tidy_frog
It’s disappointing how little they cared, they just rushed the product in time for the anniversary.
Meh…there’s an important distinction here to be made, IMO.
The rushing was done by the stupid-fuck of a CEO they’ve got. Not the D&D team. The team only really cares about the game, and you can just about smell the frustration there.
The CEO constantly starves the D&D team. They don’t have the budget they need to make a good product. They need at least quadruple the number of people they have (after that massive layoff round so the CEO could get his fucking bonus…the sociopathic piece of shit…) and really they need to double it again after that.
They need 3 writing teams that can work on stuff.
Team 1 works on large-scale grand campaign books. This is your campaign setting books, and hard-backed adventures. Everything team 1 works on should be campaign world focused somehow. They are the lore-writers and one of the DM’s best friends. As a rule, every campaign setting gets at least 3 adventures written for them before team 1 moves onto the next campaign setting.
Team 2 focuses on smaller gap-fill content, as well as generic major content. If team 1 were to write the planescape campaign book, this team would write a book that describes the major port city features as the backdrop in team 1’s three adventures, as well as a host of minor adventures to help gap-fill areas and plotlines that the hardbacked adventures either leave up to the DM or just don’t address. Team 2’s release schedule would be far more aggressive than Team 1’s, but their supplements would be far shorter most of the time, and would be almost completely either online only or, at best, Print on Demand. Full-color optional, but still PoD. We’re talking about a turn-around time of 30-90 days per supplement, and a new product released weekly on average.
Team 3 would be the Core Mechanics Team. This is the team that writes your PHBs and DMGs. Teams 1 and 2 can produce their own monster books, but the core MM come from these guys. They will contribute to content produced by Teams 1 and 2 when those teams need to include mechanics in some form. Campaign-specific class, subclass, or spell? Team 3 content. Adventure or campaign-specific subsystem? Team 3 content. Team 3 is the excel-powered, math-heavy nerd-fest of the teams. Nothing gets past them without being modeled, tested, and balanced in addition to playtesting. Nothing gets balanced “by feel”. Only idiots balance “by feel” because only idiots think that’s how anything works (hint…“feelings” are subjective. If you “feel” that something is balanced…you’re probably wrong).
The biggest change I would make here, though, would be to have Team 3 release updates to the PHB, DMG, and MM every 5 years to incorporate new balance, new quality of life improvements, changes made due to player feedback, and the inclusion of new core content (like artificers…fucking WotC…). The idea here is that every 5 years the core books should be refreshed (not at the same time…give like 1.5 years between releases and only do one book at a time) to keep the game up to date with what modern players and DMs think the game should be. This doesn’t even mean re-writing everything. Just parts that can be improved and have had improvements tested and play-tested.
Right now we average a new edition every 10 years. I say that if money is really the focus, dedicate an entire team to the effort and do it every 5 years instead. As long as the releases are consistent, and the goal really is to keep supporting the same edition for the foreseeable future, then more frequent releases with a focus on digital sales and goods wouldn’t be a bad thing. Primarily because it would require a dedicated team to constantly research, develop, write, and release a new core book every 1.5 years.
It’s too bad I’m not CEO of Hasbro or WotC. I actually like D&D as a game…
That all sounds like way too much work. You’re basically re-designing the entire game at this point.
IMO, your time would be better spent finding a system that already does all that. They do exist!
I would suggest maybe taking a look at 13th age, or some of the renaissance games like WWN and the like.
Yes. Well, no. Well, sorta.
Rather than making races illegal, I defined what races were available in my last campaign because it was supposed to take place in a part of the world that had very specific limitations.
Primarily, there are no reptilian races in the area. This is because I want them to form their own empire elsewhere in the world, and I want that to be the second area of the campaign we play in with everyone playing a reptilian character.
Not every consequence should be negative, but not all should be positive, either. There should be a mix of the two.
My suggestion is to literally ask them which story threads they would like to resolve poorly. Take their answer, pair it down to something managable and focus on that. Make the outcomes bittersweet because they asked you to.
Then, take one of the threads you wanted them to pick that they didn’t (because they will always do that) and resolve it yourself in a bad way.
On the flip side, ask them which threads they think probably ended up fine. Pick one or two of those and let them self-resolve better than fine because of the PCs’ actions. And turn those into a resource that the PCs can tap when things get serious later.
No matter what fork you take, you run into ogres.
Even if it is immediately a false choice, the point of the fork in the road isn’t necessarily one of immediacy.
A poor DM will run the same exact campaign no matter what fork you take.
A good DM will still have the choice you make have impact, even if the immediate result no matter which way you go is a pair of ogres.
Maybe, if you go left you choose to save the prince rather than the princess. Yes, no matter which way you went you were going to encounter the ogres and it’s only the hostage that’s different. However, if the one you don’t save gets killed by the Basilisk-knight, that means you got to make a choice that impacts the campaign.
It just didn’t put you into conflict with the knight that the DM hasn’t written up yet. That’s next week.
Training wheels are useful tool for beginner cyclists, but not useful for advanced cyclists. Likewise, quantum ogres are a useful tool for beginner DMs, but not for seasoned DMs.
I hard disagree. Quantum baddies are useful no matter how seasoned a DM you are.
Quantum enemies are a technique you can use to help preserve the prep work you do as DM, and doubling the prep you do isn’t a mark of experience. Use it when appropriate, and avoid using when the story says you must.
Don’t discount Monks!
That’s how bad monks are. I forgot they even existed :D
But seriously, they’ve been getting some good changes in the UAs, and with WotC being a bit more generous with things like expertise it makes being useful a lot easier when you’ve got a lot of random weird shit you can do, like a monk can.
Honestly, Monks are so close to being a top tier class. All they really need is for WotC to pull their heads out of their collective asses and make short rests not a fucking tooth-pulling exercise in frustration for your average group.
If it were me I’d bring back the concept of 10-minute “exploration turns”. You use one exploration turn to do something like pick a lock, break down a door, climb your speed x 5 in relatively safe conditions without a check, attempt to disarm a trap, attempt to climb a slippery or dangerous surface, examine a magic item (arcana check to figure out something basic), make a general knowledge check about a subject (would have to define a distinct difference between using knowledge checks in combat and using them outside of combat), etc…
…but, most importantly, you would use an exploration turn to try and take a short rest. Take one short rest action and you can spend one hit dice per three levels (rounding up). Take a second in a row and you can spend one hit dice per three levels. Take three of them back-to-back and you can spend another one hit dice per three levels, and any short rest recharges trigger. Your short rest is now done. You can gain the recharge benefit of the third rest action twice per long rest.
…and while that was going on the rest of the party was able to fuck around and do stuff. Which means the monk who gassed themselves in the last combat can take three rest actions to get back their ki while the rogue searches a room, disarms a trap guarding a hidden chest, and then picks the lock on the chest.