Episode 222 of Mastering Dungeons! Main topic: Looking Back on 2024, Forward to 2025! Shawn and Teos revisit the year’s biggest stories, the show’s main topics and guests, and look forward to what will impact our hobby in 2025. News: Bigger Monster Manual, CNBC on D&D’s Financial Success, Beyond Ranked Skills, and more! Contents 00:00 Happy New Year! 02:37 Vancian Magic Limits Narratives? 12:03 Adjust DCs Based on PC? 23:41 Bigger Monster Manual 25:33 CNBC on D&D Financial Success 30:09 Using Third Places 32:32 How to Do a Character Voice 34:42 Weapons of Lore 36:13 Beyond Ranked Skills 40:00 Clank Acq Inc 2 41:00 Looking Back, Looking Forward 41:16 2024 Highlights 57:25 Our Guests in 2024 59:17 Our Main Topics 01:02:25 Our Fans 01:03:14 Our 2024 Favorites 01:07:58 Our Questions for 2025 01:26:14 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, your favorite tabletop role-playing game, RPG, news reviews, interviews, et cetera, et cetera. We made it through 2024, and I'm Sean Merwin here with Teos Abadie. Hey, Teos.
Happy New Year, almost. Happy New Year to listeners.
Happy New Year, if you're hearing this and your name is not Sean Orteos, then it is probably the new year. Numerologically, I noticed that this is episode 222 of you and I as co-hosts, but episode 111 of Mastering Dungeons. That worked out interestingly. I think that means we're half as good as we once were.
Yeah. As foretold by prophecy, if Mastering Dungeons records its 222nd and 111th episodes simultaneously, car-sized drones will attack New Jersey.
I welcome my Transformer overlords. They are more than meets the eye. That's true. And as are we. And as are our listeners. So thank you, everyone out there, for listening. We hope that your holidays have gone well, and we hope that your 2025 kicks off with, I don't want to say a bang, because bangs could be good, could be bad, depending. So, yeah, it kicks off well. How's that?
I kicked mine off by getting a copy of The Psychology of Dungeons and Dragons, Jamie's book from our host from the last show. A lot of people said they bought the book based on our show, which, wow, that's kind of cool.
Yeah, really interesting stuff. I've been perusing my copy, my multiple copies. Amazing thing. It was great to have Jamie on last week. And it is great to be back with you this week. And it's great to be back with all our listeners who sometimes send us questions. They send us questions via our Patreon Discord.
via YouTube, via Mastodon, via Blue Sky, via email at masteringdnd.gmail.com, sometimes in real life, sometimes, you know, to pass them in the grocery store and say, hey, I had a question. Conventions, wherever. Send us your questions if you have them. And the Welsh DM did, via Blue Sky, asking, does the 5e fancy and magic system actually limit the narratives we can tell?
Is its strict rigidity actually a hindrance to storytelling in tabletop role-playing games? And so my first thought was, well, any system by definition limits what's allowable because that's what systems do. But I think if we get rid of that semantic argument, it's a good question to look at how Mancian magic systems can guide play and therefore guide the stories that come from that play.
But let's step back for a second, Tez. Yeah. Why do we say Vance-ian magic system? What does that mean?
Because Gygax read stories from Jack Vance and was enamored with it, as with various other parts of fiction of the day.
So Jack Vance was a fiction writer, sci-fi fantasy writer. There was a particular collection of stories called The Dying Earth. And in those stories, wizards, in order to cast spells, would need to first sit down with their spell book and do these magical rituals that would transfer the power of the spell from the book into their brains.
Then when they cast the spell, that power came out and they could not cast that spell again until they sat down, reread the book and delivered it back into their brains. And Gygax was obviously a fan. Vakna is also an anagram of Vance. And so that's how important Jack Vance's magic and his system and his stories were to the game.
So what happened in AD&D was, based on your level, you could memorize a certain number of spells at each level. and also have a certain number of spells in your spell book. So after resting, before you went on your adventure, you would need to sit down and memorize spells. I think the first book said 15 minutes per spell level. So if you're a low-level caster, you're maybe spending
an hour, two hours. If you're a high level caster, you're spending most of your day.
In days even, I do, I recall during play that our high level adventures, and this could possibly be when I'm playing like a really, like 23rd level or something like that, but I remember we, um, We needed like I'd say more than a day and a half.
I want to say like like it was it was weird how long it could take you when you were totally drained, especially if you did things like pilot a spell jammer, which back then required eating up all your spell slots when you sat on it. That was wild.
So another thing was. If you're used to playing more recent editions where you just have slots and you can slot in any spells that you have prepared, this was you had to pick the spell and you could memorize it once, twice, three times, four times, but that was what you cast. So say you had four slots that you could memorize a first level spell in.
If you wanted to cast four magic missiles, you had to memorize four magic missiles. And if you got to a point where you needed to detect magic spell, you were out of luck. You should have memorized at least one detect magic instead of using all four of your potential slots to memorize magic missile. So as you can see, that was super limiting. And while I don't want to go as far as saying that
that the Vancian system limited storytelling, but it definitely shaped it. Now, over the years, we've gone from that truly Vancian system to a system of sort of you know, a Vance-like system.
A menu of options, yeah.
Right. You have slots and you can choose on the fly those slots as you go, which gives you a ton more flexibility than you had back in those first edition AD&D days. I don't want to say currently that it limits it, but it does provide a framework within which magic is supposed to work.
So you are limited by not just the Vancian memorize and forget slot system, but by there being spells in the first place. if that makes sense. So you can't just summon up a ball of magic and do anything you want with it. It has to go through one of these channels that says this is a spell.
Yeah, there was a fun conversation in our Discord, too, about what is magic and how do you represent it and what kind of storytelling you can do.
And so we've had various explanations over the years for Dungeons & Dragons, but the sort of prevalent Forgotten Realms one is this idea of the weave, and you're pulling it in sort of mystical strands, and by learning magic, you learn sort of how to pull on these strands and turn it into a spell like Comprehend Languages or whatever it might be, rather than it being...
for some other reason, right, it's not unlocking a set of runes or a pattern that you learned in a book. And now and now you can cast it whenever or or or that it uses up your life essence or some other thing like that. Right. There are various ways it could be, but it isn't. And I think
When I look at this question, what I think of is the D&D, as usual, is flexible enough to please most people in most of the time. So it works pretty well, which is why you see it pretty much emulated by other RPGs as well. It's surprising how close it is. It tweaks it, but it's still kind of that kind of slot like system. Or something similar. And very seldom is it just, you know, free form.
Tell me what you do with your magic. Right. As you might see more in some movies and media like that. And I think the reason is that there's this conflicting desire between magic is a thing you do the way a barbarian does a thing. Or somebody else does a thing, right? And so it can't be so world shaking and freeform because nobody else in the party gets to do that either.
Or we'd have to all do weird freeform things, including the barbarian. And what you know, and we don't quite know how to handle that. So there's partly that. And also that because magic is supposed to be like, well, a lot of the game is combat. So it's the way you fight.
It needs to kind of slip into that and then be utility things every now and then, just like the rogue and the barbarian do utility things every now and then. So it's trying to confine itself while being evocative and interesting and all these things. It's trying to do all that.
And it actually kind of does it fairly surprisingly well, like when you really think of it like it's not bad, you know, we can cast our powerful spell and feel good about it. But now the next person gets to go.
Yeah, it's not a hindrance to storytelling. It's the game has decided that this is the kind of story that the game will will provide. So within that structure. It does all the things that it's supposed to do. So you need to solve a particular problem. Here are the tools to solve that problem. That problem may be solved by a wizard spell or a ranger's ability to survive in the desert. Yeah.
it may be solved by a spell or the rogue's ability to disarm a trap or open a lock. And so it gives you the tools to do the things that the stories you tell with the game are supposed to tell. Yep, yep.
Yeah. And if you did something more freeform, you'd probably have to have such a nebulous set and confined set of results that you, you know, you're still it's still a system that would try to and what do you call it? Like, like, like confine its its abilities. Right. You can't just say, like, what would you like to do with my magic? Well, I will shatter my enemies every time.
Yeah. Right. And if you have a system where the players can do that, as Tao said, you either then need to either have everyone be that or give people who aren't that something that is comparable or...
the thing that you do is unique but the risks involved in that are so strong that then that becomes a story of oh i can just shatter my enemies but if i fail i shatter myself right right where i'm so worn out that i'm incredibly vulnerable to everybody it's and that it has often not played super well right yeah Exactly.
And this really leads us pretty quickly into our next question from Sam Fries via email, and Sam emailed masteringdnd.gmail.com to ask this question. In the question mega show, there was a really good discussion around the character skills versus player skills, the low charisma barbarian with a high charisma player.
As you were discussing this, I found myself thinking about the forged in the dark systems of action roles, the position and the effect system where a given role accounts for both how hard it is to do this and how much would this action success influence the world. In practice, I think this is similar to how I adjudicate the problem when DMing.
The DC and effect of the role is dynamic based on how good the player's idea is and how good their character is at doing the thing. When you have the eloquent player making an argument as playing the Barbarian, I'm lowering the DC a bit to account for how good the argument is. Conversely, if the quiet player just wants to roll, it'll be more like a standard DC then.
This scales all the way down to a trivial, I look behind the painting on the wall equals you automatically find the hidden vault without having to roll. end up to i attempt to belittle the king into doing what i want by insulting his mother equaling uh that's impossible but let's see how poorly this goes for you I haven't thought critically about this particular aspect of my DMing.
Does this vibe as a reasonable approach for addressing these ludonarrative disconnects? What questions would you ask about an actual system for translating how good an idea is this and how good are you at this into DCs? Does it seem valuable to try to formalize, or is it best left hand-waverly to DM discretion? I love the word hand-waverly. Hand-waverly is good. Yes, hand-waverly is now an adverb.
Thanks for the many hours of fascinating discussion. So great question, and it's a totally reasonable question. And doing that, taking what the players give you and then deciding the difficulty class and how to handle the game of that is one way to sand down those ludonarrative dissonance moments. Because the story, i.e. what the characters say, will then influence the game
what the players need to roll, which then potentially goes back to being the game translating what the story does after the roles are made. So that's a strength of a more conversational style game. where it's a back and forth between the game master and the player. What do you want to do? OK, you want to do that. Let me think. Let's talk this through. If you tried this and succeed, what happens?
If you try this and fail, what's the consequence? How difficult should this be? Great if you have players that love that conversation, love that storytelling. Bad if you want to run a fast game where there isn't a lot of that give and take.
And as Tao said earlier, that's why D&D tends to be so popular is because there is a form of consistency in the system where you either have a set number that you know you're rolling against, the armor class of a monster. You have a set DC for certain checks. Standard lock, say DC 15. Or it's easily found. Oh, you're trying to stealth pass the bugbears? I have their perception right here.
Let me roll versus your check. Or let me use their passive against your check. That's quick. That conversation can take a lot of time.
Yeah. And we'll talk a little bit about this as well when we review Ethan Yen's blog post on skills. But there are a lot of systems that try to do this. The Cypher system from Monty Cook Games and all their kind of offshoot games tried to do this. The Free League games often tried to do this where they try to say they try to handle this right by saying,
Everybody who tries to do this must hit this particular DC. And in the free league games, it's often, oh, you're rolling a D6. You've got to hit a four or something similar like that. So there's sort of a universal everything is hard level four almost always. And if not, the DM will announce it because it's strangely hard. Right. And and Savage Worlds is also like this as well.
And then you as a hero get some slight bonus as to your opportunity to carry this off. But you may have a skill or you may have a tool or you may have circumstances or whatever. And all of these things do something like they may give you more dice or they may give you a bonus to your role. or they may reduce the D.C. or something like that. Right.
And Monty Cook games, you know, it all starts impossible and then it all gets whittled down to where you don't even need to roll is a funny thing to do in Cypher system. Right. And that's that idea. But D&D is architected differently. And while I think it's totally fine what's being done in this question, that's that's fun.
You know, ultimately, what you're saying is, I just know you're going to make this because you're so good. So I'm lowering the D.C. of reality for you. But if the other player tries it, then I'm not. And that's that there are there are cases where I think that will cause some friction. Right. You gave the bar to pass, but you're not giving me a pass.
You know, can be a little bit of a it can be strange. And you're kind of doing things to the curve of the math, which doesn't matter if you're having fun. But if if it were a policy, if it were a firm part of the game, I think would cause friction for various situations. Right.
Yeah, it's It's the what works for your game and your players addendum to any rule. By making the rule, you are making the world. And like you say, Teos, D&D expects you to, on these not the microtransaction checks of combat, but on these larger checks of opening doors, picking locks, finding traps, it expects you to.
it's sort of a weird game in that there are supposed to be these consequences for failing, but there never really are for a good percentage of the thing, right? True. Because you overcome them in some way, or the story is better if you succeed, so you just succeed. because we want you to find the secret door because that's where the adventure is.
We want you to get the king or queen to agree to your terms because that's where the adventure is. Right, right.
Yeah, and it's about the effort and you doing it and the role playing that goes with it and all that rather than just, you know, it's not a random chance. And in fact, even when DMs don't quite think about the DCs they're assigning, you know, they really are often assigning probabilities that are almost always within reach because that's the kind of point of it.
Now, the dice are also big enough, that giant D20, to be swingy. So sometimes you get that surprise and you deal with it and that can be great in some cases and sometimes it's abysmal.
Just awkward.
Yeah, just awkward, right? It all hinges on this one diplomatic decision you make and you make your plea and you roll a one and okay, let's explain that.
Yeah, yeah.
So, in many ways, we come from an organized play background where you sort of want things to happen. in a way that is reasonably close from table to table. You don't want one DM making the DC five and another DM making it a DC 20 based on anything, based on role play, based on situation. You want it to be that because that's how games are supposed to work, right?
You're supposed to play sort of by the same rules. So it's that the ludonarrative dissonance is always there, and you sort of have to figure out how much of it you can accept as the game master, how much the players are willing to accept as players, and find the happy medium for your game.
But as a game designer, you still have to do the hard work of, all right, if it's a D6 role and you succeed on a 4, 5, or 6, what resources am I giving the players to lower that to a 3, to lower that to a 2? And each time I do, it's 16.7% chance more that they're going to succeed. What sort of threshold do I want in my game for those things?
And that then dictates how many resources you're going to get players to be able to fudge that number or fudge the probabilities.
Yeah, I recall a living Greyhawk adventure in the Jeff region that took you into the Barrier Peaks Mountains. And those of you who think of that name will go, okay, well, there's a spaceship up there, right? And so a little bit as a joke, there was in a scene a metal door that you could possibly spot.
And then, like the fools that they are, the adventure authors and the admins and whatever, assigned a DC to opening the lock that they considered to be impossible. Which, of course, players then proceeded to hit at at least one table at the premiere of the adventure. The adventure had to be rewritten later because the reality is there was nothing behind it.
And there were a couple of adventures that were like that, where someone would assign a DC thinking nobody can hit it, but they forget about all the, especially in third edition, all the stacking things that could lead to success. And, you know, like I've often said, if you don't want an NPC to be killed, you don't give it stats. Because as soon as you do, battle can be had, right?
But you need to just have it statless and describe it as having some way of, you know, getting away or something like that, because you just you can't you can't give somebody a DC because they will hit it.
So decide beforehand whether you're playing a game or telling a story, and then err to the side of whichever of those things that you are doing. If you're telling the story, then let the story that's playing out affect the game. If you're playing a game, then play the game and let the story flow naturally from the roles in that game. And move the lever as necessary.
Okay, let's get into our news and commentary now, starting with a bigger than expected Monster Manual, according to Christian Hoffer of EN World. Christian writes an article on EN World saying the next year's Monster Manual will include over 85 new monsters, an increase over what was previously believed.
A description of the Monster Manual also confirms that there will be over 300 new images for the book. These new stat blocks that are coming in will either mostly add higher CR monsters or lower CR variants of existing popular monsters.
So the example is there will be several low CR vampire variants to represent freshly turned vampires, along with a higher CR vampire called a Nightbringer, who can be a threat to those higher level PCs out there. And of course, the Monster Manual is coming on the 18th of February of 2025.
Sean, what this means is once again, Wizards of the Coast has invented the technology to fold space so that you can have more art, more subjects, bigger font. You can have your stat blocks now have this big row of blocks and multicolors for the saving throw bonuses and whatnot. That's amazing. I think this technology should be applied.
I call on Wizards of the Coast to release the keys to this technology that they have so that other companies can employ it as well. So we can exist on a different plane of existence. Yeah, this ability to pack more into a book with larger font and more images, it's incredible. I salute them.
Yeah. Well, they're also cramming more money into D&D, apparently, according to CNBC, which had an article about D&D's financial and social success. Do you want to take us through this one, Teos?
Yeah. The headline of this video was how Dungeons and Dragons helped bring in over one billion. And the CNBC video interviews players, store owners, Wizards of the Coast staff to establish how D&D has grown as a brand. And there's some really cool stats on here. Baldur's Gate 3 grossed an estimated $1.7 billion on Steam.
But then later they say the game earned Wizards of the Coast $90 million in royalties in the last half of 2023 alone. So it's always interesting how billions become millions. And in fact, double digit millions is sort of impressive. Wizards of the Coast estimated 85 million people worldwide have played D&D since 1974.
One thing that's really neat and different was they interview a Brooklyn store gaming shop that has brought in nearly 110,000 in 2024 from hosting D&D game nights alone, they say. And they host 20 D&D games a week. And they say that the D&D is 50% of their revenue, which is pretty unusual, and that it saved the store. And they talk about they started, I guess, right when the pandemic happened.
hit so so it was a big you know difficult situation for them and that's the dnd has really helped them climb out of this uh they also talked to maya research a market research firm that estimates that 54 percent of dnd players are between 15 to 29 years old uh that includes you and i the uh brooklyn store says most people coming in have never played dnd before
And in the video it says there's been a 320% rise in the tabletop RPG market since 2016. The graph starts with 50 million for revenue in the tabletop RPG area in 2016 and then gets to around 250 million in 2023.
Since 2019, they point out that Wizards of the Coast revenues, that's not just D&D, has increased 54% from $761 million to $1.5 billion in 2023, and then a slightly lower $1.2 billion in 2024. But still, $761.1.2, sizable increase across the years for Wizards, which is much more than D&D, but they say D&D is an active part of that. They then go on to quote a number of people talking about how
There are things outside of Wizards that are driving this as well, and maybe even more so. It's left as a sort of question. It's somewhat implied. And actual play is the big one they focus on. They mentioned Dimension 20's arena event where they sold out Madison Square Garden and something like 17,000 tickets. I'm not sure that's the actual number of tickets.
That may be what Madison Square Garden seats.
uh but they say you know something like 17 000 tickets at an average price of 119 that's impressive math and then more solid math one of the dimension 20 podcasts worlds without number has a patreon with thirty thousand eight hundred thirty thousand eight hundred members paying five dollars for roughly 150 000 a month that's coming in right 150k that's also what we're making
yeah yeah it's very close um yeah so you know and then that it kind of closes with this idea that the game's popularity comes down to community and sort of saying for wizards leaving kind of suggesting that for wizards for for the dnd brand and for those companies that are involved in it it comes down to that community that you can create and the excitement you can create that proves whether it's worth paying for and i thought that was a kind of a neat way to end it uh in this video
All of this is amazing information, and that part about community really, really resonates. Because you and I have seen the power of community over the years, and it's not even always a community that Wizards of the Coast or Hasbro can create on their own. It's a community that they can help facilitate others in creating.
And that is something that I think they hopefully will be focused on going forward. And we'll talk more about that in our main segment today. But we have more content here. We have the Full Moon Storytelling blog talking about using third places.
It's a little bit of an older blog from 2023, but it was shared again on Mastodon, where a friend of the show, Dave Clark, discusses using, quote, third places, locations where cross-cultural, cross-class, or even cross-character class people can gather. Now, I didn't read this, but I assume third place is first place would be your home. Second place would be work or school.
And then third place is where you interact with people outside of those two.
Yeah. And the idea is if you think of like old timey life, You'd say like, OK, you know, the market, right, that in a traditional town back way when it doesn't matter what your social class is, you'd come to the market or you'd come to the tavern or something like that. You think of like, you know, an old Irish pub or something like that. You know, everybody in town goes there. Right.
So these third spaces are places where anybody can meet. And what Dave's talking about here, which is a kind of neat idea, is saying, you know, a lot of times we might make fun of like starting in a tavern. But that actually makes a lot of sense because it kind of doesn't matter what your character backstory is. Coming to the tavern makes sense, right?
Versus if you said you all meet in the castle, the barbarian might say, like, me, the castle, why? And so it's talking about the importance of these sort of places and how they change over time. Like the US had a time when bowling alleys might be the third place or the mall, right? And now my kids are like, the mall? What are you even talking about? uh, cafes they might say would work now. Right.
Um, and, and so these places can work as backstory locations that tie people together. Right. What did you all, uh, how has the market been important to all of you as a question you could ask the characters and they would probably be able to answer, right. Or in a more modern game, something like, you know, this cafe where everybody would gather something like that. Um,
And so they're world building tools to think of these places, particularly as ways to appeal to many types of characters, even NPCs, and to create interesting plots feeding off of them by thinking through that. You know, these are places where people gather.
Very interesting. Very interesting. OK. Yeah. And you can find that at Full Moon Storytelling dot com. And we also have something from the bell of lost souls about how to do a character voice. Teos notes they have far too many ads there, but they do have a very nice blog on the various techniques to do a character voice without needing to master an accent.
And some of the tips they provide there are use repeated catchphrases and sayings to promulgate an understanding of a character. Impersonate a character you know well from other media. change your normal volume, pitch, and rhythm while speaking. Use an archetype like Batman Vigilante or Femme Fatale or Nerd or Bad Boy or Nosy Neighbor to get the character's personality across.
Consider their primary emotion such as anger or happiness. And finally, be confident and carry through regardless of how you're feeling or how you're doing in the moment.
Yep, yep, absolutely. That's one I often turn to whenever my voice starts to stray and I start becoming another NPC, trying to turn it back towards the original. I had a friend who had two old guy voices and they would often cross over and it was fun and we'd all smile when it became voice two, old guy two came into play. Yep.
And if you think, oh, but I'm great at accents, I will give you this tip. you know, you're doing your accent with your home group and everybody's happy and it sounds great.
Think about then going to a convention or going to a public place and DMing for someone from the place that you are accent is, because that happens a lot when you game master publicly, especially at larger conventions, when you may travel to say England,
to run a show that English accent that you thought was just killer may not go over as well while you're actually game mastering for a player that has that particular accent.
Killer will become a different type of term.
True story. And speaking of killers, we have a couple killer things in our creator corner, starting with Jeff Stevens Publishing, who is about to launch a Kickstarter called Weapons of Lore. This will be PDF or print-on-demand, as well as for Roll20, Foundry VTT, and Shard Tabletop. It is in preview mode right now, but the Kickstarter launches on the 14th of January of 2025.
And you can go there now, of course, and be subscribed to be told when it launches. What is Weapons of Lore, you ask? Well, it's a 5e supplement containing magical weapons for you to divvy out as treasure applied to enemies or trade in merchant establishments, including 40 Weapons of Lore. Weapons that increase in power as the attuned creature advances in power.
40 traditional weapons in the style of traditional magic weapons with properties and no advancement. 20 cursed weapons, weapons that give and take. 20 rechargeable weapons, weapons with limited charges that can be replenished by completing rituals or other tasks. And then finally, encounter ideas to help you introduce these weapons into your game.
Again, that Kickstarter will launch about two weeks from you hearing this episode when it drops.
Yeah, I love how Jeff tackles weapons and the ideas behind them. So I wholeheartedly endorse it, having not seen it.
Okay. And second creator corner is Ethan Yen, who in a blog talked about different RPG approaches to skills. You want to take this one, Teos?
Yeah, it's timely based on our earlier conversation. And so on EthanYen.com, Ethan talks about how different RPGs provide an approach to saying, hey, you're good at this, right, versus how somebody else may or may not be that good at it. And so he kind of puts together a chart that has four different boxes and the titles kind of go across intersecting on these two axes.
One is whether you have skill ranks. So some RPGs will say you can improve your skills by having, you know, rank one, rank two, whatever it is, while other RPGs have a binary approach that say you have the skill or you don't. And skill ranks allow character definition. So there's some great positives, right? I'm a master tracker and varying levels of competency, right? I am okay at diplomacy.
And someone else says, well, I'm an expert at it, right? But the math can be intimidating or problematic. And it can mean that not having a bonus can shut down a player. I don't have a bonus in diplomacy, so I don't want to talk. Right. And so he talks about these issues and looks at that axis. Then on the other axis, he looks at having a list of skills to choose from and how this defines play.
So if you know you can pick a lock, maybe and we get into one of our earlier questions, that means that you think the only way to interact with a lock is to pick it. and forget that there you could bash the door or the chest or convince someone to open it for you or some other way of looking at it because you kind of turn to your skill list to solve all the problems in the game.
If you go the other way, you have a free form approach to skills. Now you may be able to define what your character does, but that can also lead to some interactions not being covered. And I thought it's a really cool read to go over this. It made me think a lot about games like Gumshoe that have an alternate approach where you say yes,
I am skilled at shooting, but everybody's rolling a D6 to shoot and everybody succeeds on a four. But what you're doing, maybe it's a three. I forget which one. I think it's a four. But what you get to do is to burn points to succeed when you want to. And eventually you'll run out of points and the points are equal to your skill ranks.
So if you have a six and shooting six times or six, you could give six pluses at any number of times until you run them out of them. And that kind of lets you be competent as in a spy movie, but only so many times. And someone who doesn't have very many points can still hit that one shot they need to hit. And that's a very interesting take on it, right?
Free League games we talked about that have that low threshold of success, but skills or... Equipment or whatever lowers that and makes it easier. 13th age feels a lot like D&D, but you get to say what your skills are on a very broad level. Like, you know, I am a master linguist or I worked in a royal court. I was a sailor. Right.
And then your DM just says, yeah, OK, I'll give you, you know, a boost because of the fact that you have that skill background. Right. That the definition of your character is different. It was very interesting to think about this, and I love the way Ethan picks apart game game aspects, and this is definitely a good read.
Yep. Ethan is a great designer, a great thinker, very creative. I have his little. Oh, yeah. With Kelly Tran made fetch my blade. It just happened to be sitting on my desk. I thought I'd give that a little plug as well.
And I have one last plug that I forgot to make, which is I've been playing this Ooh, Clank.
Acquisitions Incorporated 2.
Yeah, so this is the Direwolf board game that's the sequel to the first part. It is an incredible game that is like Clank, if you know that game of trying to explore before the dragon comes, but also fully steeped in Acquisitions Incorporated and developing your franchise, this time around one that Jim Darkmagic is heading up.
uh and then with lots of store and laughter like it's amazing my family's playing through it we just did like the first two missions the amount of laughing we do is incredible it really is so i so far highly uh recommend this as an awesome thing this was my gift for the family and uh it's been really great awesome awesome so that is our news and commentary segment
In our main segment here on Mastering Dungeons this week, we are going to look back at 2024 and look forward to 2025. So thank you for being on this journey with us through 2024. What are some of the things that we covered? Well, we looked at D&D trying to recover from the open gaming license, little brouhaha. and what they did.
We saw other companies emulate Wizards of the Coast moves, even those that had criticized Wizards of the Coast, like Paizo trying to change its fan policy to dissuade Starfinder One sites, various companies reissuing the same edition, companies having layoffs, et cetera. What else did we look at, Teos?
It's amazing what a huge year 2024 was like if all it had been was just post OGL. I think we could talk about that forever. But I mean, the DMG and the players handbook coming out with this revised 5e edition. And even that wasn't just that it was like. You had people saying like, oh, look at how low the book scan sales are.
And then you had other people saying, I can tell you for sure we have just reprinted more books than we ever could have imagined. Like the sales are through the roof, which shows you that things are changing, right? How the game is sold, where it's sold, how you can track it is now quite a confusing picture.
even though one has to believe and i've we've you and i have talked to enough people behind the scenes that there are truly some big sales out there but you can't kind of track them in the traditional ways um and i don't know the dnd movie yeah the dnd movie i i think back about how important a dnd movie a good dnd movie was to players since
since the beginning of the game. We've always wanted something that captured what D&D is without just being generic fantasy. And we saw it try to succeed, fail miserably, fail even more miserably. And when it finally... Straight to video. Yeah, straight to video. And someone owning the rights to it that really didn't care about making a good representation of D&D.
They just happened to have the rights to it. And so all of it finally coming around so that we could get a full-scale, well-done well acted, well written, carefully crafted movie for D&D specifically. was mind blowing for those who have been waiting for years and years and years.
Yeah. Amen. I mean, and again, this is one of these things, if the only thing that had happened this year was the D&D movie, that would be amazing, right? Like any other company would say, we're done here. This is all we ever need to talk about. And we'll talk about it all year long. And in fact, the D&D movie was a thing I remembered to put on this list as I was like coming up to record today.
I'm like, oh man, we didn't put the movie on here because so many things happened. Right. And part of it was the 50th anniversary. Yeah. And the release of, Really, there are a lot of shadows in between those bright lights.
And the 50th anniversary brought a Lego set right that I have over one of my shoulders, the US and UK stamps, which I think are the new high watermark, the new the new D&D baloney Converse shoes at really reasonable prices that you could customize. We've sadly, Sean, missed out on Pop-Tarts, but we I mean, the list of impressive things that have D&D brands is tremendous.
Yeah. And then moving on to the brand allowing others to take advantage of that. We had that with the DMs Guild for years. Okay, you can use our IP to make these adventures. But now we've got this digital platform that a lot of people are using to create their characters, to run their games. We're going to let third parties put their content on there. It's going to be curated at first,
which we've seen with Ghostfire Gaming and with Cobalt Press and with MCDM and Griffin Saddlebag and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that is not slowing down. Those third party content creators putting things directly into D&D Beyond seems to be a game changer
could be a game changer for the industry and for Wizards of the Coast if they don't have to spend the enormous amounts of time and money to create the content that others can create for them. Yeah.
Yeah. Incredible. And we had these bright moments then, you know, while it wasn't 2023 in terms of the OGL and the Pinkertons, we still had things like the D&D layoffs, right, that came off of the Hasbro side where Hasbro was struggling mightily with its D&D, with its toy side. And that impacts D&D because you have to apply these layoffs across the company to
prove that your stock price should be higher or something. You know, capitalism is tough to explain. We had the D&D 2024 players handbook gathering all the steam around influencers want to talk about it and the company saying, hey, influencers make videos about it and then, oh, wait, but not that way.
And you've got to take down these videos because D&D is so big that it gets treated differently even by the influencers. So you had people who were producing scan capable, full page walkthroughs of the product, you know, and that's just something that other games don't have to cope with in the same way. And so then it was, you know, take down videos or blur them. No, wait, they're OK.
And, you know, a whole working through what its influencer policy had to be as a company, which was tough. Revenue wise, we were able to figure out D&D's revenue. And at least surprisingly, what I thought was not actually the numbers. Well, first, I was surprised the numbers actually resemble about what we had kind of estimated before.
But the surprise to me was that actually a lot of the other stuff like Baldur's Gate 3 or Monopoly Go, when you move away the billions, the reported and you go to the piece that Hasbro gets to keep. D&D actually holds up pretty well to that. That other stuff's more exciting and you can arguably leverage it with less investment and so on sometimes. But D&D...
is like those things in many ways without the giant numbers to throw around. But profit wise, pretty, pretty ballpark in that area. So I thought that was really interesting. And you can see, you know, our Q3 or Q2 shows where we break down that revenue, which I thought was kind of fun. We did see signs of D&D slowing.
financially and it wasn't just dnd it was the hobby overall it was kickstarter drive through everything shows a post-pandemic slump but as you and i covered if you go back and look just a few years you know look at the pre-pandemic times we are way higher and kind of blindingly higher than You know, 10 years ago. Right. So so, yes, it's a slowdown.
But as we said, you know, it's not like the golden age has ended by any means. We're still in an incredible golden era compared to even just a few years ago. And it's only the pandemic that makes you feel like you're down figuratively and literally.
Yes, yes. And speaking of being down, Wizards lost a few folks during the layoffs, including Kyle Brink, who was ostensibly running D&D. and became a victim of the layoffs. And it was replaced by Jess Lanzillo, but she came in at a higher VP level than Kyle's original title.
We also lost Cynthia Williams, not lost in terms of perishing, but in terms of leaving Wizards of the Coast to take the lead at Funko. And then three months later, John Hite took over the president's position that had been vacated by Cynthia.
And in both the Kyle and Cynthia situations were awkward for the company, right? Like Cynthia left clearly unexpectedly. There was no transition game plan, nothing the company could possibly announce in a good way.
And while John Hype, by all accounts, seems to be a great hire and has and people internally speak highly of him, it was an unexpected transition that had to come in and maybe is somewhat related to Kyle leaving And how that was also handled very awkwardly, right? We were actually the ones who had to break the story by reaching out to contacts and saying, hey, we want to talk about this.
It's becoming kind of obvious to us. Can you give us the go ahead to share this? And eventually Wizards say, yeah, we can confirm this and you can share it. So we tried to kind of follow our due diligence. And, you know, you and I know we try not to be journalists because that is not our true calling at all. But we at least tried to follow some process in that.
But it was an awkward situation that shows the team kind of struggling at times in what should be and in many way was a great year. Right.
We saw Hasbro in an effort to chase, not necessarily money, but chase the investor's idea of how they were going to make money. We saw them shift from movies and video entertainment, let's say, to video games, despite the movie actually doing well as a representation of what D&D is. and doing well as a streaming entity in the US and in other countries.
Yeah.
Yeah. And on the organized play side, you know, Ventures League has been declining in company emphasis, emphasis and company support. A lot of it sort of farmed out. We hear everywhere people saying, you know, what's up with this? And while we hear some exciting things like the upcoming Greyhawk organized play campaign, it still is yet to be seen what 2025 will look like.
Will it continue to be this thing that's at arm's length from Wizards, or will Wizards take an active hand in it? But I'm getting ahead of myself and looking to 2025. For 2024, we can simply say, hell, this was the year it was very clearly declining in interest and support and all of that.
And we also saw... how we imagine that Wizards of the Coast is going to deal with going from a traditional publisher of books to a publisher of digital products that may, in some people's mind, be replacing books, and how that is going to change their process, how that is going to change the way that we as players and fans interact with their things.
as D&D Beyond publishes the same content as an official book, but then that content is changed while the book obviously sits on your shelf unable to change. Yeah.
And their approach was not to say, hey, you know, we've made a change to this digital product. Here's what the changes are. Right. Errata seems to be gone as a thing that they track. Oh, hey, look, there's extra art in the digital version, but we're not even going to bother talking about it. And apparently it's done for the map side of things and just
shows that there is this sort of splintering in emphasis at times tied to the different pillars, D&D Beyond or VTT or traditional. And you saw also reports internally of Dan Rawson talking about kind of wanting to get rid of paper, perhaps, was sort of the headline level. But then Jess Lanzillo saying, no, paper is critical to us. And I just got back from being at the printers.
And we're not moving away from this anytime soon. We'll go wherever fans want us to go. And on the distribution side, clearly there's this emphasis on selling on D&D Beyond, and that's no surprise given the difference in what you make from selling at a store, at a Target, at a Amazon versus what you get when you sell your own product on your own digital storefront.
But the distribution ending with Random House with no other plan which you know what i hear internally is there had been a call for a plan but no plan seems to have appeared yet um jess lenzillo said that she would that there is an effort to bring the core books back into like target and walmart but as of this time they're not there yet
And so this emphasis on D&D Beyond came with growing pains, even if it might create revenue in some places. And it's a thing to watch, I think.
Yeah. And something you said that's not here, but that that reminded me of us reporting on is this split between the pillars between the virtual tabletop and D&D Beyond and the traditional publishing and how
There may be a mini power struggle going on there between what's the best way versus what's the way that people actually want to consume versus how much influence or power that each of these entities will have over the direction of not just the brand as a whole, but of the game itself makes it very interesting and something to keep track of going forward.
Yeah. We saw Roll20 by Demiplane. Roll20 clearly trying to kind of shore up its ability to say, look, we're robust. We've got things going on. We've got a lot of energy on our end as the current biggest virtual tabletop out there. Other virtual tabletops did things as well to try to shore themselves up thinking the same thing. We saw third parties.
begin to unleash the what they began in 2023, where the OGL became the energy and then kind of final impetus, the burst of energy to say, OK, we're doing this thing that we've been wanting to do. Right. So we heard MCDM and Cold Press both say we had long wanted to make our own game. Well, here we go. Draw steel from MCDM will be coming out. And that is not a D&D game.
If anything, it resembles fourth edition, right? But it's not a 5E game. Cobalt Press released the Tales of the Valiant, which is a 5E offshoot, a strong Kickstarter success. And we saw games like Daggerheart and others that, you know, may be significant over time. So that'll be interesting to see kind of how that comes out.
Mm hmm. we had some great guests on in 2024. We just last week had Dr. Jamie Madigan discussing the psychology of D and D. We had Ben from that other podcast, uh, Ben come on a couple of times, one podcast in all the land in all the realms. Yeah. Uh, to, to talk about dark fantasy. Uh, we had Hannah Rose on to talk about her venture into the sort of serial publication of, of, uh, D&D content.
Alex Kammer in his yearly talk about the realms of D&D and GameholeCon.
Yep.
We had Michael Henderson, who also goes by Rel, on to talk about his game Distal and some other design questions and commentary. Dan Dillon and Jason Ward were on to talk about Surviving Strange Hollow, a project that I am helping bring to completion at this time. You had Rob Heinzu on.
He's amazing to talk to. I love his creativity and the things he was able to confirm about the OGL, which he only scrapped the surface of. But, you know, him going back and confirming that in fourth edition, the OGL was, you know, this close to going through the same process we saw in 2023 was an interesting piece of the history puzzle.
And then we had Graham Ward on. I think Graham took my place when I was out one week. Yeah.
And he was amazing. Right. And he had some really great comments about stewardship of the game and how it isn't, you know, just wizards and it's all of us. And that part alone was just absolute gold worth going back and checking out if you missed it.
In our main topics, we did some extended reviews or topics. We covered the Blade Runner role-playing game, the Shadow Dark RPG.
Yeah, and you know, even this week, I got two messages to our YouTube channel asking why we hated it so much. I don't know how to keep writing. We didn't.
Yeah, yeah. We learned that Discussing a game as a game designer comes with some pitfalls, and that is ticking off people who only want to hear glowing, positive... They don't want to hear even a critical analysis of things.
I would argue that Shadow Dark is special in its connection to fans, right? Like there was one of the comments that we got this week was or may have been last week, but it was about that from those old series of videos was saying there is no ambiguity in how Shadow Dark is written. I don't know what's not.
It wasn't this angry, but it was sort of like, you know, I don't know what's wrong with you guys. The rules are incredibly clear. And it was just so interesting to hear it. But when we talked about Daggerheart, you know, which is from Critical Role fandom, Nobody had those kinds of comments.
So there's something special about Shadow Dark and that link to the audience and what the audience wants from it that became very personal. And when we analyzed it, it really came off as criticism in a way that our analysis of Blade Runner or Daggerheart or other games did not come across. Or 5ED&D. Yeah, because we talked about the Planescape adventure and nobody said, you know, how dare you?
It was really interesting. Yeah. And sorry to anybody because, you know, and we are, you know, we're not just trying to say like, you know, we're sorry that you felt that way. Right. That's not what I'm saying. We have thought a lot about how to come across better.
And so we're trying to be more cautionary in our explanation of here's what we're trying to do analytically and to explain like we really did like Shadow Dark a lot. We both played it a number of times. But yeah.
We talked about designing an intro adventure and then escalated that into building a world, building a starting village to set your campaign and your adventures in, and then creating a full RPG campaign based on all of those topics. We did delve into Daggerheart, played that, discussed that. We did a long, extensive, in-depth look at Greyhawk via the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer.
And then we talked more in general about campaign guides and what to put into them, what to maybe leave out of them. We talked about being a professional game designer, game design lessons, what it takes to be a designer. And then we delved a little bit finally into dark fantasy and what that means to a D&D type game.
Yeah.
wow and it just it was a great year i mean i for us as a podcast uh our biggest year for sure uh the discord was a wonderful place to be with everybody was amazing uh interacting it was really healthy we learned a ton from from our community um
And it was really fun to, you know, because if you think it's not been long that we've been on YouTube or that we left the original network that we're on as a podcast or really started a Patreon that was our Patreon. So this is all still really new. And to see it start to grow is great. And we're really thankful of that.
And it's something that we're actively kind of looking at, like, wow, how do we keep this being as good as 2024 has been?
Yeah.
And oh, yeah, I just I think I was going to say the same thing, usually, which is all right. Like, you know, looking back on 2024 a little bit from our perspective, you know, Sean, do you have any favorite like like what was your favorite D&D product or other RPG product or thing that you worked on or RPG played?
I loved. everything that I got my hands on, whether it is to design it. You have to love it. You have to go in loving it. Like you said, we loved Shadow Dark. I went into there wanting to love the game and did. I went into, I'm looking at my shelf here, I went into the Alien box set wanting to love it and loved it.
Projects that I'm working on, Crooked Moon from Lesage of Adventress, had an amazing time doing some work with them. Surviving Strange Hollow, Took up a good chunk of my gear. Still working on it. Loving that. Waiting for Grim Hollow 2E. Waiting for the new SRD to come out. Oh, yes. So we know what we can do and how far we can go. So that has been an interesting thing. Love Gamehole Con.
One of my favorite conventions. Yeah. How about you, Tess?
A number of things. So book-wise, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed playing at The World, which was actually sent to me by a Discord member, thank you, who had ordered two by mistake and was kind enough to share that extra love with me. This was just great. I didn't think I would love it as much as I would, but I really did. We mentioned Graham Ward, The Last Caravan came in.
That's a really fun game. I really like everything the One Ring is doing. And I have a video that came out today on talking about D&D's exploration pillar in the DMG and particularly the travel segment of it. And then tomorrow there will be a video talking about the One Ring system, kind of continuing that thought process over.
I'm still digesting the combat system, the exploration system, the diplomacy type system that they have there. It's really, really extremely good. And if I had to pick one book that I thought was like, oh, that's different this year, it would be this guy.
And I know I've been talking to my friends about this a lot, but the monster overhaul, which was shared on the discord, it was either Andy Demps or Graham Ward or somebody like that brought it up. Thank you, because I picked it up at Gamehole. And I've been just loving the creativity behind it and how it tackles monsters is really awesome.
And I could, you know, maybe you and I will do a whole show on it at some point because it just is so fun that I know we keep thinking about about what it does. D&D wise, for me, the product that captured the imagination, my imagination as a designer was the DMG itself.
um because i think it did do it is a much better version than 2014 whereas the player's handbook i go back and forth and how about i how i feel about that new core book um there are things about it the capitalization alone that gets under my skin a bit uh there are things i like but you know weapon mastery there's a lot of give and take and how i feel about the player's handbook but the dmg while i can ask for more because of course
Overall, I think it's a very purposeful, smartly done book. And I like a lot of what's being done there. And so I found myself making, you know, initially I didn't think I was going to make a single video about it because I was a little tired about the Blurgate type influencer stuff that had happened.
But as I began thinking about the book, I found myself wanting to talk about it because it's cool and it's useful. So I think that's probably my pick for the product of the year on the D&D side. Convention-wise, Gamehole really blew me away. That was awesome. I continue to be enamored by Free League products. It's not that they're perfect.
Um, but I have had so much fun playing, you know, Coriolis and alien and any number of, of games of theirs this year. I feel like I'm buying all of it. Uh, one ring, uh, it was just it, whether they take a game and add to it or it's their own game. Uh, and then I, you know, a friend lends me forbidden lands and I'm like, wow, that looks really neat too. And it just goes on and on.
So, so they're a company that I'm always looking at. Um, though I'm excited for things that are coming from other companies as well.
All right, let's look forward then. Let's look forward to 2025. What are the main questions that you have, Teo? So what's the main question you have? for what we have to look forward to.
I think there is little doubt in my mind that D&D began to finally slow. The way all role-playing games always have in history, 2014 5e D&D somehow managed to not slow and instead grow. in the kind of only game that's ever done that ever in our hobby. And then it eventually became real and started to slow down as it had reached most people that were going to buy it.
And the question is, does this new edition you know, the 2024 version, does that, not addition, but, you know, version, does this new version, does that re-energize everything? And can it magically take us back to that hallowed land of increasing growth, perhaps bolstered by stranger things and other things like that? Or, will we get back to this decline?
And I don't think it'll cause anything to specifically happen this year for D&D, but this is the year when you would try to do that. You'd try to get the curve to keep going up
i want to say keep saying this word magically because literally nobody knows how you do that right like even the the 5e team isn't entirely sure how that 2014 managed to do that um yeah that's my biggest i don't know what do you think no i i agree i think you know we can try to give reasons for that continuing growth
And we can talk about it being the right rule set at the right time. We can talk about streaming. We can talk about how the pandemic, while it was obviously devastating, came at the time when normally we would have definitely seen a decline. But the way it changed life made it continue to go up. Yeah, maybe.
Mm hmm.
Maybe. Right. I mean, it had begun to go up even before the pandemic, which is, you know, like my girls has talked about, right? Like they expected, OK, year one sales were solid, good year two sales. Wait, higher. Right. And then the pandemic after that. So perhaps that artificially, like you're saying,
Right. Yeah, I'm wondering if not non-pandemic, we would have seen the decline then, but life changed so much that it may have affected things. And the term magical is perfect here. Because it is. It was magical, it is magical. Not one person, we can't point a finger and say, this is the person or this is the reason. I think it was a lot of reasons.
And so there can be a concerted, strong effort to replay that, get stranger things to focus on D&D again. put up more video content, engage with streamers more and try to recreate the success that Critical Role had in expanding D&D. I just don't think that you can say, let's do these four things and it'll work.
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, it's interesting to hear that Brooklyn TV's show that we talked about in the news segment, or the Brooklyn store we talked about in the news segment, how they are primarily bringing in new players. And when I run games at PAX, organizing the D&D presence at PAX or Emerald City Comic Con, it's primarily new players too.
So I know there are just droves, countless, I don't know, there are a magical number of people out there who want to actually touch D&D who haven't yet. And if we can get to them, well, that's your growth right there, right? That whole percentage of the number of people who are young that are playing our game, if you can keep accessing those young players, there is that possibility to drive growth
But there is also the importance of the established base. The established base is always important and avoiding missteps is always big. And so can Wizards do that this year? Can they avoid those missteps? Can they please the existing fans to act as that sort of fuel that shepherds community that, you know, turns things, keeps things positive.
So when you're a new player that enters an online space, a community or whatever, you feel like you're joining a cool club, not a bunch of old, tired people who hate everything.
Right. And I think that is just as important. We had talked in the first segment about community, which I think is where you're headed here. How can you establish or give the seeds for people growing that community? And that is done through things like organized play.
It's done through programs at game stores where people are actually going to buy the books, or if they're buying the books digitally, have the information they need there to get them in touch with the community that you want them to be in touch with, rather than people making spaces on YouTube. And so part of me is also wondering if we have seen the peak of people who watch actual play.
There's generationally things ebb and flow. We have now seen the people who were teenagers or in their early 20s who had the time and the stamina to watch four hours of people playing D&D. Very entertaining people, but people watching... will that lose its effervescence with the kids who were five then, who are now 15, and maybe they don't want that.
Maybe they want their own form of entertainment, their own thing that draws them in.
One part, you know, 2014 of the many reasons that made the 2014 5E version so good was the fact that the books were great. The game was really, really good. It's hard to argue. And the release cycle was slow. And the release cycle was slow. Yeah, yeah, that's totally for sure. And I think that's critical.
But just the books being good, we will now this year in 2025 get the final core book, The Monster Manual. And we've seen new encounter rules. We've seen...
new approaches to creating the to tweaking the gameplay to increasing the power of characters now the monsters are going to come in that are apparently stronger and the encounter rules are tougher will all of that come together to make a really fun 2025 edition or will we hit issues and it's easy to dismiss that but you know Various editions of D&D have had problems.
Once you really start playing it and you start going up in levels and you start playing through the adventures, you find that there's some friction there that gums up the works, right? Whether it's too many actions in the action economy or it's the monsters are too hard or too easy. A lot of that comes together only once you can get all these three books.
So I'm very curious how solid the rules really be. I think that plays a part in it. Yeah. On top of the other releases that we will see and whether that can energize people, because I feel like that and it's not unusual that when you have a new edition or version coming out in 2024, your other releases seem a little flat.
But Vecna is a product that in theory could have been really, really exciting. And didn't play out that way, at least at the level of the community that we see. And so I'm curious whether their upcoming products will see an audience response that's very positive.
Yeah, we've got the dragon anthology of 10 short dragon adventures coming in July. When you have a new edition, the first thing you need is something for people to play. So in July will be that book. We won't see an updated starter set, the Heroes of the Borderlands until October. So that's a long time to wait for release.
The thing that most people look for to bring new players in is the starter set. So it will be interesting then. And then in November, we'll see the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide and Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide, which again is that big sort of bellwether thing that everyone is going to buy to see what... the setting that Wizards of the Coast is most supporting will will provide.
Yeah. And it's got a different approach. It's focusing on specific regions. So we'll have to see how well that that works for people.
Mm hmm. Yep. What else? We're looking at how the D&D Beyond third-party marketplace evolves. Will there be more partners signed on? Will it become too much content? If you have to integrate everything that is being sold there into the character builder, At what point are there too many feats? At what point are there too many subclasses?
At what point will there be pushback, especially if the technology does not allow a DM to successfully block the things that they don't want their players to have access to? That is a huge question.
I had a funny thought last night as I was drifting off to sleep of, I wonder if there's been a situation already where a D&D designer pulls up D&D Beyond to look something up and goes, wait, is this the wording we're using? Oh, wait, no, that's a third party product that I just found in my search. How do I filter off this stuff that other people wrote?
Like, I just imagine that scenario because I bet if it isn't something that's happened already and it probably has, but if it hasn't, it's going to happen where at some point somebody on the team goes, what?
is this the wording we use no it's not you know um and and but of course like as you said dms and players deal with that right we already had issues where like you know someone makes an uh an eberron you know mark as a feat and any number of things like that but it gets more and more to where you just you know what's going to show up at my table with all this integration um and will they allow smaller companies or just anybody to publish or will it only be the biggest partners
I could argue both ways, you know, but they either has impacts and. And so it'll be very interesting to see how that evolves in 2025. Yep.
And going from D&D Beyond to Project Sigil, the virtual tabletop, How will this early beta be regarded? How will it fare as we prepare toward a final release? Is this something that Wizards of the Coast is putting all their chips in on? Or is it something that they were going to but have decided not to? Or is it something that they're going to ramp up even?
We have no idea how big this will be pushed and how much functionality will be actually usable by the average person with the average computer or phone or iPad or whatever.
Yeah, there was a 2024 video that almost seemed like it was positioning the virtual tabletop as sort of the, you know, the steam of role playing games. And now it looks like maybe they've backed off from that approach. So maybe it's more D&D focused, at least initially.
But how big those dreams are and how well all these features end up actually pleasing people, there's no question it's gorgeous looking. But is it really fun to play in that space? We're just in that early beta phase starting up as we hear people start to get beta invites. It'll be interesting to see what people report.
How will the financial outlook of Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro change from what it is now, and what effect will that have on both D&D as a game and the industry as a whole? We are getting into the post-Baldur's Gate 3 era as people have played it, replayed it, played it again, and now they're on to the next thing.
Yeah, I mean, BG4 perhaps being created in-house or by some other partner because Larian is not doing it. The Exodus video game is supposed to come out in 2026, but it has an RPG and clearly something that... The company is trying to create an IP around, so maybe that is something we see glimpses of this year.
Maybe there's a D&D game that comes sooner than that, but at least if there is, we haven't quite heard about that. But maybe they start talking about those other video game plans to get people excited and get investors excited. Whether... We get these bumps from the new edition, new version itself, from Stranger Things, from some other area that maybe translates into financial benefits.
How Hasbro's overall finances impact D&D? Are the layoffs behind them, right? Can we get back to a more normal way of operating it? It's hard to know. These are all open questions that will be fascinating to watch in 2025.
Yeah, how will third party games, both third parties making other role playing games or third parties making 5E compatible content affect things? Will games like the Cosmere role playing game or Shadow Dark or Draw Steel, how will those games impact the hobby? Will it bring new players in? Or will it just siphon off players who are already in the hobby into these little silos?
Yeah, there's always this question of whether everything must be D&D centric as sort of the core that has all of the numbers, all the revenue, all the growth, right? Like if you're a creator, do you feel like you can create for other programs and really be financially in a good place, right?
Right now, fifth edition is the obvious place, but for some small creator to launch a Kickstarter or a crowdfund of some sort.
and whether that changes right would be interesting right could you see a situation where you know kobold press writes for dagger heart or for draw steel right or for a freely game you know or is it like no it's our game and it's fifth edition and that's it and is every company doing that that that'll be interesting um to to not just this year of 2025 but beyond that to see how it goes um but but i'm really very curious about how
that third party feel where we will be, because we've certainly shifted in 2023 and 2024 as to how companies are working with wizards. Always a question for me is, can wizards change how it works with third parties?
It has long functioned as a sort of ivory tower better than thou, even when they mean well, like they kind of almost can't help but collectively coming off as, you know, we are the big brother, big sister. Let me show you, you know, what you can do for me versus a true partnership and a caring relationship. Right. Could that change in some way?
Yeah. And what changes will come in social media or the platforms with which we engage with content impact creators? How will creators overall feel about the hobby? As I said earlier, will actual plays as a form of entertainment continue to appeal to people? Or will we go then back to a more, I want to engage with this hobby rather than watch other people engage with this hobby?
Will we see any shift in that?
We know how tech companies are behaving. And so, you know, one just looks at the platforms one uses and wonders which one's next to do something completely absurd, right? At what point does Discord want its money? At what point does Patreon want even greater gains? And they all start changing the way that they do business and that forces creators to all do something completely different.
We've seen a number of shifts in 2024 and I'm sure we'll see more in 25 and all of that sends everybody scrambling and make things different, right? Difficult. If YouTube changes its policies drastically, it could all go sideways or If it did something to say boost positive content and get rid of rage inducing algorithms, boy, that would be a complete sea change for our hobby, right?
Or even if the community itself said, you know, that's enough of this wild speculation and negativity. Stop. I'm not going to click on a thing that has a shock face on it anymore. You know how that could transform things if people were to lead it to, which is always possible.
Possible, but... Not probable?
Strictly speaking, not likely. Well, one thing I do know, Teos, is that heading into 2025, I'm glad I'm going to be doing it with you.
Aw, thanks, man. Same thing.
A tip of the hat to you for putting up with me for yet another year. It's always a pleasure, and I can't wait to hit the ground running.
next week absolutely same my friend it's been a fantastic year i always look forward to my mondays and recording and then seeing how people react on our wednesdays and it's been great it has been great and it's great thanks to all of you listening out there thank you so much for your support your well wishes everything that you do for us thank you also to our patreon supporters you can support us
on our Patreon at patreon.com slash mastering D&D, like these folks did. They're our Master of Dungeon supporters. Thank you so much. Master of Realm supporters. I'm looking at your names right now in our show notes. And Masters of the Multiverse. We're going to do something different. We're going to alternate. I think we can do this to us. Oh, coordination. Ready? Yep. Ready. Here we go.
Agile Monk of Fantasy Companion Workshops.
Keith Amon of The Monsters Know What They're Doing.
Lou Anders of Lazy Wolf Studios.
Craig Bailey. Dave Bastiensen.
Steve Bissonette. Merrick Blackman. Calvin Bridges Avalos. Evil John. John Carney.
Will Doyle. Andy Edmonds at Nerdronomicon.com. James Fisher. Scott Fitzgerald Gray at Insane Angel Studios.
William Harshman of Runeforge Tabletop Gaming.
Ben Heisler and Paige Leitman. Sean Hurst. Mark and Mary's Gaming Compound. The Mighty Jerd. JR of the Twilight Perspective. Brian King. Jim Klingler, a.k.a. DM Prime Mover. How come I'm getting all the long ones? Chad Lynch.
Paul Mata. The Mathemagician. Eric Mengi. Anna B. Meyer of Fantasy Cartography.
Frey McLemore. John Mickey. The one and only Sean Molly.
Falcon Neal. Tom Nelson, creator of the Deck of Player Safety. The Mighty Zeus. Phil Wirt from the Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo. Coming soon. I got Frog Prince at Tentacles Squelching Wetly. You had to say that. I can say post-fiction RPG audio. Robert Pasley. Vladimir Pruner from Croatia. Pugnus. Ozymandias Rex.
Runner Rick. Chance Russo at Drago Russo. Andy Shockney. Damn, I got Krishna Simosa.
Spark from Dunner Games. Josh and Lee Wanika of the Tabletop Journeys podcast. Talos the Storm Lord. Jeremy Taloman from the D&D and TV podcast.
Tres. Joe Tyler. Marcelo de Velasquez, the Valiant DM. James Walton.
Graham Ward. Jason Ward from Accidental Cyclops Games.
Javier Wasiak. Chris Webster, Zach types and Z Walt Winfrey. Thank you so much for your support of our Patreon. As I said earlier, you can become a patron as well by going to patreon.com slash mastering D and D a perfect time to help us at the beginning of our 2025.
Also, if you can leave us a review wherever you listen to this show or subscribe on our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Mastering Dungeons. So, Teos, what are you up to and where can people find your end of the year stuff?
Ooh, find me at AlphaStream.org. From there, you can get to my videos, which I've been doing a lot of on the DMG, including these two part series on exploration. Where do we find you, Sean?
I'm on all the socials at Sean Merwin. You can also follow the podcast on the socials at Mastering D&D, Blue Sky, Mastodon, all the good places. Ask us questions on our Patreon. Go to our YouTube channel and leave us some comments. And we finished 2024. We're looking forward to 2025. What are we going to do now?
Uh, I'm going to finish clank, uh, legacy, uh, or at least get as far as I can before my kids go back to college. That's my plan.
I have about 48 hours to write about 200,000 words. I think I'm good.
He's a geek. I got it covered.