Dragonlance What do you want from a Dragonlance 5e?

[Zardnaar]

Pretty close in some ways. An 18th level Wizard will be casting Wish &c in both versions, for instance.

Level 10-14 ,1E was functionally epic levels. You could kill gods, demon Lord's, Balors, and ancient dragons at those levels.

Throw in more powerful magic items. Dragonlance wasn't that far out of whack for magic items in 1E.

Main difference is you could get a kick ass sword level 6 and still be using it 10 levels later. The upgrade your magic items thing is a very modern concept. Level 8 holy avenger isn't that unbelievable in 1E.

I had a 1E druid playing 1E adventures. He had stuff like bracers of defense ac 3 (17), +3 and +4 rings/cloak of protection, a scimitar of speed etc level 8 or 9.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Level 10-14 ,1E was functionally epic levels. You could kill gods, demon Lord's, Balors, and ancient dragons at those levels.

Throw in more powerful magic items. Dragonlance wasn't that far out of whack for magic items in 1E.

Main difference is you could get a kick ass sword level 6 and still be using it 10 levels later. The upgrade your magic items thing is a very modern concept. Level 8 holy avenger isn't that unbelievable in 1E.

I had a 1E druid playing 1E adventures. He had stuff like crackers of defense ac 3 (17), +3 and +4 rings/cloak of protection, a scimitar of speed etc level 8 or 9.

Crackers of defense? Those must have been one tough cookie!

 

[Zardnaar]

Crackers of defense? Those must have been one tough cookie!

I hate this phone.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Crackers of defense? Those must have been one tough cookie!

First invented by the Lich, Xykon.

192 Everything Sits Better on a Ritz - Giant in the Playground Games

 

[doctorbadwolf]

5th level in AD&D wasn't "low level" It was mid level and on higher.

I put you together with the other poster who was largely agreeing with you (or so it seemed) that DL was somehow a low power setting. It's not. DL started at 5th level. Good grief, Darksun didn't even start that powerful.

Sweet jeebus this is much too far into nitpicking for me to care.

Also. If you can’t separate two posters enough to only put responses to one poster in a reply to that poster...please just avoid replying to me at all. I do not answer for other peoples’ statements.

 

[Makarion]

Yeah it’s an incredibly cosmetic, inconsequential (in terms of effect on the world) difference that a lot of fans really care deeply about keeping intact.

I don’t really care, but if including orcs would ruin the world for them, Im not gonna try to push for it.

I do want seafaring Minotaur, and half-ogres, though.

What a lot of people overlook is that there's no fey at all in Dragonlance. Some got patched in years later, but iconically, they did not exist.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

What a lot of people overlook is that there's no fey at all in Dragonlance. Some got patched in years later, but iconically, they did not exist.

There’s a unicorn in the Chronicles, IIRC, and in most editions they would be Fey, not celestial. Also the forest they were in, I thought, had other more definitely Fey creatures, but I could be wrong.

 

[Hussar]

Well, to be fair, at the time of the original modules and novels, the whole "fey" thing wasn't really a thing too much. But, IIRC, there were a number of possible fey encounters in the modules. DL 1 had dryads as a set encounter and had sprites, brownies and will-o-wisps as random encounters. So, yes, there are fey in Dragonlance. They just didn't make much of an appearance in the novels.

I suppose, thinking about it, one would need to be very clear where you are drawing from - the novels or the modules. Because they really are quite different.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

There’s a unicorn in the Chronicles, IIRC, and in most editions they would be Fey, not celestial. Also the forest they were in, I thought, had other more definitely Fey creatures, but I could be wrong.

The Feywild wasn't a thing in 1st and 2nd edition cosmologies. Nor was the strict classification of monsters by type. I don't believe in the 1st edition Monster Manual the unicorn was either a celestial or a fey. It was just a magic horse with a horn on it's forehead.

 

[MostlyHarmless42]

Again, yes and no. The Chronicles heroes slaughter their way through a LOT of baddies. Those are draconians they are fighting in hordes and draconians are quite a lot bigger than an orc. None of the modules DL1 - 14 were lower tier. Even in the Chronicles, the heroes were nowhere near "Fledgeling Adventurers" as @MostlyHarmless42 calls them. They had been adventuring for years together, then spent five years separately adventuring before the first book even starts.

DL in Chronicles and in the modules is solidly tier 2 to tier 4. DL doesn't do tier 5, as was noted, the levels were capped at 18. But, nowhere in the modules or the novels was anyone a "fledgeling adventurer". They were highly experienced adventurers with reputations and whatnot, right from the get go.

As you so pointed out yourself, there were many more dragonlance books than just the original trilogy, starring FAR more than just the original adventuring group, many of whom are of humble origins. As for the heroes of the lance? At most I'd say they were 5th level (by 5e terms), purely because Rasitlin could cast fireball, and even that nearly spent him in the beginning of the Autumn Twilight. And several of them WERE fledgling adventurers: Tika, Riverwind, Goldmoon, and Laurana were within terms of story completely inexperienced and while I'd give their players equal level characters for simplicity were I the DM of that game, in reality would've been 1st or 2nd level characters at most to start out. As would many of the other characters accrued along the way.

In my mind, DL is the campaign first and setting second approach.

And you are welcome to that opinion. I agrue that the true spirit of dragonlance is a game world that showcases people rising up and working together to overcome overpowering obstacles through teamwork and a bit of help from fantastical items or creatures. Their stories typical have dragons, knights, martial warfare, and gods front and center and they tend to focus on average people working with a few experienced individuals to confront them. People like to hate on kender, gully dwarves, and gnomes but there is a damn good reason that for almost every major plot arc in the setting a character of one of these three races plays a prominent (if not THE most pivotal role) in defeating the threat, and it's for the same reason Tolkien used Hobbits: to focus on goodness overcoming evil. One can argue that is unrealistic but frankly I view it as the single most important aspect of the fantasy genre: to provide an optimistic escape from the harshness of reality. The dragons, magic, and medieval shenanigans are all secondary.