Running 5e as OSR: Monsters by HD not CR

Some of my friends love 5e, only play 5e, only will play 5e. I find 5e unwieldy and time consuming to prep and run, whereas I love the flow of OSR and PBTA games. But 5e has been around for nearly a decade and apparently isn't going away soon either.

What I want to know is whether I can run 5e for them, RAW or RAW-ish, in a way that means I a) don't have to bog myself down in encounter building and all that crap and b) can use all the cool OSR stuff I have lying around.

Encounter building is painful; it sucks all the joy out of running a game for me. However, embracing "Combat as War, not Sport" I'm sacking off encounter building for good so I don't need CR. What I could do with, however, is an idea of general stats against Hit Dice in 5e so I can use OSR resources or eyeball stats in play.

Making Skill Checks More PBTA

Image (cc) oxpal

One thing I loved when reading Dungeon World was how all the moves fall into the same basic pattern:

• 10+ (on 2d6 plus modifiers) means clean success
• 7-9 means success, but with a cost or limitation
• 6 or less means failure and the DM moves the story along

It's an easy change from pass/fail and it runs right through all "Powered by the Apocalypse" games.  Note how there's no DC. I like this. So often my players roll skill checks and announce the result before I decide the DC that I end up just eyeballing it - so why not get rid of it? This is all about stakes and not about difficulty.

System Hacking: Dragon Age

Image (cc) Andrew Becraft on Flickr

There's been much discussion of DARPG around - enough to warrant me reading the Players' Guide and GM Guide through quickly to see what all the fuss is about - with a lot of gripes leveled at the fact that the initial Set 1 release only caters for levels 1-5.

Personally, I think this is a good thing: let players grow into the game before you throw everything at them.  There's been a lot of discussion of broadening the classes over at darkAgeOracle, to cater for the likes of Clerics and Archers, and given my love of polyhedral dice (d6s are sooo dull) I soon developed an idea - probably spawned by WyRM's "define your character as a mix of Warrior, Rogue and Mage" spin on the traditional class idea...

Alignment: Blurring the lines

We didn't get to play in last night's gaming session, but I did get to thrash out some ideas for house rules with David - and he made a very valid point about the dullness of "Neutral" characters(1). With that in mind, I've been considering replacing the nine alignments with nine overlapping blocks of four:

On Action Points and plot twists...

Well, my plans to use a Pathfindered version of Monte Cook's Hero Points have had mixed success... so it's time for a spot of tinkering!

Here's the original idea, straight from our campaign wiki:

“Joss” – An adaptation of what I read here on Monte Cook’s Hero Points, Pathfindered, and given a name players are familiar with already: Joss Points are gained through excellent roleplaying, creating memorable moments in game, contributing to this wiki – for example by posting to the Adventure Log in-character – and so on… They can be used for: