At one point they suggested something new, a sci fi campaign which sounded kinda fun, then they said it'd be run using D&D 5E and I instantly was deflated.
Man I have been there so many times it's unreal, it's why I got into DMing in the first place. My friends were so married to sticking to Pathfinder no matter what even if there were other games that would do exactly what they wanted, except better, but they just refused to move on to a new game until I started DMing.
I will try to inspect all the rules from my perspective amd try to write how they effected my game, but currently i am in a hospital. And i dislike typing on phone.
Take your time man I really appreciate the response. I also hope you're doing alright and aren't in the hospital for anything super serious.
I think it holds up fine especially if you want to do old school dungeon crawling. You may have difficulty finding takers, though. But the kind of takers, although grognards, will probably be of fairly high quality.
Thankfully for my group we have an agreement that if the DM wants to run something, that's just what we're playing. And since nobody else wants to DM we just end up playing whatever games I feel like running back to back. It's been a few years and nobody's complained so far. AD&D 2e's amount of content looks insanely varied and fun to me so I think the other guys will get into it too.
ACKS II mainly does the following:
- Clarifies or expands rules for people too autistic to just make a fucking decision
- Fixes the trade mechanics, which were incomplete
- Consolidates the best material from the ACKS I expansions
- Removes all OGL terminology (like renaming Cleric to Crusader) because WotC had tried to retroactively change it
I looked into it and damn ACKS II is a fuckin'
TOME of a book. That's good value for the purchase cost. I found and read a bit of the ACKS I corebook over the last couple days and I like what I'm seeing there too. I think I'll consider sitting down and doing a side-by-side of D&D and ACKs and consider which I'd rather go with, but ACKs is looking pretty solid to me so far.
For me, 5e's biggest crime is it's slow. It's biggest benefit is that it does heroic fantasy really well.
Personally, while it could have been the DMs fault or I just wasn't into it at the time, I just felt a little bored with 5e the handful of times I've played. Just something about how it plays even with leveling up there just wasn't a lot I was too excited for. Granted each time I played was also playing official adventures so perhaps WoTC just sucks ass at writing a fun adventure anymore.
Problem is it doesn't have a real strong grab beyond "draw in the people that like the marketing." It's slightly too crunchy for new players or snappy gameplay and too restrictive and safe to do much interesting for people who get properly familiar with it.
That about sums up my feelings when I've played 5e. Almost like it's too much and too little at the same time.
I wish I could offer you more recommendations that are modern but my experience with modern modules has been that they are extremely badly written or just have a very hack-writer feel to them.
I haven't had much luck in finding really good modern written adventures for almost any game, outside of Call of Cthulhu. Maybe the assumptions about what should or shouldn't be in an adventure have changed, maybe writers in general have gotten worse (this is kinda true across the entire profession it seems, so many sci-fi or fantasy books made now are almost unreadable garbage), or maybe the game publishers just don't think good Adventures are worth investing time and money in. I often go back to adventures from well before my time just to crib ideas just because a lot of them are well written enough use their ideas even outside their intended game or setting. Thanks again for the recommendations I've already found copies of a few of them to read.
