So, while I didn’t personally sign
up to fund raise for Extra Life this year I did participate anyway. I had some friends who did sign up to help
raise money and awareness and they wanted to play some RPG’s. As such I volunteered to DM a game for
them. We ended up playing Dungeons &
Dragons 5th Edition, but since 5E doesn’t have a lot of official
one-shot modules I ended up converting an old Pathfinder/D&D 3.5 module
into it for them and we played Crypt of the Everflame.
Helpfully Pathfinder is based on
D&D 3.5 and as such it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to convert the
encounters over to the 5E system as many can just be run straight as they
appear. However, there are many things
that don’t work so well. Pathfinder and
3.5 both operate off a constantly increasing skill level and there were a lot
of traps and locks that had difficulty classes of 20 which makes them nearly
impossible to bypass which would be ignorable if many encounters weren’t so
damned deadly. For instance, there is a
Shadow to fight at some point who can’t be hurt by common weaponry which leaves
you to be relying on your wizard and a magic dagger. If your party gets to this stage which is
probably ½ way through the first level of the dungeon they can quickly be
overwhelmed and killed.
There was another instance where a
trap knocked a character down into a 20 foot deep pit. Even fudging damage, I still nearly killed
the poor warrior who was knocked in which was a high point of the day as
everyone gritted their teeth and it created some great tension but man would it
have hurt the party.
For some of the encounters I simply
dug through the 5E Monster Manual and found challenge rating equivalent
monsters whose attacks made sense to take the place of monsters who did more
than I think the players could handle.
For instance, there is a space where they encounter a Giant Beetle who
breathes fire at them, but there isn’t a creature in 5E that does that, plus an
area of effect damage like that could really destroy the group, particularly as
it occurred just before the previously Shadow encounter. As such, I chose to change the creature to a
Giant Ant. Sure, losing the fire attack
made the encounter less deadly but it also kept the characters moving and still
gave them something to concentrate on in-between areas of encounters.
I could go through the game itself
but the quick version is thus. We played
for 7 hours, they made it all the way through from start to finish, everyone
lived (if just barely) and the game was most successful in that everybody had a
lot of fun and one of the players (first game ever) said he really enjoyed it
and would like to play again. The real
reason I kind of talked about this is to pump a little juice into 5E. Like I said, Wizards hasn’t put out a lot of
modules outside of full on campaigns but the fact is that Pathfinder and 3.5
had a LOT of modules which you can often find at game stores who sell used
products, or on eBay, or on many .PDF repositories on the internet. I know for a fact that Paizo sells digital
copies of all their modules from their own website so for those running 5E and
looking for material, go get it, it’s out there, and it isn’t hard to use. Viva la D&D!
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