Episode 225 of Mastering Dungeons! Main topic: Monster Manual Comparison! We review the recent monster previews. How do 2024 5E monsters compare to 2014, and what do we think of the design? News: Diamond Files Bankruptcy, Ray Winninger on 5E History, Student Trains AI on CR, and more! Contents 00:00 Deadlands and Playtests 02:16 Handout Prep Worth It? 10:52 Rolling Under Pressure? 22:26 Diamond Files Chapter 11 28:51 Ray Winninger on 5E History 41:04 Legends of Greyhawk News 47:37 Grad Student Trains AI on CR 49:41 WizKids Glo in the Dark Minis 52:42 Encounters Under the Shadow of the Dragon Queen 54:37 Monster Manual Comparisons 56:02 How Previews Work 57:53 Ancient Green Dragon Preview 01:01:56 Legendary vs Reactions 01:07:03 Spellcasting and Theme 01:13:16 Numerical Changes 01:15:47 Kuo-Toa 01:24:54 Cyclops 01:38:15 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, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of Mastering Dungeons. I'm Sean Merwin, here with the ever-energetic Teos Abadias. So, Teos, how are things going this week?
Things are going great, Sean. Yeah, I'm having an absolute blast on this Monday. Let's see, what am I doing? Yeah, I did a lot of looking at monsters, and that was kind of inspiring. And I had an amazing, amazing game of Deadlands on Friday night where I really had to ponder, like, why is our group so much fun? Like, it was that good a session.
It was just like, I don't know, whatever we're doing, like, let's not mess with it because, boy, we had some fun.
rollicking good times the character the players have like these really excellent characters and they're doing all the things really well it's all interlocking into complete absurdity and fun and yeah it's great that's great i got the chance to run 2024 officially for the first time running a play test of an adventure that we'll talk about later uh but i played some
obviously with the play test and all the things that they were doing up until the release. And I've played with the new rules, but I haven't played
the new rules and new monsters official monsters so uh got to do that this weekend i had heard that power levels are much different than they used to be i can say at second level i haven't seen that yet but uh so far so good in terms of expectations of how difficult things are going to be weapon masteries behaved it was all reasonable at the table It was. It was.
It was a little silly, but it was okay.
And speaking of silly but okay, let's talk about our listeners. Our listeners are all okay. Some of them are a little silly, but not the people who write to us. They are generally very serious. So we're going to take a couple of those emails right now, starting with Tentacles Squelching Wetly via our Patreon Discord.
Do you have recommendations on how to evaluate the best return on your invested prep time when balancing the effort required in creating adventure handouts or props with their impact on immersion, particularly when distinguishing between essential clues, and more flavor type pieces.
Have you found that the time acquired enhances player enjoyment and storytelling significantly, or are there alternative methods such as more detailed role-playing notes for NPCs, environmental descriptions, or other types of pregame prep that should take precedence when the goal is deeper immersion into story and setting? We'll cut it there. And what did you have to say on this, Teos?
I have a lot of thoughts on this. I think an important thing is to think back on the last time you were prepping or the average time you're prepping. And are you finding yourself doing something like madly trying to finish that handout, but you also haven't prepared some part of what you're going to run tonight? That's a clear indication that you're spending too much time on handouts.
And this person, TentacleSquelchingWetley, shared on our Discord awesome examples of, and you can see it in our show notes, of the handouts they've been creating, which are amazing. And so if you're spending, to me, this is all like the cherry on top. You want to do all the things that are a great session, Then if you have time and inclination, desire, it'll pay off for you.
Creating awesome handouts on top of that just takes it to that sort of next level category. Same thing with things like, you know, the right minis, awesome terrain, any handcrafted anything like that's all extra, but the rest has to be taken care of. I'll stop there. How do you think?
I think that one of the joys of using published adventures, especially ones that come with these great handouts, is that you don't have to create your own. And usually, since they are made by a publishing company or an accessories company, they're usually very well done.
I'm not terribly visually oriented, so handouts never have done a great deal for me unless they specifically represent something that my character would need to know or see in the game. So remember Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain? Yeah. When they had that little... art pack that came with them. And so you as the game master could describe the room and then show a picture of the room.
And people raved about those at the time, how great they were, how amazing they were. And for me, I was just like, yeah, okay. But where my mind went was I could already visualize it based on what the DM read. And so I'm looking for like, okay, there's art here, so there must be a clue. There must be like in the corner, there's a mace on the floor, right? And that's the thing.
That's the thing that will get us through this encounter. I was looking for that sort of stuff when it was really just, here's a picture of the sea, which for some people is everything. And for some people means absolutely nothing.
this makes me think of the art pack for barrier peaks. There is a picture that I can, I can imagine when my DM showed it to me that has like a column and then it has, it looks like a buried laser pistol. And I'm like, Oh, I'm going to find that. And they're like, Oh yeah, I don't think that's there. And I'm like, what do you mean? It's in the art.
And like, so that was totally that sort of like, I was looking for that payoff. And, and I think that's a really good point that you make of the payoff will vary by player. But also, a lot of times, or let's say it's easy to fall into the trap as DM where the payoff is being actually made for you. I love my art project. I'm doing my art project.
And it's really important for us as DMs to remember the payoff is for the players. This is why you're doing this handout. And so it needs to be tied to the rewards they will get, right? If I think of why Blade Runner's handouts were so effective, is that those really beautiful pictures that they include in there are things that reinforce the setting and pay off further actions.
You describe the scene, you look at this thing, and then you get a picture when you ask for details. Is there a way that we could track the car? Well, you could try to enhance this image and you flip it over and like, oh, there's the license plate. That sort of thing, that kind of payoff
is is obvious to the players right like we are better for the handout the handout was a reward to what we chose that kind of thing what i try to do if i make a handout is do have a payoff for myself as the game master sure which is what are the things that after i read the box text or describe the scene the players are going to keep asking me over and over again
If I know that, oh boy, every five minutes someone's going to say, what was that NPC's name again? Or how many pillars were there? Or what did the puzzle look like? If I can get a handout for that, then I am doing myself a favor by not being interrupted by the player asking over and over and over again when I'm trying to focus on something else. So I like to have, as you say, that payoff.
But that payoff... both in terms of story, but just in terms of running the table more effectively.
Yeah. And something we talked about with the examples that were shared on the Discord, they're pretty intense. And so to me, those kinds of handouts where it's sort of like lore information, journal pages, that kind of thing, those are actually really great to deliver towards the end of a session so that folks have something to look at in between sessions.
Because I find that anything bigger than like a paragraph of text At least half the players will not really read it. Although there'll be that one player that's like me that will consume this avidly and they may tell everybody and that's fine because if you have that player that you know will read it and translate it to everybody into a bite-sized chunk that everybody hears, that's all good.
You've just really given a big payoff to that player. But if you really want everybody to read it, it's better done in between sessions where you have more chances that most of them will go back and read it just to see what's really going on here.
And if you have a note taker at the table, someone who loves to take notes on NPCs and treasure, and they love that part of the game, giving out handouts sort of short circuits their fun. And by saying, here's a list of the NPCs that you've met in town,
You sort of take that person wants to make their own notes and wants to be the person that says three sessions later, oh, yes, we met that dwarf carpenter in town. And they were the ones that gave us that special vision that they had. And so it can be handy.
Think about it. Give them what they will use as fuel if you have that person. If you don't have that person, then yeah, that becomes helpful. Right. Yeah, so you tailor it to your players like that. And that's, I think, the biggest thing is just think about the time that you're using for prep and what's effective, right? Mike Shade does a really nice job of breaking that down.
You don't want to forget about character goals because you're making a cool stained map because you could just explain where the location is. And watch your players. It's hard to do because we hate to assess things like that. But watching your players and seeing whether they seem excited by this or not and comparing that to the amount of time you spend.
I would do things like mass combat systems or whatever and try these things out. And everybody would say, yeah, that's great. Don't do that again. OK. Or we like the other stuff better. Theater of the mind with this neat system. And they'd be like, that's cool. Could we have Forge next time again?
Yeah. And same thing with sort of maps or tactical maps is if you're going to run a combat where it's going to last two rounds, you don't need a big detailed tactical map for that. But if you're running a combat where there are four different combats within this one location, you may want to take the time to make that map, which will save you time late down the road.
So thank you for that question. We're going to take another question here from NorCalBowHunter3264 via YouTube. This is going back to the Shadow Dark shows, but makes a good point here. That's a good question. An issue I have, and this isn't just Shadow Dark. I've seen this advice in a lot of other spaces. It's just role when there is only role when there is a time restraint or danger.
Isn't this always true in a dungeon? You have rounds and every X rounds you do a random monster check. So theoretically there is a chance that while you are trying to pick a lock, a monster shows up. And isn't there danger of breaking your lock picks? And now you can't open the door or you accidentally trigger a trap. Which is a possible danger, right?
Even in a city, the argument could be made that a guard could walk across a thief trying to pick a lock. So that's time pressure threat issue as well. It seems to me more like the intended advice is only to have players roll in combat. Otherwise, I feel the time restraint and danger advice is too vague.
And this, this is a good question because it gets to the gist of a game design philosophy that really people are talking about when they say only roll when there is a time restraint or danger. And that, that philosophy is true of fiction stories as well. And that's only trouble is interesting.
If there are no consequences for a failure other than not succeeding and staying at this static state, then what is the point of the check? So let's think about this example in a dungeon with a door. Let's say the door is trapped and locked. How does your game expect you to handle that? What do you want a game to do to handle that?
Because the answer to that question will change depending on your play style, what you want out of your game, and then you can decide what game might be best for you. So we'll take this example. There's the door. Your party's looking at it. There are five characters in your party. How do you want the game to handle that?
Do you want only one person to be able to make a check to find traps on the door? Do you want them to be able to retry if they fail? Do you want every single person to be able to try? Are there consequences if they fail?
Are there consequences if they fail by more than a little? Now, you've found a trap. Same question.
Can only one person try? Should everyone be able to try? Should you be able to retry if you fail to disarm the trap? Should there be a consequence for if you fail or fail by more than one? Now the door is up. You've cleared the trap, and now it's locked. Should more than one person get a chance to try to? You see what I'm saying here?
Well, and also, I think part of this question is whether each of those attempts are counting as a sort of magical, like a clock tick.
For sure. For sure.
Things are going to happen if you have too many ticks, which I think is a big part of what's being discussed here, right?
And so let's say we're going to make a dungeon-delving, very time-sensitive game where, yes, you can retry as much as you want, or anybody can try again. So let's say all five characters need to search the door to find the trap. There's five ticks. Then every character needs to try to remove the trap. There's five more ticks. And then everyone needs to try to pick the lock.
Okay, there's five more ticks.
Better like random encounters if you're going to go down that road.
Exactly. So now you need to decide how many ticks until there is automatically an encounter or you get to roll randomly for an encounter. Because if you roll randomly after every three ticks, you could be rolling five encounters there at that door.
yeah and then you might have 10 doors in the place and yeah precisely now you can say well that's the game i want and that's the challenge of a consequence for the players but if you give characters experience points for every uh every battle they fight every monster they kill every gold piece they get now you're actually not penalizing the players
and their characters for having those random encounters. You're actually giving them five times the experience and gold, assuming they survive, that this other group had who got everything on the first try or somehow used magic to bypass the door completely.
So now you have to say not just how many checks and what are the consequences, but you have to look at your experience point system of your game. That's how integrated these questions are.
And that's why Shadow Dark is really clever with what it does. It's got the torch, and darkness is bad. So you don't want to run out of your torch. The fewer times that happens, that's good. You stay in initiative so that you're all taking turns. You know, so generally things are moving through and there's this encounter check process and the torch. So there's this pressure.
But there is also this advice of, hey, sometimes you can just pause and resolve things because we're just in a room talking or we're, you know, resting or discussing options or or checking out the door. And maybe we don't care to do that in initiative order. And so it has a little bit of that freedom to pull off of that system when you want or when you suspect this would be a problem. Right.
And none of those games, none of those options that are in those games are wrong. But they could be wrong as they're integrated into the whole of the game, or they could be wrong for a certain play style. And so you need to keep all the things in mind. And another question that comes from this is, for a skill system like 5e D&D has, should
the thing that I just talked about, the checking for traps, the disarming the traps, the picking the lock, use the same sort of setup that other skills use for doing diplomacy for making a medicine check to diagnose a disease? Or should they be different?
And if they should be different, then should your skill system actually be different so that certain skills allow retries, certain skills don't? Certain skills make ticks of the box, certain skills don't.
5e tries to have the skill system one size fits all when one size really doesn't fit all even the game doesn't want one size to fit all uh so it it's it's a challenge to to try to think of all the ways that you might use skills allowing re-rolls having consequences for failure etc
Yeah, and there's a gameplay angle to this as well, where if your players feel this pressure, they will have a certain type of play coming from them. And that will shut down what can be really fun When you have the freedom to just sort of go back and forth and try things, discuss things, do silliness, right?
Like that is obviously time consuming, but they're going to do this and talk about their character. My character starts coiling the rope this way and, you know, because that would be a tick on the clock. But we're not following ticks so they can have the freedom to do this sort of silliness and we can go back and forth or do some elaborate plan without worries.
There is something to do that that can be really nice. And also, I'm a believer in actually having lots of roles. I like rolling. I see rolling as engagement. But I'm not saying every DM should do this. For my style of DMing and the way that I talk to my players and develop a rapport with them,
they they learn that these things will happen right that i will say to them well based on your question make me this sort of a check and then i will make up in my mind based on sort of how they did and what i know about their character what they kind of learned and the reason i do that is i want them to be constantly touching the game i want them engaging with it and i don't want them to worry overly about it so i want lots of checks and interactions
I find that people rolling dice gets them into the game. So I just I want to see more and more of that. So I am constantly looking for roles and things. But I also don't allow 20 people to open a door. And so a game like Deadlands, where it does a nice job of saying there's a help system. And one of the players is actually very good at the table. She will often say, well, I'll help you with that.
Sort of takes that help slot. Right. It reminds everybody at the table. Oh, yeah, we shouldn't just jump in and everybody do this. You know, we can take someone can take the lead and someone can assist. And that's it. Right. And so and so everybody kind of falls into line that way. And that ends up being a really nice for our group. Right. That works really well.
Yeah. That whole there should be consequences for every role. It's a good mentality to go into the game design with. But as I've said so many times, that D&D is a great game with a storytelling problem, or a great storytelling game with a dice problem. And one of the consequences of a failure can just be the story. It can just be the, okay, you failed to do this. Nothing in the world changes.
But the story that comes from that, we are going to have fun with, or it will be dramatic, or it will be sad, or it will be ridiculous. And that's a completely fine... reason to have a die roll because the story, the things that we tell and joke and talk about at the table will change because of that die roll.
And you're absolutely right in that rolling the dice is important to keep people focused and to keep the game in mind as well as everything else that's going on around.
There was a great player I played with in third edition who played a bard. And he would, like most bards in third edition, make bardic knowledge checks about just about everything. But when he would get it wrong, he would come up with whatever he believed was true. You know, here we are in the desert. Oh, these are the tracks of ice trolls. And everybody would say, ice trolls? Oh, yes.
They're very dangerous. They fade over time, but they're very cold, so they last quite some time. These are their tracks. And we're like, okay, we're all tracking ice trolls. And the DM would just go, what is happening? We'd have a blast, right?
Yep. Getting things wrong and having the players play that up can be an incredible part of the game. I think we should jump right into news. We have a couple more questions, but we'll get to those next week. We want to talk about our news and commentary section, starting with Diamond Distributors filing for Chapter 11. Why is this important to us, Taylor?
Well, distribution of how the books move around is a big complex beast, and it's like the hidden engine you don't think about, right? You go to your local gaming store and you pick up a book and you go, great, but you don't think about the fact that there are all these steps taking place of how that book got there. And these are all lifelines for various parts of the industry.
Diamond is best known for distributing comics, but they also distribute books and games and toys and miniatures and all sorts of stuff to all kinds of stores of different sizes, including your local gaming store, but also other larger places to convention suppliers. You know, you name it, all kinds of places.
and when they file chapter 11 that means they are running out of money and they are facing imminent failure so they are asking for protection against their creditors right they owe money and they want to continue to operate while they attempt to fix it because the idea is hey everybody in in let's say the united states is better off
If we don't pay a bunch of people we owe money to, but remain solvent, then if we collapse, and we'll talk about sort of the whys of that, but that's kind of what's at the heart of this, right? This is an engine that runs a lot of our industry.
Okay. And so what happened? Why did they have to file chapter 11?
Well, so this comes from their approach during 2020. And Diamond has sort of bad and good sides to it, you know, reviled and hated in some ways over the years, but also admired because they often do things like let small businesses sort of accumulate some debt so that they can...
get going and then pay off and so on so there's positive negatives to them but in 2020 during the pandemic lockdown phases diamond made the decision um the other thing that should say is they've sort of propped up the industry and did it by saying well we will take exclusive deals if you just deal with us and we distribute everything uh you know you comic book company right marvel dc
We will be your only distributor, but we will kind of run all this expensive stuff and handle the industry of moving all this around. And so companies largely said yes to this. But in 2020, when the pandemic was shutting down stores, Diamond said, we're going to lose money on this. So we're not going to distribute. We're not going to ship new comics to stores.
And if you're Marvel and DC and other places, you're like, I'm sorry. That's how we make money. And you have this obligation. You've got to do this. So what Marvel and DC did is cut ties with Diamond as being exclusive and began to find other ways to distribute. So other companies grew up, some already existed.
And this began to happen where other groups were there and no longer exclusive to Diamond. Diamond lost a lot of money on that. And it's only increased over time as more and more companies have ceased being exclusive or found other ways to do it.
So here we are, and they're finding out that they've probably not changed the way they operated, probably an expensive way based on this previous way that they're making lots of revenue. Now they're not, so they owe a ton of money.
And so is there a way out? Is there a RPG industry tie-in here?
Yeah, there absolutely is. So Diamond owns what's called Alliance Game Distributors, which is the tabletop game distribution subdivision of Diamond. And what they've said is as part of this restructuring, we're going to sell that off. And so far, they have a $39 million what's called stocking horse bid from Universal distribution.
And the idea, what that means is that if nobody else beats that bid, they will get Alliance. So it will be sold. We know it will be. If someone bids more, Universal will get sort of a payoff for the fact that it wasn't them because they kind of came in, but they set the floor, if you will, for sort of bidding on it. So someone is going to own it that isn't Diamond.
So that's already a bit of a shakeup because you don't know what's going to happen with this. The other thing that's a big deal for the industry remains to be fully seen of how it's going to play out. So one of the things is we talked about these creditors, right? This is all happening because they owe a bunch of money. Well, Whom do they owe that money? So the biggest one is Penguin Random House.
Diamond owes $9.2 million to them because they function as sort of sub-distributor of publishers, where Penguin Random House is sort of the primary behind. So, you know, Penguin Random House is looking at losing tons of money, more than they make in several years, probably, in the comics and other tabletop areas. They also owe a ton of money to Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast.
Wizards is a bit over $910,000. Hasbro is just over a million. They owe NEC, the company that owns WizKids, about $2.7 million. So if this bankruptcy goes through, a lot of these companies are not going to get paid, either partially or in full. And so you're looking at a company that, say, owns WizKids, losing $2.7 million out of nowhere. Will that change how Wiz could sell things?
Will it change how Wizards or Hasbro do things? Maybe, right? Hard to say. And the last bit of this is how it impacts stores. We have a Discord member. Thank you. I don't know if you wanted to be named or not, but they are an active participant.
And they actually went around, did some legwork for us in a major metropolitan area, spoke to a number of different stores, and they all actually seem to feel OK. They have a mix of distributors, and they weren't expecting major impacts.
But it's possible that some stores where they're kind of doing this sort of like, I owe you money, Diamond may actually reach out to them, say, you've got to pay up now. So it may put some pressure on some stores and stores may find themselves changing distributors, and they'll have to see how this once the RPG part gets sold, how that impacts things.
So this may take years to sort of play out its full effects. Interesting.
All right. Thank you for that. Ray Windinger, former head of D&D at Wizards of the Coast, went on to a podcast with Stan, the RPG designer and artist, to talk about a variety of things. Stan has a YouTube channel where he interviews Wizards staff, current and former. Obviously, he had Ray on this time. We've talked about Ray before.
He managed the D&D team for about seven years into 5E before leaving. Kyle Brink, who Teos interviewed on this show, came to lead the team after that. And Mike Merles was the previous head of D&D before Ray. Teos, you were there at this and you were actually feeding questions into the chat. What came out of this interview with Ray that you found interesting?
Oh, there were some really, really great parts. As a buff of history that I am, I was buffed. Plus two to all my history checks. Ray said the goal that management gave him was to double the size of D&D in five years. And again, this is seven years into D&D. This is 2021, right? When he's coming in, seven years in, and he's being told to double the size
But they actually did it not in five years, but in three years. And he says, I'm not going to take credit for it. The game was already on an upswing. But just shows you how often management gives you a goal that you can't hit, right? Or you have to murder yourself to hit. And they did it in less time, which is something else. He also said another piece about growth that I found just astounding.
Quote, we were selling about as many players handbooks every year This is fifth edition as we're sold for most of the whole third edition era. So every year selling. About as many players handbooks as in all of third edition. That's incredible, right?
Yeah, that it shows the growth of the game in ways that we've been trying to show, but people haven't quite been grasping.
He talked about how every edition before 5e would have a fantastic first couple years, then sort of gradually taper off until it would hit point depending on the edition. But five years out, eight years out, whatever, where the sales have dwindled enough that we really have to do a new edition to sort of pump up the sales and start the machine all over again. That never happened with 5e.
5e, the core book sales just increased every year all the way up through my whole tenure. So that's just incredible there. And he discusses a number of things of, cause Stan asks, so, you know, why did it grow? And he, he has a couple of, of, of things that are interesting.
He talks about sort of trying to shorten the campaign time and stance or says, well, you know, actually we've, we've had surveys at wizards that said the average campaign was, um,
shorter than you're saying it was so they had an interesting back and forth there if you're interested in that kind of topic um ray said a big growth was the diversifying audience which is something you and i have mentioned all the time and the way he broke it down quite simply was you know it used to be 80 male and at one point he said it was essentially 50 50. and that's basically doubling your audience
Right? Yeah. And Ray also said YouTube broke down tons of barriers, right? All of a sudden, people who wanted to play could just easily learn how to do it and where to get started and all of that.
Yeah.
And the other thing that he came up with that was a sort of different way of saying things that I really appreciated, he said, when 5E debuted, D&D was kind of a low point. And he says, I liked 4th edition. I thought it was a true game. But we're sort of at this low point. And Wizards dramatically scaled down the size of the D&D team and sort of, you know, divested from D&D, I'm quoting here.
There were actually real serious questions about, you know, are we at Wizards, are we still going to make this game? Like, is this a business we want to be in? And so a serendipitous thing that arose from that was that Wizards made far fewer D&D products because the team was so small, they could only manage to get a couple of products a year.
What they discovered relatively quickly, two years into 5e, is that we're selling way more copies of those couple of products than we used to have those giant, you know, during the height of my freelancing at TSR, there were 60 products at least every year.
Yeah. I mean, that's something that we theorized on as to why sales were so strong. And still, we still get pushback from people saying, well, if they had put out 10 more products a year, they would have sold 10 times that because everyone would have bought.
But I think this hits the nail on the head of they didn't even do it on purpose, but it showed that it's a strategy that at least in the time period that they did it, worked very well.
Yeah. And Ray just really says that these extra products were just that were done back in the TSR days and second edition days, third edition days, even fourth, were just cannibalization, right? Eating up each other's sales. And he really breaks down that I had not thought of in this respect is that there's this publishing turnabout term where you have a front list driven business.
And the bulk of your sales are what you just released. So he says, and then if you publish too much, you're just killing off those sales because people are only paying attention to what's at the front. So he says, quote, the typical life cycle of a Dindy product would be 60 to 90 days. The book would come out, it would be around in the stores for a month or two.
Sales would sort of then drop off and it would more or less disappear. And unless it was a very major, you know, something like the Forgotten Realms box set. But most of the releases, that's what would happen. That's amazing. In 5e, it was a backlist driven business. He basically says 30% of the sales every year were new stuff.
the rest was the old 5e products so the bulk of your sales are coming from your backlist which is awesome because everything new you make becomes part of that and just keeps selling right and he points out that during his tenure like nothing really went out of print they just kept making it because it kept selling and when you think about that 60 to 90 day drop off
versus it keeps selling and all i could think was oh i would kill to know what is happening say last year like what did last year look like or the year before that i wonder if it's changed back right it would be fascinating to know whether it has changed to be a front list driven business again
And if you could ever untangle why, or maybe it's just still doing well on the backlist, but it's different or, you know, you get the feel it's changed and I'd love to know how this plays in. Yeah.
Yeah. So much to dig into, but I want to stick to, to, to what Ray said here. Did, did he mention the OGL at all?
He did. I had to ask something about it. Um, and then they didn't quite, in fact, they kind of laughed about, we're not going to answer the questions that were asked. You know, it's a good question, and people are a little uncomfortable about it is the way I look at it. But they gave me more than I'd hoped for, and thank you, Ray and Stan, for that.
They also said very nice things about our podcast, which thank you for that. But on the OGL, Ray said, what started to happen was that D&D became so successful at Wizards and at Hasbro that it started to attract a lot of attention from other parts of the company. And you and I have talked about it, right? We had this time, I remember, where one of the quarterly results came out,
And Hasbro said, you know, D&D and wizards are going to teach the rest of the company how to operate.
And I thought, oh, we both went, oh, that's not good.
Right.
That's that's not. Yeah. Yeah.
And they said, so Ray continues, one of the points of contention was the OGL and the role that it played in the overall ecosystem. And then he kind of distanced himself and says, I was not a fan of the OGL, you know, and that he was pleased with how they, what he said was reasonably quickly how they altered course.
uh unfortunate how it rolled out but that they were able to kind of recognize this is a big misstep and let's undo it and i certainly heard that you know from my contacts it was issue one at hasbro for a while right and they were working hard to try to solve it once they realized that they had stepped in it and he says you know this is the nature of large organizations
And that both D&D and Magic the Gathering are very strange businesses. Like they're not a thing you can just explain to a random executive who comes in. It's a very complicated thing. And even the people in it have trouble understanding how it works. So, yeah, it was a fantastic watch. So you can look for Stan and his YouTube channel or follow the link in our show notes. Anything else, Sean?
I know this is right up our alley. Yeah.
This is all great stuff. The other thing I want to add is that's why when Wizards hires new vice presidents or vice presidents, even if they're coming from games, it's usually digital. It's usually coming over from Blizzard, coming over from Microsoft, the games division of Microsoft. And it's a completely different animal. There's nothing like
tabletop role-playing game publishing, because it's not really publishing. It's not really games. It's not any of these things. And it's all this big mess. And so people coming in thinking, well, I know games. And I know business and I've got my MBA and I've been vice president four different places and I'm the president here. It's completely different.
All of the lessons that you learn at those other companies, not only do they not apply here, but sometimes they're the complete opposite. Right.
Yeah, I mean, like that whole idea of, you know, hey, maybe if we only have, you know, a couple of products a year, we'll sell more. Right. And even though fifth edition started that way, we've seen fifth edition try to accelerate the number of products and it has not seemed to pay off. And at least with the data that I analyzed and we talked about this on the show.
But when when I broke down the numbers from BookScan with the help of our discord folks, we didn't see We saw that, yes, there was some volume increase overall, but it did seem to have that effect of each individual product is selling less. It isn't just open up the spigot, put more streams of water in, you make more volume. It's not that simple. Some of it begins to cannibalize, it seems.
And it reflects what you ask when you ask fans and they say, I can't remember what was released last year or in what order things came out, or I only used one book the whole year. You start hearing that.
Otherwise, really bright people cannot seem to grasp that creating a book costs something. Publishing a book costs something. It's not just if you make it, you will instantly make more money. You may make more money overall, but there is the cost of making that money. So it isn't just make a book and you're better off for it.
Yeah. I mean, it's not that during fourth edition, people didn't want more martial power abilities, but there's a reason martial martial power two didn't sell well. Right. Right. And it's complicated. It goes back to that whole thing we're talking about, but it's, it's just, you know, you give people too much, it eventually starts hurting itself. Right. Yeah.
Even if it isn't settings like it was in second edition, it, it still has that effect. And then I think, you know, hopefully fed tradition can figure it out going into the future so that we continue to see this growth that benefits everybody. We'll see.
There you go. We got more news on the Legends of Greyhawk organized play campaign. There were two articles that went up on D&D Beyond a couple days ago, one by Chris Tulek and one by David Barker. And they have more information both on this campaign and what's going on in Chicago at the end of February, where there will be a preview at Magicon for this new campaign.
What did we learn from Chris Tulock's article? There were five sections. The one was called Preparing for Adventure. We know that the campaign will be set in Seaway 576, which is the same as the year detailed in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, and that the 2024 core rules will be used for this campaign. What do you need to do to create a character?
They tell you how to go to D&D Beyond, what toggles to turn on, what toggles to turn off. So it's just going to be the player's handbook or free 2024 rules right now for character creation. They said that you will be able to customize your origin. which is something that's talked about in the Dungeon Master's Guide. And you can use a standard array or point bife to get your ability scores.
No evil alignments. And the campaign, at least at this point, will start at level one. The adventures in this campaign will go from two to four hours, generally aiming for about three hours. And there may be information in the adventure that will allow you to shorten it to two or expand it to four.
And we get this quote, characters will reach level two after one adventure session and level three after another adventure session. Advancing to levels four and five will require two adventure sessions. And then from levels five to ten, characters advance after every three adventure sessions apply.
That basically matches the type of advice we see in the... in the Dungeon Master's Guide. I'll be curious if the levels of play go higher, whether they go to what the DMG says. The DMG actually surprises me, says that later it speeds up. So your higher levels go by really fast. And so I'd be curious whether they will do that or not.
Yeah, there's been over the years, as you know, Taylor, there's been a lot of
introspection on what's the best pace for a campaign of of this nature and so we've seen from you need to play four or five adventures to go up a level you know way back third edition fourth edition days to level after each adventure if you want in in others campaigns so this seems to as you said follow that dungeon master's guide advice of let's get the third level quick
then we'll slow down the pace a little bit and then maybe at the end we'll speed it up more yeah yeah they do say that higher level character advancement additional features unlocked with play will be covered in a future update so either they're still working on it or they're saving that for later what about treasure and rewards because that's another huge part of creating an organized play campaign they say that you select one of three options and what are those options so
I thought this was really interesting. Like, you know, normally it's sort of like, oh, you get X gold plus magic item. But here it's you can choose gold, a featured magic item or roll in an adventure specific short table for a random magic item. And that's kind of neat, though.
I wonder if there's some base gold either way or what, how that because, you know, usually you need some cash to go around. But I thought that was a really interesting this idea of choosing through those three.
And there will be some conventions that will have convention-exclusive magic item certificates that can be traded. So we've seen this before. The first thing I go to when starting a new campaign is how do they handle magic items? Because I've seen the effects of two...
hate to use the term liberal because it means something politically but you know too liberal uh magic item giving generally takes a toll on the campaign a couple years later and so it will be interesting to see what magic is given at what points when when you get characters or players
Taking magic items in this campaign so they can trade it to a different character and you start to get into some weird territory. So we'll see how this goes. If you want to look at some of the upcoming Legends of Greyhawk adventures, Bald Man Games will be bringing you a special event at MagicCon that will give you a glimpse into convention play for D&D in the near future.
There will be three adventures that will be running at MagicCon for level 20 VIP badge holders. They can get other exclusive events, including three epic campaigns, but the adventures for this particular campaign will be a village called Hamlet, Darkness and Nold, and Ruins of the Moat House.
So if you are a Greyhawk fan, an old-school gamer, you will recognize all of those things from the Temple of Elemental Evil campaign. Still a beating heart. I think I can say that I wrote Darkness and Null and some of the other designers. If you said, like, name me your top 10 convention organized play designers, these people would be on that list. So a great list of designers to kick us off here.
I saw Eric Mengi's name somewhere there.
Eric Menge wrote A Village Called Hamlet, some Marx guy, of course, maybe some Doyle gentleman.
Who are those people? Never heard of their names.
Yeah, never heard of them. So all of that is there. There are two D&D Beyond posts, and then the MagicCon website will have further information on when all of this runs. So tell me about the grad student who's using critical role transcripts to train a dungeon mastering AI.
Yeah, that sounds like a joke or something, but it's true. So a graduate student, I guess, published last year a sort of experiment they did. And what they did was they went out. You have to kind of follow the chain of these things. But basically, they went out to fan sites that have created data from transcripts of Critical Role actual play sessions.
So this is fan-created, and the transcripts name each player and what they say, the Dungeon Master and so on. So they took that and used that to train an AI, along with the Sunless Citadel adventure created by Wizards of the Coast. And the experiment then aimed to have the LLM run the adventure for you based on what it had learned from how Critical Role all play together.
This Critical World data set contains about 160 episodes and apparently has been used by other LLM projects as well. This is all from a Polygon article, and they didn't say who, what, but potentially for profit.
when this was at least just an experiment at a university level and all of it raises the question of what is ethical use right what is copyrighted and at what point is it owned critical role owns their show of course well what happens with a fan transcript and can someone just take that and it isn't exactly clear and i can tell you what i think but there are a lot of lawsuits that are still ongoing on this topic right and and
you know, I don't know when D and D talks about, or the, the CEO of Hasbro says something like, you know, we're going to train AI on, well, what are they going to use? Right. And is somebody out there going to create a product based on essentially stealing copyrighted information and using, uh, who knows?
Right. Yep. So we will, as always keep an eye on this issue. Uh, and if it's dark, uh, when we're keeping an eye on this issue, we can use some new minis from WizKids to see what we're missing. You are the minis expert, Teos. Tell us about these glow in the dark minis.
Yeah, this is the first time that WizKids has introduced this in their 44 mini set called Underdark Expeditions. It will feature
a new quote dungeon glow effect and yes they made that one word and they removed the w and they are so happy with how clever a name dungeon glow is that they have trademarked it so i thought that was funny i laughed for quite some time but that's how i spend my evenings um this quote adds a glow-in-the-dark dynamic select parts of the figures And it's available in a variety of colors.
And the idea is that different parts would glow in the dark. We know that the gelatinous cube, myconid, gasp, or beholder in green slime all appear to have the treatment. There are probably others as well. Those are just the ones either named or shown in pictures. Personally, whenever I try to dim the lights, Nobody can see what the heck they're doing, and it just is disappointing.
So I basically never go with a low-light situation. Mood may seem great, but you got to see what you're doing. So I don't really need it.
But, Teos, if, say, one of the minis was a flump, would you turn out the lights then just to glow? Bask in the glow of flumpness.
I mean, yes. Well, it means that it has to go in my bedroom. And I think we signed in our contract for wedding that if it's a glow, if it's a flump, I don't know where I'm going with this joke. I'm going to stop now. But I definitely will be buying this set because it does indeed have the third ever flump mini from WizKids. There is also an unpainted version, but Who's keeping count? Oh, I am.
But yes, it has a flump in it. And so that makes it an automatic must have, at least for that one mini. But otherwise, you know, well, we'll see how it does.
They did separately say they are, you know, with the Monster Manual having all new art, they have a set of minis also coming out that will be based on the Monster Manual to have, you know, the majority of those or a good number of those captured in the in the new art style. And they've already been having new dragons with that art style, which maybe you like.
So what I'm envisioning is a glow in the dark mini, like an adventure holding a torch. And if you shut the lights off, the torch glows in exactly like a 30-foot emanation. So if it's on the map, it just shows what's... I don't think we're to that level of glow in the darkness yet.
I wonder if they thought about adding something like an adventure with a torch or just a plain old torch mini.
Yeah, yeah. Let's wrap up with our creator corner here, talking about Dragonlance, Encounters Under the Shadow of the Dragon Queen. Command the invincible armies of the Dragon Queen, Pachesis, in this collection of encounters for Dragonlance, Shadow of the Dragon Queen. This project features some members of our Discord.
led by Megan Jay, writing from Chad Lynch, Jeff Mueller, Raymond Jenkins, and John Rhine. What does it include? It includes a 47-page PDF containing 24 one-page encounters, four for each chapter plus four bonus encounters for chapter four, The Shadow of War, 18 colorful and thematic maps with gridded and ungridded variants. You can download those as zip files.
and nine monster stat blocks to add to the Dragon Queen's ranks. What will players do in these adventures? They will infiltrate the Red Dragon army camp, threatening Volger. They will hunt for spies inside the walls of Keliman. They will counter the maneuvers of the Green Dragon army in the east. Explore new locations in the Northern Wastes.
Investigate Lord Soth's dark designs in the ruins of, oh, I can't pronounce that, Anyari. And engage in deadly aerial combat with the ace Dragonel Rider, the Red Ruin, in a redesigned encounter. This all on the DMs Guild for only $8.99. Link in our show notes. Some great people designing that and looking forward to it.
I also saw Sean that, uh, empty black just released a, an adventure that I think you might've kickstarted for. It's now out there. So maybe we'll have that next week, but I'll just mention it now for folks who want to go looking for it.
Okay. You know where to find empty black stuff. So check that out. That was our news and commentary section. I hope you all enjoyed it. This week, in our main topic here on Mastering Dungeons, we are going to look at what has been released from the 2025 Monster Manual, look at the design, and compare it to what we saw in the 2024 Monster book.
First of all, Teos, if people want to get their own analysis going, they don't have the Monster Manual yet, where could they go to get that wrapped up?
I mean, they should stop. There's no Flumph preview yet. So I don't know. What is even the point, Sean? What's the point?
We're done. And end.
Thanks for that. That was our main segment. Good night. Thanks for watching.
That was our main segment.
Take care. No, so Ian World actually has a pretty good thread. It's hard to parse it and there aren't links for it, but they've gathered a bunch of them in one place because these have been these previews have been scattered kind of all over the place. Some of them are in YouTube videos. Some of them are in the D&D Beyond website. Some of them are shown as images on blue sky.
So, you know, you kind of have to hunt around. But our show notes, if you are a patron member, have all those links in there as well. So you can pick them up. And it's been interesting because these previews actually started quite some time ago with the ancient green dragon and things have changed even since the beginning of the previews, which fascinating.
Yeah. So first of all, it was interesting that the influencers who received preview copies of the Monster Manual, it sounds like Wizards may have coordinated with them to say, you, why don't you preview this monster or this set of monsters? Because as you go through, there are different influencers looking at different monsters.
Yeah, I waited. I'm still waiting by the phone for the call to say that I got to preview the Flumph. They're very busy at Wizards. I know they're going to call any moment and let me know that I should preview the Flumph. I did get a copy to help me prepare for videos I'll release later, which I greatly appreciate because why am I preparing, Sean?
But I'm not in that elite group, you know, so Ginny D and lots of other cool people, they've been able to show off these specific, as you said, they got like permission to release one thing in the same way that you may have seen. Like, I think Ginny D got to talk about bastions before anybody else got to talk about things. Right. So there's some preview things that happened for other books.
So with them and they're doing the same thing and saying, hey, you can share, you know, the Cyclops or whatever it is.
I assume there's an embargo in place.
Yes, there is. Until the 20-some odd. So it's like a week or so. Okay.
So not too terribly long. Then we can start talking. Okay, I'm in a similar situation in that I have a copy in order to do freelance work. So I'm trying to focus. Yep, yep, yep. Trying not to give away anything.
What's nice about these previews is we can focus on this part, which is all publicly known. We can talk about it without upsetting our NDA side of our brains.
Yep. So let us dig in then. As Teo said, one of the first monsters we saw was the Ancient Green Dragon that was put up on D&D Beyond, I believe. And we know for a fact that now it's changed. It's changed since that preview. But we will look at that Ancient Green Dragon, the preview of it, and compare it back to the original.
So what do we know about this ancient green dragon, Teos, in terms of design and the move from 2014 to 2024?
Well, if I were brand new to things and hadn't been following anything, the first thing I would see is this interesting layout that jumps out at me, which is the stats, strength, dex, con, et cetera, have these sort of slightly different color things with blocks. And then it has like a modifier and a save next to it.
And so this is a before it would list the statistics and sort of normal text kind of fade into the background. And then you would if it had a boost to its normal save, you would see that. Right. And I guess they're trying to what they're trying to do is help you really break down the modifier versus the saving throw in case you need it.
But layout-wise, I'd be really surprised if a lot of layout people would go like, yeah, this is great. It's also the thing that jumps out the most on the page. And I do not think this is the most important thing on the page. So that's the first thing that might jump out at you.
I agree. One of the issues with stat blocks for any edition is the amount of space it takes up versus the usefulness, the utility of the information in it.
Yeah.
Spatially, I'm not sure it saves space to not just have a saving throw line below. And I appreciate the setting it off with different colors. Or different shades, I should say. But yeah, it doesn't... In the playing I've done with the new monster stats... I've had to take more time to find the information. And that may be because I'm used to the old information.
Or it may be that visually things are just not where I would intuit them to be anyway. So we'll have to wait.
Yeah, our brains get used to it, right? So it'll all fade into the background. But ideally, your thing is intuitive to begin with. And it's fun. If you just want to have for fun, just go break out a 2E stat block or a third edition stat block
fourth edition and and just suddenly your brain would go like wait i used to know this and now i'm like parsing the fact that this is you know complicated and it is all of them are but i this stood out to me as a thing that you know you're going to notice this and it's different and is it better you know i you that's super arguable right which i take to heart one of the things that when i'm looking at 2014 versus 2024 i i take something that the third edition team said
Is it demonstrably better? I'd say this is a no. This is arguable, right? And you're not in the business of arguably should be the answer. And what they were saying is you should be in the business of demonstrably better. This is a sort of weird. It's like a choice, right? Rather than, oh, yeah, you solved something. You always have people that feel otherwise.
But I don't think your numbers are going to be some high percentage of people go like, oh, yeah, this is obviously so better and intuitive. And if I wanted something to glow on the page, it would probably be the attack value. That's probably the thing I'm looking at the most that I need to jump out about all the text, right? Would be like attack and damage.
That's what I might have put a glow up on it if you wanted things to glow. But anyway. Yeah, I agree. You know, we see the usual breakdowns of traits and actions as they were before. The thing that's interesting here is this ancient green dragon, which is a legendary monster in 2014, doesn't have a legendary section in this early preview. It has a reactions section. And this was a...
I think this came out in August, and this preview does not represent what we see in the ancient gold dragon, right? So it shows you that in August, the team was still operating on this idea of we're going to remove legendary actions and we're instead going to make them reactions.
And we're changing things that we're maybe going to get rid of some things in 2020, 2014 rules that would remove the ability to use your reaction. Because otherwise, you'd nerf. What's the cantrip that removes your reactions? Oh, well, that's somebody I know. Yeah, I know.
I can't think of it, but it'll come to the zappy electric. Everybody at home, you know, hey, we got there.
Right. So, you know, the idea was, well, we'll remove that. So you don't just shock and grasp the big bad constantly to just remove all of their legendary actions. Right. Well, in the end, they went away from this, right? But this early example is fascinating because we get to see the idea of like you can take three reactions per round, but only once per turn. And so you could do that.
What's interesting is you could do this either on your turn because it's a reaction or you could do it off turn like you could with a normal legendary, but only one. You had to space them out. So it's almost like the same thing, but a different part of the action sequence. language, and so it had its own considerations to it. In the end, they abandoned this, and that's fascinating.
It's interesting because I actually like the idea of giving a monster like that multiple reactions to make it you know, harder for the players to move around it to, oh, I'm going to soak up its reaction by, you know, this small thing. And then hopefully we can do all these other things to, to then get away with it.
But in the long run, I, I didn't like this idea of trading out reactions for legendary actions because the, the trigger is something that the players could mess around with.
Yes.
If there was a particularly strong legendary action slash reaction that was triggered by a ranged attack, just don't take ranged attacks. And then we ended up seeing reactions that were just like, when another creature completes its turn, you can take this reaction. Well, that's just a legendary action. So it got into a little too much.
That's exactly what we see here, right? Charming presence is when you end your turn. Corrosive miasma is either when you use your legendary resistance or if you are hit with a ranged attack and so then you do this thing. But yeah, if people are just attacking you melee, they get to shut down corrosive miasma from ever triggering. So yeah, it's interesting, right?
So maybe you can just... But yeah, it's a level...
now you have to really be paying attention to this section right it's one thing to say that hey i need to remind myself when a player ends their turn i may want to do one of these things cross off my list it's another to say i need to watch out for every time someone uses a ranged attack or makes me make a save and i choose to you know like that's that's even more complicated thing so i'm glad they moved away from this but it is surprising to me because how you're designing your monsters is important
And you apparently had not made up your mind at the time when you'd already printed the first two books.
Right.
Right. And that is also indicative of a team that's a little bit scrambling, at least in this regard. Right. And maybe not. Maybe, maybe team members would say to me, you know, we just made this one decision. Teos, don't make a big deal out of it. And that's possible. But to me, this is a fairly big thing to still be working through and maybe why monsters came at the end and in 2025. Right.
Because there was still this kind of development going on.
Yeah. I mean, you know, I love the people on that design team. Yeah, me too. personally, professionally, and I can't imagine that they weren't absolutely hustling and working long hours and not really getting the time necessary to bring all of this together. And it's just the nature of a very complex beast that you are trying to build piecemeal
And you end up with a bunch of gears, and these gears sometimes don't fit together. And it's not a knock on their skill. It's not a knock on their dedication. It's a knock on the planning, scheduling for these releases.
Can I say another thing that we said? Absolutely. Well said, John. Another thing I just thought of is it has a spellcasting block. And in a recent video, Jeremy Crawford and Wes Schneider were talking in all these monster videos. And they were saying that... kind of dragons are often thought of as having possibly the ability to cast.
And so for the older ones, they've just gone ahead and done that. So they're all spell casters at the upper age levels. And so we get these cases. And here in this version, we see some Matt Will spells, including Charm Monster at an upcast level 5 version. Dissonant Whispers at a level 4 version. Twice per day Cloud Kill at level 8. There's also Gas, which is interesting.
And then once per day, Modify Memory and Polymorph. To me, this is super fascinating because it seems to take a step back from what they did with Mordenhanans, right? Where they wrote to us blogs saying, if it's an offensive spell, it's going to be an action. If it's utility, it'll be in a sell list. Not even Mordekains actually did that. They broke their own rules in that very book.
But this seems to really step back because now not only do I deal with my three traits, my multi-attack, my rend, my poison breath, my three different reactions, I'm also looking up all of these spells. And while this is not as bad a spell list as 2014 spellcasters tended to have, it's still one, two, three, four, five, six, seven spells I in theory need to go
pick up and I'm either scrambling during the combat or that's additional prep time, right?
Yep. And what drives me crazy sometimes is they'll give a spell to a monster that already has a very similar thing in their stat block, right? We know that green dragons breathe poisonous gas. It has the miasma there. It has the breath weapon there. Cloud kill on top of that? is just sort of, you've already got two things that do it, do you need a third that's really thematically similar?
And what I loved about dragons from earlier editions, especially going all the way back to AD&D second edition, is the fact that they could cast spells, but the spells they cast were not even just utility spells, but I want to be able to cast haste with my dragon.
Even if it's not on itself, even if it's just on the people helping it defend its lair, there's something that it's very important to the combat that it does it. And it's not something that it can do with its breath or with its presence or with anything else that it can do. And it...
tactically it's important so i would love to see more that type of thing or at least tell dms the difference between your dragon fight and this other game master's dragon fight is go ahead and choose a third level spell
that you think would be helpful to you as the game master to challenge and delight your players i might choose hey someone else might choose some other spell and that will so it's not always the exact same things for the dragon every time you go into its its layer what was your out of curiosity if you have a favorite what was your favorite edition for dragons
I have to go back to first and second. I really do.
I think third was probably my favorite. The fourth is right up there. Third, I thought had really distinctive things. They also had the sort of like wing Buffett, wing Buffett, tail slap rates of many attacks. So you felt like these things were this is before you had legendary actions, but they could just tear into you in all these little ways that were significant.
And then they would have things like the white dragon could buffet snow up and like conceal itself so you couldn't see it, which when it was flying above you and you also couldn't see it was a mess. They could really easily like strafe you and do all this. That was significant. Frightful presence was an impressive part of what they did.
And fourth edition took that frightful presence to where like, you know, almost any dragon encounter was it shows up. It takes a round. It stuns you. It takes another round. So you just had to live with a dragon shows up and it takes two full rounds and now you get to go, which I actually really like. Not everybody feels that way.
But the way all the powers came in or the features, I didn't like feats on monsters in third, but both third and fourth, I felt like you really knew that this is what it is, right? Whatever it was, its presence was felt. This ancient dragon, it's solid. But if I think of what tells me it's a green dragon, well, OK, it can breathe air and water. That's fine. It has advantage on initiative rolls.
That's fine. That doesn't tell me anything. The rend has poison to it. And this is, I think, something we'll see in a lot of these monsters, where it's sort of like, I attack and I do a thing. On top of my damage. So 17 piercing, 10 poison. So that's a little bit, you know, gives you a little flavor of what's behind it. Reminds you it's a green dragon. Its spell list has cloud kill. Okay.
It also has some mind control stuff. And if we read the text, it tells us that green dragons are kind of the super schemers, corruptors kind of thing. Poison breath, of course, the breath weapon. And then we have the...
reactions that grows of miasma if it gets to go off will definitely give you that feeling that this is a green dragon so yeah you know i would say that this does a pretty good job of of uh cementing that right which is a big thing i look at in monsters does this thing feel like what it's supposed to be i'd say here yeah oh absolutely absolutely uh
Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about numbers. Some of the numbers are hard to get a handle on just because you don't know at this point through actual play how much harder characters will hit. So hit points, I don't really care if there's a difference. AC, don't really care if there's a difference. Initiative, there's a difference.
If you look at the initiative modifier for this Ancient Green Dragon, it is plus 8. If you go back and look at the 2020-2014 Dragon, I think it was plus one. Wow.
not only that in the little parentheses next to initiative where they give you sort of the take 10 number since it has advantage on initiative checks if you'd use their static initiative just where it's going to go in relation to what the players rolled it's a 23. now granted you're going to have some high initiatives fighting this cr22 creature but that's great as the game master
I'm not going, okay, here's the huge battle. Rogue is going to be plus 10 on their initiative. Everyone's going to be plus something. And I roll, oh, I got a 10. Okay, plus one. Wah-wah. I love that. I love that at least this higher level monster has a fighting chance to beat somebody on an initiative roll. Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. No, I like high initiative for monsters like this for sure. You know, I don't want to take apart the damage too much here comparison wise but we can do that with the gold dragon which could be interesting to do.
One other thing is based on what the 2014 green Ancient Dream Dragon was, this one will have one more legendary resistance, two more if it's in its lair, which I thought was probably based on DM feedback of, I use all my legendary resistances in the first round. And I didn't see any frightful presence in this stat block. Yeah.
So we'll have to take a look at the gold dragon to see if that's something that was added back or not.
Yeah, I like the awe-inspiring idea, right? That just dragons are awe-inspiring. When they show up, you probably lose your turn or have fear or something like that. I like that, so I miss it not seeing there.
Should we do the Kua Toa next? Okay, Kuo-To is a similar thing to the Green Dragon. This was a preview, so we can assume that some changes have been made. But let's take a look. I'm just focusing really on wording and massive number changes. And we have the slippery ability, which is a reaction that's a very awkwardly worded trigger. It's Kuo-Toa.
If the Kuo-Toa has the grappled condition at the end of a creature's turn, it can use its reaction to no longer be grappled. And I'm like, okay, so any creature's turn? Anywhere in the battle? Anywhere in the world? Why not just say immune to grappled?
you already have a line with immunities just say it can't be grappled because that's basically what you're trying to do here except maybe that if it can't take a reaction then it remains grappled but
Yeah, I think this guy and we'll talk about the gelatinous Q, but both of them had, you know, they have features they had before because there is a sticky shield for the 2014 version. But the wording has been changed. And I don't know that it's vastly better. Again, like, is it demonstrably better wording? I don't know.
It's not that it's, you know, I think I can figure out what's going on, but it is it is. It's not really fewer words. It looks pretty similar to me. Maybe it's a tiny bit. I don't know. It looks the same to me in terms of just eyeballing it. And, and it's, it isn't like an absolutely, Oh yeah, I read this and this makes perfect sense. And that sort of surprises me.
And the same thing with the gelatinous cube. When, when we talk about that one, like it just doesn't automatically seem to me like, Oh yeah, this is super a hundred percent clear and I'm all good here. I'm so glad you revised this. And maybe at this point it's worth saying like, If you had told me, hey, look, the D&D team is going to revise 5e, but it's not a new addition.
I would have thought, yeah, OK, so most of the monsters will probably be the same. Right now, you know, when they say that whole we've talked about this on the show, everything is new. Good grief. They really did like go through and try to it's almost like they didn't they tried to change everything.
They have tried to revise every little block here, and it's a miracle if one of them survived unchanged, right? So like the amphibious trait is the same, you know? But other than that, it's like they have tweaked every little block And again, I have to say, is it demonstrably better? And if not, well, why did you feel you needed to tweak this when it's not a new addition?
And I don't quite grasp it. I mean, the only thing I can think of is because we thought it would sell better that way. I don't know. Or maybe just like we really felt like we had 10 years worth of experience and every little block could use a tweak.
I can understand the desire to update the rules and make it a much better mechanical experience for people that are playing the game mechanically. So capitalize words. Don't love it, understand that tendency to do. But we get something like the sticky shield.
So it's while stuck, in other words, you hit the Kuo-Toa, it's got a sticky shield, you miss as a reaction, they stick the weapon to the shield. And so it says while stuck, the weapon can't be used. Now, if we're playing a game that's more narrative-based, cool. There we go.
But I'm going to come up against, at not a very high level, somebody who has a sword or a weapon that can also be used to cast spells from. You can cast a fireball from this quarterstaff. So you go up and you hit the monster with the quarterstaff. Okay, it's stuck and the weapon can't be used. bought, can I cast the fireball from it? Well, no, it says the weapon can't be used.
Well, that's not using the weapon, right? And you've created, you've actually created all of the things that you need to say, While stuck, the weapon cannot be used to make a melee or ranged weapon attack. You know, whatever. You've made actions. You can still use the magic action to whatever. You've done it. So go through with it. Go all the way.
Show me how to run this game that you have so carefully created the words to match.
Yeah, and in this case, you know, that kind of wording of the weapon can't be used was in the 2014 version. And so they could have gone through and improved that, but they didn't, right?
Right. Exactly, exactly.
But if you're going to be tweaking every little block of text and you did change this up, you know, why? Why didn't you? Yeah, I don't know. And maybe they didn't care about that or, you know, who knows? They're human. Maybe they didn't think about that situation. But yeah, it's interesting.
Yeah, yeah. And the last thing about the Gotoh is the sticky net. So I'm cool with it, right? They throw a net on you and you're restrained and you need to cut it off or break out. And then the net is destroyed. Do they have more than one? It doesn't say like once per day or one time only. It's just...
Yeah, and that's interesting because a number, and we'll see this and there's another monster preview that sort of has this, but some monsters have gear and some don't. One assumes when they don't list it as gear, there's an endless number of sticky nets, I guess, right? But it's an interesting thing to say.
yeah and in fact like the strange spear that it has uh right you know it it is only melee melee but a lot of the ones that are range will just say like and it returns to you it's like you know but if it doesn't you know does it matter you know it's yes not listed as gear and yeah
Well, in that earlier preview, there were, I don't think, any gear descriptors. So we don't know. Maybe there will be gear. Maybe the sticky net will be gear that you can then take. But maybe that. We don't know. Well, I can safely say that the skeleton...
There is one difference between what we saw in the preview and what we know is the final version because it was in the player's handbook, I believe. The only difference is that the dex modifier of the skeleton is one higher. So there is one extra plus to hit and one extra plus to damage. And that's the only difference that I could see between the 2014 and the 2024 skeletons.
Yeah, which is good. I mean, I'm all for if a monster works well enough, You know, you don't have to mess with it. What we see also in this preview is the war horse skeleton, the minotaur skeleton, the flaming skeleton. And it was funny to hear Jeremy talk about, you know, and we brought back the flaming skeleton. It's like, yeah, okay.
I had that in addition to go, but yeah, but you know, we get a few more types here and this is like an example of that idea of adding more to the, the monster manual that it's core. Yeah.
So this example and some of the others, too, made me wonder, you know, going back to that at the summit where they were talking about how they were going, all books will remain in use and are valid with the exception of Tasha's and Xanathar's. Well, we're going to use so much material from those. that we will reprint those with new things in them.
And we actually didn't see that much from Tasha's and Xanathar's make it into the core rules. And here's another thing where, and maybe this is deliberate because they didn't say we're going to reprint Mordenkainen's or anything like that. But I was just curious whether we would see one of the many cool skeletons we've seen in other books. And the answer seems to be no.
that generally we're not going to pull a monster out of another source. Maybe we'll see some exceptions to that, but it doesn't look like they've gone through and said, oh yeah, let's pull in this really neat monster that appears in Mordenkainen's or in Van Richten's or any of those.
Right. Yeah. Maybe, maybe not.
Shall we do the Cyclops?
Yeah, that's a good one. Let's do the Cyclops.
Okay. So the Cyclops in the 2014 Monster Manual, there was just Cyclops. And in the preview that we got, there were two Cyclopses, Cyclopai, Cyclopace. There was the... Help me out. The Sentry is the basic one, and then the Oracle was the sort of advanced one. I'm going from memory here, but I think that was that. So any special things that you noticed about that, Teos?
Yes, we had a lot of fun breaking this down on our Discord. And what I find interesting about the... There are a number of things I find to be really, really very interesting about the Cyclops. One is that we see a very different... approach to the lore of the monster, which we haven't kind of super talked about that angle of it. But one of the questions is, okay, what do you do
You know, how do you handle your lore from one edition to the other, especially when it's not a change in edition in theory? And the answer is, well, we've changed a lot. Like there is a lot that's different here. And the Cyclops is a great example that because if if I were to say to you, you know, what do you think about it? Well, where do you go back when you think Cyclops?
What, you know, famous work do you think of?
Right. You think of the Odyssey.
yeah yeah you're thinking jason argonauts you're thinking about you know uh this kind of dumb brute that can can't you know has to feel for you once it's blinded and stuff that kind of cat and if you go back and read the 2014 description you know of the cyclops it has and and i like this about third about fifth edition 2014.
Fifth edition said has those kinds of like generally three things sometimes four that are in bold Italic that tell you sort of the key things about the monster So here it says non-religious unsophisticated unwise And then it goes on to give you quite a good number of words and I forget what the number breakdown was But it's I did look at the word count and the word count is far higher on the other version here
we get the name Cyclopes and then it just says monocular servants of destiny. And then it says they're descendants of the gods using their mystical vision. And I'm like, what? And so are we suddenly saying that Dungeons and Dragons no longer has the kinds of Cyclops that we've been putting in all our adventures?
Because the whole idea that they said on the videos was we're working hard to bring forth that what these monsters are not necessarily mythology but in D&D, boy, we've had that. We've kind of had the mythical version, the Greek version in D&D and suddenly we don't. And they talked about the art being symbolic of the monster in D&D and when I look at the art that they showed off, it's Two Cyclops.
One of them looks like you wouldn't even guess it's a Cyclops. You would guess it was like a cloud giant or something with robes and it's spell casting and weaving some sort of arcane whatever. And then you've got one wearing all these tattoos, chucking a rock and behind them. What looked like sort of like Greek architecture ruins.
And none of this is to me the cave sheep whatever that probably would have been used in your average D&D adventure. So I find that fascinating.
The only thing I was going to look and I didn't get a chance was the Theros book. The Greek-inspired book. I'm wondering, I think there were Cyclopes in that, and I don't know if they were sort of updated versions of this.
Maybe so, yeah.
Well, yeah. Yeah, go ahead.
But it is so interesting that this idea of, you know, deliberately, like the fourth edition, the 2014 version is a very simple stat block. And what's interesting here is even the Cyclops Sentry, the lower CR one, which is the same CR as the old one, it has gotten a little more complicated. So the old one has poor depth perception and then a multi-attack with two great clubs.
It has a great club and the ability to throw a rock. Now we have... those things, but also this limited foresight and it loses that poor depth perception. So it's a very interesting change here that.
Yeah. Yeah. So, so this was my take on that.
Yeah.
First of all, I'm fine with both. I'm actually fine with the old Cyclops and I'm fine with the new Cyclops. For me, what's most important is the, If it's going to have lore, make that lore count. And if it's going to have special, unique physical features, make those count. So what's the thing you think of when you think of Cyclops, like you said? You think of the one eye.
So that one eye needs to have a game impact. In 2014, that game impact was a negative. It was a negative. It was poor depth perception. And how did that show off in play? They had disadvantage on ranged attacks of over 30 feet. So they couldn't throw the rock well over 30 feet. How often were you throwing rocks with your cycle base in 2014? I hope maybe only once.
And even then, unless you made a big deal about it as the game master, oh, look, you're far away, and he's squinting, trying to figure out where you are. I have disadvantage. Whee! And you'd roll two dice. That's fine, but it doesn't sort of live up to that.
Well, I don't know. I'll disagree a bit in that I think that the point of it is this thing does more damage with its club in 2014. It gets to attack twice with its club, and it's going to be more accurate if it's at range than if it's at range.
it's your choice the the the logic is here and you can decide whether you want to play up to it and it sort of creates that argonaut scenario where if you can get away from it Now it can't do a whole lot to you, right? And so you can play with that if you want, whereas a lot of monsters don't have those kinds of obvious flaws.
To me, this was a good example of a monster with an obvious flaw that if you want to, you can play up. You can, of course, just have it be like the big thing that's going to smash you with a club. But to me, it had that.
You can play it up if you set up a very specific scenario. Absolutely. My big issue, and it's not just with the Cyclops, it's with all of these sort of mythological or story-focused monsters from various worlds and lore. If I'm running a game for all new players who are even fairly well-read in mythology, I say, and you approach the temple and there's a guard standing there, it's a cyclops.
What's the first thing they're going to try to do? They're going to try to shoot its eye out, right? Oh, gotcha.
called shot to the eye exactly we we try to hit it in the eye so it can't see us the first thing they're going to try to do it's it's fun yeah it's historical it's it's what rational adventurers would do but there's no way we can do that yeah there's no way we could do that uh even even something like make it have disadvantage on saves against the blinded condition.
Something so that the players feel like they're engaging with the monster in the way that they feel like they should be engaging with it, and you're rewarding them for it. Now, the risk of that, of course, is every encounter with the Cyclops from now until the end of time, the power gaming group is going to be like, well, we blind it.
And so it's that sort of thing that when I see a monster manual being made, I want the designers thinking about that.
So a possibility here, Sean, is that what the designers did, maybe even after a review, is conclude that the 2014 Cyclops kind of says, if you have one eye, you're dumb. Mm-hmm.
and i think there's a fine line between that and the problems that involves and saying look if we have two working eyes we probably don't want to lose one right or if we have one we don't want to lose it which is logical right and and maybe they've gone a little far here trying to I think it's okay to have monsters that have limits, and they don't always have to have real world.
I can see why they... If that was the reason, I can understand the motive and even applaud it to some extent. But I think that in this case, sometimes a creature has a weakness, right? And it isn't always going to link back to our real world. I thought with a Cyclops in general, it worked. But, you know, there have been moves around vision and, you know...
loss of auditory capability where there's an attempt to clean that up. And so maybe this is another of these cases.
It could possibly be. And I'm okay with the lore. I'm okay with this change to have them be something bigger.
There is so little said, right? If I tell you one-eyed descendants of the gods using their mystical vision, they can witness how future events are likely to occur. The Cyclops Oracle gazes through history to learn hidden truths. Many share these secrets with those who aid them. The Cyclops Sentry serve their divine progenitors and oppose those who tamper with fate.
I don't really know what to do with that, Sean. It's really rough. Those descriptions could be for any number of monsters, and I wouldn't know what to do with them. I don't know. To me, this is too... Like, I have trouble imagining what to do with this. I mean, I can come up with something, right? But it's not, to me, it's not very grounded. It's very open. I don't know what a sentry can do.
Okay, so is a sentry seeing glimpses of the future? Are these all seeing, you know, or is it just the Oracle or... There's so few words here that I end up not knowing what this monster can truly do or is meant to do in a book that they have told me is supposed to ground me in the logic of D&D. Now, I don't know. Like, in the Forgotten Realms, do people now seek out Cyclopes constantly?
Are they revered and not fought? You know, like, hmm.
Yeah, I see the Sentry as being just a plain old Cyclops.
what tells me that i mean they can literally like impose disadvantage on somebody they seem to have some sort of tide of fate and the gods apparently the gods that they used to shun they now actually somehow channel or you know like i don't you gave me so little here i don't know what this is i i i can understand that i can understand that i i i think i am adding my own
Wes, I think I'm seeing the encounters that I would create. Yeah, so that's why I'm like, I'm fine with it. But I can totally understand that. I feel like we got about halfway through what we wanted to talk about.
Yeah, yeah.
So we have a topic for next week. We'll finish this off. Yeah, it sounds good.
It's a lot of fun. And I hope it comes across, you know, we're a little gun-shy after, at least I'm a little gun-shy after Shadow Dark. This does not mean that, you know, don't think I'm going to have fun with 2024 monsters. Or, you know...
uh this is design analysis right and and uh i could be in a room with folks who are designing this if i were lucky enough to be in a room with folks who are designing this and i could share these things i could totally see myself going like oh okay okay you know let's ship it the way you did it you know like that's all possible but these are the questions that we would the kind of thinking we would ask if we were trying to analyze the design right
Or design ourselves. And I have been in exact situations like this where I'm like, I need to put an ability in. This ability leads in this direction. Let's make the lore match. You can go a lot of different directions. And also, coming from all different directions are our listeners. So you out there listening as a podcast or watching it as a show on YouTube, thank you so much.
We hope that we have been entertaining and informative. If you would like to show your appreciation through a Patreon, you can do so by going to patreon.com slash masteringdnd. We already have quite a few people who are doing so. We have Master of Dungeon supporters. Thank you so much for giving and helping us make this show.
Master of Realm supporters, the wonderful list of those folks are right here in our show notes. And the Masters of the Multiverse, they get a shout-out on the show bottom up this time z walt winfrey zach types chris webster javier wasiak jason ward from accidental cyclops games graham ward james walton marcelo de velasquez the valiant dm joe tyler tres jeremy talleman from the dnd and tv podcast
Talos the Stormlord, Josh and Lee Wanika of the Tabletop Journeys podcast, Spark from Dunor Games, Krishna Simonse, Andy Shockney, Chance Russo at Drago Russo, Runner Rick, Ozymandias Rex, Pugnus, Vladimir Pruner from Croatia, Robert Pasley, Post Fiction RPG Audio, Frog Prince at Tentacles Squelching Wetly, Phil Wirt from the Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo. I hope the show went well, Phil.
David Norris, Tom Nelson of the Deck of Player Safety, Falcon Neal, Sean Malley, Mighty Zeus, John Mickey, Trey McLemore, Anna B. Meyer of Fantasy Cartography, Eric Mengi, The Mathemagician, Paul Mata, Chad Lynch, Jim Klingler, a.k.a.
DM Prime Mover, Brian King, condolences on the Lions season, JR of the Twilight Perspective, The Mighty Jerd, Mark and Mary's Gaming Compound, Hyperlexic, Sean Hurst, Ben Heisler and Paige Lightman, William Harshman of Runeforged Tabletop Gaming. Scott Fitzgerald Gray at Incendiangels Studio. James Fisher. Andy Edmonds at Nerdronomicon.com. Will Doyle. Evan at NimbleCo. Evil John.
Calvin Bridges Avalos. Eric Blackman, Steve Bissonette, Dave Bastianzen, Craig Bailey, Lou Anders of Lazy Wolf Studios, Keith Ammon of The Monsters Know What They're Doing, and Agile Monk of Fantasy Campaign Companion Workshops. Thank you so much for your support. Again, you can go to patreon.com. Patreon.com is something different. Patreon.com slash mastering D&D.
If you get a chance, you can also leave us a review wherever you listen to the show or go to YouTube and click that little subscribe like thingy. And that would really help us out. Chaos, I know that you are super busy on your stuff. So tell us what you're up to and where we can find it.
You can find me at AlphaStream.org. From there, you can get to my YouTubes. I just published a blog article that I had before on themes and truths in your campaign. And now there's a video based version of it. You can check out there. Sean, where do we find you?
You can find me on the socials at Sean. That's S-H-A-W-N. Merwin. You can follow the podcast at Mastering D&D on those same socials. And go to Patreon. You can talk to us on our Patreon Discord. And yeah, YouTube. YouTube.com at Mastering Dungeons. So we're working our way through monsters. We're working our way there. What should we do now?
Well, I'm gonna go to matreon.com, that sounded amazing.
Yeah, and I'm going to consult the oracle of the local Cyclops to see what my future holds.