I’m slowly contacting people about this. Glee & CatInASuit have been contacted hopefully.
After 8 years many of the Emails might be obsolete.
Should I be getting 5th edition stuff or are you going to take care of all that again?
I don’t think you’ll need it. We’ll figure that out. I’ll send a PM or email eventually as we get further along. Hopefully we have some players with 5e experience.
I’m not a 5E expert, but I’ve played a fair amount of it – just enough knowledge to make me dangerous. 
If I can help out contacting anyone, just say the word, O great and much-appreciated WE. Email or PM me if you need email addresses and can’t find them.
Woo hoo! Thanks to What_Exit, I’ve been able to rejoin the Dope (I got dropped in the move.)
I would like to rejoin the campaign (I’m healthy, but due to age etc. I need to stay in isolation, so this will be a welcome distraction.)
I guess you’ve made your mind up about 5e, but here’s a gentle plea:
- time spent playing 1st Edition … 41 years
- time spent playing 5th Edition … none
So it will be a learning experience for all of us!
I’ll note that 5E has a bit of a 1E feel to it. It looks nothing like The Edition Which Shall Not Be Named, and I think of it sort of like what you’d get if 1E and 3.5 had a baby. 
It would be extra hard to go back to 1e. My books are currently packed up and I’ve been off it for maybe 2 years now.
I will say what got me to move was that 5e is it is the most like 1e & 2e but cleaned up. There are great online tools for 5e also. Every class has a myriad of subclasses. They all have the same experience chart. Experience is kind of downplayed in 5e. The players can really customize their characters a lot with skills & feats. Their are some hard rules to reduce magic item hoarding and walking around covered in a dozen protective spells like 2e through 3.5e really accelerated.
Spell Casters come in 3 basic varieties getting the same spell charts effectively.
Full casters start with spells and Wizards, Clerics, Bards, Druids & Sorcerers all use the same spell charts. All get up to 9th level spells.
Half Casters are Rangers, Paladins & Artificers, start getting spells at 2nd and get up to 5th level spells.
Third Casters are some sub-classes like the Arcane Trickster (a rogue) and Eldritch Knight (a fighter). They start getting spells at 3rd and get up to 4th but very late.
Then their is the oddball, the Warlock. Probably not for anyone new to 5e.
Multi-classing is much simpler and straight forward also.
No objection. I know we’re in good hands with WE.
Fair enough - I was just nervous about a new edition.
I’ve found some 5e stuff on t’Internet, so that will help me a lot.
And as Elendil_s_Heir says, we are in good hands.
So the sites I rely on the most for 5e are
https://5e.tools/ and https://www.dndbeyond.com/
They are both somehow sanctioned by Wizards of the Coast from what I can see.
5e tools is really handy for most aspects of the game.
My kids are playing games online with friends; real time using https://roll20.net/ & Wizard of the Coast D&D modules that integrate into the tool. Most of the players are local but two are down in Texas at college again.
I will say, the current popularity of D&D, while helped by Stranger Things and the online gamers, was really helped by 5e making the game more accessible and straight forward to new players while recapturing a lot of what made 1st edition so fun for us older players.
Just dropping in to say:
D&D 5e has a free version of the rules, D&D Basic Rules. This is, as it says on the tin, a basic version of the rules. It has basically everything you need to play or run the game. The big limitation is that it has relatively few race and class options, doesn’t have popular “optional” rules like feats, and lacks stat blocks for some of the most iconic monsters (which WotC considers “Product Identity”).
D&D Beyond is the officially licensed online tool for D&D. You can access the free elements of D&D 5E for free (it’s pretty much Basic D&D in a more elaborate format). You can also pay for additional content, such as the contents of the Player’s Handbook, or even ala carte, such as buying access to the full rules for a particular class. I think D&D Beyond does contain some 3rd party and homebrew content, as well, so you might want to take a careful look at the source of any content you find there to make sure it’s “official”.
Sites like 5e.tools are 3rd party sites with no affiliation with WotC. WotC publishes Basic D&D under an “Open Game License”. Basically, anyone can use, reproduce, and re-format the information, as long as they credit WotC and don’t charge for content. There are a bunch of sites that do that. Some of them stick pretty much to just presenting Basic D&D in a more convenient format (I think that’s the case with 5e.tools). Others are opensource projects, like dandwiki.com and dnd-wiki.org. They include both the Basic rules and a lot of homebrew, much of which, well, it’s written and uploaded by amateur enthusiasts, not game designers. Be very careful with any material or information that you glean from sites like that.
Thanks, gdave.
WE, are you thinking we would be able to play our original characters, if we wished? And would the campaign resume, in game terms, some weeks, months or years after the last adventure (Middle Earth FA65 D&D Game: Tenth Adventure – On to the Quest), or go in different direction or timeline?
I am interested.
That is something we’ll need to decide together. If the returning players want to take up their old characters, we can go that route. Skip ahead a short time to allow some narrative to catch us up and introduce new characters.
Cool, we’ll get this figured out.
My vote would be that we pick up where we left off, a few months later in FA65, with players free to resume their previous characters, or create and play new ones. And if we did that, I hope Princess Gilraen would continue as an NPC healer/love interest/friend in high places.
I would like to pick up as Gwaelur personally, but would be happy to start over if necessary.
So Thoroncir, Bitur & Gwaelur are all fighters.
Gilraen was a Healing Cleric now a Life Cleric.
Glee had a Druadan (Wose) Druid
We’ll have to figure out sub-classes to convert.
My character, Ceol, was a paladin of Eonwe in the original game. I liked the character quite a bit, but depending on party balance, I’d be happy to change up, as well.