Some people will be happy to run the Starter Set adventure....it looks to me like you could get at least five game nights out of it, and with 26 monster stat blocks you have enough stuff to craft an adventure or three of your own if you don't mind the limited range: hey everyone, it's mating season for green dragons in Chirak, so they're all over the place looting gold and cows as gifts for their green dragoness beloveds......yeah nope.
But luckily there's enough stuff floating around to help out. Obviously the soon-to-be-released free Basic D&D rules will offer up 100 pages of material for the core four classes and races, so that's covered. If you would like the latest menagerie of monsters take a look at Dead in Thay, the latest PDF release module WotC produced; it's got a robust bestiary with over 30 pages of monster stats. If you're cheap you can fish around for the playtest bestiary or find it stuck on your hard drive somewhere no doubt.
I suppose you could just make stuff up, too. I'm already considering how easy it would be to adapt Dungeon Crawl Classics to D&D 5E right now, for example. Use the baseline monsters in the Starter Set as examples of design, and it ought to suffice for a few weeks of gaming. In fact just about any old school style module will be really easy to adapt to 5E.
Anyway, if all goes well I may be running some 5E tonight, and definitely this weekend with a game already slotted for Saturday. The system looks good; the basic rules in the Starter Set are extremely easy to use. Maybe I'll run the Starter module, but honestly I love doing my own thing. Still....I guess it would be wise to try the module out, it'll give me something to blog about, at least!
Showing posts with label starter set. Show all posts
Showing posts with label starter set. Show all posts
Thursday, July 3, 2014
The Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set is in my hands
At 12:01 AM my friendly local game store kindly sold me my reserve copy of the D&D Starter Set....soon, everyone will be expressing their opinions on it as other early buyers get their copies, but at least I can say I was in that group!
I'm still reading it obviously, but here's a few details to hold you over or help you make a buying decision:
Contents are one 32 page rulebook and one 64 page scenario book plus five double-sided character sheets. As shown elsewhere the pregenerated characters have five levels of advancement included on the sheet itself. The two books are thick glossy color paper but do not have different card-stock covers; this is a shame, I was really hoping we'd see some sturdier cover material. Also, no poster map in sight though the scenario book has five chapters and plenty of maps, along with a mini monster manual with 26 monster entries that tie to the scenarios.
At first glance the scenarios look like roughly 4 hours play per chapter, so I am guessing you can get five sessions out of this book but only an actual playthrough will determine if this is true. Losing a PC with only five pregens suggests a lot of recycling, or of course using the Basic rules once they are loosed into the wild later today.
The box is a real box, old school style, and feels sturdy enough to hold stuff. Nice.
The art in the books is nice. YMMV but I really like the game's new artists and look.
Overall not a bad deal for $20, worth it for collectors and the scenario book looks more and more promising. If I find time after I finish reading it I'll do a more detailed content follow-up. That said, as nice as the Starter set is I think the real meat of 5E is coming later today with the Basic D&D PDF release....
I'm still reading it obviously, but here's a few details to hold you over or help you make a buying decision:
Contents are one 32 page rulebook and one 64 page scenario book plus five double-sided character sheets. As shown elsewhere the pregenerated characters have five levels of advancement included on the sheet itself. The two books are thick glossy color paper but do not have different card-stock covers; this is a shame, I was really hoping we'd see some sturdier cover material. Also, no poster map in sight though the scenario book has five chapters and plenty of maps, along with a mini monster manual with 26 monster entries that tie to the scenarios.
At first glance the scenarios look like roughly 4 hours play per chapter, so I am guessing you can get five sessions out of this book but only an actual playthrough will determine if this is true. Losing a PC with only five pregens suggests a lot of recycling, or of course using the Basic rules once they are loosed into the wild later today.
The box is a real box, old school style, and feels sturdy enough to hold stuff. Nice.
The art in the books is nice. YMMV but I really like the game's new artists and look.
Overall not a bad deal for $20, worth it for collectors and the scenario book looks more and more promising. If I find time after I finish reading it I'll do a more detailed content follow-up. That said, as nice as the Starter set is I think the real meat of 5E is coming later today with the Basic D&D PDF release....
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