This is an interesting article on converting 1e monsters to 5e in case you want to play your old modules.

Dice Monkey

Mark Meredith writes the Dice Monkey blog and articles. His website is well worth taking a look at and reading

http://dicemonkey.net/

Now that is some old school coolness!

What about all of the "or die" attacks?

I guess that would come down to the DM and where he wants to establish a DC.

Well we will be play testing 5.0 next Sunday. Sir Nibley,CTHB and I will tryout this edition. Sir Nbley's dad is our GM. My son even join us. I never gamed with him yet, he just started playing a few months ago with some of his friends. They are trying 3.5.

I plan to read the PH download this week. I will most likely play one of preset characters just to save time.

So i'll report back my comments after I've had some time to digest how things went.

Can't wait to read that, Ody!

I run out at lunch today and bought the started set.

Pretty blue dice!

Odyson’s Review of the 5e Basic Rules:

Well I am not reviewing this game from the GM’s side. I don’t run the games, I play the games. I have done a few different rules sets and I have to say I am not the quickest study to learn rules. I need to play a game a while to get the flow so this is just a first impression.

This weekend my son and two of his friends joined our usual tabletop group. To make things easier the GM pulled out the new D&D starter set. There are five pre-generate characters for jumping into a quick start. We had seven show up for the game so our GM’s two sons built characters from scratch. Even with that we got started in pretty quickly.

The game started a little slow as each player got use to their character and the character sheet. I played the cleric and I did mess up a bit on the difference of casting cantrips and spells. I confused having three cantrip slots and having three cantrips ready. I started thinking I could cast any cantrip but only three. It took a bit to figure it was that I could select three cantrips that I could cast as often as I wanted.

We started like good little gamers as first level with its low HP and limited spell choice. Even a few lowly goblins can create havoc on level one adventures and this game is no different. We lost two characters in the goblin cave. My son was playing the rogue with 9HP and took 24 damage in one hit and one of human fighters got DOA with the wizard cast an area effect spell that caught him in the area. My cleric even took a hit that dropped him to -7. So if you’re a fan of running rough shod you better bide your time.

A good game needs a good GM to keep thing moving and spice things up. Our GM Randy is very good at that and our encounters were a hoot. The roll play in this version is what it is supposed to be all about. The opportunities to build story and interplay are better than in other hack- n slash games.

So in a brief summary you get out what you put in, it is less complicated and an easy roll play so it plays quickly. I really need to play through a couple of more levels to see how character growth works, so I’ll report back after each session.

Just a heads up. We will be playing again either next weekend or Sept. 7th. Our GM got the actual PH and now I have it to help my son Dave can build a new character, he'll be 2nd level so fit with the rest of palrty.

So after the next adventure I'll give my feelings oh how it continues to play.

Ok, going to play tomorrow. Got to play early (11:00 am - 2:00pm) becuase our GM has to go out of town on business.

I was able to help my son create a new character, this time a human rogue. To get ability scores we usually use a method of rolling 3d6x6, but we do that 6 times to make a matrix of 6x6 scores. Then we pick the best combo of horizonal, verticle or corner to corner. They are assigned by choice.

But I tried a variation and used the Inn's dice roller using a d18 instead of 3d6. It built the matrix faster. In cases like this I'd assign 1's and 2's to be 3's, because the lowest roll on 3d6 is 3. Below is the matrix.

4 1 13 12 17 4 Your total roll is 51.
13 2 5 5 13 3 Your total roll is 41.
9 14 16 6 9 10 Your total roll is 64.
7 11 18 13 13 14 Your total roll is 76.
13 16 12 11 17 7 Your total roll is 76.
16 2 7 10 11 5 Your total roll is 51.

In this case the next to last colume was the best, 17, 13,9,13,17,11. For the 5.0 human you add one to each score so that gave an awsume 18,14,10,14,18,12.

This would make a formidable fighter class.

But because my son wanted a Rogue I used the 18's for Dex and Int.

So his Rogue will have Str 14, Dex 18, Con 14, Int 18, Wis 12, Cha 10.
AC17 with Chain Shirt, Shortsword 1d6+2, Shortbow 1d6+4.

I used the Halfling Rogue sheet from the Starter Kit as a template. But picked Acroatics, Athletics, Investigation, Nature, Slight of Hand and Stealth as the proficient skills.

Then I rolled his HP for a level 2 total of 17.(Kept the level 1 hp9, rolled a 7 on a d8 and added the +1 bonus)

Now it's up to him to keep him alive, lol.

I'll post how the second session went next week.

It was really entertaining and enlightening to read of your hands-on experience with the system, Ody! I'm also thankful that 5.0/D&D Next appears to resonate with so many of our roleplaying Old Guard here.

Fingers crossed for the system in general, and I look forward to reading your next update with it, Odyson!

Well todays game went a bit slow. We ended up short three player.

My son got called into work as he was driving over to the game. If friends that have joined our group didn't show up either. One had car issues last night and had to work on his car and the third was just MIA.

But it didn't stop the game. We had four there so it was still a chance to play. Unfortunatly one of the four still needed to create a new character, seeing his last killed last game. So the rest of us used the time to talk about the rules and how these affected our characters.

I am running the Dwarv cleic from the starter set. I learned more about how my character being a Disciple of Life affected his healing abilities. Also seeing that he is a spell caster I figure how to determine how many spells and cantrips were available to him. Now to some of you this is simple stuff but I'm not a quick and maybe a bit less aware of how thing combine. So it was time well spent. Plus the fact that I had worked to develop my son's new character got me reading more and applying more of the rules.

As for the game itself when we started in the town of Phandalin. Our new character was a Paliden, but we had not met him yet. so there were just three of us exploring the town. We ended up in a scuffel with the Redbrands at the Sleeping Giant. It was a Tefling Wizard, a Half Drow shapeshifter amd me the Dwarven Cleric. We faced four of the Redbrands. Well my usual amazingly bad dicing made this a near ruinous encounter. When given the oppertunity to cast Inflict Wound for up to a 3d10+6 on the leader I rolled a 1. But we did survive and of course after the encounter the Paliden finally rolled a d20 and finally noticed what was happening and came to investigate. So in our next game meeting he will be ready.

Well this may not quite be what you all are looking for in my game review, but I found the rules to run fairly smoothly. Healing is a bit simpler in that there is not the need to use spell slots each for a cure light , med, severe and critcal wounds, you now have prepared Cure Wounds that becomes more powerful as you advance and you get to choose how often to use it by just using an availabel spell slot.

Now back to more rules review and prep for the next session. We now have several choices of what to do next.
Hopefully we'll have a better turn out.

Looks like we will play again on either the 31st or the 1st.
I'll let ya'll know how things go.

Now I have to go back and read some more from PBH.

Well I'm sorry it took a while to get to my review but I just didn't have much to write.

This was our last game night. Our DM has taken a job in California and starts early in December. I'm really happy for him but I'm really going to miss him and our games.

That said we played the game until 4am with wreckless abandon and it showed. We decided to go to the manor after the Red Band and found some interesting foes. My Dwarv Cleric, Sargent Rocka Geobraltra, died!!!

So what do you do? Well the party goes back to town and low and behold there is his cousin, Sargent Snorkil. Just so happens he too was a cleric and joins the party to avenge his family. (Later it happened that my old character showed up as a Zombie, lucky I didn't have to take him out.)

Well from this game I learned more about Spell casting. Review of the rules for success is advised. Much as in melee combat where you have to overcome AC to hit here you overcome DC to hit. My first Cleric had the usaul luck of my roles so his spells failed too often, but his cousin faired much better, even with his damage rolls. Near the end of our last encounter he cast Guilding Bolt that is a 4d6 spell and rolled 20 points damage to knock off the main badie.

We had advanced to level 3 for this night's gaming and it showed that leveling does help. Even losing a character it was more fun having more option available. I'm just sorry I won't be able to report on further oppertunies.

So with that this is my last report.

In summary, 5.0 is easy to play, rules seem less complicated and generally fun to play. So give it a try.

I may have a new twist on reporting on 5.0 play.

If I can get my gear together we are going to try to play live online.

Going to try "Roll 20" to play a 5.0 game. Our DM is in California and his sons are here. He will DM the game from there.

The thought is to play twice a month for 3 hours. Shorter bites more often. On the 17th we will try out the setup for the Roll 20. Then try to play around the 23rd.

So I'll try to report on both the 5.0 game and how well the live online play works.

I still have to figure out the online stuff so this will be most interesting.

Stay Tuned!!!

I have experience DMing on roll 20 and am currently a sub. If you want some advice on something feel free to ask