Episode 206 of Mastering Dungeons! Main topic: 2024 5E Conditions and Greyhawk’s Regions! We examine the design goals of conditions and how they have changed for 2024. We visit Greyhawk’s Paynims, Perrenland, Pomarj, Ratik, and Rel Astra to see how to make the most of kingdoms and rulers. News: 2024 PH Errata, Draw Steel License, Shadowdark Hex Crawl, and more! Contents 00:00 Tastes Like Introcaso 01:43 Alignment Problems? 16:21 Preferred Tools VTT or Table? 25:33 2024 PH Errata 30:15 Time Mag on D&D 33:37 BMG Organized Play Survey 34:49 Draw Steel Creator License 37:34 Shadowdark Hex Crawling Rules 41:17 Grim Hollow Valikan Clans 44:30 Jeff Stevens on PWYW 46:18 Frontiers of Eberron PreOrder 50:47 Conditions in 5E 2024 vs 2014 51:40 Design Goals 01:00:07 4E and Do We Need Conditions? 01:02:50 2014's Conditions 01:06:43 2024 vs 2014 01:30:24 Greyhawk's Plains of the Paynims 01:35:17 Perrenland 01:37:23 Pomarj 01:39:48 Ratik 01:41:27 Rel Astra and Solnor Compact 01:45:02 Shout-Outs Thank you for listening! Get the full show notes with links on Patreon. Show Search Engine: https://mdsearch.alphastream.org/ Our intro and outro music is Metropolis Fanfare, provided royalty-free by Tabletop Audio (https://tabletopaudio.com) under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). MP3 file metadata populated with Online MP3 Podcast Chapter Editor, built by Dominik Peters. https://mp3chapters.github.io/ and customized for Mastering Dungeons by Vladimir Prenner from Croatia.
Hello and welcome to yet another episode of Mastering Dungeons. We hope all of you role-playing game fans, players, game masters out there are looking forward to another week. I am Sean here with my friend Teos Abadie. Hey, Teos. What's the haps?
I was visited in Portland. Well, okay. He didn't come to see me, but James Intercaso was in Portland.
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
I was visited by him via text saying that he was running Peril and Pinebrook for a family member's birthday. And I thought, that's awesome. Thank you for letting me know, Jameson. He is the nicest guy. So I didn't get the full Jameson Tricasso experience. You did. I'm jealous, but... I got a small taste of it. That's good.
I mean, every taste is good of James. This cannot be disputed.
Yeah, it got weird there. We like it weird. And we also like hearing from our listeners. We like hearing... uh for them via all the social medias and so we take a few questions or comments and we're gonna do so this week as well first via youtube from servant b36
asking about alignment is your dissatisfaction with alignment more about its impact on gameplay and mechanics or its simplistic portrayal of morality and character complexity should a fantasy games alignment system reflect real life nuances or is it sufficient to use it as broad archetypes as a starting point for character development because does this stem from dnd's all things to all people generic fantasy approach to rpg design
as opposed to other games' more opinionated takes. I'm thinking of 13th Age and MCDM and other explicitly heroic role-playing games. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on better ways to describe characters apart from alignment. Now, to be clear, Teos and I, I think, differ a bit on this question. So I'm the one that is dissatisfied with alignment. And sometimes I play it up for the clicks.
as the kids would say. But yeah, I am dissatisfied and here's why. Alignment is a tool that has been used in D&D since there has been D&D. And for the most part, it's been a tool for role-playing purposes. There have been points where it was also mechanical, but that sort of thing has waxed and waned over the years about how mechanical we make it. So alignment mechanics are mostly gone from 5E.
So let's just focus on it as a role playing tool. And I was thinking about this and I read another listener on YouTube who's JoeB3688, as opposed to ServantB36. Coincidence? I don't know.
A little suspicious, let's be honest.
Yeah. And they talk about how they use alignment. Alignment, and this is from Joe B. Alignment is just like the whole game, abstract representation. I have my players choose it. It is a role-playing tool, and a few times it may be important in the mechanics.
uh quote i have chosen to be good and follow laws says the player who takes a certain alignment and then we have a conversation about what that means take the abstract we decide together what it looks like for that character using the choice as a reference it doesn't mean you can't do evil or chaotic it just tells me as a dm a guideline about what kind of choices a player will probably make
And my experience is that Joe B. there is using the tool about as well as you can use it. And in my experience since first edition AD&D, I hate all of that. Now, again, this is my experience over 30 years, and I'll break it down. And hop in at any point, Teos, because I'm just going to go until you stop me.
No, I'm enjoying this. Go ahead.
So the one part of this is, you know, we choose an alignment, then we have a conversation about what it means, right? Now, as part of a session zero, communication is important, but I have about one hour or two hours or four hours of other things to talk about. With all those other things to talk about, one of the things I don't wanna talk about is, okay, you chose lawful good.
Let's talk about what that means and the situations where it might come up. Okay, you chose chaotic neutral. Let's talk about that. And communication's great, but when it's talking about something that I think could be done more easily, more effectively, and more richly, I don't want those conversations. Now we're talking about philosophy as opposed to games. Are you with me so far, Teos? Yeah.
You want to jump in? Okay. Then there's the quote, we take the abstract and we decide together what it looks like for that character using the choice as a reference. And again, I get this. But then what you get into the conversation is, what would you do in this situation? What would you do in this situation? What would you do in this situation?
And even if you only do five situations, is that an hour of talk? Is that a half hour of talk for one character? And those are only in five instances where something might happen. And you know within the first session, there's going to be the sixth thing. And then we have to stop and talk about it for the sixth thing.
When what you could say is, tell me your character's goals and one rule in life that they like to follow. Now we are not getting into philosophy. We are just saying to this player, give me some words that we understand the meaning of to tell me about your character. And I'll just get to the final thing. It tells me as a DM, as a guideline, what kind of choices a player will probably make.
Probably, okay, we're already on shaky ground, but it doesn't tell you what kind of choices that character will probably make or that player will probably make because the player can make any choice they want for that character. They can say, in my life, this is exactly how I am. And then they come up to a situation and they decide, you know what?
All the things that I believed as a character, they're out the window. I now believe this. And all of that discussion we've had, really, other than the big turn, whether it's a heel turn or a face turn, if you use pro wrestling parlay, has gone for naught.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
The way that we play.
And part of this for me is scarring from my college days when I was forced to take nine credits of philosophy, nine credits of theology, and we had all these arguments. And what it comes down to is there is no right answer and there, or there are several right answers to what is good. What is lawful? What is your unlawful? What, what is all of these?
And so to try to answer them through a game, it's, it's fine to try to answer them through a game, but it's not right to debate them through a game.
Yeah.
I want to know what your character is thinking as they do it, as opposed to what would they do because you've put this tag on them.
Yeah.
And my answer to that is no.
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
I have gone through enough education and through enough experience with storytelling that that sort of cut and dry thing is the least interesting part of a character's story. And like you said, it was a tool that was put in place. And it can be fun, right? The memes are funny. The little charts with the people. Batman is all alignments, right? The pizza topping, right? Whatever. The toast. Right.
But you need... you need to look beyond that tool to better tools that have been created by other games to do the same thing, to talk about tough moral dilemmas without saying good and evil. Because there's so many shades of gray in there that you need to drill in on what that character's story is.
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?
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.
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?
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?
So thank you for the question and thank you for the comments to both of you to help us sort of get through that question. And we have another question via LuckWhisker coming to us via YouTube again.
So in light of the Sigil conversation, that's the virtual tabletop that Wizards has been showing off, I would be interested in hearing more of your perspective about using digital tools, especially at the table. Have either of you played in many online games?
When you play in person, do you or your players have laptops open to use D&D Beyond and other tools like character sheet managers, VTTs, etc.? As DMs, what are your preferred tools for battle maps at the table? Dry erase, paper, minis, theater of the mind? And how does this experience affect your thinking about the way Sigil is likely to be received by the community?
Will you use it in your own games?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
yeah so for me there's two questions here there's the tools conversation of how do you digitally use uh these tools to make play better and it is for me it's i like dnd beyond i also like a character sheet in front of me i can do both and i try not to tell people this is how you should or this is how you have to because who knows what their situation is um So in that way, use what's best for you.
In terms of presentation of the game, this is what I used last time. I am showing a big, gorgeous battle map.
Yeah, it's got different glowing areas. Yeah, pretty cool.
Yeah. What's that from? This is from the Ghostfire Gaming's Citadel of the Unseen Sun. I usually use wet erase on a vinyl map or on a plastic map or whatever. But if I can get my hands on something like that, that completely matches the adventure, then that's how I will go. Because one of my design credos is put one cool thing in each combat or each encounter.
And sometimes if that one cool thing is complicated, it's hard to draw it quickly. So that's why I love having a battle map. The first, I mean, I played online during COVID. I learned how to use Roll20, ran a couple different adventures on that, but it was all, I purchased it, it was all set for me, and I could build stuff, but like you, Teos, it enervated me to do that. I just wanted to run.
Winter Fantasy. Oh, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. Winter Fantasy, several years ago, pre-COVID. Someone brought this television, flat-screen television, to set on the table. And this was the first time I'd seen it used this way. They had Roll20. They set the map up. And I thought, oh, this is going to be really cool. And everyone would walk by and go, oh, cool, cool.
And they were watching and asking questions. And what ended up happening, the DM was great. Don't get me wrong. But it was, okay, you've gone to a new encounter. Let me get the map up. Five minutes pass. Oh, let me resize it so it fits the minis that I'm going to put on and your minis. Okay. And it slowed the game down to the point where it wasn't, it didn't add to the game. It detracted from it.
I would have rather had the vinyl maps and drawing because it would have saved us probably 20 minutes to a half hour of a four-hour session. So... Yeah, it's the old technology thing, right? Technology should enhance things, whether it's education or business or whatever. It should enhance, not interrupt. And sometimes we get to a point where it interrupts rather than enhance.
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.
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.
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.
Some part of it is the fact that a lot of times we're playing those without any tools because none exist.
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
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.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Definitely. Definitely a way that I would say a lot of people come to the game looking for that. And also, there's the counterpoint of there's the people that just want to play it as a game. And having all the books right there, they're fully engaged. They're not putting their character sheet aside, pulling a book out, flipping.
They can just click a link, go to the rules they need, and that's a whole thing.
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
Now to our news and commentary section, starting with the 2024 Players Handbook Errata. Did you know there was?
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?
How did you know?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah.
So D&D has not provided a list of that errata. But and they also haven't transferred previous 2014 5e errata that they had up on the website. So the wizards.com website had a list of errata. When that site went away, nothing was transferred to D&D Beyond, so we can keep track of the errata that has been.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
We go from... digital to sort of analog with Time Magazine's D&D Special, now available out in stores. Go to your favorite newsstand. Kids, newsstands are these places that were usually out on the street where you could buy these paper books that we called magazines. And Time Magazine was one of those. And they now have a special D&D issue to celebrate the 50th anniversary of D&D.
You can also go to Amazon to buy it, of course. And we don't have a copy, but friend of the show Walt says, I think it's a nice little collector's piece, whether it's worth the $15 cover price is debatable. I haven't finished flipping through it yet, but the articles I've read are top notch, even if none of the info will be new to someone like you or us. Overall, I'm happy with the approach.
This looks at D&D with an air of legitimacy, not just some niche hobby for nerds, and is aimed at educating mainstream readers.
There's, of course, the obligatory promotion of the new edition, but it really does cover the full spectrum of the hobby as it exists today, from Baldur's Gate to the movie to actual plays to its use in therapy, along with the cute puff pieces about stuff like why we love Dyson, who is Vecna.
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.
Yeah. And, uh, someone said, I, The name alludes to me, but someone who I've worked with, an artist who I've worked with, said that an artist who I've had do pieces just for me and my family, for our characters, said that what Matt Morrow, there we go, it came to me, Matt Morrow, said that one of his pieces of art was used in the Time magazine. So kudos. Yeah, that's great.
Yes, but they talk about the partnerships and all the licensed D&D products, but what are we lacking still, Teos? No D&D baloney.
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.
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.
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
So if you don't know, Bald Man Games is the group that organizes convention games for Wizards of the Coast. So if you go to Gen Con and play the official D&D stuff, if you go to some of the PAX conventions and a few other conventions around the country, some of the Comic Cons even, there will be an organization.
Teos was representing Bald Man Games when you ran stuff at PAX Prime or PAX West just last week. So they've put up a survey asking some questions about your interest in organized play of various kinds, both who you are as a player or a game master and what your expectations or your desires are for organized play content.
And so we have a link in our show notes, it's baldman.link and then bmgop__survey. And you can go there and you can tell Bald Man Games folks what you're looking for in your organized play and convention events.
Yeah. Exciting.
Yep. And speaking of James Intricasso, MCDM has released a draw steel creator license. And since you talked to James last, I'm going to let you talk about this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Yeah. We had, uh, Matt Colville on the Eldritch lore cast last week, and he was very careful not to mention draw steel, even though I, I wish he would have. And I wish he would have talked about this because that would have been very fascinating. Um, But that's okay, and we go from MCDM's Drawsteel to Arcane Library's Shadow Dark. There is a new Shadow Dark hex crawling rule set.
So of course, the Arcane Library is the publisher of Shadow Dark, and they are providing a free download of some hex crawling rules, part of three cursed scroll zines that will be kickstarted soon.
these rules are similar to other osr old school renaissance style hex crawlers you roll to see if your terrain changes so that you don't get big variances like going from a desert and then all of a sudden you're standing in a river what else is in this pack
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.
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.
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.
The DM rolls for random encounters every other hex, and you kind of repeat various steps over and over again.
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
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.
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?
Yeah. We made a similar thing for 5e with Aurora, sort of exploration and then settlement creation. And I'm curious then to read this to see how it breaks it down. It simplifies. I want to run or play a Shadow of the Dark campaign for more than just a one shot. Just to play it as it is meant to be played. And I need to find the time and the people.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
I can tell you why you love it. It's because it started with Aurora and it started with Scott Gray, who I said, let's build a system where you can, instead of using a species, you can build based on all the things, ancestry, species, background, build a character. And then we looked at it and we said, this can work even in a more traditional setting than Aurora, if we focus it.
And that's why clans, right? Even if you might be a dwarf, but you're from a magic-using clan, so all of the stonework stuff that you think is part of a dwarven background, you don't take that. You take this spellcasting stuff because you're from Clan Rune, and your clan is all about using magic.
So, yeah, we tried to build a system, and we're going to be using that in the Grim Hollow Reforged, or Transformed Kickstarter coming up. We're going to do it for the whole setting. So, thank you. Great stuff. That works really nice. Appreciate it. And speaking of creators, we have our Creator Corner, starting with Jeff Stevens, who talks about in his newsletter, Pay What You Want.
Pay What You Want is one of those things that some people are like, yes, it's very useful. And some people are like, never ever put up a Pay What You Want product. And Jeff gives some details about what Pay What You Want has meant to him and his company. So his product called Encounters on the Savage Seas 3, It has been downloaded 10,316 times, but it's a gold bestseller. What does gold mean?
Gold means it's actually been purchased between 500 and 1,000 times out of those 10,000 downloads. And it has 56 ratings and three reviews with 10,000 downloads. So what does Jeff recommend? He recommends using Pay What You Want to promote other products. So he would put a small sample of his recent Mace of Tiamat, or his magic item book.
He puts up the small sample as Pay What You Want, so it gets 1,500 downloads.
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
And so we go from Jeff to Eberron. Frontiers of Eberron Quickstone is up for pre-order on the DMs Guild. Yes, you heard that right. Pre-order on the DMs Guild. Teos, you did a deeper dive into this than I did. So tell me all about it.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If I were a creator, I'd recommend it as a way of studying this kind of product. It's pretty neat.
The area of Dro-Am in Eberron was always one that was fascinating to me, because it was sort of the monster run setting. Was it Dargoon? Was the goblins, hobgoblin, goblinoid nation?
but drome was the much further away from humanoid sort of uh setting so it's it's a fascinating place and i'm glad that keith gets this opportunity to share his uh his creation with with all of us yeah getting to our main topic here on this extra special episode of mastering dungeons we are going to do our twofer first our 2024 5e mini review
And then we will get to Greyhawk and talk about more regions that we may see in the Dungeon Master's Guide of 2024. So, this week we want to talk about conditions. Conditions are something that have creeped more and more, I think, into our D&D game over the editions.
And so we're gonna talk about why we have them, why designers use them, what were they in 2014, and what have they become in 2024, if anything. So as design goals, Taos, you may disagree, but I'm going to break it down this way. We've said before that if you put role-playing and story aside as a game, D&D is about reducing the enemies to zero hit points before they reduce you to zero hit points.
Obviously an oversimplification, but if you break it down, there is an underlying structure that that's you win. If you can take the monsters down, you lose if they take you down. Okay. So why conditions?
Well, conditions are meant to make that goal of knocking the masters to zero before you get to zero a little more interesting, with a little more fun and a little more flavor, because there's also the story elements that need to be involved. Why do we need petrified as a condition in our game of D&D? Because in our mythology, we have basilisks and medusae and things that turn you to stone.
So the game needs to support that story-wise and therefore mechanically. Why do we need the Charmed condition? Well, because we have stories with succubi and vampires and things that alter your mind and make you serve them or befriend them. So therefore, since it's in our stories, it needs to be in our games.
So it's got that dual purpose of flavor of stories and mechanics to make things more interesting than you take 27 hit points of damage. With that, I'm going to take a break and I'm going to get some thoughts from Teos on this whole what are conditions and why.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
And 2024 is saying, we want to free up the DM from having to make calls all the time that'll get questioned.
Right.
Right?
Which one you like.
Yeah.
And that's why, jumping sideways here, that's why in the 2024 books, we see so many capitalized words. because we were seeing words used with their regular connotation, matching words that were game terms. So if something is charmed, is it charmed just because they feel a kinship or attracted to a creature, or are they charmed as in the magical compulsion?
And sometimes when the word was used one way in one place, it questioned whether it was a game term or not. So now they've gone to using these capital letters. So when you are prone, small p, it just means you're lying down. When it's prone with a capital P, It means you have a condition that means very concrete things in the game.
How important are conditions to 2024 D and five E D and D how many times do you think the word condition or conditions or conditional appears in the 2024 players handbook?
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.
300?
How about 878 times? The word condition and its derivative appears in the 2024 Player's Handbook. That should be a small clue to how important conditions are in this game. As we go through... there was a question that came up in my mind over and over and over again.
And that is, is it better to have more conditions that do a very specific single thing or fewer conditions but have them take on more weight by having more riders attached to them? And I don't think there's a right or wrong answer per se. It would come down to... your opinion on what's clearer.
But what I mean is, as we go through, you'll see that some conditions have like six riders that go down them. Basically six little sub-conditions within the condition. And some, well, most have more than one. So my question is, as we do this, what would be better for you as a player, as a game master, as a designer? Would it be
50 small conditions that you can stack together or these larger conditions that you can also, in some way, make a subset or a superset of each other.
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.
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.
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.
And that tactical juiciness is there.
And for those of you who like the more narrative, well, if you're petrified, you're just made of stone, and that pretty much sums it up. The question I have is, well, can you take psychic damage while you're petrified? Because some reasonable people would say, absolutely. Why wouldn't you? You still have a mind. And others would say, well, no, obviously not, because you're petrified.
The brain is stone. Right. So that's why these questions become important. Ed, so as we go through, think about that. So for 2014, we had a lot of conditions, and we saw many of these conditions in 4th edition. In 4th edition, many of these conditions had a rider called Save Ends. So what would happen is you would be attacked by the wizard, right?
The wizard would hit you with a bolt of energy, which would do damage and stun you. And the stun would be save ends, which means on your turn, you wouldn't be able to act because you were stunned, but you got to make a saving throw. And if you made that saving throw, the stunned condition went away. If you failed it, you remained stunned for at least a certain amount of time.
It became interesting because you would end up sometimes with, especially if you were the DM and you had a monster that the group was teaming up on, you would have five, six, seven conditions on the creature all at the same time. And people were using plastic rings from soda pop bottles. You know, you pull the top off and it's still got that ring.
And so they would collect different colored rings or they would use rubber bands or they would use scrunchies like hair ties.
yeah to put over the minis to say all right well this is stunned incapacitated prone on fire etc etc and then at the end of the turn you would have to okay i've got six conditions on me so i have to roll save ends for every one of those conditions here we go oh i failed that one oh but i made that one and you would remove conditions uh as you went
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.
Mm hmm. It did get to be a little bit ridiculous. And so when we got to 5e, we have a list of 15 conditions. And I would say they are less prevalent than they were with fourth edition, at least at the start of fifth edition. As we went, we began to get more and more rules that were allowing these conditions to be applied to characters. What were the 15 conditions in 2014?
Blinded, charmed, deafened, exhaustion, frightened, grappled, incapacitated, invisible, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned, prone, restrained, stunned, and unconscious. 15 conditions. Excellent. And when I was trying to come up with a topic, I'm like, huh, let's talk about conditions because I'm sure that there must be differences in the 2024 players handbook.
I didn't go through and read other people's analysis and lists. I just like, I need to do this on my own. I won't remember. So let's do it. And I went through and I looked at all the conditions and there are 15 and they are exactly the same names. Names. Yeah. Yeah. But there are slight differences in some cases. So that's what we're going to look at now.
Before we dive into these individual ones, Teos, do you have any other sort of overview thoughts on this topic?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is interesting. The one the one reason that save ends work so well in fourth edition was because there was only one save. It wasn't charisma save, it wasn't even going back to third edition, it wasn't a reflex save or a, what else was there, fortitude save. Boy, I'm really mixing up my editions here. It's hard to remember those like that, yeah.
Yeah, for saving throws in fourth edition, you just rolled a 20-sided die. If you got a 10 or higher, you saved. So it wasn't, to do that with fifth edition, you would have to say, right, Constitution save ends DC blank. And it would, you could still say 10, but then they would still have to go and add, oh, what's my, oh, I'm proficient with cons, so here we go, plus five.
I think it would still be good. I still like that mechanic. It would just be a little harder to adjudicate. all right so here we go 2024 flair's handbook let's go through one at a time ready blinded pretty much the same uh the wording slightly changed but the the core of it is still the same charmed and deafened pretty much still the same now we get to the good stuff exhausted
exhaustion all right we've talked about this already we but let's do it again in 2014 we had an escalating scale of penalties based on your level of exhaustion so at first level of exhaustion you were you had disadvantage on ability checks at the second level of exhaustion your speed was halved your third level of exhaustion you had disadvantage on attack rolls and saving throws and that's where
If the first didn't really upset you and the second was something you could work around, the third one was generally the one where people started giving up on their character. Then by the fourth level of exhaustion, your maximum hit points was halved. And by fifth level of exhaustion, your speed was reduced to zero. but there was no rule that say it couldn't be increased.
So apparently if you got some sort of spell that would increase your speed, your speed would go up by that. It's just, that's something I noted because now we're seeing a lot of, and your speed can't be increased. So they didn't put that in there. So technically based on the rules that they're now adding, your speed could be increased through magic.
And at the sixth level exhaustion, you are an X character. You are dead. Yeah.
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
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.
And that's literally the point of what I shouldn't have to do. And yet I'm going to have to do it.
Yeah, I was good with the minus one to D20 checks during the play test. And when the minus two came, I thought they were going to, what they normally would do is take the teeth away from it. And so I thought it would be, oh, something puny. And they went in the opposite direction. So minus two to D20 tests. D20 tests, if you don't know, are saving throws, attack rolls, and ability checks.
so that's uh that's significant at at minus two you're in the disadvantage territory uh at minus three you probably go just beyond the disadvantage uh mathematical penalty for for d20 roles we're gonna get arguments about that sean Yeah, that's OK. I'm not a mathematician. I do not play one on TV or in podcasts. But, you know, we're we're in the ballpark here.
Either way, I think that to me, it's less about the math of it.
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
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.
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.
yeah and and it's interesting you know that mentality that sort of mental uh the mental part of what the player brings to the game cannot be overstated and that is another really huge benefit of play testing is check the numbers yes check check this check that but also check what what players are willing to put up with because
i can tell you right now if you take exhaustion or you take these other penalties and you take them away from what the player sees put them on the dm rather than saying okay this player has a minus six on all their checks dm just increase the ac or the uh or the difficulty class of the checks that they make by six players would still engage the players would engage with the game differently.
They would try things to overcome them. They would think outside the box rather than just throw their hands up. And so that's one thing a game designer needs to keep in mind is where are you focusing that big, horrible penalty or advantage spotlight on the game itself and who interacts with the rule. Mm-hmm .
So let's go to Frightened. Now, am I right that that did not change either, or has it changed in some way?
It really hasn't changed. What they've done, I just wanted to put this in there to show this example of what was in the old rules and what's in the new rules and how it sounds different, but it's exactly the same. So in 2014, it says, "...a frightened creature has disadvantage on ability checks and attack rolls while the source of its fear is in line of sight."
The same thing in 2024 has a heading called Ability Checks and Attacks Affected. And it says, you have disadvantage on ability checks and attack roles while the source of fear is within line of sight. So it's basically the exact same thing, just worded differently. And 14 has, the creature can't willingly move closer to its source of fear.
and 2024 has can't approach you can't willingly move closer to the source of fear uh so they're putting these they're putting these sort of sub conditions like can't approach within the main condition which is why i asked that question at the start is would it be better to have many more of these sub are there other times when can't approach might be useful other than frightened and if we had this list that deals with everything movement
site that deals with all of this, could we build our own
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
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.
Well, you know what you do, Teo. Say your character's frightened, so you can't move 10 feet to get to the monster. I'll just shoot you with a heavy crossbow, and I will push you 10 feet, and then you did not willingly approach the monster, and you can now attack it. So there we go.
Or bring it to you, right? If you can bring it to you where you are, yeah.
For sure. So next is grappled. And again, pretty much the same. The only thing I want to point out is that something that I would hope they would fix that they didn't is they talk about moving a grapple target in 2024. And I have, in my 2020-2014 game, a creature, a PC that grapples everything and moves them in and out of an area that affects spells.
And so I had to make special rules for if the character wanted to move a grappled creature but not move themselves. Because it seems like you should be able to do that. Take someone, move them there. So I had to create rules. I was hoping with 2024 they would fix it. And so I saw the movable sub condition for grapple. I was like, okay, cool.
And it says the grappler can drag or carry when it moves. And every foot of movement costs one extra foot unless you are tiny or two sizes smaller than it. So basically, it still says, no, you can only drag or carry something when you as the grappler move with you. But what position is the grappled creature in? Is it in the exact same square relative to where you were all the time?
That question is still something that I know happens in my game every single round, much less every single combat, much less every single adventure. So there you go. More questions for Jeremy Crawford. Exactly. Incapacitated. Incapacitated got a really big redo.
In 2014, it was just an incapacitated creature can't take actions or reactions, which led to the question right away, can they take bonus actions? In 2024, there are four sub-riders that go with incapacitated. So one, you're inactive. You can't take an action, any action, bonus action, or reaction. Okay, cool. No concentration. Your concentration is broken when you become incapacitated.
Okay, that's clear. That's been added. Speechless. You can't speak. So this was added because in other places in the 2014 rules where it was, you know, you're blank, you're whatever, you're stunned, you're unconscious, it would say you're incapacitated and you cannot speak. So now they just added cannot speak to incapacitated.
And with the new surprise rules, it says if you're incapacitated when you roll initiative, you have disadvantage on the roll because you are surprised. Thoughts?
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.
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?
You know, like you can't sort of nail it all down. Right.
One thing you can do now and when you're incapacitated is move. Mm hmm. You can move if you're incapacitated, which is a difference from the previous one. Unless the other thing that incapacitates you also gives the you cannot move or your speed is zero rider, then you're free to move when you're just incapacitated.
Tell me about Invisible, because this one I find very interesting.
Yeah. Invisible, it's always been weird. Didn't we talk about sight and invisibility and finding things on a previous show? Yeah, stealth, hiding. Yep. For 2014, it's an invisible creature is impossible to see without the aid of magic or special sense. For the purpose of hiding, the creature is heavily obscured.
So they're using the game term heavily obscured to show something that's completely unobscured, including your body, which is weird. The creature's location can be detected by any noise it makes or any track it leaves. So you can still be found when you're invisible. Attack rolls against the creature have disadvantage and the creature's attack rolls have advantage.
And this got into the weird situation where you would need to make a hide check while you were invisible or a creature would know exactly where you were. They still couldn't see you, which led to problems. So an area of effect spell would still be able to target them. Right, right. So what do we have for 2024? We have surprise.
If you are invisible when you roll initiative, you have advantage on the roll because you have surprised the enemy. Concealed. You aren't affected by any effect that requires its target to be seen unless the effects creator can somehow see you. Any equipment you are wearing or carrying is also concealed. And then the attack's affected.
The attack rolls still have disadvantage and your attack rolls have advantage. If the creature can somehow see you, you don't gain this benefit against that creature. Boom. So in some ways it's simplified, but in some ways it really didn't change much. Unless we go outside and look at other terms.
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.
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
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
Some things are a little trickier, but for the most part, paralyzed. So basically the same. In 2014, there were four riders saying that you're incapacitated, can't move or speak, automatically fail strength deck saving throws, attacks against you have advantage, any attack that hits you is a critical hit if the attacker is within five feet of you. And in 2014, now we have five riders.
So it's incapacitated again. Your speed is zero and can't increase. Automatically fail strength saving throws. And then the same two attacks affected and automatic critical hits are there. And this can't move from the 2014 rules is one of the reasons why some people want a game that gives more game-specific or rule-specific verbiage, verbiage, both verbiage and verbiage.
But because a paralyzed creature in 2014 is incapacitated and can't move or speak. And move there is a word that means different things to different people, right? Some people say all that means is you cannot leave the square you're in because your speed is zero, where some people means you can't blink, you can't shift your eyes. And while game mechanically, that might not be a big deal.
Me being able to move my eyes and give hints to where a creature might have gone or. blink twice to tell me the answer to this is a huge story thing for a game and so now with 2024 paralyzed we have your speed is zero and can't increase all your incapacitate so you can't take actions But what now does that mean in terms of what you can do within the parameters of all of those different riders?
Can you blink? Can you whistle? It's not speaking. So it's still a question that is unanswered and will change from table to table.
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.
Yep. And the rest are very, very similar. I think the stunned condition, since incapacitated... change to say you can move i don't think the 2024 stunned condition says you can't move and unless i'm wrong uh i can look it up relatively quickly that is interesting uh so stunned i don't see it saying that you can't move
right incapacitated so it's incapacitated removed that writer of you can't move and stunned yeah So you can move when stunned, which is interesting. You can move while stunned at this point. Will that be changed? We'll find out. And the last thing is the prone condition. I just wanted to make this note because I thought it was hilarious.
In 2014, a prone creature's only movement option is to crawl unless it stands up and thereby ends the condition. Say you knock something without a form prone. Can a jelly stand up? So what they did in 2024 was your only movement options are to crawl or to spend an amount of movement equal to half your speed to, quote, right yourself and thereby end the condition.
So they've gotten rid of stand up and added right yourself. And I thought, that's hilarious and super pedantic, but... By golly, with the rules lawyers out there, sometimes you have to be super pedantic and therefore ruin the game for everyone. So it's just it's it's hilarious and terrifying. And that's where we stand.
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.
Right.
Yeah. And then again. An open question is. Go ahead while I look this up.
Well, it's. They've tried so hard to make everything mean something, and then you get this and are not aware of your surroundings. what does that mean? Can you see? Why not add the blinded condition when you're unconscious?
You've got the condition.
Yeah, you've got all those conditions right there. Why not use them? Why say unaware of your surroundings, which could, for some people, that means I can do anything because while I'm unaware of my surroundings, it doesn't mean I can't
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.
Interesting. Yeah. And I've, I mean, in the game design I'm doing for Grim Hollow right now, we're using bloody a lot. nice because i remember that from you know third fourth edition and uh it was you could do a lot of cool things with it tactically that didn't add a lot of weight to the game right right so yeah
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.
So we'll continue our look next time with some other element of the game to look at why it's there, what it was, and what it is now.
Let's quickly hop over, land safely in the realm of Greyhawk, where we talk about even more regions from the living Greyhawk Gazetteer with a hopeful look forward to what they're going to present in the 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide and their discussion of Greyhawk there. Shall we jump into the regions that we have to get to cover?
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.
Yep. And he's talking about the Plains of the Paynims. And so what's that? Well, it is a loosely affiliated area with tribes of backloonish nomads, hence the turbans and the Middle Eastern look that have a hierarchy of nobles, but no rigid structure.
so this is in the far far far west of the eastern plenaeus where the backloonish nations existed before the invoked devastation that we talked about at the start of this whole look at greyhawk so these are now grasslands that aren't necessarily great for farming but do allow for livestock to graze and some herbs to grow uh And since the soil is poor, there are nomads there.
They have to keep moving to find the best soil and the best sources of water. But there are clear parallels to the nomads of Asia. So if you go all the way back to the horse riding Mongol empire, you get very strong themes of that here.
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.
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.
Yeah, precisely. So if you want to do a cool nomadic sort of campaign or adventure or set of adventures, this is a good place to set it. I think back to Game of Thrones, and I didn't read the books but I only watched part of the series, but that sort of nomadic tribal force.
The horse lords, the Rohan of Lord of the Rings. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. That sort of thing. To a greater or lesser extent, there is an area of there that is already steeped in that sort of background.
Yeah. The other thing that's cool about them, but it's not super focused, as we've said, often this book
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
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.
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.
Yep. And we'll jump from the dry plains of the Paynims to Perrin Land, which is a place where... Well, first of all, it's named after Jeff Perrin, who was a game designer with TSR back in the day. Yeah, co-designer of Chainmail. There you go. A bunch of people war, and then their eventual leader named Perrin sort of brings them all together, and they name the land after him.
What else is up with Perrin land?
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.
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.
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.
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
palmarge is the next region and this region is interesting because it is the uh land of turash mak who is a half work who rose to power over the years in a specific series of venture adventures called the a series back in the early early early a d and d days and
When the villains of those adventures who would take captives, and it was also called the Slave Lord series, after they were defeated, Turishmak unites all the orcs and other humanoids in this area and takes it over and it becomes its own nation.
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.
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.
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
evil land and try to wreak havoc, assassinate, help retake over the land, unless you're going to play sort of the humanoids. And then you can play as the orcs or other, quote unquote, evil humanoids who are just trying to protect what's yours and fight off these evil humans and elves and dwarves.
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.
We'll head north to Radek. which sits beneath the remnants of the old great kingdom to the south and the various barbarian lands to the north. Craddock was named for a general who held back the barbarians, and he was granted the land by the over-king of the Great Kingdom, and then later became independent. And we see this story play out throughout many of the regions here.
Part of the Great Kingdom on the outskirts at one point, when the Great Kingdom starts to decay, these individual lands become their own independent nations. uh, what else is cool about Ratic?
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,
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.
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.
And the last region that we will look at in this episode is Realm Astra and the Solnar Compact. Rel Astra is a free and independent city state under the rule of an undead administrator advised by a demon. It's good work if you can get it. And when I become a ruler of my own evil domain, I want to be called Drax the Invulnerable. Just putting that out there right now.
I mean, the title Fiend Sage for the administrator, also pretty cool.
Yeah. Yeah. And this is an interesting one in the sense that this is another place that has broken away from the great kingdom over the years. And so it is called Lawful Evil because it is run by this undead person being advised by a demon. But he's also called pragmatic and with a wry sense of humor. And while he is obviously evil,
it's not like this horrible like with iuz that this sort of destruction is is described it sort of is fighting against evil all around them and they have joined with these other free city states to make the solnar compact so this area is on the far eastern coast of the flanais south of the north kingdom and east of alyssa so it's sitting there in its own little
long coastal stretch where these city-states have formed a pact to defend each other against any aggression from bigger powers.
and uh rel rel astra is seen as one of the largest uh cities in all of the of greyhawk greyhawk city and you know grad school and and uh some of the other cities would argue but it's still large and it's got three sections so you can do the old the old city the common city then the foreign quarter so you can have all sorts of intrigue within that and there's also political intrigue between these city states in the alliance
So while they are a pact, while they are a compact, there's always someone trying to woo one of the city-states to leave the compact and join them through marriage or through intrigue. The Scarlet Brotherhood is always there. The Old Kingdom is still trying to get their claws. And Alyssa, the same thing. So it's a place where you could have some fun and intrigue if you want it.
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
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
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And we thank you for that. Teos, what you been up to on social media and where can people find you?
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?
I am slowly not recovering from a work onslaught, but you can find me on at Sean Merwin at all the socials, or you can go on socials to at Mastering D&D and follow us there. All the places. The Twitterishness, whatever that is. Mastodon, Blue Sky. Join us on Patreon. Leave comments on our YouTube channel. Yay! Do the things. And now...
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.
I can only wish. I can only wish.