Sunday, June 9, 2019

The Glog 5e crossover

In my Yoon Suin campaign, the party has accumulated a fair bit of NPCs, some of which are somewhat combat capable.   There is a rogue, an alchemist, a thug, an animated plant... 

There is a big battle coming up, and as a GM it's hard enough to run the foes and adjucate the game. I didn't want to have to, on top of that, also be running the party NPCs.  So I decided to give sheets to volunteers players who would run these NPCs during this big battle, as well as their own PCs, to make my life easier.

To make *my players'* lives easier, I made NPCs into simplified versions of a full PC - each sheet is half a page long, and with a few "signature" powers as opposed to the whole thing.  Here is what it looks like:



After I was done making these sheets, I had this thought creep up on me... what if I mashed up the GLOG and 5e?  The sheet above looks a little bit... Glogish doesn't it?

I know this will sound like *heresy* to many.  I probably will lose whatever tiny credibility I had in the OSR movement (small loss, almost no one reads this haha).  But hear me out here.  By fault or by chance, there are some similarities between the GLOG and 5e that aren't there with other D&D version.  For example:

- Bounded accuracy:  Bonuses don't get out of hand.  Your chances to hit increase slowly.   

- Short breaks for some healing:  In 5e it's a short rest, in the GLOG it's lunch.   Preeeety similar no?

- Fast healing:  Sleeping overnight restores a lot of HP, unlike older games where natural healing was 1 hp a night, or maybe 1/level a night.

- Backgrounds:  Both system have them and they matter a bit, it's not just RP fluff. 

I think I'm on to something there.  I *really* liked the simplicity of the GLOG, and I really liked that spellcasters only had a few spells and not an enormous swiss army knife.  But the lack of a skill system bothered me (and other of my players) and they felt that it was a little too under powered.  5e on the other hand is a little *too* complex and a bit *too* over powered for my taste.  By taking a class and reducing it to its signature element, limiting level progression to say 5... voila.  

The GLOG is meant to be hackable, and 5e is pretty robust.   I think this can be done.   But *should* I do it?  

3 comments:

  1. One thought I had, when I was writing about all the GLOGgers and thinking of all the things you could do with it - if you start with a +2 proficiency bonus at 1st level and have it increase every level, you get to +6 (the maximum proficiency bonus in 5e) by the time you reach 5th level (which is effectively the end of level progression in the GLOG).

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  2. There's a couple of different 5e/Basic blended games floating around at this point. They may be good starting points:
    https://o5rgames.blogspot.com/2019/05/into-unknown-is-now-available-in-print.html

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sigilstonepublishing/five-torches-deep/description

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  3. I don't think it's heresy by any means. I've said before that I think GLOG can be a gateway drug for OSR games. It has all the classes and powers of modern games but on a low-powered simple OD&D chassis.

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