors, certainly, but that's true of everything. I DM 5e, and it's nice, but it's definitely not without its problems, and I think on balance, no pun intended, I prefer 3.X.

The "horribly imbalanced classes" complaint is mostly an artefact of most people who complain about such things being forumites. Yes, if you play a Wizard the way the most rabid optimiser in the world would, you will break the game in half, but almost nobody is actually going to go full Tippy, and if they do, no spell protects you from the DM slapping you. Keep an eye on content from non-core books, and you should be fine. I recommend implementing some stuff from this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?490409) to boost non-casters. (The full 3.5 rebalance, from the same poster, is very good but time-intensive and often more convoluted than 3.5 itself.

(Note that 5e isn't exactly blameless in balance terms, and it has far less 3rd-party material to contend with. I'm looking at you, Conjure Animals/True Polymorph/Teleportation Circle.)

"Needless complexity"... now, that's a matter of taste and design philosophy. 5e is designed to be a balanced, simple game; 3.5e is designed to be more of a simulation. The rules for combat manoeuvres are clunky, though Pathfinder mostly fixes that problem. Vancian casting can be a bit of a headache, but there are ways around that (e.g. the Strain & Tolerance homebrew - Spell Points are an option, but they encourage novaing.) Remember: you don't have to use the rules in all their detailed glory if it would disrupt the flow. You can always just let the player roll; just be aware that that can seriously unbalance the game and create implausible scenarios. The rules are tools for the DM and players, not ironclad laws.

5e is less complex, but it mostly accomplishes that by cutting out as many options as possible from the mechanics and leaving everything up to the DM, resulting in the infamous mother-may-I problem. e.g. Say the enemy Wizard has a powerful staff and I want to try to cut it in half with my greataxe. 3.5e: OK, make a Sunder attempt. 5e: Ask the DM ("Mother, may I?"), who either says "no" or has to desperately try to invent balanced mechanics for that in their head on the fly without breaking the game. Skills are even harder.

The other problem with 5e is granularity. Every +1 is crucially important. A +3 weapon in 3.5e is a cool toy; a +3 weapon in 5e is a legendary artefact. This limits your options and customisability quite a lot.

3.5 also lets you do a lot more with magic. 5e more or less forces a low-magic world, which some people like and I find terminally dull.

So both 3.5e and 5e have their benefits and drawbacks, ultimately because they have a different design philosophy, but please don't dismiss 3.5e out of hand; its flaws are often massively exaggerated. It is more complicated, but I think it's worth it for the options it brings to the table.

Smyther
2018-05-13, 01:04 PM
Thank you for the advice.

However, we're not actually using 3.5/pf, but some alteration of "d20" called "Anime d20 system" Now, I've heard of d20, but don't know what it is beyond some old attempt at creating a "free d&d" system? I'm attempting to read the custom srd (found here: faterpg.com/dl/animed20srd.pdf [had to break the link to comply with forum rules]) but I'm struggling to answer basic questions like what character points are and how you spend them.

Does this change your advice on the matter?

Knaight
2018-05-13, 01:56 PM
The short version of some 3e D&D history: 3.0 was published under a custom license, the "open gaming licence", which is usually just called the OGL. It's a fairly broad license that has actually been used all over the place since and isn't as attached to 3e as often portrayed - think of it as analogous to a creative commons license, but for tabletop RPGs in particular (some of which have nothing to do with D&D, including a lot released under similar licenses that were later rereleased under the OGL, what with it having been drafted by actual lawyers).

This explicitly allowed commercial and noncommercial products to use OGL stuff elsewhere, including most of the content in the core books of D&D. There's a couple of spell names, monsters, etc. exempted, but the terminology around the mechanical structure of the game and that structure itself were both made open, though you generally can't copyright mechanics anyways. More than that, the d20 system (very underlying mechanics) was explicitly pushed by WotC as an engine to unite them all, with tons of commercial products released under it, from various new games to conversions of older ones.

These products were vastly outnumbered by the deluge of free self published games. These vary highly, and basically have to be approached on their own terms. 3e knowledge doesn't transfer - Anime d20 fundamentally isn't a setting for 3.5, it's a totally separate game made with the very basic d20 mechanics and released under the OGL.

On a very quick skim of the first few pages of the .pdf I can see that Evil Hat was involved in producing it, which is a good sign. Document design also appears to be broadly competent, and I'm not seeing typos, particularly bad writing (I've seen one sentence on skimming that particularly annoyed me, and that was technically a matter of not knowing chemistry), or other particularly obvious flaws. There's room to at least hope for competence, though all sorts of terrible games manage to avoid issues that obvious, and there's at least a couple of really good games that dropped the ball on presentation.

Smyther
2018-05-13, 02:19 PM
That's given me a lot to think about, but thank you very much for doing a little digging and providing some much appreciated context for what we're looking at.