Can You Run Old-School 5e?

I've been thinking a lot about trying to run D&D 5e in a more old-school style, where encounter balance is tossed out the window, healing is reduced, and the game is just a lot more dangerous. I've been playing a lot of old-school style games over the last six months and one of the biggest differences between old-school games and games like 5e isn't just the lethality, it's the sense that failure is a real possibility.

I feel like the biggest hurdle to overcome is not the mechanical adjustments that would need to be made to the system, but rather the mindset of the players. 5e has taught players that, when presented with a hostile situation, they're supposed to engage in combat. And they are supposed to win as long as they use their powers at the right times. But in an old-school style game, when PCs are presented with hostile enemies, they know that if they engage in combat, there's a very real chance that some of them may not make it out of the fight alive, so they're much more motivated to try to find creative solutions to avoid or mitigate the situation.

I believe there is an underlying design assumption in 5e that failure is not fun. 5e is engineered around the idea that the characters should succeed when facing obstacles. Nowhere is this more apparent than in combat, where encounter balance is such a core part of the game. As a GM, you're supposed to budget a number of encounters and an encounter difficulty based around the challenge rating of the monsters and the level and number of members in the party. The idea is to try to craft encounters that feel challenging but that the PCs will ultimately be able to overcome. 

This design works well in video games where characters have a limited set of options and abilities and where even in the most open-ended of games, there is some linearity to the game's progression. The player has to beat the boss to advance to the next level, so the boss fight has to be balanced to meet the limited options that the player has within the game.

But in tabletop RPGs, a player's decisions about their characters options are unlimited. They may only have a limited set of "combat abilities," but characters can try other strategies. They can climb up a hill and roll a boulder down on the monster. They can craft a trap and lure the monster into it. They can go back to town and hire an army of first level adventurers to chase down the monster. Anything the players can imagine, they can attempt, so trying to design an encounter to be "balanced" is ultimately pointless. It's the spherical cow of TTRPGs. 

And the PCs don't even have to engage in this encounter. They can skip the boss! Unless they are railroaded into doing so by the GM, they can choose to go somewhere else and do something else. At the very least, they can usually find ways to circumvent a fight. But often, it doesn't occur to players to avoid a combat encounter, because combat encounters aren't really dangerous.

Given the underlying assumption that the players are supposed to win removes any real sense of risk from the game. Instead, combat becomes more like a competition between the players to see who can deal the most damage. Even in situations with monsters that deal a lot of damage, PCs have plenty of healing options and almost never die, particularly at higher levels. Encounters are engineered by GMs to be winnable, and the players know this, even if no one ever really talks about it. There's very little tension in combat because the PCs aren't really at risk of failing. The fun in 5e combat comes from the enjoyment of playing a tactical combat mini-game. And while I love a good tactics-based video game, in a tabletop setting, you often wind up in a situation that takes an hour or longer to play out that has no real underlying tension. 

However, one of the lessons we have learned from storygames is that failure isn't unfun. Failure introduces complication, and complication is interesting. It's at the heart of what makes fiction enjoyable. In old-school style games, there is no inherent balance or assumption that PCs will win combat encounters. That means every time the characters engage in combat, they are taking a risk. In a hostile encounter in an old-school game, the characters might have to run away, or try to delay the monsters, or sneak past them. These are complications and they make things interesting. And while seeing their PC get killed may not be the highlight of a player's night, the high degree of risk of death creates tension. There are real stakes at risk. And that tension creates excitement. And excitement is fun! 

In 5e, the one exception is when PCs are first and second level. This is the time when a single well-lucky hit from a monster can down a PC and healing resources are minimal. Combat still feels very risky. I would love to see a version of 5e where that tension continued to exist carried beyond second level. But doing so requires not just a change in systems like short rests and healing surges, but also in the mindsets of the players.

Ultimately, the title of this post is a little bit clickbait-y. First, it presumes that you want to 5e in an old-school style, which you might not care to since there are many excellent old-school games already. There's no need to run 5e if you want to play an old-school style game. And what makes a game old-school isn't system, it's play style. But 5e is popular for a reason; its a very good game with millions of players. But the underlying design assumptions in 5e that PCs should succeed all the time can create a situation where there is little tension and that lacks narrative complication.