Teos Abadie
Appearances
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And so if you find that in your game, your passives are resulting in an unengaging game.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
and you still want to use the passives, you must make what they see engaging so that you're still on the right track or only use passives of Sean said, which is really what was intended back when the designers created it so that it's it's a way to solve a problem without giving away the surprise and seeing whether you find some clues. But don't remove that engagement.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Totally. And 2024 makes it almost, well, I don't know if it makes it more complicated. It's at least as complicated in 2024. And that 2024, by approaching things in a sort of piecemeal fashion of various bits, right? What is searching? What is the invisible condition? What is passive perception? But not telling you how it all works altogether. Maybe it doesn't the DMG.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
uh means that it's it's a little unclear and we're back to the same situation of you've got to decide how to run your game so that you get great engagement and and the sum of the parts must equal that whole of engagement that's when you know whether you're doing it wrong or right is whether your players are excited and engaged and and hopefully don't feel invalidated for character choices but their character choices aren't aren't stripping away that engagement
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
This is, you know, all week I've been dealing with very parallel things to this, though, in the environmental data world rather than the character builder database. But when you create databases of information that have a version to them and those things are used in an application and then you have another data set.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
and you're going to somehow retain the other one, there's trouble, there's challenges, there's difficulties. It's not simple. I don't care. I've never been on a project where this was simple. And so, you know, at the D&D Summit back last year, April, you know, more than a year ago, one of the questions that I and others brought up was, hey, how are you going to handle these two data sets?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Not to mention also the VTT, which is its separate question, but how are you going to handle all this? And we got kind of deer in the headlight responses. And that worried me. Now, since that time, they've obviously kind of looked at this. But, you know, we have not had another D&D summit since then.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And I point to this as an example of where D&D would be better off if it had these kinds of meetings with people and feedback with people to say, Get a sense of maybe how the community will react, because what they announced was just a change log. Hey, here's what's coming. You know, we're going to have going from 2014 to 2024. Various elements are just going to auto update.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And so if you're in your character sheet and you've got your 2014 character, hey, your spells, your magic items, they'll be the new version. And I guess they looked at this. What they said was they looked at this as like, cool, you're getting free stuff. And what users heard was, wait, I can't play 2014 in my character sheet. You know, the world has has ended for me.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
I am very angry and I'm not making light of that. I mean, people were impacted by it. And to various people, this is not free. Awesome update. It's a problem. You're always going to have people on both sides of it. And there was a lot of iron line, including a lot of disinformation. So then D&D issued a clarification. But people were still very angry.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And where they've ended up with is going back and saying, okay, okay. And this came at like last night at, I don't know, it was very late in my time when I saw it. And so on a Sunday night, they issue a, hey, we're going to do it differently. We are going to have the ability that if you have a 2014 character sheet, that character sheet will retain the 2014 elements. And that's complicated, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Roll20, by the way, was loving this. They have talked about how, you know, oh, with us, you can choose what you want 2014 and 2024, to which I say not so fast, Roll20, because you're being very clear about how you can choose one or the other. But you have people on all sides of this, right? You're going to have people who want to say, hey, I do want to have mostly 2014, but some 2024.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
this is a mess it's a mess for roll20 it's a mess for dnd dnd as usual gets the giant spotlight and the giant internet ire uh i can only imagine the poor developers who probably had a meeting some time ago to set this all in stone talk through all the technical issues the reasons why a compromise was found this was the compromise and they come in on the office today and learn that they're gonna have to do a whole different level of work
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
I pour one out for all of you. I know what it feels like. I'm sorry. There's no right or wrong here, but maybe Wizards should have things like D&D Summits to talk through things with people and not be blindsided when communities react this way. That's my point. What do you think, Sean?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Big hugs, my friend. Thank you. Yeah, it's tough. This is one of the things that... You have to somehow hit a certain age to really appreciate what it's like to to to either know you're on the threshold of that because you hear it through others or to start experiencing it. And it is it's tough. And all you can do is treasure every moment you have with people around you because it is so important.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
So if you can get ahead of it, it helps. Because they could have, that change log was handled like a sort of techie kind of thing. I mean, it was a mix of it, but if you're gonna talk to customers, talk to your customers, this is the change we're implementing, here's why. It's super hard to do this stuff. It's super labor intensive. You know, here's and all the choices carry pluses and minuses.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
This is the path we're following. Test it out. We'll have a feedback period, something like that, you know, or test it internally with people, talk to people in user groups. There's no perfect answer here, right? I mean, and same thing with Roll20. I mean, I may want my 2014 character to fully update to 2024. I may want to mix and match options.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
I may want to just create a 2024 character, or create a 2024 character that gets 2014 things. Should I expect that the tool gives me all those things? I mean, I work in an IT enough that I don't even know that anyone would give you that. It's hard and everybody's have a different flavor of what they think the tool should give for them. And so communications becomes super, super important.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And the moment I saw that first changelog, I thought, oh, this is going to go rough. And there's an there's a huge chance that in short order, they'll have to do something else. And the poor developers will have to carry that burden with whatever staff they have currently.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
It's what makes life great. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Yeah, and the fault's not yours, employee, person who went through this, Dan, Dylan, anybody. I mean, all our hearts, huge hugs. This sucks. Yeah. But also it's just, you know, we as people who get hired must know this is the reality. And that's it's a shame because It would be a dream for most people to work at Wizards of the Coast if it weren't for these things.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
But these things are part of that reality. And it can happen at any time. And it's historically happened. It's happened at TSR, right? You listen to When We Were Wizards and it's these waves of layoffs and a lot of conversations on that podcast about it. It's remarkable and sad. And we had that regular, you know, December layoffs. 5E was able to get rid of most of that. But not always.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And the reasons are complicated. But I've seen this thing happen. I've had it happen at a company I worked for with 50 people. And someone was laid off. And then we were almost immediately reauthorized to hire again. And it's like, so do we tell them they have their job back? And they're like, well, can't they apply? I'm like, yes.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
I mean, you know, and it's complicated why it all happens, but it happens. And it's not just wizards and it's terrible, but that's part of the landscape.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Yeah, it's a cool trailer, you know, just glimpses, but that'll be neat to see.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
No, the company that launched the ORC license so that companies can't change agreements, Sean, they wouldn't. Okay, wait a minute. In July, they said they would be changing their community use policy, replacing it with a more limited fan content policy, which of course also has some new great things to it, because that's how it always works.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And fans reacted against this because it really, not to get into too much in the details, but it put a lot of pressure on various projects, particularly projects that were using the first edition version of Starfinder. And this was seen as a way to try to prevent kind of 1E things happening until 2E was released. And so Paizo is now reversed course and kind of activating both policies.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
So the new fan content policy will allow you to do some kind of new things like maybe create merch, but you will still also be able to use the old policy.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Because they hold all that power. Yeah. Keep places accountable. So two fun things, Sean. Universal Studios has what they're calling Fan Fest Nights for D&D. And this starts in spring 2025. They're doing Back to the Future, Star Trek, and D&D. And they did say a lot, but they'll be like immersive experiences and celebratory moments and themed food and stuff you can buy.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
So details to come, but we've linked in the show notes to where you can... Keep an eye on it and even get email alerts for whenever it comes out sometime next year. And then in Rochester, New York, the Strong Museum of Play will have a D&D exhibit celebrating the 50th anniversary.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
It lets you check out historical artifacts, early game prototypes, artwork, and even the history of controversies over the years. So that's interesting. You can create characters, monsters, dungeons, do a personality test to figure out your class. And this is neat. Be a dungeon master for a five minute campaign.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Yeah, yeah. I had a fun time reading Lucas Cockrum, who is a really nice guy I've hung out with at Winter Fantasy, and he is on our Discord as well. He has a blog series called the Giant's Bane blog, and he's been going through the Planescape series, and he actually has a product as well on the DMs Guild where he provides these insights, pulls them together as he goes through running the series.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And he started with his read-through and our advice that we did on our podcast, and then he's been putting this all together into... how he runs. So you can get the outline of it on Giants, thegiantsbane.blogspot.com. And then on the DMs Guild, you can also find his write-ups.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
To make money by having one exciting new thing. Wait, you said design goal. Sorry, that was my mistake. You know, that's an interesting question. Well, I guess what you'd say, right? And I held up the Complete Gladiators Handbook from the Dark Sun Complete Series of Second Edition because it has something very similar to this, as others have noted. It has a section about weapons.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And in it, it comes up with these ideas of when you are proficient or when you have a specialization, then you can do extra things with all your weapons, right? So you can have like an Al-Hulak. And when you're proficient, you don't have to worry about the downside of the weapon, which it has normally. And then you can use it two-handed.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And then when you're specialized, you can now like grapple this other person and ensnare them with extra bonuses and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And...
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
know in second edition various of these books had these kinds of things and the point of it was to true to create some tactical play some engagement uh and to reward kind of your choice especially as a fighter class to kind of focus on these particular weapons and show your mastery of them and sort of you know you're not just using a long sword you know how to do all these cool things with your long sword right and with your spear and whatever
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
So it's a creation of engagement in play for those characters that use weapons. And if you take a step back, some of the argument was because spellcasters have lots of tactical great choice. Weapon people just stab and round after round. So this gives you kind of like the parody with the spellcasting class. Though I could say, and I'll shut up,
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
past third edition, your melee classes also have a variety of tricks through subclasses and whatever. So I don't know that you super aren't on parody already, but, you know, maybe that's part of the design goal still. What do you think?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Maybe we could say design goals don't muck up the works.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Though the rogue and the monk had other choices to make. And, you know, the paladin, but they're smiting. And, you know, so it's not again, it's not like you didn't have anything. But but yes, most rounds you were swinging that weapon, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And let me, if I can add one more thing, like a class will tell you whether you get them and how many you get, right? So the barbarian gets two at first level. It increases to third at fourth level. Then it goes to fourth for the rest of your career once you reach 10th level. So you have a number of these that you can have.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And sometimes spending your class, you'll have an option like you can actually wield one weapon, but apply the weapon mastery on others that can get kind of Trixie. But it's that idea of, yeah, you focus in on a certain number of of of weapons that then you gain their properties. And the table of weapons tells you what has a property. And then you can, you know, go from that.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
the the idea is that tactical piece right so for cleave alone we can think of like okay now i as the player want to try to find clumps of creatures right i want to go up uh or draw to me you know several creatures so that when i attack one i might be able to hit the other right so a boss fight or the last creature or that one lone archer i don't really want to go after that i want to go over the like the several people together
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
which is maybe dangerous and might be fun in that way. But that becomes the kind of MO I want to do. And what often happens with these design wise is people will say to themselves, well, can I do that reliably? Because if not, I'm not getting my benefit that I am due. Maybe I'll choose a different property and they'll keep reading. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
It's going on fumes. I have been working. I don't even know what a weekend is anymore. And I drew strength from my parents who wished me a happy birthday today. And today's not my birthday. I was like, We're on the same page, parents. I don't know what month it is, year, anything. You know, I'm just barely making it through. But it was very cute. They wrote really nice things.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Oh, go ahead. Well, it's interesting also to look at the design cost of these. We talked about that. Do you muck things up, right? So with Cleave, well, you've got to make an extra attack roll every round. Right. And but it's pretty easy to look up, but you've got to do that second attack. And then there's this question of all these interactions that is, you know, a little worrisome.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Gray's pretty simple in that if you missed, you just once you get through it, you will remember, oh, yeah, you know, three damage, right? You just you shout it out. I missed takes three damage from from Gray's move on. Not too bad.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Yeah, I mean, monks tend to use their bonus actions. A lot of classes do. And so if you need that bonus action to do things, then this nick quality on a weapon makes sense because now you get one extra attack on top of everything else you would have done and you still get your bonus action for additional attacks or whatever it is that you're doing.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
So, you know, again, we're looking at sort of making another attack role with, I think, a little more decision making here. So it's even slower maybe than than Cleave was because it's a little more at case by case basis thinking. The other thing is there is plenty of confusion, as our Discord was pointing out, between the light property, Nick, and the dual weapon fighting feat.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
You have to read what am I really getting or not getting if I have various of these.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
It's interesting they didn't go with your size or smaller, but yeah, fine, whatever. Yeah. Yeah, this is generally the kind of thing that people will not choose because it's so seldom useful.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
It's useful if there's a pit right behind them or something like that, but usually you can't kind of punish them by going through a spell that they already took damage from, but it depends on the kind of application.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
you know on the wording of things but it's it's there's the kind of people where you go i don't know that this is going to help me much you could arguably what would be fun is i think of like two npcs that actually one of them has push and the other one has cleaves you can always push people together for the cleave to work but players generally don't do that kind of thing
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Yeah, I'll take a shot at it. So I think one thing is that in general, so a lot of the big conventions are run all by Baldwin Games. And so the number of slots, the approach to a day is pretty similar. And even outside of conventions that Baldwin Games runs at Origins, Gen Con, PAX... various comic cons, winter fantasy, even outside of that, the schedule ends up being pretty similar, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
My opinion is disadvantage. You shouldn't be giving disadvantage to things unless it's with something you've come up with a fun situation. Like I'm going to topple crates onto this creature. I'm down with that. Right. You spend your action for that. And it's a neat effect. I love the story of it.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Maybe if it's a spell that does it, but you've got to be careful that, you know, you don't want it spammed all the time. Spamming is the biggest thing I'm worried about, because if I'm going to sap the boss and
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
constantly and always give disadvantage to the monster, it's gonna have such an unequal effect, but especially on a monster that takes like one big attack, then its next attack roll, it's huge thing to have disadvantage on it. And AC is already often through the roof on the person who's tanking this thing. So I just worry that this is not, it's the opposite of what the DM wants, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
It's tough, and a lot of it depends on how your characters are using it. If they will just use it every now and then, it can be very different, right? But the same thing with this next one, slow, right? You hit the creature with this weapon and deal damage to it. You can reduce its speed by 10 feet on the start of next turn.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And it does say if the creature is hit more than once by weapons that have this property, the speed reduction can't exceed 10 feet. which is good, but you could maybe Ray of Frost it or something else. And, you know, and again, that's where it gets non-fun. It's one thing if it takes a little longer for the monster to get to you.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
In that you're going to get, you know, three to four games a day, and there are going to be some number of days, you know, depending on what your travel schedule is and what the convention provides. So like PAX, for example, has more days, but it actually tends to offer fewer adventures because a lot of it is focused on like learn to play.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
If the monster is never going to get to the party, that would be a problem, right? If this was a tactic that everybody employs, I'll hit it with Ray of Frost. You hit it with this thing. It'll never reach us. We will murder it before it ever comes to us. Yeah. Fun once.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
a group that played and within a few minutes they decided to all take topple and every creature was prone in every combat forever. The DM was just like, this is the worst.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
and and i don't mean to be negative right but it's not like you can't have fun with this and again the more that your players are doing this as sort of just fun things every now and then it's great but that's the thing about weapon master is it kind of encourages you to just do this all the time and always be proning everything and then begs that question well how could i abuse this right how can i take this to another level and that's where you can end up with the yeah and its strength is drained and it has to consume half its movement standing up so then i can uh you know this that and the other and
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
So there may be only but so many adventures if like the folks who come over to PAX and I'll be headed to PAX this week. We do have some people who are hardcore AL and but, you know, and they often replay things because they're that hardcore. Because we're not offering new things in every slot. And that's where it gets tricky. And it can vary from year to year.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Too many cases can show up or someone's going to write a guide on it, right? Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Almost put it on an encounter refresh like 4E.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Well, we also didn't talk about Vex. Let's just quickly say Vex. If you hit a creature with this weapon and deal damage to the creature, you have advantage on your next attack roll against the creature before the end of your next turn. All right. Overall thoughts. None of these have drawbacks, which is interesting design wise. I don't object with that. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
But but it would be, let's say, balanced with 2014 if we said I can vex the creature, but I deal no damage this turn. Right. So I'm going to have advantage next round, but I dealt no damage or I didn't add my ability score or something, you know, some drawback to it that would make me choose. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
I can topple the creature, but, you know, I give this I have give advantage to everybody because I put so much focus into toppling them. But there's none of that. This is just gravy. Take everything your character was doing before, you now get this bonus stuff and potentially quite, quite bonus-y if you put it all together.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
That means the monsters, which are already considered easy, have to do even more work for the challenge to be at the same level. Because in theory, what we want design wise is fun tactics, fun choices, engagement, but not that the players always auto win. So now some other part of the game will have to do that work for you to compensate.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
So it's still the same challenge level and you're still having that engagement and that fun. And. the engagement and fun of these weapon masteries have to balance out with the extra time you're taking to run your character and the
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
the resolving of all of it both you doing it and it being resolved right oh that's right my monster is prone says the dm my bad let me remember to okay so no he didn't get to there uh they were back here and they so they can't reach you so they wouldn't have attacked you they'll attack this other person instead oh no you know what they'll take the range weapon out it's so easy for all that to bog down and one of the dangers of games is that we say it will be so much fun when we do all these things
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And yes, it is fun. Like it is. But at the end of the game, we feel a little dissatisfied. And it's because there's so much rigmarole that we didn't do the thing that we really love, which is creativity, fun back and forth, thinking in the moment, right? A lot of the games that are the best games bring those qualities to, yes, they have meaty, fun play and all that, but also the time to...
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And as you mentioned, special events make it more complicated because what we want is special stuff. Well, the bigger conventions have more of that. So I find it's pretty similar. Like you said, if you can find a local convention, the nice thing there is, especially if you get to know your community, it's a lot easier to organize late night events.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
to dream and characters right like when we played mcdm's game i had a great time playing draw steel but i came up with a shtick for my character who was a warlord tactician type that he would call his mom for help on some magical telephone because he had no idea he's very new and so you know the first couple times i role played and someone in the you noted on the youtube video it was a funny concept of like uh mom there's like a guy in the other room what should i do you know like oh go you know use this power okay
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
But there wasn't kind of time to do that. Right. Partly it's being online, but partly it's because the game is so meaty that trying to work in the role playing takes, you know, a little bit of extra energy around all the tactics, at least until you learn all this stuff. But I love that stuff. That's the stuff I want in my games. And so they can fight each other, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
So that's a long way of saying that I'm interested to experiment with these because I do like tactical play. I am worried that this is a load that will detract from my fun in a game.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
I absolutely agree with you. It's hard because there's you can't get data to back it up, you know, and so it's tough. But I absolutely feel like you do. I have that feeling that one of the keys to 2014 success was that the rules are so elegant and they are basic. So you can play any type of game, whatever your impression is of fantasy.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
even if it's heroic superhero type fantasy, it could work with what 2014 gave you. As 2014 has gotten Tasha'd and on and on, and now 2024, it is more and more super heroic, whether you want it to or not. And it doesn't, you know, I was thinking actually in the shower today, I would have loved if mastery properties were an option. Yep. but they're baked in and there's no, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
extra slots and this is something we did all throughout living greyhawk we'll talk about greyhawk in the second part of the show uh we used to do things like i would go to bissell which was connecticut and i would play the offered slots and then i would play two midnight madness slots uh if not three and so the number of adventures i could play at a convention like that
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
So if you want to play 2024, but you find that these are not creating the effect you want, or if a player game goes, God, this is so complicated. I just want to play a fighter. What happened? I was supposed, you told me it was the simple class, but I'm, you know, I used Nick and everybody got mad at me. And, or, you know, I used a SAP and, and, and, and then the DM seemed to not feel good.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
You know, what, what am I doing wrong? You know, it's just, it's, it's that load. That load is, is significant. And, And so hard to quantify, right? It's so hard to see why a game is great or not. But I've played a lot of third edition and fourth edition where players said, this is too much for me. And they didn't want to play anymore. And 2014 largely avoided that. Not always, but largely.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And now it feels like we're definitely headed in that direction. I agree with you. Yep.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And I think particularly our second show on Greyhawk was when we talked about living Greyhawk itself. The first one was the history of Greyhawks. I think it was our second show where we really kind of went into this.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
was huge because i could do all this before the convention or even on-site wrangling of you know impromptu dms who would run things for us and we would crank out you know i think at one convention i did 23 adventures 23 four-hour adventures uh which is not really possible if you do the math and that's because of various trickery things that we did to run very short very quickly it was just
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
The common problem back in third edition was the World of Warcraft hit one of the triad members and they disappeared just playing World of Warcraft. We laugh about how fourth edition was designed, but it was true that we were seeing this happen.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And again, just I want to say one last thing, which is the idea was really cool, right? Because if you take like, say, Adventurers League, there is an admin set that run everything. But nobody's trying to push individual storylines in that kind of level of detail.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And so breaking the world into these regional groupings with regional admins created a lot more capacity for like incredible play because all of these storylines had their own administrative team. And even if it was one person largely doing the work, you could have incredible stories coming out of some regions. Now, when it fell apart, it fell apart hard.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
But when it worked, it could do what you never could have just with a regular campaign, right? So Living Forgotten Realms had regions and it had some admins, but it works slightly differently. Couldn't quite do the same thing that Living Greyhawk had done.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And certainly with Adventurers League, you have a great team of admins, but you can't get that flavor that you would have if you had these regional groups and so on.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Yeah, Ontario and Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, a couple other areas, yeah. Part of Canada.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Yeah, so we talked about like high folk. This is west of high folk where we talked about. So it's kind of like still close to the center of Greyhawk if you're looking at the map, but a little west of it. And what it does is control that sort of flow. If you were coming from sort of the Baklunish West and Zaif,
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
and the old areas there to the west you would have to go through Khet to kind of go through one of these narrow areas if you're not going to cross the big huge mountains you're coming through Khet and then you'll either go down to Bissell to the south or you'll go through mountain passes to get towards Voluna or High Folk to the east and that was a lot of the tension there's a lot of historic tension particularly with Bissell which is where you'd have to go if you wanted to go
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
through Ket and down into like the Sheldemar Valley towards Keeland, anything like that. You want to get to the ocean quickly, you're going either through Bissell or Voluna.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
I wouldn't recommend it kids, but we were young and we needed these certs. You were 50, young and foolish.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Yeah, if you think about Moors invading Spain... It has that feel to it. And if you know, you know, kind of like the 600 or so years that the Moors ruled Spain, it has that feel with sort of how it took over Bissell and then retreated. It feels like that was sort of a parallel they were going for here.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And this is the kind of campaign or region that feels to me like an NPC. It's the kind of thing you put over somewhere so that you might have to deal with it periodically, but then go back to whatever you were doing. It doesn't feel like a place that I'd want to live in and launch adventures.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And when I look at, like you mentioned here in your show notes as well, conflicts and intrigues, it doesn't easily lend itself to things...
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
adventurers want to do and how to operate within this society seems kind of difficult there's not a lot of support for it and i think kept struggled as a region in third edition during living your heart because that it had its conflict with bissell but it was hard to make that conflict interesting and not just were the bad guys right and one of i i only went to play in cat once but
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And I don't remember enough about the region, but, you know, one of the possibilities that you say, well, since Zaif was not a region, then you could possibly take on the sort of al-Akbar mystery and try to unravel, you know, why have we been so kind of zealous in our, say, taking over Bissell when we're supposed to be the good guys and serving al-Akbar, you know, and that could be more interesting to figure out why we've been going in a particular way.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And I thought I was... I know there was an Al-Akbar story track. I don't know if that was the core or if it was in, you know, maybe it was in this region. I don't recall. Yeah. Because I remember Abyssal hearing about it. But yeah. Anyway.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
It was super, super loving. And then they said, oh, and we, you know, because they're in Europe. So they're like, I don't know, maybe they thought I'm ahead or who knows what happened. But either way, at the end of it, they were like, oh, wait, today's not your birthday. And so we had a good laugh.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And even resolve player action. So I'll try to tell this very, very quickly. But we had a situation where on the Yahoo group for the Jeff region, a person from another region started posting about how they're hanging out in town. And then they started saying the name. I forget.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
whose name it was but one of the demon lords over and over again and like the watch showed up to try to stop them and all this but they kept doing it and they were pretty powerful wizards so they were able to sort of like Well, what the triad ended up doing, our triad decided to create a gateway to hell in our favorite tavern or to the abyss.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And and then players were like, we want to find that wizard and hold them accountable. So then the two triads spoke together with the region this person was from and the region where it had happened. And they coordinated a strike.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
team attack on that player characters and sort of told him hey look there's a strike team coming for you we're going to resolve this which ended up with the player's character being bound in stone and presented to our king for you know deciding what to do with and yeah it was really very wild and fun and just the kind of thing that could happen just out of nowhere in in this living greyhound campaign right quite wild
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Yeah. So this is kind of like if you're familiar with the Lord of the Rings concepts and, you know, we all sail off into the sea or Everest on the Forgotten Realms. It has some of that feel to it as a elven area with the following the Church of Sehanin, the highest cleric of Sehanin lives here. And we get a picture of dolphins swimming and a ship going across. But this is really far off the map.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
It is all the way to the east on the edge of your map, this clump of large isles. These are not small islands that are kind of placed all the way east and south of the area, kind of east of Sundy. So it is not close to anything else.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
And that's deliberate because this sort of concept of like Lord of the Rings or Forgotten Realms that, you know, one would have to go out of their way to even hear about this.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Yeah, it's a weird region and hard to know. Again, one of those that you're like, wow, this is a real NPC region. Like, it's hard to know what you would do if you use this as your basis. Gee, what would you... There are...
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
rebel humans here and there are half elves that remain from earlier times who have kind of conflicting agendas but I mean boy I don't know that any of this would be any fun it's a strange region and if you were to do something with it in 2024 I would want to change kind of almost all of this and maybe dig into that feeling of
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
It is your Everest, right, your more elven place off the end and and and maybe that they welcome scholars from other just change it up somehow. I'd have a change to to get rid of this kind of species war aspect that, yeah, does not resonate today to me.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Yeah, it's a little weird for me because there's this whole idea of how profitable it is, right? But the problem is this is on the corner of the map. And the only thing south is the Amedeo jungle or the Amedeo jungle? No, the Piedmont land. Uh, so hip model land is down below. And so it's one of these ideas. It's very colonial in its, in its approach.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
It doesn't super say it in this version, but you know, where's the, where's the trade and money coming from? Cause you're sort of far off. from where all the nations are. So what is it? Well, you've got to be extracting resources from the South and then fueling the racist Sewell Brotherhood. And so Scarlet Brotherhood, none of it is great. And, you know, it doesn't...
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
and it's also just so far off to the edge of the map it's a little different when you say talk about the moon shades and you have a mix of things going on you you have some clear commerce between the mainland and the the forces and the moon shades and hey you also have some pirates and some other stuff that makes a lot more sense i think than this does uh unless you're just gonna super dig into a colonial kind of narrative so i would absolutely change the lordship of the isles to be different it's it's fine to have pirates but
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
It's positioning and story is kind of not fun for me.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
to help us out there like subscribe and do the things teos if people want to just push me aside and just look at your stuff where do they do that uh well they can find me at alpha stream.org though boy i've i have so many things i want to do and boy that day job relentless day job keeps getting in the way but let's say they want to get rid of me and find you where do they go
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
I'm going to prove the world by making my own character builder that contains all of 2014 and 2024 until I realize I've run into IP infringement and copyright infringement, and then I will be sued, and then I'll close it all down.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Yeah, and the other thing is what your levels are, right? So if you're a first-level character, right, a new player bringing in a first-level character, well, that's one thing. But if you're trying to get mid-level or high-level play, then different conventions will do that differently, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
The Baldwin Games conventions try to give you a good assortment of that, and they are aimed at pleasing sort of the most players possible. So that benefits you if you have a wide variety of characters and levels so you can play everything that's offered. If you're either brand new or really established, well, then that, you know, will change things up.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
I will share, if I can pull it up quickly here, yeah, a fun number, which is that at Gen Con... Dungeons and Dragons offered, through Baldwin Games, 15,815 seats of D&D. And so that gives you a thought of just how big that is, right? That's an enormous number of opportunities.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
If you have hard-pressed to rank them, I mean, the reality is your Origins, your Gen Con, those are going to have the most seats. um, winter fantasy is right there. And, and then the others, uh, will be less than that. Right. Uh, I'd have to look and see how game whole con compares. And I'm not entirely sure.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Um, but a big part of it, I would say they're close enough to what it translates to is a lot of opportunities to get to play. If you can find a slightly smaller convention, uh, your chances to land what you want are better, right? So Gen Con has a lot of seats, but a lot of people, a lot of to counter those lots of DMs.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
So Winter Fantasy, it's probably a little easier to grab the particular seats you want, the schedule you want if you sign on that first day. Gamehole, same thing. Even smaller, more and more chances that you'll get exactly what you want, even if it's a little less. So it really plays off and there's no one answer that will really fit all this.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
Well, OK, in our in our timeline, not the listener timeline. Yeah. So, yeah. Happy birthday. Thank you. Thank you. I still think one of the best jokes you ever did was when you told everybody on Twitter that I was turning 60 when I was like 45 or something. And a lot of people really believed it, which made me feel really good about myself.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
I think that's awesome. I love it, love it, love it. Very astute. What I would add to this is going back to, you know, what am I doing wrong? You're not doing anything wrong if you're having fun. What I would say to DMs to consider is the effect of sort of always revealing things, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
So if you're gonna use passive perception and you're gonna say, hey, you see this, you see that, you see the other, that's fine. And if your notes are accounting for it, that's fine. And then we can think about what the kind of engagement is that you're generating. So if you are making the world interesting through this, then all good, no problems, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
So if you're constantly saying like, you know, hey, Sarah, you just saw this thing over there that looks really cool. It's a discarded weapon kind of wedged in the corner. This is neat, right? It's showing the world off. And if you describe a trap as something about those flagstones seems off, you're going to want to investigate that. And that's really cool, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
But what often happens at tables that kind of follow what you're talking about is they will say, you find a plus two sword, Sarah. Hey, Jeremy, over there looking, you see a trap and so you can avoid that. Now what you've done is removed the fun exploration from the game and you have solved the problems. Right. Right. And that is what players minds lead them to do. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Weapon Mastery and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 204)
They'll think, well, if I take the observant or the alert feed and I do this and then, you know, then I will see everything and I will never be hurt. Well, you will be hurt in your soul because the game becomes so boring that every trap is solved for you. And the point of a trap is engagement, not punishment. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Yeah, it's interesting to look at, like, I think second edition was really the time when we had the most kind of house rules and lack of uniformity out there, both because second edition itself had so much for it and all the oney stuff that people would use, too. But you found, you know, you couldn't be on a forum online, you know, on Usenet or wherever without. all kinds of house rules.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And then there were so many books and supplements that just had wild ideas. And so what would happen is if you went into the local pegboard at your local gaming store and you jumped into some person's game, the first thing you probably got was a house rules document. And it could be from any of those things. It could be something they found online, some product, some weird settings, some whatever.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And it has some actually really fun articles on the D&D movie. and on Stranger Things that are just kind of fun of their own right. But yeah, it's sort of like a pop culture look, like the pop culture history of D&D and the pop culture, what is important of D&D. And it's fun for its own ways for that. I also got the alternate cover Player's Handbook.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And that was what they enjoyed. And it could be just wildly different, you know, if they liked skills and powers towards the end of it, if they liked kits, if they liked and you name it, right? You know, some sort of wizard duels in Dungeon Magazine, right? I mean, anything's possible. Yeah. And it was so wild that you just it was like you feared it.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
You feared showing up at another person's table because it was so disparate. And since then, rules have tried to be a lot more cohesive, standard, understandable to the point where I think in 2015, you know, there's also you hear a cry out of like there aren't enough house rules out there, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Or or homebrew is a dirty word because we've become a lot more communal in how we approach things, which is making a few tweaks.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
part of that is because the rules are very very good but you may be seeing a little more now as you at least people are saying that we'll see what they actually do but they're saying things like well i'm not gonna do weapon masteries i'm gonna do them this way or you know those kinds of things because i think the game is trying to sort of clamp down in a way that maybe isn't as clear to everybody or or so universally accepted for just working at any table right yeah
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And it does not, Goldfold does not come off in my hands. So they did their job right. Congratulations. We'll call that a...
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I share your perspective. Mm-hmm. And especially because I am very scenario now driven, right? So as an example, if you come into town and you want that blacksmith to make something for you, I'm most certainly not going to use whatever player crafting rules there are. This isn't a character, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
This is an NPC and they will make that thing based on what I want it to take, based on the scenario, the timing, the whatever, and to make it fun.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And, you know, the last thing I want to do is say, well, OK, now this blacksmith needs to take a week of downtime and let's see if they complete three checks or whatever the thing, you know, they need to procure the materials like now, like it's going to be whatever I want it to be. And that's the kind of game that I prefer to run.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Some other folks, though, really want the whole world to always make sense. And where I think the designers are better off is when they can Maintain that separation. It is a game about your heroes, not about the whole world. But you don't want it to seem so out of whack that you go, well, this wouldn't possibly work in a real world. And I mean, let's all be clear.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
We're always maintaining that little shield of dumbness, deliberate, you know, dumbness to believe in the world, because there's just no way any society would function with wizards the way all of these function, these societies depict. Even Eberron, right? I mean, even that we choose certain places where we allow lightning trains and whatever to feel like, oh, yeah, magic had an impact.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
But I mean, no, you would have slave trade wizards that are just sitting there casting an at will prestidigitation day in, day out.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
it would be horrible what our society would do with actual wizards would be horrible right and i don't want that in my game right you you start getting into reality with fantasy and it's it's not pretty and and you know i want to have a fun right fun game where we go and kill dragons so yeah and and then the second part of that is you know the the the
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
We'd like to retract everything.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Yeah. And that's what I think, you know, 2014 does a pretty good job of it, of trying to step back a little bit from where third and fourth were of sort of demanding certain skills be maxed out, be whatever. I mean, third edition, it was like a it was like warfare, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Like characters and their players felt like I must hit some unbelievable DC because an unbelievable DC will come my way someday. And that was such a bad, that hot-cold model was destructive. It was combative. Fourth edition brought that back a bit, but skill challenges are important. Fifth edition, I think, has tried to be much more open about it, right? That sort of flexibility to say that...
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
your skill system is a representation of your character. It's interaction with the environment. It allows for these scenes, these kinds of neat situations, and that there will be enough looseness in these numbers that in general, the DM can create a particular type of experience reasonably, right? And I think it does that fairly well.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Yeah, and we saw this at 2014 jumping right like yeah That was a case for 2014 for whatever reason at the last minute decided to make this change and suddenly Jumping was based on your score and no not a die roll in most cases And so then you could just see that well a five-foot put pit is now useless
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
unless something's going to push you in it right unless there's some trickery involved everybody can jump it automatically and you saw the first adventure designers even official products mess that up because it was hard to suddenly you had to know this right and then you started seeing reasons why there's a check and i'm curious whether this will happen with 2024 because if i look at what i see at least in the player's handbook i haven't seen the dmg yet but the player's handbook
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
tells me seems to say all locks, all traps, one DC. Yeah, that seems really weird. Anathema to most designers and how they think. So will we know what will designers do to explain why this trap is harder than the DC that's in this book? Because that's what the player was led to expect and might generate their character. If I can hit that DC, I'm done. End of story. Well, who knows right now?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
We'll see where this goes.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Well, Variety reports that this long gestating, as they called it, Magic the Gathering animated series has a new showrunner, Terry Matalas. Matalas received praise for the third season of Star Trek Picard, the sci-fi series 12 Monkeys and other projects. Before this, it was the Russo brothers in 2019 and then Jeff Klein in 2021. And then it has been just completely quiet.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And someone actually interviewed said, well, I think this is dead. But hey, out of nowhere, now the series has a new showrunner. And so, you know, maybe that'll bring new script writing or pilot proposals or who knows what, but more energy to the show. And, you know, the reason for reporting this isn't just that it's kind of interesting, but it's Magic the Gathering.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
It's not D&D, but the D&D TV show is also in this sort of situation now. And there are things like there is the Transformers movie coming out. And these days, because of Hasbro, it can all be a lot more integrated, right? And how one does can mean how the next does. So if we have a super successful Magic the Gathering Netflix series, that may bring a D&D TV show.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
We saw Optimus Prime in the virtual tabletop demo, right? Against Driz Dwarden. So all of these things kind of can fuel each other. And so in some ways, you want to kind of cheer them all on a bit and hope that they can do something interesting with them because it could all tie into how D&D fares.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
It's really cool. And, you know, this has been something Jared is like my better self. It's like I was thinking to myself, you know, I really want to comb through all these old materials and really remember what all this stuff happens in these various adventures and what Vecna does and to what extent the fifth edition adventure builds off of that or is something completely different.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
But I didn't have to because Jared did all the work. Thanks, Jared. Thank you. He goes and starts way back with Eldritch Wizardry and in the original Dungeons and Dragons and the DMG where it's just basically two artifacts from this dead, famous person. And then we get like a cartoon and we get all other things. And, you know, some of it's conflicting backstory, as he rightly calls out.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
It doesn't all make sense or jive, but Vecna lives as an adventure based in Greyhawk. Very cool. At the end of it, Vecna is defeated and then he ends up in the domains of dread and Cass is his neighbor and another neighboring Ravenlob domain of dread. Then he escapes and Vecna reborn with sort of a weird idea of how to get out of a domain of dread.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
uh divekna die was this huge adventure uh at the end of of one edition leading to the next and it's one of those things where when editions change often and maybe this is you know is is uh 2024 a new edition maybe this answers it and that we didn't have an adventure that really explained all the rules changed right but we sure do in other cases and one of the things that happens is divekna die
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
is all about Vecna finding how to get into Sigil and trying to rewrite everything. And it's the explanation of why, like in third edition, a plane like the Nine Hells can have a version for Greyhawk and a version for the Forgotten Realms.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
right uh he is expelled out from sigil but becomes a full deity fourth edition names as a as a deity for for an entire veil setting which was interesting and even things jared talks about like critical role where it's not canon right it's not at all the way that they fought vecna and kept him from being a god and then akon the cruel at the last minute uh steals the hand of vecna and gets away not canonical at all except for the fact that akon the cruel
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
does have the hand in Descent into Avernus, official fifth edition adventure, and the name Exandria is mentioned. So you're like, wait, maybe it was canonical? And then, yeah, Jared makes this great point that sort of Vecna actually has been, while he started as just two artifacts and as a Greyhawk power, became a villain that was very much tied into this idea of multiverses, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
From the Domains of Dread to trying to sort of change all these multiverses into being just a single one. Like, he's actually been at it for quite some time, and it was very clever of them to tie into that for 5th edition again.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And so, yeah, and he makes some comments like maybe the reason why the hand and I don't appear as artifacts in Vecna Eve of Ruin is because of Joe Manganiello's falling out with D&D over the Dragonlance TV series. It's really all of this blog is just fantastic reading. Really fun. Incredible. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Yeah, I think this is fun. And I appreciate the Bologna scale of things. But I will say, to me, what made D&D Bologna really awesome was it was Oscar Mayer.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
right and it was something that was in grocery stores in spain where you know your random cousin whatever family member is going to be in that meat aisle and go isn't that game that my you know whatever plays and and it creates this discussion right magic the gathering had the um what was it in the frozen food aisle like egos or something like that not too long ago oh the uh hat pockets
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Hot pockets. Yes. Thank you. Right. Like that's a great example. We're just random people are going to go like, oh, OK, this is a thing. And maybe go like, oh, that's that game I always wanted to try or that game I played a million years ago. And, you know, that creates a real change. Mythic meets, you know, hey, have some fun with that. But you're not in everyday store sales shelves. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
The D&D stamps. To me, that is the new high water mark. Right. Because. That is something in the UK and the US where random people are like, I went to my post office and I'm seeing that sign saying Dungeons and Dragons 50th year anniversary. That is the kind of, you know, exposure of the brand that is just, you know, you can't pay for enough to get that kind of thing, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
It's like the 80s cartoon. It's just on everyone's TV. It's on everybody's stamps. It can just mail away. To me, that is the highest pinnacle we've ever seen. But I will take all of it, John. Even if I find today's dried meats to be weirdly overpriced, what happened?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
You can wash it down with the Beetle and Grimm's alcohol and then have the mimic chocolate bar that I got once to try and it was very tasty. There you go.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Yeah, you know, my group, we applied to do play testing, additional play testing. We were not picked. But they were kind enough to send us a discount on this. So I did actually pick this up already. It's $60 for that core rulebook, which comes not just the book, but also the 279 cards. That's pretty sweet. Maybe a very reasonably priced.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
I feel like everything Daggerheart makes is sort of like cheaper than it should be. And maybe that's on purpose. You know, I don't know. The limited edition has alternate cover cards, larger storage box, DM screen, character sheets, 120 acrylic tokens for 150, which again, pretty reasonable for compared to other products out there.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
It is interesting to see these companies that are this is starting to become a thing, right? We're like, if you don't kickstart, you still like preorder.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
if it's almost like it's like kickstarting when you know that you're going to fund anyway right it's an interesting approach and sometimes you see both like pre-ordering and kickstarting and so yeah companies will do all they can to kind of get the money in before the product actually goes out we've seen it with mcdm and with others i'm excited to see what daggerheart does uh what that the last changes they do um pretty neat stuff yeah
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Yeah, you have until October 22nd to ban it. Ban it? To back it. There we go. Don't ban it. I did think it was a neat concept, right? This idea, like, I think it's clever to say, hey, take whatever worlds you've got and bring them into the labyrinth as a sort of connective venture tissue. I thought that actually could have been something that D&D could have done more strongly with Radiant Citadel.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
You know, to really say like, look, use this. Here's how. So it seems like a smart thing. And one thing I noticed is like Richard Green worked on Parsantium as a world a long time ago. And like that is being added here. Right. So there's that capacity that you can add other people's settings, not just as stretch goals, but just in that concept of this is what it's meant to do. That's neat.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Absolutely. Yeah, you want to... You're saying, by adding this section, you're saying our players... will be better off if they have some understanding of the underpinning in the world. Some of that may represent just baseline knowledge, like a person, you know, in the Forgotten Realms should have some concept of other dimensions existing. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
But also a little bit on the player side of the working of like, hey, there are a bunch of material planes or a material plane with a bunch of worlds in it. And I guess is the current way and and how you characterize that can be really important to the game. And sometimes when you know things too well, you forget how to share that information or maybe this is deliberate.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
But if I look at, for example, the Feywild in 2014 and the Feywild in 2024, we go from a large paragraph to just this. I'm holding it up here for viewers, just the tiniest sliver. It's just a little paragraph that that shows up. And that is.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
you know all we say here is this vibrant idealized realm brings with brims with life and emotion which are most intense in the realm's domains of delight and i almost don't know what you said there like i don't know what domains of delight is you just it's capitalized so it's a place i guess or place is um vibrant idealized realm you didn't even say that there are fake creatures here though i guess that's in the name feywild
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Whereas the Feywild description 2014 is more of like what we might have thought about explaining of an ultra vibrant world with fake creatures. We get examples of the kinds of creatures, you know, music and all these kinds of things. And similarly with the Shadowfell, You know, the we get very little here.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
In fact, what we get is this the infamous domains of dread, which aren't mentioned in 2014 as well as sort of the few things that are here. But it's just wastelands, haunted ruins and domains of dread. That's your Shadowfell in this gloom haunted realm. But it does not explain things the way that they are as a sort of alternate version of reality or anything like that.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Well, you know, and Timely is today's headlines in that issue, Time magazine issue of Dungeons and Dragons. They look at all the kind of video games and they talk about this 1974 students in Southern Illinois University who develop a game for the Play-Doh computer system. They call it the dungeon.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And yeah, it's a really interesting shift of the design goal, perhaps.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Yeah. And I think in the DMG is where you get more of the mapping to gods and and a little more about them and the physical image of what they look like and all of that. You know, there were a couple of different art pieces, but you get this concept of layers and infinity for some things like that.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And second edition deities and demigods takes it to a whole nother level with really interesting concepts on what the priesthoods are like and adds a whole dimension. I know Alex Cameron is a big fan of that book and rightfully so, because it adds just a dimension to it that is really, really fascinating of what the gods are like and these realms.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And yeah, and I think that continues on into third edition design as well.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And that domain concept is important in the Player's Handbook because third edition takes that second edition idea of priesthoods being different and says, okay, you will get domain powers, some small bonus for the domains that are associated with your god, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And they decide to add a boss battle because they wanted the game to have something big at the end, right? And sort of like the first video game boss battle that was like a D&D-themed game inspired by. And I think there is that to it, but I mean, yeah, as far back as you can think of of adventures, there are big boss battle fights. And I think it's evolved... you know, hand in hand, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
But that's interesting. Yeah, go ahead. This is described as a best of God's pantheon, right? As a sort of more of an example. And I think Fortithian is trying to say. There are so many worlds to D&D, and so here is kind of Nentir Vale is going to use this best of of all the different worlds and pull them in together. And that's why all these are here, which is interesting.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
I got a Japanese anime cry. It's great. I'm so proud of my son. I went to Santa Clara University for the first time. My wife had been there, but I did not go when they first visited. And it was amazing. Like, it was really good. The staff all said really nice, touching things. And the teachers seemed surprisingly competent and everything. And like, it was fantastic. Everything was great.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Yeah, it's really interesting to look at from a number of perspectives, like we could just do an entire show on this, but it is, it feels like, and maybe I'm transposing what they've said in other cases, but the design team, you feel like this was approached from the idea of this may be the last version of D&D. We don't know if this is going to be successful or not.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Let's kind of cover all the bases. So in the gods section, you know, let's tell you the difference between Greyhawk and Eberron and Forgotten Realms and so on. And for the planes, let's try to show the kind of variety of what's out there, because this book may need to support all of it. Who knows what else we're going to get away with creating is sort of how it feels like to me.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
You know, so maybe you'll be running an Egyptian themed campaign. Whereas I think the 2024 team can go like, yeah, we don't need to cover that. You know, we will be telling you what you play in and it's going to be successful enough. So we can just ditch all that stuff, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
No, in fact, I think 5th Edition tries to sort of explain them away. There are regions where they come together and delve into this. And in fact, the way that the DMG explains it, because we reviewed this in our DMG analysis, it's more like where these planes combine and with the material planes
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Where D&D has led the way in terms of how to depict the storytelling in a game, maybe.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
That's where this stuff is sort of you end up with like some oozy stuff or icy stuff or whatever, but it's not. They are not separate planes. Here we go back to that, which I've always liked those planes, so I think it's cool that they exist.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
But but it's one of those, you know, how do you explain what these planes are and what it means to go from one side of it to the other or deeper into it or every one to look at it? And and they definitely chose a different path here than they had earlier on. And you have to wonder why. Is there some adventure coming that's going to make use of this like? It was just someone decided.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
I mean, I sometimes think of 2024, you could call it a lot of things. And boy, people seem to not want to just use one term. But, you know, while we're throwing around terms, opinionated 5E is one that I could live with because it has a perspective. Whereas you could almost call 2014, or I would argue this, unopinionated 5E should work for everybody, no matter what kind of campaign you run.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
This has a very like particular way towards it. And I don't know, I look at this information on the multiverse and it's like, I don't know what to do with it. Like, you know, they bothered to put in alignments for the outer planes, going back to that AD&D concept. But, okay, and I see Arcadia, for example, drawn here.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
right um but but also uh with the idea of these mechanics right which which are video very video gamey in form and and there's a lot of back and forth right well wouldn't it be cool if right but you can look at i don't know old deities and demigods or anything like that and and and look at you know there were deities they could just touch your magic item and drain it of all its power
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
I don't know, it sort of looks like a weird video game graphic-y kind of thing with some conical mountains and whatever's. And it just says lawful good, lawful neutral. I don't know anything about it. So why is it here? Like, if you're going to tell me so little,
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Well, that's fine. But then I would say... take away this two-page thing here that tells me actually very little and replace that with something that's inspiring around the scope of adventures and how they can cross the plains and give me just some neat kernels of interest that will make me want to
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
both play in those things and be aware of the fact that this could happen as part of play and maybe want to make me DM, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And tell those kinds of neat stories that go beyond your... And yeah, maybe recast it as like the life of a hero can include not just, you know, saving your town or whatever, but it can span the realms and it can bring you to the home of your deity or the biggest villains and just... Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
becomes not a weight i just think this brevity has you know like if i look at 2014 the table with the alignments which you can debate how useful that is or not i know how you feel you know at least it tells me arcadia the peaceable kingdoms of mechanist the clockwork nirvana of you know akron the infinite battlefield of something that tells me what the why i'm even looking at this otherwise i'm just looking at stuff on a page that's meaningless
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
yeah and non-inspiring except that on dnd beyond right now you can go by planescape the book and see all and get get the answer to all of that yeah i could also get confused by it or you know i don't yeah i i could also buy the 2014 book and it'll tell me more i don't know i just think that they've gone to to brevity right with like the question that prompted this of you know what do we make of
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Or grant you wishes or whatever, right? The ability to be a boss beyond comprehension almost because it's so incredibly powerful. And so there's always kind of been that, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
This being so drastically reduced. Well, I think a couple of things. One thing is you've you've removed the gods entirely. And in some ways that makes sense because you're not trying to limit the scope of things. But you've also made it so that deities are further disappearing from play and importance and in consideration. And I don't know that that's fun.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
I would debate the fun of that and the service that it provides to the players, the benefit to the players to remove that. Similarly, with the planes of existence, I think that when you've distilled it down to this one page of text and an image, you've lost a lot of what made this interesting.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Yes, you know, sure, it can be in the DMG and stuff, but that's the book that people keep on saying they've never read. Right. Even DMs. And yes, there is a planescape setting, but then you got to go by that and read all those things. And, you know, how many people do that? We know the numbers are low on that. And so I just this was your chance. This was your chance to inspire and inform.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And I feel like it's right.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and maybe that's it is that, you know, fifth edition 2014 being a new edition, it felt it had to declare what things were right. Um, like separate a bit from the dawn war of fourth edition and things like that. Um, and maybe 2024, uh, I might even say tricks itself into thinking, well, I don't have to say that because there's all this other stuff.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
But but I mean, this is your this is your first book for a new player. And so I think it does. I think it should give me what I need to know. Otherwise, then remove the entire section. Right. What you've told me here is guns don't matter.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Yeah, I mean, and I think you and I, we may sound further apart than we are, like you made a comment in the show notes that I totally agree with, which is like, you know, tell me what do gods in the multiverse mean to your setting? Right. So that you position then settings to tell you, I think that would be great. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Like that would be really neat because I think somehow what I see more and more at the table is only the cleric seems to care about their deity and actually very little. Like I'm seeing more and more of that. That's not always, but you just, you know, we're further, further away.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Yeah, for sure. I agree with you, Sean. I'll just add from my end that the other thing is you see it's patternistic in the same way that if you read an encyclopedia, we've said this is encyclopedic. You know, at some point you're like, I'm going to learn. I'm going to read everything in the encyclopedia. You may have done this if you're old.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And you at some point went, yeah, maybe I'm done or I'll skip this section. And it's the same way. These start resembling the approach that was taken to the book over and over again, even though they're different regions. It's, you know, this war and this clash. And how did I use threaten you? You know, how did I use hurt you? Please tell us. And what are you doing about it?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Which is probably, you know, not great. And it's like that. And it really does... continue the same pattern over and over again. So even though there are some really neat regions, like, you know, we haven't talked about Valley of the Mage. We've only addressed Voluna a little bit, you know, Verbal Bonk. Some of these are famous areas that tie into the history.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
But I think as listeners, you get it. You get what's here. And if you are curious about the last few regions, we have three where we kind of wrote up we were going to cover and won't. And then we have the list of the others.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And so you can take our show notes and go look up anywhere on the internet, kind of, you know, backgrounds about those if you want to complete it or check out the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer yourself. But, you know, I think that, you know, if I can say to sort of wrap this up, Sean, and add your piece of what you think.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
One of the things we wanted to do with this series was answer the question that a lot of people will ask, which is, how is Greyhawk different from the Forgotten Realms or other settings? And it's different because I think it more closely ties to war games. the ideas of nations conquering one another, and this being a lot of the play that's in place, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
It's been really fun for me to read John Peterson's Playing at the World, and I'm holding a copy of the second edition, because in fact, in this, they share that in one of the early diplomacy games that they're playing, they have these various variants of diplomacy, and one of them includes one involving the Great Kingdom. And it has the near div in it.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And, you know, this is all parts that we've covered in Greyhawk because they start just using it, this world for the lake of unknown depths and the dry steps. And let's see, where's my picture? There we go. You know, this is literally the world of Greyhawk or part of it. And and just that's what's going on here. Right. It's an it's a coming from this background.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And what that means is there's an emphasis on world building. where everything is balanced on the tip of a dagger and can go one way or the other way, and there's going to be blood either way. And every region is like that, which is kind of amazing, right? The Forgotten Realms feels very stable.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Even areas that are set up for change or, oh, the king passed away or whatever, it still feels like, and the next 20 years could be just like this entry. Every Greyhawk region feels like next year is going to be totally different. Right. Or more likely to be different than anything else. All right. What do you think? Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Again, and then leaving you back at that steady state. Adventures do this too, right? You know, Tiamat shows up and then everything's fine. That's what novels often do to the point where the world then feels fleshed out and stable, right? Icewind Dale, all kinds of wild things happen in the novels of the Driz Dwarden series. and then get resolved.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
So now we're back to the steady state and the world feels very safe state versus Greyhawk. No, it's all right. They're about to explode, about to go one way or the other. And it can be, you know, what happens in one region. It's like dominoes for everything else. And that's kind of neat.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
It also means that you have a lot of different possible stories you can tell based on what regions you choose and which aspects you lean into. Whereas the Forgotten Realms, you certainly have like climactic differences, climate, you know, architecture or whatever sort of cultural things.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
But it feels like which nation you choose doesn't, you know, like if you are Baldur's Gate or Waterdeep, is it a huge difference? And I would argue it's not as great a difference as where in Greyhawk you sit.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Yeah, no, 100%. I completely agree. We have formalized things. And I mean, I think Jeremy Crawford has spoken to it, right? The idea that what Jeremy's trying to do, what the team are trying to do is to simplify life for the DM so the DM doesn't have to make calls. And if you go back and listen to previous team members for 2014, they were trying to make it so let's empower the DM again, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's a real possibility that, For a future, I mean, I think the DMG for 2024 is likely to do very little, right? And I'm not saying it's bad. Like you could easily talk me into in a designer boardroom meeting kind of thing. We're all in the room.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
What do we do to say, hey, let's just take a couple of areas in Greyhawk and paint a broad brushstroke of what the world is, choose a couple of regions and explain to DMs how you can use that to create a cool campaign. Done. Let's use eight pages. Ten pages. Twelve. I don't know. Are they going to cover all this stuff? No. Not at all. But...
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
you can use that as the springboard for either DMs doing this work or a future product where you could take this that we find in the Gazetteer and modernize it to have all of that potential we talked about, right? And to have really neat opportunities for the kinds of campaigns and stories you can tell because it's a world uniquely suited to that compared to the other settings. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
We didn't cover also here, Sean, just to make sure folks know that after this section of the glossography of the of the yeah, the glossography, I think it's called. Then you have a gazetteer of the Flores. Then you have the geography of the Flores. And this further fills in not just it goes beyond the regions, the nations.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
and into the hills the mountains the swamps the forests and all of them have varying amounts of stuff sometimes a little too encyclopedic you know what are the three types of main trees or whatever but often with really cool hooks as well and the again the potential for pivotal things right what is layering in these forests and what could suddenly be a big impact um yeah which is kind of cool
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
A player's guide, which...
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Yeah, and there's some great ones we mentioned, you know, the circle of eight before and the history and how they've changed membership, the the silent ones of Keelan you had mentioned. And, you know, one that I love near and dear to my heart is the old faith. And it's a great example of how you can have this intersection of the information that's in this book with the reality of play, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
So in my region, in the Living Greyhawk campaign that we've talked about of Jeff, this idea of the old faith that serves the Earth Mother Bayori, who is maybe the planet herself as a goddess. was taken and the idea of the flan people who worship the old faith was taken with the region of Jeff being conquered by giants, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
If you think of it against the giant series and all of that, and created a really neat concept. And Eric Mengi was one of the architects of this, who's a patron backer. Thank you, Eric. And thank you for creating this because what he did was say, okay, Baori, Halor, Obad Hai, and even Nerol, the god of death,
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
are all worshiped by the flan in in certain aspects right like nerul as a god of decay and they're tied to the seasons right summer is palor and the fall is obad high and then winter is is nerul and the druids worship these aspects and they the old faith druids are often the lake in this area of jeff and with the monks and bards who protect them and you all of this can really come together to create fantastic regions
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Make the calls that are going to be fun at your table the way the game should play out. And those are very different views of the world. It's fascinating to me because 4th edition was super into that codification, right? It was almost like going back to wargaming roots where you would just, you know, you look at those diagrams of whether a thing has...
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
That's the kind of thing that I would love to see in the DMG, that kind of instruction of how does one create a setting that is really cool for your players to explore and get to know, right? That's so much more important than a glossography or what these hills are or what this nation is, is what do I do with what you gave me and how do I create my own version of that, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Yeah. And then the chapter seven goes into deities and it's, you know, encyclopedic, though it has some nice aspects to it. And one of the things that I really love is the art. They don't do this for every god, but for a lot of the gods, they show off what different priests look like. Let me see if I can get for those viewing the video. There we go. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And it shows how much their dress varies, but through the artist trying to also show their mannerisms and beliefs. And it goes to that question at the beginning of the book, you know, like how is it important to explain, you know, religion in some way? Well, this is one of the ways you do that by showing just how different you can be depending on who you worship, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And how important this is to the setting to have these different beliefs and followers and so on.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
uh cover or whether it uh you know is in within range and whether it has um uh a combat advantage type thing right like all of that you know are you flanking like those things were so precise and it wasn't about your judgment and you can look at 2014 with like its stealth rules and it's like
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, it was really and it was one of the better ones because of that. One of the campaigns that for all of its ups and downs really got a reaction out of players and tons of people who are very devoted to it.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Absolutely. Well, I want to thank everybody who has provided feedback on this series. Now comes the time when you can tell us what you want to see us cover next. A lot of you folks have enjoyed our 2014 to 2024 comparisons. So we'll focus on that for now. But let us know what else you'd like to see. Maybe things that tie into future releases. Let us know. And thank you all.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Thank you to the Master of Dungeons supporters, Master of Realms. We give you a shout out in our show notes. All of you are vital to to our making the show and the masters of the multiverse who get this special shout out now.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Keith Amann of Monsters Know What They're Doing, Lou Anders from Lazy Wolf Studios, Craig Bailey, David Bastionson, Steve Bissonnette, Merrick Blackman, Calvin Bridges Avalos, Evil John, Will Doyle, Andy Edmonds at Nerdonomicon.com, James Fisher, Scott Fitzgerald Gray at Insane Angel Studios, Ben Heisler and Paige Leitman, Sean Hurst, The Mighty Jerd, Brian King, Jim Klingler, aka DM Prime Mover,
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Chad Lynch, Paul Matta, The Mathemagician, Eric Mengi, Anna B. Meyer, Fantasy Cartography, and thank you for all that Greyhawk inspiration, Trey McLemore, John Mickey, Sean Molly, Falcon Neil, Tom Nelson of the Deck of Player Safety, Mighty Zeus,
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Phil Wirt from the Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo, Post Fiction RPG Audio, Robert Pasley, Vladimir Prenner from Croatia, Pugnus, Ozymandias Rex, Runner Rick, Chance Russo at Drago Russo, Andy Shockney, Krishna Simonsei, Josh N. Lewanica of the Tabletop Journeys podcast, and
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
you're hidden if sort of maybe your target is distracted or your DM feels like it or whatever, you know, and then people would maybe want more because that's a natural thing that people will want. But the game was ultimately saying, and you figure this out. And now we get into a situation where invisible doesn't even mean what you think it means in English. It's like a condition, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Talos the Storm Lord, Jerry Taloman from the D&D and TV podcast, Tres, Joe Tyler, Marcelo de Velasquez, the Valiant DM, James Walton, Graham Ward, Jason Ward from Accidental Cyclops Games, Javier Waziak, Chris Webster, and Walt Winfrey. Thank you all so much. You can find us at patreon.com slash mastering D&D and support us there.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
If you can also give us a review on Apple podcast or whatever podcatcher listening device you are using. And you can subscribe to YouTube to see our fantastic faces. Sean, where do we find you? At Sean Merwin, wherever you get your socials on. Fantastic. Yes. And you can find the show at Mastering D&D. You can find me at AlphaStream.org. And Sean, what are we going to do now?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
It's a thing. It's a state. That's an on off switch of the game. Right. And that is really very different.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Way beyond where I dared expect it would all feel like. Yeah, it seemed like he was fitting in well. And so now he just lives without us.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Well, and this ties into the next section of the question. Can I kind of go on to that? Please do. This is there is a community that seems to take advantage of loose wording or intentionally look for places to gain advantage by reading rules in a particular way. A 2024 example of this is opportunity attacks.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
The first two sentences in that section clearly stated that it applies to enemies and foes, but a rather large community is claiming they can do an op attack or an ally on an ally because the mechanical text
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
uses the word creature and they've interpreted enemies as flavor text and what this is if you haven't seen this little piece of ridiculousness it's the idea that you can take an opportunity attack to like cure your friend when they move by when they move out of here because it's i forget the exact technicality but it's like the wording Now, it doesn't say that they threaten you.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
It just says that they've moved out of your reach. And it doesn't say enemies in a particular place. It says creatures.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
So you could take like the I forget what is the Mage Slayer feed or whatever, but you could basically as an opportunity to cast a cure spell on your ally, which now can be abused because every time your allies need help, they can just move around you and they're away from you and cause this free healing.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And I don't know how you feel about this, Sean, but I think the more that you are nailing down things, it creates in the player this mentality that all exactness can be used, right? And so then they start parsing for this. And I sort of feel like this happens the more that you try to nail down things. It does. Right? Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
Right. Yeah, but what I think that is what you do get. So you can't kind of either way, you're going to get some people arguing whatever. And, you know, the Gamers movie had the beautiful example of like, you know, can I just set up a ballista, you know, or a crossbow behind, you know, to to just arm this thing up to then like sneak attack with it on this person in a tavern. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
The rules don't say I can't. And the DM is just like, I don't know that this feels wrong, but I don't know how to behave. And so here is this bro, you know, setting it all up to fire is huge. Yeah, you know, and that's the kind of thing you get. But but there is it is a thing that like the more that you claim in your game that your wording is perfect.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
The more that people will go, oh, well, if it's perfect, then then that certainly means I can do the following. Right. You have endorsed this when they're just words and we're all trying to do our best. Sometimes when it's looser, you just know it's clearer that we are doing our best with few words. And so we should figure it out. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
And what I do think is that the more that you are nailing things down. you are driving particular behavior interactions more and more versus creative use of things. I've had a lot of fun reading Playing at the World, which on one hand, this this revised version, it can be a little boring because it's a lot about the wargaming side of things.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
You know, it wasn't just a weekend for him because at the local Target event, I found the issue of Time magazine, the special edition. I read it cover to cover during the nights. And yeah, it's pretty neat. It's a very fun kind of it's like a look at history from a particular perspective, which I think is great. And it's fun and it has nice pictures and art and everything.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
But and I get why John's being very clinical, John Peterson, in writing this. In describing really where does D&D come from, right? And they're getting into things like the Bronstein rules where people are starting to sort of have campaigns and starting to have roles that they play in really interesting, funny ways.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
I mean, it could be we could do a whole show on this, but it translates directly to this idea of, you know, you get what you put in. When you tell people, hey, you get to play you as a character in this game, people understand that they are now an actual person, not moving just units dispassionately on the board as some country.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
They are now an entity, a person, and they start thinking differently and doing things differently. And at the far level, when you prescribe particular actions everybody can take, then people want to use those actions only. And that becomes the menu of operations, right? I mean, it's like fourth edition, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Gods and Multiverse! Final Greyhawk! (MD 208)
You give everybody at wills and encounters and dailies, and it's sometimes all they can see, even though they can do anything they want. And the game says, you can do whatever you imagine. Okay, well, let me see my menu of at will encounter daily. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
Live from Gamehole: Create a Campaign With Us! (MD 212)
What did you see this week that piqued your interest, that you're taking home with you, that maybe surprised and delighted or dismayed you?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
But what I did see as I was opening them is every one of these little numbers over to the side was in fact unique for me. And I bought two of those packs of six from the Lego store. And probably by luck, they were two distinct units of six. And I got the full 12, all 12 with just buying two boxes. It was like the best collecting ever.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
I think that's brilliant. If I pick up what you're putting down, it's that skills are meant to provide information, uncover options. It's engagement and interaction. It's not truly solving problems. It's not creating things. It's not attacking, healing, interacting with those parts of the game. It's not combat-oriented. It's not something that you don't want to drive behavior
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
to where someone feels they must maximize a skill and the only possible uh you know where you do see that is perception because you want to find hidden things and you see it with uh stealth and you see it with anything that whatever you decide is traps right that's that's you're going to have some you there's no better way to do it for the game so it just is what it is you're going to see that in the skill section but otherwise
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
You know, just in the same way that maximizing your arcana skill isn't supposed to unlock the game for you. You know, same thing with medicine. We did see in 1D&D a early version where you can sort of use a healer's kit and medicine to heal. And when they were playing, sorry, not 1D&D, in D&D Next, when they were playtesting the 2014 rules,
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
There was a version where you could use the combination of a healer's kit and medicine skill. And that was a little too strong, right? It was sort of like a potion of healing all the time. And so you saw people become a healer through the feat that juiced up the medicine skill. And it was a little much.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yeah, I played Dragonbane not too long ago, and assuming we played it correctly with the starter set, one of the things that we all just went, wait, what? Was that when you bedded down each night for your long rest, you had to make a check to see if you essentially bedded down correctly. I forget the exact name of the skill, but it's a, you know, camping kind of skill. And...
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
If you succeeded, then you got hit points back. And if you didn't, you didn't. And well, you know, immediately we're like, OK, we must all maximize this skill check. Right. Right. And it just becomes a cost to your skill points because you've got to have this. And, you know, in theory, it's I'm sure the designers are like, well, this is so fun.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
You know, you'll you want all, you know, resting is tough in the wild. But what it does is it just tells the player, well, you got to dump points into this stat. No matter what, to get this, you turn to the skill to get it better. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
My wife thanked the gods of collecting that I often fall prey to. So it was great. So I got all of them, and they're pretty sweet. And, you know, we've got little, like, tieflings with a little pet dragon shooting out an Eldritch Blast.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yeah, yeah, I'm looking forward to that talk. That's a neat piece, the short and long rests and how they change.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And they kind of iterate this, right? So they're kind of saying like, well, if we don't have a new monster manual, well, then you use the old one. But when you do, you use the new one. And they say, if a rule appears in a previous book, such as Tasha's or Xanathar's, right? This is very true of player character features.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
But if that has seen a rule update because that Tasha's piece was, say, pulled into the player's handbook as a new updated subclass, then you use the new core book version, right? That's the most recent version, the 2024 player's handbook. So you use that, not the Tasha's version.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff. So I might show them, you know, as we go, you know, here and there. Anyway, what was your weekend about, Sean?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And if it has not been updated, well, then you use the most recently published version, whether that's in Tasha's or wherever it might be. So essentially always use the latest version, which has always been the case in the past. And so, again, now this is happening and it's happening for 2024. And it's and it's effective today.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Well, by the time you hear this, September 17th is the date when 2024 is available for playwrights, general release. Everybody can have a player's handbook. And so therefore, everybody can use it at the table in their games from both the GM and player side. But there's a grace period.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yeah, and then they give us some dates. So the DMG will be available for Adventurers League play starting November 12th. They point out, hey, magic items will be updated. So you may have a magic item that changes on your character and you'll use that latest version and there'll be specific guidance when this happens. 2024 Monster Manual will be available for Adventures League on February 18th.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
More specifics for that will come at that time as well. But we do get some information around that kind of gives us a look at how the monster changes will work because we get advice on previous adventures.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yeah, and then, you know, your giant weasel and spider and stuff like that. Those are all there.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
yeah um and then let's see what else they say oh dungeon craft so dungeon craft is the program by which adventure designers can create and publish on the dm's guild for the adventures league play uh and it says that from now until before release of the 2024 monster manual you should replace or you should reference the two 2014 rules where applicable applicable
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
and then updates to the dungeon craft program will be available after the 2024 monster manual release along with the srd 5.2 i didn't love the wording here it's a little i but i think what they're saying is hold off on 2024 for dungeon craft until the monster manual come out that's what i read so if we misinterpreted you know hopefully greg marks or someone else can can clarify
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
But that's what I understood, probably because of the SRD 5.2. Maybe, though. I mean, technically, the DMs Guild can use anything. But that's what I understood, Sean. Did you understand the same thing looking at this?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
I'm holding up the Lego minifigs for the Druid and the Barbarian. And one thing I should mention about these Lego minifigs is they come with multiple heads. So like one female, one male. So you can decide whatever kind of face they have. And often they're also double-sided, so they can be like intense grin or happy smile for either. So that's kind of fun.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Well, I did have one thing that was kind of funny. I had a dream at night. At some point, we'll get to listener questions.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
So looking at these rules, Sean, I think it's all very reasonable. It's all very logical flow. And the only thing that I, you know, when I really step back and look at them was, well, what you didn't do is say, play with either 2014 or 2024. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
They could have chosen to do that, given that this is all fully compatible, which I mean, honestly, it kind of is, or at least close enough compared to any previous fully compatibles that have been attempted in the past. So, you know, should they have? Why didn't they? And my general thought is that the hardcore AL player would just try to maximize stuff, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
but i had a dream and i it was like i woke up like at four o'clock in the morning or something from this dream and the dream was that i had just finished work for catalyst game labs uh somehow updating shadowrun right and like i'd done my last bit of reference work and it felt so real that when i woke up in this like groggy state i was like wait do i need to turn that in Do I have this job?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And probably cause trouble at the table where you'd take both kinds of counterspell, for example. Right. And you would, you know, I'm going to do the stunning fist that I used to have on my monk, but then I'm going to take this other, you know, I think there would have been that sort of because Ale can draw out that sort of min max or there could have been some of that destructiveness in play.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
That may be why they did this. I don't know. What do you think about it?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yeah, absolutely. 100% on everything you just said. I am pulling up the Lego Mind Flayer with its Intellect Devourer Companion, and I am using its mental powers to try to convince Wizards of the Coast to release a new campaign and retire the old one.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
There's no name yet, but it's on the penguinrandomhouse.com website. Link in our show notes. And it says, Journey to the domains of dread and face the fearsome Count Strahd Van Zorovich in his upcoming official Dungeons and Dragons novel. Or this upcoming.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
A group of adventurers must fight their way through a dark and twisted realm known as the domains of dread, where powerful dark lords rule over worlds filled with supernatural horrors. Well, that told me nothing, Sean.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
the the movie tie-in ones those are great yeah really really yeah that's done and the fall oh and i can't fall back i think they're called the fallbacks that was really good too so very fun very much what i would want from a dnd type novel light easily read by people of any age group most groups i i the the the ravenloft one is the one that attracts me the most to maybe
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And I really didn't know for like I was like, I got to remember when I wake up to find out whether I actually have to turn this in because but I guess I did it. And I'm like, I don't remember doing the work. And then I fell back asleep and I woke up and just laughed because it was such a hilarious, you know, no, I do not have this job, but. Somehow, 3 o'clock, 4 o'clock in the morning.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
I mean, it's kind of funny listening to the interview. It's a, it's a lovely recording that kind of says like, you know, and then I went, you know, this is Louise can be the granddaughter who like kind of goes through his boxes. I mean, it was only, but so lost, you know, it's like, well, maybe we should go through grandpa's stuff.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And they find the tapes that were believed lost for 40 years containing the 44 second theme song he composed. I mean, honestly, though, he shouldn't have hidden it underneath all his box of cables that, you know, that that's where they want everyone to go through those. I'm kidding about that. So, yeah, it's just 44 seconds, but it's beautiful. And the grandfather, I thought this was neat.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
In the interview, they say that he had composed various songs for Marvel, Transformers and other properties. And I forget the exact wording. It basically says this was what was like most requested by fans. Yeah, cool. So the music came out last week on YouTube. There's a link in our show notes. And it's gorgeous. Just 44 seconds.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
But it's that song that plays at the beginning of the carnival ride and through the end. And it's just it's lovely. It's fun to see it. And there's some nice pictures of the grandfather of Johnny Douglas composing and doing other things. And so it's neat. I like it.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yeah, this came from my daughter who said, OK, you got to listen to this. And she was right. So it is the recording. The podcast is in Spanish. It's a really nice piece done by Radio Ambulante and NPR with an episode called One Million Coins, Un Millón de Monedas. And if you can understand Spanish, I highly recommend this as a fantastic listen for for all kinds of reasons.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
There is also an English transcript that you can see from the link in our show notes. And what it's all about is how Venezuelans began to find the game of classic runescape online, a massive multiplayer game.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
as a way to make ends meet and we get a couple of different voices that talk through this experience they had including a couple who are in university in 2018 they begin to farm items in the game to essentially pay for college right and They slowly start making money there and good money. So they tell their uncle and their cousin and their mother in law.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And I mean, you name it and everybody starts going on to runescape and farming items. And there's places you can go and risky places you can go and, you know, the easy places. And so you've got to pick your poison of how much you're willing to risk, because in the game, if you get killed, everybody can take your stuff. And so you lose everything.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And so they often in because of their economic status, can't risk dying in game. So it's very interesting in that way. And then the economy in Venezuela goes through lots of issues and there are all these power outages. And the number of Venezuelan in-game farmers had grown so high. This is right around just before the pandemic and the early pandemic.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
that when the Venezuelans can't log in, the economy of the entire game crashes, right? It's massively affected. Prices skyrocket for everything. So, you know, everybody who's nice and wealthy can't just buy the super cool thing for cheap. Now they got to pay five times, 10 times the usual price. And instead of this bringing thanks to the Venezuelans, it brings lots of racist attacks against them.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And huge bully guilds kind of organize against the Venezuelans. And this culminates in a huge in-game war with Venezuelans and allies beating off these bully guilds. And then eventually the company steps in and stops all the battles, right? And then we get views during the pandemic of how critical this was. People...
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
facing just, I mean, the complete destabilization of Venezuela and the impacts it has for all those. And so the farming becomes so massive that people have to move to other games, right? It's like it's kind of farmed out and the economy is not producing. So they jump from game to game. The culture sort of fragments a bit as they're all sort of searching different ways.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
But it's just it's such an interesting lesson, right, of what people in other countries where we might take for granted just playing a game for fun and people are doing it for subsistence. Right? Like, there are a couple, you know, that couple that's in university kind of shares, like, this is the only reason we made it kind of thing, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Like, because we're farming these items for wealthy players. And at the end, you know, they look back on it with, like, emotion of, like, you know, and I've kept my avatar in case my daughter wants it, right? And just, you know, even though it was work, right? But it's such a part of their identity having been through this. It's really, it's a great emotional end to the story, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
and really heartbreaking of what games can be for different folks so if you do understand spanish or if you're interested in the in the um um in the english transcript check out it's at radioambulante.org i will try to americanize it there yeah it's interesting that i've seen economists who will use
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
I can't hear you. Oh, sorry then. Yeah, absolutely agreed. And, and, and fascinating that, that, this this this is an economy not just the in-game economy but that right country's economy right like that interplay is fascinating and and and scary at the same time we will now go to our creator corner where we get a new class for a new game
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Pesto has done some great work. He's one of their big play testers. So neat to see him take the lead on that creator license and put it to use.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yeah, James Quigley on his blog pulls together a tremendous list of resources. He's got them itemized and categorized, everything from associations and conventions, how and where to publish, tools, all of this. So you can check out our link in our show or go to quigjam.substack.com. And then in our show notes, we have the direct link to it. But it's great. It has all kinds of stuff.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
I don't care how experienced you are, you'll probably find some link there that's useful or that you're thinking, yeah, I should keep this in my toolbar somewhere so I can get to it periodically and go to it. Very useful. Nice write-up. And he even links to something of mine, which is really nice.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Fantastic. Lady of Pain, last mini of the 12. There you go.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
It is. It's a fan wizard. This is what the little boxes look like. I'm holding it up. They're very small, kind of fits in your hand. It's not oversized packaging for once. Amazing. Well done, Lego there. And, you know, we reported back a few weeks ago that you could get these and that they we had heard that you can scan the barcode and know what's inside. And so I put that theory to the test.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
That's neat. And I, yeah. He numerically kind of ranks everything and, you know, plus and minus and how does it compare to advantage and disadvantage. And it's really kind of fascinating. But yeah, I mean, it does show that it's hard to balance these out, which is one of the things we talked about on the show.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yeah. And I want to add something to this, Sean, that goes back to those design goals, right? So absolutely, design goal is around this resource management and particularly hit points, but also its cadence of play. And this has been a critical thing for players, for GMs, and for designers, right? We heard a lot of discussion about this in third edition and fourth edition, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
if you are, you know, are you going to stop and rest and buff up and heal and all these things right before you open the door?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
every door right are you going to um uh save certain things for the big boss fight right are you going to have one fight sleep go to your next fight every time right or do you feel you can play forever right are you going to try to go to the dungeon not even get there and have to go back and rest right those kinds of questions that cadence of play is super critical
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
to how enjoyable the experience is and even what kind of experience it is.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
If you live through this, you may recall that going back to rest was weeks. It was at least a week. Because even spell slot, the other thing is that there were fewer spell slots and the number of them that could be used for healing spells. And so what would...
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
even if you had a cleric in the party, you needed many days for all those spells to be cast and rehealed once per day to allow you to get back onto it. And of course, then get all their spells back that they wanted to adventure with so you could head out. And so even with a spellcaster or two in the party, you could be looking at a week or more to rest before you could get out there.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And that was a very different cadence of play, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
dm made home stuff might yeah and your players would do things like layman's spells um the rope trick right those were critical to just like vanish so that the dungeon dwellers looking for you while you need a whole week to heal on level two might not find you right and also design wise there are often things like a weird grotto that none of the goblins would go into and well you clear that grotto out and you hide there as long as you can right
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
I'll just say real fast, one last thing, which is that it's so interesting to me often when I look at old school type games, they do not return to this, right? They all kind of seem to agree. Yeah, no, no, you heal overnight or much more easily. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
I didn't remember that at all. That's really funny. You did this research, and thank you.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
You know and probably because what we did was we wanted it all away right a wand of cure light wounds There was a magic item crafting things it wasn't particularly hard to get to the level where you could craft this thing and Once you could you would just take a wand of cure light wounds with full charges and slowly burn through that Healing each other until you were ready to go the next day if not even right down there.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And the amount of them was pretty high. So it wasn't usually a problem, but it was nice because it was a tool where when you wanted to do that sort of deep dungeon exploration or very difficult series of combats one after the other, you know, every time, even in combat, when that somebody is that leader is healing you, you, you know, hey, you spend a healing surge and get, you know, 10 hit points.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
cool if you have healing surges available. And if you started to run out, then that's where everybody started blinking and going, hey, this is really hard. What do we do? Yep.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And it's just, you know, remark on just five minutes, right? We're talking about just that you can just Right. So really what it was that every encounter had your encounter powers because you could assume five minutes was possible. But that also gave you a tool as GM, as storyteller to say, no, you've got to run from this room to the next. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
You've got to keep, you know, the poison gases in this in the dungeon, as Tom Walken famously did, or, you know, some other reason why.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
now you can't just regain your encounter power and then the game could actually really change which was a neat tool right if you wanted to have that pressure and and people would take it so for granted that you'd get your encounters back that if they didn't it was like oh edgier seed time right like okay all right now we're really resource managing big time because we you know our the scenario has alerted us to this special condition
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Well, we'll talk about that later. I'm just putting a pin in that because that fascinated me when I first saw it.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And that's good because, you know, if you have a fight in the middle of night, right, you don't want to say and now start over your. But it's interesting they decide to add that hour. I mean, that's a new thing, that idea that like interruption equals and an extra hour. So if time is brief, you know, maybe that messes you up somehow and you actually can't deal with the rest.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
You know, it's interesting.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
It's a strange addition. I don't know that it needed to be there. It's like a sudden attempt at realism. But OK.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
You know, something I miss just because people may not listeners may not know this, but in fourth edition, this was really like they did a lot of this. And in fact, there were a couple of times that designers took the phone lines. And I remember there was a particular day was like call and speak to the designers.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And I called in with a question about my crossbow rogue and Greg Bills and I think I think he he had said something on the Internet or something. So I was like, is Greg there to give me his opinion? And they're like, Greg doesn't like your your rogue using a crossbow. They don't think that should work. He doesn't like it is allowed, but it doesn't like it.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And I remember just laughing like, oh, Greg doesn't like my ability. But I liked that there was that interaction back then to that level. I don't know to what level it exists today. But yeah, for sure, feedback makes its way and they see these things.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
I mean, there was clearly a bit of a change in that we saw like Tasha's and those in Earth Arcana's around then would really heavily lean into all subclass features started becoming not short rests, but, you know, per day. And it almost felt like the short rest was disappearing, which begged the question, what about those classes that really use them?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And so we thought, you know, maybe in 2024, we're just going to see that all vanish. Right. Monk, warlock, whatever, like, forget it. Nothing's going to say short rest. But no, some things still do. There are fewer, but it's still there. And I think it is a bit awkward still. Like, it's a bit awkward where some classes you want to raise your hand and say, hey, everybody, can we take a short rest?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And lots of other classes or subclasses will say, no, why would I like what to keep going? Why would we take an hour? And I thought this, you know, the change, it used to be like 10 minutes and 30 minutes in the 2014 playtest packets. And then at the very end, I know it happened right before Vault of the Dracolich came out because we had to talk about it with the DMs.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
It changed to an hour in that very last packet. And that still, to me, feels too long.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
um for that kind of cadence impact it makes it it's hard to fit an hour break into the story of a lot of dungeons or other places where you may want to rest it's like if you can fit an hour you can probably fit an eight right if you can hide for an hour you can hide for eight kind of thing and you've got a good enough hidey hole that's gonna you know but
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
20, 30, that's a little easier to explain that, yeah, maybe you could hide out behind the crates and sort of heal, you know, something like that, but not an hour.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And anyway, it just it seems like a strange thing that they stuck with it and that they stuck with this sort of in-between state of many encounter things are gone that would refresh or many features are gone that would refresh to the short rest, but not all. And to me, all of this, and this ties into my previous pin about hit dice, regaining all of them with a long rest.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
There are fewer options here for the DM to apply pressure.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
so one of the things that would happen is if you wanted to run like a long sequence of say going through a challenging jungle and things are coming at you often right and you're resting you're getting half your hit dice back well only half and then the next day is tough and now you get half back right this creates pressure yeah and and it was a tool you could choose to use but you could also say nothing happens the next day and then you know eventually you got enough of your hit dice back that you're fine
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Now that that option isn't really there, right? All pressure must be applied in a single day or you're getting it all back. Same thing with ability scores, right? There were these questions of what happens with an intellect devourer or any number of things. And there were a lot of like, I don't know, I guess it's this.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And now it's clarified that, you know, if that shadow took all your strength away, you take that long rest and it all comes back. And that erodes those possibilities for pressure. It's not all bad, but it just creates, I think, fewer options for a DM and for the creation of a campaign, things like that.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yeah. And then what it says to me is, yeah, if there is no long-term erosion and pressure, then it's all really on the encounter, right? Or the day's encounters. And that has been hard for DMs with 2014. It's not been terrible. You know, it's certainly very, very playable. Very, you know, 5th edition is doing just fine. But it is hard. It's something that DMs complain about, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
I don't know how to challenge my players. And that means this becomes the only way is that you must learn how to, if you want the challenge and the challenge would be fun, you must learn how to do it within the day.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yeah, it's a little bit hard to sort of work through this. It feels like it's kind of unnecessarily trying to bring in their Native Americans. And basically everybody has fought against them and tried to take over their territory at great cost. And they're sort of on the last legs. And to me, this all just feels tragic in a real world context.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
yeah i love that i mean that's really what it is right the open is is generally competitive um even though there are many tables going through the same event and it's deliberately meant to be a sort of test and it harkens back to what the open was originally which was and i'm not entirely sure when the name open came in the first thing i have in my notes is in 1978 with what became shrine of kuotola
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And the only thing we get, thankfully, is a bit of hope at the end, though, in a kind of strange way, in that a former servant of Ayur's named Tang the Horrific No one likes that drink. Escaped Ayuz and gathered rovers to attack Ayuzite forces. Tang dies in this attack on the Stonehold, but they are able to get a bunch of horses and they're victorious.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
They burn down the Stonehold place they attack. They, for the first time, sort of have hope against Ayuz. And they're now negotiating an alliance with the wolf nomads. And, you know, thinking about the potential...
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
of this zone right it's got plenty of issues but what there is here is the kernel of hope against evil i mean all of greyhawk we said this again it's always a powder keg it's always something that's you know on a fulcrum and you know can swing anyway this is a nation that struggled it's been beaten by oppressors and now this is where an alliance heroes that could all be pivotal towards turning it around that could make for a fun campaign if you framed it in the right way
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And that's that's interesting. You mentioned that given the next region of the Scarlet Brotherhood, The whole book, right? We said this being this book is said to be kind of rumors and widely known information. Potentially some of it could be wrong.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And they lean into it in this section because we don't even exactly know what the capital is like or exactly where it is in this area. And so things like the father of obedience who leads the whole Scholar Brotherhood, we don't get their class and level, right? It's a mystery, Sean. Yeah. I'm the GM. What do you mean? It's a mystery. It's a mystery.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
i have there it written of as an open i i'm not sure that's science i just have that word there uh but the first tournament which is what the kind of where it all came from was the tournaments began with the adventure you may have heard of tomb of horrors at origins one july 25th to 27 1975 at johns hopkins university that was that was the first tournament
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
So they control this vast Tildenot Peninsula, which is in the south, and it's hidden by the vast swamp, which they, I guess, sort of also quasi-control. And then they have a large island that they control. And the capital is somewhere in this peninsula. The Brotherhood also travels daily. They send ships to Hypmonaland, which is a sort of South American slash...
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
african sounding place jungle you know forbidden lands lost lands uh all for reasons unknown we're told um and the idea was that back before the greyhawk wars the vast swamp meant nobody wanted to go in there and so you just felt like oh yeah the you know whatever we've seen from spending a few travelers oh they look like farmers and traders but boy they sure grow a lot of food
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And then the spies start finding out, well, it looks like maybe they worshiped Therizdun, the great destroyer, though it seems like that's just some of them in this sect called the Black Brotherhood.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And really what happens is that when during the Greyhawk Wars, they emerge and suddenly, as we talked about, you know, go through this enormous assassination attacks on various nations and turn everything around. We'll have an example of that later. That's when fear and paranoia, they become like one of the main worries other than Ayuz. here.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And they, in fact, in the entry, they say, you know, the only thing that has more enemies than the Scarlet Brotherhood is Ayuz, right? Or maybe it was the other round. Yeah, only Ayuz can count more enemies than the Scarlet Brotherhood. And they have a credible wealth and resources, we hear.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And while some nations have made gates recently, the idea is that they may be stronger than ever before, especially because this paranoia and fear, nobody knows who to trust because somebody within your own government may be secretly a member of the Scarlet Brotherhood. to which I say stop hiring so many Caucasian people. Anyway. Yeah, exactly.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
You know, thinking about potential, this is one of these places, it's like a setting backdrop-y thing. Because you can't just set a campaign in here with what they've given you. I mean, you can, but you'd have to make it all up. There's nothing here to be used. In fact, even to apply what's here to the rest of the campaign, nothing here is given.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Now, there is a whole other second edition book on the Scholar Brotherhood, but it's just, it's very hard to use this, right? We're just, when you're told there are secrets, but not what they are, that's the opposite of what a DM wants, I think. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And it introduced this idea of, hey, when we all play at a convention together, it's going to be competitive and see how far you can get. And this was a thrill. And yeah, that idea of like, you know, only going to play in day two if you were one of the best teams in day one. And at the end, there's a winner.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yeah, they joined the Solnor Compact as a way to oppose the Scarlet Brotherhood and the Lordship of the Isles, who are under the control of the Scarlet Brotherhood. But they really, it's not out of friendship, it's out of fear of the Brotherhood. But I think there's some interesting potential here.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Like this could be a place where you could say, all right, if I want like a seagoing type campaign, I could have some fun here with these like,
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
uh you know what is this cursed island about could that maybe be pivotal to uh the the uh turning you know fighting off our enemies and thwarting the squalor brotherhood um maybe it ties into the past of this island of course this was originally flan um so maybe the whatever is ancient there is flan and origin that could be interesting um and maybe you could find a reason for
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
an actual alliance, right? You're doing this to be self-serving, but maybe a reason to convince as heroes that your sea barons should join the larger efforts globally. You know, that could be a cool part of a campaign.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And around the third edition and fourth edition, I think even second edition era, the Open was an event at Gen Con that was very important to a certain segment of the D&D player populace. It was all separate from organized play, right? It was just its own thing. And you would get the pregens at a certain time. And sometimes you've made your characters, but usually it's pregens.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yeah, I mean, in one night, the Scarlet Brotherhood takes out 27 out of 30 of the key nobles ruling the Sea Princes, right? So then half the country, even though they have like rebellions and back and forth, half the country is owned by the Scarlet Brotherhood or controlled by it. And then Killen gets involved.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
in in a sometimes in an alliance with others and sometimes just of their own accord what sort of potential do you see here for adventure it's such a perfect example of a greyhawk nation right in fact there is even a revolt within or infighting within the scarlet brotherhood as this black brotherhood that follows therizden led an armed revolt
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
uh that started the chaos that keelan took advantage of and and this was after discovering an ancient temple in the hill furnaces near the sea of dust and so it's just one of these great again it's a powder keg it's it's it's a thing that's you know it's it's not this isn't there's no stability here whatsoever and anything could chuck at one way or the other right so dm rich territory here you can say like well let's go with the black brotherhood and what they were finding in the sea of dust and why this led to revolt
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And let's, you know, kind of like what you're talking about in the previous region. Or maybe we're from Keeland and we're how do we hold on to the city we have and expand? Or I want to have an ocean going thing and lean into this whole pirate business. So how do I get the sea princes back on our side and an alliance with the merfolk and the tritons?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And what secrets are there under the water that could be there? And, you know, lost pirate, whatever. I mean, there's just so much that could happen. This actually could be a really fun thing.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
uh you know dump all that old slavery stuff and just focus on the piratey uh undersea ancient and and it has everything right i mean you've got deserts in the sea of dust hell furnace mountains the ocean i mean swamps and everything here it's a really could be a really fun campaign everything a young uh dm would want to put a campaign together yeah
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And I'm holding a piece of art that shows like a broken statue and shields on the ground and, you know, just war torn landscape devastation. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
So, I mean, I feel this feels like one of these places that's kind of backdrop. It does have some potential, but a lot of it is like this is the land that has always stood up and been this bulwark against evil. And it's been going for some time. In fact, there was a local warlord named Hal Madar the Cruel. And what did he find?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And there was, you know, some some fanfare around this. And the prizes could be fabulous. Like in the fourth edition era, people got things like, you know, custom iPods or you name it, you know, black, the huge one, each of the huge dragons to the top team. Like it was a lot. So it was a big deal. And then it disappeared for a few years.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
The artifacts known as the Hand and Eye of Vecna, and he conquered a whole bunch of territory before his subjects, his former subjects, bury him alive in the Kron Hills. And in fact, I think it was Vecna Lives takes us maybe back to even getting that from the Hand and Eye.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
um from the crown hills um the shield lands faces off against the horn society then i use uh lady katarina is preparing the knights to retake their lost land so if you love that kind of mass warfare
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
um and the idea that you know there are gonna be these huge military campaigns to retake lost land and what could heroes do to act as strike teams or and take you know like the near div is a really cool ocean a lake in the center of this place with admin fort on an island um you could uncover powerful artifacts and secrets in either the near div or the cron hills
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
take out key enemies and keep some dungeons. You know, there's a lot that could happen here. If you want to lean into that kind of backdrop of war, it's not my kind of campaign, but, but there certainly is that potential there. And if the shield lands could do well, everybody around that region would be better off against eyes, right? So it's, it's a fulcrum point for the larger area around it.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Uh, it borders for Yandi and, uh, the bandit kingdoms. And so there's a lot that can happen, uh, uh that would strengthen everything if if somehow the shield lands could make uh make gains against ios i i think that's a great point if your campaign is going to be the war against ios
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
I wasn't sure. This is Tasha looking really good with a cauldron and a book in one hand. Oh, nice. Or egg wolf. You know, you do. Mm hmm.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
I never really went to the Shieldlands. It's Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota that played there, so I don't really know their storylines. Interestingly, the Sea Barrens were Italy, which is kind of cool. Yeah. The other areas, I think, weren't represented that we talked about. No, definitely not.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Find me at alphastream.org. Work has been completely busy, but boy, do I have ideas. Someday in the future. Lots of new stuff coming.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Well, not to make things emotional, but I'm going to spend all the time I can with my son before taking him off to college this week.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
uh and uh so i i bought these like big oh i think i can reach one uh this is what a box like you can buy a box of six and they look big okay so the boxes of six have a um this will be our mini review they have uh the same they look the same on the outside so you can't tell one box of six from another as far as i could tell like all the upc codes whatever the same Open that up.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yeah. Until then, we can only give fake reviews. I thought that there were too many ghouls. I thought that the Empire was not really well detailed in terms of, you know, I found it ghastly.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yeah, yeah. That's a ghast, ghast, ghast. Also found that at the end, I couldn't believe that it was a giant chocolate monster with a nougat layer. That was unexpected as the big boss.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
I do not own it. I have not seen it. I can't talk about it. Yep.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Yeah, one of the reasons that you often see adventure designers not tell you everything is because they're trying to help you not give things away. We've seen this in fifth edition adventures fairly recent, right? We reviewed Planescape. There's another one out there. And what they're often trying to do is so that you can role play this NPC totally comfortably without giving anything away.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And then later you will get the reveal if you didn't read the whole thing and the players will get the reveal. And so that makes sense. And that's not terrible, but I would rather you just tell the GM as an adventure designer how to run this convincingly or what it is now, even though you know the larger truth and rather than hiding it. I also think that it's it's.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
While it's easy to come up with this sort of one-two punch of reveal, the truth is that it's seldom doing anyone any benefits because the players are now also cut off from all possibilities to uncover anything useful. And it's better to just adventure-proof the adventure rather than...
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
Now you get like a barcode on the individual ones. And then there's like a little thing here that that's basically it's like the UPC code. And there's another thing next to it. That's the thing that I found was unique. And the brick scanner, whatever it's called, app did not do anything for me with that.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
hide things because you know what does happen if they cast a spell on this npc and you know detect their alignment was the oldest thing in the book right going back to many many editions right well i'm a paladin so i'm going to detect evil on the npc yeah they're evil or in third edition we'd always say are they wearing a hat right the hat of disguise like you just always ask are they wearing a hat well they've got a ribbon in their hair yeah right probably a hat of disguise you know
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E’s Resting Rules and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 207)
And I'm holding up a Strahd figure while I... Oh, yes.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
If you're not already there, find those items ultra quickly, you know, literally bring them to them, leave all the clues and have that big fight so you can get the payoff and wrap it up. And that's probably what I'd do is step one. And then step two is picking the campaign that's going to let you have that change that you want to it. What do you think?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah. Yeah. If you decide that you need a turn for the dark, then you could go back to that. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And seldom is it that you, you know, you'd be lucky if you had a really clear answer. Like you think about it, you go like, oh yeah, we absolutely want to finish the campaign or leave or whatever it is. Uh, you know, have different experiences within Barovia. You know, you're going to have to just choose one, right? Get some feedback from the players and go with it.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And either way, it'll be fun, right? Just like you've been having fun for a year, but you've also realized, well, this is not quite the kind of fun we want to have. So, you know, the same thing is true of any other choice you'll make. It'll probably be more. You'll ratchet up the fun to some level. Will it be the perfect choice? Who knows?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Well, you can watch a live play run by Jeremy Crawford, DMing an all-star cast. There are designer signings. There is a DMG panel where they'll talk about the design of it and what's in it. Learn to play adventures will be offered. Hunt for the Lost, Uni's Lost Horn will be there. A learn to DM workshop. I thought that was very interesting.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And we reached out to Chris Tulak, head of organized play. And he said, yeah, they're kind of trying this out.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
in london and maybe if it's successful there'll be these learn to dm workshops at other shows too which i think is really cool i know at pax west a lot of folks have come up and asked across the years like hey you already kind of learned the dm workshop here so this is really neat there's also an anniversary special called scions of elemental evil premiering there
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, it's interesting. You know, when they say, like, continue the series, I think what they mean is there's these sort of anniversary specials are Sojkant, the Uni. This one. Was there another one already? I forget. But, you know, it's part of this. These releases to sort of celebrate the 50th. So, yeah, I'm really excited to see what this is like.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And hopefully we can also see it like on D&D Beyond later.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
They do try to focus on new things, but they often will mention things that already existed in 2014. Like one of my favorite examples is they go through and roll to create a settlement. And I was like, cool, cool. Wait, didn't Sean and I do this when we reviewed the 2014 DMG? And so I opened that section up as I watched the video. And there were actually some new things that they came up with.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
But a lot of them were right out of the same tables you and I rolled on when we were reviewing the DMG. So I think this is more of a review of the book as a whole versus just, hey, here's what's new.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, I mean, this is the end. Excellent sign. But also on the DMG topic, you know, alignment was discussed. And this goes to our earlier question. The book argues, and Perkins talks us through this, that action determines alignment. Alignment doesn't determine action. So if a creature's behavior changes, then the alignment can change.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And they give the example of a goblin that might initially be hostile and it's neutral evil. The party might win it over and talk it down from combat, teach it to change its ways. And if that behavior is over time different enough, then the alignment would change. And so, you know, I think that kind of speaks to this idea of like, you know, why aren't there consequences in alignment?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Because and the answer they might give is, well, we're not seeing this as a shackle to which you must conform, but rather the current representation of how to summarize what you are actually doing. So if what you're doing changes, then your alignment changes. That's an interesting take.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And again, the game itself is removed right before it used to be that some classes would say your alignment has to be an X, Y or Z or to worship this deity, your alignment must be A, B or C. And then alignment change would have actually had deep teeth in older editions because that would bump you out of whatever you were and you would have to atone or whatever. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
But but now there are no such restrictions. So, yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Even then, right? I mean, I think we saw that in the original incarnation of Dragonlance in an Arthur Cana where they would say, like, well, to be a red wizard is to... But I believe a lot of that really went away, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yep.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, I thought that was interesting. And this also hits on some comments we've had on one of our earlier videos where we talked about DCs. And, you know, the tools section of the player's handbook has this very prescriptive, here are the tools and here are the DCs, right?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And in fact, if you're trying to figure out how to pick a lock, you find it by reading the lock section and that the DC of a lock is 15 and you use this check to try to open it. And it all sounds very static. Well,
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
that's the equipment section which is on page you know i don't know 100 and something if you go to page 10 page 10 will actually say that this book the player's handbook has dc's and that they are examples
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
but it's really easy to miss that right well this reinforces that because we apparently get not only information on doors which codifies approaches to to you know approaching the door dealing with the door and then stats on various doors and on various locks so we can see here that though the ph might make it look like there is one lock to rule them all here there are various locks of different types so
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
I'm asking on behalf of a friend of the show. We will find out, right? But I mean, I think that's where... I end up saying, well, then why did you do what you did in the player's handbook? Because the player's handbook really kind of makes it seem like this is all very cut and dry in one way.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And then I wish the tools section would have just said, which it easily could in the text that's there, you could easily have said, you know, these example or typical or whatever DCs, feel free to vary, you know, your DM may vary them or they may vary based on the situation.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
That just would have saved everybody a lot of grief, I think, versus having to put two books together to figure out what the real answer is. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, well, I think that, you know, there have been some loud folks like the Alexandrian talking about how this is, you know, lacking. Maybe we'll see to whether they go to the extent that that pleases them, you know, on having dungeon procedures and things like that. So we'll see what's here and how different it is from what was already there.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
I'm curious to what extent they will actually pull from things like...
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
wasn't Tasha's I forget there was one of the books maybe maybe it was Van Richten's one of them kind of gave us like all these planar tables and effects and I'm wondering whether they'll remember to go back and get that they probably will because I think James Wyatt worked on it but I'm curious to whether they pull in some of those things that are in other source books or if they really stick to more of the DMG yeah you would think the Planescape book was published recently enough that they would maybe find maybe stuff them if it was there
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
I noticed the art, which includes pictures of the 80s cartoon characters. And I also saw I forget if it was this video or previous one art from the Fallbacks novel series. You could see their little pet companion audio was there. So, you know, it's kind of fun that they add this in some really nice looking art. And as you mentioned, Perkins rolls to create a settlement.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
They said that the siege weapons now include a keg launcher, which I thought was very Acquisitions Incorporated.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
It's true. They have an article out noting that Honor Among Thieves has become a global Netflix hit, despite not even being available in the US. So Netflix shows the weekly kind of listing of of top movies, the top 10. And various people look at this and parse it and so on. And there was an impressive three point two million viewers and seven point two million viewing hours both last week.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And it looks like this week as well, if I kind of put in the date of October 13th, placing it in ninth place on the list. And that is really due to limited number of EU territories. Like it was number one in Croatia and Serbia. Right. And like number four in Brazil. So just not every country has it. And of course, not the US. And yet still globally ranking ninth.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
So Screen Rant points this out as well. First, they praise the movie. They say, you know, I don't know what's wrong with humanity to have missed this as a great movie. And they say that, you know, it got all this acclaim from both from them and others in the past, gathers all the high marks received from various audience review platforms and the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
It won this year and that all of this could encourage a second movie and that maybe it'll boost it in subsequent weeks higher, especially if it were ever to be on Netflix in the US.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, I mean, if you're new to Greyhawk, you may be surprised to find how much of what we might think of as D&D's lore comes from Greyhawk. I mean, I know I now delight in when people ask this question and you start just rattling off names and they're like, wait, wait, really? Like all of that? That... That's Greyhawk, not Forgotten Realms or not just some core D&D worlds. Like, no, no.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And the list of famous adventures. And just and so it's just a nice, very simple capture, quick capture. And it'll say, like, you know, who's a Sararac and who is Vecna and just all these little bits, not in any deep way, but just in a quick kind of giving you a feel for it. And, you know, all these aspects that tie back to Greyhawk. So it's fun, recommended read.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Well, 30 cultures that you can put in. And the real point is like, If you think of the 2024 rules where it really says like, OK, because you are a sailor or a guide or whatever it might be, you get ability points and you get these skills and you get this feat. And that may feel a little weird that like every sailor has this one feat, right?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And so really going into that nurture concept, right, saying like, well, what if we say that instead it's culture, right? So to quote from his product page, create a rogue from a maritime culture, a barbarian with an honor culture or a paladin from a corrupt culture or a fighter from an erudite culture. Better yet, be a bard from a body modifying culture and start the game with the tattoo kit.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Adorn your friends for fun and profit. And Keith was kind enough to do a sneak peek as he was working on it on our Discord and even kind of think through some options of, you know, should there be a hedonistic culture? And, you know, what does that mean? And it's really fun. It's a really neat approach to kind of change up the idea of what your background is, making it this cultural aspect.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
It's only five bucks. So thanks, Keith, for creating it.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
The fun of it is that it's a Groundhog Day type mystery. So you are traveling on this lightning rail train that Eberron has, and you're stuck in a time loop. And this is causing you to travel through Ravenloft rather than to get back to the destination you're trying to reach.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
It's an adventure for third to fourth level PCs, six to nine hours of play, high resolution maps of each train car, and you have to unravel this puzzle of why you're in this time loop and work it out by visiting the different train cars and things like that. Very clever concept, a lot of fun. I love Groundhog Day type adventures. Yep. Very fun. Good fun.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
I mean, that's a really interesting question. Older editions, right, had consequences in various places. The idea that, well, it's either an envoy of your cleric, of your god, or a god that grants a cleric their spells. And so if you've misbehaved, you don't get spells.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah. Really, this is taking their their vast number of dungeon pieces they released over many different Kickstarters and pulling them together into one set with some really neat, awesome additions and giving new fans the opportunity to get back to get into this. Right. And say, OK, you know, I missed all that.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
How could I just get some cool sets right to make help me make the kinds of dungeons that I see people building with awesome Dwarven Forge? And so you can pick up three different types of sets. They have the kind of traditional classic dungeon, the dungeon of doom style, where they're kind of pillars on the walls that I like a lot or a new sinister paint scheme.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
So you can do that where they want to create a particular look for a certain room or section of the dungeon or because you won like over the others. And everything is discounted compared to the typical prices. Plus, when it's on their website, they tend to sell out. So this is like the time to pick it up.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And even if you don't want the full terrain builds and you're more of the kind of DM that puts a few things on the battle map, they have some set pieces that are just amazing. Like one of the new ones is like a serrated, you know, kind of jagged, daggery like stuff all around and an opening.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
You can just think of how much fun that would be to plop that down on the map and everybody goes, oh, man, we have to go in through that. And or, you know, maybe you're fighting around it or whatever it is. So there are a lot of those kinds of set pieces that you can just drop down on a battle map and have fun with.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Sadly not, but I'm sure you could build the Dwarven Forge Dungeon of Doom with it. I don't own all of Dungeon of Doom, not remotely close, and yet I can build almost anything from it with the pieces that I own. So a lot of times it really kind of works either way. Everything's modular enough that you can build the free adventures that they have on their website that I help write.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, find the campaign at gamefound.com. Vengeance Reforged.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
and you won't until you get better right and that is super fascinating with the paladin if they strayed from being lawful good they were no longer a paladin right they were stripped of their paladin hood and and the books would talk about this right
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Welcome back. You have exciting news?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Well, actually, even before that, can we have you introduce yourself to the show? Like, we know you well. We've been admiring your work forever. But tell us about you and your co-founder and kind of how it led to here.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And I think just those two examples alone, though there were probably a few others, really hammered home this idea of consequences to everybody who was a player. And you might not play a paladin, but you thought about that when you read that section.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
I want to say, you said, oh, I've been working for six years. That is a six years that a lot of people have been working for 30 would like to have that across their 30. That's incredible. You did all that in six years. Wow.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And so this kind of encouraged that kind of behavior and that kind of table talk of like, oh, wait a minute, aren't you supposed to be, you know, chaotic neutral? What are you doing here? And then people, OK, I guess you're right. And it's kind of course correct, right?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah. Having another partner that brings in slightly different skills is super key for sure. I marvel at the people that have the skills that I don't. And I'm so thankful for that.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
I love your, your emphasis on the visual side, my actual, and you said you enjoy seeing it. So I don't know why this is, but my biggest kind of fear I have in a project that, that I have a large control over is actually seeing the art. And I didn't know this about myself until it started happening, but I'd like get an email from the artist. I'd say, Oh,
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And like, I was afraid to click on it and I didn't expect that. Like, like it's my big, I've realized of all the things that might frighten me, seeing the finished art is like the thing I have the most trepidation about and anxiety about. And I'm not really an anxiety person, but like, yeah, like I click on that thing and I'm like, oh, okay, okay, okay.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
So a magazine, how did it come to be a magazine? I can imagine you're the kind of person who had a ton of ideas of things you could create. And magazines are a big part of D&D's history and RPG history. What led you to be a part of that?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Happy centennial, Mastering Dungeons.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
well and that tells me a lot because there are i've worked with companies that play test but they don't know what to do with the play test feedback and the value you put on it and and how you're talking about it being involved in the process tells me you really make use of it but that takes a ton of time it really does it really does it's a lot of time in spreadsheets it's also a lot of um
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Your magazine is quarterly. Process-wise, are you taking up the entire quarter creating it? Like I could see it taking that long.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, that certainly resonates with me. I had a number of years in graduate school and just after it where I was not running D&D, but I was living off of my Dragon Magazine subscription to feel like I was still in touch with it. Between that and old list server forums, I'm very young, you just can't tell.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
But it was, you know, like that just kept me feeling like I was still a gamer until I could again be a gamer.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
It was nerdy in a good way. I was impressed by it, too. I was like, oh, we're going here.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
I've made it the backdrop behind our faces. So folks who are watching this on the YouTubes, you get the extra treat of seeing that art there, but everybody should go see the actual art that is on your website.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Nice. Great artist. Yeah. So the articles. Yes. Actually, one last thing. Do you have a preference with monetization cuts, whatever? Is it better to go to your website or to go to Patreon? Do you prefer one over the other?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Sounds so marketing. I mean, I feel like some chief marketing officer celebrates that. Hey, everybody!
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Awesome. I like that part a lot. That idea of then handing it over to the players so it's not just an NPC side thing. That's really cool.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
The art of the dwarves is really great with the star-like flesh that they have in the art is really something else.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
combat consequences seem fine but these other consequences are just less acceptable i mean i suspect it's a sort of societal thing right i mean i think if you've when you're playing like board games for the first time with a young kid right you know they roll something they don't like and they want to reroll it, right?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
I love everything that Willy designs, but he also is particularly good at names and all of the names of all these NPCs are just excellent.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, yeah. Stratus and Mylar and Hylai and just all kinds of great... But they're also really fun. Like, what does he have? Denim isn't one of the characters. Denim Delph? That's just a great name.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Or they want to like, what if my arm were to just hit this die and change what it says, right? And they kind of look at you like, could I just? And you're like, no, it is what it is. And part of maturity is sort of growing up to accept that. And so I think that
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
in the context of dice of play of you know decisions oh you're right that meant i fireballed my party that's my bad you sort of accept those consequences because they are clear results of your actions but i think when it gets to things like this sort of renown infamy losing your access to spells you know warlock right did you stray from your patron right we could really go into that and actually could be very interesting novels do that you know like crazy um
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, this is what happens to an NPC when their parents change their room when they go off to college. It's just make a villain. It's a cautionary tale. You're helping people, Hannah. You're letting them know.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Fantastic. So, so issue one is jam packed. Uh, you must have some pretty interesting plans for the future as well. Uh, cause you said you're we're working like two, three issues in advance.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And or, you know, very emphatically. And I think that's where we, you know, that becomes a judgment call. It's not as black and white. And so when it's not so stark a line, then we have to reinterpret it and think, well, now it's my opinion that you have gone too far. And that, I think, is a little harder to take. And so, you know, why why did Wizards of the Coast go halfway here?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Fantastic. Love it. Wow. Yeah. Every DM wants that if you have a paladin in the party. That's great.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
It's been a pleasure. It's great to hear about about your your company, the excitement of this, the passion you're bringing to it. Just fantastic. Issue one looks amazing. Highly recommend folks go out and pick it up and sign up for all the future issues as well. We look forward to seeing it, Hannah. Thank you.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Folks who want to follow you and follow your compatriot Clara, where can they best go to kind of see what the two of you are up to?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Well, because to go full way is to leave a certain number of people dissatisfied as well. would be my guess as to why. And I think that if you talk to Chris Perkins or Jeremy Crawford, they would probably say, yeah, no, we don't want to have a rule for that. And in fact, we'll have a quote from Chris later in our news section that I think speaks to how they feel about this along those lines.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
I have been consumed by work, now consumed by GameHoleCon, but you can find everything I've done in the past at Game... No, AlphaStream.org. You know, that's how much game holes in my brain.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
uh my cleric was talking to this entity and this entity basically was saying i should worship it right and that it was almighty and do everything i'm saying and then i won't destroy you was sort of the underpinning of all this And so I really I mean, I couldn't say no to it. It was going to squash me. But I also I've decided my character was kind of intrigued.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
So I kind of dual dated for a while, let's say. And Kelsey was sort of smiling and laughing and a couple of the players were too. Right. And that kind of matters. The tenor, the kind of nature of it was a little sort of, you know, let's have some fun with this. We weren't trying to be super serious about this play. But, you know, at some point.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
She basically had a little conversation from my normal God saying, so, you know, what are you doing? Are you moonlighting? You know, are you? And I said, well, no, no, I'm not. I'm with you. But there's this entity and it is pretty powerful. It's not like you. But, you know, I got to I got to kind of, you know, kind of got to play it a certain way.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And she's like, all right, you know, I'm watching, you know, says my deity. And but it made that clear. Like if you stray a little further. The deity will be mad with you and there'll be consequences. And I thought that was a really fun way to do it. Right. But it would no rule would capture that back and forth. We had. Right. I think that if you want rules.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
You have to think about what they're trying to accomplish. Right. Like 13th age has the icon systems. And those can feel like sort of deities in some ways or factions that you're a part of, but they're larger than that. But you do have these relationships with them. And one of the things that the system allows for is that you can change over time, right?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
How close, whether you have an enmity with them or are you... you know, closely allied or neutral, that can change through play to represent those interactions that you've had. And that may result in something along those, you know, some kind of consequences directly in play, but also to your character itself. But but it's something that you work out over time. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And it's both a framework and not super nailed down in rules. Right. That makes sense.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, I mean, you know, and that's where you want to have a feel of like, you know, should you literally say to everybody, hey, you all want to just change to a different campaign? You really can do that, right? I tend to think that you will probably want most groups would want some payoff for the investment you've done in this campaign and story thus far, especially with over a year down. But.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
There comes a time when you want to kind of nip it in the bud and get it done. And so what I would probably do is, you know, there are and this was brought up on our on our discord. There are ways to do Curse of Strahd in a day, right? Like people say, like, hey, one evening in October, you want to run Ravenloft or Curse of Strahd.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Here's what you can do to get it all done and get all the items and, you know, finish off with a big battle. So you could, you know, look at some of those and find a way to just wrap it up. It doesn't have to be in a session, but maybe it's a couple of sessions and maybe sprinkled into those sessions. You add some things like some pretty funny ghosts, right?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Or something along those lines that lightens it up a bit and gives you starts getting you that some some some play that is a little more along what your group wants. But you may want to, you know, step A. Get get this campaign done really fast, like, you know, two, three sessions just charted out, you know, get into that castle.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
when and why or why not teos i rambled last time so you go first this time uh well my last game i ran was uh one of my favorite ways to run a game which is a vinyl battle map wet erase pens drawing out what's going on and doing it and the reason it's one of my go-to's and the thing i would generally advise to anybody to use if you're going to use minis is because This frees you up.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
It frees up your headspace to do all of the other things that are great about the game, right? Role playing characters, blah, blah. You don't get locked into too much. If I have the time and I will make the most of it, then other tools are great, whether they're dungeon tools or tiles and tiles, Dwarven Forge, right, which is gorgeous. I love height.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
I love things that players can move around and see what's on the other side of like that's super cool to use terrain and things like that. Love it, love it, love it. But it is a fun option and you've got to do that extra work to make it pay off. I have played tons and tons of online plays.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
I used to, during fourth edition, play, I don't know, two or three games a week on Map Tool, which was an early VTT. I also played on, I don't remember what it was that we always played back then, but it was very text-based with, you know, kind of very simple moving stuff around. Yeah, I did a lot of that during Living Forgotten Realms and it was fine. I've done a lot of Roll20.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
In general, what I find is as a player, totally fine. As a DM, I find that the time I spend setting up online stuff exhausts me versus the time I spend, say, doing Dwarven Forge or drawing a battle map or laying down dungeon tiles. That energizes me. I don't know why. And I've heard people say the exact opposite for them. Right. So I think it varies by person.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
But for me, setting up an online thing exhausts me. And so it doesn't it doesn't give it robs me of energy rather than giving it. So I tend to not do it. And it's just going to vary by person. I think Sigil looks gorgeous. I think that what I would want most out of it is ready to go drop rooms that I would just go kind of like a fully built Dwarven Forge thing, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Like take that really cool thing and let me just drop it down pre-built and join it with a corridor. And then if I'm going to add stuff to it, I can drop in features. I like that idea. That would be neat. But I want the minimum. I do not want to Lego build every piece. And I say that as a person who loves Legos in real life.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Yeah, it's got different glowing areas. Yeah, pretty cool.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
I feel the same way. And, you know, I forgot to say kind of how I feel about digital like character sheets and stuff. I'd rather not have them. And a lot of my players do like them. I don't make a big deal if they want to have a laptop or an iPad at the table. It's fine. I don't care. But or let's say I'm not going to cause trouble around it.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
But I will say that I find that when they play on paper pregens, they are more present than when they are using digital tools, because there's some amount of headspace that's going towards that. Lower my hit points. Do but the debit up.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And the menus and the whatever is that takes a little bit more effort away from being there and looking each other in the eye and hearing the joke that someone else made or hearing the cool insight another person landed. Right. Those kinds of things happen more when you're just looking at each other. Sometimes I think that people's love for like indie games.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Some part of it is the fact that a lot of times we're playing those without any tools because none exist.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
and so we're totally in the middle of it right like you go to a convention game or whatever and you're totally into this thing and there's just the gameplay being paid attention to when we go back to what may be our root game we probably have all these tools and whatever's and thingies and we bog it down so that we're not in that immediacy right but we can easily have it it's always there to be had um again no issue with anybody who loves all these tools and has fun but in general
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
No, I don't really find that. To me, that's not the amazing part of the game. And if I think of 5E's resurgence, I think it's because it's what Rodney Thompson said in a video recently. It's the idea that the rules can recede into the background and the play carries forward.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
other side of technology that is useful that's helpful that brings you closer to the game so you know all over the place short answer whatever works for you and your group do that yeah and just you know pay that attention to to to think through hey this session were people focused on the tool or were they focused on the game and what would be more fun right yep
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
How would I know? How would I know, Sean? Where's the errata section of the D&D Beyond website? How would you know, Taz?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Well, I knew because Christian Hoffer, formerly of comicbook.com, I'm really sorry. And they laid off many at comicbook.com. He is now writing some posts on Ian World. And one of those was gathering various errata that people are reporting about that do not show up in the 2024 physical books, but show up in D&D Beyond.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And you and I have been around, we've seen some games, we've seen some additions. We know that lots of games come out and immediately need errata. This is nothing new. There are always things that, you know, the game is, it's like any IT system, right? It's perfect until some user touches it. And then you realize all the things that kind of pop.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And that's the way it goes, no matter how much playtesting you do. So there are a number of things that have changed. I don't have a problem with that as much as I really don't have a problem. I just to me, that's just the reality of games. But I do have a problem with the fact that I can't go anywhere official to find this list.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And if you're going to change stuff in the digital rules, wizards, I want to know it. I want you to tell me. I don't care if you change the italics, you know, italicization. Yeah, sure. I want to know. Like, I want you to tell me, right? We applied format changes or at least or something like that.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
But especially if you're going to do things like say that shields now utilize that require the utilize action to Don or Doff. And that's not in my player's handbook. You need to tell me you made that change. The giant insect spell now clarifies its hit points and changes it on whether you're fourth level and above and that. You got to tell me any of this stuff.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Yeah. Yeah, and it's something we brought up at the summit. It's something that I've emailed them since then to kind of say, hey, this issue is still there, you know, and the most I've heard is something along the lines of like, oh, we're working on that. And it's not that hard. Bring the files over, you know, create a new file.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Someone's tracking this somewhere because someone's telling somebody to make these changes in D&D Beyond. So there's a document somewhere. Pretty that thing up.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
and get it out there so we have it maybe maybe they're waiting for the official launch release to come out when everybody has the book but if you're going to make it on dnd beyond it should be documented yeah no no argument there anything else about this uh yeah about this issue you want to mention
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
One thing that D&D Beyond did do is they put up a page that shows the differences between 2014 and 2024. It's not as detailed. It's not the same as what we covered last week that Tom Christie pulled together in a document. But it's focused and it's focused more on like D&D Beyond character creation. But it is at least a way to see some things that have changed.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Like it doesn't say all the feats that are new, but it does identify all the spells that are new, some changed items, some changed terms. So things like, you know, I had missed that starvation is now called malnutrition. I'm like, OK, you know, that's good for me to kind of put a pin in and a good document to have as a creator. So there are a number of these things that are useful.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
But, you know, it's only a partial view. And I think it's fair to say and important to remember that there have always been 2014 elements that were not fully implemented in the character sheet in D&D Beyond. That's going to be the case of 2024 as well.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
So, you know, I think most folks who are pretty there in these kinds of things in their assessment have said, you know, it's kind of like it was before. There's some things in the new classes that aren't there, some things that are. And that's all right.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Yeah. And thank you for Walt for that breakdown while also provided a, uh, what all the different articles are and the list of pages. So you can see that in our show notes, it talks about all kinds of things like, you know, making honor among thieves movie, you know, all this stuff, uh, stranger things, uh, biggest actual plays, you know, there's a lot of things there and nice articles all there.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Though, I mean, I still, you know, I think we've hit baloney levels with what 5E has been able to do this last year. I mean, what did we have? We... We've had nerds, we've had Legos. Yeah, the Legos is really big. And there was another one that I remember thinking like, oh, this is this is this is what I was looking for.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
I got I can't think of it now, but but I think we've surpassed the bologna levels because we have to think bologna was in Spain. And that's great. I love Spain. But but that's limited compared to sort of, say, the giant U.S. market of various things. And we have now enough examples like the stamps, for example. Right. Like Everybody walking into a post office seeing a poster of D&D stamps.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
as i did when i walked into my post office not too long ago that is amazing that beats baloney right there uh and so i think even if the pop-tarts didn't happen you know this this uh this has been really strong and and we are past the baloney levels so good job dnd true story something that's not baloney bald man games has an organized play survey that they've been sending out to people who play dnd and who go to conventions and maybe play organized play
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Yeah, it's really cool. MCM has often pondered, you know, exactly how to open things up. What's the best way to allow creators to create in that space? And they're doing this with the latest backer packet. Right. Drawsteel is not out yet as a game. So this is kind of a test, which I think is kind of smart.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
So creators or backers where you have to be a patron backer, you can take that backer packet. and you can create with it. Now, it is important to notice that the license can change at any time, right? This is kind of a test of the system. You can't use art, but you can use literally everything else. You know, check to find print to make sure that I'm right.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
But the and we've got a link to the license in our show notes or you can go to MCDM productions dot com. but you can use proper names, right? You can use lore bits, all of that. You just can't use the art, but you can use the rules, the mechanics, all this stuff in the backer packet and create things for it. And that's really kind of neat, right? You can't use their logos.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
You can't say it's an official MCDM product because of course it's not, but you can see all of that. And there's a specific text that you'll put on the cover of your product to show that it is done through the creator license.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
but really neat so if you're interested in that go see the mcm productions website for the full information on it so where can you you can where can you publish this yeah you can sell this you can do free stuff you can you can do for sale things i think you can publish anywhere you want so uh again i'd i i've yeah only give it a quick once through read but my i didn't see any limits on where you can sell there isn't a dm's guild or anything like that like you could
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
A little suspicious, let's be honest.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
go and publish for the world of draw steel and use a famous personage and all of that as I understand it if it's something that's in that backer kit document then you can use it again I'd be careful if you want to go beyond that then you need to read it carefully like if I want to use something from a previous published product that's not a backer kit one so I'd have to read the fine print but
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
It's a neat initial test, right? I think it's a nice way to do it. So you can see if, if folks are interested in it, um, you know, as a creator, you can publish something small, test the waters, see how, how the interest is there. It's kind of cool.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Yes, I mean, it's really short, as we expect from from Shadow Dark, right? It's all brief and contained with the idea that you're going to add to this as needed. In general, what's going to happen is the DM is going to roll for weather. They're going to determine and share which hexes nearby are visible to the party and determine the danger levels of those places.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
PCs can then make checks as sort of tasks they take on. Sort of if you think of like one person's the navigator, that kind of thing. One person's foraging. And those things can provide various benefits, like giving you is it called luck token? I forget that whatever it is that can give you like rerolls and things like that. And then you based on that, you may change things. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
So even the DM determine the weather, you can actually withstand it better. So the weather becomes one better for you. Right. So you can change things after the fact duty. If you succeed at your tasks, you can even lower the danger level because you're prepared for things. It's a kind of nice, elegant, simple system way to do it. Then you PC say, hey, this is the way I want to go.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
The DM rolls for random encounters every other hex, and you kind of repeat various steps over and over again.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
there are also things for camping which is nice addition so you can when you when you bed down for the night you uh the dm's gonna check for random encounters twice pcs have different tasks that you're doing so that can also affect things um and we get rules for traveling quickly making a hex safe like you want to clear the place out and make it non-dangerous uh and then ideas for the kinds of threats and counter tables that you would do and stuff it's pretty neat um yeah and there's things also like like um
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
what a hex will contain, whether there's an obvious thing to be found or if it's hidden and you must locate it. So a lot of nice rules. It's very similar to other OSR rules that are out there for hex crawling if you're into it.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And I think a lot of it is really, you know, to what extent you love a procedure like this versus just saying, here's the story I'm going to put down for the party to roll off of or I'm going to play off of what the party does and just decide what shows up. You know, this is really a procedure, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
uh but and my players are mad at me and for murdering them in the gauntlet won't let me run shadow dark but uh but i yeah i i am curious to see how that works i've also been reading justin alexander's book which is full of very procedural type stuff that i don't quite jive with but for the reason that i don't jive with it i want to try it out and kind of understand it better so i can see where my view of that might exist uh and speaking of grim hollow stuff sean i picked up
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
These arrived in the mail. It's the the player kind of setting book for Grim Hall of Valachan Clans. And I'm also holding up the the adventure itself that comes with it. And these are really cool. The art and layout are just absurd. Top, top notch. And you've talked about some of the neat things that are in here before. But but I was.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
I was kind of struck by a couple of things, and I held them up in opposite order. But anyway, when I look at the one that has kind of player facing stuff and campaign kind of rules, The use of maneuvers for classes is really cool and creative. We're all classes. At first, I thought, oh, this is just like a maneuver, like a battle master type thing.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
But no, it's like druids have maneuvers and monks have maneuvers and sorcerers have maneuvers. And it really injects a lot of flavor into the play. And these all come through subclasses. Yeah. And then also there are some the way that you define your character has a really nice system where you.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Instead of and you've kind of talked about sort of really leaning deeply into what your species is, what you're doing is is defining what aspects of your clan you pick for yourself and you get a number of things that you get to do, like
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
you know being a gifted performer or being able to hide more capably and you you get a number of these and so you can actually like double down and do two things and now you're like better at it because you you get the second level hour you're born healer you gain proficiency metal skill a medicine skill but if you take two of these you become a war doctor and now you can do the check with advantage and so on and so forth
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And I really like that system for defining your character. And I think the player, it's the kind of thing that when I read it, I was like, well, players, if I drop this on my players, they'd be like, oh, oh yeah, I want to make my character now. Exciting stuff.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
20 uh 280 almost 300 on roll 20 and then it leads into sales of the entire book or uh points back to the kickstarter yeah that's smart yeah really clever i love his newsletter for these kinds of insights and and even if it's just one data point it's a well thought out data point and there's a lot of you know a lot of downloads and experience behind it which is great
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
yeah i mean so pre-order is really unusual i don't know if it's ever happened before um i can't think yeah the dm's guild has allowed keith baker's company to to put this up you can buy it now and it's been up i think for a little more over a week um and the the actual product will arrive on september 17th one of the folks on our discord was saying hey maybe this is as a way to determine whether print will be available and which could be smart
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
I was visited in Portland. Well, okay. He didn't come to see me, but James Intercaso was in Portland.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
But it's already at Electrum and climbing, and I'm sure we'll soar once it's actually available. It is $33.95, which is not cheap, maybe in lots of people's eyes. But, you know, it is Keith Baker and his team. And Eberron's very popular, and he has often had the most popular things on the DMs Guild. for quite some time.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
It details the western frontier, the contested land between the ancient kingdom of Breland and the rising nation of Droem. Quickstone is built for 5E 2024 already, which is pretty cool. It includes new species such as Harpy, Gargoyle, or Medusa. New feats, backgrounds, magic items, subclasses. There's an adventure. And so I looked over this advanced copy. It's 257 pages. Very pretty.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Art everywhere. Nice layout. Chapter 1 is really cool. It may be my favorite chapter. in that the character roles are really nice ways to tie the players into the setting. In fact, both chapter one and chapter two are very much created with the idea of like, you are a DM running this. Let's make this as good as possible for you by involving your players.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And so these character roles are story elements for your players that are going to make them more interested in this setting. There's great advice and elements to guide play and have ties to the land. There are things like the Western fields reinforced with rules for arcane duels and options to use like a wand or other item in addition to spells to like face off each other at high noon. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Kind of fun. And then we've been talking with Greyhawk about how do you make settings interesting? And what's cool about their Gazetteer is it's really all player facing. So it is written speaking to the player. And that's a really neat trick, right? Like you're not usually it's the DM that you're talking to. And so therefore, everything is like secrets.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
But sometimes it's overdone and the history is not useful in this way. Everything is made so that the player gets the necessary information about this region, knows what's interesting, sees these things that are teases of what could be. And then the DM can decide to flesh that out. You know, whatever seems interesting. And chapter three is the town of Quickstone.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
There's some really neat things like, for example, groups that your characters can join with possible ties between the different groups or types of characters. Chapter four is player options. Chapter five is treasure. You can be a warforged. Right. So that's been updated. So you don't have to wait if you want to updated warforged. Here's Keith's version of it. You can play a warg as a species.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Chapter six has new monsters. These kind of have some fun features, like there's Demon Glass Warrior as a template with an example provided, but you can make anything into a Demon Glass Warrior. Chapter seven then has the adventure. So very cool. I would I would give this my endorsement. It looks well worth the money and a lot of fun. I like a lot of the ideas here.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
No, I'm enjoying this. Go ahead.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
If I were a creator, I'd recommend it as a way of studying this kind of product. It's pretty neat.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Yeah, I mean, so I think that increasingly what designers found is that it's a bit of a mess when everything is described differently, right? When the Medusa petrifies one way, the Gorgon another, the... You know, trap does it entirely different way. Everything's a one off and every designer is doing it differently. So it's a problem for the designers as well. Oh, well, I did it that way.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Oh, I did it this way. Right. And the play experience is a surprise and not necessarily for the better. It also means that these conditions are completely not balanced. So if you want players to do them in any way through a magic item, through a feature of their class, you start wanting to standardize it.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Because now it'll work all in one way, the same way that you want to have climb rules be a thing you can look up. You want to look up what it means to knock someone prone and not have it be five different ways for five different features. So it becomes a standard block that designers can use, players can use, DMs can use. And now the DM knows what's going on.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
games like fourth edition did this a lot, right? Where you just saw that every power, it might just be damaged, but it might set you on fire, it might knock you prone, it might push you, slide you, you know, all these various things. And so having those as keywords is helpful to know what it means. Fifth edition pulled back a bit from fourth edition, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
It made things a little looser, but still wanted that definition. So we see that with being hidden, for example, where it tried to dance in between the here is everything you need to know to decide whether something's hidden. And but DM, you make the call as to whether your target is distracted and whether the factors allow for hiding or not. They were trying to play in between both.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
I think now we see in 2024 an attempt to be more codified. And so everything's in this rules glossary. And these are keywords that are supposed to be more stable and less about making call, which is in part a big change between 2014 and 2024 of whether the DM is making a call or And let's say the positive way. 2014 said, we want to empower the DM to take the reins of the game and make calls.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And 2024 is saying, we want to free up the DM from having to make calls all the time that'll get questioned.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
I see the number in front of me in the show notes. Were you surprised by that? Yes, I was. That is way higher than I would have imagined.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
uh he and his lovely wife and so i got to see him we had a we hung out we we had a meal we uh chatted about the game industry and all sorts of fun stuff uh all of the exciting things about mcdm which we'll have more in the show later uh but yeah it was super neat he said he's like the nicest guy in the world right so it was just uh everything was pleasant and laughs all of that
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Right, like for example, we could say that more like along the lines of Shadow the Demon Lord, and I forget whether Shadow the Demon Lord has conditions per se, but in general, it's more like you either get a boon or a bane, right? Advantage or disadvantage type of option or a thing that has happened that we would view as negative with, you know, OK, petrified your turn to stone.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
I mean, and the game might some games might say, I don't even need to define that for you. Look, you're stone. You don't get to do stuff. You know what's up. I don't need to tell you. And everything else is going to be like you either get a boon or a bane on one side or the other, and the DM can decide. And we're done. Yeah. Right. And maybe that's great.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
But then also what it means is your character now just is doing these things. And so if I both knock you prone and I have something else I've done, well, I can't get, you know, double advantage. So there's not much interest. But if I can, you know, slide you four feet and knock you prone and charm you and deafen you. Well, now things are now I've got lots of options. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And that tactical juiciness is there.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Yeah, especially when you'd have area of attack things that would be like, oh, you know, you're on fire. And then another thing, you've got acid damage and also you've been, you know, charmed by this effect. And so, you know, you'd have lots of characters or miniatures with these things on there. And it was a lot to track. Many would say a little too much.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
No, I think you're right that in kind of core 2014 players handbook it seems really reasonable and play how these things happen right if you do an obvious like this is a spell that is you know causing vines to come up of the ground and you know bind you well you're probably restrained right uh you know something like that uh but Otherwise, the game was not heavy on this.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
It wasn't like fourth edition. We felt like, you know, every other power was doing something to apply some sort of effect like this. I do like save ends. I miss save ends. I'll say that particularly for things like being on fire, acid damage, this kind of thing. I like just having that simple term save ends to let you know exactly what to do with it.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
The the things that like sort of you may repeat at the end of your turn, you know, it's the saving throw at the end of your turn or start your turn. The language is unpredictable enough that you never know if a spell would have this or not. You almost have to look it up.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And it's funny watching even the designers like Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins run acquisitions in corporate games and they have to look this up. Because you can't count on it the way you could with fourth edition. And it's not as simple as save ends so you just could have on a character sheet, you know, S.A. at the end of it and remind yourself, no, you got to look at that.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
What is the wording? And they often would either call it wrong or had to look it up. And I thought that was pretty interesting.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
so what did we get with 2024 as exhaustion rules to us yeah still death at sixth level uh and every level is minus two to d20 tests per level of exhaustion so it's more wide ranging but the minus two is probably a little more palatable to people at the initial levels so i'd argue that by level three your character your players are looking at the dm and giving them you know mean looks
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
I don't you know, I don't love either version. We've talked about it. I find that in general, this is trying to do too much. You know, the end thing to me is that if I'm making a story about traversing the wilderness, I'm not going to just use exhaustion and make you do checks all the time. I'm going to have to create my own rule for how this all works specific to the adventure.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And that's literally the point of what I shouldn't have to do. And yet I'm going to have to do it.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Either way, I think that to me, it's less about the math of it.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
the mentality of it right like the way jeremy crawford will say i can't believe that people cared about whether their you know dwarf gave them a plus two to con or not and i'm like are you kidding have you met players right it's the mentality is the key and and and that's the thing is i'll have to see more tables play but i know that disadvantages on ability checks in 2014 caused players not to want to make a role and you can say that player is wrong all day long doesn't matter that's what it does to a lot of people
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And there's some point where this minus two is going to do the same thing. And it may be as early as minus four. I think minus two, most players I've played with, you know, OK, well, that's whatever. I'll do that. But at minus four, they start going, well, you make the check or I don't want to make a check or I'll go the long way around. And now player choice is impacted.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Player enjoyment is impacted. Minus six. I mean, that seems to me well into where players are just not going to want to play the game.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
So let's go to Frightened. Now, am I right that that did not change either, or has it changed in some way?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
large conditions based on just stacking those well and i would guess that you know someone who wrote the 2014 version would say to the 2024 team well i did that because you've said can't approach and then you've immediately added the word willingly in the next sentence which is now an important part that they need to consider so it's not as simple as can't approach you it's just can't approach willingly but you know right so you get into that little trouble of
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Trying to define it, it's hard to try to and you can move so around the room such that you don't get closer, but you can't approach. You can't lessen that distance. That's where it's still going to have to read both. It's a nice reminder, but you might miss something if you're not careful.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Or bring it to you, right? If you can bring it to you where you are, yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
You know, I guess I feel like it sort of doesn't matter. Like, I want to think that this is, to me, 5th edition was not trying to be this defined a game. And it was at its best when it played that, when it when it leaned into that, like we're not trying to nail down every little thing. And here we're trying to nail down everything.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And then, you know, now I'm wondering, well, can I take other actions? Can I take can I can I can I take a free action? I would say it would already was to me pretty clear you can't take actions. But now that you've gotten an added bonus action, now I really think that maybe I can do other types of actions. And, you know, it's just like, what do you want to nail it all?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
You know, like you can't sort of nail it all down. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
So, you know, if I think about where alignment came from, it comes from this sort of like law chaos paradigm in novels. And it was at a point when the game kind of. was still very war gamey, just you get to play a character.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Tell me about Invisible, because this one I find very interesting.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Yeah, hidden and all that. It's now sort of an underpin for being hidden. I think one thing here, this equipment you're wearing or carrying is also concealed because it doesn't say at the time of gaining this condition. It says to me that that question of like when I'm invisible and I pick up the thing from the table.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
is that visible or invisible right it's always fun in movies that you can see it and in novels too this to me suggests i can pick up a thing and it becomes invisible because it doesn't limit it drop something it becomes visible yeah
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And so having some simplistic way that you could say, I lean this way or that way, added a new dimension to the game that was kind of cool when otherwise there were nothing like that was going on. Not that we can't see like in I'm not going to get all ancient historical, but there are plenty of examples of people role playing and LARPing type behavior throughout early role playing game stuff. But
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
right if i drop something it's it's visible an effect that leaves me is visible but but the thing on my body and that's interesting because i would have thought otherwise but the wording of this and i don't know if it's if it's intended or not but now that you went and said it this way i end up thinking this and that's the danger of saying too much um yeah it's it's it's fine you know this is fine yeah i agree it's it's a it's
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And I communicate telepathically, right? Right. Am I witnessing things? Did I see what happened in the room? There's a lot there that I wish we knew a little better with both paralyzed and petrified.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
what a lot of people were doing is stabbing stuff with their swords so adding this is pretty sweet in the my early games of playing basic and ad and d alignment was this like really interesting piece that would lay on to everything else like like it would it would be an overlay over everything that you're doing
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Yeah. What else? I think that. Unconscious. If I recall correctly, let me check and make sure this is true. So unconscious now says you're unaware of your surroundings. I don't know that it said that before.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Yeah. And then again. An open question is. Go ahead while I look this up.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
do blank you know it's it's it's weird so yeah yeah it is weird uh the other thing is not in the list of conditions but bloodied now exists as a keyword where you have half your hit points or fewer remaining and that's one where it's like Okay. Hmm. Interesting. You know, to me, that's very much a condition, but they didn't want to add it as a, on the condition list. Okay.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
that the DM could kind of use to remind you of the fact that this is a role playing game, right? So they'd say things like your cleric wouldn't do that because you espouse these virtues and now you're trying to go this way. That doesn't make sense. It's not coherent.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
It's interesting, right? Just a small area of the game with some small, subtle, but really signifies the design intent changing, right? Different approach to how rules should be used by DMs and what they should say or not say. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Let's do it. And let's start with the folks depicted in this art, which is holding up a picture that shows a sort of genie, married type character speaking to some folks who are all wearing turbans and that kind of attire that we would associate with maybe Middle Eastern cultures in our real world, even though we're in a fantasy world.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
um you know it would say that you cannot be like that paladin because the paladins must all be lawful good right and and are these paragons of virtue and law and whatever and so that adjustment constantly happened and you even had in third edition spells that would say you know it only damages these kinds of people right so the ethos was of this these alignment axes were constantly being drummed into the game
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And it reflects all of those kinds of issues, right? That somehow when Rome does things, oh, well, that's an ordered society doing things. But when Mongol raiders sweep through, well, that is a totally terrible thing, right? And, you know, it reflects this, right? The designers give them a chaotic alignment, right? Raiders and thieves. And it's like, okay.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
It's like they can't even read their own words about the lack of resources and how you have to move around and do a lot of gathering of resources rather than going around. And hey, they're attacking like every other one of these nations here, but they get the chaotic label. Okay.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
The horse lords, the Rohan of Lord of the Rings. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Yeah. The other thing that's cool about them, but it's not super focused, as we've said, often this book
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
washes or brushes over the neat stuff right so there are these stone circles of tovag baru on the waters of udru kankar i mean that already sounds amazing and uh that's where these marriage that i showed in the picture have showed up and the married gave a gift identifying the next back loonish emperor to a bunch of traveling traders but the traders lost this gift and so the emperor was never recognized
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
So that way there's a giant thing that could change everything. And then they don't really say what Tobag Baru is, but it's appeared in a number of other works. And it is the all that remains of the capital of the Baklunish Empire after the Invoked Devastation. It's a site of power. There are ties to Vecna in later adventures. And so there's a lot that can be done with this place.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And we're not really told about that. Yeah. And then we have a lot of prophecies of war, a possible son of the deity of Akbar provided his intrigues. There was the the the folks of some folks of these planes who are more aggressive, attacked, kept and held it until Keelan freed it. So there's a lot of interesting pieces here. If you could kind of reshape this and work on it.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
The coolest thing here is the archmage and witch Igwilv. She resides in the quote-unquote lost caverns, they say here, Sojkanth. Her or Sojkanth if you're Chris Perkins. Her armies of evil humanoids conquer Perenland with priests of St. Cuthbert trying to win it back.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And what actually turns the tide of battle is when she's, quote unquote, brought low when a great demon prince she holds captive escapes. And later there it's said to be grazed and her son is revealed to be Aya's. And so it's a big deal that she held Graz captive and consorted with him because this leads to Aya's being on the land. So really big oops for the rest of for anybody who's good. Good.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And they were used as sort of almost like course correctors of the type of play you were doing, which I think made sense for what the game was then. And I think that can still be fun. This is where you and I disagree in some ways. I think that, for example, if you were to dig into Dragonlance, I think that, you know, fifth edition, when it had its unearthed arcana, Dragonlance had these ideas of.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And then there are always rumors that Igwilv is coming back. This is all written before Tasha was also said to be Igwilv. I won't get into the super history of it, but you know, now we say, or at least designers say that Tasha and Igwilv are one in the same, which is always a little tough because she's made to be kind of good in more later products or good-ish or chaotic or whatever.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
But she does terrible stuff back in Greyhawk, right? Like really, really terrible stuff is as dangerous as Ayuz or Graz or any of these uh demon lords that we would accept are through and through evil so yep it's a little history there uh
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And it says here his next goal is to conquer Selene, the Elven kingdom we detailed a few episodes ago. Highport is described as an interesting city. There's not a whole lot here to go on. But this city on the northern coast is the largest city in the Pomarge. And it's dark. It has all manner of inhabitants.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And one thing that's kind of neat is sort of like who's around during the day is different than the night. And so the night is this indication of where the city is headed as all kinds of evil humanoids or demons.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
have like sort of their own markets at night and so on and and everybody who's maybe goodish is closing their shutters and pretending this isn't going on which is an interesting idea yeah so you know this place is perfect for that you need to infiltrate this
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Yeah, or change it from within. The other thing, if you're looking for more traditional adventure, there's the Drakensgraab Hills and Sus Forest. They're just kind of named here. There's a section later that talks about, you know, hills, mountains and so on. But Drakensgraab means Tomb of the Dragon. And I mean, you just tell players that and everybody goes, ooh. There you go.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
alignment in various pieces. And I thought, you know, that could be really interesting to give it a shot in this day and age to say, OK, if we really say that to wear the black robes means this and to be a mage that wears the white robes means this and that to be this kind of knight means this thing. And we're going to dig into that. Now that's kind of cool, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
I mean, it's kind of cool, but also sort of like we've already held, heard a number of cases of, and the King falls ill and the wife falls ill or some variation of that. And so in this case, it's Knowles in the bone March defeat the King's son. When they go off on a sort of mini crusade, the King falls ill right after that. And so now the, uh,
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
The I think it's the yeah, it's the lady, Evilly, the queen. She struggles to rule because her family is originally from Bone March, so she's not fully trusted by the people of Radek. And so they're in a very perilous position between trying to have peace with various tribes to the north. trying to deal with the Bone March and other forces around them.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
So great danger here, very, very much on the edge, right? Which is so Greyhawk, right? Everything is a powder keg waiting for one little bit to send it one way or the other, which can be a lot of fun if you like that kind of impetus for change.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
I mean, the title Fiend Sage for the administrator, also pretty cool.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
You're joining the alignment club and it matters. And in interactions with NPCs, this will come up. And when you cast spells, it means and what you can access. And that's really cool if you go into it. But if you don't, you end up where we are today, which is I've done this at a table at a convention. And I invite anyone who wants to see how important alignment is in today's era to do the same.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
mean this is a really cool sort of overlooked region i think because it's so far off to the side but if you think about it with the north kingdom remnants with the uh you know elissa sunday uh scarlet brotherhood on wall kind of being to the south and southeast uh you've got the sea barons and the lindor isles to the east so you got a lot of oceany type fun stuff that can happen the uh hepmonoline down below there's a
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
lot that you can go off of here i would always rather be sort of in and you know partly biased because it's where i played the most in living greyhawk but i i really like that sheldemar valley region and of course being right by greyhawk is really cool but this is a really nice option for a campaign there's a lot here that you can work off of and easily add to without making any real changes and with that we will say adieu to greyhawk until next time
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Tell everybody to flip their character sheets over. Or, you know, not look at them or whatever, and then ask them, all right, tell me what your character's alignment is. Doesn't matter if it's a brand new character or level 20. People have no idea. I mean, there'll be one someone at the table who goes, of course, I'm, you know, whatever. Or they guess neutral good and it's accurate.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
I have been slowly recovering from a work onslaught, but you can find me at AlphaStream.org. Someday there will be my PAX retrospective when I can finally write on my blog. Otherwise, find from there all the things that I'm up to. Sean, if I want to find you, where do I go?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
What are we going to do? Well, I didn't want to spoil it this early, but since you brought it up, I have actually started the paperwork to change your name to Sean the Invulnerable.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
But a lot of times people have no idea now because we're no longer using that as a tool. Nothing in the game is reinforcing it. And role playing. We now have so many examples of how to do this that we just don't use it as a guide.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And that, to me, is my problem, to go back to the original question, is that it's the wrong tool for the job we want today unless we're going to do all this other stuff to it. And it's really clear that Wizards of the Coast isn't going to do that. And so if the official game isn't going to do it, at most you've got maybe some third-party product that would do it, but you're just...
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
This is the wrong tool. And as you said, it's better to ask questions that are really along the line of the axis that matters, which is the campaign story. Right. That's where you want to say, like, hey, this campaign is about blah. So here's what I want to know about your character. Right. You know, we are doing Storm King's Thunder.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
And how how do you feel about these various areas being attacked by giants? You know, what is it that you wish you could do? Uh, within this geographic scope, what are the goals of your character? How do you feel about this in time? You know, these kinds of things are much more important than are you neutral, evil, law, good chaos that they don't, you know, they don't align with story anymore.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
I mean, every taste is good of James. This cannot be disputed.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
lean into other memes right we've got the the with a critical hit we've got other things like just lean elsewhere and let these go is probably there because we're just not using them in the game and and if you really really want them then you got to lean into the game and then they're not leaned into and so it's you're just better off skipping them now if it works for any one dm awesome you know like whatever works at your table works at your table there's no two ways about it but as for most tables yeah yeah yeah i
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
Yeah, I mean, it's been fun in the Greyhawk section, right, where we've looked at these various countries that are tagged as being a particular alignment. And on one hand, that's a little bit helpful because, you know, you're reading the description of yet another empire and you're like, are these good people?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
But then you realize that a lot of times the answer is based on these perception of like, oh, if you are nomads, well, of course, you're chaotic. It's like, really? Or maybe resource constrained. Yeah. Maybe I can't just stay in one place and grow crops. And so it's such an inexact thing.
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
I think also that alignment is primarily around guidelines, which means barriers and constraints, lines that when you break, we're supposed to do something. rather than facilitation of cool stuff your character can do. And that's where, to me, it's the biggest problem with it, right?
Mastering Dungeons
2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 206)
If the shackles aren't going to be fun, and they seldom are because nobody spends the time on them to make them fun that way, then you're better off with other guidelines, right?
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Yeah, so the video walks through a new encounters sidebar you can use to run the initiative on the maps VTT. And so essentially what you do is you add tokens to the map like you would before. for the monsters and for the PC PCs. But now you can then click on them and add them to the encounter sidebar. You get to see the token little image, which is very sweet, and then the names next to them.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And then you can either use static initiative or click on auto roll and it'll roll the initiatives for those that you chose. The PCs can still roll before in chat and then you can assign the value you can group or ungroup monsters so that they can have one initiative for all the monsters you grouped or you can roll for them individually.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Yeah. Who could have done that? I mean, they would have had need to know you at a certain level of comfort. And right.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
So you hit start combat and now that sidebar has the order for you and you can go through it. You can add more creatures and they go into a little pending area and then you can put them into the initiative. So if you want to surprise things because maps let you do things like, you know, you can set a creature to invisible and then when it comes out, you make it visible.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And then you get that at that point, you could add it to the initiative, too, so that you don't reveal it. So it supports that. And one nice thing that's kind of cool is when you are in this encounter sidebar, when you're looking at that sidebar, it actually shows you the difficulty.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
So like you put a red dragon, adult red dragon, and it shows high difficulty based on the characters, which is kind of neat. Turn order is preserved. So you could do something like go through a portal and switch to another maps window and then come back and it would still have that initiative kept. which is kind of neat. There aren't things like monster attacks or anything like that.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
So, you know, that would still be done through your normal integration through D&D Beyond, either through the Discord or something like that. But, you know, but it's just really about that initiative order being able to add that there, which I thought was kind of cool.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
wait a minute. That's a great idea. I mean, you forgot that. Oh man.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Yeah, there's a whole ecosystem now of of, you know, any if you read the first series of novels in the first, like, say, six or nine, there is now so much of an ecosystem between all the different characters and NPCs and stuff. And they all have families and all that. So if you're into that sort of thing, like, boy, it just keeps adding layers through all of these, you know, additions to the saga.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Yeah, I did look at the little avatar and decorations. You know, Discord's free. So every now and then I'll buy one just kind of almost like like my yearly payment to Discord. They generally get in the way of whatever you're trying to do. But but they're kind of cool. And yeah, seeing like the dragon breathe fire and stuff, it's neat. It's worth a thought if you like to decorate things like that.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
A couple things caught my eye besides the history of it and how it's influenced various RPGs. There's a $1 pledge level that lets you get over 100 digital freebies, including the fourth edition of this game and many other source books.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And then through the campaign, they sort of set a level at which they said, well, if we hit this, we will release the text of the core rulebook under the CC by SA 4.0 license. So this allows a creator to use the text commercially, but anybody who uses what you created must in turn use the same share alike license. So that means that what you create must also be shared, right?
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
So it's a continual sharing. Anything you make becomes open. So but that's really neat, a neat kind of take on it. So that means that lots of people could create for Ars Magica if they want. And already we have an example of the first major third party release, which is the Spanish language source book Finis Tere, El Tribunal de Iberia, focusing on the setting of mythic Spain and Portugal.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
If anyone doesn't know how hard you work, it's whatever you could imagine. And then just add a lot more to that. It's, it's, you know, add a Christmas bonus on top. Um, On my end, you know, I didn't do a bunch of stuff for a while because I was just working, working, working on the day job. And now I'm like on a tear creating videos. I'm all excited.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And this you've got about a week, a little less than a week on it. And by the time you listen to this, it ends November 14th, I guess, a week. All right.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Yeah. Rodney, amazing creator, one of the main people behind the math of 2014 5E, made Lords of Waterdeep along with Peter Lee. So he has the new mailing list. You can go to scratchpad-publishing.myshopify.com and you can sign up for his mailing list because...
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Rodney says that both Dusk City Outlaws and his Supers game Spectaculars are going to get reprinted and that there will be a new game that he's going to be kickstarting next year. So that's really cool. I love the idea of Rodney Thompson getting back into creating various games. And I love everything he's designed. So I'm looking forward to this.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I'm digesting like all kinds of like a friend of mine. Well, Jeff Mueller, who supports our show, we mentioned his work. He shared Forbidden Lands with me. And I've been eating that up, reading through it. That's been a lot of fun to read, which is a free league kind of gritty OSR style kind of game. That's cool.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
So friend of the show, Dave Chalker, is one of the designers behind this board game, Thunder Road Vendetta, that has now become an RPG. And in the the game is like the board game is like a Mad Max style thing where it's all about you moving the cars on this play mat and ramming into each other and using all kinds of horrendous additions to your car to, you know, cause devastation.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And the RPG leans into this, creating an experience focused on wasteland post-apocalyptic driving. I immediately had to go back to this because it just sounds bonkers. And the kind of thing that I want to learn from, right? Very different from the kind of games on my shelf.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
It promises quick character creation, furiously fun over-the-top vehicular action, and ongoing campaign play where you build and maintain your settlement. So this is on Kickstarter through November 21st.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
thunder road vendetta rpg and it looks fantastic yep they go in like a little car and you somehow like move the car and the die is being rolled you can like lift the car up or something and it's yeah wild coming from from the the gentleman who had bro uh shark eat robot eating sharks uh
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Yeah, the Kickstarter looks really interesting. It ends November 22nd. The rules promise a feel-good game with fun ways to engage other than violence. It's an interesting concept. It's already more than doubled its 20k initial goal. And yeah, all of these options are sort of ways to have non-violent play using 5e.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
was a bunch of companies saying, wow, because I couldn't go to Gen Con as a company, I saved a bunch of money. I had all this extra time. I had all this extra energy. And it caused people to rethink things a bit. Now, I think they all have gone back to having booths anyway, or most of them. But it did cause folks to reflect a bit.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And I think that is really important to say, like, hey, conventions sound great on paper. But they do take your energy. They do require a bunch of time. You never you always think it's going to take less time than it does to prepare for them. It takes a bunch of money. There are ways to save on money, save on time.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
But overall, it's really easy to find yourself spending a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of energy. And that's not to not inconsequential. So it's worth kind of keeping in mind. And if you're a person who thinks, oh, I can't afford to go to conventions. Don't go, you know, or if you're like, I can't possibly do this because I have to get product out the door. Great. Keep stay on target. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Like like stay on your targets, whether they're financial or time or whatever. It's fine. But there are opportunities. And for those who are interested, then I think it's great to review, you know, what does game offer and and how we approach to what we did, what we learned from it.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I see you at this convention, and you manage to have pep and vigor. I don't know how you do it.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
in order to maintain all of this. I think Sean Merwin is secretly a time traveler sent back to save the world's role-playing games and cannot share all the technology that fuels him. He's an Android.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I say he, like you're not right here if I'm looking at you.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
and uh touchdown airplane what what do you do taos uh i get i get i usually get in flying from portland's terrible so it's like i have to either show up like very late in the day or very early and so i did the red eye i i grabbed the coffee i check in early i shower you
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And then I go down to the lobby and immediately start seeing all kinds of cool people, which is great because the first day pre-con is like people day. And I'm an extrovert, so that's easy. And it's just wonderful. I mean, it's amazing how many people I know now in this industry and how awesome it is to see everybody. What's your first day like?
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And then someone says, what do you think? And you're like, I wasn't listening.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I have kind of the thing that happens to me more is that I will see somebody and I'll be like, oh, sweet. Well, you know, if I saw him today, I'm certainly going to see him several times at the convention. And for some people, that's true. Like, it's always great how you'll see certain people over and over and you're like, hey, hey, you know, and you just feel like I saw that person so much.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And then I saw Dan Dillon, like as I was rushing to a seminar and I was like, oh, Dan, you're here. I can't wait to talk to you. And I never saw him again. I was like, oh, no, you know, and so you just never know.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
it's a fantastic event and you get to see the game hall right and I remember you know listening to you and Chris Nizak talk about your first trips to the game hall and the amazing collection that Alex Kammerer has and it is it's incredible and he's got you know Monty Cook's gaming table and then he has just all these kinds of neat things on the walls and all the dragon heads and just
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
copies upon copies of rare things right multiple versions of you know dragon number one from from dragon magazine and just yeah on and on right and and it's just so impressive to see that space and the love he has for the hobby is so clear there uh love that and then everybody who comes up is sharing their love for all these things
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
it's whether they're new or old it's it's great and and uh and yeah just seeing incredible people that make this hobby what it is is fantastic so you start out just super great great vibe
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Yeah, absolutely. Really nice. Gets everybody in a super excellent vibe, which this is a convention that has a really nice vibe in that way around around community. And so this I think both these events help establish that.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
so i started to hit the ground running with dming the 50th anniversary game so i did not stay up super late because i knew i had to be on point to run a great game for for a table and i did i had a full table uh ran people through this one hour game uh that was all dragon the gold dragon themed and it's short there wasn't a whole lot to it there's a nice review of it uh on andy demps's website and he talks about his game whole experience so i ran that that was fun uh it used dwarven forged terrain which was great
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And from that, it was just, you know, it's again, it's always so interesting to run a one hour game and see what you can do with it. And I actually really like the format. Like, I love running one hour games because it is both hard thing to do. It keeps you focused. But I think it provides a lot of fun to players because because everybody knows that this time is short and precious.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And so everybody makes the most of it. So I had a great that's always for me filled with lessons around DMing when I when I do one hour games. And then I went immediately and ran to join Brewer's Heist, an adventure run by David Ewald, who has written for a number of things, including he wrote the book
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Of Dice and Men and of Dice and Men is this neat combination of sort of talking about his campaign and then the history of D&D. And it was fun because, you know, he describes his campaign setting and I found it really evocative. And I was always wondering, I wonder what his campaign will be like to play with him. And so this was a little bit of window into that with this.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
kind of story around tainted brew and a bit of a mystery. And then you kind of end up breaking into a place and trying to solve the problem. We had a blast. It was really good. Nice four hour game. You want to take a couple of things you did on Thursday?
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Yeah, I've enjoyed booth work. I haven't done it for the RPG industry, but when I've done it for my day job quite some time ago, I did enjoy it. And it is kind of neat to watch every you get a good feel for attendees, right? Because you're watching the myriad of people that walk by and interact. And yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I went to a D&D history roundtable. So there were a bunch of one-hour seminars that had really brilliant people talking about the history of D&D. And this was just a general sort of how the game started. And it was John Peterson, right, who writes Playing at the World and all these amazing books that really... I mean, he's one of the best scholars on D&D. I love his writing.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And he's the same speaking. He has just... endless amounts of knowledge you can tap into on the history of the game. And he was joined by David Ewald and Mike Witwer.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And the three of them just it was a really great I mean, most of it was stuff I'd heard before, but to just hear them say it and the way they paint the picture of how D&D developed was just another kind of reinforcement of kind of understanding how this game began in such fragile ways and became such a juggernaut. And they tried to make it kind of all the way through them.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
It started with a heavy emphasis on the beginning, but they made it all the way through fifth edition in one hour, which is impressive.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
So this was a little funny, you know, despite all my planning, I'm somehow I have like nine spreadsheets of any convention I want to attend. And at the end of it, something surprises me and I go, what? And this was one of those where I had two goals. You know, I might run a Coriolis campaign, so I want to really understand the rules. So therefore, I'm going to sign up for four hour adventure.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
So one was it finished in about two hours, just a little over two hours that I didn't expect, but it just somehow ended early. The other thing is that was using the new Coriolis rules from the Kickstarter that's not out yet. And I think I could have found that out if I'd read more carefully and somehow I missed it.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
So I was like, oh, OK, well, you know, so I did not become more expert at it, but I did have a blast. And Coriolis continues to be an RPG that if you want like high science fiction, right? Like the stars and ancient civilizations and, you know, just big sci-fi topics in your game. This is a great RPG for that.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And the game has a great, both editions have great premises around them and really fun dynamics. And you just, you get the feeling of what you're doing, right? When you're, We were crawling into an area that sort of irradiated and worried about what our suit would handle and what we would find.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And it just felt absolutely like you're in one of those kinds of movies or books and just dripping with cool sci fi stuff. Right. Just you just felt it very rock and very awesome. So I had a blast, even though it's only two hours and not the edition I was looking for. But yeah, it's still fun. How about you? It's funny.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
That's fantastic. Yeah, I love that. I heard some things about both that table and then another morning table where everybody just had a blast. And that was one of those events that I was like, how can I? Oh, I can't because I'm already booked for something else at the same slot.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I honestly had no idea how this event would go. It started as I think I'll do a seminar on creating traps. And then I thought, well, wouldn't it be fun if like maybe I had like something you could see, like maybe I have dwarven forge trains you can actually look at. I'm like, I don't know how you see that from afar in a seminar room.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And I was like, what if you're standing around the table and what if they're actually playing? And at some point I just was like, OK, stop and just do this. And I spent a lot of time, we talked about that, you know, before a con, you don't think of like I at some point I even said to myself, I'll keep it simple and I'll only do this for this event. Oh, my God.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I, you know, I made pregens with their own pregen one page character sheet. So it'd be easy to see. And everybody played rogues, but a different species. And and I use the 2024 rules so I could get to learn them. And then I took the Dungeon of Doom gauntlet that I'd done, which is a long trap filled corridor and a little bit of the room before it and walked through it.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And we talked about the history of traps and we talked about, you know, why is this here? What's the intentionality behind the design? And we got to see kind of how it all plays, right? Because everybody's interacting and all six rogues trying to take turns, handle things. So I was really happy with how it went. From what you're talking about, that format of play to learn.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And I'm actually really excited to do it again for other parts of the game. Sure. As a way of, you know, like, let's play through this while talking about what's going on here, right? Whether it's role playing or it's, yeah, puzzles exploration, right? Like that could be fun, too, to do. So it's already in my brain that at Gamehole, I've got to do one like this, but different.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And I like the 12 people format concept. in that room that we ran it, which was a very quiet room. Thank goodness, because some of the other rooms are very loud. So if I can get that same room, I definitely want to do this again because I really enjoyed the format and I loved the feedback from people like the back and forth was really cool and the ideas and yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I first did a... I think I'm making it first. I did the making of D and D three panel. I remember this because I actually asked a question at the panel. So this was Peter Agason and, uh, two other fine folks, um, who were, were there. And, um, I asked a question about the OGL, which was actually kind of fun.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And because I had really wondered, right, like Ryan Dancy is always credited as sort of architecting the OGL. But if you listen to what Ryan said, it isn't what they actually did. And primarily that Ryan's plan really seems to have been like, hey, we're only going to make core books. and so my question was sort of you never did that plan why did you not do that actual plan
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And Peter Atkinson's first response, you know, who had been the CEO of Wizards of the Coast was, you know, like, we're not going to answer that. But then and I don't know why I'm blanking on his name, but the tweet. No, it was it was more guy who's played a business role. And I'm blanking on his name, but I'll think of it at some point. But he actually started to answer it.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And the answer they ended up both giving because they did end up talking about it is. We expected the OGL to create for people to write the things we didn't want to write. And instead, they had done the same kind of intelligence we had, and they knew that core books is what sells money. So they started making essentially core book type stuff.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And then there were obvious holes we had to fill and we couldn't just not do anything. We had to make all these other products as well and, you know, could never just leave it to others to do that and just live off the core books. But I thought that was really kind of neat. That is neat.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
What I heard from folks who attended it that they liked was that we kind of had points of disagreement with one another, which I think is very illustrative of, you know, it captures perfectly what this is all about, which is that there is no one way to look at this issue, especially the contentious things. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
So you can try to think of what does the company actually think, which at least the team tried to speak to that and and how she saw it as a person who has to worry about the product she creates for various companies and whether somebody else can touch them or not.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
um we hit it from the angles of you know being a small creator and just you know it was really i thought that that kind of diversity in our opinions was useful it would have been nice if we talked a little bit about the the impact it had on the industry because it really is fantastic and i think that topic of say contrasting third edition and fourth edition
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
or fourth edition and fifth edition right those are really fascinating ways to look at the effect that these things can have especially around the popular game of dnd but but i think it was still i enjoyed it so that's why yeah what uh what did you do after that I went to play historical figures and the journey to the San Dimas High School Auditorium.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
hmm i you know there's something to the generic vanilla e life cleric light cleric storm you know whatever like those kinds of tempest whatever it's called you're like they're just very generic sort of like like almost like divine um uh what are those called the um like the God portfolios. Right. The right. There's a better word for it anyway. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And this was just absolutely wild game using the cipher system where we all got to play in Bill and Ted, the what's the name of the movie? Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Excellent Adventure. Thank you. I'm running into the name of the second one. In Excellent Adventure, the scene where Bill and Ted have to go off and get Napoleon and they leave everybody at the mall. That was the adventure.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
We had wild stallion guitar picks as our points we could spend to do cool things. And you had to stand up and say excellent and play the guitar, pretend to air guitar. If you if you wanted one back and which, of course, I felt compelled to do. It was just such a fun game, just being completely ridiculous.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I declared war on the Witch King because I saw that there was a skating rink park and I thought there had to be some Witch King behind it. And that ended up being the head of security. And we led a mob against the mall and there was a lot of blood spilled and it was just completely, completely excellent.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Great seeing Ben at the con and everybody from the Ghostfire team. There were really a number of folks there meeting Martin. That was awesome. Dante, incredible. Yeah, yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I did a learn to play the one ring. I actually got three games of one ring in and two of them were the learn to play, which I guess Graham Ward helped write, which is super cool. And so he ran actually part of it in a hotel room one night. And then I got to play the learn to play, which also used it, which really helped reinforce.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
This is where I did succeed in playing the one ring and going through those mechanics. And I really enjoyed everything I saw about it. I later played a four hour adventure, which then was really cool to see the journey rules, the role playing.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
There's a name for the role playing rules as well, but they have a really neat way of choosing roles around combat exploration or travel and also role playing. That really works quite well. And I am jazzed to play one ring. That was great.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Um, after that, I went to a Chris Perkins signing because Chris Perkins, uh, is one of those introverts that like, if you don't go to the event that, you know, he will be there, you may never see him at the convention.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Um, and so I went to the signing and that's where I was able to confirm, um, as we reported at the show on what his new role was, uh, cause there'd been a lot of confusion as to whether he was leaving or what exactly was doing. So, so that was nice. And I got him to sign my Cursus Strahd book, which was, which was cool. Um,
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
um and then i went to a really neat event that had been organized um and funded through fantastic people um and this was a poc industry dinner and and it was really neat to to meet with folks from really diverse backgrounds with a lot of energy and desire to figure out this industry and find how to work within the space.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
So those of us who were a little older, we tried to share knowledge and make connections and help create connections. I'll just go ahead and say now that then the next day there was a BIPOC mixer at Monte Cook Games. And so this kind of carried forward into that where we tried to also kind of have some influence and make connections and help people kind of do some really cool things.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And some of the things I heard about were really, really exciting. And I'm excited to see if they can happen. So that was a lot of fun.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I hung out with with Graham Ward, Jeff Shue, you know, a number of people from our Discord. So it was super fun to get together and play one ring, roll some dice and just, you know, talk. The sharing is a little loud, so it's very vibrant and exciting. But but it was just awesome to see everybody.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And and it's nice because you see enough people like like you'd see keep them on and then, you know, then we'd be at the food carts and oh, hey, and then meet up again. And so just every little one thing that's nice about conventions like this is when you have even a short touch point with somebody, it makes it that much easier to meet with them again when you see them. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And so I love that the more you go to these conventions and have these little touch points, you feel comfortable just hanging out and talking about things and asking questions, you know, getting advice from folks.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Everybody listening thinking that, you know, like that kind of sort of just like a columnar thing of like this is the general area of worship. Like it actually worked far better than I thought it would for 2014. And I think made it very easy to appeal. My preference would be I wouldn't say that you just only have that in a setting book. To me, what I would like is just a few questions that say, OK,
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And we got to share the news that you and Scott and I worked on a second mini Akink project, which was part of their Kickstarter to bring the Akink show back. And that went out to backers this last week. But it was backers at a very high level, like I think $300 on up. So they're also looking at ways to make this available for sale because there's some really neat features in this.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
They called it a module, but it's really it's like a mini source book that extends has ideas for franchises. It has ideas for for kind of campaigns you could run. It has neat spells, very funny spells and all kinds of stuff. And so we spilled some of the beans at the panel. But yeah, I'm excited to see how people like it. And hopefully.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
yeah so i played adn d uh sort of with ed greenwood um it's hard to talk about this game for a number of reasons uh i will say that i think if that anybody from wizards of the coast had been watching this game they probably would have been horrified at how black staff tower was portrayed and all of the people inside of it i was pretty horrified by everything i saw uh and i felt like every npc hit on me
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I still love Ed Greenwood, but it was not an experience I'd recommend. But what was one of the things that was interesting along those lines is it was an advanced Dungeons and Dragons game where nobody made a role.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
and i tried to at one point cast a spell but maybe ed didn't hear me or maybe he didn't want me to cast his spell so i just didn't um because i was trying to figure out what was happening i wanted to cast esp uh so it was it sure was not an ad and d experience it was uh it was an ed greenwood experience with all of that entails sure uh cool and uh
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
You're a life cleric. Pause and ask yourself, in this campaign, what does that mean? Jot down three bullets, right? You can literally have it like on a character sheet, right? If you're going to do like D&D Beyond, you're going to have custom character sheets. It's a cleric. Okay, here are your three bullets. Tell me. What's your life cleric really pushing? Like, what's the thing? Right.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
It was a great day. I went to the 5E panel with Mike Merles, Peter Lee, and Rodney Thompson. And just seeing all three of them in the same place was heartwarming. I love the design that they did for 5E and previous to 5E, their 4E design as well. And so just hearing how they approached the project was really cool.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I did a four hour Magnus Archives RPG by Monte Cook Games in the Monte Cook Games area. They've got a lovely play space there. That was fun. It was just sort of like a Delta Green, a little bit Cthulhu, a little bit investigative type mix. And we had a blast doing bad British accents and solving crimes that involve horrible amounts of insects. But it was cool.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
We set it on fire and called it a win. And then I play that four hour one ring that I talked about. And, you know, I really I love that experience, as I said. So one ring is high on my list. So Saturday was just one of those exhaustive wall to wall fun times for me. And it's that point where you suddenly go like, oh, wait, this con is about to end.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
But that's great because you had that energy of all this...
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I love Dante's mastery. You know, he's he's like, you know, I can send you the files and mastering dungeons live. And they were edited already. I'm like, oh, my God, this is just beautiful. Like I said to him, I'm a little worried that our live show sounds better than our recorded studio shows. But but we'll go with it. Yeah. I definitely got a lot of energy from this convention.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I felt like I made a lot of connections with people that I care about and some new folks that I had only met a little bit or on the Internet and I became closer to them. I definitely got back and I was like, OK, time to make videos, time to do more because it was just it filled me with energy. It's also coming in time with one of my one of my many day jobs has ended.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
So it gave me a little more time. But it's really filled me with energy. And part of that was folks being nice enough to say, Hey, I like success in RPGs or I love this book or, you know, asking me to sign something or any of that. And boy, that makes a big difference, right?
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
When you just kind of remember why you're doing this, remember that when you do this hard work at the end of it is somebody feeling thankful for it. It makes us thankful. Right. And yeah, I came back super, super energized from it. For sure.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And so it might be like, well, I'm a life cleric. I'm all about vitality, rebirth and the why of it. Right. And just think about that. And boom, you're done. You're ready to go.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
now we could have a setting guide that tells me what those things helps me that with those bullets more and and i would love that too right and every now and then you're gonna have a weird campaign your darkson type thing where it's like well the rules are totally different and in that case we've got a maybe subclasses don't even fit the bill right it might not be good yeah yeah and
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I just put out a video looking at the Bastion system. And because I know I have thoughts and my thoughts aren't everyone's, I started with what's awesome about it. And tomorrow's video will be a little more critical and peel behind into it. So hopefully folks who just want to be like happy land can look at what's cool and how to make the most of that.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And tomorrow, if you want to peel back the layers and see that, then you can do so. So that's Monday and Tuesday. So by the time this comes out, they're both available.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
I'm going to see if you can use the new weapon mastery feats to dual read dungeon master guides.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Yeah. I'll cover normal cover simultaneous. See which one's better. Roll for stress with a capital letter. Yes.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
If you will, whatever the kids do place tonight, a little bit later, we'll be Santa Claire playing the Billikens, my favorite mascot of all time. And I got not to switch away from important topics, but I'm dual fisting the dungeon masters guide. All right. Those, those I've got those. And then a lot of people have talked to have been picking up theirs.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Because you want to, like, on one hand... not require a phd in the claire in the god or campaign setting to have a fun game and 2014 does that really really well uh but you want to somehow allow the person who wants to have a phd in this thing to be able to or to write their own dissertation on who their god is and whatever or that the dm did that like for that to all fit together and yeah
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Yeah, totally. Yeah, that's a neat idea.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Yeah, absolutely. I know with adventures as a DM, I've had situations when I read an Adventurers League adventure, and one of them particularly stands out that I prepared it for a convention, and I thought, wow, this adventure is so lackluster. It was an investigative adventure, and it just seemed like each of the scenes was so, like there was nothing super engaging about them.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
But when I ran it, much to my surprise, the simplicity of it actually meant that it was therefore not confusing. And the players really worked with what was there. The right things were there. It actually worked really well. And I had a suit. It was probably the best convention I ran at that con. And it was backwards of what I expected, right?
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And I think there's two levels to this question, right? Of like, when you read something... And you're not so sure about it, whether it's player or DM. One thing is that any group can have fun with anything. The worst rules out there, someone's having a blast with them. Right. So it's not about whether somebody can have fun, like always somebody can have fun.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
You'll find that person who thinks it's perfect. But. on the aggregate of all the people who are going to experience it, have you just created a big barrier towards it working for enough tables?
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And I think that as you become more experienced game designer, you're probably a little better, not perfect, but you're a little better at assessing from the written word what the likely impact will be on an aggregate of tables, right?
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Yeah, and I think one thing that is important, right, where I do put kind of hard pieces, you know, where I really will bounce off of something, if I was reading it and it's poorly written, then I just worry, like, if you can bother with the words, I don't believe that you bother with the mechanics. Right. Right. Or if you state assumptions that are sort of just demonstrably not true in the text.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
right and even wizards can do this in some of their products right where you make a statement but the next piece of the rule undermines it right or you listen to someone talk in an interview but the written page doesn't do that then you can worry about the design because there is a mismatch going on here that has not been properly baked addressed work through and here it is in the finished product right
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
And that's always a concern. Again, you could still have fun, but that is a weakness that you're pretty sure you can be pretty sure that there's a weakness there in that text.
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
get this one see how it goes and then prepare for the flood of elemental evil themed content on the inside it is november i was gonna say it's october but i have to check myself uh before i wreck myself it's it's november sean so they're running out of time for you know 50th unless they're going to somehow carry this into the 51st but i will say that what i liked about one of the my favorite things about this is just you know and i would not be shocked if this is just
Mastering Dungeons
Looking Back on Gamehole Con ‘24 (MD 214)
Will coming up with these names, but the names for the parliamental cults, Children of Splintered Ice, Children of Suffocating Ooze and the Order of Falling Ash. And like, boy, just steal that and put that in your campaign because it just sounds like wonderful.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
new advice in every chapter, tracking sheets throughout the book that you'll be able to download, encounter building changes, sample adventures and settings, expanded and revised magic items. In the chapter two glimpse, it looks like player types are more prominent now, which is one of the things we talked about when we reviewed the 2014 DMG.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And for chapter seven, treasure, it showed us treasure themes as being used in the monster manual to help color the types of treasure a particular monster will have. And that's a really neat idea.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah, even as Madeus was smiling, which if you've watched the recent Akink episodes, you might know why. There you go.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
yeah it's it's tough uh they say you know we're still working on translations to spanish italian french and german and i'm like that's not exciting or positive other than that you will someday have them but you know it wasn't that long ago that they said we're redoing our whole approach to localization so that we can produce books in the other languages immediately everywhere in the world.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And that seems to have been abandoned. I know it's hard. So I mean, even back when they said they would do that, I said, wow, good luck with that. That's a very, very difficult thing to do. But they have now stepped back from like Japanese isn't on the list, for example. Right. And they've left out several languages that 2014 provided. And
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
They're going to be later, and so it feels like that battle has shifted and been lost somewhat, and that's a real shame. I hope that the D&D team will go back to localizations and global emphasis because I think that's a tremendous growth opportunity if they can figure it out.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
thank you again um if you admin thank you if you dm'd thank you if you played thank you it was so cool to see great people we had robert pasley from uh our patreon he was there yeah what an incredible guy he's running and and then he's like you want me to run some more and then you want me to keep running and then then he says you know i have dinner with my wife i should really go
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
I was just going to say the folks who don't know, like this is a great, you know, if someone were to ask me, who should we feature that is maybe, you know, known, has some fame to them, but are really great people, great creators, like people you would just want to have in your home campaign. Excellent pick with the dungeon dudes here.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
The Lord of the Rings 5e. And on social media, they didn't say it here, but on social media, they showed pictures of various books from partners, including the Lord of the Rings 5e. So we don't know it's only that, like they've got Symbarum 5e, but at least the Lord of the Rings 5e appears like it'll be there, which is kind of neat because, you know, it's also just Lord of the Rings.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
So that's another opportunity that more fans will come in through that.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Well, first, I thought they were doing another dragon book. And I'm like, we just had the, you know, Draconomicon remade. But OK, it's an anthology of adventures and like, great. I mean, that seems fine. I you know, they sort of made it sound like, boy, we never have a dragon in a dungeon. And I just immediately thought of like countless examples of that that just went through my mind.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
But I'm like, sure, it doesn't hurt. Like, this is great. You know, who doesn't like more dragons and dragons are fun every time an organized play scenario, learn to play thing has it, people get excited, right? They love that. I mean, I think I remember fourth edition, you know, had the demo with the dragon at the end.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And even though it often TPK'd them, it was such a blast for them to go up against a dragon. And so, yeah, this is good to have.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Lots of stories like that are just people going above and beyond where they needed to do that. And what else? Yeah, we got the anniversary special die. We had the uni and the hunt for the last horn preview of the 2024 rules adventure that I mean, players loved it. They had so much fun going back into the world of the of the 80s and comic, what do you call it, a cartoon.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
so dms can figure out how to do this if they're learning or even if they're know what they're doing sort of walk them through it yeah yeah and then there'll be a video just uh just the same way that stormwork isle had all those videos and a dedicated kind of website and on the youtube channel so there apparently will be a how to play video for this as well which will be helpful yep
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah, and it's interesting because we have the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide already from many years ago. So, you know, what does this do that's different? And then they mentioned Baldur's Gate and you're like, okay, we already have a Baldur's Gate guide in the one adventure. We have the Mithdranor or the Icewind Dale content that was available before.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
both of these, you know, through D&D Next release products that then became 5e versions. But it's like, do we really need that again? And I was waiting that they were going to say, you know, and a Waterdeep, but thankfully not. Instead, it got a little more interesting with the Dalelands and Mythdranor and some of the others.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
But, you know, hey, like Moonshades has been explored in such great detail by Baldman Games at their Organized Play Adventure series. And I thought to myself, you know, I don't know what's been out there, you know, more than 30 adventures. I'm sure maybe it's more than much more than that. And I know Eric Mankey will let us know. But, you know, did they care about that? I don't know.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Have they looked at that at all? Because there's been so much work done. Yeah, you've done work there. And yeah, so I was very curious what what they will do with the moonshades and Kalimshan especially. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And and they just, you know, played their hearts out and were super positive. And that was one really interesting thing is The entire weekend, I really had just one person who said anything about not being excited about D&D in 2024. And they weren't a player. They were just somebody kind of walking by. And everybody else was just so excited, so positive. They either didn't know anything about it.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
uh yeah i mean on what you just talked about that wasn't interesting to me because you know like many folks who demoed it at um pax unplugged and it's you know been featured a number of places it's had closed play tests i saw it first when i was uh part of the summit you know normally you're playing it in sort of a up above kind of mode and you're quite distant from things.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And boy, they zoomed in for the maximum shot of how beautiful everything is. I thought that was kind of funny because you would never play at that angle tactically, but it was it did show off how good the graphics are. They then talked about Danger in Dunbarrow, which is going to be the intro adventure.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And Chris Kao tried to beat Jeremy Crawford at the game of superlatives, calling it the best starter. Well, like the best starter pack that's ever existed in Dungeons and Dragons. And I thought, OK, you have my attention. Let's see if that's true. Tell me more. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
That's a clever thought because, and they showed examples of them, right? You can just take any image and, you know, so if you're playing someone else's adventure or something like that, you can take that image, upload it, and boop, there's your token of whatever that creature is that doesn't exist in some other form. So it's neat.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
right and then play a short adventure with that it doesn't include the full spectrum of an adventure from beginning middle and end and i wondered here whether they may be thinking of you know not just to get you started though of course it can do that and that's important but almost whether they want you to like play it maybe solo or in some other capacity because it had this feeling of like something you might play over and over again
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And in fact, then later that we're shown Drizzt, they say Drizzt fighting a robot, but it was Optimus Prime. Right. So that makes me think, OK, you know, Jess and Zio had talked about other properties. So are they going to bring in G.I. Joe and Transformers into Sigil through the Hasbro books that were written by Renegade? You know, it's. It was interesting, right?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
I mean, they've taken the work to put this in there. Is that just for fun or because they own it and they can, or is this really something that's coming?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah, and they walked through the level builder. The footage looked a little sort of sped up to me, but it did show impressive pieces like a cargo lift and a mine that can lift, you know, your miniatures, creatures up. That all looked really cool. The visuals are amazing. But, you know, there's always that question of how easy to build things, right? You know, Dwarven Forge looks amazing, too.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
which is kind of funny for those of us who just live this stuff. Yeah. Or they had a vague notion or they were really into it. Like one guy just he gets on his phone because we had a copy of the book there. He gets on his phone and he's like, can I call my friends? And we're like, yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And sometimes it's really easy, but some of their pieces are quite complicated to put together. And you approximate that Lego level of intensity, which... can be a lot of prep, right? So it'll be interesting to see how that really is when the open beta comes out where people are truly building things within seeing.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And they talked about sharing being important, integrating with D&D Beyond characters, pulling flat maps into the maps application or into here, and that idea that there might be a marketplace there, right? That's always interesting as to what exactly that would look like.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
yeah and it's interesting he talked about you know sort of the the transition he's gone through of like sort of thinking about what it means when you kind of own a game or you're this big part of the game um that he and greg had worked on for so many years and he so he set up a relationship with mongoose and he works for them and works on the game through this you know license
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And he calls his friends and one by one goes through with them how their characters have changed in like the most excitement you can imagine. Right. So that was that was the world I was in for the last four days. And it was a lot of fun.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
But he wanted to set things in place that he is not the bottleneck and he is not the sole decider. And so he clearly enjoyed the relationship with Mongoose Publishing. And so now they own it. And while he continues to work on the game, nothing rests on him being around for it to work. And it was very mature, very, very savvy. very good of him. And so it's a nice read.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
We linked it in our show notes because it's nice to kind of see, you know, someone think through that. And as we all get older, these are the kinds of things we have to think about for those of us in the old department.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah, it's really neat. The author shares in this piece how much D&D meant to them as a young person who found the game that helped them identify who they truly were, come out of the closet, right? When you look at a piece of artwork and you go, that guy looks absolutely spectacular. Maybe I'm finding something out about myself.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And being able to walk into someone else's shoes can be just a great way to figure that out. And I've had the fortune of talking to folks like in high schools who've talked to me about how important D&D was for these kinds of reasons, right? Figuring out who you are and you're polymorphing. And you realize that both you and this other person at the table, boy, we really like changing shape.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
maybe there's something there to this. Right. And so you start finding that out and in a safe way to experiment with who you are and your gender, your your your your assumptions people have of what you should look like, all of that. Right. And so it's really neat. It's a nice article on that. And it's part of the overall
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
NPR series they've been doing to cover the 50th anniversary, which they were at PAX West. I had a lot of fun talking to the person who was there recording. They recorded a session of Union Hunt for the Lost Horn, which Jefferson Dunlap was running, and they interviewed DMs and fans.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
So I'm excited to see what comes of that and what I can hear about it, because it was really neat to talk to them and see them there.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
warmed the cockles of this cold uh heart yeah yeah because people are afraid to speak out right i think greg had clearly reached a point where he was so frustrated with where he was in the scheme of things which often i mean being in any kind of marketing communications area like that can be really really hard um But I'm really glad for him, right?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
As someone who's talked to Greg a number of times in the past, I'm really glad to see him go to somewhere else. It's a really huge shame that it can't be within Wizards because that's where he'd like. But one of the things that was fun, we try to go behind to the sources whenever we can. Well, I hold here the seal of the Secretary of State of Washington State because...
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
He came by and visited the area while at PAX. Twice, in fact. And one of the times I'd given him one of the anniversary D20s. And he came by and thanked me for it. And then started just chatting with me and a couple of people who were around there about a number of things, including how happy he was to have Greg and that Greg had reached out saying, I want to make a difference.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Like, I want to not be in some... Situation that feels like you're part of a megacorp, but that I'm I'm paraphrasing, right? These are not this is not a quote, but, you know, a place where I'm contributing and I'm making a difference. And so I want to be part of, you know, this sector now and work with the government and try to make lives better.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And so that had meant a lot to Steve Hobbs to hear that. He also shared with me a number of funny things. I won't repeat all the words, but he definitely has a strong preference for, let's say, healthy YouTube content rather than alarmist content. And he shared that with us in a way that brought tears to my eyes and also an appreciation for him.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Uh, and just, yeah, it's clearly, you know, he's a big fan. He loves playing. He loves running games. Um, so it was really cool to have him there. And, and I think that, you know, it looks like Greg's in good hands, right. And in a good place. So, so happy for him for that. I did talk to a couple of staff members of, you know, Hey, what do you think about Greg having left?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And the general tenor was awesome.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
sometimes people are in a rough spot and it doesn't it's not working out right that was kind of the feeling they had right it's not they didn't say to me yeah we all feel horrible right what is what they said was yeah and it's rough when one of us is in a spot that just is is butting heads and it's not working and and so we're really glad that you know while we're sad to see him go glad that he's in a place where he wants to be right
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for making us laugh on the social media. Very true mention. Absolutely.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
You have to be a master tier subscriber, but in a week you'll get it if you're hero tier under their new kind of way of encouraging you to pay a little more monthly. Yep.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah, so the version of the free rules, I did check today so that you can still see the 2014 rules, which I appreciate. I was a little worried that 2014 might go away and be replaced by, but no, you can see them, which is nice because you can easily compare them.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
and one of the things the reason i was curious to compare it was what did they decide to include in the free rules compared to 20 of 24. so i checked feats because if my memory is correct the 2014 version has one feet and that's the case in the srd as well well and then i saw oh look we have several feats now in 2024 well that's great that's an improvement and then i saw the classes and i saw cleric fighter rogue wizard
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
and i thought wait a minute and i looked at the free 2014 rules and they have 12 classes right and everybody would complain why don't we have the artificer well now you don't have a warlock or a bard or a number of others so right you know hard to tell what this all means i i don't really mind this here
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
what the impact it has is when they release a 2024 srd as promised will this be the kind of difference that we see where they're saying yeah we're not giving you our bard at all in any form right
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
um and then that leaves you with a little bit of legal gray area as other companies have had of well can i make an artificer can i make a bard right an artificer is is you know an interesting writer warforged because those have general concepts and they have dnd concepts and digging into those dnd concepts is where you can run into ip challenges and so on so i didn't um you know we don't know what the srd will look like but i thought that was kind of interesting and worth you know starting up that discussion of hmm
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Is this indicating some real change that we'll see?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Ah, one quick addition. You are absolutely right, Sean. I'm looking at D&D Beyond, and it does say, and I'll pull it over here,
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
when the pup players handbook sees its wide release on september 17th there will be a full release of the dnd free rules including remaining base classes uh blah blah blah blah warlock as well as one subclass for each class there will be more spells and feats so you're seeing a preview that's just kind of a placeholder which is kind of smart i like that and that we will be able to retain the 2014 rules as well so
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
I dig that. And then they just did do a quick note to say the free SRD rules are not the SRD, which you'd think you didn't have to say, but that has come up a lot. And that will be coming later once all three core rules are released, as they had said before.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
The other thing I did note, you know, we now have the words of the player's handbook digitally. And on the show, we've often wondered about the superlative claims that this is the largest player's handbook ever, Sean. And we know the page counts higher, but we also know the font is bigger and the art is bigger.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And you and I have said, boy, it sure would be hard to increase the art, increase the font and fit it in the book. So early analysis indicates this player's handbook has. fewer words than the 2014 version. We knew it, Sean.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah. Tom Christie of D20 Play, who recently ran that awesome draw steal game for us, he has put together a reference sheet capturing the changes in 2024. So we've got links in our show notes. And that link hasn't worked for everybody. It did not work. Worked for me the first time I tried it, but it's on d20play.com and you can check it out.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Also, he has placed it on the DMs Guild because of that issue. So you can go pick it up there and see this free guide of what has changed. He does a nice job. There's a version that has sort of like blue line differences and stuff. So take a look at that. It's a nice little way of seeing what has changed.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah, absolutely. And it should be, right? I mean, I just finished a whole weekend of working with countless new players. I mean, we tried to count them. And it's complicated, right? And in fact, this came up on our Discord. Someone said, you know, what do you think about the new rules? And I said, well...
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
you know let's set that aside for a second and let's go back and say that for learn to play i have what i consider to be my favorite pregens to use for this event that we use when we do learn to plays and they're ones that almost look like the fourth edition pregens if anyone did the dnd encounters program they really streamline things because if we just give them a character sheet
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
it's really confusing. And so that tells you the mind of a new player, right? Too much is just super overwhelming. And so the more that you can distill it down, break it down step by step, right? Teach it a thing at a time. Like here's how to do skill stuff. Here's how to do combat stuff.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Here's how to, you know, the more you break that down, simplify it, give it in little bits that are digestible towards that emphasis of a new player, the easier it becomes for them.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
So it's not particularly long when you think of rules in general, right? That's a pretty reasonable read. And it's really hard for us, people like us who've been playing to properly assess that chapter. But I think it does a pretty good job of giving you what you need to know without getting mired in the details, which is accomplished by having a rules glossary. Right. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
It kind of gives you a high level view of the kind of things you're going to do. It has play examples. It has art and layout that kind of help you get that. The whole point that when you get to chapter two on page thirty three, now you're going to know what you're even talking about versus before creating a character with sort of an interesting opening because it said.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
here are these, you're gonna choose a race, and you don't even know what they're talking about if this is your first time reading D&D, and you're gonna have to go to the race section later to even figure out what the options are and choose and go back and forth. And so it's an interesting change.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah, I mean, and the funny thing, fourth edition, right, was trying to solve the problem of the wizard is too different from the fighter, right? Makes all these choices. Where have we heard that before? So therefore, martial characters need something. So what if everybody has that wills and everybody has encounter powers and we're just coloring them differently? Doesn't that solve everything?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
go super deep here right so they mentioned like you may choose a different direction for your character if the dm is planning swashbuckling versus high c or swashbuckling high c's and versus greek myth i guess and um
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
so yeah totally right but also they don't say things like your dm might limit what options you can take or your dm may you know want you to start in a certain type of city they don't go deep on this right just a light bit which is fine to give you a feel for your dm has a say and affects things they also talk about the session zero
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
and that you may get together to do things like talk about do's and don'ts in the campaign and so on. And so that's, again, another thing that doesn't cover all of the possibilities, but at least helps prepare the mind of a new player for, oh, yeah, my DM matters, the campaign matters, and that's on.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
No, because people then say everything's the same. There's not enough variance. And so it becomes that difficult thing. How do you make it feel equitable to be a fighter or a wizard, right? It's fair, but it's not the same and it's not necessarily balanced. And even within a class, right? If every choice of what you can take is the same, then you don't feel rewarded for finding that thing.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
It does. I fight it. I struggle with it. I think because just, I mean, from the simple perspective, when I create a character, I always think of that, right? So I just think of like, well, I want to make, you know, orc monk or whatever it is, you know, and that's how my brain always approaches it. And I think most video games reflect that as well, right?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Like, you know, you choose to make a dwarf and then, oh, what class is your dwarf and so on.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
um because it it colors the whole experience right like you can think of the video game right if it if it said like make a a class we wouldn't have anything to look at because it'd be a nebulous concept out there and then we'd be like and what's your background oh you're a sailor and then it would be like and now let's have finally have a visual of this you know whatever it is a half elf of halfling uh whatever right like
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah, and I get that. And we don't want to be mired in the real world's place where it definitely matters how you look and then your life is different for it. So we don't want to be mired in that. But also part of the problem is that this D&D doesn't know how to separate culture from what you look like, what your anatomy is.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
It also doesn't know how to deal with being an incredibly different physique from another and how that impacts things, right? I mean, that was all what the game was trying to simplify before. And now we're saying it completely doesn't exist, but also that it's not part of your concept of who you are. And I struggle with that.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
trait wise but don't tie it to this idea that because you are an elf you have to be this way because you are a dwarf you have to be this way yeah yeah i um i mean you know i don't i don't we could go on this forever right because it is such a deep thing from the the perspective of really the order of creating things for me i don't know that i'm i'm i'm making characters where
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And that's a thing that video games struggle with and role playing games struggle with. How do you reward the person for finding that thing if there is no thing? So there has to be a thing. And that causes all of this hullabaloo of, look how I found this thing and this loop and whatever, right? Magic the Gathering thrives off of it, right?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
it's a final step, right? And I don't, I have trouble believing I'll, I will approach it that way mentally. Because I do want to be part of the setting. And to me, that's a big part of it. It's part of how I will shape the personality I have is based on the fact that I'm a dwarven Smith or my whatever, I'm not just a Smith. And then all of a sudden, oh, And I'm a dwarven smith.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
I've discovered this. To me, it's a far more integral piece that's going on and that I think about it. But, you know, I've talked to other folks who say like, you know, the first thing I'm thinking of is I'm making a barbarian. And then later I figure out what kind. So, you know, it'll be interesting to see. I mean, and I get why they do it. Part of it is what you're talking about.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
But part of it is also because they have moved all of these items to the background. then the mechanical weight is no longer on the species. And that means it should come later because it's not necessarily driving these things. And we still have, I mean, like if you look at 2014, it kind of makes sense mechanically, right?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
You choose the race, which locks in certain things like ability score bonuses, whatever, right? Right. and various features and weapons that you're proficient in and so on. And then you get the class and that fills out the rest of them. And then we do our final ability score thing so we can fill out the rest of the character sheet. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And you add a background on it because that's sort of just an extra little nice thing. Now we have to go and say, all right, you're choosing your class because that's now the highest concept we will go for, because if we didn't, we'd be really messed up. Right. So then we've then we go to our background and our background is going to add feats and all of this. But to me,
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
I still don't quite jive with that, right? And maybe I will. But to me, we're saying too much about our character without knowing enough. Like, I don't feel like it lines up in the right way, except mechanically, right? To me, mechanically, sure, you're trying to say like, oh, here are your ability scores. So we got them through the background. So that's got to move up in order and so on.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
But yeah, to me, it's not narratively in the order that I want it in.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
uh and shame on wizards for being the cowards not to put the axe to ability scores and not just use modifiers uh but yeah that's just my my little personal hot take there i was watching a video with with the designers of uh third edition and they're talking about how close they came to remove it i think it was something monty cook wanted to do and some of the others and you know at the end of it they just couldn't do it way back then right and we just we keep going forward
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Probably one edition will eventually do it, but it's not this one. There's still sort of too much out there that they're thinking of. And yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And one of my friends this weekend was noting that they also state that 30 is truly the cap, which was a little unclear from the way 2014 talked about things. Now you know that. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
I believe it. So good packs. It was an amazing packs on a number of levels. I got to see that game. That was really fun. There were some very, very hilarious things like Omen drawn escaping the dad like duties of his business franchise by going to the bathroom and hiding there for an hour. And then Perkins sent him messages. So he's like getting the messages while he's on the potty.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
you can envision a lot of species that would tend to live in cultures, depending on the world and the setting, where these things would not be true, right? I can imagine elves not thinking that you're protective when you're muscular or whatever, you know, like when you're high strength, like, in fact, it could be very, you're protective when you are intelligent, right?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Would make more sense to me for your typical elven setting, right? And Yeah, and it's just, hmm.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
I feel like I've been better attempts in the past to sort of say, what does a score signify that has said sort of, you know, it doesn't just mean this one thing. It can mean a number of things. It's sort of like charisma is a classic example. It doesn't mean that you're just
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
physically attractive you know it's not about whether you're a pinup it's all these other factors that help you inspire attention lead people get someone's ear right those kinds of things and and same thing with intelligence or any of these abilities and and so
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
that to me is more useful that could shape you thinking about what your what your ability scores mean to you than to state you know yeah this table driven by strength or what any ability being low or high yeah
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Because they're memes and it's part of the parlance.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Honestly, I think alignment came up in humorous conversations a dozen times this weekend, right? So it has that import, maybe even more so than ability scores, where we used to laugh more about, you know, I've got an 18 strength, this is my dump stat. I mean, alignment comes up a lot in talk.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And so I think there's just that fear of cutting out something that has, but it really has separated, right? There's the game part of it, and there's this other piece. What I would love to do is to have wizards put in the effort to try to make this mean something in today's game. Or then, yes, if you're not going to do that, then cut it, right?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And like we've talked about before, I would have loved if Dragonlance had said, you know what, we're going to really dig into what alignment can do for a game. Then it may be worth retaining, right? Or if you're going to show me how to link in, use your alignment to create cool stories, that'd be great. But if you're a new player and you just look, these two steps are rocky, right?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
The ability score, appearance, personality piece, and the alignment piece are... rocky for a player when the game no longer uses this in any way. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Well, it's like, and at the end, to make it even worse, we, I'll say this so you don't have to, there is a table that on based on your alignment, then you get associated traits, right? So that a rebellious person can be a result from chaotic or helpful come from, come from good. And I don't know how helpful this is. This is... Yep. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
I like how the hit point dice very quickly switches to saying hit dice because they're just too darn long. Yeah. So the other thing that's worth noting is that we get this, you know, kind of never before seen picture of a character sheet. Right. And it's all numbered, which tracks to these steps. And there are a lot of fives here. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Because at the end is when you fill out like all of your spells and, you know, your spell slots and your weapons and your class features and, you know, all this you end up filling out later. So it's a little. You know, I don't know how useful it is. It's maybe somewhat so for folks to look at where, you know, like, okay, your coins come from step two and, you know.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Your wisdom comes from step three and so on. Okay.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Which is fine. I mean, I think that... What I guess, you know, what's interesting is that they've given up on trying to have some sort of a system there that drives role playing. Right. So the inspiration bond flaws, et cetera.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
I mean, they were too much and they were didn't quite work, but it was an attempt to try to emulate indie games and have pieces there that would foster, like get you, encourage you to do something interesting. And I will say that when I look at this process, I don't see a whole lot. That really drives. creating an interesting character. Not that it's not possible.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Of course it is, you know, and there's some, there's, but it's not saying as some other, you know, 13th age, we've talked about the, what is your one unique thing? You know, what faction are you aligned with? You know, what enmity do you have in the world? Like there's, there's nothing going on like that here, right?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
It's, it's very D and D and it's sort of like, and now you have a character and it's up to play to determine how this pans out and whether you're a good role player or not.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
I think that was their attempt. It was definitely an attempt. They thought, hey, maybe when people fill this out, it'll create creative, neat play, which is good. It may be a lousy system, but I think it... It probably did cause people to think about that, right? Because it's right there. You got to look at like, oh yeah, what are my personality things?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And you might abandon them, but at least you understand that because you read this, all characters have desires and goals and whatever. And you might not use the ones you wrote down, but you'll maybe play a little more that way. Here, you kind of don't have that, right?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah, it'd be interesting to see if the DMG touches on that in some way, because it could be campaign specific, but yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
yeah well yeah this ties into our earlier conversation about packs right there's there you can look at things through various parts of like i don't know lenses right yeah you can look at through a design analysis you can look at it through you know what i want out of a game as we did briefly with we had a race species type contrast um but at the end of the day this is absolutely uh
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
you know, two chapters, both the setup and then the actual character creation. And I think people really dig. And overall, if I think of all the people I met at PAX, they'll have a blast making cool characters of this process.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
uh where we go a little bit further into why this may be great or this may not be perfect for a uh setting in our 21st century yeah i mean absolutely right we start with the north kingdom and the first thing reading through all this description that i've hit was oh yeah here we go another monarchy another you know uh history of like this having been a part of an earlier kingdom. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And in this case, it's part of the the old great kingdom. And this is the north part, which, by the way, the north kingdom is to the east. But it's the northern part of what used to be that large great kingdom. And so that's why it's called that, even though it's really like it's just all on the eastern side, kind of near those islands that we talked about last episode. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And yeah, what do you think about North Kingdom?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah, and this is another difference between Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms is that Greyhawk, the gods are way more involved and the religions are there for a stronger presence and smash into each other more, right? Yes, religion is important in Forgotten Realms, but the gods, other than during the times of troubles, don't just really put their hand into it the way they do in Greyhawk.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
I have two thoughts about that that came to mind when I was saying that. One is we shared stories of things that happened at the table at PAX West, and there was a DM who shared that when they had the monster show up in their learn-to-play scenario, what did the paladin do? He says, well, I'm going to run into that other room and hide. Mm-hmm.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And so you don't see it. And Greyhawk is also setting written during this from a perspective of kind of a simulationist world that's very real. And so because it is, it therefore must be fully described. Right. So the army matters. So it must be fully described. And the theocracy matters and the history of the rulers. And that's bunk.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah, of course, you can just say it matters, but you don't have to detail it all out and endlessly talk about it. And what it does, at the end of the day, that I think you and I have been talking about, is it means this is a fairly decently large section that doesn't really give you a lot to go with, right? Yep.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
heir to the glory that was the great kingdom so you can play around with that a little bit but even then it's just put me in front of giants and dragons and let me let me kill them is where my mind keeps going yeah the the this setting and that's where i feel like this was written as a oh you know this is the historical truth and we must write about it and represent it versus thinking like players want to do much with this do dms want to do much with this if not
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Let's either keep it really short for those tiny moments when this will work, like you've got to go into there to recover this lost artifact from the fallen empire, or just let's write something else here.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Our next region, Nairon, I felt was a little bit like this as well. But I felt like it had some like saving bits that made it more interesting. Right. It's almost like how to take the previous one and give it a little more to it. Right. Because, yes, it has all these tensions.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
that's what happens when you don't know the game's balance right you can't say oh it's going to be a balanced encounter and in fact an intro level easy balanced encounter i've got nothing to worry about this is a game right that character is doing actually role playing their character and their own selves in quite a good way and you know if you were to say to them look
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
But to me, the history of kind of why it is where it is makes it more more interesting with and the monarchy's issues are more interesting. What do you think? Right.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
It's just west of the North Kingdom.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah. And what I like, you know, and I wish they'd, they'd made this like, sometimes I feel like this sometimes because it tries to be encyclopedic, doesn't tell the DM, just, just tell the DM, Hey, here's some awesome questions. Right. Right. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And like, so one of them is the young, a younger brother tries to take over the moment that a, a, there's a sudden stroke to the older father, but was that magical mundane? Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
you know that begs the question becomes really interesting and then it's like oh you know the the older brother regains the power the younger brother disappears wait a minute where is he right something's going on and then oh so the young the older brother gets married and immediately the wife has a sickness and she's never been seen since after heat stroke and it's like
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
let me peel back the curtain. This is balanced so you'll have fun and you have zero chance of dying. Well, that would take some of the fun out of it. And that's what happens when things are too balanced.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And one other thing is, is sometimes they, you know, they don't point out like I remember the fourth edition Forgotten Realms guide. One of the things I really liked about it is it would take these little snapshots that it would use for the picture in each section.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And it would that is both visually grounding and it would help you imagine like, oh, there's this forest and this marsh and this thing and this coastline, because those are all the adventure sites. And it would give you little tidbits about them. And a more modern version of this is the Critical Role, both of the Critical Role setting books do a great job of doing that, right?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Of showing you, hey, all these cool features, if you base your campaign here, you'll want to do this, right? And here are hooks at both low level and high level because that stuff's awesome, right? Like you want to... How can it not matter that Realm War Bay is to the south of Nairon? But we don't mention it because... You're just supposed to look at the map and conclude.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
But if you're really going to write fun things for the setting, well, then you want to know that.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
right and um the other thought i had was someone was talking about honey heist uh at the con and how you have these two stats and one of the things that even though you just have these two stats they can one goes up the other one must go down so that you upset that balance right and keep that interest you're giving up something you're not just getting and getting right and that's because of this whole issue
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
yeah um and and i think this was a region that did really well because of that i i was fortunate to play a few of these uh adventures which were written in the uk um and they were fun and they were neat and there were big scenes involving the scarlet brotherhood as these enemies there was a lot of subterfuge because of how the scarlet brother had those the spy network and everything but and there was a lot of like unify the people and um you know deal with the people who try to profit from war and so on and so
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
It was pretty neat. They could see what they needed to do, right? This is an area of the world that's very clear, has neat agency, neat, obvious action going on. And so, yeah, it was it was a good region. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah, and that's where you can think, like, if you're really going to make this useful, you've got to address that, that, hey, you're a little far away from everything else. So, you know, what's under the waves, right? Things like that. What's, you know, a place like this would be really impacted by weather and climate and shipping routes.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And so, you know, a little more there would help you then also make that an interesting setting for players.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
No. This region was in Northern California and Nevada. And it was one of those regions that was hilarious to either visit or have their players visit your region because they would come in And they may either be like anti-Fultites or often they were they would role play being strict Fultites. And so they would be like, you must acknowledge Fultas of the blinding light.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And everybody just rolls their eyes like, oh, we've got a Fulton at the table. Right. Like, oh, my God. And and there was a lot of humor in that. Right. But also in character, it was very serious. And and yeah. And if you had ventured there, you had to be careful what you did or said. And you had to understand and quickly come up to speed on the rules so that you didn't run into trouble.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And there was a lot of burning at the stake and stuff like that.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah, and that's such an interesting thing. I mean, you could almost apply that lens when you're when you're creating a world of what are places that we visit and don't stay in and what are places that we might start and stay in home base and right like, yeah, you wouldn't want to stay in under the watchful gaze of old dates for long.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
right so sean had to head out because of another meeting he had for a design meeting so i want to thank all of our masters of the realms our master of multiverse and master of dungeon supporters master dungeon supporters we greatly appreciate you master of realms you are in our show notes And Master of the Multiverse, you get this shout out. Shout out? Shout out. See, this is why Sean does it.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Keith Amman of the Monsters Know What They're Doing. Lou Anders of Lazy Wolf Studios. Craig Bailey. David Bastionson. Steve Bissonnette. Merrick Blackman, Calvin Bridges, Avalos, Evil John, John Carney, Will Doyle, Andy Edmonds at Nerdronomicon.com, James Fisher, Scott Fitzgerald Gray at Insane Angel Studios, Ben Hazler, and Paige Leitman.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Sean Hurst, The Mighty Jerd, Brian King, Jim Klingler, aka DM Prime Mover, Chad Lynch, Paul Matta, The Mathemagician, Eric Mengi, Anna B. Meyer of Fantasy Cartography, Trey McLemore,
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
John Mickey, Sean Molly, Falcon Neil, Tom Nelson of the Deck of Players Safety, Mighty Zeus, Phil Wirt from the Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo, welcome, Post Fiction RPG Audio, Robert Paslick, great seeing you this weekend at PAX, Vladimir Printer from Croatia, Pugnus,
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PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Ozzy Mandis Rex, Chance Russo at Drago Russo, Andy Shockney, Krishna Simons, Josh and Levanica of the Tabletop Journeys podcast, Talos the Storelord, Jeremy Taloman from the D&D and TV podcast, Tres, Joe Tyler, Marcelo de Velasquez, the Valiant DM, James Walton, Graham Ward, Jason Ward from Accidental Cyclops Games, Javier Wasiak, Chris Webster, and Walt Winfrey. Thank you all.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
You can join these fine folks at patreon.com slash mastering D&D. And when you do, you'll be part of our community on Discord. Love that group there. If you can give us a review on Apple podcast or wherever you listen to the podcast that helps other folks find us. And subscribe via YouTube, youtube.com slash at Mastering Dungeons.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And you will get to see our beautiful faces and help folks find us there. You can find Sean at all the places at Sean Merwin. You can find me at alphastream.org. And what are we going to do now? Well, I think I'm going to craft a setting where the first thing you do is choose your alignment and then you choose your species. I think Sean will really like that. I can't wait to show him this.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And then he casts create water, washes his hands and looks at the crowd and says, because I'm not an animal. It's just the kind of dad humor I'm here for.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
yeah and that's the thing is you know there yeah you need to adjust it for your group right we get this question uh asked often around forge of foes because in forge of foes we say hey here's how to make you know monsters more thrilling and you can give them monster powers and you can make a new monster or alter it to feed these criteria and then they say well wait haven't i made it harder
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
yeah you did and if that's a problem at your table then yes you can compensate but probably it's not a problem probably you came to this book because you want the game to be a little more thrilling a little more challenging right similarly if you're going to change up weapon masteries it's probably because you're a little worried about how that'll play given where you are today
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
But if you're running a campaign, you're thinking, gee, I wish my characters could, you know, the players on my table, their characters would hit harder. I'm like, great. No worries, right? Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
that's that's that's what we love about uh at kink yep and uh and let me just say the packs i mean i can't i don't know that i can share the full numbers of how many people came but it was twice as big as last year it was and and then some it was unbelievable we had two fire marshal
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah. And, you know, the easiest thing is to have a conversation with your players and say, I want to test out some variations of how we could run the game. The other option is to do it in world, right? Have some sort of thing like, you know, the enemy illusionist shows up and something washes over you. And now here are the things. Here's how your weapons work, right?
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
The strange arcane ore bathes you in energies. And for the next session, here are the rules that are in play, right? Yeah. Yeah. Just test it out, and then you can undo it very easily.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
Yeah, absolutely. And it was fun to see people in the videos that we knew. You know, one of my friends now has a kid and seeing the kid appear several times in the video like that was really neat. And and seeing, you know, some legends like Claire Hoffman there running a game at Gen Con. So that was really nice to see. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
And so what they started talking about started with the player's handbook itself, kind of getting people, I think, you know, excited for for this week.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
So it was a brief discussion of it being chock full of advice and they showed various pages and it was a lot of fun for me to pause and look and read. And those pages were great. And I spoke to a couple of staff who I trust for how they say things in an even keel manner that we're just talking about. This is the coolest DMG.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
One of them said the coolest DMG since the 4E, which I thought was hilarious, but I know what they meant, which is 4E's DMG was so good.
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
type incidents where everybody was working together to solve how do we handle the massive amount of people who are trying to run in and go straight for the D&D area. It was a sea of people and just shocking. And anybody out there listening, if you were one of the folks who came by and said hi and thanked us for the show,
Mastering Dungeons
PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! (MD 205)
that to attain that level is difficult right and they and they said you know this is at that level of that fourth edition dungeon masters guy just full of useful advice um and in fact all the pages i looked at like chapter one intro in the basics uh discuss what a dm does and we can make out a summary of various things that have changed including
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
You need to join a guild. I absolutely agree with that. I don't want to see you must choose your guild or you must choose your fighting brigade or whatever for each class. The reason deities are there... is because they are, historically speaking, such a huge part of a setting, right? What is a setting but a magical world dominated by gods? Almost all, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
There are only a few that really deviate from that. And so if there are these enormous powers at bay, then those are paramount, right? And when you are a cleric, I mean, we can't not know. You got to tell me who you worship, right? Or play off of that, right? Like in the Fallbacks novel, the cleric does not worship any one god. He makes deals with all of them.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And that's a fun way to do it too, right? You know, you're playing against type, that's fine too, but you've got to have an answer. And your answer can be, oh, I don't know, or whatever it is, right? But that answer is important because the roles that deities play in almost all settings should be huge, even though somehow we've strayed from that.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And our main segment is going to talk about setting, which kind of links into a lot of what this, this is a nice warmup. It absolutely does.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Well, it's hard to say because, you know, we don't they didn't say like first day or, you know, some number of hours. But if we if we look at, you know, when the press release came out, it's been it had been roughly a week. So Tasha's we got some data from BookScan back a bit ago. And was it last June, something like that? Not this June, but the one before that.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And in those numbers, it showed Tasha's with one hundred and twenty five thousand eight hundred and thirty eight first week print copies sold through the book scan series of outlets, big box stores, Amazon, things like that. I estimate that maybe Bookscan is 20% to 34% of print sales. We're just talking print here. So that's a lot, right? More than 125,000.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Add another 20% to that, so another, what, 24,000 or something like that. So 160, something like that. I don't mind math remotely, right? Check me at home. But it's a huge number, and Wizards is saying 2024 players' handbook is even higher. On the internet, you'll hear everything from revisionist folks saying like, well, of course it's that big.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
I always knew it would be because, you know, if you think about it, there's so many players that, of course, they picked up the player's handbook. But those folks were probably saying two months ago, oh, nobody's buying this new book. The old book is how everybody's going to be playing and 2024 is dead. So you get a lot of variants on the internet.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
For Wizards to say that the Player's Handbook has sold three times as many as the 2014 version, that's great, right? Assuming that's all 100% accurate, that is fantastic. D&D has grown a lot since 2014, which is also amazing and fantastic and fortunate. And but we have to factor in that, you know, Sean, this is this is not like 60. It's another five.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And you can argue about how that's been explained to us or whatever. But the end of it is it's always tricky to have a new version, whatever it is, and convince people that, hey, everything is fully compatible. So you kind of don't need this. Boy, you really want it.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
and if they really printed three times as many and are selling three times as many that's amazing and some darn good planning to have that match up of three times as many printed three times as many sold um there's some more data in this press release sean you want to chat about that
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And that is like an ever-touched-it kind of thing, but that's still an enormous jump in how many people they say have played it.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah, it's possible. I mean, if I look at my son during the pandemic, before including, telling me, oh, there's five groups in our high school playing D&D. That's a lot of kids at just one high school, right? And there are how many high schools in our city? Like, just a ton, right? And then a couple of other high schools where the kids have reached out to me in one way or another.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
So, I mean, yeah, maybe. I don't know. It's a big jump. It's a surprising jump to me, you know, adding 35 million. But either way, a lot of people have played D&D, and I'm not going to quibble about that number too much.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
uh how many were there in 2022 13 million registered users now that interests me sean because 18 million is actually the number we had heard before right as you're saying so it's like We added 35 million ever played D&D. We didn't add to D&D Beyond. And I wonder if that, I mean, it's not been a long time, right? I'm talking about the Q2 2024 call.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
But at some point, there was a reason to adjust one and not adjust the other. That can just be different data sets. But, you know, maybe it means, I'm sure they would have liked to have increased that number. And so they probably looked pretty hard, is my guess, to increase it and couldn't. I don't know. Interesting. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
So, you know, one of the things that people have been trying to reconcile is these numbers, which are fantastic from the D&D marketing group. And it looks like it came, you know, from the wizard side rather than the Hasbro side. Or, you know, kind of reconcile that with... whatever people imagine the edition should do, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And then what made it more interesting is BookScan sales data being shared again by Stephen Glicker on his YouTube channel. And this data came across as the first week being 3,773 copies sold in BookScan in the U.S., And, you know, it was done in a way that sure felt like it was being done for clicks. You can decide for yourself. A lot of drama.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And this is talked a lot about, you know, all over the Internet space amongst those little bubbles of us that talk about things like D&D online. I do think that number is really suspect. Right. But there's a lot behind it. The why of it. Right. Why is this number so low? It doesn't make a lot. And should we believe it? Right. So you can look at things to try to figure it out.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Like, well, you know, Amazon has one page for the 2024 player handbook, which is the same as the 2014 one. You buy the player's handbook and you choose the version. So that kind of prevents it from having its own rank. You can analyze it. Maybe that's also causing these book scan sales to be weird.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
I mean, I noted when I looked at the previous book scan set data two years ago or a year ago, whenever that was, that data sometimes had things like critical role books would be like smushed together. You know, like there wasn't you couldn't get the new book. You had to see the green Ronin one. Right. And so like when things like that happen, it can throw stuff off. That may be why.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Why this number doesn't make sense is because we know like 3000 were sold at Gen Con in a heartbeat. We hear gaming stores all over the place reporting strong sales. Multiple reports of distributors running out of books that they can't give them any. Stores talking about how they convinced their distributor to give them their last 20. Things like that.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
We also had a report from the UK book scan showing that those numbers are higher than that US number. That's like 3,800 or something like that. It's a little higher. And we know the population of the UK and the interest level in the UK is not what the US is expecting. There are reports on ICV2, you know, around this. So none of it really makes sense for the book scan numbers to be that low.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Why are they that low? We don't know. And there are a lot of people guessing. And I would just caution to not, you know, not go, oh, I saw this thing, therefore, right? Like either something major has caused book scan to lag behind in its reporting. And there's a whole bunch of numbers to add to this number. In which case, we'll see this eventually, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Eventually, when you look at what the first month sales or two months or three months or whatever, or lifetime, and you know it's been three months and you're looking at lifetime, you will see a more normal data amount come out of it. So hopefully we get somebody who shares that, you know, sometime for now and we can look at it.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Otherwise, it means there's been a titanic, unimaginable shift of how D&D is sold. from normal print channels to other, you know, like everybody's buying it from D&D Beyond. And realistically, that just doesn't make sense, Sean, because it means like all of America has just shifted how it buys. That's not generally how those things happen. So it's an interesting, you know, riddle.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And we'll have to figure out why it's wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's wrong.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
But a little bit, I mean, again, this would be such a Titanic shift to suddenly say like, and no one's buying it on Amazon, right? Like, that's unlikely, right? No one's ever going to their Barnes & Noble anymore because everybody who previously purchased from a D&D Beyond is now. 3,700 is such a laughably small number. Yeah. You know, compared to like Tasha's, right? It had 124,000.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
So you have D&D saying, Wizards saying, we sold more than 124,000 plus 20%. You know, and then to say, and even if they're counting digital, right? And you can, it's still... It seems 3700 is just it would mean, I don't know, you know, people have vastly changed their purchasing. And the thing is, we got to remember that, like the fans online are not representative of all fans, right? Like,
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
All those player handbook sales for 2014 didn't come from the few invested people we see posting on EN World, right? It's a very wide network of disparate people who buy in disparate ways. For them to all shift to D&D Beyond would be bizarre.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
I mean, I kind of feel like I have to. I own the Spelljammer vinyl that came out previously. And, you know, I always I still don't have a physical copy of the Sharn City of Towers music that came during third edition and in the back of that book. So I need to get that one of these days because that's such an awesome piece. I think the Spelljammer wasn't quite as good as that.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
It's fun, but it's sort of wacky. Maybe deliberately so. I think deliberately so. So, you know, we'll see how good this is. Hopefully we can do some, you know, little previews and stuff. There's not a link yet on when it comes out or where we can purchase it, but it's apparently going to be 50 bucks and you can get it on a double vinyl or digital. We'll see.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah, yeah. I ran it back when it was being playtested, and then I was working with many, many DMs who ran it for many, many, many, many, many players at PAX West. It's a cool adventure. I highly recommend it. It's fun. Will Doyle and Stacey Allen wrote this. They write such good, flavorful stuff. And it feels like the cartoon, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
I mean, one thing you know about Will and Stacey, they understand the assignment, right? Even if their assigners don't know it, they know it. And so you get a very cartoon-like experience. You've got bully wugs and you've got... you know, Kalak and Venger and angles going in and that are very fun and cartoonish. And, and yeah, I totally think it's a great one shot.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
I will say the pregens have these magic items that are really, really strong. Not only are they, you know, 2024 characters, but these magic items, I mean, Bobby can create the Fisher with his, you know, hammer and, and, uh, The cleric Nico can like summon an angel multiple, multiple times, which is way too many. One would be fine or really too strong, maybe even.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
But so that that makes it really strong, which is fine for this one shot because you want the kid cartoons to win.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
um but if you do decide to make a campaign out of it you will want to fine-tune those magic items to not have a blow away or if you want to play this with their own characters realize that they won't have the magic items that make them as strong as as you have in this version there you go oh oh mini corner with teo sales
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Well, you know, WizKids has a weird lag time on everything. They'll announce a thing. It'll take forever to come out like the Vecna minis are just coming out now, which is like what? And I think the anniversary minis just came out like a month ago. So, you never know with them, but they announced a new visible box set with seven pre-painted minis based on the Baldur's Gate 3 characters.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
50 bucks gets you those seven pre-painted minis. If you've played the game, you can guess who's in it. Yes, they're probably there. There is also a blind box set featuring 40 new minis from the video game. This includes monsters and NPCs and all sorts of stuff. Each booster is twenty five dollars. It comes with one large and three medium or small minis. Those prices.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And, you know, you'd have to buy a lot of it to get all 40. So, you know, decide how you how much you love it. We've got a link to ICB2 there where we saw this announcement. Yeah, it's it's kind of wild. We've you know, I think folks have said, like, why haven't they done enough on Baldur's Gate three? And the truth is, we continue to see more and more of this come out.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Maybe it's a little later than you want, but here it is.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Wow. That was two really cool, conflicting questions. I think we have to put both of these folks in a cage match. That's the only way to do it.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Thoughts? Yeah, it seems cool. You have $5 a month or you can buy each issue for $15. We know, you know, if you follow D&D, you're probably well acquainted with Hannah Rose, who's worked on Arcadia magazine for MCDM. Lots of D&D official projects, often as an editor. Clara Daly is a graphic designer who's worked for Darrington Press, MCDM and others.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
The two work together on Tal'Dorei's campaign setting Reborn, which is this puppy right here. And in an interview with Polygon, they talked. You can see the art that they are using that will be in this next issue. They said they're paying top dollar for articles with an eye towards creating sustainability for creators in the TTRPG space. They say they playtest in two stages for all of this.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
It's important for them to get the balance of things right. So, I mean, it's really cool. I think that magazines are great. Talking to folks on our Discord, you know, I think there's a mixed feeling as to how magazines work in today's era. I think quarterly probably is good. You know, even Arcadia, as good as it was, I felt like it was a little too much too often.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
So I think fewer articles that are very good spaced out quarterly probably is the way to go. I hope this works. I'd like to see these kinds of things exist. Yeah. But it's hard. It's hard to to to get the people to enough people to derive that value from it. Right. Even though they'll all say how much they love Dragon Magazine and miss it. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
It's hard to get them to put their money where their mouth is.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah, sure. It's really neat comment because sometimes you don't know kind of how a product comes to be. And so this quote says, great show. And I enjoyed hearing you talk about Keith Baker's new release Frontiers of Eberron. You may not be aware of this, but he developed and tested some of the material by running a mini campaign for his Patreon supporters.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Team two is in effect. Yes. Go Santa Clara. So what happens if Duke plays Santa Clara? Duke wins. Statistically speaking, historically speaking. So it's not too hard for me, but I cheer on both and either way I win. That's the way it works.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Character development and some aspects of story direction were built with input from questionnaires on Discord and Patreon. And then he ran online games with a revolving cast of supporters playing the main characters. I was lucky to play in a few of those games and have listened to all of the audio video recordings.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
I learned an immense amount playing with an experienced and creative DM like Keith, but I'm most amazed that he managed to orchestrate a pretty great ongoing story in this way. I played a different character every time I was on and other people played the same characters in different sessions, but somehow it all came together. I look forward to seeing how the characters and story will be together.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Might have influenced the final product. And that's really neat, right? That it was sort of play tested live with the Patreon folks. I've been fortunate because Keith is in the town that I live in. We've played together a number of times and he's a fantastic DM, very quick on his feet, as good as they come.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And so I have no trouble believing how he was able to take this, spin it into really neat, you know, parts of this setting. So it's cool.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Fantastic.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
When you will get the actual book, you'll open it and you'll feel Sean's sleep somewhere in those pages.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And with that, the uni adventure that we mentioned earlier has some stat blocks, but it also has the cautionary text of these could change. So, yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Probably culminating in third edition.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah, so the point of the block and taking it away from that textual representation
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
is kind of twofold i think one is to provide the information in a way that is recognizable right you will always know what the top will be my name and then you know if it's fifth edition it's gonna tell me the size and the type and whether it's aligned to some alignment uh and then we're gonna get like some stat things like armor class and hit points and then it's gonna have like the ability scores and some senses and then at the bottom will be these various actions they'll be broken up into action type
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And all of this, as it becomes familiar, helps me run it. We can look at fourth edition for an even more kind of blockified, right, like parsed, segmented kind of approach to things. We can compare that to earlier editions, including Third, where Third would have a stat block, but it was full of so many words and things that you had to look up, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
The feats, for example, that this monster had, the class levels it had, the spell lists. And one of the big questions design-wise is to what extent are you capturing everything? Right. So it's really easy to run. Or are you reflecting the larger world of the game? Right. A wizard is a wizard and has these spells because that's what wizards do at this particular level that this monster represents.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Right. All of that can be design goals that you have to tug at and balance.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. So I think those are our design goals. And increasingly, I think, you know, DMs and players expect, especially DMs, that you're going to have this block, this definable thing, right? It's not a paragraph of text for D&D, especially fifth edition and kind of future editions. It's going to be this sort of block that breaks things up.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And it's because of those design goals that there should be some complexity, some richness to the battle. Though, in a lot of ways, we can look at how 5th edition stepped back from 4th edition, right? 4th edition had multiple interesting things per creature. A lot of the 5th edition ones don't quite stand up to your rule of the proficiency bonus minus X, minus 1, because...
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
They are a little simpler, especially at the lower levels. They can often have not a lot that's interesting. It just does what it does. It's a little more like second edition, perhaps.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And D&D Beyond, yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah, so what's really interesting is what jumps at you visually immediately when you look at this stat block is it now has the ability scores in these kind of color-shaded tables. And so it'll say strength, this is for an ape, strength 16, mod plus 3, save plus 3, int 6, mod minus 2, save minus 2, dex 14, and so on, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
So it breaks this out, and almost everybody when they first look at it goes, wait, what is this?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
what is this what is it doing and and because it's now added right explicitly the saving throws so you don't have to you know think through the math of it as you did before when you saw strength 16 plus three now it stinks strength 16 plus three but also save plus three and in this table format i would say this is a questionable decision
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
I'm just trying to be fair here, like trying to not be personal about it, but it's questionable. Questionable because from a graphic design, layout design, you are making this like the thing that jumps out at you at the page. And I think everybody would admit those are not the most important things in this stat block.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
So you've somehow chosen to bizarrely color code this thing as if they're the most important thing when they're not. Yeah, it's not the end of the world, but it's a it's a strange opinionated move rather than what we would all agree. You know, what are we usually doing? Even though we are enjoying more complex stat blocks, we're doing our attacks.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And the plus to hit, the damage, the AC, the hit points, those are like your biggest obvious things you need. And yet we've chosen to highlight these blocks.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
use yeah and i mean when i look at the printed page right we know the 2024 book has a larger font But if I if I hold up the 2014 and look at like this bat, you can see those vertical or horizontal lines that are there. Those actually kind of make things a little big. So we actually end up with about the same space used for the bat.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Although I will note that the bat no longer has an echolocation or keen hearing line. So it's maybe not the best. Arguably, 2014 would be smaller with its smaller font. But it's reasonably similar, right? We didn't really truly gain a ton in the 2024 version, but we have this kind of complexity of that big giant stat block segment there.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yes, I join you in that. You know, we can argue that the ape in 2014 hit a little hard. But not tremendously so. I mean, you know, six is higher than maybe the four we might want and see as a sort of average. But...
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
I mean, it's amazing. I love both of these comments. I think that the question of what a cleric does for the game is really interesting. And the thing I can't get over is that I feel like it's changed and I can't exactly put my handle on why, but I feel like in the various campaigns that I ran or were run for me, deities were more important.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
it's it's not tremendously off and you know you could look at its armor class and hit points and decide whether on the balance it's fine i haven't done that analysis um for this guy but to then say well everything stays the same but we're going to take the damage down one for fists and then make this rock hit harder but only one in six rounds on average is really tricky. It's really swingy.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And I think, honestly, what I would look at design-wise is, I mean, I haven't run the math on it all, but not only have we changed how much it deals, but we've created this variability
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
that can be very dangerous in encounters and maybe that's fun right maybe you think that's fun i'd have to run the numbers to really look at how i feel about it of what i expect this to be over time but you know the more apes you have which with cr one half is easy to have a lot the more that you can get that recharge off and suddenly have a bunch of 10 hit point hits on your party
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
At a low CR, I would tend to think that's not desirable for the fun of the game, right? Because these are going to go up against low-level characters and have a chance to do some real damage.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah, and it's interesting also, I just pulled up, you know, I've got a spreadsheet that folks on my Patreon can access and looking at that spreadsheet, a CR1 half, historically speaking for 2014, does seven damage a round, which is a little higher than we'd probably wish it would be. for low level characters. And if you look at what we recommend in Forge of Foes, then it becomes four.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And I think that, yeah, so it is good. We do think it's good to take it down a bit. But the method in which it's been done here, yeah, it takes away from it and creates a certain tactical type of play that to me is opinionated. If I go back to the ape in 2014, it's fine. You know, it's not on the big list of things to fix, move on, do something else.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
But no, we've taken a big pass at this and decided to change how it plays, which is really interesting. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah. So in looking at other monsters, did you see anything else that stood out along these lines for you?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And probably because while it makes sense, it's a creature that you can summon as a familiar and through a warlock. And so it becomes, you know, more of a problem in that sense.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah. Yeah, it is. They don't have a football team, but they have a basketball team. Their women's soccer is really strong. Yeah, I've already got like their games mapped out and stuff so I can cheer them on. I'm hoping for greatness this year.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And maybe it's that they were like, I mean, from all the angles, from the setting would make it more important, right? You'd run into a church and it was of this God and it was like a big part of play. And there were penalties for crossing your alignment or deviating from the expected way that you work. And...
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Which is fine. I can see that being less about an opinion and more about we've looked at this game data and going back and forth on saving throws, how engaging, how fun is it versus the time it consumes. I can sign off on that.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Especially, I mean, in this case, this DC 11 con save, right, is something that becomes quite a waste to roll, especially if you have higher level characters, right? Because the idea is that your plus five to attack because of bounded accuracy will still make the imp work if you have a bunch of them at higher levels.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Well, now you're doing all these saving throws over and over and over again to see if they hit a DC 11, which more than half of the time they'll probably make, and then just becomes a waste of rolling. So it especially works in this kind of case with a low CR creature, I think.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
that is an interesting idea, right? That we're giving you less to interact with and we're just going to give you a hit point boost. So in fact, it's interesting that didn't go from 10 to 20 and went to 21 for whatever reason, but probably just stat based, whatever.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And yeah, I agree with what Michael says, where like when you chose a deity to worship, well, suddenly that becomes highlighted in the world and the DM will probably riff off of that. Well, if you chose, you know, this God, well, this is the anti-God to them and that becomes a part of it. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah, that is super interesting. It's. Yeah, it certainly makes. I mean, that's a different fight, right? That's a different fight. Yep.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
It's interesting. It's like, okay, I don't know that you needed to, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And so that's why I'm trying to reverse engineer. I'm going to disagree in a sense. Yes, but your job as a designer is to change them in an appreciably better way.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yes, but appreciably ceases to be right. Like at that point, we're talking about you pull a bunch of people and they're going to all go, yeah, most of us agree this is way better. I don't know that some of these changes we're talking about do that.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
I think that the setting can be a part that does that, but I would rather almost say, hey, it's Dark Sun, there are no gods, so just strike that from your character sheet, then... Create a place where to me domains are a little too separate from. The gods. And that's OK, but it ends up with this effect where there's almost too few hooks into the setting. And maybe if it was something like.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
What was a huge change was the giant spike. You know what I am seeing? I take it back on giant spikes.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
because it does say on web walker ignores movement restrictions caused by webs and it knows the location of any other creature in contact with the same web right so it does still know this is this is oh it still knows in the 2024 version it does know where it is so it's so they actually juiced up its perception but actually kept they just didn't make it another entry they walked it in they moved it into web walker cool all right i missed that
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
For the giant spider. Yeah, interesting.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
I gotta say, I do like the idea of it not killing you at zero. I don't know. I liked it. I mean, I get the problem of it, but to me, what it does is when... When you make monsters interesting, the DM is going to think about fun ways to use it, right? So the idea that you can have in the giant spiders layer, the web matters. So you put the web in. There can be a stable...
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
prisoner that's bound up in its in webs to be eaten later and we know that it's there but it's going to be sick even if you heal it right like to me these are things that can be interesting and if you don't like that well you use a different monster because in fact 2024 and 2014 both give you lots of spiders so you don't need to you know it's not like it's the only spider out there yep
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah. And, you know, my guess is what they did is they looked at the giant spider and said, you know, you're already flinging a web. That's your interesting thing. Let's cut the other things out. And so I can sign off on that. I'm not saying I hate this. I just think that actually that idea of being stable is kind of cool. Now, maybe you make a different spider with that. But...
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
but i think it's a neat concept i don't think it had to go well i mean being stable is fine but being paralyzed is you might as well be unconscious oh yeah because you're paralyzed yeah it's not just yeah yeah that's fair yeah okay yeah that's not fun all right to be on the back of the uh barbarian as he carries you she carries you around or they carry around for an hour yeah that's a problem
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
I don't know, your domain is weather. And we saw ways to hook that into all the weather things in the game from what the climate is today to what people are growing in the small town to the priests and the whatever is the churches that are there. But I feel like that ends up not happening is the result of it. I don't know if you feel that way.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
What's your opinion so far? Okay. Let's assume 250. I agree with you. And I'll say why. So yeah, it is worth noting that a book like this, this is 13th age, right? It is a rule set and a setting, right? You get the pretty map and you get all the stuffs and... But you've got to teach the game, and then there's some chunk of it for the setting, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Then you have other things like, say, Matt Forbeck's Shotguns and Sorcery, right? And that is using 5e in this case, because this is the 5e version, and so you are adding to it, and yet it's still... Pretty much the same size, slightly smaller. And, you know, I could pick any number of like, you know, here's Deadlands, which does not include the Savage Worlds rules.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And it is slimmer, both smaller in its overall size and whatever. You know, so. But when I look at all this and when I talk to people, gamers of all kinds, they'll tell me like, yeah, I couldn't read all that. Mm hmm. And I agree that is an issue. We'll get to that, I'm sure.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's gotta be some reason why this is awesome to play and you need to make that really clear. And I think old school approaches were like, you just have 400 pages worth of proving why or 200 or 70 or whatever, but like, like your entirety of the page count was supposed to prove it over time. You can't do that these days.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
You've got to tell people up front exactly why and really play off of that, right? I think 4th Edition did a really good job where they would have these truths or campaign aspects. It would be like 5 to 8 in a bullet point or numbered list or something that would really break down what's special about the Neverwinter campaign setting or Dark Sun or Eberron.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And then DMs and players could just, you know, you could literally print that out, put it on the table, like... This is what we're doing, right? Tap the sign. This is the thing we do.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah, that's smart that you bring that up because that was specifically, the idea was like, hey, D&D makes these suppositions. So if your campaign is going to change it or your campaign setting is going to change it, then you've got to really think through what that means for the game and do that, right? Like no gods, we talked about earlier in the show, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Whatever that might be, then you want to underscore that and play off of that and drive that home as a major theme.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
That's a really interesting question. I've been thinking about a lot because like the Eberron book that we reviewed, it really did a... Why are my show notes blanking in and out? They are. What was the name of the Eberron? It is called Frontiers of Eberron. Yep. So Frontiers of Eberron, you know, there is a whole chapter that's really player focused. that's a great way of achieving buy-in.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
So I think it's becoming more and more important to do that, sequester some area of this product and say, this is for players. Also allows you to take some of those pages as a PDF and say, here's your player's guide at kind of no extra real cost to you because you've sequestered it already. But that's really nice, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
That lets you have essentially a player's guide and a DM's guide all in one book if you need to.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for a number of reasons. One is that, you know, when you share with someone a map, you know, here's Tal'Dorei, for example, right? When you share a map, it starts inspiring, right? We've been talking all about Greyhawk and you look at those things and you want to know what's off the edges and what is in these mountains and the names of places, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Like hell furnaces, like it just starts inspiring you. And so, yeah, you do need to understand the world. And even if it's changed, right? So like if you've got something like the Gamma World role playing game, right? Like I want to know what happened to Seattle, right? And what happened to wherever, you know, part of the world we're in.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
If you're playing Call of Cthulhu to know like, well, what's my area of the world like? And yeah, it's good to also understand Boston and New Orleans. But what about, you know, my area of the woods? What's going on there in a particular area that we're playing in? And so as you establish that world, you give people a feeling of what they can explore. But I don't know about you. I feel like
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
The Forgotten Realms, it's really interesting. People will complain like, oh, it's just the Sword Coast. And we never are done with the Sword Coast. The Sword Coast keeps getting explored and built upon and so on in 5th edition. It's almost like you don't even need all these other areas because the Sword Coast is already really, really big. And I'm not saying we don't.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Don't misunderstand what I'm saying from folks out there listening. I'm not saying get rid of the rest of the Forgotten Realms. But... When worlds are so big, then it makes it less approachable. And it means it's really a long-term project. It's more than you kind of need. I think that a smaller world makes sense. Dark Sun, right, is just that table land section. And there's more beyond.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
But we're just focused on just these seven, nine cities. No, I'm blanking. Anyway, just a few, right? Like that kind of focused in lens can really work.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah, I mean, it waters down that experience. And there are a lot of really nice settings, especially when I think settings are trying to be innovative, like it's an apocalyptic situation. It can be really beneficial to say, we are in the one last remaining place, and now we've got to venture outward. That gives you a real nice, cohesive start. Or even to say, where should we begin?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Like, maybe the world is bigger. It's Tal'Dorei or it's Forgotten Realms or whatever, but... You know, if we're all starting in Neverwinter, now we can have a really cool Neverwinter and radiate outwards and we can we can kind of change that up. Right.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
We can we can have like a different focal lens for each of the areas like Neverwinter is very defined right around it, much more so the next two cities. And then we can get hazy and let DMs just have fun with that because it's not as critical and it's not that that super focus area.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
That's really true. One other possibility is you don't always need the map, as we might think of it. I'm thinking of Coriolis, and I'm holding up the book from Free League. Coriolis, which is a far science RPG, does give you a map of the major stars. And that's all well and good. But but we're not getting maps of every planet.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
We get just some descriptions and details because the fun of it is sort of more like Firefly or the expanse where we're going from place to place and we're finding things along the way and on the area. But you don't need the worlds. It's it's the pattern of play and the things that one will encounter. And so the emphasis is elsewhere. You do get that star chart, right? But you don't.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
It's not about the detailed level of that nations and mountain ranges and things like that.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
yeah my heart wants to say no to you but my brain says yes in that i really do think that like some people say like oh you gotta you know dnd should pull out all this player option stuff and no it's it's selling much better by putting in a few subclasses or backgrounds at least to feed some spells some magic items That makes everybody happier.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And you've got to try to sell your adventure to more than just the person or your setting than more than just the DM or the one person at the table. You want several people wanting to buy it.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
and and and a diverse crowd buying it so you absolutely need it from a from a business sense i think the key to try to make that better is to say how are these rules really supporting the play and and enabling that play rather than being just tack on stuff right like if um if we have airships in our setting it doesn't mean we need like airship combat rules right
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Because maybe it's just like sometimes you're fighting on an airship and sometimes, you know, it's two airships that are next to each other that crashed and you jump from one to the other. But we're not firing missiles like and we don't need all that complexity.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Maybe I'm thinking of, you know, there are a number of games that sort of have like, you know, blimps and stuff, but there are no blimp rules. And that can be fine because that's what the game's about. Right. But if it is about that, if you are doing Spelljammer, maybe you wanted some ship combat rules to have. you know, made that experience into what people expect and want out of it.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah, 100%. The more that your setting has something that's more interesting than just, you know, our nation likes, you know, purple clothing, the more that you need to explain that in play and give examples. And we hear this from players a lot, right? We heard it at GameholeCon when we recorded live last year, people saying, hey, for Planescape,
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
I want an example showcase to me why an adventure in Planescape is cool and what it should look like, right? What makes it unique compared to any other adventure? Dark Sun, right? If you're going to run a Dark Sun campaign, you may not immediately know like, well, how do I use things like running out of food and navigating and
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And so an adventure, even a very short one, can very quickly hit like hunger, thirst rules, navigation, Templars, defilers, cannibal halflings. And then you're just like, yeah, got it. This is how I do it. And from there you can run on Blade Runner.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
For me, I mean, reading the rules, I'm like, OK, how do I make a mystery detective adventure or campaign or whatever that I'm running that forces decisions around compassion and empathy versus organizational duty? You get these adventures and you go, okay, I have a better grasp now of how one might do that.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah, I mean, it really can be. And that's okay, right? Like, if that's your campaign, then that's great. Like, I would say that, you know, for Gamma World 4E, a really fun part of it is, like, the way you mix and match your character during creation to just choose these two things that you jam together, and that's your character.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And then the cards you get both, like, that are sort of salvage gear, right? You're fighting with a stop sign and whatever that might be. And then you find other gear as you go, you know, an old radio, you know, and the clever ways to use it. That's a big part of the play. And so you want to you want to lean into and highlight that because that's that's the game, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
All right, folks, we cut that down to the wire. I had something coming up where I had to go do something and Sean had to do something. So we're going to stop there for now. And maybe what we'll do next time is we will get into how one would create a setting. And we'll kind of do an example, just kind of playing around with these concepts.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And let us know what you think about this topic and where you'd like us to go. And speaking of you, we'd like to thank everybody who is a Master of Dungeons supporter. Special shout out to our Masters of Realms. You are mentioned in our show notes every episode. Thank you so much. And our masters of the multiverse get a special shout out. I will read the list in reverse order.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Walt Winfrey, Chris Webster, Javier Wazniak, Jason Ward from Accidental Cyclops Games, Graham Ward, James Walton, Marcelo de Velasquez, The Valiant DM, Joe Tyler, Jeremy Taloman, Talos from the D&D and TV podcast, Talos the Store Lord, Josh and Liwanica of the Tabletop Journeys podcast, Krishna Simonsi,
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Andy Shockney, Chance Russo at Draga Russo, Runner Rick, Ozymandias Rex, Pugnus, Vladimir Prenner from Croatia, Robert Pasley, Post Fiction RPG Audio, Frog Prince at Tentacles Squelching Wetly, which is a Stranger Things reference. Phil Wirt from the Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo. Mighty Zeus. Tom Nelson from the Deck of Player Safety. Falcon Neal. Sean Molly. John Mickey. Trey McLemore.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Anna B. Meyer, Fantasy Cartography. Eric Mengi, the Mathemagician. Paul Matta. Chad Lynch. Jim Klingler, aka DM Prime Mover. Brian King, the Mighty Jerd, who I got to play with this last weekend. We had a lot of fun in the world of Coriolis.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Mark and Mary's Gaming Compound, Sean Hurst, Ben Heisler and Paige Leitman, Scott Fitzgerald Gray at Insane Angel Studios, James Fisher, Andy Edmonds at Nerdernomicon.com, Will Doyle, Evil John, John Carney. Calvin Bridges Avalos, Merrick Blackman, Steve Bissonnette, David Bastionson, Craig Bailey, Lou Anders, Lazy Wolf Studios, and Keith Amann of the Monsters Know What They're Doing.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Thank you all so much. You can find us at patreon.com slash mastering D&D if you want to support the show and help us do this work that we do here. You can find Sean Merwin at Sean Merwin on all the places. Find me at AlphaStream.org. Find us at Mastering D&D. And thank you so much. What are we going to do now?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
We're going to go pick our daughters and help that family member have the job interview and check in on many, many other things and then build the perfect campaign setting that reflects all that.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Yeah, I guess I don't feel like the rules, like if I say take a look at second edition or first edition and I compare it to third or fourth, I don't know that truly one is saying to a cleric or a paladin. I mean, I guess paladin is pretty arguable. Paladin definitely said that. Paladin is pretty hard to get past. But I don't know that it was like both sort of say like you have a deity, choose it.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
But then you end up in the domain of the setting, right? What are the deities available? Which are you choosing? You know, what does that matter? But to me, it's more that the the hooks that tie into that deity have become lessened, right? The spells don't care. The settings care less. The adventures don't care at all, generally, right?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
and and and so that to me has a negative impact in play in terms of the things that you interact with to the same extent that i would say that like if you choose to be a rogue and you are playing an urban game well that thieves guild will come up right and if for somehow we did a thing that caused it not to well that would be a loss right that's sort of how i feel about if it makes sense
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And that that's a way that you could make me happy and maybe answer both these questions to say like, hey, whatever your character class happens to be, what are your ties to the setting? And with clerics and paladins, there's a real obvious one there. Like, what is it that you are serving? Right. You are serving someone. You are bound to someone.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Just like if you're a warlock, you are bound through this pact. Well, your pact isn't a vacuum. It's not just some concept out in the ether. It ties into this setting. How? Yeah. Right. You're a rogue. Right. Hey, you're probably an independent, but maybe you had ties before. Or what do you think? What kind of organization would appeal to you? Right.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Like you start thinking about them working on that. Now you create these ties either way. Maybe that's the thing we agree the book could do.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And fascinating that 2024... removes those pieces and i can and i don't disagree with that i mean i did not love bonds flaws and whatever so i'll get into that second but it doesn't add something to put those factors back in or reroute that energy to something else it just removes them which i definitely don't like right because you should have something that tells you
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
where your backstory comes from, what your factors are, the guide play, tie you into the setting, all of that. And again, I think that should be in the core, right? Like it's not just that a setting should say, hey, it's Eberron. How do you tie into this? Like, yeah, it should say that there too. But at the core level, it should say, hey, player,
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
look for how you you know how you integrate to this world into this game what is it you care about and the problem with bonds and flaws and ideals and all that one is there were too many of them so nobody could remember them right even your own player had trouble remembering them but five players couldn't remember each other's and the DM could not remember all five.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And I remember trying in the early days of Ventures League setting up, I had a spreadsheet kind of format and I would write down people's things. It was impossible to DM to all those things, right? Far easier is a game of 13th age, as I've said many times, where I could just say, what's your one unique thing?
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
And bam, I can write one thing down for each of those characters and everybody's playing off that. You can write it on a table tent, fold it up, see each other's things.
Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
and you're boom you're playing off that canton concept and then icons right in 13th age are these big group things that help you do that on a richer level of saying you know i am linked to the rogue prince and i am in enmity with the dwarves right and like and then and i'm neutral with the diabolist right and those things can just now be those seeds for play at the setting level whatever your setting may be