Looks like D&D's back on the menu, boyz!

I promised some guys here locally that I’d run something for them coming up. Not necessarily a full-blown “this is now my group”, but that I’d at least run a 2-3 session mini-campaign, just to see how we got along, how they liked it, how I liked it, etc. It became obvious when I talked to them that they’re not really interested in stepping too far beyond D&D tropes, and that if I wasn’t running 5e, I’d be at a severe disadvantage with them. Of course, I have had little interest in 5e other than academic, so that’s not great for me. But I reviewed the SRD last night, and I think I can do it. My first thought was that I could revert to a hand-wavey style of running 3.5, like I had done years ago, but I couldn’t remember how to do it very well, honestly. I would need to review it as carefully as I would need to skim the 5e rules to run it, so why not just do 5e, is kind of what I ended up deciding. Sigh. I really had no intention of doing anything with 5e. Luckily for me, with the online SRD available for free, I don’t need to actually buy anything, which I absolutely do not intend to do anyway.

I suspect that at lower levels, 5e works relatively well as is, although there are a few changes; two of which were for tone and one of which I just like better, that I’m going to implement as house-rules. 1) The death save DC is ridiculously low. I don’t necessarily have a problem with the concept of death saves, but a DC of 10, and you have to fail three? C’mon, that’s not much risk. DC of 15. And ideally, you fail two and die, but I’ll make a concession for three. 2) There’s no such thing as a short rest. Long rest now works like short rest, except of course, that it requires overnighting to get the benefit. 3) There are no spell slots. You can cast any spell that you have as often as you like. However, just like with everything else in D&D, you have to roll to successfully cast it. 

The first two are pretty straightforward, but the last one requires just a little bit of explanation. First off, roll what? What is the DC and what is your roll? For 5e, it’d be an ability check against your Arcana skill, which presumably casting classes would have proficiency in. DC is 10 + 2 x spell level. So a 1st level spell, like Burning Hands for a sorcerer would be DC 12, while a 9th level spell like Gate would be 28. Why 9th level? If it’s just a low level game, that’s not likely to matter is it? No, I suppose not, but since there’s no slots, you can potentially have any spell in the game, assuming you can find it somewhere to learn it. If you’re a low level character, however, your likelihood of successfully casting a high level spell is very low, however. You basically need a natural 20, and even then if you, with a natural 20, still don’t meet the DC, at best, I’d give you a conditional success… it sorta worked, but there is a complication.

Also, some spells still require To Hit rolls, or the target can save, etc, making it unsuccessful even if you successfully cast the spell. That’s OK. That would be extra punitive in a spell slot system where you spend your spells and then you’re out. However here, if you either don’t successfully cast, or successfully cast but don’t successfully pull off the effect because the target saved or whatever, that’s OK. You can try again without any penalty, because you haven’t expelled one of your “spells for the day.” However, the more you cast spells, the more you risk a critical failure on a natural 1 on your spellcasting roll. What normally happens here is that the spell would backfire and you would become the target. If it’s an area effect spell, like Sleep or Fireball, you could end up targeting your entire party. That would really suck if you try to Sleep your enemies and instead you and your entire party Sleeps and become incredibly vulnerable to just being murdered in their sleep. Fireball also, obviously, would really suck in the entire party is in the area of effect. 

If it doesn’t actually make sense to have the spell backfire, if it’s not the kind of spell that harms the target for instance, what happens instead is that some kind of extradimensional magical monstrosity is ripped out of the Far Realm or whatever and attacks the spellcaster obsessively until one of the two of them is killed. If it kills the spellcaster before dying itself, then it will randomly attack the next closest target, which again, might be part of the PC party. In general, these shouldn’t be so deadly that they threaten a TPK, but it can still be dangerous, especially to the spellcaster personally. So sure, spellcasters can cast spells as much as they want, however, there may be reasons why they don’t want to cast all they want. On average, once every twenty times that they cast, they get a critical failure and have the spell backfire on them or get attacked by a hound of Tindalos or some kind of demon or elemental or whatever. 

Other than that, what exactly am I going to run? I’m considering adapting The Skinsaw Murders, which is a great Paizo adventure (one of their best, actually) as a one-shot for 1st level characters. I’ll need to also remove all of the context from the adventure path in which it comes and adapt it to a stand-alone situation, but that shouldn’t be hard. I’ve got plenty of other material to add to it potentially as well. Some of the haunted house stuff from the first Carrion Crown adventure might fit in well, and some of the stuff from their Dunwich Horror pastiche module (Carrion Hill or something like that, I think it’s called?) Again, my point isn’t to create a “campaign” but just a one-shot or mini-campaign; 2-3 sessions; maybe four at the most, and then we decide what to do after that. I’m giving no thought to what happens after I get through those few sessions.

UPDATE: Here's a few images of the scarecrow ghouls out in the farms.