Mastering Dungeons
5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! (MD 209)
Wed, 02 Oct 2024
Episode 209 of Mastering Dungeons! Main topic: 5E Stat Block Changes and Building the Perfect Campaign Guide! We look at how 2024 5E changes stat block format, while also modifying monsters themselves. We then turn to creating the perfect campaign setting guide. News: 2024 5E Sales, Uni Finds Beyond, Grim Hollow Transformed, and more! Contents 00:00 Go Broncos! 00:56 Divine-Powered Goals? 19:35 2024 5E Sales 33:01 D&D on Vinyl 34:06 Uni on Beyond 36:40 Baldur's Gate 3 Minis 38:10 Horizons Magazine 41:15 Frontiers of Eberron's Creation 43:08 Grim Hollow Transformed 48:26 2024 Monster Stat Blocks 50:03 Design Goal 58:22 2024 Layout Changes 01:03:03 Changes to the Ape 01:10:34 Changes to the Imp 01:14:32 Other Creature Changes 01:20:45 Building the Perfect Campaign Guide 01:21:37 Constraints and Assumptions 01:22:40 Length 01:23:55 What to Include: The Pitch 01:26:25 Player Knowledge 01:27:29 The World 01:33:23 New Rules to Support Play 01:35:56 What Might Be Included? 01:39:15 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 this week's episode of Mastering Dungeons. I'm Sean Merwin here with the red and white supporting Santa Clara loving Teos Abadie. Hey Teos, how's it going?
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.
Santa Clara is a division one school, right?
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.
Awesome. Awesome. Well, speaking of greatness, we have some really great listeners out there who ask us some really great questions. And in fact, this week we had two really, really great questions that sort of overlapped. So we're going to do a bit of a deep dive into answering these two questions.
The first one is the short version from Paul Bigby via YouTube, who says, where is the subsystem in any WOTC D&D material that anchors the divine-powered character to the goals of the deity. And yes, I know a demon or cleric can make up some narrative answer, but that's table-specific and has no mechanical incentive or consistency.
Clerics and druids are, right now, just different flavors of wizards, and paladins are merely a multi-class fighter wizard.
second question yeah second question from michael draper via patreon this is sort of the longer version hi your discussion of gods and planes in the 2024 players handbook touched briefly on how clerics choose their god and how this determines the domains they can use for their spells the act of choosing the god for a cleric character doesn't just affect that character it also alters the setting of the game
Specifically, when the player chooses their cleric's god, they are making it canon that this god's power is active in that world. That's not a minor detail they're adding to the setting. That's defining the ongoing presence of a god in their game. How much of their game leans into that in play may vary, but that god's presence is there as long as that cleric is around.
This seems like a fertile concept for class design, providing character creation choices that simultaneously define aspects of the character and the setting, and in doing so enhances the setting and the player character's ties to it. Yet only three D&D classes, Clerics and to a lesser extent Paladins and Warlocks, seem to do this.
The other classes involve choices that are essentially limited solely to that character. Now here's the question part. is D and D missing out by not applying this character design concept to other classes? What if rogues had to choose a guild and a role as the way to get their subclass? What if other classes also got to choose setting wide organization or affiliation and their, uh,
and their role or tie to that to choose their subclass or other abilities. I could see how this could require creating Pantheon equivalents. That might be good or a bad thing if you had to do it for every class, like the way Eberron has its houses.
I'm interested in your thoughts on the way choosing a cleric's god influences the game at the table and on the merits or otherwise extending this design concept to other classes. Okay.
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.
But really, they're asking the same question, right? They're asking... Why does this choice that's seemingly so important not seem so important? And how could we make it more important for everyone? And should we? Yeah, it should be. And that's what we're going to get to. Especially how the second question of Michael Draper via Patreon was, here's how I would do it. Now the question is, should we?
So let's talk about all of this. The first thing I wanna say is if you've listened to me before, you know I talk about the three Fs of game design, right? Fun, flavor- They're all swear words. And freaking balanced. So what these two questions are talking about is what flavorful to me is about. It's making the rules illuminate and illustrate the setting in which your game takes place.
and the tone and the style and the atmosphere of your game. So you definitely want to always keep that in mind as you design the rules for your game and make the rules you make work not only for the mechanics, but also for the setting.
However, and here is what you always need to keep in mind, making those rules too restrictive can be detrimental to the fun of certain kinds of players and maybe a majority of the players. So the idea of these gods being important in your game is great until you have a setting where there are no gods or where you want to de-emphasize gods.
That is why I was super happy to see domains be emphasized for clerics rather than gods, or oaths be highlighted for paladins rather than gods in the core rules, not necessarily in setting books, but in the core rules. Because then if I play in Dark Sun, or if I play in Grim Hollow,
and the player who has only read the player's handbook comes to me and starts saying, well, what god do I choose in this? Then I have to explain, well, there are no gods here, so we're going to have to map these gods to these different things. With domains, you can have that, but the work is done in the setting rather than in the main game. I'm going to stop there and let you talk.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I understand that, and I want all of that work done in the setting. I want the game to be a tool with a skeleton or a blueprint, and then I want the setting to say, here is how we are going to do this particular thing. Because I want my player to be able to worship Umberlee but take the trickery domain or take trickery themed things.
I don't want the player to sit down and say, here's the concept for my character. I worship Umberlee, the storm goddess, the, the harsh weather sea goddess. But I, uh, But my my backstory is that I trick people into taking these long ocean voyages and then my goddess strikes them down. And then I send the crew later and pick up their wreck. So I'm really a rogue, but I am a cleric.
but the rules say here is my goddess i have to do these things and that's not what i want to do now i can as the dm say okay well just take the trickery domain and we'll just say you worship that but by tying it into again this tool set that that we have you are eliminating choices And that's why I don't want subclasses tied to organizations.
I don't wanna say you need to belong to the Thieves Guild to be able to take this feat or this subclass. Now, in a specific kind of campaign, I think that's wonderful. If you wanna create your world that does that, Please do. And I think there are, you know, Living Greyhawk did that great as the supplements came out. They said all this stuff is locked away.
However, if you join this organization, you can take this extra feat, not extra feat, but this feat that's in a supplement. But you need to, and that was great for that campaign.
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.
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?
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
And I just go back to, you can always do that in your setting. It's easier to add something than it is to take something out. If we go back to first edition, right? Clerics couldn't use bladed weapons, right? No matter what God you worshiped, no matter what, no matter what you just... Jeremy Crawford wasn't around. Exactly. And so...
So if the base rules tell you something is true, that's what people will default to, to a fault. I agree. I think we agree in principle, right? We want there to be rich story. We want things to tie together. We want players to think about the choices they make, and we want those choices to affect Everything.
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.
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.
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.
And right and 2014 had that it had that in a place, unfortunately, that people ignored because it wasn't mechanically relevant. And those were the blonde bonds, flaws, personality traits and goals. And So you could be anything you want. You could be any kind of paladin you want. You could be any kind of cleric you want.
And you could say, okay, I worship—think of a—I worship the god of magic, but I worship the god of magic because I hate magic. Right. And so I'm in my traits or in my flaws or in my goals, I'm going to tie myself to the world that way. And then you're not restricted in playing a certain character in a certain way. But they didn't.
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
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,
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.
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?
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.
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
Yeah, absolutely. I know we agree. It's just a matter of where that weight belongs. What prickled at the back of my neck was that idea in the question of rogues having to choose a guild and a role as a way to get their subclass. Story-wise, in your campaign, absolutely do that. I just don't want that done in the base rules. I don't want to be a second story thief. Right.
Or whatever that subclass is now.
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?
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.
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.
I've said my piece. I think I've already said my piece. I don't need to say it again. I will simply say rules are a toolbox. If you make your tools too specific, you are limiting how a game master and their players can use that tool. Agreed. Okay. Well, that's, I mean, that's a, what a way to start. What a way to start. So thank you to Michael and to Paul for those questions.
You can ask your questions all the ways. And we'll talk about all those at the end of the episode.
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.
We're going to talk about building the perfect setting book so you can come back for the next segment to hear about that. In the meantime, let's get into some news and commentary, starting with an interesting press release from Wizards of the Coast that has triggered a lot of discussion by people who aren't me.
D&D 2024 players handbook sales, according to this press release from Wizards of the Coast, exceeded the initial sales of 2014 players handbook. And it also became the fastest selling D&D book ever. Of all time. Of all time. So this press release said that Tasha's Cauldron of Everything had been the fastest selling D&D book, but the 2024 Player's Handbook has already surpassed that.
So Teos, explain what fastest selling D&D book of all times means.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Well, yeah, the press release also, well, they printed three times as many copies, like you said. And so they give us another estimate about how many people have played D&D worldwide. In 2022, they gave us an estimate of 50 million people. Now they're saying 85 million. So again, if this is even in the realm of correct, that's 30-some percent more have played since 2022.
So in the last two years, another 35 million people have played D&D.
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.
Right. And I believe this, just knowing the... The world in which we live and the newer people coming up through the school systems and out into the world, they are fans of this type of entertainment.
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.
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.
Yeah, well. I mean, anecdotally, I went in to talk to the local college's game club and they told me what room it was in. And I went to the room and I realized it wasn't one room. It was three rooms and it was full. It was full of I thought there might be like 20. You're right. We're looking at like 100 people. And then I went and talked to the writers club and
Before they did a show of hands, how many of you play D&D or role-playing games? Again, this was a table of maybe 30 people, and all but five raised their hand. The five that didn't raise their hand were the the president and the secretary and the treasurer of this club. And they they just looked at me stunned and I'm like and they went, wow.
And I'm like, yes, there are a lot of people playing this game. So that number makes sense to me. But in addition, they stated that D&D Beyond has over 18 million registered users. And this is what they also claimed in the quarter to 2024 call.
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.
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.
So on September 25th, the Player's Handbook debuted on the USA Today bestseller list at number 57. It's strong. It's not the highest that we've ever seen for a 5E release. But like you said, for a new .5 edition, if you will, that's pretty good sales. What else do we know about this game?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
And we'll have to figure out why it's wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's wrong.
Yeah, well, I mean, we know that they ran a special through D&D Beyond where you could get the digital and the print copy for a reduced rate. So people who were invested and who were gonna buy it no matter what, who are already on D&D Beyond, already paying or signed up on D&D Beyond, if they are your invested buyers, they are likely going to, or possibly going to use that route anyway.
So it would make sense if the numbers were skewed a little bit in that direction.
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.
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,
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.
Yeah, it would be. And what we see is what we see in... in most of life at this point. It's people looking to back up their opinions. And if there is data out there that does not back up their opinion, it's either a lie or incorrect or there's something wrong with the data. It can't be my opinion's wrong. It's got to be this other thing.
We'll continue to keep an eye on things, but for the most part, the book is out. We are reading it. We are discussing it. We are using it in our games mostly. So that's what is the important thing, at least for me, who works in the industry. Yep. But what I don't do is make music. but I can buy D&D on vinyl for the 50th anniversary. It's a licensed offering from Bardic Inspiration.
It's a vinyl record that celebrates the anniversary with 12 tracks reflecting a musical journey through the Forgotten Realms. Are you buying this, Teos?
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.
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.
Well, the vinyl has been found, but Uni has been lost. Or at least Uni's horn has. The 80s D&D cartoon adventure Uni and the Lost Horn is now available on D&D Beyond. We knew this was coming out. It was said it would be an exclusive for conventions like PAX West and some gaming stores. However, that exclusivity is now no more. If you're a D&D Beyond subscriber, you can get the adventure.
It is designed for four to six level four characters, including the pre-gens of the protagonists from the animated series, Bobby, Diana, Eric, Hank, Presto, and Sheila. There's also now a seventh character for Nico, a cleric from a different set of adventurers who recently tumbled into the D&D multiverse. Now, you ran this, Teos.
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?
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.
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.
But so that that makes it really strong, which is fine for this one shot because you want the kid cartoons to win.
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
What new minis are out there for us, i.e. you to drool over?
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it's a little later than you want, but here it is.
Awesome. Now over to our creator corner where we start with Horizons Magazine. A new company called Wild Mage Press created by Hannah Rose and Clara Daly are launching Horizons Magazine for 5e D&D and for other role-playing games. It will be a quarterly magazine featuring at least three D&D articles and then one article for a different role-playing game.
Upcoming role-playing games that will be featured will include Pathfinder and Candela Obscura in the first few issues. October 9th will be the release of the first issue. You can go to a Patreon to subscribe or you can go to wildmagepress.com to receive previews prior to the release. The first issue will include an article on Star Dragons written by a space plasma scientist, Imogene Ginjal.
New rune-powered vehicles and travel options by Aaron Roberts. Kukulan, a town in the Cloudlands of Nym. and Atraxis the Crystalline, a powerful orc mage, friend or foe, for the Pathfinder 2E game.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's hard to get them to put their money where their mouth is.
I hope it works. That is very true. So good luck to everybody there at Wild Maids Press. We also get a little behind-the-scenes look at Frontiers of Eberron. Teos talked about Frontiers of Eberron a couple weeks ago, and then one of our listeners and supporters shared some cool behind-the-scenes information. You want to... Read this for us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yep, Frontiers of Eberron is still number one on the DMs Guild, so you can go there and definitely check it out. And I think they're having a sale right now on the DMs Guild, so you might want to go and check out not just Frontiers of Eberron, but a lot of starter set things are on sale on the DMs Guild.
And last but not least, the Grim Hollow Transformed Kickstarter is live by the time you hear this show. With a link in our show notes, you can go there or you can just search for Grim Hollow Transformed on Kickstarter and you can check it out. What's involved in this Kickstarter? Well, let me tell you. It's not that I've been working on it for the last few months or anything.
You get a campaign guide with an update to the setting where we dig down into each region of the world. And then a stretch goal that I think we'll be able to hit, we'll look at one city and give us a detailed description, adventure areas and so on, for one city within each of those regions.
You'll also get all the factions of Atheris and then a guide to magic and divinity within that setting update. But also you'll get articles on how to run a dark fantasy campaign. So there'll be a chapter covering all that. We'll present you with variant rules for dark fantasy campaigns. Your character's healing a little too quickly? We could take care of that in a nice, balanced way.
New magic items, new curses and new curse monsters, all of that covered in the campaign guide. Then you hop over to the player's guide where the real meat and potatoes are. You get the heritage system where you can do your own choosing of traits for the heritage that you want your character to have. So you want to play dwarf, you get a bunch of standard traits.
You want to say, well, my dwarf had nothing to do with mining. So I'm gonna remove this trait and replace it with this trait because my dwarf grew up in a merchant human city. You can do all of that, build your own heritages from scratch, et cetera. We give you a new class called the Monster Hunter, and then new and updated subclasses for not just the Monster Hunter, but for all of the classes.
So all the ones that were in the previous book will be updated for 2024, and we will give you at least one and maybe more new subclasses for each class. The transformations, if you have always wanted to use lycanthropy or vampirism or all of this stuff that's in our lore but has never been modeled really well with D&D rules, we give you transformations that will allow you to do that.
Updating all the transformations that have been there and adding some new ones as well. new spells, new and updated backgrounds and feats to match the 2024 rules, new and updated special equipment in the Player's Guide, and more! And you can't have a great campaign without having some adventures. So we are also offering five or possibly more with stretch goals, adventures, one for each region.
So if you wanna specifically set your campaign in a particular region, you can look at this adventure and it will give you a way to kick off your campaign and to show you what sorts of campaigns you can play in that particular region. And if all of that's not enough, you know how lots of Kickstarters say, we will support you choose a virtual tabletop and you will be supported.
We give you that for D and D beyond. So if you choose D and D beyond as your virtual, uh, play play area of choice, you'll be able to pick D and D beyond, and you will be able to purchase that material from the player's guide ahead of time. Wow. Where do I get this, Sean? You can go to kickstarter.com and search for Grim Hollow Transformed and you will see it all.
Or you could just go to grim-hollow.com. And, well, there's not time to get the preview stuff now because this show comes out Wednesday and this kicks off on Tuesday. But you can see all of the great stuff in the Kickstarter.
Fantastic.
So when was the last time you slept? Oh, it's been a while. I haven't slept well in a while. Let's put it that way. But we're getting a cool book, so it's all right. You are getting a couple of cool books, some cool adventures, and possibly more. We may have more to discuss as the Kickstarter progresses. So keep an eye on this space.
When you will get the actual book, you'll open it and you'll feel Sean's sleep somewhere in those pages.
Yes, the sleep. My sleep has been used in the ink that prints these books. I can't wait to get my hands on this. Awesome. And then the resin that makes up all the cool minis and other maps and everything that you can buy. Ghostfire does an incredible job with its manufacturing of stuff. So I'm not a big collector, but if I were, I would be all over this.
So that, my friends, is our news and commentary section. This week on Mastering Dungeons in our main segments, we are going to do the twofer again. We're going to give a mini 2024 5e review, looking at stat blocks. And then our main topic today is going to be building the perfect campaign guide. Yeah.
We had a question, and the question led to some thought, and that thought led to this main topic. But first, let's go take a quick glance, if you will, at stat blocks in 2024. Obviously, we have not yet seen the monster manual. But we do see the new stat block in the Player's Handbook. We also got a preview of some monsters. I think the Kuo-Toa and the Ancient Ring Dragon.
We saw some preview pages for that online.
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.
Mm hmm. Yep. The as we know, the Monster Manual will not be out until 2025. So they're probably still making a tweak here or there on the Monster Manual. But Teos is taking a good look at the Player's Handbook stats, and we're going to talk about them and how they may have changed between 2014 and 2024. But first, as we always do, we'll go back and we'll look at the design goals for these things.
So what is the design goal of a monster stat block? I didn't write this in our show notes, but I should have thought about this because we've been going all the way back to first edition. And in first edition, we obviously had the Monster Manual. You could open it up and there were stats that you could see and a description, just like we have in Monster Manuals.
But when you read something in an adventure, in a module, as we called it back then, you would just get a very brief line. It might be one full line or maybe a line and a half that would give all the information that you really needed to run that monster. And over the additions, that has gotten more and more and more complicated.
Probably culminating in third edition.
Yeah, third edition was the addition that broke me. Me too. It was the addition. As I was editing my millionth stat block for some product or project, and I'm counting how many ranks of rope use something has because enough ranks in rope use gave you a benefit in Escape Artist or something strange like that. I said, okay, this is too much. Yep. So why do we need and why do we have stat blocks?
What is their purpose? Teos, do you wanna take a swing at this?
Yeah, so the point of the block and taking it away from that textual representation
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
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?
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.
Right. All of that can be design goals that you have to tug at and balance.
And one of the reasons that in first edition and second edition to a degree, you could just have a single line for your monster or multiple monsters is because you really only needed to know for most of them, their AC, their hit dice, their hit points, and their attack roll and damage.
when we get to third edition specifically but also fourth and fifth the the principle of like one cool thing kicked in you don't want the goblin to just be a small sack of hit points and an ogre be a large sack of hit points you wanted them to both feel like they belong somewhere or have some meaning in the world
And you want them to, for the Game Master's purpose, be able to do something cool mechanically as part of a game. That could both be fun for the Game Master and also to sort of surprise the players. So that's where you get things like the goblins being able to... Disengage, shift, whatever, five foot step, as a bonus action. So that differentiated them from other monsters.
Whereas orcs may be... They could, if they were... driven to zero hit points. Actually, the first time, come back at one hit point. That showed that they were tough, and that was a little bit surprising to players when they first encountered them. It's like, oh, he slumps down, and oh, but he stands back up.
Same with zombies, same with skeletons, same with anything, giving them this one cool thing. And in fact, I've sort of made a rule for myself now Whereas when I make a monster, I want to have one cool thing per proficiency bonus minus one. All right, so if the monster has a proficiency bonus of two, which is the lowest it could have, take away one from two, you get one.
So that's one cool thing that... Monsters with that. Now, if you get to a proficiency bonus of three, you're talking CR four. So you're talking, you know, fourth, fifth level characters. You're getting into tier two use there a bit. So I want to have two cool things that that monster can do. Maybe it's that plus a breath weapon or that plus an area attack.
Now, if you get into, you know, the fifth level, proficiency bonus, proficiency bonus of five. I want to have four cool things because now...
combat should be lasting a little longer players should be a little stronger so i want to surprise them in ways and this could be layer actions this could be anything but the important thing for me is these be active things these be things that the players see and know and understand not just like oh they're resistant to non-magical weapons uh it needs to be something they can do or act a reaction that makes a certain attack miss you know that sort of thing yeah
So a stat block that does that, though, becomes larger. Because now it's not only giving that basic information of hit points in armor class, but you're also having to describe and detail these cool things that the monster does that's different than just attacking and doing damage. Yeah. Any thoughts there? I went on for a bit.
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.
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...
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.
Yeah. So what I did was I took some of the stat blocks that we have for 2024, and I put it in a document directly next to the one from 2014. And the first thing I thought was, well, this is done via D&D Beyond. So the first thing I thought was, well, we know from the Player's Handbook that there is a new layout for the stat block. It looks slightly different.
Teos is holding up a copy here that shows what the new stat block looks like. So when I went to the 2024 stat block in D&D Beyond, I realized they didn't really update that layout. It's still using the old layout.
And D&D Beyond, yeah.
And D&D Beyond. And now I don't know if they're going to change that because that would probably take more work than they want to do. But the print version is definitely different looking. With the book right in front of you, what are some of the things that you note, Teos, about the new stat block?
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?
So it breaks this out, and almost everybody when they first look at it goes, wait, what is this?
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
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.
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.
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.
Yeah. When I first saw it, I went, oh, cool. Okay, that's going to save space. And then I realized, no, it really doesn't save space. And if the... if the saving throw bonus was going to be different than the just plain ability score bonus in a lot of monsters, I would say, okay, cool.
Now I don't have to look down a line, look for that saving throw line that they used to have, where if the bonus was more because they were proficient in that save, it would give you the updated save. But for so many monsters, unless something changes in the player's handbook where monsters are now getting bonuses to their saves, it seems like an extra bit of work for not very much payout.
And as you say, it draws the eye, but it's drawing it to something that we rarely see.
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.
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.
Yeah. So I just did an experiment. I'm like, I'm going to grab the first stat block that's in the player's handbook. And I think it was ape. So I took the stat block for the 2014 ape and to put it next to the 2024 ape. And I'm looking at it right now. And The only change is instead of a dash for languages, it says none, okay? Multi-attack, the ape makes two fist attacks.
Fist is capitalized now in 2014, so all attack types are capitalized. we got rid of the word weapon. So the fist is a melee attack, not a melee weapon attack, but we added the word roll. which I'm not sure why. Reach is the same. We get rid of how many targets an attack does.
I haven't found a monster that has more than one target per attack for a melee attack, so I don't know how they're going to do that if it's more than one target. The damage is one die less now. It was a d6 for a fist attack, and now it's a d4. Bludgeoning is capitalized now in 2014 rather than lowercase b. And this was the one that was really interesting to me. So, rock.
In 2014, the ape could throw a rock as a ranged weapon attack. And... do D6 plus three bludgeoning damage. And I thought, okay, cool, yeah. You're playing in some jungle themed game and the rocks are up on the cliffs and they're throwing rocks at you. The apes are up there throwing rocks. Okay, cool. And then I look over for the 2024 and the rock now has a recharge of six. And my thought is, okay,
this is a game mechanical change, not a story change. Because in a story, I'm running an adventure and the whole idea is the characters are going down this ravine and up on top are apes throwing rocks. And now they can't. Even though there may be a hundred rocks around them, this thing recharges, so they can't do it.
And the damage though, when it does hit, goes from a D6 plus three in 2014 to two D6 plus three in 2024. And I'm at a loss to why that change.
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...
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.
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
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
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.
What it does is it forces DMs, designers, game masters to treat the ape as a one-shot... ranged monster, and then you sort of have to move up and engage. So you can argue that there is a story element here of the ape. Now, the ape's intelligence is six, so it's not an animalistic intelligence. There are people in my home gaming group whose intelligence is not higher than six.
And I don't mean their characters, I mean them. And so... This for me is design meant to give this ape a place in the world. And I don't like that the same way that I was talking about it at the beginning of our last segment about using rules to try to make a setting where you should let the setting make the setting.
So I want my ape to be able to throw a rock anytime it wants, and I want to lower that damage. So I can use it in these ways without people saying, why are you changing the way an ape works?
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.
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.
But no, we've taken a big pass at this and decided to change how it plays, which is really interesting. Yeah.
And it's just this one small thing that for me makes game design so interesting. It's how the numbers affect the story.
Yeah. So in looking at other monsters, did you see anything else that stood out along these lines for you?
I did a pass with the imp. And the major thing I noticed was in 2014, it had damage resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from non-magical attacks that aren't silvered. And that has been eliminated in 2024. Okay.
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.
Precisely. A lot of these monsters that are in the player's handbook are there because they can be summoned or druids can turn into them, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a thing. The other thing I noticed is in the sting... The damage was five, and then you had to make a constitution saving throw to avoid taking 10 poison damage, 3d6 on a failed save or half on a successful.
Whereas now it's just six points from the piercing sting plus seven poison damage straight up. No save. No save for half. You just take it. And I feel like we are going to start seeing this more often, this elimination of the saving throw. It's just going to be you, the monster does this thing and there's no save for it.
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.
Yeah, I can sign off on that too. I'm good with things happening to players automatically that don't change the game without their quote unquote consent. So if it's something that changes the state of play, absolutely saving throw. If it's just this extra little bit of damage, I'm good with that just being something that happens.
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.
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.
Yeah. And the last thing for the imp was the hit points. At 2014, imp had 10 hit points. The imp in 2024 has 21 hit points. And my first thought was, and I'm like, oh, they got rid of the half damage from bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from non-magical attacks. There you go. That's all I needed to know.
And I'm wondering if we will see that bump in other monsters if they remove that non-magical attack damage resistance.
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.
But yeah, because of the math, they have it nice.
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.
just a couple other things of note the octopus which i think is there because hey druid you can turn into this creature and swim through the water and do these cool things uh in 2014 it could grapple it only did one hit point on bludgeoning damage but it could grapple and they got rid of that grapple in 2024 and i'm like okay i see yep uh
You don't want the druid turning into the octopus and grappling everything. Only doing one point of damage, but now you're holding and yeah. The giant spider got rid of web sense that it had in 2014. And I was like, okay, I guess I see that. And what they did was they gave it proficiency in perception.
So now it's like it knows where everything is on its web, or it just knows where everything is better. It looks like they're taking out those situational things and just making it, at least in this case, making it more of a mathematical thing.
It's interesting. It's like, okay, I don't know that you needed to, right?
Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, as a designer... You're told your job is to go through the book and change these monsters. And this is our design goal. So go to town.
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.
Well, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying better. Better is relative.
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.
I don't know if they do either, but that's what I'm trying to discern. I'm trying to... Then it's not appreciably better, right? I don't know yet. That's the thing. Appreciably is a word that has appreciate in it. Or demonstrably or whatever, you know what I mean? Like... Right. But all of that requires a knowledge, requires you take the time to think things through.
And so that's why I'm doing this. I'm trying to think things through to say, this may not look like a huge change, but is it a huge change? And we just haven't seen that change yet.
What was a huge change was the giant spike. You know what I am seeing? I take it back on giant spikes.
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
For the giant spider. Yeah, interesting.
Now, this is a change that was for the better, right? In 2014, the giant spider does seven piercing and an average of nine poison. Has a save versus the poison, but if you fail... not only do you take the damage, but if that poison damage reduces you to zero and 10 points or nine points of poison damage after seven piercing with a creature of a CR that small generally did take you to zero.
you're stable but poisoned for an hour and while even after you regain hit points you remain poisoned for the hour and you're paralyzed while poisoned in this way but i want lord of the rings sean that was so huge and that was so annoying as a player as a game master because it happened so often and now they just like okay you take the extra damage and and you're you're done
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...
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
Yeah, it's cool if it's to an NPC. It's less cool if it's to a player character.
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...
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
So that's our quick look at stat blocks as we know them right now. So I hope you enjoyed that look at the 2014-2024 comparison. Now we're going to get to our main topic today, which is building the perfect campaign guide. Not the perfect campaign, the perfect campaign guide. Maybe we'll do the perfect campaign later. This comes from a question that someone asked, but I don't see that.
It was Lou Anders. Yeah, it was Lou Anders. Thank you. Who basically asked, what would you put in your campaign guide? And it just so happens that I seem to be building about 20 campaign guides at the moment. So I would love to answer this question. The question here is for me, what should it include? What might it want to include? And what should it definitely not include?
And it's very easy to say, we'll put all the things in it. But Teos, as you know, having done work in this industry before, that ignores the reality of limited budget, limited page count, limited resources, time, all of that. So we can't put all the things in. So let's assume that we have a typical audience for this project and their needs, not a special niche audience.
Let's assume that we don't have to teach the core rules for this campaign guide. So the players, the game master will have whatever the core rule set is. Assume we don't have to teach the game masters how to game master. Generally speaking, although that we may want to give them tips about GMing a particular campaign, set up by this guide.
And let's assume about 300 pages to present this campaign guide. I already have an opinion. All right.
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?
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.
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.
Oh, absolutely. So let's go through a list. Let's give some opinions here. So we'll start with what should definitely be included in the campaign guide. And I'm going to alternate. We'll alternate what we think and veto if necessary. Sounds good. So I'm going to start with the pitch. Okay. We need to have the pitch. What is this campaign? Why are we making it?
How is it the same or different from other possible campaign guides for this particular game? What do you think?
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.
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.
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.
Yep. And there was that list. It might have been in the Dungeon Master's Guide that were like, is your world steeped in magic or is it low magic? Is it points of light or is it highly populated, right? And you could put that on a continuum. And they had five or six different things where you could do that. And that could be part of what you say there as the key aspects.
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?
Whatever that might be, then you want to underscore that and play off of that and drive that home as a major theme.
Yep. What do you think then about what players should know versus what the game master should know in terms of the pitch?
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.
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?
That lets you have essentially a player's guide and a DM's guide all in one book if you need to.
Okay. So we've got the pitch. Mm-hmm. I posit then something else you need is the world. Whether that is the physical map and the description, whether that's cultural, whether it's economic, you need to have a physical space where the characters can be from, can adventure in, can look toward, can go through, can go to. What do you think about that?
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, and if you go too big, or I shouldn't say too big, if you go larger, what you then need to do is differentiate this area from this area. And when you do that, you either A, risk just being repetitive, or B, you have to have a different tone, you have to have a different thing, a different focus, which then can dilute a setting to the point where your pitch becomes irrelevant.
Because if you pitch this sort of thing and then change it to this sort of thing, you're already losing people who fell in love with the pitch to give them this extra stuff. So I agree with you completely. People love this encyclopedic thing that we saw with Greyhawk, but is it useful? Probably not in the long term.
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?
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.
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.
Now, one of the things I'm working on right now is strange hollow setting. And that is sort of the opposite. That is not you start here and you work out. It's this big, massive area of mystery that you're going into from the known into the unknown.
But that's nice because we can just then focus on the mystery and the transformative nature of this place and how it's unique compared to the typical D&D, you know, mid to high fantasy setting.
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.
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.
It's not about the detailed level of that nations and mountain ranges and things like that.
All right. So now I'm going to say something that maybe I'll get a little pushback. I say in a campaign guide, you need either new rules or a way to modify existing rules that support what your setting is supposed to do. And I think this. It may not be needed for use, but I think it's needed for excitement. I think it's needed for marketability because you want players to tie into this too.
So that's the second F of my three Fs, right? It's the flavor, it's the, you're gonna come into this world and you're going to bring these rules with you to show you how the game changes because of the setting.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
So for me, those are the big things that a campaign guide must, must, must have. And that's a quick and dirty version of it. So what are some things that might be included? And the first thing that pops into mind for me is an adventure.
If you are not going to release published adventures as part of your campaign guide, okay, here's the guide and we're going to have a series of adventures you could buy elsewhere or play elsewhere. Then you would need to at least have an introductory adventure to show game masters what an adventure in your setting is meant to do. What sort of play comes out of this setting?
Well, here, let me show you where you can get a model of it or even start your campaign.
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,
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
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.
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.
Yeah, and for those sorts of games, I think the adventure is the game. Alien, for me, was that. It's like... I read the rules and I'm like, yeah, all the trucking stuff and all the social stuff, that's fine. But the adventure where you find the ship and you go onto the ship and blood everywhere, the end. The adventure is the game. At least for me.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.