We continue following a party of Dungeons & Dragons characters as they work their way through the Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. The twist? We're actually watching parallel universes. One is a 5th Edition party, the other is 1st Edition. Which game is easier? So far, the 1E party is struggling a lot more. Let's get back in there and see.
Area 29: The Tomb of Pelota
5E:
After moving roughly northward when possible, the party finds more glyphs. There's still a little time left on Morton's Comprehend Languages spell, so he is able to read the text. He says, "There's a pit here, which we are not to open unless we're willing to face the challenge of something called 'pelota.'"
Mikhael, concerned about the poison gas, decides against it and the party moves on.
One hour and seventeen minutes in the dungeon.
1E:
After moving roughly northward when possible, the party finds more glyphs. Weyland's Comprehend Languages spell ended a while ago, and the party is unwilling to waste any more time. They continue on.
Comments:
I know this was pretty anticlimactic. If the PCs stop to open the pit, they get drawn into a game of 'pelota' which rewards the party with some decent treasure, but if your time is running out you aren't likely to stop.
Side note: 'Pelota' is the Spanish word for the type of ball used to play Soccer.
One hour and twenty-six minutes in the dungeon.
Area 30: The Guardian Beast
5E:
Mikhael leads the party into a large room filled with cats... stuffed. It is intriguing, but the party is still injured and Mikhael is loath to stop to look around until they at least know whether they're close to escape from the poison gas. Continuing northerly, he chooses the set of double doors in the hope they lead to a main exit.
One hour and eighteen minutes in the dungeon.
1E:
Mikhael leads the party into a large room filled with cats... stuffed. It is intriguing, but the party is still injured and is becoming desperate to escape from the poison gas. Continuing northerly, he chooses the set of double doors in the hope they lead to a main exit.
One hour and twenty-seven minutes in the dungeon.
Comments:
This is actually a fun room, but it's hard to imagine a party of adventurers who are in crisis wanting to stop and see the sights.
Area 37: Bed of Xilonen
5E:
The odd, treelike thing growing from the middle of the pool in this room. Obviously, the party will have to get past it. Mikhael decides it's time to prepare, just in case. Cure spells are cast between characters to get everyone as strong as possible.
Carefully, Mikhael and Stone approach, weapons drawn, and start making their way around the pool, watching to see if the odd treelike creature reacts to them. It does, starting to bend toward the warriors.
Morton reacts immediately hurling Vicious Mockery at the creature, and it recoils. Nathair casts Spirit Guardians and moves close enough that her guardian spirits envelop the creature. Stone roars a battlecry and wades into the water to attack the creature, but neither of his strikes finds its target. Mikhael follows suit, and lands two blows with his longsword, channeling divine power into the beast at his maximum potency as Stig moves behind to strike at it with his shortsword. Shrieking, it wraps two tentacles around Stone and Mikhael. It pulls Mikhael toward its mouth and bites deeply into him. Weyland casts Cloud of Daggers into the creature.
Morton again viciously mocks the creature and begins an inspiring song to boost Mikhael. Nathair moves closer to prepare in case she needs to intervene directly. Stone furiously strikes twice at the creature again, with one blow being massively devastating. Mikhael raises his weapon and finishes the beast off.
The party moves on, planning to possibly return later to search the dead creature.
1800 XP Earned
One hour and twenty-three minutes in the dungeon.
1E:
There is no time to don their armor, so Stone goes without and brings Morton with him.
They approach carefully, weapons drawn, and start making their way around the pool, watching to see if the odd treelike creature reacts to them. It does, starting to bend toward the two adventurers. Lashing out with a tentacle, it grabs Morton who is now paralyzed. Stone roars a battlecry and wades forward into the water, slashing at the creature with his axe, but the oily water causes him to lose his footing. Stig wades quickly up behind the creature and attacks with his shortsword but doesn't wound it as deeply as he'd hoped. The situation is becoming desperate. Nathair charges forward top club at it with her mace. Mikhael, badly wounded and armorless, joins the charge but also loses his footing in the slippery water. Weyland casts Magic Missile, sending three magical arrows into the center of the beast.
Tentacles waving wildly, the creature retaliates, pulling Morton closer to its maw while lashing out at Nathair, Stig, Stone and Mikhael. It grabs Mikhael and Stig, paralyzing Stig and pulling both toward its mouth as well. Stone swings at his target and misses badly. Mathair clubs it with her mace while Mikhael and Stone both try to injure the creature, but their weapons do not find their mark. Weyland, out of offensive spells, considers using his quarterstaff and charging the beast.
The creature grabs Stone with a tentacle and paralyzes Stone, pulling him closer. Nathair shrieks a war cry and clubs the monster one last time with her mace, and with a shudder, the beast falls. WIthn o time to lose, Mikhael, Nathair and Weyland pull their paralyzed comrades from the grip of the dying creature and pull them out of the water and through the double doors.
One hour and thirty-two minutes in the dungeon.
Comments:
Well... that battle with the creature in 1E. Ouch. It actually makes 1E look harder because of the terrible die rolls I was getting when running through the combat. Never in all my years of playing this game do I recall so many consecutive natural '1s' rolled for PCs to hit. Not only to hit but damage rolls of '1' on the die and even multiple '1s' when Stig got his backstab attack in. Just for fun, at one point I rilled the 2d6 to determine if the character slipped in the oily water. I said out loud "I'll get a 3." I tossed the dice. A '1' and a '2.' I actually looked around to see if I was somehow being pranked.
All of that said, the 1E version of the creature is a lot more dangerous but also much easier to kill.
Area 39: Chamber of the Second Sun
5E:
Making their way down the corridor after the tentacled beast, the party finds another door. Opening it, they find a room actually lit by the sun through a large hole in the ceiling. As they enter, they realize that they can breathe easy. The gas vents out through the hole. Around the rim of the hole are four baboons, agitated and screeching, but they do not come in.
The party begins scouting the room and discovers a massive snake with two heads in the center, moving toward them. Nathair steps toward it and crouches down, letting it approach. As it draws near she begins to pet it, stroking it and speaking softly to it. Her Yuan-ti nature allows her to befriend the creature. The party realizes this snake is why the baboons will not enter the chamber, and so they decide this will be a good enough place to rest.
We no longer need to keep track of dungeon time.
1E:
Making their way down the corridor after the tentacled beast, the party finds another door. Nathair, Mikhael, and Weyland drag their paralyzed comrades toward it. They are on their last legs and if they cannot find fresh air right away, Mikhael is not likely to be alive in ten more minutes.
They reach the door and practically fall through it. Panting, they realize that the air here is clean. The gas vents out through a hole in the ceiling. Around the rim of the hole are four baboons-like creatures, agitated and screeching, but they do not come in.
As the paralyzed members of the party begin to regain their movement, Mikhael assists Stone in donning his armor. The room isn't secure yet and they have not moved from the entrance. Once Stone is in his armor again, he, Nathair, and Morton move to scout the room.
The party begins scouting the room and discovers a massive snake with two heads in the center, moving toward them. Nathair steps toward it and crouches down, letting it approach. As it draws near she casts Speak With Animals, hoping it will work on this creature. She is able to convince it to let them be, and it slithers away into the darkness. The angry baboon-like creatures are enraged, but still do not dare come down.
We no longer need to keep track of dungeon time.
Comments:
The PCs are only halfway through the dungeon at this point, but will no longer have to contend with the poison gas as long as they don't go back the way they came. There is lots of treasure and XP to be had there, so using this room as a base to operate from is a perfectly viable plan.
Healing for the 5E party will be easy. One long rest and they will all be back to 100%. Not so with AD&D. Characters heal naturally at the rate of 1hp per day + CON bonus. To heal faster requires the use of magic. The 5E party can be up and ready for action tomorrow. The 1E party would take a few days.
Final Impressions:
Well, I think it's obvious that the 5th edition version of the game is a lot easier. It gives the PCs more leeway, more options, more spells, and more effective actions. In every way, the advantage goes toward the 5E group. In our experiment here, we saw that not only was the 5E party having an easier time with the encounters, but it was also able to solve some problems allowing them to avoid combat or other dangers entirely. I had originally intended to take this series of posts all the way to the end of the dungeon but I think we've seen enough to give us lots of insights. I'm sure I made a few mistakes along the way, but hopefully, they were evenly distributed between the two systems so they wouldn't impact the final result too much.
I think a more important question here is: Which system is more fun? I really think the answer to that question depends on what you're looking for. 5E is much more complex mechanically in terms of how PCs function and use abilities. 1E, on the other hand, is more complex in terms of the environment. It's more "realistic" in the sense that it tries to function as a more grounded and believable environment. !E also relies very heavily on DM's discretion in terms of things like XP values, time, and reactions. The Dungeon Master is much more involved in determining how things work, while just about everything in 5E is prescribed in the rules.
I find myself somewhat torn. I like the more "primitive" and loose style of AD&D. I like being presented with a challenge and trying to come up with creative solutions, especially when risk is high and resources are low. I like to roleplay. I like to puzzle things out. I like to really put myself in the place of the character and think about what would make the most sense.
On the other hand, contemporary D&D is much more consistent with many rules simplified. The downside of it for me is that individual characters become incredibly complex, with lots of moving parts, and in game, it can be hard sometimes to remember all of the things the character can do. That's the challenge for me. Character Classes in 1E tend to be very simple. It's the world around them that's detailed and complex. In 5E it's the opposite. I suspect this has to do with making D&D easier to translate into a computer game with the end goal being AI Dungeon Masters.
And there's a negative effect to that. When I'm running my 5E campaign, I've been noticing a sharp decline in creative problem-solving among the players in favor of expecting all of their options to be listed somewhere on their character sheet. It's gotten so bad that I once had a player complain about a puzzle they encountered in a dungeon. "Can't I just roll an Intelligence check to solve it?" He didn't even want to try to solve the puzzle himself.
I will admit that this particular module was far from the ideal to do this experiment. It did help show the contrast between the philosophy behind the two game systems, but that poison gas element was incredibly annoying and tended to push the characters through the dungeon more quickly, without them being able to "stop and smell the roses." The room with all of the cat statues has some cool stuff going on it in but we'd never know because by the time a party gets to it, they're in bad shape and just can't afford to hang around. When 1E Mikhael made it into room 39, he had 2 hit points left. In a few minutes, he'd take damage again, and would almost certainly have died. Unlike 5E, there are no death saves.
So I think, for this module at least, 5E was more fun because the poison gas wasn't as much of a factor. I think if I get a chance to do this again with a different module, I may feel differently. (There's Tomb of Horrors, after all...)
So is 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons easier than 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons? Absolutely, yes, at least in terms of PC survival. Whether or not that's a good thing is up to the individual, but I don't think there's any argument that 1E is much less forgiving.
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