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.

Go Build a Dungeon!

A better-late-than-never wrap up of all the great posts from August's RPG Blog Carnival, plus bonus gems on the subject of dungeon building:

If you build it, they will come... Image (cc) Kanut55

Lapidary Ossuary gave us this series of insightful posts detailing dungeon building from the ground up, with the finished product as a showcase. As a reader of dungeons/adventures, the layout analysis is particularly interesting.

Campaign Mastery gives us another, equally detailed, dungeon building methodology with an emphasis on lore and history.

Codex Anathema goes all out with posts on dungeons in both Eberron and Ravnica, and guidance on building dungeons and running dungeons in your games!

Dreaming Dragonslayer provided an excellently referenced framework for dungeon building, with an example 5 room dungeon, with a well reasoned argument for keeping the number of rooms in the 5-9 range.

Dragon's Keep shows how we can apply any of this dungeon building methodology to any node-based adventure location - in this case the jungle - by looking at it through the right lens.

Swords & Cloaks also takes the dungeon outside of the dungeon, and defines rooms in this context using classic video games in part of an ongoing series on outdoor dungeon crawling.

All rounded off by shorter posts from Rising Phoenix on building dungeons from terrain pieces and from The Other Side on exploration in the Vault of the Drow.

Bonus: a classic post in this vein is Goblin Punch's Dungeon Checklist from 2016; seven timeless things that every RPG dungeon should actually have (in my opinion too)

Now go build a dungeon (and let us know how you get on) and don't forget to check out September's RPG Blog Carnival over at the Five Foot Square!

My Gaming Notebook (or how I am learning to embrace order)

Let's start by saying I lean somewhat toward Chaotic. My notes, traditionally, are scribbled on margins, envelope backs, and other blank spaces sighted within my apathy radius.

I also have real difficulty with parsing text or writing while I'm talking or listening.

In that context, let's talk about July RPG Blog Carnival topic of "The Gamer's Notebook".  This post sat in my drafts since the beginning of the month as I wanted to take the opportunity to actually think about what I should be doing and if my emergent process is actually any good.

As a GM:

When I run a game I have started trying to keep separate reusable reference sheets for different things depending on their purpose and just reference the ones I need that session. I dread flicking through monster lists at the table as much as I do looking backward and forward in a published adventure looking for a certain piece of information.

Generally I'll want to have: