Making 5E Feel Old School

I was re-reading through my 5E PHB recently, and it reminded me of reading it for the first time, with an overwhelming personal sense of 2E ... it felt like Dungeons and Dragons of 3.5E, but cleaned up and simpler, much like Zeb Cook's 2E did to AD&D.  So, in many ways, 5E already felt 'Old School' to me, much more than 3E or Pathfinder 1E did.

One of the first things I did with 5E was to run one of my favourite AD&D modules, N1 Against The Cult of the Reptile God ... and the thing hung together really well!  And a number of discoveries were made.

- D&D is deadly again!  Which then encouraged smarter play, which in my mind, felt like earlier editions ... 

- Monster Statblocks are not painful!  I was able to pretty much run the conversion 'on the fly', adapting monsters and treasure levels and spells.

- Magic is dangerous and exciting!  Magic Missile is not a ho-hum spell, a found potion or scroll is a big deal, and figuring out how townsfolk were being charmed was open ended and mysterious.

Now, as the years have gone by, I've read a lot of 5E Old School articles, followed the OSR (Old School Revival) websites, and even purchased a copy of Dungeonesque at Gen Con a couple years back, and spent many an hour with Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG to get more of my OSR fix ... there are a lot of interesting ideas out there, but I think the best qualities of 5E are the simplicity of the system.  

I really like the Old School feel of my game, and only a few things were necessary, in my opinion, to make my game feel like AD&D with a couple of house rules ... 

Slow Down Levelling

Let's face it, there's instant reward for 5E as far as Levelling up and gaining benefits every level.  That's not a bad thing, but if you want to savor your progress, you've got to slow things down a bit.

My first attempt was to slow down advancement by just increasing XP thresholds for each level - at first I tried tripling it (900 XP for 2nd level, etc), and it felt right at first, but once the party got to 4th and 5th level, advancement slowed to a snail's crawl.  It was probably very old school in pacing, but a bit much for my players, so I tried just a doubling of XP goals and it felt better to me.

Because treasure isn't mandated like 3E, it's not necessary to really adjust much else.  Just be careful throwing characters into a published adventure path, as it will assume a certain rate of Levelling to go with challenges.

Slow Down Healing ... Just a Little

Don't get me wrong, the freer healing options for characters, and the lack of mandated cleric healing, but characters bouncing back to full hit points every morning breaks the verisimilitude of an old school game.  But you don't want to break the game mechanics that need characters to bounce back - when you change the duration of rests, or eliminate class abilities you potentially break the game.

My solution is this ... just change rests, slightly.

For a short rest, limit characters to recovering a maximum of 1 HD per rest.  If a character wants to recover more, they have to take additional short rests.

For a long rest, allow recovery of any number of HD, but don't allow the recovery of spent HD -- that means that the first long rest will likely recover most hit points of an injured fighter, but subsequent rests won't gain much.  It means players will need to pace their used HD carefully.

Lastly, introduce a new 'Extended Rest' period of 7 days, that let's a character perform light downtime tasks and regain half their level in HD, meaning a truly spent hero will need two weeks or so to fully recover to full resources.

Keep Magic Mysterious

Easily identifying magic items, knowing what spells your opponent is casting, and making spells predictable also does not feel Old School to me.  

For identifying spells that were being cast, I allowed a DC 15 Intelligence (Arcana) check, with an additional +1 added to the DC for each level of the spell attempting to identify.  It makes counterspelling a little harder, and evokes tension.

For identifying magic items, of course the identify spell will work as normal, but what about the idea that a non-spellcasting user is experimenting, sipping potions, jumping up and down with their new boots on, trying out historically popular command words, and so on?  Allow someone to make an identification check over a long rest with a DC 20 Intelligence (Arcana) check.  Make them describe what they are doing, and if it entertains the DM, give them advantage on the check.  If a natural 1 is rolled, consider having the item misfire, go off with side effects, or some other reaction.

Death to the Knowledge Skill Roll!

So, some of my players have been gaming at my table with me since 3.0, and old habits die hard.  So, when they see a slobbering hound-like creature, they shout 'I make a Nature check! What is it?'.  

Sigh.

Old School D&D relied on player skill, more than character skill.  Experienced players memorized monsters' abilities and knew how to scrounge information from the local villagers if it was still mysterious.  Nothing ruins my OSR visimillitude than someone calling for a knowledge check.  So that's enough of that!

If a character has never seen a minotaur, they aren't likely to know much about them, so try to dissuade your players from falling back on such mechanical crutches.  However, if you are feeling generous, let them make a check -- with a catch.

An uncommon monster (an dire wolf, let's say) might be a DC 10 Nature check.  If they have no possible argument for why they would know what it is, make them make the check with a D4.  Next time they see one, a D6, then a D8, etc.  If they study up on said monster at the local town, or buy Malovali's Fantastic Monster Almanac, give them another die bump, etc.  It will gently ease them into the idea that learning about their environment is more than just die rolls.

Conclusion

Some parting words of advice ... the other thing to remember is as the DM, you set the tone.  If you want an old school feel to your game, use pulpy descriptions, mysterious monsters, fell magic, villainous brigands, gritty challenges, and control the tone and environment.  The difference between Fafhrd & The Grey Mouser stories and Forgotten Realms isn't about the level of magic of the campaign world, or how tough the monsters are, it's about the challenges the characters face, and the reaction of the world to them.  You can lead an army against the rising forces of Bane, or you can wake the next day with a hangover and an empty purse because you frequented the brothels of the Sisters of Ilthmar ...

Happy gaming!