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.
Full Episode
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.
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