Pulling Apart D&D 5e

Recently I played Lord of the Rings for 5e and I was struck by how Free League really pulled 5e apart and put it back together again, making a game that was both familiar and easy to play and also quite different in feel from D&D 5e. They’ve thrown out the bathwater and kept the baby.

How did they do it?

• They completely removed existing backgrounds and species and made new ones
• They changed a few skills and reassigned some to different basic abilities
• They removed all the existing feats and created new ones to suit the world
• They removed all the classes and replaced them
• They removed and replaced all the spells
• Added two new conditions which expanded on exhaustion
• They added new mechanics in the social and journey pillars, and chose optional rules as core (eg resting rules)
• Added cultures to species as another part of character backgrounds They added a new shadow mechanic, a sort of negative inspiration with its own save
• They emphasised downtime and in general the passage of time by integrating that into the social and journey pillars
• Added new monsters of course

So what did they leave?

• The six basic abilities and most of the skills
• Combat! But without bonus actions or weapon masteries, since those are class features, and the classes were replaced
• Conditions
• The rules of ability and skill checks, including advantage and disadvantage
• Equipment, by and large
• Tools, by and large
• The way stat blocks look

And — incredibly — this is enough for it to also work on D&D Beyond for character generation and play, which is a big benefit to the game.

I wish the creators of Obojima, which envisages a very different 5e world from Forgotten Realms, had been so bold.  There’s so much more we can do with the engine of 5e, as Free League has shown.