By Nelson Schneider - 08/07/16 at 03:08 PM CT
The 5th and most recent edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the world’s oldest (and greatest) tabletop RPG launched a couple years ago, and perusal of the relevant corners of the Internet reveal it to be a rousing success for Wizards of the Coast. Outside of a few old, crufty, neckbearded grognards, who can’t stand the fact that THAC0 is gone and never returning, everyone loves 5E.
I love 5E too, but like most things, it isn’t quite perfect. Every edition of D&D has a handful of small, annoying things at minimum that players have traditionally beaten into submission and shaped to the will of their specific group via the use of House Rules. After playing 5E for a year, the following list of five tweaks, mostly drawn from the four older editions of D&D, feel much better than 5E’s defaults.
1. Draw Magic Items from the Complete “Encyclopedia Magica” Four-Volume Set
The magic items detailed in the 5E “Dungeon Master’s Guide” manage to capture much of the flavor of classic D&D. Unfortunately, there are a LOT of omissions, and the variety that developed over 30+ years of wildly imaginative design and writing simply isn’t represented. The good news is, back before Wizards of the Coast bought-out the failing TSR, the latter company produced a four-volume book set containing a massive compiled list of every magic item ever mentioned in a TSR tabletop RPG product.
With a ridiculous 1,565 pages of items, 28 pages of random loot generation tables, and a 65-page index, the AD&D 2nd Edition “Encyclopedia Magica” has always been one of my favorite supplements. With 5E’s throwback magic item rules for rarity and power, the “Encyclopedia Magica” fits perfectly in the empty space left by the “Dungeon Master’s Guide’s” limited list. And if you can’t find a reasonably-priced set of these books, you can always torrent some .PDFs. It’s not like the original writers are getting any royalties on an out-of-print book from 1995 anyway.
2. Use the Critical Hit Tables from “Combat & Tactics”
I was very disappointed to learn that D&D 5E doesn’t do into gory detail with regard to critical hits. Typically, a critical hit in most versions of D&D occurs when an attacker rolls a ‘natural 20’ on their attack roll, that is to say, the number showing on the 20-sided die is 20 without applying any of the attacker's modifiers to it. Also typically, a critical hit in D&D simply does double damage.
Back around 1995, a three-volume series of AD&D 2nd Edition ‘Player’s Option’ tomes were released in order to introduce a large number of fantastic optional rules to the core game, which had been largely unmodified since 1977. The single volume in this series that got the most use from my group in high school and college was “Combat & Tactics,” which introduced a large number of combat mechanics that eventually found their way into the core rules of D&D 3.x Edition. The highly detailed Critical Hit Tables, however, are the pages my copy of the book falls open to, as they were consulted so frequently. Making these critical tables compatible with 5E can take a bit of fiddling, as 5E has messed with (or messed up, or streamlined, depending on your viewpoint) weapon sizes, which was the key mechanic for determining the severity of a critical hit on these tables. I came up with an in-betweener table that works great, and wasn’t terribly difficult. Barring that, players could always just consult the weapon tables in “Combat & Tactics” to determine their weapon’s official size, as the names have largely stayed the same.
3. Use Magic Item Slots Instead of Attunement
Yuck, attunement! This particular trait of D&D 5E is one that made my list of worst features of the new edition. Its sole purpose seems to be a way to limit the number of ‘powerful’ magic items a single character can use… yet it really just feels like an overzealous nerf. Paizo Publishing’s unofficial 3.75 Edition mod, Pathfinder, introduced/clarified the idea of magic item ‘slots’ – different parts of the body which could each bear a single magic item. Slots provide 15 places to equip magic items (including both hands), whereas the attunement system wants characters restricted to 3 attuned items per person.
The purported reason for attunement is to prevent player characters from passing an item amongst themselves to benefit from its lingering effects… yet 5E doesn’t have any magic items that work like that, and I’m hard pressed to think of any from older editions that have worked that way either. The rules are also unclear about how ‘powerful’ an item needs to be in order to require attunement to function. Ultimately attunement is both a nerf and vague, so any group is better off without it.
4. Use Healing Surges and Add Cure Minor Wounds to the Cantrip List
D&D 3.0 Edition introduced a 0-level Cleric/Druid spell called Cure Minor Wounds, which performed a single point of healing upon the target. When the Pathfinder system usurped official D&D 3.x, the concept of infinite-use 0-level spells, called Cantrips for Arcane casters and Orisons for Divine casters, saw Cure Minor Wounds replaced by the crappy Stabilize. 5E has unlimited Cantrips as well, but has the useless Spare the Dying instead of Cure Minor Wounds. The “Dungeon Master’s Guide” even goes so far as to say in its custom spell creation section that no Cantrip should provide healing.
However, in my experience, having access to a crappy healing Cantrip makes the game infinitely better. Clerics are no longer limited to being heal-bots and are free to experiment with other spells (Playing a cleric with the Tempest Domain is crazy fun!). Healing Cantrips are still useless in the middle of a fight, but can quickly get the party back on their feet between battles, in lieu of the traditional concept of taking an 8-hour rest after every battle (possibly inviting a wandering monster encounter, which will then precipitate another 8-hour rest, ad infinitum).
The Healing Surges introduced in 4th Edition can also go a long way in liberating the party’s Cleric (or negating the need for one), allowing characters to roll some recovery dice in the middle of a pitched battle. Healing Surges did find their way into 5E officially, but only as an optional rule presented in the “Dungeon Master’s Guide.”
5. Play in “Tabletop Simulator”
Tabletop RPGs received a lot of great media support in the 1990s. Boxed sets with color maps, dungeon tiles, miniatures: These things brought the game to life right in front of the players. Unfortunately, due to profit margins, very few modern tabletop products provide the same kind of tangible art assets.
With the Internet, though, everyone has easy access to more fantasy art, assets, and map-making software than ever before. I’ve talked-up Berserk Games’ “Tabletop Simulator” previously, but it’s worth repeating: This software makes running a virtual tabletop sooo much better than running a real one. Any image on the entire Internet can be turned into a game asset, copyright be damned. Maps, dungeon tiles, character stand-ins: They’re back and better than ever! The best part, though, is that a simulated tabletop doesn’t take up any space. A group playing D&D 5E in “Tabletop Simulator” can save and quit wherever they are without worrying about the mess they’re leaving on the table taking up space or getting disrupted between sessions. Dungeon Masters can even setup multiple tabletops and swap between them instantly as characters travel from location to location. “Tabletop Simulator” is the ultimate time-and-space saver. Even better, the software itself doesn’t enforce any rules, allowing players to bring whatever House Rules they want to the game.
